A Lesson in Self-Mastery
What a slave and a brain scientist can teach us
He had a rough start in life. He was a slave. He had no rights. He was property and had to do whatever his owner told him to.
His owner, who happened to be Emperor Nero’s scribe, gave him permission to study under one of the Stoic philosophers.
His position as a slave gave him a unique perspective. While most of us have at least some ability and freedom to affect our environment. As a slave he had none.
As a result he turned inward and cast his focus on the only thing he had control over, himself. He realized that everything going on outside him was outside of his control, but his response to it was his to choose. He learned to master his thoughts and emotions. This led to his now oft-quoted statement:
No Man Is Free Who Is Not Master Of Himself — Epictetus
He eventually gained his freedom and started his own school where he taught others the insights he had found. Even today, 2000 years later, he has followers who study his teachings.
Freedom
While freedom can have many definitions, mine goes something like this:
Freedom = choice + environment + agency
- Choice equals free will.
We all have it, and it can’t be taken away. We’re born with it and we’ll die with it. It’s the essence of why we have freedom, but what we do with it is a different story. Here we run into limitations, which are of two kinds: the environment and agency. - Our environment.
We’re all subject to the written and unwritten rules of every group we’re a part of, whether we like it or not. Break the rules and there’ll be consequences. A woman in Iran has a different level of freedom than her female counterpart in the United States because of the rules imposed on her by her environment. - Agency, our ability to act.
I’m talking about mastery here. During our first decade and a half or so we are simply mastering basic skills, from learning how to walk and talk to basic math and learning how to read and write. These skills are necessary to participate in society. Then we go on, perhaps to college, to build more specific skills that match our interests.
Agency is the sum total of all the knowledge and skills we master. Most of the skills we master are focused on preparing us for our role in society. But how we deal with mastering our human instrument is, shall we say, not quite as clearly defined.
A Model For Self-Mastery
Self-mastery is how we learn to navigate our inner terrain, our thoughts, feelings, and the beliefs we embrace as our own. It has the potential to affect our quality of life more than any degree from Yale or Harvard, yet it receives next to no attention at all.
Let’s change that.
A simple model for self-mastery includes the head, the heart and our consciousness.
If you think this is too simple, remember that every model is a simplification of reality. The reason we use models is that while they’re incomplete when compared with reality, they are useful to help us understand how things work, to link cause and effect.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at Dr. Jill Taylor’s experience.
Her Stroke of Insight
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard trained brain scientist who, at 37 years old, had a massive stroke. She wrote a book about her experience: My Stroke of Insight. In it she describes in detail how the stroke bled into the left side of her brain, taking away in the span of four hours, her ability to walk, talk, read, write and recall any of her life experiences.
She became in a sense like a new-born baby, except that she had an adult body and brain, albeit a damaged brain.
What fascinates me about her experience is that even though she lost all her skills, all her agency, she — her consciousness — was still there, just like we are there when we are born in a baby’s body.
Consciousness. Scientists don’t really know what to do with it. Some just ignore it, others claim it doesn’t really exist while still others believe it’s a strange side-effect of the brain. But consciousness doesn’t really have a location. At least that was her experience.
One function of the left brain is to confine our consciousness to our body. With the left brain offline, she experienced herself as a fluid being without borders or limitations, one with the universe. She likened it to Nirvana, feeling a tremendous sense of inner peace, and joy.
The Head, the Heart and Free Will
I should explain here that in the book she talks mainly about the left and right side of the brain. I use the terms most people are more familiar with: the head and the heart. The left brain (the head) has all the functionality of language, logic, reason and sequential thinking. It includes the practical skills we rely on to live in this world. By comparison the right side of the brain (the heart) is tuned into our feelings, emotions and intuition, living perpetually in the present.
After her stroke, she, as consciousness experienced the world through the heart without any interference from her head and it was blissful. The only problem was, she couldn’t really take care of herself.
As consciousness, we have free will, we have choice. We can decide to create agency. In the same way that a baby starts to develop all the skills to gain control over the body, she had to do the same thing. That decision to rebuild her mind was consciousness. It chooses and it directs. And in this case she chose to start rebuilding all the connections in the brain that she needed to be a functioning human being with a head and a heart.
Self-Mastery
It took her 8 years to rebuild her brain. But she did it consciously. As her left brain began to come back online, she was very aware of its specific functions and programs and chose consciously which programs she wanted to install and kept the rest offline. The following quote sums up the process.
I have been very fussy this time around about which emotional programs I am interested in retaining and which ones I have no interest in giving voice to again (impatience, criticism, unkindness).
What a wonderful gift this stroke has been in permitting me to pick and choose who and how I want to be in the world. Before the stroke I believed I was a product of this brain and that I had minimal say about how I felt or what I thought. Since the hemorrhage, my eyes have been opened to how much choice I actually have about what goes on between my ears.
— Jill Bolte Taylor.
That is self-mastery.
Self-mastery means getting better and eventually good or great at mastering our human instrument. It means mastering what’s going on on the inside because that’s the only thing we can really control.
It doesn’t mean that just because you decide to pursue self-mastery that you’ll be able to do it perfectly. It’s much like learning to play a musical instrument. It takes deliberate practice, and the more you practice the better you get.
It also doesn’t mean you will never have a negative emotion or thought. But you can start to build new habits. Instead of responding with shame or guilt, you can consciously build a new habit of forgiveness and self-acceptance. Instead of anger you can choose forgiveness and self-responsibility. And to overcome fear you need to build the habits of courage and trust.
Is it hard? Sure.
Consider the effort you need to put in to get a degree from Harvard or Yale. This may be as hard or harder, depending on your starting point.
But is it worth it? Absolutely!
Epictetus and Dr. Taylor were obviously extreme cases. But you and I can take their example and do this too.
The choice is ours.
