Losing touch with humanity

Life is a journey through hope, pain, pleasure, ecstasy, fear, monotony- a series of seemingly unrelated events unfolding , which mathematicians might classify as a set of infinite random variables, a number of possibilities and probability functions .

After all, what is the equation of good karma? How can we quantify it?

Of course, if you believe in karma, i.e. the idea that one’s thoughts and actions determine the course and nature of future events, then the randomness of events reduces to an illusion and you realise that no matter how insignificant or painful it might be, there is a reason for everything. Yes, it’s natural to not see this fact, to be ignorant of one’s own destiny being moulded around each moment of one’s existence, to be blind to the scenes scripted by one’s own hand, being played out on the stage called the world.

It’s so easy to dismiss simple coincidences without too much thought.
You meet someone new, say in college or at the workplace, and after a few minutes of conversation, realise that the two of you live not far from each other and have a few common friends too. Big deal?Maybe, maybe not. After all, since the two of you stay in the same city, your living in the same locality, attending the same college, working at the same office or having a few friends in common aren’t really earth-shattering events.

What about coincidences that may be a little harder to explain in logical terms? For example, you’re cleaning out your room and chance upon an old album, which was forgotten for years .You open it and a young boy, maybe twenty years younger smiles back at you-it’s you, with friends who swore they’d stay together but eventually went their own separate ways. An hour later, you decide to look them up but as usual, the task gets put off till ’tomorrow' and a few days later you’re busy with your life again, when the phone rings. It’s your long-forgotten best friend – the face in the album now has a voice.

“What a coincidence!”, you exclaim excitedly.

Is it really? Would he have called had you not come across that album a few days ago?

Faith, in the idea that a higher power exists and governs the world, fuelled only by the actions of the souls it governs – a karmic feedback system.
Try questioning the faith of people  – like the man whose otherwise perfectly functional car broke down on the way to work, thereby delaying his arrival at the office in the WTC, New York, on the morning of Sep. 11,2001, even as his co-workers arrived at the usual 8:30- 8:45 a.m.
A young girl, nine years old maybe, killed while crossing the road, by a junkie who decided that red lights aren’t for him. Wrong place, wrong time. But the question still echoes in silence – Why?

The idea of karma is an internal aspect of Hinduism and has been embedded in the Indian psyche since ancient times. The cycle of life and death, past lives and reincarnation, the idea of one being responsible for one’s own destiny are implied by the idea of karma itself.

This fits in beautifully with the idea of karma and reaffirms the notion that nothing is a coincidence. Even the existence of life on earth in its present form is poised on a delicate balance of mathematical precision.
It’s easy to see that our physical world is far too symmetrical and precise in its construction to be a coincidence. It’s the same with the spiritual world; only in this case, no observations and measurements exist to give us a clearly defined view.

So here we are, billions of souls, journeying along our respective paths, not realising that ever so often, they cross and merge and separate, but never do they completely detach from each other. We are in this together, this cosmic puppet show-but the script written by our own. The wars, religious conflicts, political games and other divisive instruments becomes starkly clear when we realise that we are bound together by quantities as fundamental as time and space.

Why then, do we insist on drifting apart and losing touch with humanity?