Compilation · Psychic
Discipline: Compilation
Passages from the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on discipline, each with its source.
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On this page
- What is Discipline?
- Inner and Outer Discipline
- Discipline and Parts and Planes of the Being
- Discipline and Psychic Being
- Why is Discipline Needed?
- For Living a Better Life
- For Establishing Truth Within
- Helps in Understanding the Parts of our Being
- To Overcome Desire/Fear/Anger
- Developing the Faculty of Imagination
- At Work
- How to Cultivate Discipline?
- Discipline in Education
- Difficulties on the Way
- At Physical Level
- At Vital Level
- At Mental Level
- Discipline and Other School of Thoughts
- Discipline and Gita
- Discipline and Raja Yoga [Mental Discipline]
- Discipline and Hatha Yoga [Physical Discipline]
- Discipline and Dhammapada (Buddha)
- Yogic Discipline
- What is Discipline?
- Why is Discipline Needed?
- For Organizing Parts of the Being
- How to Cultivate Discipline?
- Common Errors
- Sources
What is Discipline?
To act according to a standard of Truth or a rule or law of action (dharma) or in obedience to a superior authority or to the highest principles discovered by the reason and intelligent will and not according to one’s own fancy, vital impulses and desires.
To live and act under control or according to a standard of what is right—not to allow the vital or the physical to do whatever they like and not to let the mind run about according to its fancy without truth or order [is the meaning of discipline].1
Inner and Outer Discipline
Outwardly there are a few limitations, because, as there are many of us and we don’t have the whole earth at our disposal, we are obliged to submit to a certain discipline to a certain extent, so that there may not be too great a disorder; but inwardly you live in a marvellous liberty: no social constraint, no moral constraint, no intellectual constraint, no rule, nothing, nothing but a light which is there. If you want to profit by it, you profit by it; if you don’t want to, you are free not to.2
… precisely by inner discipline; you can create your atmosphere by controlling your thoughts, turning them exclusively towards the sadhana, controlling your actions, turning them exclusively towards the sadhana, abolishing all desires and all useless, external, ordinary activities, living a more intense inner life, and separating yourself from ordinary things, ordinary thoughts, ordinary reactions, ordinary actions; then you create a kind of atmosphere around you.
If in your inner discipline you begin to pretend, you may be sure of falling into the worst hole—of all things pretence is the most ruinous.
Without outer and inner discipline, one can achieve nothing in life, either spiritually or materially. All those who have been able to create something beautiful or useful have always been persons who have known how to discipline themselves.3
Discipline and Parts and Planes of the Being
Physical
Digestion, growth, blood-circulation, everything, everything is a discipline. Thought, movement, gestures, everything is a discipline, and if there is no discipline people immediately fall ill.4
There can be no physical education without discipline. The body itself could not function without a strict discipline. . Actually, the failure to recognise this fact is the principal cause of illness.
Physical exercises are not done for fun or to satisfy one’s whims, but as a methodical discipline to develop and strengthen the body.
The psychic or spiritual consciousness gives you the deep inner realisation, contact with the Divine, liberation from external fetters; but for this liberation to be effective, for it to have an action on the rest of the being, the mind must be open enough to be able to hold the spiritual light of Knowledge, the vital must be powerful enough to handle the forces behind appearances and dominate them, and the physical should be disciplined, organised enough to be able to express the deep experience, in the movements of each day and each moment, and live integrally it.5
Vital
It [disciplining the vital] is a long and exacting labour requiring great patience and perfect sincerity, for without sincerity you will deceive yourself from the very outset, and all endeavour for progress will be in vain. With the collaboration of the vital no realisation seems impossible, no transformation impracticable.6
It is true that for the external vital an outer discipline is necessary for the purification, otherwise it remains restless and fanciful and at the mercy of its own impulses—so that no basis can be built there for a quiet and abiding higher consciousness to remain firmly.
When one is in contact with one’s reason, with the rational centre of the intellect, the pure reason, it is a powerful control over all vital impulses. All that comes from the vital world can be very firmly controlled by it and used in a disciplined and organised action. But it must be at the service of something else―not work for its own satisfaction.7
Mental
… this [mental] discipline consists of four consecutive movements…to observe, to watch over, to control and to master. To observe the thought, the first movement then is to step back and look at it, to separate yourself from your thoughts so that the movement of the consciousness and that of thought may not be confused… First you look at them and then you watch over them. Learn to look at them as an enlightened judge so that you may distinguish between the good and the bad, between thoughts that are useful and those that are harmful, between constructive thoughts that lead to victory and defeatist thoughts which turn us away from it. It is this power of discernment that we must acquire… Thought-control is the third step of our mental discipline. Once the enlightened judge of our consciousness has distinguished between useful and harmful thoughts, the inner guard will come and allow to pass only approved thoughts, strictly refusing admission to all undesirable elements. With a commanding gesture the guard will refuse entry to every bad thought and push it back as far as possible…8
The more the mind is educated and has applied itself to various disciplines, the more it becomes capable of proving that what it puts forward or what it says is true.9
Discipline and Psychic Being
The starting-point is what can be called the psychic discipline. We give the name “psychic” to the psychological centre of our being, the seat within us of the highest truth of our existence, that which can know this truth and set it in movement. It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us, to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.6
… a truly harmonious personality implies a conscious arrangement of the inner individualities. This arrangement may be effected spontaneously before birth, but that is rare. The arrangement is achieved later, by means of a discipline, a proper education. But to succeed in this one must consciously take the psychic being as the centre and arrange, harmonise the various individualities around it. True harmony, inner organisation is the result of such a persistent effort.10
Why is Discipline Needed?
For Living a Better Life
Without discipline no proper life is possible.11
Without discipline you won’t be able to get anywhere, without discipline you can’t even live the normal life of a normal man. But instead of having the conventional discipline of ordinary societies or ordinary institutions…have the discipline you set yourselves, for the love of perfection, your own perfection, the perfection of your being.
When one is incapable of conforming to a discipline, one is also incapable of doing anything of lasting value in life.12
For Establishing Truth Within
By discipline or positive practice we confirm in ourselves the truth of things, truth of being, truth of knowledge, truth of love, truth of works and replace with these the falsehoods that have overgrown and perverted our nature…13
Without discipline one is nothing but an animal… One begins to be a man only when one aspires to a higher and truer life and accepts a discipline of transformation. For this one must begin by mastering one’s lower nature and one’s desires.
With a single sincere heart we all will for Victory, but it is by stages that it can be achieved. A scrupulous discipline is the first step.
…the individual’s character will crystallise according to the whims of Nature and the determinisms of material and vital life, unless a higher element comes in in time, a conscious will which, refusing to allow Nature to follow her whimsical ways, will replace them by a logical and clear-sighted discipline.
It can be said that all discipline whatsoever, if it is followed strictly, sincerely, deliberately, is of considerable help, for it makes the earthly life reach its goal more rapidly and prepares it to receive the new life. To discipline oneself is to hasten the arrival of this new life and the contact with the supramental reality.14
Helps in Understanding the Parts of our Being
Things are not so clear-cut and separate as they are in speaking; that is just why it is quite difficult to see very distinctly and clearly in oneself the different parts of the being, unless one has had a very long training and a long discipline of study and observation. There are no watertight compartments between the soul and the mind, the vital and even the physical. There is an infiltration of the soul into the mind.15
All living creatures, and more especially human beings, are made up of a combination of several entities that come together, interpenetrate, sometimes organising themselves and completing each other, sometimes opposing and contradicting one an