Spontaneity

Discipline is the word. You have to learn to discipline yourself. Many of you think that if you become disciplined you will lose your spontaneity, your creativity--as if to be instinctive is to be creative! Well, maybe so. But the things that are created out of an instinctive state of mind are most horrible. That is not true creativity: it is mediocrity, even less than that--it is insanity. Creativity is a very big thing. There is only one Creator and that is God, and unless you go very close to God, to say that you are creative is nonsense. Discipline is the thing. Why? To get rid of the bad habit of letting your energies run outward. A person has a little spiritual experience; at once he or she becomes eager to talk about it. They will give twenty-thousand lectures, and nowadays you have so many opportunities to talking. First of all, you could lecture to a congregation; then you could lecture on the radio, or if you have more money you could lecture on television. Your energies are constantly going out. That's a deadly thing. You may not give out anything unless you have reached a state where the more you give, the more you are replenished. When a man starts a business with a small capital, he cannot spend the profits; he can barely live; he has to sink the profits into his business. For years and years he will do that. Then finally he reaches a state where he can enjoy the fruits of his labor; his business will not suffer. In the same way, you reach a state in your spiritual growth when, even if you give a lot, there is a perennial spring of power and knowledge within you; it has opened up, and you never lack anything. Even then, you do not become extravagant about it, and rarely do you expend yourself by you own will. There is another will then, which prompts you about what you should and should not do.