Discipline Begins – In Gita Verse 15.8 The living entity in the material world carries his different conceptions of life from one body to another, as the air carries aromas. Thus he takes one kind of body and again quits it to take another.
Krishna is giving us clarity through the fragrance. Wind or air carries fragrance from one body and leaves the body. Take to another body. Similarly our soul takes all the fragrance of our godliness or our inner growth and takes it to the new body.
Krishna is talking about the great responsibility towards ourselves. As what we can carry when we are leaving this body is only our Godliness or Soul. The individual soul is transmigrating from one body to another, and his present body and present activities are the background of his next body. One gets a different body according to Self-Alertness, and he has to quit this body in due course.
While leaving the one body and taking a new body our CONDITIONING AND DISCIPLINE plays an important role.
What is the difference between Conditioning and Discipline?
There is a great difference. They are totally different dimensions, and not only different but diametrically opposite too. Conditioning is something forced from the outside upon you against your will, against your consciousness. It is to destroy you, it is to manipulate you. It is to create a pseudo personality so that your essential man is lost.
Society is very much afraid of your reality. The church is afraid, the state is afraid, everybody is afraid of your essential person, your essential being, because the essential being is rebellious, intelligent. It cannot be easily reduced to slavery. It cannot be exploited. Nobody can use your essential being as a means; your essential being is an end unto itself.
Hence the whole society tries in every possible way to disconnect you from your essential core, and it creates a false, plastic personality around you and it forces you to become identified with it. That’s what it calls education. It is not education; it is mis-education. It is destructive, it is violent.
This whole society, up to now, has been very violent with the individual. It does not believe in the individual; it is against the individual. It tries in every possible way to destroy you for its own purposes. It needs clerks, it needs stationmasters, deputy-collectors, policemen, magistrates, it needs soldiers. It does not need human beings.
Discipline is totally different. Discipline is out of your own choice; it is out of your own will. Discipline, the very word, comes from a root which means learning. Discipline means you start learning on your own, because nobody seems to teach you the truth. People are interested in teaching you Hinduism, communism, Mohammedanism; nobody is interested in teaching you the truth. When you start seeking, searching, learning, on your own – knowing perfectly well that nobody is going to support you, you have to go alone – discipline begins.
Discipline is your protection against conditioning. Discipline is your effort to get rid of all conditioning. Discipline is your rebellion, your revolution.
To be a disciple simply means to be with a man who is not going to condition you. A master is one who un-conditions you. That is the definition of a true master: one who Un-conditions you, simply un-conditions you, and does not Recondition you.
Condition means slavery and dicipline menas freedom. Slavery can never be misused by the slave because he is not his own master; then too, it is slavery and is continuously being misused by those who are in power. Slavery is a sin, and howsoever decorated, it is ugly. Freedom can be misused, but it is better to misuse freedom than to be a slave, because you cannot misuse freedom for long.
Freedom – its use and misuse both – gives insight. One learns only through mistakes. That is the way of maturity. Maybe in the interim period, when for the first time you come out of the prison, you may misuse your freedom for a little while. You may drink too much, eat too much, but for how long?
And this freedom that a master gives is given through making you more conscious, more aware. And that is the safety valve: the more you are aware, the less is the possibility of misusing freedom – because misusing it will be suicidal.
Discipline is that which you accept on your own. You are not forced to be a seeker; a deep longing arises in you. Something hidden in you takes the challenge. Some seed sprouts… you hear some unheard music… you become attracted to some unknown, mysterious force. But the decision is always yours; it is not imposed on you. YOU decide that you would like to learn, that you would like to seek and search. Out of that longing for truth, discipline begins.
And you are always free to stop. You are always free to drop out of seeking. You are always free not to be related to anymore.
Discipline comes out of your own inner feelings, out of your own love. It is surrender but it is not a slavery. It is a surrender but not a slavery because YOU are doing it. If it is forced, then it is slavery, then it is conditioning.
Avoid all conditioning situations. Avoid people who condition you, even though they say it is for your own sake; even though they say it is for your own good, beware of all those poisoners. They have done enough harm to humanity. It is because of these people that real humanity has not yet been born.
Krishna’s whole effort here is so that when you take a new birth on this earth you are free, alert, conscious, responsible, doing things according to your own inner feelings, likings, leanings, not serving somebody else’s purpose, living your life according to your own light.
Tags: Discipline Begins
