Training the will

The teaching

As the Stoics, the Bhagavad Gita on tapas, and William James teaches it.

Askesis, training

Askesis is the Greek word for an athlete's training, and the Stoics took it for the training of the will. Their teaching begins with a division. Some things are in our power: our judgements, our choices, our desires and aversions, our own actions. Others are not: the body, possessions, reputation, office, everything that is not our own doing. The will is trained on the first and taught to let go of the second, so that a person is not ruled by what they cannot govern.

Training against one's own weakness

Epictetus taught that the training must fit the one in training. There is no use in learning to walk a tightrope; one trains where one is weak. If you are drawn to pleasure, practise against pleasure; if you shrink from hardship, practise bearing it; if you are quick to anger, practise taking an insult calmly. Begin with small things: if a little oil is spilt or a little wine is stolen, say to yourself that this is the price of peace of mind, and let it go.

And train in private. When you have grown used to plain living, do not show it off; if you drink only water, do not say at every chance that you drink only water; if you want to practise endurance, do it for yourself and not for those who are watching. A hardship taken on to be admired trains vanity, not the will.

Practising poverty

Seneca gives the most famous exercise. Set aside a few days, he writes to a friend, in which you are content with the plainest and cheapest food and with rough, coarse clothing, and say to yourself: is this what I was afraid of? It is in times of safety, he says, that the mind should prepare itself for hard times, as soldiers drill in peace when no enemy is in sight.

The fear of going without shrinks once going without has been tried, found bearable, and chosen. For a reader, the plainness is better taken in comfort than in food: a hard chair, a cold room for an hour, a day without a purchase, a walk in place of a ride.

Tapas, the inner heat

In India the word for austerity is tapas, heat, the fire that discipline kindles in the one who keeps it. The Bhagavad Gita teaches three kinds. Austerity of the body is honouring the gods, the teachers and the wise, with purity, uprightness, continence and not harming. Austerity of speech is words that cause no distress, truthful, kind and helpful, with the regular reciting of scripture. Austerity of the mind is serenity, gentleness, silence, self-control and purity of heart.

The Gita then sorts austerity by its spirit. Practised with faith and without craving for a reward, it is pure. Practised for respect, honour and show, it is restless and soon gone. Practised out of folly, with torment of oneself or to harm another, it is dark. And it condemns outright those who take on terrible austerities that no scripture asks for, tormenting the body and the God who dwells within it.

The measure of tapas

Patanjali counts tapas among the observances, and says that through it impurity dwindles and the body and senses are perfected. The old commentary adds the measure: austerity is to be practised only so far as it does not disturb the clarity of the mind. A discipline that leaves a person shaken, ill or bitter has gone past its use.

A little effort every day

William James put the old teaching into modern words: 'Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.' Be ascetic, he advised, in small and needless things: every day or two, do something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of real need comes, it does not find you untrained. He likened it to the insurance paid on a house, which brings nothing back until the day of the fire.

His rules for making a habit are three. Launch it with as strong and decided a start as possible. Allow no exception until the new habit is firmly rooted. Act on every resolution at the first chance, because a resolve that is never acted on weakens the will that made it.

One small promise

The method that comes out of all of them is plain. Choose one small promise for one week and write it down: no telephone before breakfast, a cool end to the morning wash, ten minutes of silence, a meal eaten without a screen, a walk in place of a short drive. It should cost a little and harm nothing, and it should not be about eating less. Keep it in private, as Epictetus asks. Each evening make a mark, kept or not kept, without comment.

At the week's end ask what got in the way, and what the keeping was like. Then renew the promise, change it, or drop it, on purpose. Small promises, kept, are the whole of the training: the will grows by being used where it can succeed.

Where training ends

The disciplines have the same limits here as everywhere. A promise that injures the body, takes away sleep or turns into self-punishment has stopped being training; the Gita calls that kind of austerity dark, and the Stoics trained the will for freedom, never for pain.

If a promise begins to feed fear or shame, or a war with food or the body, it is set down at once, and the matter is taken to a doctor or to someone trusted.