Teachers of schools, colleges and universities give too much importance to discipline and we should study this matter in detail in this chapter.
All of us who have gone through school, college or university, know very well what is discipline, rules, ferules, scoldings, etc.
Discipline is that which is called the cultivation of resistance. Schoolteachers delight in cultivating resistance.
Resistance is taught to us, to build something against some other thing. We are taught to resist the temptations that laziness brings, temptations of not studying, of not going to school, of playing, laughing, ridiculing teachers, violating rules, etc.
Teachers have the mistaken concept that through discipline we can understand the need for respecting school rules, for studying, maintaining our composure before teachers, behaving well with our classmates, etc.
There exists among people the mistaken concept that the more we resist, the more we reject, then the more we make ourselves understandable, free, complete, successful.
People do not want to realize that the more we fight against something, the more we resist, the more we reject; the less is our comprehension.
If we fight against the vice of drinking, this vice will disappear for a while, but since we have not understood it profoundly in all the levels of the mind, it will return later when we neglect our vigilance and we will drink at once for a whole year.
If we reject the vice of fornication, we will be chaste in appearance for a while, even though in other levels of the mind we will continue being frightening satyrs as our erotic dreams and our wet dreams demonstrate. Then we will return with more strength to our old ways of unredeemable fornicators, due to the concrete fact of not having profoundly understood what fornications is.
Many are those who reject greed, who fight against it, discipline themselves against it following strict norms of conduct, but since they have not truly understood the whole process of greed, it turns out they covet deep down the state of not being greedy.
Many are those who discipline themselves against anger, who learn to resist it, but the former continues existing in other levels of the subconscious mind, even when it has apparently disappeared in our character and at the slightest neglect of our guard, the subconscious betrays us and then we thunder and flash filled with anger, when we least expect it and perhaps for some unimportant reason.
Many are those who discipline themselves against jealousy and finally firmly believe that they have extinguished it but since they did not understand it, clearly it appears once more in a scene precisely when we thought it was truly dead.
Only in the full absence of disciplines, only in real freedom, will the burning flame of comprehension emerge in the mind.
samael aun weor
Creative freedom can never exist in a framework. We need freedom to fully understand our psychological defects.
We urgently need to demolish walls and break steel shackles to be free.
We have to experience for ourselves everything that our schoolteachers and parents have told us as good and useful. It is not enough to memorize and imitate. We need to understand.
All teachers’ efforts should be directed to the Conscience of students. They should exert themselves so that students enter the path of comprehension.
It is not enough to tell students that they should be this or that. It is necessary that students learn to be free so that they can examine, study, analyze for themselves all the values, all the things that people have told them are beneficial, useful, noble and not just accept them and imitate them.
People do not want to explore for themselves. They have closed stupid minds that do not want to investigate. Mechanicals minds that never investigate and only imitate.
It is necessary, urgent, indispensable for students to enjoy true freedom, to discover themselves, to inquire, to understand form their earliest years until the moment they leave the classroom and not to be limited by the abject walls of prohibitions, scoldings, and disciplines.
If students are told what they should and should not do and they are not allowed to understand and experience, where then is their intelligence? What opportunity has been given to their intelligence? Then, what is the use of passing exams, dress up smartly and have many friends if we are not intelligent?
Intelligence only comes to us when we are truly free to investigate for ourselves, to understand, to analyze independently without the fear of scoldigns and without the ferule of disciplines.
Scared, frightened students submitted to terrible disciplines can never know. They can never be intelligent.
Today the only thing that interests parents and teachers is that students have a career, that they become doctors, lawyers, engineers, office employees; living machines and that they later marry and also transform themselves into child-making machines, and that is all.
When boys or girls want to do something new, something different, when they feel the need to escape from this framework of prejudices, antiquated habits, disciplines, family or national traditions, etc., then the parents tighten the shackles of prison more and they tell the boy or girl: Do not do that! We are not willing to support you in that. These things are madness, etc.
Thus the boy or girl is formally imprisoned inside the prison of disciplines, traditions, antiquated customs, decrepit ideas, etc.
Fundamental Education teaches the conciliation of order with Freedom. Order without Freedom is Tyranny. Freedom without order is anarchy.
Freedom and order wisely combined constitute the basis of Fundamental Education.
Students should enjoy perfect freedom to find out for themselves, to inquire, to discover what they really and truly are in themselves and what they can do in life.
Students, soldiers, police, and in general all those people who have to live subjected to rigorous disciplines, usually become cruel and insensitive to human pain, merciless.
Discipline destroys Human Sensitivity and that has already been totally demonstrated by observation and experience.
Due to so many disciplines and rules, people of this age have totally lost all sensitivity and have become cruel and merciless.
In order to be truly free, one needs to be sensitive and humane.
In schools, colleges and universities, students are taught to pay attention in classes and the students pay attention to avoid a scolding, a pulling of ears, a beating with the ruler, etc., but unfortunately, they are not taught to really understand what conscious attention is.
Out of discipline, the student pays attention and many times wastes creative energy in a useless way.
The creative energy is the most subtle type of energy fabricated by the human machine.
Eating, drinking, and all the processes of digestion are, deep down, transformation processes in which gross substances become useful substances and energies.
The creative energy is the most subtle type of matter and energy made by the organism.
If we know how to Consciously Pay Attention we can save creative energy. Unfortunately, teachers do not teach their students what conscious attention is.
Wherever we direct our attention we spend creative energy. We can save that energy if we divide attention, if we do not become identified with things, people and ideas.
When we identify ourselves with things, people and ideas, we forget ourselves and lose creative energy in a most pitiful way.
It is imperative to know that we need to save creative energy to awaken Conscience and that creative energy is living potential, it is the vehicle of the Conscience, an instrument to awaken Conscience.
When we learn not to forget ourselves, when we learn to divide the attention between subject, object and place, we save creative energy to awaken Conscience.
It is necessary to learn to use attention to awaken Conscience, but students do not know anything about this because their teachers have not taught them.
When we learn to use attention consciously , discipline becomes unnecessary.
A student who pays attention in class, to his lessons and to order, does not need discipline of any type.
It is imperative that teachers understand the need for intelligently reconciling freedom and order and this is possible through conscious attention.
Conscious attention excludes that which is called identification. When we identify ourselves with things, people, and ideas, fascination takes over producing the sleep of the Conscience.
We must know how to pay attention without identification. When we pay attention to something or someone and we forget ourselves, it results in fascination and the sleep of the Conscience.
Observe carefully a moviegoer, he is asleep, unaware of everything and of himself. He is empty within and looks like a zombie. He dreams with the movie and the hero hi is watching.
Students should pay attention in classrooms without forgetting themselves so that they do not fall into the terrible sleep of the Conscience.
A student should see himself in action when he is taking an exam or when he is at the blackboard as told by the teacher or when he is studying or resting or playing with his classmates.
Attention divided in thee parts: Subject, Object, Location, is in fact, conscious attention.
When we do not commit the error of identifying ourselves with things, people and ideas, we save creative energy and we accelerate within us the awakening of Conscience.
Whoever wants to awaken Conscience in the Superior Worlds should begin by awakening in the here and now.
When a student commits the error of identifying himself with things, people, and ideas, he commits the error of forgetting himself and falls sleep through fascination.
Discipline does not teach students to pay attention. Discipline is a true prison for the mind.
Students should learn to use conscious attention from the very desk at school so that later on, in the real world outside the school, they do not commit the error of forgetting themselves.
A man who forgets himself in front of a person who insults him identifies himself with that person, becomes fascinated, falls into the deep sleep of the Conscience, hurts or kills and inevitably goes to prison.
He who does not become fascinated with a person who insults him and does not identify himself with that person, does not forget himself, he who knows how to pay conscious attention, would be incapable of giving any importance to the words of a insulter, or would be incapable of wounding or killing.
All the errors that human beings commit in life are because they forget themselves, they identify, become fascinated and fall into sleep.
It would be better for young people, for all students, to be taught how to awaken their Conscience instead of being enslaved with so many absurd disciplines.
Samael Aun Weor
