The Unknown vs Luck

“I don’t know” is one of my favorite truthful and courageous statements.

We often doubt of how exactly things came to be, how they are now, or how they may be in the future. Often observation- or perhaps manipulation- brings us to identify certain variables and patterns which give a sense of insight and causation. And yet, sometimes our explanations seem flawed, incomplete or fruitless. There are forces at play that cannot be isolated, patterned, seen or understood.

Like most confrontations with the unknown, this is a bit threatening, so one hastens to retreat.

The formula for retreat is simple: agglomerate all that you cannot identify into a box. Give that box uniformity, a single base consciousness, characteristic or intent. Label the box.

Sample labels include “talent”, “luck”, “nature” or “the force”.

Let’s explore this deeper with luck:

What is luck? What is to say that someone or something is lucky? What property can one assign it? At most, one points to previous successes, and without identifying any unifying causational factors amongst them, one shrugs his or her shoulders and says “well, that’s luck”. Luck is precisely the unknown and unpredictable, what happens that is beyond a person’s control.

And just what lies beyond a person's control is unfathomable, immeasurable and most likely infinite.

So how can it be that anyone “has luck”? How can you have the unknown, the unpredictable and precisely that which is outside of you? How can you be without it?

This carries the unfortunate repercussion that luck, through our acceptance of the concept, is something real and tangible, it exists like any object, you can have it, or not. Is luck a quality? But how can anyone have, hold, or seek a quality that is inherently indescribable, mysterious and unknowable?

It reminds me of Richard Freeman’s statement that purusha (the truth of being that is naked behind form) is inherently impossible to capture. The moment you say that anything is purusha or that purusha is any thing or quality, you are hiding it behind prakhti (form).

Precisely so with the example of “luck”. The second you point to anything and say “that is luck”, all you really say is “the causation of that is variables I cannot identify or explain”. Or more simply, “I don’t know”.

There’s a tendency which I’ve noticed to agglomerate all that one does not know and understand into one category, “the unknown”, which quickly gets labeled with something sweet such “talent”, “luck” or “the force”, for example.

I reject the unity of this notion- just because there are an incredible amount of variables in a complex world that are constantly in play and effecting every single action that you can possibly take- does not mean that these variables have one universal consciousness. They may have a billion consciousnesses; they may have infinite consciousness, but to unify them all under one purpose is oversimplification.

I believe there are an unknown number of unknown forces that are at play in any interaction. This makes figuring out what happened, what is happening, or the possibilities of what can happen incredibly difficult. It means that any knowledge, regardless of whether it is past, present or future, is inherently incomplete. That doesn’t make it worthless; knowledge is an incredibly powerful tool in action.

But no matter how much knowledge you have, you always act with variables of uncertainty. You can seek shelter in small mastery; obsess with the identification of every variable. But the unknown is still present; it is inescapable even in moments where you doubt its presence (and even more so in those).

Perhaps we could instead embrace the unknown? Relish in the joy of knowing you live within an infinity of cosmic chaos in constant interaction with your own.