The Triple Gem: The Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha. It's our refuge that we can reflect upon to give us more inner strength. How to use it in normal life, in particular to stay balanced?
Let's talk about Moral Shame and Moral Dread, in particular. Moral Shame we talk about in the regular retreat. Moral Dread is something different. Moral Shame often goes together with Moral Dread. Dread is a type of fear, we're afraid of doing something.
Moral Shame is when we look into our past, and we recognize everything we did that wasn't right and we consider this, and we consider that. We really do record it, we make a whole computer file, whatever you want to call it, about everything we did not do good in our past, that's what Moral Shame does. But that's all Moral Shame does as a quality.
Moral Dread is the partner of Moral Shame. Moral Shame takes this database, hands it over to Moral Dread and says, "Ok, Moral Dread, study this and don't do it again!". So Moral Dread is afraid to do anything on this list again. It is a type of fear. But it is a wise fear because Moral Shame has already discovered, "Hey, this was no good, this was no good, this was no good, you got Dukkha from this". So Moral Dread understands that and wants to not have Dukkha again in the future, it's afraid to do something wrong.
Now, when we consider that aspect of Moral Dread and combine it to the Triple Gem, this can help us greatly in our normal life. Somebody says to you, "Hey, let's go and get drunk!" But you think, "Ooh..., what would Steve and Rosemary do if they saw me drunk", that's a type of fear. What other people think of you, other people who are nice and kind and wise and so on. What would they think of you if you did this?
So, by remembering the Triple Gem over and over, recalling how important they are in your life and then considering what would happen if the Buddha or the Sangha, in particular, would see you do this sort of thing, then that can help protect you from doing things that aren't so wise in your normal life. It can help you stay balanced within the practice, within yourself. On another level, to actually know that there are people who have gone beyond you in the practice, people who have purified, people who have ended all of their anger, all of their fear, all of their jealousy, this is an inspiration. This is something that can pull us forward. It can help inspire us, "Yes, somebody else did it, if they can do it, I can do it". Everyone who got enlightened used to be ordinary people one day in the past.
Some of you have probably read about the Buddha and the life stories. There is one particular monk whose name was Mogallana. According to the scriptures, Mogallana was the most gifted Arahant, enlightened person, except for the Buddha concerning psychic powers. Mogallana could float through the air, do all sorts of things because of his psychic powers. He had the highest psychic powers except for the Buddha.
Fine, in this lifetime he was a great human being. He was very pure as a young man and he was a great enlightened person, who lived to be eighty years old, but in past lifetimes he was even worse than all of us today. According to his biography in Buddhism thousands of lifetimes before he became an Arahant, he killed his mother and father in the same life, he killed both of them.
That's the worst Kammic thing you can do, ever. Killing your mother is number one, killing your father is number two according to Buddhism. He killed both of them, he was worse than any of us today. And yet along the way, thousands of lifetimes later he ended up being a great enlightened person.
When you know some of the stories about the Arahants and you realize that, yeah, they were human beings, average human beings even worse than me at one stage in previous lives, that can give us encouragement, "Yes, they can do it, we can do it!". So this is also an important aspect to reflect on and to know the stories of the enlightened people helps greatly to give you more inspiration.