How Much Does Luck Matter in Life
“With every aspect of life, it is you who has to make it happen.” —Sadhguru
Sadhguru: Those who depend on luck are always looking for stars, planets, places, lucky shoes, lucky soaps, lucky numbers – all kinds of stuff. In this process of looking for luck and waiting for things to happen, things that they could have easily created for themselves are completely lost. With every aspect of life, it is you who has to make it happen. Your peace and your turmoil is your business. Your sanity and insanity is your business. Your joy and misery is your business. The devil and the god within you is your business.
Instead of allowing your energies to express themselves to their fullest capability, instead of creating the necessary inner and external atmosphere around us where the right kind of situation can happen, we are unfortunately always looking for something else which could make that happen for us.
How you experienced today, from morning to evening, is definitely yours. How much friction you had with people around you simply depends on how insensible you have been in understanding the situations and people around you – their limitations and possibilities within themselves. It is definitely not decided by what lucky charms you may be wearing. It simply depends on how sensibly, intelligently, and with how much awareness you walk and look at life around you.
One day, two men met in the airport. One man was looking truly dejected. So the other man asked, “Why are you like this? What happened to you?”
The first man said, “What should I tell you? My first wife died of cancer. My second wife eloped with my neighbor. My son is in prison because he attempted to murder me. My fourteen-year-old daughter is pregnant. Lightning struck my house. All my shares went bust in the share market today, and my medical report says I have AIDS.”
The other man said, “Wow! What a lot of bad luck for you! Anyway, what do you do? What’s your profession?”
The man replied, “I sell lucky charms.”
It is just that if you are in a certain way, certain things will gravitate towards you. If you are in a certain other way, certain other things will gravitate towards you. If there is a flowering bush and a dry, thorny bush out there, all the bees gravitate towards the flowering bush. The flowering bush isn’t lucky, it just has a fragrance – which you may not be able to see – that is drawing everything towards it. People walk away from the thorny bush because it is creating another kind of situation. Maybe both of them are unconscious of what they are creating but things are happening the way they need to happen.
So, if things are happening great for you and you don’t know why, I would say you are eating stale food. You cooked your meal somewhere else – maybe long ago – and you are still eating good food. But it is stale and getting staler by the day. However, if things are happening well for you and you know why it is happening, that means you cooked your food today, consciously. If things are going really bad for you and you don’t know why, once again you are eating stale food which has turned rotten.
Adrishtam – When You Cannot See
In Indian vernacular languages, the word for being lucky is adrisht or adrishtam. “Drishti” means “to see”, “adrisht” means “unseeing”. You lost your sight. If you could see, you would know why something was happening. When you cannot see, you think things are happening randomly or accidently. You think it is either a fortune or a misfortune. This is the most appropriate word for luck.
To be spiritual means that you have taken your life 100% into your hands. Only when you take your life 100% into your hands, you become a 100% conscious being and the possibility of the divine arises in your life.
It is time you created your life consciously. Don’t depend on luck, stars and planets. These are inanimate things. Should human nature decide the destiny of inanimate things or should inanimate things decide the destiny of human nature? Which way should it be? Human nature should decide what should happen to the inanimate. But if a star is deciding your future, then inanimate things are deciding your destiny.
Don’t allow such things to influence you because once you get into it, you will get into a certain rut and what you can do in your life will be limited. You cannot go beyond that. It will restrict your growth and possibility.
By chance a few things happen. But if you wait for the chance, good things may happen to you only when you are in your grave because it may take its time.
When you live by chance, you also live in fear and anxiety. When you live by intent and capability, it does not matter what is happening or not happening, you are at least in control of what is happening to you. It is a more stable life.
Editor’s Note: Hatha Yoga, Sadhguru explains, is one doorway to liberation, offering the possibility to transcend compulsiveness and move towards consciousness. Read the article, Project Human : Moving from Compulsiveness to Consciousness
