Keeping The Watchman Of Attention Alert

All the religions and spiritual groups place a lot of importance on the virtue of discipline. Without discipline you do not manage to transform negative habits and you do not create a new state of awareness where the self is nourished through the experience of spirituality. Every day you eat, you brush your teeth, bathe, drink water and breathe, and all of this you do not consider a discipline; you have adopted them as something natural in order for your body to continue working properly. On a spiritual level you also need to nourish yourself and to have a discipline that, with practice, a time comes when it becomes natural because you make it a part of your life. In the process of change you need to discipline yourself in order not to let old habits come back. Until you have burnt the old habits and they have died, you should keep the watchman of attention alert in order to maintain your self-control, given that each time you use a negative habit in action, you strengthen it. When you do not use it, you allow it to die. 

The path of the spiritual traveller is therefore one of waking (awareness of self as soul) and sleeping (under the illusion that we are our body), waking and sleeping. We tend to fluctuate between the two (like dawn and dusk) until we find stability in soul-consciousness. This is why it is important to awaken and stay awake, and this is why it’s important to give our mind and intellect good spiritual food (spiritual wisdom) and exercise (meditation) every day to keep them fresh and alert. Being conscious of the soul, acting from that consciousness, the scars (habits and tendencies) left by past actions based on illusions of bodily awareness are healed. Discipline is necessary for spiritual growth and personal transformation if you want to obtain satisfying and permanent results. If not, the old habits continue to rule in your life. The evidence that our discipline in the practice of meditation is working is mental lightness, an increasing easiness in our interactions with others and success in everything we do.