For those of you who don't know, these two, Moral Shame and Moral Dread, are called in Pali, the Lokapala Dhamma. And in English they have a special name: Two Virtues that Protect the World. Protect the world. This is interesting. They protect our world and they protect other people's worlds, the worlds of those who are around us who are affected by our actions. Now, the basic work to develop Moral Shame and and Moral Dread is that we start with Moral Shame. This looks into our past. We try to remember everything that we've done which was unskillful, anything we did that was not right to do. We might call it bad, we might call it improper or unwise; anything in the past that was not good to do.
Moral Shame wants us to look at all those actions very objectively. We're not going to do this in order to beat ourselves over the head. We're going to do this to understand our conditioning. We're going to do this to understand where we've come from. We're going to do this to open our heart more to this human being who we've been. So we basically make a huge database. You can think of it a bit like a computer where we're just tabulating; we're just reporting everything that we've done in the past that we don't think was very good. We want to be very objective about this. It's very clear: "This was a good thing to do," or "This was not a good thing to do." If it was not a good thing to do, write it down. Now if you're not sure whether it was good or was not good, put it on the Moral Shame side as well, because there's probably a part of it that wasn't perfect so we want to correct that as well.
Now, this is fine; we become a great scientist, a great historian, and we have all this information. If we don't do anything with the information, then it isn't really worth that much. So Moral Dread comes in. The word dread means a type of fear. We become afraid of doing it again. Moral Dread means that we're afraid of doing that same action ever again. We don't want to do it. So Moral Dread takes this database and it remembers it all. It needs a good memory. At first, we want to remember the big stuff, especially, and then, later, we have to remember everything. If we're going to purify, everything comes into the scope of Moral Dread.
One thing that helps Moral Dread is to have friends who don't do the action that we're trying to avoid. Then we feel embarrassed if we even think about doing it. We don't want to do it because our friends don't do it. So having good friends is a great support for both Moral Shame and Moral Dread. Now, of course, we don't want to be too idealistic; it takes time. But we try to remember everything that Moral Shame has written up and then we're going to guard against doing it. We're going to guard against repeating the same unbeneficial thing that we did in the past. This is basically how Moral Shame and Moral Dread work.
Now, I think Rosemary answered a question a few days ago about a statement I had made that if you can perfect Moral Shame and Moral Dread, it's probably the same as getting enlightened. When we think about it, we're going to see every negative, unbeneficial thing we did. We're going to stop doing it and never want to do it again in the future. No more anger, no more fear, no more greed, no more desire, no more jealousy; none of it; it's all gone. We're getting to the same definition of enlightenment: no more desires, no more aversions, no more ignorance. So this is how Moral Shame and Moral Dread work together to protect this world and to protect the world around us.