what a neat post, i enjoy your logical take but i always wonder if those that have such a strong need for the logical are really afraid of believing in magic of any kind.

like you would get your hopes up too high knowing they would eventually be dashed b/c that’s just the way life is.

or the eternal bachelors like george clooney, are really quite romantic but deathly afraid of getting hurt so he avoids real relationships all together. (forgive me for sounding as if i know george, i do not but i use him as an example for simplicity.)

i firmly believe that it’s all as it should be and the people that we cross paths with are those that either we have something to share or vice versa and many both it goes both ways.

i believe in things i don’t fully understand, b/c you never know what road, person, or event will lead you. i’ve learned that it’s a better path than choosing safety.

i wrote this down, it was from a recent tara episode: “the pitfall of choosing someone for safety is that we come to resent them over time.”

There’s random, and then there’s Random. What you’re experiencing is what scientists would call “stochastic” — randomness that follows laws. There are laws to social interaction and laws to personalities; laws to the way economies work and laws to the waxing and waning of populations. By which I mean that there are ways that they proceed, and ways that they can’t. You don’t make friends by punching people in the face, for example, but you do make them by interacting kindly, by having a connection, and by sharing interests.

In this case, you made a blog post that resonated with a reader, who pointed you down a path that you followed. There’s a law there, or a series of laws: bloggers gain readers, readers interact, and we all adapt and respond.

So no, I wouldn’t call it random in the sense of unexpected or unusual: it’s stochastic. You randomly had a reader who pointed you down a path that appealed to you, and you followed it.

Interestingly, this is what Buddhists would point to when they talk about karma. There is a widespread belief, it seems, that karma is like the christian heaven or hell — that if you do something good or bad, you are rewarded or punished. Christians just add the explicit actor (God). But that’s not what karma is, at all. Karma is just cause and effect, and in that sense it is really very reasonable. If you punch someone in the face, then “it’s karma” that you get punched or sent to jail, yourself. (Yes, I know that the religious Buddhists believe in rebirth and karma that transcends life, but that’s not what I’m talking about here — there are plenty of secular Buddhists, too, and they also believe in karma without believing that they’re going to be reborn as a worm for being a Bad Person.)

So in this case, a secular Buddhist might say that it was your (good) karma that led you down this path. You opened your heart and suspended your skepticism of the meditation practice, and in the course of doing so, made new friendships. Cause and effect.

And as others have mentioned, it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is now. That’s the key to meditation, anyway, right?

I like to think that people do come into our lives for a reason. Whether random or not, it doesn’t really matter. Live in the moment. Go with the flow. Breathe deeply and just BE without thinking. You never know where it will take you.

My latest meditation is: Everything you need is already within you.

I think that we Westerners too often interpret karma as though it’s supposed to be some divine hand of justice. We’re so into the whole almighty God man with a master plan thing, it’s hard to understand it outside of that framework. Buddha’s not a God, he’s a teacher meant to help you find your way to your higher self. The universe has no bus driver.

The Secret has absolutely nothing to do with karma as I understand it.

The resident Lama at my Tibetan Buddhist temple says we don’t, and shouldn’t, look at every big bad event as karma – actually, we should never try to measure anyone’s karma but our own. After all, plenty of things that seem or feel terrible as they are happening turn out to be blessings.

Also… Buddhists know that shit happens. When the earthquakes hit Haiti, karma didn’t have anything to do with it. As she put it, “sometimes holes just open up in the Earth.” Chaos happens, and it would be anathema to judge that as the karma of those individuals. The opportunity to sow good karma through compassion for the disaster victims exists, though, and that’s a measure of karma it’s a-ok to worry about.

P.S. Not all Buddhists take themselves as seriously as Richard Gere. Probably not even Richard Gere.

I like to think that everyone we cross paths with online and in real life brings something (enlightenment, entertainment, wisdom etc) to our lives whether we realize it or not.

Then again, I also think chin whiskers on women are sexy so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I do like to practice yoga with meditation–concentrating on my breath, and trying to be really present in the now. Also, I like the Tao te Ching.