Keep reminding yourself of the negative karmic consequences of breaking moral precepts – to make them harder and harder to break. This is how they will not be broken in the slightest. Otherwise, from breaking of minor precepts, one thing might lead to another…
And before you know it, you are in a fix so great, that it seems to urge you to just continue breaking the precepts, in worse and worse ways. This is how already ‘hard days’ become harder days, seemingly with no respite. However, there must be extremely evil karmas to suffer relentlessly.
The protagonist laments of his plight. ‘In the desert, there is a lizard. The sand’s hot, so to stay cool, it hops back and forth on both sets of legs. Doesn’t go anywhere, just stays in the same place. “Why not get out of there?” you might ask. But it just stays. Just… goes back and forth till it dies. Never gets out of the desert.’
What he forgets, is that when the sun goes down every day, he does get a long break. It is not Uninterrupted (Avīci) Hell (无间地狱) after all. Also, rather than pointless hopping on the spot, he might as well hop his way out.
He faces an antagonist, somewhat his equal in fighting to win and survive. As they fight each other to the point of death, they are as if two lizards wrestling. Why not focus such strong wills to race out of the desert together? Even if the desert is big, there is the possibility of exiting it eventually.
To further ride on the analogy, why are we now existentially hopping to and fro, back and forth, between births and deaths? With all these futile efforts, of hopping on just to hop on as we speak, we might as well learn and practise the Dharma well, to be liberated from cyclical suffering.
