Our online talk opened with this suggestive title.  Alejandro Adrada posed a few thought-provoking questions to the attendees: Are we somehow involved in that which happens to us? What responsibility do we have for things that repeat themselves? Is the human mind a participant in its own destiny?

With amusing examples and a few parables from the rich Buddhist tradition, Professor Adrada encouraged us to take responsibility for that which happens to us. If we cannot change something, at least we can choose how to behave when we face it. Following the line of thought of such books as “Don’t blame it on your karma” or “Damn Karma”, we can begin to understand that what happens to us is rather a great opportunity to grow and overcome precisely what we dislike the most, that which becomes an obstacle to our liberation or enlightenment.

In some mysterious way, understanding karma as the Universe’s law of impersonal retribution, the Buddha himself taught: “A snowflake does not fall in the wrong place” and “the circumstances in which we find ourselves are the result of what we have thought”. New Acropolis, as a school of philosophy in the classical manner, always offers the possibility of transferring Buddhist teachings as well as those of other Eastern and Western philosophies, to our everyday practical living, to achieve a better way of life: one that is more self-aware, joyful and responsible.