Modern systems: one concept
The wave of fortune
The wave of fortune is Vadim Zeland’s name, in Step I of Reality Transurfing (Russian 2004, English 2008), for a lucky streak, explained as a cluster of favourable life lines. The Russian name, волна удачи, means literally “wave of luck”. Zeland writes that a first success brings a cascade of others only if it delights you; no study we found tests that, and the hot hand debate since 1985 shows how easily streaks are misjudged.
A run of good luck is said to be a cluster of favourable life lines: only a first success that delights you carries you on to more, and destructive pendulums pull you off.
In Russian. волна удачи is the original term; English and Polish editions do not always render it the same way.
Where the idea comes from
The wave of fortune comes from chapter III of Step I of Vadim Zeland’s Reality Transurfing, Пространство вариантов (St Petersburg: Ves, 2004), published in English as Reality Transurfing 1: The Space of Variations (O Books, 2008). According to Zeland’s official site, excerpts first went out through an internet mailing list in August 2003, which is why the series is also dated to that year. The Russian title of the chapter, “Волна удачи”, means literally “wave of luck”. Zeland presents the wave as the antipode of the pendulum, a structure that takes none of your energy, and as the material basis of two old metaphors, the blue bird of happiness and the wheel of fortune: luck and bad luck, the chapter begins, follow each other like white and black stripes. The table keeps apart what the book claims and what can be checked.
| Fact or claim | Status and evidence |
|---|---|
| Which book | Documented. Step I, Пространство вариантов (Ves, St Petersburg, 2004, 206 pages, ISBN 5-9573-0283-X). The Russian State Library lists the wave of luck third among the six items in its summary of the volume’s contents; chapter III is titled “Волна удачи”. Russian State Library record; contents on LitRes |
| English edition | Documented. Reality Transurfing 1: The Space of Variations, O Books, 2008, 182 pages, ISBN 9781846941221. Open Library record |
| What the wave is | Claimed in the book; a definition, not a finding. A run of circumstances favourable to you personally, which Zeland explains as a cluster of life lines favourable to you in the space of variants. He calls it a temporary formation that dies away, and a few paragraphs on a stationary cluster that neither moves nor weakens, the word “wave” being only a convenient picture. Step I, chapter III, section “Антипод маятника” (publisher’s sample, no page numbers) |
| How it is caught and lost | Claimed, not verified. A cascade of successes follows only if the first one delighted you, and good news can be the wave making itself known. Destructive pendulums pull you off it, and negative energy you give out comes back like a boomerang. Same chapter, sections “Антипод маятника”, “Бумеранг” and “Трансляция” |
| Gratitude | Claimed in the book; one technique among several. Gratitude for what you have, even for a house you dislike, sends out positive energy that comes back, Zeland writes. He ties staying on the crest to a feeling of celebration and to the habit of remembering that a pendulum is trying to hook you. Same chapter, sections “Бумеранг” and “Трансляция” |
| In the author’s words | Documented as the author’s own statements. More good news after you start savouring it is, he writes, neither mysticism nor the mind filtering what it sees, but a move to life lines that match your thoughts. In chapter IV he adds that nobody can ride the wave of luck all their life. Same chapter, section “Трансляция”; chapter IV, “Равновесие”, section “Желание иметь и не иметь” |
| Evidence that it exists | Cannot be checked as stated. We found no test that could tell a wave from an ordinary run of chance. A PubMed search for “transurfing” on 2 November 2026 found no records. PubMed |
| Nearest measured effects | Documented in psychology; different claims. Streak shooting in basketball (not found in 1985, found once a biased measure was corrected in 2018) and gratitude exercises (2003; a meta-analysis in 2016). None of them measures luck arriving from outside; details below. Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky 1985; Miller and Sanjurjo 2018; Emmons and McCullough 2003; Davis and colleagues 2016 |
Checked on 2 November 2026, each line at its source. Documented means a record or text anyone can open; claimed, not verified means the book asserts it and nothing independent confirms it; cannot be checked as stated means we found no test that could count for or against it.
How do you catch the wave of fortune, according to Zeland?
In Step I of Reality Transurfing, Vadim Zeland writes that the wave of fortune is caught by being glad of a first success and of good news, and lost by feeding destructive pendulums with negative energy. No effort is needed to ride it, he says; it is a matter of choice. Good news, in his account, is the wave announcing itself, an echo from other life lines to hold on to: savour it, discuss it, hunt for more, and keep bad news out. Irritation works the other way. Shout at someone, he writes, and some new trouble will follow: negative energy you give out comes back as new problems, like a boomerang.
Gratitude enters here as one technique among several. If you dislike the house you live in, Zeland advises thanking it for sheltering you instead of hating it, and thanking even the things you throw away when you move; grateful thoughts, he says, send out positive vibrations that come back. He ties staying on the crest of the wave to two habits: keeping a feeling of celebration, and remembering at each irritating moment that a pendulum is trying to hook you. The chapter ends with magic rituals, such as a trader’s discount for the first customer of the day or touching the goods with money. The ritual itself, Zeland writes, has no power and works like a stage prop for tuning in, and it does not matter whether people believe in the ritual or in the tuning.
He also anticipates the obvious objection. More good news after you start savouring it is, he insists, neither mysticism nor the mind seeing the world through dark or rose-tinted glasses, but a real move to life lines that match your thoughts. In the next chapter he sets a limit: nobody can ride the wave of luck all their life. Criticism has come from Russian academic writing: in 2014 Yu. A. Kilis read Transurfing as popular subjectivism and objected that anyone with ten years of conscious life behind them remembers failures that came despite the most positive attitude, and large successes that came with little effort and even with scepticism.
The older idea
Two older things sit near this idea, and neither is its source. Gratitude in place of an offering is genuinely Hermetic: close to the end of the Asclepius, thanks takes the place of incense, which we turn into a one-week exercise in thanks instead of incense. Timing is the other: the medieval Picatrix chooses favourable moments by astrological calculation. Whatever one thinks of that, it is a rule fixed in advance, which a wave recognised afterwards is not. The working mechanism is a written record: count the run, and act on what the count shows rather than on the feeling of a streak.
What you can actually check
What you can check is your own luck, and only in writing: for a month, note good and bad turns as they happen, before you know how the month ends, then compare the count with your memory of it. The book invites you to watch for yourself how trouble follows each negative reaction; what it does not ask for is a count kept in advance, the only way to tell a pattern from memory. Deciding from the count rather than from the feeling of a streak is a small case of keeping your own judgement when nobody can know how things will turn out, which is what acting under uncertainty is about.
Has psychology studied anything like the wave of fortune?
Psychology has studied the belief in streaks and the effects of gratitude exercises, but none of that research tests Zeland’s claim that luck comes in clusters of favourable life lines. Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky (1985) found that 91% of the 100 basketball fans they surveyed at Cornell and Stanford believed a player has a better chance of scoring after two or three hits than after two or three misses. The shooting records of the Philadelphia 76ers, the free throws of the Boston Celtics and a controlled experiment with the men and women of Cornell’s varsity teams showed no such dependence; earlier shots changed the players’ predictions, not their performance. In 2018 Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo proved that a common measure of streaks is biased, substantially so in sequences of the lengths often used in research, and that once the bias is corrected the conclusions of the 1985 study are reversed. Both concern skill at shooting, not luck arriving from outside, and between them they show that a streak can be misjudged twice: by eye and by a careless count.
Psychologists also have a name for the reading Zeland rules out: confirmation bias, seeking or interpreting evidence in ways that favour a belief already held (Nickerson 1998). Gratitude has experiments of its own. Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough (2003) randomly assigned people to list things they were grateful for, hassles, or neutral events; the gratitude groups showed higher well-being on several, though not all, measures, most clearly in positive mood. A 2016 meta-analysis by Don Davis and colleagues found that gratitude exercises raised reported psychological well-being a little more than filling in the questionnaires alone (d = 0.31) or doing another activity (d = 0.17), and no more than other psychologically active exercises (d = -0.03). These studies measure how people feel, not whether better things happen to them.
None of this is evidence for the wave of fortune. What the studies offer is a method: decide in advance what counts, write it down as it happens, and only then look for a pattern.
Sources cited on this page. Vadim Zeland, Трансерфинг реальности. Ступень I: Пространство вариантов (St Petersburg: Ves, 2004), 206 pp., ISBN 5-9573-0283-X (Russian State Library record); chapters III, “Волна удачи”, and IV, “Равновесие”, read in the publisher’s sample of the e-book Трансерфинг реальности. Ступени I-III (IG Ves, on LitRes since 2023), which shows no page numbers; the sections of chapter III are also listed on the LitRes page of the audiobook (IG Ves, on LitRes since 2008).
Zeland’s official site, “События и факты”, read 2 November 2026: first excerpts by internet mailing list in August 2003.
English edition: Reality Transurfing 1: The Space of Variations (O Books, 2008), ISBN 9781846941221 (Open Library record).
Yu. A. Kilis, “Популярность субъективизма”, Omskiy nauchnyy vestnik no. 1 (125), 2014, pp. 92-95, the passage on p. 92 (CyberLeninka).
T. Gilovich, R. Vallone and A. Tversky, “The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences”, Cognitive Psychology 17 (3), 1985, 295-314, the fan survey on p. 297, doi:10.1016/
R. S. Nickerson, “Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises”, Review of General Psychology 2 (2), 1998, 175-220, doi:10.1037/
R. A. Emmons and M. E. McCullough, “Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84 (2), 2003, 377-389, doi:10.1037/
PubMed search for “transurfing”, 2 November 2026: no records.
What it does not settle
The book names signs of a wave, good news and a first success that pleases you, but gives no way to tell a wave from an ordinary run of chance. Read afterwards, a lucky run always looks like a wave and a bad run like a pendulum at work, so no outcome can count against the idea.
Nearby
The full set, side by side: the ten concepts. Dating and pedigree: the main entry. What to do with any of it: in practice.
Fair questions
What is the wave of fortune in Reality Transurfing?
Vadim Zeland’s name, in Step I of Reality Transurfing (Russian 2004, English 2008), for a lucky streak: luck in one thing, then a cascade of pleasant surprises. He explains it as a cluster of life lines favourable to you in the space of variants, which you can ride only if the first success delights you and leave when destructive pendulums pull you away. As a description of how a good run feels it is apt; as a claim about where luck comes from it cannot be tested.
Which Transurfing book explains the wave of fortune?
Step I, Пространство вариантов (Ves, St Petersburg, 2004), in English Reality Transurfing 1: The Space of Variations (O Books, 2008). Its chapter III, “Волна удачи” (literally “wave of luck”), has sections on the antipode of the pendulum, the boomerang, transmission and magic rituals, and the Russian State Library lists the wave among the six items in its summary of the volume’s contents. Where Step I sits among the five core steps: volume by volume.
Is the wave of fortune just confirmation bias?
Zeland says it is not: in his account, good news that multiplies once you savour it is a move to other life lines, not the mind filtering what it sees. Nothing in the book can tell the two readings apart. Psychology calls the second one confirmation bias (Nickerson 1998), and the hot hand studies show how easily streaks are misjudged: in 1985, 91% of the basketball fans surveyed believed in streak shooting that the same study’s analysis did not find, and in 2018 that analysis was shown to rest on a biased measure, with the corrected result pointing the other way.
How do you catch the wave of fortune, according to Zeland?
By being glad of a first success and of good news, savouring it and expecting more, and by not answering setbacks with irritation, which in his account feeds destructive pendulums. Gratitude for what you already have is one of his ways of sending out positive energy, and the habit of remembering that a pendulum is trying to hook you is what keeps you on the crest. The version you can check needs no life lines: write down good and bad turns for a month as they happen, then look at the count rather than the feeling.
Does gratitude keep you on the wave of fortune?
Not on its own, even in the book. Gratitude is one of several ways Zeland gives for sending out positive energy, and he ties staying on the crest to a feeling of celebration and to the habit of remembering. Research on gratitude measures something else: in Emmons and McCullough’s experiments (2003), people who listed what they were grateful for reported higher well-being on several measures, and a 2016 meta-analysis found small effects, no larger than those of other psychologically active exercises. None of it measures luck.
Sources & further reading
- The description is ours. We do not reproduce text, instructions or exercises from Vadim Zeland's books, which are in copyright.
- Dating, pedigree and the unnamed-source question: Reality Transurfing, read with care.
- How the system sits beside the law of attraction, Stoicism and a therapy with trials: compared.
- This page makes no therapeutic claim and is not advice for treating anxiety or any other condition.