Learning Discipline
Discipline Is Learning
The subject of discipline is fascinating because discipline is a paradox. Discipline is freedom, and yet, discipline is conformity. But discipline means to learn. If my discipline is Jeet Kun Do, then I learn the art of the way of the intercepting fist. There’s so much to learn in that discipline. You commit yourself to learning a discipline, and that art disciplines you - your body, and your mind.
You learn to become that form - a person who has learned the art of that particular martial art. You move in that way, you think in that way, you become someone who practices the art, which means you continue to learn. That is a discipline. If you are disciplined, what does that mean?
Behavior change
Habit
Discipline is often associated with changing a behavior, for the better or for the worse. Usually the better - you want to learn how to play guitar so you commit to placing your fingers on the fretboard in the correct positions and practice changing them in rhythm with your strumming. That’s a practice, and that’s a skill. You are discipling yourself to become a songwriter, or a rhythm guitarist in a band, or a lead guitarist who wants to become a studio musician, or whatever it is.
Discipline must be without control, without suppression, without any form of fear... It is not discipline first and then freedom; freedom is at the very beginning, not at the end.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
James Clear says astutely that it takes forever to maintain a habit. What he means is that the discipline is constant. And this is where the paradox comes in. If you want to continue being able to play those chords then you must continue to play regularly, learn new chords, try new warmup exercises, build up your callouses, and so on.
The moment you stop, your callouses go away, the gait of your strumming hand gets rusty, and your fingers get sloppy at playing the chords. You have to put in effort to get back to where you were before, let alone surpassing your previous skill level.
The mechanical mind
The problem with discipline is that it becomes conformity, which we’ve said. When you do it because you do it, the enjoyment is gone. Perhaps finally you can get up without effort at 3AM like Jocko, and that’s great for working out, because that’s hard.
Playing guitar is fun. It doesn’t apply in the same way…always. But at a certain point, each discipline will encounter the same resistance, and the situation changes. Working out is fun after a month once you’ve gotten your rhythm down, and playing guitar becomes a chore, eventually.
To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
When the mind becomes mechanical, we don’t do things in the same conscious way. The structure of the brain changes, because it becomes stuck in patterns, habits. Those habits are only sometimes useful. The trick is to know when and how to apply the practice of, the discipline of behavior change. What good is the skill of learning to make a habit if you never learn what things to habitualize and when to habitualize them?
Let’s look at an example
Running
You run every day, every week. Or perhaps every other day - it doesn’t matter. You love that you run, you don’t love running, but you value it. You must do it. How do you do it? You make it a habit and you put effort into getting to the point where the mind is mechanical and you don’t have to try. Perhaps, for a while, you even want to do it.
Then you go on vacation. You fear that you’re going to fall off and lose the habit, so you look for a place to run. When you book your accommodation you make sure there is somewhere you can practice your discipline, the discipline of running so you can continue to reap the benefits even when you’ve gone home.
You’re afraid that you’ll go away, have a lovely time, not run, and then go home with a relaxed mind, a relaxed body, full of energy, and no more running habit. You have anxiety about not running anymore, so you put that anxiety into planning to stay somewhere that has access to a place that is perfect for you to run, whether that’s outside, or if you don’t mind being on a treadmill, or whatever it is.
Freedom
Where is the freedom in that situation? You are relying on the habit to get you out of bed or off the couch. The mind has been shaped so that there’s no decision. Do I run? Yes, of course I run. Why? Because that’s what I do, the mindset says. Is that freedom?
Discipline is freedom means that the habit gives you the freedom of time because you don’t have to think about when you run. When it’s time to run, you run. There’s no cognitive load, no decision to make, you just do it.
If in the world of reality there is no freedom at all, then we are completely slaves. But when there is order, that is to put everything where it belongs in the world of reality, then there is a certain quality of freedom there.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
When the mind has become so mechanical that you do something unconsciously then you are not free. How many times have you found yourself driving somewhere on autopilot when that’s not your intended destination. You had an intention, you got in the car, you became unconscious - the mind fell into its mechanical, habitual routine, and the next thing you know you’re on your way to somewhere familiar and not where you wanted to go.
Being aware
Of course, I don’t mean you actually went unconscious driving in that hypothetical scenario, but your mind went somewhere else - your thinking mind. You thought you had the freedom to think about something rather than being in the driver’s seat, and you followed a thought. That was just enough time for you to make a turn you didn’t intend to make. Or more likely, to miss your turn.
You were off in lala land instead of driving to your intended destination, which means you did that unconsciously. You were awake, and driving safely, but you lost your mind. You weren’t consciously following through on your intention to go where you wanted to go.
Real Freedom
Learning discipline
Getting back to the running example, what is the discipline there? Is it the running, or the maintenance of the habit of running? No, it’s learning how to build the habit of running and how to manage it in different circumstances. Which means that you’re growing older, it’s harder for you to find the time, for example, but there’s more of a need to run. Your knee hurts, but you love how you feel when you’ve done the hard thing.
The learning is a learning about yourself. That’s discipline, real discipline. It’s not learning how to program a month of running, or figuring out how to start the habit all over again if you haven’t run for 6 months. It’s the practice of learning who you are.
You were a person who ran, and now you’re not. You were someone who had no problem making several habits and managing them. And now things have changed. Why is that? That’s the discipline I’m talking about - you’re learning. Have things changed because you’re older, or is the way you approach the same habit differently because you’ve been doing a certain kind of work that exercises your right brain instead of your left brain, and now recreating the habit is trickier?
Education
Education is discipline, and yet it’s not. What we call education, the education you received, is discipline in that it is conformity. You learn to do something or remember something, or to know something; not to learn. You don’t learn how to learn. In university you can go to a liberal arts program where you learn how to learn. And still, this is not learning how to think for yourself, to be free, but to think about that one thing. That discipline.
If you go to architecture school, then you learn how to think like an architect. You don’t learn how to think. You’re still a specialist, but you’re not a philosopher, you’re not free in the sense that you can think for yourself. You think in systems, based on the prior levels of education.
Chaos
Space
You need space to learn, to think. You cannot go to architecture school and fulfill the design assignments unless you have the space to come up with ideas. This can be difficult for the student new to the liberal arts college because she has spent more than a decade learning facts, or history, even if they’re not facts.
If your mind has space, then in that space there is silence—and from that silence everything else comes, for then you can listen, you can pay attention without resistance.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
She has been memorizing, and calculating - not creating. There’s very little creative education in schools. And now she has to design a solution to the problem, which cannot be done without constraints. With a single good idea, she can maneuver within those parameters and develop a design proposal that meets the requirements and is an original idea. But without space, she cannot use that order to make anything authentic.
Chaos is a wonderful thing. It’s the antithesis of order, of rigidity, of certainty. It’s on the brink of order, because chaos is the unmanifested ready to be. To come into form. Chaos is where the ideas live, and where inspiration comes from. We fear chaos, and uncertainty, yet we despair when things are the same, or predictable. We have fright about expectations that cannot be met, yet we assume there’s a certain fixed nature of things.
That fixed thinking, the fixed mindset is the antithesis of openness. Openness is the defining factor in the trait of creativity. The more open you are, the more creative you are, and typically the more prone to boredom you are. Einstein scored very high on the boredom propensity scale. That means you’re willing for things to be uncertain, in fact you delight in uncertainty, and get bored when life is too predictable.
Order
Cosmos means order. Like a natural order, which is different than manmade order. Manmade order is authority, discipline, structure. Structure is an engineering word. The structure, the rigidity of the structural frame is required to hold up a building. When one has the space to observe, to be, then one can pay attention. There’s no need for discipline, for structure, for rigidity, because one can see what is needed in the moment, one can find clarity, can see clearly.
Discipline, in the context of order, is learning what is happening and noticing what needs to or wants to happen. There is an order that creates itself without our involvement. Your kidneys do what they’re supposed to do, your blood makes its way around the body, the Earth makes it way around the sun.
Man is not involved. When man is gone, the planets will still revolved around the sun. The authority of man has no bearing on cosmic order whatsoever. Man is not needed for order or discipline, yet man insists on ordering reality in rigid ways.
Authority in its very nature prevents the full awareness of oneself and therefore ultimately destroys freedom; in freedom alone can there be creativeness.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Do we need order beyond what is natural? Do we need discipline? Or do we need space and freedom? When there is space, there is freedom. When there is freedom there is clarity. Right? That sounds right to me, what do you think?
Real order
The intuitive mind
Do you need discipline to make yourself run on the first morning of your vacation, when you wake up in a new place and you’re excited to explore? Does that feel like