The Road to Self-Mastery
By Phil Golding (A Review of the Work of Neale Donald Walsch)
Self-Mastery is a curious term that no doubt means many things to many people and triggers an equal number of varied emotional reactions. For many perhaps, without necessarily knowing what it takes to achieve such a thing, it all seems a bit too hard.
There are other terms that can be used instead of Self-Mastery such as: self-empowerment, self-realization, self-awareness and even enlightenment. The connotation is that one gains full control over one's mind and body along with the ability to rise above the difficulties of human existence, and in the ultimate sense that would be a fair definition.
Of course, the road to self-mastery for most of us can be a long and at times difficult one, which we all somehow intuitively sense and therefore balk at. Despite the likely effort I can say with confidence born from experience that any distance traveled down that road brings many priceless benefits. However, many of these benefits are subjective, that is they are about personal experience and by their nature are not always easy to describe to others or to quantify. In fact even attempting to do so often confuses the matter beyond understanding. Such benefits acquired by sojourns down the road to self-mastery are better simply observed by paying attention to the changing behaviour of the self-mastery aspirant. Even this can run into difficulty. For example, an acquired ability to inspire people rather than put them down would not likely impress someone who gains some form of self-gratification such as self-aggrandizement from belittling people. Such loving kindness may even be a seen as a threat to such a person's attempt to hang onto this position of pseudo power. As the old saying goes, you can't please everybody. One thing the aspirant to self-mastery quickly learns is that the real reward of any level of this skill is inner-peace regardless of the reactions of others. Of course, if you want to see the true benefits of an acquired skill such as loving kindness then simply observe the quick and positive effect practicing it has on small children.
Unfortunately, the idea that the human being has the capacity to reach such a state of self-mastery is not a popular one in our rationalistic Western culture. Orthodox science and psychology, as well as many forms of religion, suffers from what I would call "this is as good as it gets" syndrome. This syndrome produces a spirit nullifying attitude amongst those who suffer from it that seeks to invalidate anyone who dares to reach for anything more than the mediocre. Those who dare to dream outside the orthodox scientific or religious dogmas are ridiculed, feared, judged and even ostracized. Many a theologian or university professor would testify to this. At least they are not allowed to burn us at the stake anymore.
Very rarely do such preservers of orthodoxy stop to think about what they are preserving. Rarely is the question asked; "is what we are believing in and doing actually working?" A few simple questions, if considered seriously, would soon expose some short-comings in the old ways. For example: Have the wars stopped? Is the crime rate going down? Is poverty being reduced? Is inequality being reduced? Is the rate of disease falling? Is drug and alcohol abuse decreasing? Are we getting any happier?..... How is the old way holding up so far? Maybe we should hang onto the old paradigms for another two thousand years, because that is how long we have been trying them out. Perhaps if we just try even harder with the same old methods it might just work this time. This "trying harder" method seems to be popular these days. I must say though that I haven't seen any different results yet from these latest noble efforts to finally make it work.
So why isn't it working? Few people in these so-called modern times stop to realize how much our society still bases its values on a certain book that was strung together for political reasons by a Roman Emperor by the name of Constantine 300 years AD. I am of course talking about the Bible. Constantine wasn't that interested in love and spirituality and he would have been considered a part time Christian at best - what could be called a Christian of convenience. He was more interested in things like how to secure a controlling grip on the populous of the Roman Empire . The preferred methods of use in those days were fear, punishment, authoritarianism etc. There wasn't much room for peace, love and freedom of thought. Therefore, when compiling the texts that we now know as the Bible, the texts that favored the authoritarian perspective were included and those that didn't were not included. The subsequent discoveries of the not included Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary seem to add weight to this speculation. It is interesting to note that the Gospel of Thomas has no stories or interpretation. It is just the sayings of Jesus faithfully recorded.
My intention is not to bash the Bible. There are many useful scriptures in the Bible which I am sure would bring very positive results to society if they were actually practiced by our political and religious leaders. My intention is to reveal what works when it comes to creating peace, harmony, fulfillment, community and so on, which is surely what we all want. The issue I have with the Bible and other important religious texts is the often conflicting and contradictory nature of their contents. In the Bible we have God represented as a loving father and even an embracing mother but just when you relax with that you are suddenly tossed into hell to burn for eternity for all sorts of petty reasons. God is loving and compassionate one minute and angry, vengeful, punishing and murderous the next. This is supposed to be the moral code that our society, our laws and our political ethics is based on. Is it any wonder that few thinking people take it seriously? It simply cannot be practiced to the letter. These contradictions make it very convenient to justify all sorts of ungodly behaviour. What's worse is that we are not allowed to question these sacred texts. If we do we are either chastised or told that God is a mystery. Quite frankly that is not good enough for me and it never has been. The mystery to me is that we don't use our common sense and face the facts that humans write these books and not God. God inspires, I have no doubts about that, but by the time that inspiration reaches pen and paper it has gone on a very bumpy ride through some fallible human being's mind. It is not surprising that we have lost faith in "truth" when it is represented in this way. Even if we do have faith in the truth (that is living principles that really work) then living it in this society can be a challenge due to so much of our society being created out of confusion about what is true. The destructive and heartless materialism that our society is in the grip of is a perfect example of this confusion.
Should we just give up then and take the so-called easy way and dam the consequences? Hell no! Fortunately what works is not such a mystery. It is more a matter of an open-minded commitment. The answers are definitely there. The journey to these answers is the facing of our accumulated confusion. Pure Unconditional Love is my God and I have never found it to be contradictory. To be sure it has revealed plenty of my own confusions which at first made things appear to be contradictory. Unconditional Love is an uncompromising but endlessly compassionate teacher. My faith in this great divine force has always proven to be well-founded. It is my bet also that this was what the Bible was meant to be about before us humans got in the way, as we do. Fortunately there is no shortage of books we can read on the subject of unconditional love. As far as I can see, this Light never dies, it just keeps searching for new things to shine through because it will not be bound by dogma of any sort.
Institutions like the medical industry are good examples of how dogma works. Discoveries in quantum physics over the last few decades in particular have rendered much of the science that the medical industry is based on as obsolete. However, the implications of these new discoveries are largely ignored. In my view it is because thousands upon thousands of people's careers depend on things staying the same. Applying the new understandings of quantum physics would radically change the way medicine is carried out, shifting it predominantly to health-sustainment through education and support in personal responsibility rather than the inefficient and unsustainable disease cure approach brought about by societal attitudes and structures that just don't work. We don't like change. We like our comfort zones - it is just human nature, or at least an aspect of human nature that lacks the power and ability to evolve, which is in all of us. Overcoming this tendency to stagnate is perhaps our biggest challenge as human beings.
Learning and applying the principles of self-mastery to our life can certainly mean pursuing lofty goals such as enlightenment, but it more often simply means creating balance and harmony within our everyday lives. It can mean gaining something that we can pass on to our children that will give them the strength to rise above the dangers of our confused society. Self-mastery is definitely about learning to comprehend a big enough picture to enable us to make wise decisions in our life that bring benefit to everyone now and in the long-term. I wish you all peace and harmony.