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).
1 comment:
Sounds to me more like overworked cops.
It is of course possible to divide actions into two classes: actions good and actions bad. A simple or simplistic way of thinking of Karma is like a sort of banking account, to which one makes deposits of good actions and from which one makes withdrawals of bad actions. If one's account is "in the red", one had better start doing good things!
The trouble with implementing this theory is the difficulty in knowing what is a good action and what is a bad action, because all actions inevitably link to others.
You may know the story about the skydiver who leapt from the plane only to find that the parachute was not working -- that was bad. However, the diver landed in a huge pile of straw -- that was good. But there was a pitchfork in the hay -- that was bad... and so on.
Maybe more pertinent, though, is the situation that what seems to be good (say, giving someone a ride) may turn sour -- but not maybe in a direct way (for example, if the hitch-hiker proved to be a serial- murdering car-jacker), but one more subtle: perhaps if the hitch-hiker had not been given that lift, she wouldn't have met someone who was impacted by that in such a way as to give birth to someone whose offspring years and years later did something...
I'm inclined to suppose that making a direct correlation between the ride and the cop incident is superstition rather than science.
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