Sila and Equnimity – Beezone Study of Adi Da Samraj on the topic of sila and equnimity

What is Equanimity or
Sila?

Equanimity
is:

1. The release of attention from the
self-bond.

2. The stable development of true
psycho-physical equanimity.

3. Full responsibility for
self-transcendence.

4. The magnification of free energy
and attention.

“The Way of Life or Truth is a sober
enterprise that is founded upon the mature equanimity of the
body-mind. That Way is not itself characterized by mental
knowledge, mystical states of the psyche, or physical and
mental strategies for attainment. Those who take up that Way
must have first matured to a sensitive state of
psycho-physical equanimity, or freedom from reactive and
self-possessed programs of thinking and bodily experiencing
that cause one always to seek the Truth rather than
presently surrender to the obvious Truth. Only when such
maturity or equanimity has stabilized the body-mind can
actual practice of the Way begin”.

The
First Truly Human or Humanizing Stage of
Development

Developed Third Stage of
Life

The
Dawn Horse Testament –
edited and adapted

“The Gorilla conveys a sense of
great strength and peacefulness. In this sense, it
symbolizes the overall functional integration achieved in
the third stage of life. Thus, the gorilla represents the
force of the will in a state of equanimity. It is suggestive
of peaceful, loving independence”.

The
Seven Stages of Life

Equanimity and
Ignorance

“”I” cannot inspect the existence of
anything (or itself) from a position different from or
outside existence itself.

“I” is not Transcendental but
phenomenal.

“I” is the body-mind-self, and its
right or native disposition is, therefore, not contraction,
differentiation, and dissociation from the not-self (or the
phenomenal world) but surrender to the degree of no-self,
no-contraction, or self-transcending equanimity.

It is only in that disposition of
psycho-physical equanimity (or free energy and attention)
that the Transcendental Reality is obvious”.

Nirvanasara

“The self and the not-self are thus
rightly perceived only in Ignorance (or the awareness
corresponding to the view “I do not know what anything is”).
Such is equanimity, freedom from self-contraction, or the
state of free energy and attention. And such is the basic
disposition that develops in the “yoga of consideration”
that is the initial form of response to my
Argument”.

Nirvanasara

“Simply practice this understanding
and the basic beginner’s disciplines of expansion beyond
self-contraction until there is a basic equanimity of the
body-mind-self in Ignorance (or Divine Communion). In that
equanimity (rather than in any form of belief or
concentration of attention in experience or knowledge) there
are free energy and attention. Therefore, when there is such
basic equanimity, use the freely available energy and
attention to inspect and re-cognize all the forms of
self-contraction”.

Nirvanasara

“The Way of Life, which I have
Realized, and which I propose, is founded upon equanimity,
or prior transcendence of any and all conceptions of a
dilemma or inherent problem of existence. Likewise, it is
founded upon transcendence of the mood of recoil from bodily
existence, or preference for confinement to the mental,
psychic, or non-bodily illusion of self”.

Scientific
Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the
White House

“If “I” recoil from born experience
and thus turn upon myself like Narcissus, the body-mind
contracts. In that process, discomfort or dis-ease arises.
The natural equanimity of the body-mind is lost in
self-consciousness. A conception of dilemma arises, so that
thereafter it is always as if I am motivated by some yet
unspoken problem and toward some yet unrealized solution,
happiness, or release”.

Scientific
Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the
White House

“This disease is apparently real. We
do suffer. We do show signs of the absence of equanimity. We
do exhibit the qualities of boredom, doubt, and discomfort,
mental agitation, emotional distress, physical disease, and
all the patterns of bondage in relationship. Wherever there
is the self-contraction, there is bondage in relationship.
Self-contraction is always associated with object-bondage or
object-dependency”.

Dreaded
Gom-Boo

“Sila, or equanimity, is fundamental
to truly human life. Even though many kinds of disciplines
are associated with the Way of the Heart, one aspect is of
continuous significance throughout the course of your
practice. That is this process of releasing energy and
attention from the self-bond and enjoying the state of
equanimity, or natural control over the outgoing
automaticity’s of energy and attention”.

Incarnation
of Love

“True sila is good discipline, if
applied by one who would understand the conditional self.
True sila is not the product of a problematic or negative
summary view of conditional existence. True sila is a
servant of consistent self observation and, ultimately, it
is an expression of real and most fundamental
self-understanding. Ultimately, true sila reflects real
experience and true knowledge of the structural laws of the
functional, practical, and relational processes of the
body-mind. And such true sila expresses a reality-sense of
the limits of conditional existence.

True sila is necessary and good for
those who would realize god, but false sila is itself the
avoidance of god.

The obvious limits of conditional
existence provide all the reasons for either false sila or
self-indulgence. In either case, the problem and the search
become the logic of existence. And the problem with seeking
is that it always serves and reinforces its own original
principle, which is the self-contraction.

The god-realizing process is
necessarily self-transcending. Therefore, it is not a
process in which the guiding principle is either false sila
or self-indulgence.

Ultimately, true sila is the
discipline of love itself, or even happiness itself. The
heart of true sila is true heart-fullness, or the spiritual
heart-infusion of conditional existence through self
transcending divine communion. Therefore, not false sila and
not self-indulgence, but self-transcending love-communion
with me under the circumstances of conditional existence, is
the necessary ordeal”.

Alpha
and Omega Strategies

“…rather than reacting to events
or conditions themselves. If this is done, then there is no
Problem, no Question, and no seeking. And the apparent
lifetime of the body-mind thus achieves equanimity, or
freedom of participation, so that its destiny becomes
natural, easeful, free of the strategies of ultimate
fulfillment and release via knowledge and
experience”.

Transcendence
of Attention

“…stand prior to self contraction.
When you stand in the position of the knot itself, the
position of creating it, you can then feel beyond it and
simply stand in the natural condition of relatedness. Thus,
in any moment in which this simple feeling-realization is
re-awakened whole-bodily, the knot of egoity is released,
and you stand in the position of equanimity.

This realization, this original
insight is twofold. First the knot of the self is released,
and you are established in prior equanimity. When you stand
prior to self-contraction, the disposition of merely being,
feeling toward, feeling through, and feeling beyond, is
awakened. The free, feeling disposition of free energy and
attention, the natural state of equanimity, is realized. The
second aspect of the same realization is that you are
restored to relatedness. In the context of the first three
stages of life, then, this self-understanding restores you
to the variety of relations that pertain to the grosser
dimension of the body mind. The process must proceed through
the advancing stages of life, where this same
self-observation, self-understanding, and self enquiry
awaken in relation to the limitations that belong to the
subtler dimensions of the self-experience.

Thus, the process that leads through
the stages begins with listening and hearing. You practice
in the sphere of relations and experiences, and you realize
fundamental equanimity and relatedness. You progressively
observe, understand, and feel beyond the limitations of the
stages of life. This process culminates in the sixth stage
process or in the transition to the seventh stage of life in
the event of transcendence of the feeling of relatedness
itself. In that event, the process is made
single.

In the earlier stages the process is
associated with the feeling of relatedness and therefore
with a variety of objects, according to the stage of life.
Thus, the agent of the process leading to the seventh stage
of life is the feeling of relatedness, which is a natural
realization developed on the basis of listening and hearing.
In the equanimity prior to self contraction, the feeling of
relatedness is wholly felt, wholly allowed, and in any
moment in which the self-contraction intervenes, it is
observed, understood, and felt beyond, or felt prior to.
Instead of self-contraction generating your experience, the
-feeling of relatedness, simple being, feeling toward,
feeling through, and feeling beyond, is awakened in every
moment of true self-enquiry or True Prayer”.

Observe
the self in Tot

“The earliest stages of the practice
of this Way in my Company, are associated with changes that
serve.. purification of attention…the establishment of
psycho physical equanimity, and the freeing of energy and
attention”.

What
is the Conscious Process – Beezone Study

“…higher levels of
practice… cannot even begin until spiritual maturity,
or until the body-mind is responsibly and naturally
maintained in a conservative state of equanimity, and thus
no longer obsesses or controls attention”.

Spiritual
Maturity

“Psycho-physical equanimity,
responsibility for energy and attention, will be the result
of that. And on the basis of such equanimity, there will be
free energy and attention, energy free of this ego-bond,
energy free of the character of the false identification of
the separate one. That free energy and attention is the
ultimate arms or means at the level of the individual
whereby Spiritual understanding can be fulfilled. Only when
energy and attention are literally free from the ego
illusion and bind at every level can this process of
awakening can be fulfilled”.

Non
Dual Teachings, Talking Schools and
Transmission

“When the ego (or self-contraction)
is understood and transcended, then Nature is seen from the
point of view of Wisdom. Then the world is no longer
conceived as a drama of warfare between Good and Evil. In
place of this dilemma of opposites, a self-transcending and
world-transcending equanimity appears. And in that
equanimity there is an inherent Radiance that transcends the
egoic dualities of Good and Evil. It is the Radiance of
Love. And in that Free Radiance, energy and attention are
inherently free from the ego-bond, self-contraction, or the
“gravitational effect” of phenomenal self-awareness.
Therefore, dynamic equanimity, or the free disposition of
Love, is the “window” through which God may be “seen” – not
in the conventional mode of Creator, Good, Other, or
Heavenly Place, but as the Real, or the tacitly obvious
Condition of all existence.

The ultimate moment in the play of
Nature is not the moment of egoic success. The ultimate
moment is beyond the contradictions of good and evil. It is
the moment of equanimity, the still point or “eye” in the
midst of the wheel of Nature’s motions and all the
motivations of the born self. The Truth and Real Condition
of self and Nature is Revealed only in that equanimity,
beyond all stress and bondage of energy and
attention.

This disposition of equanimity –
free energy and attention – is basic to the conceptions of
the sixth and seventh stages of life. In the sixth stage of
life, it provides the functional base for the ultimate and
final investigation of the ego and the dynamics of Nature.
But in the seventh stage of life, fundamental equanimity is
native and constant, expressing prior Transcendental
Realization. It is in the seventh stage of life that God,
Truth, or Reality is directly obvious, prior to every trace
of egoity, dilemma, and seeking. Therefore, it is in the
seventh stage …there is not anything that must be escaped
or embraced for the Happiness of God-Realization to be
actualized. It is inherently so”.

Nirvanasara

“It is Identification with Me beyond
modifications, just As I Am, My Very State, My Very Person.
That’s the “Perfect Practice”.

To do that, however, you must go
through the tapas, the discipline of relinquishing all
modifications until you come to that point of steadiness,
fundamental purification, equanimity,
one-pointedness”.

A
Mastered Life

How is equanimity in the Way of
the Heart different from traditional methods

Traditional method:

“In this greater power and
illumination of mindfulness it becomes clear that the
watcher and the watched are parts of the same process and
that they arise and pass away according to certain laws,
under certain conditions, You can see that a sound or a
sight arises with a new moment of awareness, and that it
then passes away. So there is a natural evolution in
practice. When it is cultivated to a real depth and
intensity, even the lower stages of your watching are
eradicated; even the appearance of someone watching
disappears.

Mindfulness has two separate
functions. One is that it develops moment to moment
concentration and -investigation. And the second factor is
that it brings about balance. Out of this watching and out
of this spontaneous development of balance and equanimity,
one simply sees things from moment to moment, not
condemning, not identifying, but simply seeing. When the
mind comes to perfect balance, there is simply what is
happening, nothing else. And this is the super mundane
consciousness”.

Mindfulness

Way of the Heart

“….even though initial adaptation
to the practice of the Way develops many characteristics of
interior attention, the primary and ultimate force and
attitude of the practice is not based on a duplication of
the exclusive and inverted pattern of death (or the
abandonment of body and mind). The ultimate practice of the
Way is Radiant, founded on Ecstasy, or priorly Enlightened
Equanimity, which spontaneously and inherently Transfigures
and Transforms the body-mind and the world of its relations
with the Brightness of the Divine Life-Power”.

Scientific
Proof

“Its only in your emptiness or
dis-ease that you meditate on things, so to speak – desire
them or not seek them and so forth, and become entangled in
them. But if you can forget about them long enough to
establish a new wholeness, a wholeness that doesn’t include
those aberrating factors, then they’re truly obsolete,
because you already have that fullness which you otherwise
would look to achieve by those involvement’s. So you don’t
need them. They’re not a need in you. They’re not about
desiring.

That’s what happens when it gets
fully that way, but even in the meantime there are degrees
of purification and relaxation of the binding tendencies,
and you enjoy more discrimination about them and discipline
is effective more readily, simply. Eventually its not a
struggle at all. But when there is this true, fully
established equanimity, there’s also great concentration,
freedom of energy and attention, and the previous
adaptations that were binding have been made obsolete by
nonuse, through discipline, through Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga,
all of it. So you are full, whole, not seeking, the
body-mind in a state of equanimity. You see how you’ve
become disentangled. So that’s what the original period of
the process is about. And as it moves into the Spiritual
dimension of the exercise, it Realizes Spiritual equanimity,
a fullness unagitated.

And that fullness, of course, is
especially magnified in the profoundest exercise, in
meditation and so on. But when you’ve entered into that
sphere of equanimity – no longer agitated such that your
practice is undermined – its then that you are presenting
yourself, or established in equanimity and in Communion with
Me, such that energy and attention can become directly
focused in the right side of the heart. Attention not
agitated, attention can be transcended directly.

If attention is simply moving about,
you’re always noticing its objects. But if that fitfulness
relaxes, you can be sensitive to attention itself, because
it’s steady and doesn’t just jump to objects. It has a
certain kind of equanimity itself, such that attention can
be comprehended. And it’s the last thing in the space –
everything is epitomized as attention. When it is found in
the Self-Condition, in Consciousness Itself, its something
like the hearing matter. You’re in the position of that
first contraction. In fact it is the hearing matter, but
exercised at this later stage. Its like the original hearing
understanding, because you suddenly grasp it – the
self-contraction and the ability to feel beyond
it.

So in this noticing and equanimity,
this noticing of attention is the first stroke, really. It
is the feeling of relatedness, the feeling of separateness.
It is the root-disturbance, but you’re feeling beyond it.
But yet you notice this is a sensation in the midst of
Consciousness Itself, an apparition there. Suddenly you
become aware of the Self-Field in Which that primary thought
or gesture is arising. So this shift, in other words, is
from being identified with attention, by focusing on it, to
being identified with the Consciousness in Which its
appearing.

So that is the basic event in which
there is a transition to the Witness-Position”.

Torque
of Attention

Edited by Beezone

Orignial published in Crazy Wisdom Magazine,
September/October 1986, Vol.5, No. 9.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I have asked that some notes I
gave this afternoon be read and commented on. They are about
a discipline in daily life. They are about “Sila”. I’ve
noitced there is a certain habit of imbalance and
inattention, or the misuse of attention, or the failure of
Sila among many of you.

Lack of Sila, produces not only failures in what one
does, but even physical discomfort or disturbance.
There is a constant tendency to act without
the discipline of Sila. In other words, people are
tending to live out of balance, and therefore are
inattentive to what is precisely required in the
moment. As a result, there are constant disturbances
and poor function.

If this is done constantly in all the ordinary and
petty details of daily life, to the effect of inefficiency
and disturbance, imagine how this lack of Sila is disturbing
the course of your Spiritual life and preventing it from
being fulfilled!

It is because of this lack of Sila that people have spent
so many years in developing the practice, and are still only
beginning. They do not “hear”
enough of the Teaching to put it into action, and they are
too much out of balance, in fact, to do anything but
constantly struggle with their imbalance. This matter of
Sila is a very important one. Without Sila, you are
constantly creating chaos by not understanding
communications and not fulfilling them in a balanced and
efficient way. The absence of Sila corrupts your daily life
and obstructs your Spiritual life. Sila is important in
ordinary human relations and basic to the practice of the
Way.

The absence of Sila is imbalance in the body-mind and
unavailability of attention. The essence of Sila, therefore,
is balance of the body-mind, discipline of the body-mind,
control of the body-mind, and freedom or availability of
attention. To practice Sila, then, is to discipline the
body-mind, on the basis of real self-observation and
self-understanding, and to grant attention to that which
deserves attention.

The ability to control the body-mind, discipline it, and
keep it in a balanced state is the first of the two basic
dimensions of discipline. The second is the ability to have
attention available for what requires attention. That is,
the second dimension of discipline is the ability to have
attention not only for the Spiritual Process in its ultimate
form, but also for whatever requires attention in the course
of your sadhana, even ordinary matters.

Sila is the essence of your practice. If you do not
understand yourself, then you do not know how to develop the
practical discipline of the body-mind. If you do not hear me
and “see” me and enter into the Way in its fullest sense,
then your attention will be preoccupied with less than the
fullness of practice. You will tend to spend your life in
the earlier stages of practice, because your intention, or
your habit, is to fulfill the ordinary purposes of life, the
purposes of the first three stages of life and the frontal
personality, rather than the Purpose of the Divine Person,
Which is Realization of the Divine Condition.

Without Sila, therefore, there is no practice, and
likewise without Sila there is no peace in daily life. The
absence of Sila is the root-source of disturbances
everywhere in daily life, and perhaps it is the best way to
explain why people do not quickly advance through the stages
of practice. You could say that even the Ultimate
Realization is about Sila, the discipline or transcendence
of the body-mind and the discipline of attention. Ultimately
the Way is to discipline attention by transcending attention
in its Source.

Everything I have to say to you is about Sila. Nothing
could be more important, in ordinary life or in the practice
of the Way, than Sila, the discipline of the body-mind and
of attention. Let everyone understand this and truly hear
me.

I have been telling you this for years on end. Therefore,
let nobody have any vague misunderstanding or weak
appreciation of the necessity for discipline of the
body-mind and of attention in the practice of this Way. The
Way that I have Given to you is not a practice for fools, or
distracted people, or neurotic cultists. It is a profound
Process that requires great discipline. More and more
discipline develops over time, that is true, but discipline
must be present even at the beginning.

People are either doing or thinking or saying instead of
listening and hearing and observing. This is a habit
associated with the lack of Sila, a habit associated with
imbalance, lack of discipline in the body-mind, lack of
discipline of energy or what the traditions call outgoing
exuberance, the all-over-the-place expansive tendency.
However, the lack of Sila is not just outgoing exuberance.
Dullness, lack of energy, and inattentiveness are also
reflections of the lack of Sila.

Sila is about two things, just as the practice of this
Way of life and its Wisdom are about two things. Sila is
about the discipline of the body-mind on the one hand, and
the discipline of attention on the other. The Way itself is
about such discipline. Without Sila there is no practice.
The absence of Sila is the absence of discipline or control
over the body-mind on the one hand, and on the other hand an
absence of discipline of attention, or the ability to use
attention effectively for the Great Purpose or even for very
ordinary purposes.

Therefore, the Way itself has two fundamental areas of
discipline or practice. One is the discipline of the
body-mind and the understanding that will move you to
discipline the body-mind-really everything that is about
hearing. And the other is the
discipline of attention and everything that moves you to
discipline attention-basically everything that is seeing,
everything that is about Transmission or Awakening,
everything that is about the process of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti
Yoga in our Way.

There is no such Yoga, which is ultimately about the
discipline of attention or the transcendence of attention in
the Transcendental Divine Reality, without the discipline of
the body-mind. And you will not discipline the body-mind
until you can listen. You must be attentive just to hear.
You must be balanced in some basic sense to grasp even the
most mundane aspects of what must be heard.

The result of listening and hearing is the self-generated
disposition to discipline the body-mind. The more fully and
profoundly and effectively you do that, the more profound
your practice wili be ultimately and the more effective your
practice will be Spiritually. To the degree there is
weakness in Sila, or discipline of the body-mind, to that
very degree your practice and realization will be weak,
slow, and based on misunderstandings. To the degree you are
weak in understanding, weak in Sila, weak in the discipline
of the body-mind, to that degree you will not see, you will
not receive the Divine Transmission, you will hardly even
notice It, perhaps. You will not fully receive the
Spirit-Baptism, and even if you receive something of It, you
will not practice Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, you will not
practice the Way in that full form, with that full
understanding, or with the extraordinary signs associated
with just that Process. Therefore, self-understanding and
the discipline of the body-mind are profoundly
important.

You cannot practice this Way by simply making a practice
out of the discipline of the body-mind, trying to clean up
its act, purify it willfully, realize something great by
simply disciplining the body-mind and doing various things
with it. No. There must also be the ultimate discipline of
attention. The body-mind must be submitted to the discipline
of attention. There must be seeing, there must be
Transmission, there must be an Awakened relationship to That
Which Transcends all, to the very Divine Person or
Condition, and to the Agency of that One, Which is the
Graceful Means whereby the devotee passes fully into the
Ultimate Realization.

All this depends on Sila, and there is no Sila for the
Ultimate Process if there is no Sila in ordinary life.
Ordinary life is a good place for you to find out about the
effectiveness and strength and clarity of your practice. Are
you in a balanced state? Are you self-generating real
conservative discipline of the body-mind so that you are
basically at ease, flowing in your activity, effective in
what you do, able to observe or listen to what needs to be
observed or heard in order to find out what you need to do?
Or are you constantly creating confusion and disturbance,
forcing others to ask for things over and over again, or
having things pointed out to you over and over again,
thereby using up others’ energy? Are you constantly failing
to observe things as they are? Are you generally out of
balance and preoccupied with your doings and thinkings and
sayings, so that you do not have any free attention to
observe what is, apart from your doings and thinkings and
sayings?

If in your daily life you observe an imbalance in the
body- mind, a lack of discipline of the body-mind, and an
unavailability of attention, or a scatteredness of
attention, a preoccupation of attention, a lack of
discipline of attention, then this is a certain gauge of
your Spiritual life, of hearing and seeing and your ability
to practice this Way. Use your daily life, then, as a
circumstance in which to develop Sila, by observing yourself
in every circumstance and thereby learning how to conserve
the body-mind-and, to begin with, learning why to do
that.

By improving Sila in the daily circumstances of life, you
will see that you will improve your capacity to hear and see
and practice altogether, and in ultimate terms. It is easier
to discover these faults of Sila in the ordinary
circumstance of your daily life than it is perhaps to
observe them in terms of the Spiritual Process in its
ultimate sense. How able are you at the moment to judge the
significance of non-Realization? You cannot judge it fully
and completely because it is not there to be observed in the
ultimate sense. But you can certainly observe the
significance of psycho-physical imbalance and lack of
attention in your ordinary life. You can certainly observe
yourself as you are by tendency, come to self-understanding,
develop discipline, and on that basis, through hearing, be
better prepared for seeing or reception of Spiritual
Blessing, for practice in response to the Ishta-Guru, for
development of the Way altogether, for sensitivity to the
Spiritual Reality moment to moment.

The Process begins in reality, on the realistic, rather
than on the idealistic, level of self-observation in the
context of your life or what you are by tendency. What you
do by tendency is readily available to you moment to moment.
It is an excellent field in which to develop and improve
this Way of life. Apart from Ultimate Realization, and
Realization in every detail of the Process that becomes
Ultimate Realization, how do you know what ideals to put
before you as goals? How would you know, in other words, how
to create the Way on the basis of idealistic propositions?
You can develop the Way, however, on the basis of real life,
real self-observation, real responsiveness.

If you observe yourself in reality and observe the
consequences of your life of tendency, you must, if you hear
me, if you understand me, know that it is necessary to
develop Sila, or the conservative discipline of the
body-mind and the Spiritual discipline of attention.

Let this consideration be used by everyone. We have made
a useful lesson for all devotees.

The absence of Sila is imbalance in the body-mind and
unavailability of attention. The essence of Sila, therefore,
is balance of the body-mind, discipline of the body-mind,
control of the body-mind, and freedom or availability of
attention. To practice Sila, then, is to discipline the
body-mind, on the basis of real self-observation and
self-understanding, and to grant attention to That Which
deserves attention.

Now, very often your practice of Sila is to listen when I
ask you to do something, either in the form of some personal
service or in the form of my Instruction to you about
Spiritual life. At other times it is to bring attention to
your daily life-relations and what is needed there—what
your service should be, and so on. Without Sila, you are
constantly creating chaos by not understanding
communications and not fulfilling them in a balanced and
efficient way. The absence of Sila corrupts your daily life
and obstructs your Spiritual life.

My call to the discipline of service is fundamentally a
call to Sila. The basic practices are the same as they have
always been. What will you assume, therefore? You will
assume some very basic disciplines that conserve and
discipline the body-mind relative to such things as
sexuality’, for instance, and that maximize attention to the
Way itself, the Spiritual Process itself. The fullest
understanding of this Process, the Yoga of the Way that I
have Revealed to you, is the Ishta-Guru-Bhakti

The ability to control the body-mind, discipline it, and
keep it in a balanced state is the first of the two basic
dimensions of discipline. The second is the ability to have
attention available for what requires attention. That is,
the second dimension of discipline is the ability to have
attention not only for the Spiritual Process in its ultimate
form, but also for whatever requires attention in the course
of your sadhana, even

If you do not understand yourself, then you do not know
how to develop the practical discipline of the body-mind. If
you do not hear me and “see” me and enter into the Way
in its fullest sense, as Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, then your
attention will be preoccupied with less than the fullness of
practice. You will tend to spend your life in the earlier
stages of practice, because your intention, or your habit,
is to fulfill the ordinary purposes of life, the purposes of
the first three stages of life and the frontal personality,8
rather than the Purpose of the Divine Person, Which is
Realization of the Divine Condition.