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The powers of regret and promise

Briefly

  • what is karma
  • what are the four results of one actions
  • what do we purify

How do we purify

The four powers

The two powers - regret and promise, as explained in the book The Bodhisattva Vow:

The first opponent power, the power of reliance, purifies the potential for the environmental effect, and also functions to subdue negative karma in general.

The fourth opponent power, the power of promise, purifies the potential for the effect that is a tendency similar to the cause, and also prevents us from repeating the action.

  • The power of regret

    • Clarifying the difference between guilt and regret.

    • In Joyful Path (power of regret) Venerable Geshe-la says:

    • We develop regret by remembering all the dangers of our negativity.

      this is practical but hard so need to approach this gently

    • The stronger our regret, the stronger our restraint.

      This is an insight for the importance of regret

  • The power of promise
    • exploring the act of promising - what helps us keep a promise, what may be the reasons we break promises

From the dictionary

guilt (ɡɪlt) n

  1. the fact or state of having done wrong or committed an offence
  2. (Law) responsibility for a criminal or moral offence deserving punishment or a penalty
  3. remorse or self-reproach caused by feeling that one is responsible for a wrong or offence
  4. archaic sin or crime

From chatGPT

Regret is about wishing something had been different — an event, a choice, or an outcome.

Guilt is about feeling responsible for harm — it carries a moral or ethical weight.

For example:

  • You might regret missing an opportunity to visit a friend before they moved away.
  • You might feel guilty if you promised to visit but didn’t, and your absence caused them pain.

Re-stated

  • Guilt is the emotional weight of feeling responsible for a moral wrong — “I have done harm.”
  • Regret is the emotional reflection of wishing one had acted differently — “I wish I had not done that.”

So guilt carries moral judgment — the sense of having violated a value or duty. Regret carries emotional sadness — a yearning for what might have been.

These kind of insights can help us understand why people do not like guilt. But if we think about it guilt is not necessarily as "negative" as most people feel it to be.

It might be that our capacity for taking responsibility for incorrect moral behaviors is manipulated by others to make us behave in a particular way. This is of course problematic and make cause a lot of resentment.

Practicle take away

Explore how can these two forces be practiced:

  • In meditation
  • During our daily activities
sherab
sherab  commented 6 days ago
#1

Some people feel they can't remember a single malicious intention they had toward any one. May cause them to believe that they have never done anything that needs purifying.

This is understandable because we usually present purification based on the patern of negative action leads a potentail for negative experience which turns into negative future experience => if I didn't do anything worng in this life then I have nothing I need to purify.

Of course based on someone's karma this is possible. It is possible that they came with such good heart and good imprints that they simply did not have any malicious intention during this life and thus didn't hurt or even intended on hurting anyone.

Another explanation for such idea - the idea that I didn't do anything bad this life - is a type of lacking awareness to the fact that some actions we have done that we thought we were completely justified in our behavior were in fact negative actions. But for this people need to have a higher level of awareness.

Another angle is to do with the need to purify any action that is performed out of delusion. The normal way of teaching is to take the mind of anger as the basis of our activity and explain that activity performed from the mind of anger leaves negative potential etc. But in reality any activity performed out of any deluded state of mind is a negative activity. These activities and their potentials exist on a spectrum - they range from the most gross negativity - which we explain as actions done out of hatred to subtler behaviors that are performed out of varying degrees of the various delusions.

Because most people do not recognize delusions they do not realize the presence of delusions in their mind. Therefore they cannot begin the process of acknowledging how the presence of a delusion such as pride in their mind, act as a basis for actions that are actually negative.

At that time they do not recognize that they have pride in their mind, they do not recognize their way of behaving comes out of their pride and they are not in the position to understand all of this to be negative.

Any actions performed out of delusion is a negative action bearing negative results.




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