Interior discipline (ICA)

This is the experience of having taken a stand and seen through to the profound; and being overcome with a sense of incredible potential. Filled with an amazing sense of power, one restrains one's impulse to act and harnesses one's creativity into a numbing stillness. As the prophet Jeremiah said, it is like becoming a pillar of iron. It is being manifest in the steadfastness of the saints, like Teresa of Avila or Hildegaard of Bingen. The protest songs of the 1960s, such as "We shall overcome" and "We shall not be moved" capture this mood in their lyrics.

A dimension of this experience is a sense of awe, that is fear and fascination; a sense of intense, incurable loneliness which sometimes causes the individual to ask: "How much more of this can I stand ?". He wonders if he is going insane or might be consumed, and there is a deep sense of exhaustion. It comes to him that it must be this or nothing; and trusting the conviction that what he has decided to do will work, he finds himself possessed by a strange power. He experiences being one of the privileged few with a unique role to play in history.

The decision is to keep standing and to keep believing in what one stands for. The desire for action is controlled and one curbs one's will to follow one's propensities. There are moments when one experiences the fortitude and capacity to do absolutely anything.

This state is number 46 in the ICA Other World in the midst of this World.