Is luck really good fortune?

The soul is the arbiter of your destiny—you have the shaping of your future in your own hands. 

The soul is the gift of the Almighty. 

The term soul is used as expressing the spirit that dwells in the spirit body. 

It is not the spirit body merely that constitutes spiritual being. 

There is no such thing as destiny in the sense that any fixed rule of conduct is laid down for anyone. 

Some think they are destined always to be unlucky―whilst others wonder at their friends' luck, which seems likewise a mark of destiny. 

You ignore one important element in the way your affairs are shaped—the interference of spirits who ally themselves with those on earth. 

It is common for us to be under the delusion that we are the creatures of destiny—that the Finger of Providence may be traced in our daily affairs. 

If a (hu)man falls in the street, it is just his luck, and if instead of falling, he gets a rise in the world, he thinks it is his luck again. 

His friends who are less profane think it is the Will of Providence, but these are convertible terms―what one person calls luck, another calls Providence. 

God's laws are omnipotent and pervade the whole universe―consequently, if a sparrow―or a human falls, he does so in accordance with some law of nature—the law of gravity, which is only another convertible term for the laws of God. 

God does not interfere with His own laws. 

He does not require special providences to produce special events. 

They occur in accordance with laws that are common to all ages and all times, and if a miracle could be performed eighteen centuries ago, so also by the same laws could it be performed nowadays if the conditions under which it took place were the same in both cases. 

If spirits can, and do interfere in our affairs, not by controlling matter, but by controlling our spirits through our minds—such being the media by which alone they can reach our matter—there is, therefore, no difficulty in explaining why―or how an event may happen amongst us, which at first glance seems such an extraordinary coincidence as to be little less than a providential interference. 

Matter is usually controlled by spirit, whether it be the Spirit of God, breathing through Nture's Laws―or the Spirit of God in (Hu)man. 

If you take up a chair, it is matter controlled by the spirit within you, for, of course, the matter of your body is merely the agent of the spirit within. 

Hence if you hear of matter in the form of clothes, money and food being sent to someone in answer to his prayers, you have a case simply of matter controlled by spirits in the same sense that you have it when you move the chair. 

The modus operandi is as follows—the person praying simply calls to his aid spirits—that is, men and women who sympathise with his work―in short, he may be said to advertise for them. 

The difference between him and others who solicit their charitable contributions is that he advertises in the spiritual world, and other men advertise in the natural world. 

In reality, it is nothing of the kind―it is an earnest appeal by spirit power to those whose necessities, as spirits seeking their own development, require that they should lend help of this kind. 

Hence you see it is a mutual benefit―not a one-sided one. 

It is more blessed to give than to receive is a saying whose meaning few understand as well as spirits do.