Karma!

i first came to lancaster to see PCA&D a few months ago. while my friend and i were walking around checking things out a woman came up and asked for a ride to york. i asked her if she just wanted to use my phone to call for a ride but it turned out her boyfriend wouldn't come get her and she was stranded in lancaster without any help, and to make the story a little more interesting she had just been released out of the hospital. i didn't think that about her i just thought she was a crack addict that was telling lies. once she was in the car and we were driving to york she asked to use my phone and i got to hear an actual conversation between her and her boyfriend and turns out she was telling the truth and he was just not coming to get her. so we dropped her off and headed back to harrisburg.

the whole way back i was speeding and my friend kept saying watch out for cops, don't get pulled over. not twenty minutes after he said this we flew by a cop going at least 85. i started freaking out, especially after i watched him turn on his lights and start after us down the highway. so i got in to the left lane and watched in the rearview mirror and the cop pulled over a different 4 door red car, that wasn't mine. i looked at john and i said "DUDE!!! thats karma right there, since we gave that lady a ride to york that cop didn't pull us over!!!" he just laughed and we went on our way.

i just thought this story could tie in because i thought of it when you were talking about the Buddhist notion of self. With the karmic dispositions, samskaras (inclinations to action based on past action).

listen up

i tried to listen and do nothing but listen and to my suprise i couldn't do it as long as i thought i'd be able to. A few classes ago you told us to try and do this in our free time and at the time i didn't think it would be that hard. Trying to just sit and listen to the surrounding sounds can be more difficult than is seems. For the first few seconds i was listening to the clock ticking and the sounds of the highway out side but after that my head started thinking and having conversations with out me telling it to. I was thinking about how i'm going to get to new bloomfield to get this car i'm trying to buy, how i'm going to get my community service done in the next three weeks. My mind also started thinking of things i haven't been worried about today, i remembered that my friend called me four days ago and i still haven't returned her call. So i tried again to clear my thoughts and just listen but in the end i got the same results. It's just wierd that i can't keep my mind distracted on just listening for more than a few seconds without my thoughts taking over.