Discipline Is a Choice
When you practice right mindfulness, you’re making a choice. The basic formula tells you, on the one hand, to follow the body in and of itself, and on the other hand, to subdue thoughts of greed and distress related to the world. You’re choosing to follow one part of your experience and to subdue another part. And you try to do that consistently.
Normally, we jump back and forth, focusing on our bodies for a while, then going out into the world for a bit, then coming back in. But that’s not much of a path. It’s a very zigzag path. You want to make up your mind that the path of right mindfulness is the one you want to follow, and anything that’s going to pull you off that path is something you have to discipline. That’s the implication of the word that we translate as subduing: vineyya. It’s related to Vinaya, the discipline.
Discipline is a word we don’t like. We tend to think of it as having to do with punishment and harsh regulations. But it’s simply a choice that you’re making. You’re learning from your past experience that some of your desires are in your best interest, and some of your desires are not. No matter how much they may like to dress things up to lure you to get you on their side, they’re not in your long-term best interest.
This, of course, is a part of wisdom: “What when I do it will be to my long-term welfare and happiness?” Once you’ve got a good answer to that question, you want to stick with it consistently. If you look at discipline not so much as something imposed on you, but as a choice you make to stick with the desires that are in your best interest—having considered carefully where you want your life to go—then it’s a lot easier to stick with it.
The Buddha talks about there being many paths in the world: There’s the path that leads to heaven; there’s the path that leads to hell. There are the paths that lead to an animal rebirth, a hungry-ghost rebirth, a human rebirth. There’s a path that leads to nibbana. Most of us jump around from one path to another.
It’s as if we have a little helicopter that picks us up and puts us on one path. Then it picks us up again and puts us on another path. That helicopter is something we’ve got to watch out for, because it requires that we forget about where we really want to head in life, and the implications of our choices. It inclines us to look for the short term: How would it feel to go someplace new, try out something new, right now?
Now, this desire to try something new is what got us on the path to freedom to begin with. But just because it got us here doesn’t mean that we have to follow it wherever it goes.
Once we’re here, we have to realize that this is a good path to keep following. So if any impulse would pull you off, you’ve got to subdue it. You’ve got to discipline it.
The English word discipline comes from a root different from subduing: It relates to the fact that you’re learning. Learning, of course, requires that you dedicate yourself to a particular subject and stick with it. In this case, it means that you have to learn how to deal with your vagrant notions, your vagrant desires, and not feel that you’re being punished when you say No to them when you subdue them.
This is why the Buddha has you understand the process of becoming. When a desire comes up, then around it develops a sense of you wanting the desired object and you being able to attain that object. Then there’s the world in which might you do that. You slip into that world and you go with it.
Ajaan Suwat calls becomings “the traveling places of the mind.” Discipline requires you to say, “No, I don’t need to get into those. I don’t have to go traveling around. And I don’t have to identify with those desires.” This is why the Buddha analyzes things in terms of clinging, craving, and all the other steps of dependent co-arising, in an effort to depersonalize the whole process.
So realize that it’s simply a vagrant impulse. It’s not you or yours necessarily. You have the choice to claim it if you want, but why bother? Get good at seeing where these things go and really taking to heart what you see, learning from that—not just jumping with any impulse.
Discipline requires that you take the long view. You’re willing to say No to some desires because you have a bigger desire.
This is where many of us fail to understand discipline. We think we’re being hemmed in by other people’s desires for us. But you have to realize you have this one great desire—to find freedom, to find a happiness that doesn’t cause harm to anyone, a happiness that’s not going to disappoint—and you want to protect it. You want to keep choosing to go in that direction. So you have to learn how to talk to yourself. You have to learn different perceptions to hold in mind to remind yourself that this is where you really and consistently want to go.
Some people say it’s narrow, being committed like that. But then the people who refuse to commit to anything in life, where do they go? What do they accomplish? They just wander around aimlessly, off into the woods on the side of the path. They may find some interesting mushrooms and other plants and animals in the woods, but we’re not here just to find interesting or fun plants and animals. As the Buddha said, there are only two things that we can expect for sure when we’re born: aging and death. We have to prepare for them. If we don’t prepare for them, we’re being very shortsighted. And this is the best preparation: the path to something that doesn’t age, doesn’t grow ill, doesn’t die.
When the Buddha talks about people dying, he notes that even the wealthy have to die. When he talks about arahants, he says that they, too, have to lay down their body, or their bodies are subject to being laid down, subject to breaking apart. But the part of the mind that’s awakened—that doesn’t die.
That’s where this path leads. But it doesn’t lead there if you let yourself get tied down by lots of different vagrant notions, things that you haven’t learned how to subdue yet. Again, we don’t like the word subduing, it sounds like we’re being harsh and oppressive, hemming in our creative impulses. Well, there is room for creativity in the path, but the creativity is in learning how to be clever in saying No to your defilements. Apply your creative talents there, because they’re going to be needed. Your defilements are very clever. They come up with one argument, and you say No to that, but then they come up with another one.
So be creative in learning how to say No to those things, creative in learning how to subdue greed and distress with reference to the world. You’ll be making a good choice and you’ll be learning how to use your creative talents in the right way, in a way that’s consistent with your ultimate choice, which is the desire to be free.
