Discover the Art of Self Mastery: A Philosophical Approach
Self-mastery is the art of mastering yourself within the experience without changing or controlling the experience.
Where did that come from? How did I get there?
There are a few philosophical principles or theories that I have adopted through my own healing journey. They include:
Existentialism: Experience has no inherent meaning on its own. The meaning created from an experience is a human construct. Everything that we think or feel about an experience is self-created through our perception. The experience and my reaction to it are completely separate things. I believe that human perception is inherently flawed in such a way that we unknowingly and unintentionally victimize ourselves through our perception of experience.
Taoism/Buddhism: God is the God of all that is. God is not the God of good; therefore, God is neutral. All experience simply exists neutrally in the world. The only thing that changes this is human perception (existentialism).
Moral Nihilism: God did not create a code of conduct. Morals are ego constructs designed to make people feel better about themselves and their perceptions of how people should be in the world. Morality is completely subjective and shaped by social constructs, not by anything objective.
Likewise, right and wrong are also human constructs based on flawed perceptions of experience that have no objective basis. Right and wrong are open to interpretation and subject to change.
Psychology teaches us how to live with the wounded ego. While psychology does attempt to explain the human need for acceptance and love, it also accepts flawed human perceptions as truth, which means the basis for much of the currently accepted psychological theory is flawed.
Many existentialist philosophers struggled with the idea of a God that was only good. This caused them to move toward atheism, or the belief that there is no God. When we drop the Western Christian belief that God is good and move to a more balanced Taoist or Buddhist belief, existentialism no longer conflicts with the idea of a higher power. People have the free will God intended them to have, save for societal expectations, rules, and laws, which, if one simply accepts the potential consequences of those things, don’t stop anybody from doing anything.
Self-awareness is the key to unlocking our own internal freedom. The more aware we are of ourselves in the experience, the easier it becomes to manage how we interpret the experience so that we don’t unintentionally cause ourselves more pain than the experience may have offered.
The range of experience mirrors the range of emotions that humans feel. Human emotion is on a spectrum that ranges from love to hate, and human experience follows the same spectrum. Each experience is intended to offer some emotion between love and hate. We allow our emotions to inform our interpretation of the experience; however, the emotion is not the objective truth of the experience—it is simply our human ego-based reaction to it. If we step outside of the emotion, we can find an objective interpretation that doesn’t create more pain. Self-awareness allows us to see what the wounded ego does with experience (psychology), allow the emotion to pass and not use it as a means of interpreting the experience, and then find a more objective means of seeing the experience (existentialism) in a way that isn’t painful to the wounded ego.
Self-mastery is the process of managing your thoughts and feelings about the experience while recognizing that the experience is outside of you and that your reaction to it is your own and completely under your control.
I got here unintentionally on my own. Self-mastery was something that I was offered intuitively very early on in my journey. I was taken through a process of understanding my own thinking, then understanding how my emotions were playing into my thinking, and finally shifting my behavior once I had my thoughts and feelings somewhat managed. I wasn’t reading philosophy or psychology books; I don’t really follow anybody’s work. I have realized that, obviously, these ideas aren’t new and that there is room for me to analyze the struggles some philosophers had with their own realizations. By putting different philosophies together I can create a new view of the world that doesn’t argue with itself. It also opens up a whole new means of exploring and sharing these concepts with you.
I’m spending my day writing, researching, and questioning the beliefs and philosophies that I’ve come across. I found myself in a pool of things I never expected to be in!
Thanks for hanging out with me!
Love to all.
Della