Discipline - What Is It?

John interviews: 

Jim, you and I have always been basketball fans, and we—Duke, Michigan State, Coach K for Duke—was one of the most disciplined men. And you've always told me, thank you for that advice, how important discipline is in shaping and forming your life.

Why is discipline important, and how can people use that to improve where they want to go, what they want to accomplish, and just being—forget tasks—just being happy? Why is discipline so critical?

Jim speaks: 

Well, you kind of work, by definition: What's being meant by discipline? Because there's a lot of the external world, and a lot of our culture doesn't want to tell you what your discipline should be.

I learned, relative to what discipline is, from the external world as I went into the Navy, and then you have to confine yourself to what the Navy tells you. As they kind of bring you to a zero point about what you've come to in terms of discipline. It then brings you back onto discipline as it says—what discipline is. Because it's an organization like all others, it's still an organizational setting. It was in the Navy. So, I had to learn how to work discipline according to what I was told discipline would be, for others as well as myself.

But what I discovered, after that fact, getting into a bit of different philosophy formats—particularly these, particularly of Buddha, etc.—is internal discipline. That's the critical factor. And internal discipline comes along with getting to know yourself. In order to get to know yourself, you have to work on internal discipline to get there, to put your time on yourself—who you are, ask the question, that's the inquiry about yourself, where you're at, etc. And that's it.

That takes internal discipline rather than having the external world tell you to spend all your time on this or that, go buy this, go shop for that, get this done and get that done, finish all your tasks, work the left hemisphere of your brain out the Gazoo—and not very often having a whole lot in the creative format of your right mind. You’ve got to go over there.

As it came to me, in terms of understanding more of this, I was searching for it. That's called searching. Yeah, before the surgery. I found out, after the surgery though, what I needed to do to figure out who the new me was going to be, as the surgery took place and eliminated part of the brain. So, it eliminated part of my personality, and I had to find my personality again—a little differently.

Well, I think you can do that without needing the surgery per se, but you're still coming to what Buddha came to, in terms of focusing, coming, bringing yourself into your—who am I—and then giving yourself time to study and ask the question: Who am I? What am I about? Where do I want to go? What do I want to do? And not being told who to copy or how to copy, etc., by the external world or by the culture. Go into yourself. That takes discipline.

We have to love yourself. You know, love isn’t the romantic scene per se of how you fall in love with somebody else. Love—Ram Das made this clear to me—is how you're taking care of yourself, how you're loving yourself. And someone “Hell Comes” about when you're living in hell, when all that stuff around you is very hellacious, it isn’t working, you're on the chaotic moment of time, etc., and you're having to do battle to make something work on the material format of this or that achievement and all that sort of stuff. You come back to—who are you? There's a discipline required internally.

This is a martial art. Actually, a good martial art has to do with internal discipline, not just external discipline.

There's bad martial art too. At the same time, were you working only from an external mode—of how you kill somebody else, hurt somebody else, whatever you do, how you defend yourself—aketo brings on that, not just as a physical practice but a mental practice. A mental practice within yourself: that discipline internally of what's important for you and how you put to it.

It does take some dealings with culture, in terms of being in the culture but not of it. And if you don’t realize that, you can get caught and become “of it” because you're not working on yourself. And that's what's going to be primary—working inward, about yourself, and loving yourself. And that's a discipline: to really love yourself. And when you love yourself, you love everybody. Then the romance of things that can come and go as they go, etc., are just an extra in the deal.

John interviews: I asked you a question about discipline. I didn’t expect such a great answer. Jim: discipline, internal discipline, and loving yourself.

Well, that’s a view, a perspective that I don’t think I would get from asking 99 out of 100 people. Thank you, Jim, 

Jim speaks:

by the way. Just one more point: that’s key—awareness.

John interviews:

Back to awareness. 

Jim speaks:

Absolutely.