It's not really that simple. Good luck, bad luck, who knows? We've taught over 6,000 people in retreats. It's almost never that we've had a super handsome movie star type man or a super beautiful model or actress. It's almost never. One time, Rosemary and I were doing registration and a young couple about 24 years old came up together at the same time. I looked at them and they were both very good looking on the outside. Rosemary and I had the same feeling, what are they doing here? We registered them and as soon as they walked away, Rosemary and I looked at each other like yeah, this was a surprise. The very next day, while the talking was still going on, and people could change their mind about doing the retreat, they did. They changed their mind. They never came back.
As far as we're concerned, being born super-beautiful, super-handsome is bad luck, because people get too attached to their physical body. They get too attached to wanting fame, wanting people to look at their body, wanting people to praise them. They get caught up in the movies, they get caught up in fashion magazines, etc., they get caught up in that world based on body beauty. Their attachment to their body prevents them from wanting to come here. It's just that simple, we've seen it over and over.
When somebody says that some of the fruits of good Kamma are also good Kamma, no, so this is where we're making a distinction. Being born beautiful by Buddhist terms is a result of good Kamma. Being born wealthy, being born healthy, are results of past good Kamma. In themselves, they may actually produce the conditions where people make bad Kamma. If a person gets too attached to their body, they're actually making bad Kamma.
For a person who is born poor or with a disease, that's the fruit of their bad Kamma. Somewhere in a past life, Buddhism says they did something that was not good, so therefore they're born poor or diseased, the fruit of past Kamma. But how they react to it, actually determines whether they're going to do good or bad Kamma now.
A few months ago, most if not all of you know that a man in the United States died. His name was Christopher Reeve. He was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down. He could move his fingers a tiny bit, that was it. He had a very bad accident about 9 years ago, which caused him to become a quadriplegic. Very bad Kamma came to him. From his own life history, the years before that, he didn't seem to deserve such a bad state, but he got it. Buddhism would say that something from his past life gave him that injury. A lot of people when they become paralyzed they wallow in self-pity, they hate the world, they hate God, everything else. They tend to stay in a messed-up mind-state. Christopher Reeve was lucky, he had good friends. They helped him, they inspired him, and he did a lot of goodness in the 9 years he was in that wheelchair. He made heaps of good Kamma being paralyzed, he made more good Kamma in those 9 years, paralyzed, than he had made in 41 years before that.
This is where good luck, bad luck, who knows, has to be thought of regularly. If you think you have great good luck when you win the lottery, fine. That's the result of some past good Kamma, but what are you going to do with the lottery money? You think you have a great deal of bad luck, if your leg gets cut off. That's the result of something you've done in the past, but what are you going to do now that you've only got one leg?