B 3.7.1 What is this power discipline?
3.7.1 What is this power discipline?
It is a way of acting, through understanding, to negotiate your way through the hazards of any particular situation. In every situation, in every set of conditions, no matter how adverse, there is always power available to you. Committed practice of the power discipline will enable you to identify and utilise the power inherent in any situation.
Preparation for the power discipline begins with daily practice of the meditation. Gradually, you will learn to incorporate the fruits of meditation into your life by Live-ing and Act-ing. In this way you learn to set yourself face to face with reality.
The more directly you are set face to face with reality, the more you see any situation clearly, as it is, the more possible it is to produce a fulfilling outcome. The power discipline reflects the harmonious laws governing reality. To use power for unselfish ends incurs positive karmic consequences, to use power for selfish ends incurs negative karmic consequences.
The law of karma will be discussed more fully in chapter 4. It is inviolable. It is inherent in the structure of reality.
Practice of this discipline will empower you to deal with any situation, through a clear understanding. As you choose, through your actions, so you shape your life. According to your motives, so you will incur the karmic consequences of your actions.
You are free to choose and to Act, now, and at all times, as best you are able in the prevailing circumstances. We are all subject to the conditions of space, time and karma. Within this context, we each must face reality.
Practice of the power discipline will help you face reality. You are free to use it unselfishly or selfishly, for good or evil, according to your nature. The power discipline is a smooth, flowing, harmonious, organic action, understood in three steps:
Input, Pivot then Act
Some time ago I happened across the “Unfolding Images of Life” project, which attempts to set the mechanism of the Power Discipline in a historical format, and as part of a Keel – the purpose of which is to hold the ship upright in stormy waters. So far so good, although I think BTP does this without a preaching of correct behaviour, leaving it to the individual’s developing intuition and powers of analysis.
I mention this to give a possible alternative way of examining the map of the stormy waters.
“The Guide to Right Action” (Link)
That treatment places its emphasis on the description of methods of centring as a necessary first step. However the treatment given omits the intellectual analysis Input stage (although it mentions it in passing) in favour of various named centering disciplines. I would suggest that the ITC Input stage, together with the suggested deep slow meditative breathing, will result in a centering in the midst of conditions, and does not surrender the intellect in favour of complete reliance on intuitive faculties, which may not yet be fully developed.
Further, the document states “But a critical prerequisite to its appropriate use is the ability to discern whether or not you have successfully centered yourself.” My current opinion is that mistakes and Karma will demonstrate whether we successfully centred ourselves, and making mistakes is an unavoidable part of this experiental process.