Karma

How do you tell if being born beautiful, or ugly, is a punishment or a reward?

Some people believe that karma is tit-for-tat. I can't make sense out of it that way... it cannot be either punishment or reward and still make sense. It doesn't hold true. It seems to me that it can only be a learning experience either way; an object lesson, if you will. If you happen to be beautiful and successful and wealthy and all you take home from that is that you are better than those who are ugly and stunted and poor, then you have failed to learn anything at all from your experience. I am not entirely sure that having it easy in this life is as much a reward as it is a self-test, and the test you have chosen for yourself is whether you can have everything handed to you and still remember humility and compassion.