About Discipline : Raw Sitting

Here is a short note inspired by C., a Zazen friend.

What place should be given to rigor, discipline, stick-to-it-iveness?

I am not known to reflect the virtues of determination…
And many elements of my personality have more to do with fluttering and skimming over thing than stubborn intention or depth of assimilation.

From a surface perspective, at least
To fool the enemy, perhaps…
The enemy within, most certainly.

Not seeing yourself as rigorous is a great way to avoid exhausting yourself by applying the rigor necessary for the serious accomplishment of the task.

And when it comes to functioning as in a tunnel, to ride a pipe of attention, there’s nothing that can deflect me or get out of that tunnel, except falling, literally, from exhaustion.

This readily applies to various areas such as musical practice, training in one area, in several areas at the same time.

But what about the place of discipline in spiritual practice?

Here is also a cause of the match, the encounter between Zazen and this body, initially.
This combination of softness and strength,

This call of a spirit of determination, this pipe of sitting practice.

Iron hand, velvet glove,
Raw sitting, delicate heart
Practice setting, ultimate freedom.

The determination, the rigor, to penetrate the free, the indeterminate.

To become free by compulsion,
Emancipation through discipline.
At first glance, this seems very contradictory, counter-intuitive,

at the antipodes of our hyper-post modern world.

To find freedom you need a territory to leave.
Before entering the Promised Land, the people of Egypt were slaves.
These are our inner people.
To be able to break the frame (freedom)…you need a frame to break.

Many practices claim not to need a framework.
This positioning, if it is not the fruit of ignorance, is particularly skilful,
because it offers souls crushed by a tangle of frameworks (cultural, family, professional, social) an appearance of an alternative, a rest area. « Here, at last, I feel free. »

We could briefly talk about the illusion of liberation specific to society.
This liberation is illusory. In reality, it is a matter of a reinforced constraint, by way of identification, of permanent psychic solicitation (constant obligation to position oneself, to reaffirm oneself as this or that).
The illusion of liberation as confinement².

The presence of an initial framework, the rigorous maintenance of this framework conceals a real opportunity to get out of it.

To really get out of it, not through an ideological, verbal outing.
He who is free does not need to proclaim it constantly.

Also, the one who constantly screams his freedom, what confinement is he actually talking about ?

Let’s come back:

In spiritual practice, this absence of frame is actually an absence of frame to be break.
Having no framework to break, it is impossible for me to get out of it.
The universe from which I cannot extract myself is, strictly speaking, a prison.



©FJ Avril 2023
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