Five Virtues and Three Foundations
The five virtues are benevolence, justice, courtesy, wisdom, and sincerity.
The three foundations are faith, surrender, and devotion.
We tend to confuse moral values, laws, and ideals. When we talk about benevolence or sincerity, there is this idea of a moral value that can be measured, that you can be judged against some given standard. However these ideas have more to, not with the measure of our existing character, but rather as areas to be perfected by practice. They are not all or nothing. Morality is the application of energy to achieve virtue, or perfection of the outer-being to be in line with the true-being or higher nature. As aspects of the truth they have energy and action. A true action comes from within and not from a conditional habit of the outer being. The virtues represent five areas to work on and they emerge from the three foundations. You are clearing pathways for energy to express these qualities.
When the mind has been calmed and the emotions can be felt as energy then sincerity and judgment can reject movements in the mind as unvirtuous. Sincerity reveals the character of a movement and higher knowledge, wisdom, dawns so we have insight. The judgmental force then has the power to accept or reject the feelings and actions which arise. What needs to occur, will unfold. The insight is at the dawn, but the sun will need to rise to the noon day. Insight in most cases will unfold after judgement. It is there at the time of judgement but the articulation into mental thoughts is slow. We will come to realize, or we will begin to have support of, mental ideas and knowledge.
There are all manner of subtleties in these practices. For instance one can become indulgent and use the mental suggestions to reproduce feelings. It is one thing to be compassionate it is another to reason everything done by another in terms of why they did it with a compassionate eye, so that no action actually occurs. Wisdom can be blocked by the mental process. For instance someone does something inappropriate at work, we can reason that they didn't get enough sleep, and that they have been stressed and so we understand where they are coming from and let it go. They are suffering and they are trying to be happy through ineffective means. But the real situation may be one where what is needed a confrontation as to the wrong behavior. That is what needs to occur. Compassion being very important and always applicable, but it has to be supported by wisdom so that compassion is not a mechanical action, but is sincere and genuine, not a rehearsed reaction.
When working properly it is not a matter of thinking. The judgement will come instantly and the mental formulations that follow will have organized insight and support of the decision. Fluctuation and accounting are a sign that the mental process is still controlling the intuitive. One can have desire based movements that will try to pass themselves off as intuitions, this usually means that another voice will appear, calm, but insistent that will tell you accurately that this or that is not the way. Giving your ear to that voice will bring calmness, the desire will disturb the system. You have to be able to feel the difference and act on it.
Until the practice has been done for some time and a good foundation has been set down there are supporting means. These include things like careful analysis of the decision making process, use of mental guidelines and affirmations. So to begin with it is good to take a careful look at each of the virtues and define them, using your own experience as examples.
