The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 10

IX

On Discipline

The Mother says: "No big creation is possible without discipline". The true and original meaning of discipline is to be a disciple. And a disciple is one who learns, is ready to learn from a master. So the first requisite for a disciple or a learner is to obey. Obedience then is the beginning and the very basis of discipline. We know from ancient stories and legends how this discipline of obedience was exacted from a disciple or learner. For knowledge or learning was not considered at that time as a bundle of information to be acquired or collected by the pupil. It is not a mass of dead materials that is laid before the learner to possess and store; it is something living that the teacher passed from his consciousness into that of his pupil, and for the free passage of the knowledge from the master to the disciple a passive, receptive mentality and absolute obedience is an indispensable condition — a sine qua non. In the spiritual domain this was the procedure that was universally accepted and followed, although always in the name of individual freedom and free will protestant movements arose and flourished and traced their own way.

But obedience to person is in the last analysis a symbol —symbol of obedience to a principle. The person signifies and embdies a principle, a law to which we render our

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obedience. In normal life it is these principles or laws that demand our obedience. These laws or rules are meant for the welfare of collective living and therefore individuals are expected to restrain or forego their personal impulses, their so-called liberties in order to live together in harmony. Discipline is meant exactly to control one's personal idiosyncracies, place them under the yoke of the common collective law. All laws or rules that make for a harmonious collective living, that is, social or national welfare, are limbs of discipline. By submitting himself to such a process of self-abnegation the individual gains in self-control and self-mastery. But there are rules and rules, laws and laws. For that depends on the ideal or the purpose set before oneself. If the purpose is narrow, limited, superficial, the rules are necessarily likewise, and although effective in a particular field, they have a restricting, even deadening effect on the consciousness of the individual. If discipline means obedience, the obedience must be to a larger and higher law, and the perfect discipline will come only from obedience to the highest law.

The heart of discipline then is the effort to surmount oneself. Instead of a lower self following the law of an inferior consciousness one is to rise to a higher level of consciousness and a greater law of being. Discipline thus is only another term for tapasyā, replacing the lower law gradually by a higher and higher law.

Mother speaks of three lines of this higher law. First of all, the individual law which at its lowest and its most common form is the law of selfishness. It is the most elementary

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and superficial degree of consciousness when the being is confined to its own little person, confined mostly to its hungers and desires, to its sense of possession and appropriation. The human being starts with this addiction to selfishness but he moves towards a gradual enlargement and rearrangement of this sense of personal value and importance. Therefore he is given a family, a nation, a grouping more or less large in which he can find other selves to meet and learn to live with harmoniously. A collective life whether in a nation or in the family or in any other group formation demands a control over the selfish impulses and egoistic urges. That is the discipline, that is to say, the necessity of submitting the law of one's ego-self to the law of collective selves, needed for the realisation of a collective ideal. When you play a game you have to obey the rule of the game and you have to dovetail your movements into the movements of your comrades, you cannot move as you please but must integrate your gestures with those of others. Even so as a member of a particular family or as a citizen of a particular country you have to rearrange your personal habits and movements in accordance with a more general and wider plan of living. The extent of this obedience depends upon the ideal that a particular collectivity pursues and the value of the obedience depends on the ideal thus pursued. And the largest collectivity is of course the human race, the humanity as a whole. The submission of the personal law to the law of humanity in general is also a discipline demanded of man but here too

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the value of the submission depends upon the exact nature of the humanity to which one is asked to submit. For as I have said, there are degrees of consciousness and levels of being mounting higher and higher in an increasing value in respect of width and intensity and essential character. For along with the widening of the consciousness there must be a heightening of it, a horizontal movement of the being must be supported or accentuated by a vertical movement. Even the widest consciousness, a consciousness one with the universe, as wide as creation itself, can still have a core of ego-sense left behind, however attenuated it may be; the ego-sense can be abolished only by a transcendence even of the universal consciousness and rise into the supra-conscious. And this brings us to the other line of discipline, the supreme discipline which means obedience not merely, not even to the cosmic law but to the transcendent Divine Law. Here the individual is absolutely, utterly, free from his little self, the minor self-law, he is totally merged in the Divine, his being and living becomes the Divine's own law of existence.

Discipline then is the obedience of a learner to an ever-expanding and ever-ascending law of consciousness and being, until the law of the supreme status is realised which is the law of divine living: it is the utter submission or total obedience to the Divine Himself, when one is identified with the Divine in being and nature, where Law and Person are one and the same.

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