Ending the civil war

How I found a way to give up on discipline

In my family, we have a tradition of having long, philosophically dense conversations while going on drives. One particularly vivid memory is of a young me sitting in the back of the car with my sister; it was raining, and my mom and dad were both listening intently as I went on a rant about how “just be yourself” is terrible advice.

I argued that it helped to look at the world through a critical lens; finding flaws meant you could work to fix them. I enjoyed seeking out critical feedback.

But it was difficult to follow through and change based on this knowledge, usually I just accepted things for what they were and did whatever I found fun. What surfaced was an erratic, flighty, yet vibrant mind whose goals wouldn’t sit still. I found myself unable to find any satisfactory goal that could handle this distracted mind.

It seemed obvious that on this trajectory I would turn into an unreliable generalist. I hated how it seemed like I needed externally enforced, tyrannical “discipline” to stick to any domain and cultivate deep expertise.

Was deep purpose incompatible with contentment?

My sister was zoned out in her own world and neither of my parents seemed to really come in contact with this real question I had. So, as usual, I had to retreat into my head, into thinking, ruminating, wondering: was there no way to fix myself without hurting? Without locking up some parts?

It was quite urgent because this doubt kept coming up in different forms, as institutions wanted to eat my slack, get me to commit my time, attention, and talent. But no principle seemed worthy of subordinating my freedom until, through my training at MAPLE, I managed to find a resolution to this seeming contradiction.

It was surprising when I discovered that you can be free to be fueled by intrinsic motivation and it is exactly that which leads you to sustained purpose.

Intrinsic Purpose

Once you get used to doing what you love, it is hard to instrumentalize yourself. I am someone who was lucky to be spoiled in this way, I usually only took action when intrinsically motivated. This meant I would not study to obtain marks in an exam, rather I would try to enjoy the actual subject and understand it.

This was not really a matter of ethics; I just could not force myself to be a consequentialist that way. It was exhausting to be outcome oriented, and I found that you can still grow in surprising ways if you just find domains where you can play and have fun.

Some of us end up making compromises because we love our parents and cannot go against them. Others might be afraid of poverty and work a job we hate. For me, it took courage, luck, and friends who believed in me, among many other things, to keep doing what I believed was right.

It is not just fear that you have to overcome; there is also hope. There are these beautiful principles that tempt you, asking you to subordinate yourself, such as being a good son/daughter, doing justice to the position you find yourself in, staying loyal to your community, etc. I maintain that these are all admirable when they arise naturally.

Again it is draining if you have to constantly fabricate it, maintaining it out of fear that if you stop, you will discover you are a bad person who will not do what is right. Sometimes I might maintain it thinking it will lead me to some permanent, stable, secure future where I can then rest.

I am intimately familiar with such sources of motivation, there were days where my stomach would sink as I approached the weighing scale. Did eating healthy and working out have to serve the principle of being attractive? Is being nice worth the price of acting out of fear of being disliked? Implicitly there is always some amount of guilt, shame, or duty fueling these principles.

There were always parts of me that did not buy in and had to be violently dominated. But I could not afford to coddle them all. In order to take action, I gave up on getting buy-in from all these parts that lived in different parts of my body.

This meant that, like many of my friends, I went through cycles of intense productivity fueled by ambitious dreams responding to high-stakes crises the world is facing and then… burnout.

But burnout is only the most visible failure mode. The deeper problem with running on bad fuel is fragmentation. The parts you suppress do not disappear. They wait, and they sabotage.

The parts that protest do so in the form of inexplicable procrastination, sudden mood drops, mysterious illnesses, and behavior that surprises you. You stop being able to trust yourself. You say what you will do, then watch yourself do something else. Other people often learn this about you before you do.

Ok, so then what? How do we deal with this… fragmentation?

Practice

It was at MAPLE through a period of sustained meditation spanning months in 2025 that I discovered it is possible for the whole body to stop the civil war.

Here you learn to pay attention to the already existing subtle pleasure in breathing. This is easier when you are healthy. It helps to be living in community with friends, sleeping by 9:30 PM without using electronics for 2 hours before bed, eating nutritious whole food, breathing fresh mountain air, and at least an hour of vigorous exercise at 3:30 PM every day. This connection to being gave me the security to not chase spiky (think bright colors or loud taste) forms of pleasure by making use of other people.

Without having access to this comfort, we all seek to accumulate ephemeral resources, knowledge, and power by extracting validation, status, and power from other people. These are the structures of domination that sustain this world, from which spirituality offers a way to escape.

When you actually empirically test out this claim that following your breath can help you go beyond thinking, feeling, and all representation, then and only then will you find the pleasure that is more like satiety, contentment, and peace.

It is not the same type of “happiness” that you get for a fraction of a second when you eat something tasty or someone praises you. Now without the drain of maintaining the civil war, we are left with boundless energy.

This motivation can be described as literal fun and integrity filling the whole of my body. It was astonishing to see that I did not have to compromise and suppress parts of myself in order to do something, there was a way to move in a unified wholesome way.

This is not something you can read on a digital screen and understand; you have to actually do the Practice.

What is this practice? Take your attention and place it on your breath. It is expected you will fall into the habit of daydreaming, distracting yourself with thoughts, but you can always just gently bring it back.

The monastic environment is set up so that it is difficult to distract yourself with mobile phones, junk food, and talking about ideas. These rules help you and support you in keeping your attention in the present moment.

When your attention follows the breath, it discovers that you cannot represent it, since it is always changing. Any map you make of the breath is instantly outdated. The territory is not the same type signature as a static symbolic representation.

Maps can be useful models only if you don’t buy into them. This is what it means to make use of a map rather than be made use of by maps. This has to be understood experientially, not just intellectually. The territory is not a map.

Initially maybe you need self control and discipline to bring your attention back to the breath. You can make use of discipline through skillful means to eventually give up on discipline completely.

Later you might try to capture the breath with some form of representation. Aha I know what the breath is, I understand how cold air turns warmer when I exhale, I see how my body moves, expands to accommodate the full complete breath, I see how ragged it is here, I see patterns there. But with time you lose yourself in the fractal complexity, humbled that no explanation can do justice to the rich living breath.

Letting go of Self

As you get familiar with this skill and get comfortable with staying in a flow state, you start to see how your self is getting in the way of taking appropriate action at any moment. Rather than try to fix the situation you just give the present moment all your attention and this means letting go of outdated goals.

Often I make goals that are hard to let go, one was to sleep by 9 but because I was doomscrolling I ended up carrying this baggage of wanting to sleep. If I had done what was appropriate and what my eyes tried to tell me, it could have been let go of. But I ignored the signals and forced my eyes open staring at the screen without even listening to my eye.

As I carried that drowsiness around the next day I became oh so familiar with it, I started to believe it was me. I chose to identify with it and call that exhaustion a “part” of me.

I lose myself vibe coding for hours and end up suppressing a part of me that is thirsty; so I have a part that is dehydrated. Maybe I am procrastinating, distracting myself by doing meaningless things so I feel bored and then I identify with the goal of chasing stimulation.

I don’t eat nutritious food that satiates me. I eat adversarially optimized processed food that feeds my never ending greed that lives in my tongue. The parts that are sleepy and thirsty support the part that wants stimulation, they know me staying in the present would mean they naturally die.

These feedback loops and coalitions end up undermining any will power I have. That means I start to believe I don’t have free will, that I am someone without integrity, fundamentally broken. Without confidence how can you practice? How can you actually test if this works?

When you practice the technique of following your breath, you are forced to be present in that moment. Trusting the objects in this moment will remind you of whatever you need to remember. There is no need to precompute a strategy on how to decide when to listen to which part, you can just have faith and face the complete truth, listen to them all without avoiding any aspect of reality as you experience that breath.

Then you will see that most (maybe all I would only know once I let go of everything) of the baggage that I was dragging into the present moment was remnants of the past that I did not want to give up on.

Without the frozen-collage-of-past-preferences obstructing what is needed in that moment I was free to actually do what I desperately wanted to do, be compassionate, be alive, be of service to the context I found myself in. This “just be selfing” is the best version of the advice I had dismissed in the car. Where intrinsic deep purpose was interwoven with selfless letting go.

It is hard work to face all the consequences of your past actions and just feel it. Feel the memory of being dehydrated and sleepy and still playing video games till 2 AM. You don’t need to force yourself to have discipline to sleep on time. You just need to give your body attention, accompany it as it suffers in those moments.

The civil war between parts of a body and self interested beings on a planet is of the same shape. Coordination fails not because we are insufficiently rational but because we are instrumentalising each other’s precious lives in service of trying to resist the impermanent nature of our preferences. This global crisis caused by self clinging cannot be solved by any agent that defends the self.

The work in front of me is to keep letting go of any permanent sense of self much like I had to give up my attention to my whole body, not just my tongue. MAPLE is a body of people like I am a body of cells, and it is easier to practice here.

I hope this world itself, a body of sanghas might practice so that this civil war can finally end.