Question

Could you please explain, give examples for the growth of Morality and Energy and in every day life?

Answer

Morality depends a great deal on Right Understanding and Right Intention. So as you grow in wisdom and compassion, your understanding of morality and your capacity to grow in morality gets stronger.

An example of the growth in morality could be in relationship to your speech. Perhaps in the past you thought it was ok to tell a white lie just to make people feel better, or in order to give an inflated opinion of yourself to others. As you grow in compassion, for yourself, your truthfulness grows and so does the capacity to not speak in these unbeneficial ways. You no longer want to say untruthful things and you find ways to avoid doing such.

As you grow in morality, and especially compassion, you may find that your wish to cloud your awareness with any type of drugs or intoxicants decreases and ends - hopefully - because we value our awareness so much that we don't want to cloud it with anything that will prevent us from taking care of ourselves and showing compassion for ourselves and others. That's another way that morality can grow.

Sometimes people change their livelihoods. Perhaps they were in a livelihood that had a question mark about whether it was beneficial or not. And as their compassion for themselves grows, they may find that they change their livelihood. Some people have become involved in helping professions, or it may be simply even if you just do office work, just changing the firm that you work with may be something you do. These are simple examples of changes based in morality.

Energy - growth of energy. Well, a simple example of growth of energy is we do our formal practice every day. And if we did one session before maybe now we do two.

Perhaps we put a little more energy into doing these special mindfulness activities throughout the day. Perhaps we put more energy into being nice to people, and into being nicer to ourselves, especially. Perhaps we put more energy into being aware of the hindrances and letting them go. Those are very common examples of where you can put in a little bit more energy, to grow in energy, because actually you can't practice without energy.

How do we develop energy then? Confidence brings energy. So by practicing some confidence inspiring objects of meditation we develop more energy. The reflection on "How fortunate you are" - and believing in it! Helps. And when the mind says, you are not, you can recognize it as just a thought, you don't have to take it as you. And be truthful about it.

Of course we are fortunate, and this will give us energy. And because we are so fortunate, let's use our good fortune for the benefit of ourselves and others, and this also brings forth more energy. Reflecting on the Dhamma brings energy. And how can we reflect on the Dhamma? By actually remembering the Dhamma. So remember the Dhamma and reflect on its meaning and energy and zeal will arise.

We realize just how fortunate we are and we want to make the most of our precious human life for the benefit of ourselves and others. And if we are fortunate and others aren't, wouldn't it be good to do something for ourselves and others, and do something for others and this world, instead of just consuming. If beings are dying just for us to survive, then at least we can start to give something back to the world by developing ourselves.?

Our apologies if there are any errors in the above text. If anything seems to be wrong or confusing in any way, please feel free to contact the teachers for further clarification.