Re: I don't recognize the number

First post in this forum, but by way of introduction, my style is to consider the extremes of the argument and then often take the contrary position to provoke further discussion in order to understand more completely. Frequently this is taken as an attack, but please understand that no enmity is intended. Also, everything must reduce to practice in order for me to accept it.

To the particular idea under discussion, I do think (or hope) it has merit, but my experience shows otherwise. I've often done what you suggest--taken open doors with or against my experience, with very mixed results.
It addresses a dilemma I'm currently wrestling with; for me it revolves around "new age" thinking versus cause and effect, what I see as wishful thinking as opposed to practical thinking: I don't care how much praying you do, until you charge the battery, that car aint gonna start!

Taking open doors simply because they present absolutely will change your experience, by definition, I suppose. To ascribe that experience to a God, or Fate, or something else seems like the ever-present human need to apply a cause to an effect, and in this case, avoid taking responsibility for it.
And while that experience, also by definition, will enlarge you, it may also end your life (at the extreme).
So one of your premises, as you point out, is that the universe (God) has your good in mind. I guess I've seen more evidence to disprove this than to prove it, so no, I have no God yet, I'm on my own.
Pity me if you must! :-) (or show me the way!)

To the practical: I'm a trader; I find trading to be a superb compression of life's experience--you can see in minutes rather than years how your actions bear on your results! Daily I see how destructive taking doors simply because they're open can be. The open doors are often traps set by other traders to lure the inexperienced.

This world is basically predatory and IMHO it's only the fact that most of us live in cities apart from the natural world that we've lost sight of this.

On the other hand, a butterfly, for example, lives fully in the predatory world, beautifully and gracefully floating through life going about the tasks that allow it to reproduce and successfully complete it's lifecycle. Taking open doors as they present themselves. Enough are successful that they have survived for thousands of generations as a species. So we can look at them and say "See--it works! So carefree!"
However, I would surmise that the majority end up as food for species that prey upon them. For those, where is the "good" that God is said to provide?

Mankind is apparently the only species that have the faculties to try to control experiences by determining the causes of undesired effects in order to avoid them. To turn ones back on this seems like the previously mentioned wishful new age thinking.
But, I could be wrong.
David