Last night we had our November meeting at the Norwich Buddhist Centre.  Despite quite a few of us being a little bleary eyed, after Andrea's 1950's sock hop fancy dress birthday party the night before, everyone was very engaged.  

We looked at karma and rebirth, Miles and Andrea had attended a day on this at Centre earlier on and gave a presentation to the group, which produced a very lively exploration of this topic.  Amongst the many areas we covered in our discussion, one that seemed to stand out, was that whilst karma is central to the engaged spiritual life and is the most famous order of conditionality, it is not the only conditioning factor at play.  Buddhism also recognises the natural sciences; physics, chemistry, biology, psychology etc... Buddhism does NOT say that everything arises only from karma alone.  Also, by working with our mind we become happier and healthier human beings, on the basis of this, those factors that lead to the radical transformation of conciousness,  culminating in Enlightenment, can arise.

This discussion was so engaged in fact, that we ran out of time, seemingly with much more to say.