Illumination's hooks

Self-Discipline, at first,  can provide a critical foothold in the war against whatever habit (physical, emotional, mental, systemic) no longer serves.  Gradual synaptic change requires this humble strength, won through willful masochism.  The patterns of life largely find their creation in chemical reaction and the firing of neural pathways, the ensuing combination of neurotransmitter and hormone cascading into subtle, hidden sensation, floats upwards into the system of habitual process.  The impressions left in the matrix from moments and events become all the deeper when they seem to repeat, even if only in spirit.  Life resembles chaos, and the events often only have meaningful connection here in the broadest strokes.  External patterns provide security from either their predictable structures or from their simple beauty (essentially the same thing).

While appealing to this broader perspective provides a certain sense of calm and a feeling of rising above whatever discomfort the experience engenders, the habit of objective participation must first develop.  While some possibility must somewhere exist that accidental lifestyle and habitus themselves provide this critical habit, most of us require hard work.  This work all the harder because the work will not feel natural at first.  Eventually it gets better and larger more intricate patterns emerge from what seemed the aether, but now tangible connection.  As the altitude inclines the tendency towards uprooting and dispersal steadily increases.  Looking down provides practical solutions, but without great care the gaze moves up towards something wholly different.  Upon looking back down, the seeming mirage of details sweats away, lost in beauty all grounding vanishes.  This insipid dispersal has far reaching, hazardous implications first for punctuality (because time is not divine unless measured in days!).   As more awareness withdrawals from the body and pumps itself upwards into this newfound archon colds, flus, simple illnesses begin to occur more regularly, nothing terribly pernicious, but providing an oscillation of subtle and abrasive incapacitation.  All this while maintaining self-discipline.  Now the head expands, and the imagery and revery that fills where only emptiness provides liberation, seem more important than eyes-opened.  And when eyes-opened, an overlay of ever-increasing complexity falsely imposes itself over the most basic of events.  Two extremes either lost in the detail, or the largesse.

Attachment to a set of actions eventually renders their ritual fruitless.  Mistaking discipline for the specific actions undertaken in its name occurs with great regularity.  A special type of staleness sets in, removed from normal resistance to change it will increase steadily with time.  Moderation in moderation.  The ability to recognize this only comes with prolonged exposure to and participation in attempts at self-discipline.  Once the actions are removed, discipline reduces quite simply: the ability to direct the entire capacity towards one particular thing repeatedly.  AND the ability to change this one particular thing with a minimum of concentrative dispersal.

The best practitioners maintain a defensible position by transmitting no sakki.  Preparation for events can only occur as they happen due to our constant inclusion and communication with the process of reality.