The term “discipline” comes from Latin discere “to learn” and discipulus “learner”. Hence, it has no original reference to obeying rules, controlling or punishing.
Discipline merely implies the availability to learn through experience. It is not about adhering to a specific doctrine or system of knowledge. This is not discipline, it is the way the separated reality programmes human beings.
True discipline is experiential learning. Unless you experience something, you will not be able to learn it. No matter what you have been told about something and what ideas, emotions, feelings you hold about it, if you have not thoroughly gone through it, there is no learning. As a result, the lesson will hang around in a waiting chamber. You can provisionally ignore that chamber and choose to reside in a sheltered room. You can pretend other chambers do not even exist, glorifying the integrity of your sheltered room, with all its idols and gadgets. Yet, those who are hanging around in the waiting chamber will sooner or later get upset, and at a certain point burst out and invade your sheltered room.
Discipline is a learning process only when it comes out of direct experience. There are millions of books, movies and people telling you what to do or not to do, what things are good or bad. Discipline means putting aside this information and facing direct experience.
Discipline has to come from your centre, the solar plexus zone, reaching upward through the heart and downward into the roots of your being.
When discipline comes from someone else, then you are being encoded. Hence, you become a processing unit, an android, a fully certified arbitrary human being.
This is how you gain citizenship in a separate reality. Not surprisingly, pragmatic shamans are aware that this is a prerequisite. Hence, they do not challenge the encoding system. On the contrary, they use it to their advantage, employing it to promote true discipline and learning, using whatever they find at hand to sustain their intent. Concisely, they accept to be encoded so as to access a separate reality. Once they are fully integrated, they can then manipulate its resources according to their original intent, which is indeed one of solar discipline.
Shamans are champions of solar discipline, which is the educational way of sacred selfishness. This implies being madly in love with oneself, for you are indeed the closest learning device, the primary source of direct experience. If you are unable to acknowledge and learn from yourself, if you cannot contact and love the closest zone, which is you, there is no way in which you can reach other beings or dimensions. All you can do is pretending to reach or love them.