Exploring Your Hidden Moral Compass
If you would rather read this guided practice, here is a transcript as well. It may contain some minor differences to the video.
Transcript
As we go through life, there is a fundamental decency that supports us often invisibly - whereas thoughts of cruelty and harm would pull us into smallness, tension, and fear. I invite you to see, whether right now you find a degree of kindness or at least harmlessness in this body-mind. You might explore this by asking yourself: when a person or business has something I want, I steal it - or do I recoil from the unrightness of that? Take your time.
When you’re not happy with someone, do you act out in violence? Look within carefully. Your moral compass may be hidden underneath the assumption, of course I wouldn’t do that. So, we need mindfulness, to dwell with something that may be so true that it becomes hidden. Would you act out in violence if you were unhappy with someone?
Locate that already cultivated morality. Not stealing, not harming. How do you live and interact with people? Are you deceptive? Are you mean? Check out whether you empathically feel other people’s vulnerability as you refrain from harm. Can you feel the relational sensitivity in that? Is that relatedness present when you support, say a social benefit program; or hold a door open for someone, someone you might not even know.
And if it’s okay with you now, just do what’s comfortable. Maybe consider what level of stress and fear you might feel if you were continually stealing, physically hurting people and lying. What would it be like to live like that? How does this feel in the body?
And then let that go and enter back into your culturally native decency. Can you sense the relational sensitivity, the participation in wholesome social norms as you speak truthfully? Again, trying not to take it for granted. That’s where mindfulness is helpful.
Your participation in wholesome social norms as you restrain or manifest your sexual urges in respectful ways. These are all experiences of sila, morality. Perhaps you can sense how it runs through your path, bundled with your intrinsic relatedness. It’s there even though you sometimes transgress. Feel into the solid ground it provides in your life. Safety for you and for others. Comfort, respect, ease. Living a moral life is one way we manifest our social nature. In moral action, we come closer to feeling a part of a functioning whole, like the ant that scurries with its colony and the orca whale with its pod.
Certainly, morality and social harmony could be cultivated in our lives to a higher degree. And this part of our path stretches before us with a challenge and a welcome. But sense what’s here now. What decency? What in-built consideration on our Buddhist path? Sila is intrinsically individual as we experience our thoughts and make our decisions, and it is intrinsically relational in our sense of empathy, communal participation and social harmony. As the Buddha put it, this moral ground is like the earth. Everything heavy that is moved, is moved dependent upon the earth. Can you sense that foundational quality to your sila?
Sila is a Pali word for ethical conduct and morality. It can be understood as cultivating the mind internally and giving safety externally. The decency of non-harming, non-stealing, sexual appropriateness, not lying, and care with intoxicants are widely understood in our societies, if imperfectly realized. In the Noble Eightfold Path, three factors involve ethics (sila): right speech, right action, and right livelihood.
Contemplation
For a full day, see if you can explore how sila is manifesting in your relationships. Notice even small acts of kindness and care, or avoidance of harming. How do they feel in the body?
This clip if from an unpublished Dharma talk on the Four Noble Truths and Relational Multiplier that Gregory Kramer offered on February 12, 2024.