subject: The Seven Virtues Can Serve As Guides For Daily Living [print this page] The great teacher Jesus updated the Seven Gifts, which are Reincarnation, Free Will, Precocious Intent, The Prophets, Divine Intervention, Karma, and Universal Laws by showing how to more fully take advantage of them through living with the Seven Virtues. These Seven Virtues can be used as a behavior code and will serve as guides for your daily living.
There are seven virtues and there are seven days of the week and perhaps if one just took one virtue each day for the seven days and worked on it, I'm sure that something would be accomplished at the end of that week. This would be one way a person could help himself and his attitudes.
As truth is the first virtue and Monday is the first day of the week, go through your Monday being truthful about everything. Try to live one day in pure truth exoterically and esoterically. The second day of the week being Tuesday and the second virtue being kindness, attempt to be kind in all situations to all people on Tuesday and if possible continue with the truth and as needed and necessary, temper the truth with kindness.
Continue on through your week with the rest of the seven virtues. Do this every week. Post one word where you're going to see it first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. Use this one word for your meditation that day. Take the time to meditate and have this one virtue that day in front of your mind for your meditation. If everyone would do this, the world would be a better place in one week! It could not help but be a better place. This way all the virtues will become intermixed into what is needed and necessary for a synthesized man.
The Seven virtues are:
1. Truth
2. Kindness
3. Love
4. Freedom
5. Compassion
6. Diplomacy
7. Impersonality
The soul must apply the seven virtues to its own personality in order for the personality to be able to live the seven virtues. It's like the soul has to interpret the seven virtues for the personality, as if they were in a foreign language, so to speak. They must be taught from birth on, as a foreign language should be, to be synthesized by the personality and used with ease. They must become second nature to the personality.
1. Truth
The first virtue is truth. Truth is stark white; it shines with a luminous glow. Intuition is truth, bare bones truth, stark naked truth. If you trust your intuition you'll be on the side of truth whenever a controversy arises. Truth must be tempered with diplomacy, just as kindness is tempered with love. An example would be to tell a child that someone deliberately killed his or her pet dog out of meanness. This would be wrong. Tempered with diplomacy, you would tell the child that the pet met with an unfortunate accident. Don't you see, you are not lying, just not speaking a cold, harsh, cruel truth? The virtue of truth is one that needs to be looked at very closely. The world would be a shambles if all were very truthful, if people spoke what they consider the truth as far as their understanding of that word. Truth is not of the personality level at all, but must be only from the soul level, which could be called a "gut feeling," perhaps.
2. Kindness
The second virtue is kindness. Kindness is essentially doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, the Golden Rule. Kindness is a necessity for all to live their life by, not the sweet unrealistic type, but intelligent kindness. Kindness is allowing each entity to be himself and to express himself as he desires as long as it is within the boundary of universal law. Once an entity oversteps this boundary, then intelligent kindness must enter the picture. This is letting the entity know that what he is doing is something he would not want done to himself. Ask him to stop a moment and consider himself on the receiving end of the action. If he is so dense and insensitive that he still persists in his action, then it is out of your hands and that one will suffer the consequences of his actions through the law of karma. This is the judicial system, remember, the law of checks and balances. Kindness is quite often the highest form of love to be found on the earth plane, love in the form of firmness. One can be kind and firm at the same time if love for all things is there.
3. Love
The third of the seven virtues is love. Love is a feeling sensed and felt beneath the surface of everyday activity. It is like a stream flowing underground between two who love each other. The wonder of love and the trusting of one's own soul and another's soul is what a relationship must be based on. Each must have freedom without imposing on others or depriving others of their aid. To love another soul as though it is your own is a very beautiful thing. You actually feel pain that the other feels and are close enough as to sense sadness, happiness or other emotions, even at a distance. To love through the soul is the only kind of love that will be recognized in the future. Marriage will be monitored closely, as will relationships between parents and children.
4. Freedom
The fourth virtue is freedom. Freedom is the right of each entity to believe in himself and trust his right actions. To destroy an individual's right to believe in himself is to imprison him in the worst kind of way, yet an entity cannot use freedom in an unrestrained manner, running rampant over others to get what he wants just because he has freedom. There must be laws in all societies. What utter chaos there would be without them. There is quite often a fine line between giving someone his freedom and holding on to him emotionally. You simply cannot hold him close and not let him explore things for himself. Too often we are over-protective of our loved ones. This is one of the hardest fine lines for all of humanity to understand.
5. Compassion
The fifth virtue is compassion. Compassion is that feeling of empathy with others that makes one realize that he has felt the very same feelings himself at one time or another. Compassion is an important subject because it is something that cannot be faked. You have it or you don't. You cannot force yourself by saying I'm going to attend classes on compassion and by next week I'll be a compassionate person. You can acquire an understanding of compassion by truly trying to put yourself in another's place and imagining what such and such would feel like, but it will still be just role playing. It will help a little towards understanding, which is a much used and much needed substitute for compassion. It still cannot replace genuine compassion, but understanding is perfectly acceptable to be used in the absence of true compassion.
6. Diplomacy
The sixth virtue is diplomacy. Diplomacy is an art also gained through experience but, unlike compassion, it can be learned by going to classes. Some people are just naturally diplomatic; some have an easy time learning it and others never will. It is an art to impress others to do something they don't want to do and end up liking it. A good diplomat has an inborn understanding of psychology. Diplomacy must, of necessity, be tempered with impersonality. Perhaps this is the secret of diplomacy. If one is too close to a situation, the feeling comes through that it matters more to that one than it should and the whole thing falls flat on its face because of this caring too much. If one can be impersonal about a situation, it all works as smoothly as a well-oiled lock.
7. Impersonality
The seventh virtue is impersonality. Impersonality is a tough one, probably the hardest for humanity to grasp. The use of the virtue of impersonality has been misinterpreted in the past and is in danger of being more misinterpreted. It is being thought of as indifference, and this is a crime within itself. There is a world of difference between the meanings of these two words. Indifference is truly not caring about others and impersonality is caring very, very much. Impersonality is not indifference. In some cases it can be the highest form of love and kindness combined. Impersonality looks like indifference on the surface even though it isn't. Don't fret if you have trouble understanding impersonality. You are not alone and it is a virtue that will be much easier to understand and acquire in the future.
