Who Are You, and What Are You?

Meditation is the doorway to self-mastery.

Inner peace, calm, and deeply restful sleep are gifts that come from a practice of self-mastery, which is the art of controlling the body and the mind. Perhaps most importantly, self-mastery can lead to spiritual self-knowledge, that is, knowledge of one’s own human spirit. And that knowledge can lead to Enlightenment.

Self-mastery (chiefly through meditation) is something that I was “taught” fifty-one years ago. But to be more accurate, it is something which in me became fully realized only decades later. Admittedly, my Tibetan teacher had limited skills in my language back then. But his words stuck somewhere in my brain and then, many years later, they blossomed into the insight I expressed above.

The pathway to self-mastery offers very little in the way of forward vision to the seeker. You can’t expect to see exactly how your meditative practice will result in self-mastery in the future. But intuition should tell you that self-mastery will come from a practice of self-mastery. And the practice of self-mastery starts with sitting quietly and not thinking. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?