On self-mastery. Master or be mastered

"Though one may conquer a thousand times a thousand men in battle, yet he indeed is the noblest victor who conquers himself."– Buddha –

There are two entities in the person you are. There are two bearing your name. One is your body which is YOURSELF and the other one is your mind which is YOU. To master YOURSELF you have to operate from your mind which is the higher ground. The body may succumb to environmental factors but the mind succumbs to none. The body has no problem doing what the mind commands but the mind is too great follow the leadership of the body.

Your goals cannot be achieve without self-discipline and self-discipline can only be achieve if you have mastered YOURSELF. Therefore it is important that you gain mastery over YOURSELF, which is the mind controlling the body. It is important that you master yourself and not the other way round. When you master yourself you tell it what to do and it will do it. But when you are mastered by yourself or you are in the same level with yourself, you cannot tell it what to do, it either refuses or tells you what to do instead.

Self-mastery is getting out of bed anytime your alarm goes off. It is the ability to drop unwanted habits. Most people go through life without ever discovering the joy of self-mastery.

People speak of freedom but there are far from it. They are drug addicts who are bent towards the desires of their flesh, who will do whatever their body urges them to do, their control over themselves is weak and so they are controlled. They are slaves under a weak master who more than often leads them to destruction. That is how the body leads.

Take control. Refuse to be a slave to yourself. The greatest mastery a man will ever have is over himself. Be in control. Do not bend to what your body wants, but to what you want. That is how to discipline the SELF. What you want is what will take you far in life, but what yourself wants is often temporary.

Feed your conscious and subconscious mind with the important of actualizing your dreams, let it become part of you. Let it become your conviction. When your belief becomes your convictions you no more find it hard to chase your goals, because it has become part of YOU which in this case refers to your conscious and subconscious mind, and YOU have made it a common principle to YOURSELF which in this case is your body, not to ever quit from your dream and YOU, YOURSELF now lives according to that principle. The principle you created.