strings: What is implied in discipline? Why do we discipline ourselves, if we do ? Can discipline and intelligence go together ? Most people feel that we must, through some kind of discipline, subjugate or control the brute, the ugly thing in us. Is that brute, that ugly thing, controllable through discipline ? What do we mean by discipline ? A course of action which promises a reward, a course of action which, if pursued, will give us what we want—it may be positive or  negative; a pattern of conduct which, if practised diligently, sedulously, very, very ardently, will give me in the end what I want. It may be painful but I am willing to go through it to get that. The self, which is aggressive, selfish, hypocritical, anxious, fearful—you know, all of it—that self, which is the cause of the brute in us, we want to transform, subjugate, destroy. How is this to be done? Is it to be done through discipline, or through an intelligent understanding of the past of the self, what the self is, how it comes into being, and so on? Shall we destroy the brute in man through compulsion or through intelligence? Is intelligence a matter of discipline? Let us for the time being forget what the saints and all the rest of the people have said; let us go into the matter for ourselves, as though we were for the first time looking at this problem; then we may have something creative at the end of it, not just quotations of what other people have said, which is all so vain and useless.