Okay, let'd go back to a direction in your life, an intention, what you want to live for. That's a good question: What are you living for? A lot of people on this planet, especially in the West, live for working to get the money to buy the things they want to play with or have a holiday and so on. Materialism. Many live for that. Some people live for having a family, enjoying a bit of time together. But what are you actually living for? Is there one thing that is higher than your material happiness, is there one thing that is higher than your family?
If you need a higher intention and you are looking for something more important in your life, then that's going to filter into your everyday life. And you are going to start shaping your everyday living around this higher goal. Do you actually want to purify? Do you want to make this lifetime into one that you have become a better human being? That you become more loving, that you become more compassionate and so on.
Later in this retreat we plan to give a guided meditation about the Ten Paramis, the Ten Perfections. This meditation is especially designed to push us, to give us a kick in the bum to do more. Within this meditation, what can you do in your life to help the Paramis grow? Now, when you are is stimulated, when you actually think of what you can do, how you can do more, what does it do for your energy? When you are keen to do something, you actually have energy right there.Now, the energy comes from a little word which I often tell people. when they ask me whgat they shall achieve in the retreat, especially brand new meditators. And I tell them I only hope they walk away from here with especially one thing, one thing above everything else that I hope they walk away with. I say I don't care if you learned all the techniques, I don't even care if you master any of them.
But I hope you walk away with one thing: Interest. If you walk away from the retreat with interest, it means that on day 11, you do more. On day 12, you are going to do more. You try to do more after the retreat. You may learn the techniques perfectly, you can walk back and forth like a robot, everything's great, but if you walk away without any interest, nothing happens, nothing works. So, I don't care if you've learned all these techniques perfectly, but that you walk away with interest.
Interest stimulates energy. There is no question about it. For example, if you had a favorite subject at school, did you have more energy than you had for the others? I know I had. Stimulate energy and interest, get a hold of your direction. The guided meditation about the ten Paramis, that we plan to teach later, will also help you to stimulate this interest and energy.