Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Discipline in the spiritual life
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
It is an interesting thing, that practice as a buddhist seems to require a high level of discipline. I remember when I just started my buddhist studies and had a regular practice, and discipline was tricky but I managed.
Now, quite a few years later, I am feeling more natural. If the feeling to meditate comes, then I meditate. But the feeling of discipline has entirely disappeared, I don’t seem to be able to access it anymore. The drive to meditate every morning is gone.
I appreciate the relaxed feeling of being natural. Sometimes I enjoy a little just-sitting.
1
Comments
My experience is similar. Discipline is a tool, nothing more. When starting out, the hammer may be the only tool you have, so you use the hammer. As you go along, you acquire a few more precise tools and use the hammer less often. I still use mine once in a while, where nothing else seems to do the job.
I sometimes got inspiration listening to interviews of experienced/frequent meditators like Adyashanti talking about what he had found. I'm actually moving from the idea of inspiration via people on to recollecting and thinking back to when I meditated last March and imagining if I had just come out of a meditation before I started having my food I cooked and a glass of cranberry juice, and then can I be aware of how that would be the same or different then my daily awareness having or having not meditated? Like a vitamin pill do I actually notice anything mentally or physically different? It seems like in meditation I would explore connotations of things but then return to the breath. So would meditation refreshen my notion of my daily experience? Like right now cranberries seem a neutral reference to me, just a mentor liked it 20 years past, and picked up at the grocery this week just to do something different from usual.
It might be the case of "not too tight, not too lose". The middle way might be best.
As someone who is quite undisciplined, I go through phases where I discipline myself and benefit very much. For me, there is no danger of getting too disciplined. As the best marathon runner in history Eliud Kipchoge said: "Only the self-disciplined ones are free. Otherwise you are ruled by your passions".
On the other hand, I have some friends for whom you might say that they are too self-disciplined in the sense that they are not comfortable with going with the flow and get all uptight and prickly as soon as things do not go according to plan and become a bit chaotic. Here, self-discipline could be a subtle neurosis too - trying to control everything.
So, the best way might be for each one of us to honestly determine where we fall on the self-discipline spectrum (too tight, just right, too lose) and correct the sails of our ship accordingly.
It might be so for most people… I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
But for me, discipline has vanished, there is nothing to hang on to anymore. There is only do-or-do-not, as Yoda would say.
At some point I relaxed and slipped into thinking about practice instead of practicing throughout the day.
Until the delusion and ignorance are completely eradicated, I don't see myself being able to do without some discipline and schedule. Otherwise, and even with, I fall back into ignorance of thinking about practice instead of actually practicing. It's enough to be frustrated if I didn't know better. So I just laugh to myself and keep observing self to learn more.