Written by: Phillip Golding, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
There are a number of important factors that are essential to understand, in order to embark on your quest to be the master of your mind.
Understanding your mind.
Understanding the you who is mastering your mind.
Understanding the natural physics or principles behind mastering your mind.
Understanding what is not true mind mastery.
Understanding what is true mind mastery.
Real Self-Mastery
Having genuine self-mastery means that you are not dependent on the world around you to validate you ‒ to give you self-worth. You are totally in charge of this essential foundation to your self-esteem. You understand that you are human, and therefore fallible, and therefore have more to learn in this world. Your Compassionate Acceptance of your humanness enables you to be free enough to have a go at new things and to take chances, knowing that mistakes are opportunities to learn more about self-mastery. Therefore, you do not believe in failure. You see only opportunities to evolve through experience. You Accept that, as an aware adult, you have full Responsibility over what you think, feel, say and do. You know that this level of Personal Responsibility gives you the opportunity to observe and identify how you are giving your power away and or causing harm to yourself and others. You see Unconditional Love as the highest principle and strive to make this your motivation for all that you think, say and do. You do this because you see and feel your interconnectedness with everyone and everything. You know and feel this interconnectedness through your genuine compassionate acceptance and Guardianship of Your Own Self. As a result, you are in touch with the big picture. From this higher perspective, you know that the wellbeing of the stranger sitting opposite you on the train is just as important as your own wellbeing, because ultimately his/her wellbeing is dependent on your wellbeing and your wellbeing is dependent on his/her wellbeing. You know that the common denial of this truth is a key cause of humanity’s suffering. You also know that human-beings deny this truth of our interconnectedness because we are disconnected from ourselves due to self-rejection, conscious or unconscious. You strive to no longer take from the world, but instead inflow into the world from your own center of Compassionate Self-Acceptance/Love. You are able to humbly receive love from others while letting them be themselves. At the same time, you love others unconditionally, because you are not afraid of not receiving love. You stand secure in your own foundation and sanctuary of compassionate self-acceptance/love. Because you can stand firm in your own self-worth foundation, you are nobody’s fool. You know how to discern what is best for you and others. You see your life as an opportunity to freely explore and express your potential, for the highest good of all, including the planet that we live on and her nature that we live in.
What Self-Mastery is Not.
Self-mastery is not about exploiting others. Exploiting others, including your environment, is a symptom of your own emptiness, caused by your own self-rejection. Your self-rejection causes your needs to be endless, leading to the need to exploit others. Self-mastery is not about being dominant over others. No matter how powerful you think you are, your need to be dominant over others is a sign of your own insecurity and your lack of acceptance and compassion for your own humanness. Hoarding wealth, or indulging yourself in more than you need is also a sign of your own emptiness, caused by your own disconnection from yourself. As a part of your potential, you may be able to gain command of great wealth and resources. However, your level of self-mastery will determine what you do with that wealth. Some of the wealthiest people on this planet live a humble life, surrounding themselves with only what they genuinely need, while their wealth is extensively used to genuinely benefit others. The need to exploit others, to dominate others or live in opulence is ultimately a sign that we don’t know the true source of fulfilment, and will therefore never be satisfied.
Who is Mastering Your Mind?
As I pointed out in my previous articles, if you can observe your mind and act on your mind, this indicates that you are more than your mind. Here we are dealing with our capacity for consciousness. If the mind is the television, consciousness is the signal that flows through the television. The quality of the television picture is both determined by the quality of the signal, and also the quality of the circuitry of the television. In the case of human consciousness, we have the potential to empower our consciousness to where we can then change the quality of the conditioning of the mind, so that mind and consciousness can both evolve. This also implies that consciousness and the human mind are ultimately independent of one another. It also implies that consciousness is the dynamic factor. Your mind’s evolution is dependent on the expansion of your consciousness.
As I also pointed out in my previous articles, self-rejection, leading to mind-states such as shame and pride, blocks our ability to face ourselves and see directly into our minds with our consciousness, due to the emotional pain and vulnerability this self-rejection causes. Therefore, the real power or potential of our consciousness lies mostly dormant. Consciousness is limited to being mere ego, the servant of our mind’s conditioning, be it good or bad. Consciousness is not yet a truly independent power in its own right. My articles also pointed out that Unconditional Compassionate Self-Acceptance and Personal Responsibility for all that we think, feel, say and do, awaken our ego-consciousness into its greater potential, which we call Awareness. With this power of Conscious-Awareness, we are able to break through our mind’s ego defences and underlying self-rejection, layer-by-layer. We ensure these breakthroughs are inevitable, because we place our Ongoing Self-Awareness Process at the center of our lives and make this our number one priority. Every aspect of our lives then benefits from our growing Conscious-Awareness and therefore our growing ability to ‘re-condition’ our minds. As Conscious-Awareness, we are no longer captured by the mind and its more short-sighted primal motivations, but instead, our minds are being embraced within our expanding Conscious-Awareness. We are becoming the forever loving parent and sanctuary for our minds.. We can now pay attention to how we feel and through the window of our feelings/emotions, we can see what our thoughts are up to. We can see/feel when our own thoughts/conditioning are working with our higher awareness or against our awareness.
The Nature of the Mind
For those who have a significant level of self-mastery, they have actually reconditioned their minds to be the servant of their growing Conscious-Awareness. For the rest of us, our awareness is asleep and just going along for the ride, allowing the blind, randomly conditioned mind to be in the drivers seat, taking us goodness-knows-where. The mind, on its own more primal level of consciousness, only knows its own programming. It is not interested in breaking free of those limitations, because that is all it knows. When it suffers, it has been conditioned to blame the world around it, avoid the situation or it beats itself up, all of which just means that in one way or another, the suffering is going to continue. The mind seeks comfort and the status quo. It is designed to hang onto its programming for the purpose of giving us stability, but it is not on a level of consciousness to be able to differentiate between what is useful programming and what is problematic. Even when it has programming that allows it to challenge itself, it still does this within those limited programs. If we want to be genuinely happy, fulfilled, resilient, secure, empowered and aware, then we have to face up to and accept that the mind, on its own, is not up to the job. The mind is the computer that has been programmed. The mind is not the programmer. Without being awakened into genuine awareness, we are like computerised robots with the programmer asleep inside. When we were children, adolescents and young adults, the programmers were our parents, extended family, teachers, peers and various other factors in our environment. By the time we are adults, we have the capacity to program ourselves, but we use this capacity in very limited ways, usually to continue to reinforce the original programming and our ego defences, such as with education, social media, entertainment, etcetera. This means that even with what we would regard as good/normal conditioning, we are still mostly asleep at the wheel and are not in touch with the bigger picture of how our everyday decisions will affect everyone else and the very planet that we depend on. The mind is very limited in its ability to see what it is doing to itself.
The Physics of Conscious-Awareness
As a result of being asleep at the wheel most of the time, we tend to need Life to crash into us before we realise there is a problem. More than ever, we can directly experience the consequences of continuing to be part of the problem. Climate change is one growing consequence. The way big business has been knowingly and irresponsibly exploiting you and I and the planet’s natural resources in a way that causes not just climate change, but poor mental and physical health in our communities, is another problem. Continuing conflict, whether it is from deluded leaders/politicians who still think that might is right, the endless mass shootings, particularly in America, but also in other parts of the world, or the bigotry that continues from people who are afraid of someone who is different to them, is yet another problem. Then there is the media and entertainment industry, that glorifies guns, and propagates misinformation for the sake of profits and political power for power’s sake. Then it is you and I, who are voting for so-called leaders who continue to perpetuate this chaos, while we are blindly consuming our natural resources to fill up our own emptiness.
As a therapist and an awareness coach, one of the biggest problems I encounter is our lack of effective principles. In regards to the big picture, we just don’t know what works as opposed to what doesn’t work, in order to create peace, harmony, balance, equality/equity, compassion and kindness. As I have pointed out in this article and my previous articles, the most effective way of learning the principles that actually work, is to Take Full Responsibility for Everything You Think, Feel, Say and Do, in the Spirit of Unconditional Self-Acceptance. It is to make this approach to life the center of your life, along with learning all you can about how to do this ongoing. Here you now have a direct feedback loop between your Conscious-Awareness as the guiding parent and your human mind as your child. Here you can literally feel/observe/experience what works and what does not work, when it comes to overcoming your own suffering. Being the solution to your own life, in other words. Now every experience you have in life is going to teach you more about yourself and how to be there for yourself. You are now on your journey to self-mastery. If everyone got on with living their own self-awareness process like this, humanity would transform itself in 10 years. Therefore, when you get on with being the genuine solution to your own life, you are also naturally becoming the solution for everyone else, because what genuinely works for you, works for me. We are all in this together, interconnected together. Don’t wait for someone else to do it. It starts with you. Every choice you make today and every day, whether conscious or unconscious, is creating your life, and everyone else’s life, including our environment. Make the choice to be the Master of your mind and be a real part of the solution for our world.
In my next article, I will show you some practical ways to get on with mastering your mind.
Phillip Golding, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Phil has been on his own personal development journey since 1984. He overcame chronic depression and PTSD, which motivated him to continue to learn about emotional healing, psychology, and self-awareness. Phil’s qualifications and experience cover general psychology, existential/spiritual/transpersonal psychology and mindfulness and a post-graduate degree in psychology. With his personal and professional experience, Phil developed the powerful and effective mindfulness-based “Five Step Process,” which has been the foundation of his psychotherapy practice and mindfulness/self-awareness teaching. Phil is also an author and is in the process of completing the second edition of his book, “Five Steps to Freedom.”
