For a few weeks now, a topic has entered our consciousness and has almost completely taken it over. In the traditional media there are corona reports with interruptions, in the social media the most different contributions to the one topic flourish. It seems as if we are not allowed to discuss or consider anything else.
Clearly, this virus has turned all our lives upside down in a way that has not been seen as long as anyone can remember. Every person in our society must adapt their habits and daily routines to the demands of the situation. It requires a lot of thinking and speaking to be able to process these changes.
A collective consciousness has spread and has entered our heads uninhibited. Its main drive is the pure fear of survival, its additional drive the social fear of not wanting to infect others. This consciousness acts like an undertow that wants to pull everything into itself, from which nothing should remain untouched. It has encircled our possibilities for action and we have sent ourselves into our lot, knowing that all others will join in. At the same time, it has bound and occupied our thinking, which then staggers from one wall to the other and then back again, as in a prison cell.
In addition, there is the uncertainty about the duration of the measures, which puts question marks over all the plans and future expectations that we have built up and prepared within ourselves. We do not know how long we will have to sit at home, how long the restrictions on freedom of movement will be maintained and in what form they will continue to exist. We have to live more in the moment, even if the imagination always wants to travel into a desirable future. Our thinking can only circle around here too: What have I planned and how little do I know if it can happen.
We are confronted to a much greater extent with the fundamental unpredictability and unaccountability of reality. Already 2600 years ago, the teachings of the Buddha pointed at impermanence, at the constant changeability of life and at the human mind, which obstinately refuses to accept it, and which builds up all its fears around this impermanence. According to Buddha, suffering results from fighting this impermanence by holding on to old habits, relationships, expectations, objects, including health. As soon as and only when we acknowledge that nothing is permanent and that therefore nothing is under our absolute control, we will find inner peace.
But how are we supposed to come to peace when everything around us is uncertain? How are we supposed to find peace when everyone is constantly talking about the one subject that contains nothing positive, but only worries and fears? The virus with all its incalculable threat is everywhere, or at least it could be everywhere, on every door-buckle and in every drop of air.
Plea for Corona-Free Spaces
Not even this plea can do without alluding to the almighty theme. This is what happens when the collective consciousness is narrowed and restricted. But we can only get out of this bewitchment by occupying ourselves with other issues. Immediately someone stands up saying that this is just a distraction. But what should we distract ourselves from? By now we know in overflow and tedium what there is to know. We do what we have to do.
So there is plenty of time for other things, other activities, other ideas that have nothing to do with the omnipresent virus. For this we have to clear our heads, instead of constantly cluttering them up with this topic. The virus has settled down in our heads and wants to multiply and multiply further, as it were its nature. It wants to make us addicted to itself, like a lover who wants to fill the object of his admiration with his own self, so that she will not be able not forget him for a second.
How do we fight an addiction? We stop nurturing and feeding it. We restrict its space by opening up other spaces and occupying them with our activities until the addiction has died down in its chamber. We focus our attention on everything that is free of viruses: the animals and plants around us, the sunshine, the raindrops. We use the time to dig up old hobbies or to realize ideas that have been left behind. We enjoy the beauties and miracles that surround us. We live with the magic of simplicity that this time grants us.
Fortunately, in this case, the external limitations have nothing to do with violence and destruction as in a war (this difference should not be blurred, even if some politicians want to present themselves as martial saviours by using this metaphor for disease control). We can identify these restrictions with inner restrictions and then suffer from our immobility, or we can expand our inner freedom all the more as we are restricted by the outer regulations.
These two pieces of equipment for the spiritual journey have an intimate and paradoxical relationship with each other. We both need them and they both need each other. With a balanced interplay of these two forces, we can continue on the path of liberation at exactly the right pace and in exactly the right form.
About the Necessity of Spiritual Discipline
We only make progress on the inner path if we consistently deal with our issues, especially with our habitual patterns and resistances. Otherwise, we get easily thrown off track by disturbing influences from outside or inside and have to go back three steps while advancing two. The most important lesson for exercise is to use unpleasant life events as opportunities for more awareness. When we have understood this and have been able to develop it into a sustainable way of consistent practice, we have already set up an outstanding milestone, which we can always look back on for orientation, to recognize that we are on a good path of inner development.
The necessary tool for building up this orientation is discipline. It brings us back from our habits and oblivion. It reminds us of our true destiny and our inner call. It helps us to find and maintain a regular form of practice that enables us to weaken and invalidate ingrained patterns of behaviour and thinking by working persistently and consistently on mindfulness. Working on mindfulness means bringing attention to the moment instead of getting lost in thought and fantasy. In the present moment, reality is to be found nowhere else.
Only with discipline can we manage to stop the temptations and encrustations that are stored in our mind on demand and take away their power over our consciousness. Only with discipline do we become the leading rulers within ourselves, only with it can we become independent of the other voices that try to distract us and continually activate the fear-driven survival programs.
The Grace of Discipline
But how do we achieve discipline when so much is working against it? Do we need a meta-discipline to motivate us to discipline? So do we have to discipline ourselves to be disciplined? Before we lose ourselves in an endless hierarchy of meta-levels and despair, we need to pause. We cannot create discipline like vegetable lasagne or the yoga headstand. Discipline is grace, it has been given to us for use. We can forget about it or recover from it if it is too much for us. But it is always available as an option. It arises from the power of growth, which has its own consequence and has made us what we are now, with our strengths and weaknesses, peculiarities and geniality. If we did not have discipline, we would not be adults, but helpless babies in giant bodies.
Access to the power of discipline also depends on factors of our history: Can we motivate ourselves easily because we were always supported in our curiosity and initiative as children, or have we lacked a stimulating and appreciative environment so that we had a harder time building up inner structures? Were our parents moderately demanding in terms of our consistency and determination, or did they tend to overstrain or spoil us? Unfavourable emotional and social growth conditions in childhood affect the extent to which the discipline to lead an adult life is available and can be activated.
Ultimately, it also has to do with grace, the conditions and resources with which we have been endowed. However, whether we find discipline easier or harder should not prevent us from using the power of our self-responsibility to use our sense of duty and responsibility for structuring our lives. Discipline as a freely chosen commitment to our own goals is an important source for the success of life management.
Compulsive Discipline
Discipline, on the other hand, as an imposed and compulsive attitude leads to self-exploitation and lack of freedom. People with this attitude believe that discipline has the task of suppressing all pleasurable drives so that they can move forward in life. They are determined by external norms which they have to fulfil, by external expectations which they have to meet. This form of discipline, as a contrast to the pleasure principle, has no place for grace. For people with this imprint think that they can only rely on their own fulfilment of duty and performance. They are stuck between hard work and a guilty conscience, as a result of which they can never be satisfied with themselves, but always think they are doing too little and too badly. Any state of relaxation is risky, because the fear prevails that the reins must always be tightened firmly so that a perishable sloppiness does not break in. So it is the constant fear of the inner sluggard or good-for-nothing that drives one to pull oneself together in a disciplined manner.
This behaviour pattern is self-torture and can lead to burnout and psychosomatic symptoms because it is accompanied by chronic stress. It is hostile to the body and our desire for joy and is therefore inhuman. The real effort should be to see through this pattern and replace it with a new form of discipline that includes periods of relaxation and enjoyment of life. If we succeed in overcoming the compulsive imprints, grace can be invited to participate in creating a happy life.
The Secret of Grace
From here on, the considerations lead us back to the spiritual path. At this level, everything we do or refrain from doing in our lives, all disciplined efforts and undisciplined slackness, are considered a contribution to inner growth towards more freedom and ego-transcendence. Grace is a spiritual category that points out that much, if not everything, that happens, is not in our power and disposal, but has been granted to us by a deeper source. The successes in our lives are not the fruit of our efforts, but the outflow of a complex web of events whose logic defies our insight. Even our efforts and the energies necessary for them are due to this source and not an achievement that we could attribute to our ego.
In this perspective, every disciplined action comes from the background of the source, and even every bit of our capacity for self-discipline has been donated to us from there. Grace commits us to nothing but gratitude. Trust in grace is part of the basic trust in life that has allowed us to grow and develop to this moment. Grace, however, seems unpredictable and mysterious, sometimes it pours out its cornucopia abundantly and sometimes too meagrely. There is no place where we can ask for more or anything else; rather, it forces us to practice accepting whatever is happening.
The Everyday Practice
The old saying: trust is good, control is better, can be applied here in a modified form: Grace is good and discipline is necessary. Because trust in grace should not be blind - I do not need to do anything, I am already being taken care of. Blind means not to see through the intrigues of one's own selfishness. The ego always finds loopholes to get its plans through and can easily rely on grace and cultivate its own laziness instead of concentrated effort. With a properly understood discipline, we can put our self-responsibility above our habitual evasions and become active for what we want to achieve in life from within ourselves.
In the "worldly" world, worldly virtues and skills are also needed to make a creative way of living sustainable. All these necessary tools such as discipline come off the easier the more we combine them with spiritual insights. The interaction of discipline and grace helps us, for example, to maintain a daily practice of meditation or mindfulness that opens us more and more to the blessings of grace and gratitude. It also helps us not to become tired in our other efforts without being fixated on a certain success. It reconciles us with setbacks and mistakes. It forms the basis for all creative work: Because we do not make up the ideas we need for creative work, but rather they fall to us, sometimes more abundantly, sometimes more modestly.
To do what is in one's own power and to submit to what is unavailable - a formula for the interaction of grace and discipline for our own good. Or, as the prophet says: Trust in God and tie up your camel.
