What is spiritual discipline, and why is it so important?

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Spiritual discipline is, essentially, the extent to which you are willing to subordinate your mundane life to your spiritual one. It’s essential to coming to any sense of accomplishment in the realm. As Spirit is all things to all people, if you want it to be a vague collection of feel-good nothing burgers, that’s exactly what it will be for you. It’s only mildly better than just being a materialist.

Read, pray, meditate, repeat. Reading connects you with your fellow man, praying connects you with the personal deity, meditating connects you with impersonal Spirit. Being disciplined in how you approach it provides you the opportunity to experience enough of the spiritual world to where you can intuitively grasp it. Without the reading, you won’t be able to make sense of it at all in abstract terms. Without the meditation, you won’t be able to discern how it works, to see how various forms and ideas interact and play off each other.

Without prayer, it just won’t ever feel truly real. I remember once answering a question on Quora from someone who has done lots of meditation but lamented that they were never able to meet or speak with God. Stop meditating, start praying! Supplicate yourself to a deity, they have so much to offer! Too much meditation turns you into someone who effectively wants to be God, not meet Him!

I have written about my spiritual map before. You start by reading and studying, then start practicing spiritual methods, then eventually those methods bear fruit in the form of spiritual experiences, which if you persist produces a spiritual awakening, at which point one has to use the abilities gained from the awakening to surrender self and ego, producing spiritual enlightenment. Enlightenment leads into mythic existence if one can generate the energy to keep going.

Discipline will help you all the way to awakening. After awakening, attempts to continue previous methods just hit that point of diminishing returns, spirit wants you to stop efforting, as efforting is what keeps you from perceiving in the nondual fashion. Spiritual awakening is rare, beautiful, completely individual, yet completely unmistakable. If you are asking whether you’ve had one or not, the answer is that no you haven’t. Yet most people who think they’ve had an awakening have only had an experience and experiences don’t produce the same inversion of reality that awakening does. Discipline is important while having experiences. Without it you are unlikely to have more.

When I became awakened, I was using the spiritual technique known as the muscle test, as taught by David Hawkins as a way to calibrate levels of consciousness. The specific moment of awakening happened when I had occasion to ask whether the muscle test was communicating with something intelligent that could do more than give numerical ratings to things. When the answer came back ‘yes’ every last bit of every spiritual technique I’d used over the years became immediately irrelevant, I had so suffused myself in spirit that it all became automatic. Doubt was gone, I mean, it came back in many ways, but the fundamental knowledge of essence of reality as spiritual and not material was irrevocably confirmed.

I continued to use the muscle test but not as I’d learned how to do. Hawkins places a great deal of restrictions on how you’re supposed to use it. Hawkins’ spiritual awakening was fundamentally different from mine, and that’s one thing you realize as you start comparing and contrasting journeys.

I started doing it Hawkins’ way, as I’d long since realized the value of, if you’re going to learn a spiritual technique from someone else, do it the way they want you to do it if you want to get out of it what they got out of it. Eventually you’ll come up with your own take on it, and you can be sure that it’s your take because you experienced and understood your teacher’s take. This formulation had ingrained in me over years.

And it all became moot upon awakening. Now it was all about exploring my way.

This is why I’m keen to distinguish experiences from awakening, and consider that more important than trying to convince people who think they’re enlightened that they’re not. Awakening is special. More people that are awakened become enlightened than people who have experiences become awakened.

And discipline is one of the fundamental keys to get you over that hump.