Restraint as a core value is the belief and practice of exercising disciplined choice within the moment. It impacts how and why we make decisions within our personal time experience, as well as how we consider whether our decisions will impact the time experience of others. Restraint as a spiritual value helps us address how we reconcile limitless individual potential with an inherently limiting human time experience. It is a form of proactive discipline, leveraging our core values of awareness, relation, and equity to act as a map. It guides us toward maximizing our potential while avoiding the diminishment of others.
Practicing personal restraint in a relational universe is necessary to remain active in guiding the flow of our time experience. The single truth ensures that we become whatever we direct our energy and focus on. We shape ourselves in our own vision through active soulcraft but can just as easily fall prey to addicting vices that spiral out of control. The individual must be mindful of their guilty pleasures and ensure that they do not become guilty habits. This is easier said than done in a world where entire systems exist to manipulate us into desiring more. Each of us has a threshold that we must explore introspectively, developing the discipline to know when to engage and when to walk away. Restraint is how we temper our focus. Like a sword in a forge, we continuously reshape ourselves to more precisely serve the purpose we have chosen. Where relation teaches us not to cast judgment on those we perceive to lack restraint, the individual should be mindful and constructively critical of their personal lapses. Linking our spirituality to the core value of restraint emphasizes our ultimate priority within transcendence: deep freedom.
Restraint supports the individual throughout their journey toward becoming more. It’s no secret that creating and building is a difficult task, one that requires consistent and prolonged direction of our focus and energy. Even the most inspiring visions of creation become arduous over time. The wave state of information ensures that both good and bad days are inseparable. Restraint is creating commitments and sticking to them and possessing the discipline to avoid betraying our own visions of greatness for the easy distraction available in the immediate present. As explored earlier, the changing nature of time does not remove the human experience from incremental improvement. It does empower significantly greater leaps of progress within those increments, so long as the individual practices the restraint necessary to maintain prolonged focus and energy.
We develop restraint as a core value through the practice of indifference toward our own wants as well as the wants of others. We immunize ourselves from interests out of alignment with our own while abandoning intent or effort that might limit the space of others to develop and express their personal divinity. Restraint is an exercise of self-denial and imagination. Without it, even our most charitable activities fall prey to the desire for power and control that our systems reinforce. Restraint, in combination with relation, forms a deep respect for individual agency and that of others. It translates to ensuring that we are aware and mindful that our presence and actions are not actively hindering others, especially those whose birth lottery may not have provided the same opportunities for individual actualization as our own. It also provides the framework for perpetual alignment with the single truth. Choosing to embrace restraint as a core value solidifies our commitment to never believing that a circumstance or system is absolute, including the frameworks of spirituality laid out in this text. It is an unwavering discipline. We reject the development of dogmas surrounding any one specific way of life, understanding that the identity of each individual, group, and culture is an experiment in our shared humanity. Our time experience within the single truth ensures that the paths we embark on will never be fully understood at the onset. Incorporating restraint as a core spiritual value acts as a safeguard for the individual to explore and experiment with their humanity without fear of being overtaken by the momentum of change.
