We are all disciplined people. You cannot find an undisciplined person. Even the mentally ill have discipline. The addict has discipline. The lengths my parents went to to satisfy their addictions were frightening, and they developed very strong skill sets to achieve these very goals. Have any of you ever met an undisciplined person?

I offer that you have never met an undisciplined person ever. Their discipline was just different than yours. So with all these disciplined people around, how are we doing?

Discipline makes progress and evolution. It lets us grow. Or degeneration and collapse. Cancer cells grow also until the parent organ can no longer function. They migrate as well.

I think humans are doing remarkably well. So no understanding of discipline is needed? Does everyone feel they and the people around them are all doing well?

I will only speak for myself. I struggle with discipline a bit. I have born a great many social and emotional scars. These can lock up a lot of one’s energy and emotion, dull sensitivity a lot, or at least it does for me. I am strongly aware of my own innate behaviours, those animal like instincts that motivate our most basic human behaviour.

Scars can also be a symbol of survival right? I wonder about whether “survival” is noble, a worthwhile end of itself.

Should I continue on about myself? I have a serious issue with contradiction. Even looked at from a strictly organic point of view, my brains processes are so disjointed that what seem like minor contradictions to others seem like huge unintelligible gaps to me. So I have applied a great deal of time and energy to reconciling my own personal contradictions, those being the only ones I can actually affect.

What I have learned in all this effort, is that even without knowing it people can sense even subtle shifts of attitude and emotion, let alone behaviour, and every time I make an effort to reconcile a surface contradiction, some hand steps in and tries to intervene. Everyone has a preference for how they would expect me to behave. They never mean any harm. They all have an idea of how the world would work so much better if those things that get in their way would just stop and be given up by others.

That must put a lot of stress on your body and spirit. Is it like always being in a boxing ring and fearing the next strike? Oh, I do not fear the next strike. I have taken every single blow. I have found that even the blows have a shape, a pattern to them. It’s like people are cooperating without knowing it. They have this person that they expect everyone to be, or rather small collection of possible persons.

I myself tend to get shadowy when agitated. I disappear behind peoples blind spots, and like that wolf that might be in the bushes at night, I wait for that moment where instead of being stopped, I can stop the other. I really hate cages.

You throw the wolf some meat so it won’t attack you? I am that wolf, others are the cage. There is actually a meat, a bait I look for. It’s usually overlooked or simply denied me. I do recognize elements of myself in other people. It usually shows up in various tensions in their personality, subtle little anxieties, insecurity, fear.

Do you feel like the regular schedule of these classes is too restrictive for you? I do not. Functional constructs make every bit of sense to me. I see an aspect of society I have come to call “the machine.” I am perfectly comfortable with it, the rules and systems that let us do business in the marketplace, even the government protocols and legal regulations.

What about believing in the necessity of each unique being? I fiercely believe in the necessity of each unique being.

It is hard for me to believe in myself. That is my greatest challenge. It is effortless for me to believe in myself, except that self that touches on other people, that dream role I seem confined to. I sometimes exploit the dream, as nebulous and sickening as it is, like that vague smell of vomit that still lingers when you go back to bed after a bout of sickness.

What would I want from others? To conform to my expectations? No, a thousand times no. You, in fact, already do. That is the problem.

That’s why you emphasize that this isn’t really a teaching class. It’s just telling what you know and have learned. I don’t actually have anything to teach. We are all in this world here and now.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~