Quotes about Self-mastery

The aristic thrust and conception of "contra natura" lie in our power finitely to extend our self-mastery, to GROW in will and spirit; but as Nietzsche repeatedly teaches in ZARATHUSTRA, such ends must be WILLABLE, achievable. There is nothing to be learned from the human-all-too-human impulse for self-deification or wholesale transcendence over the vicissitudes of life -- even though this aims at something contra natura, it is not truly concretely WILLABLE, it is just a fantasy of our imagination. We cannot BECOME a God. But we can learn to hold our deepest passions in check for the sake of a higher morality, if indeed we are aristoi. Willing and valuing must become an art, must be made consonant or coherent with the fabric of our natures. Mere megalomaniacal extravagance does not truly increase our charge of concentrated power; on the contrary it fires up our ambition with inflationary abstractions that give no traction or purchase to our actual wills. That way lies radical frustration and a metaphysics of depression: an inevitable life-pattern of self-delusion, as we suffer over and over from the necessity that "it would not be better if men got what they wanted," and yet will not permit ourselves ever to see or to learn anything from this self-deception and self-betrayal.

Just consider for a minute: look at the Many, the majoritarian cattle in every form of society who are governed by their own irrationalist beliefs and psychological needs and forces of social coordination with others (doxai). Taking control of the Many's always turbulent irrationalisms is child's play. They are the strata, the type most susceptible to enslavement not for accidental but for essential reasons. There is nothing whatsoever difficult in mastering or controlling them, and therefore it cannot be respected as any sort of value, especially not an aristic value. Values as ZARATHUSTRA argues are every people's ultimate concept of what is most difficult of all for them. What Nietzsche esteems, what in modern circumstances has come to seem "superhuman," is the aristic drive to accomplish what one judiciously recognizes as most difficult for oneself. "Power" is the natural reward or concomitant of those who struggle aristically to achieve the most contra-natural thing of all for human beings, self-mastery, the harnessing and knowing of the obscure forces that no one is in control of by birthright. There is no honor or valor in triumphing over defenseless and witless mentalities, regardless of the mass-numbers involved or the prodigious "power" (in the modern -- banausic -- sense) that results.

The essence of human spirit would seem to be something static to Buddha: if it has an internal imperative to become something else (something higher or more spiritual), what self-disequilibrium could it suffer from that could nonetheless still be considered spiritual in Buddha's eyes? Nietzsche sought to explain this imperative for self-acculturation, for achieving rational self-mastery, for spiritualization, for self-radicalization and self-sublimation, by means of a "Will to Power" far more comprehensive than moderns (with only the cheapest and most facile grasp of "power") can understand. As a philhellene Nietzsche perceives and respects what the Greeks took for granted, that "power" above all else must be self-reflexive, an expression of aristic self-moderation (their anti-hybristic ethos and its correlative contempt for idiotia): "power" to the Greeks is moral and philosophical and cultural and political authority because it expresses itself in the hardest thing of all for humans to achieve, self-mastery.

The truth about human beings is, above all other forms of truth, something far too susceptible to our own willful and subjectivist distortions; by nature we never JUST LET SUCH A THING BE, or accept it as it is. Of all the decisive and strategic things that an intelligent human being needs to know about human beings, primary on the list would be this: human beings are overwhelmingly profoundly RESISTANT to knowing the truth about human nature. The one creature in all of organic nature that is capable of KNOWING its own nature is also, paradigmatic over all other creatures, the one most IN DENIAL about that nature. To ask of mortals that they should "know themselves" is little more than a cruel joke, japing at their crippled mentality and personality. Their grasp of this structural perversity or contrariety within human nature is the basis of all Greek wisdom, their aristic "misanthropy" or principled and profound distrust of human beings as pseudophiliacs. All that human beings are willing to call "truth" (for the most part) is some saccharine or cosmetic sweetness and light, some soporific opiate against all in human existence that might demand the utmost self-discipline, rationality, self-mastery, or spirituality from them.

The only measures that count are progress over your own self, and triumph over the vacant abstractions that most people mistake for thinking.

A vital part of philosophizing is learning to trust one's own intuitivist intelligence, getting one's center of gravity back between one's feet.  In our culture--so outer-directed, "objective" or extraverted--this is already heresy.  This is self-mastering thinking, centered in what has been well-tested as certainties:  autarkia or self-rule.

Love is not a mystical or idealized relation, it is an utterly "natural" expression of self-harmonic and self-mastering individuals, but for just that reason it is something tragically, utterly, beyond being "naturally possible" for the vast majority of humans whose characters are bereft of such values and imperatives and self-subtilizing culture.  In most cases, as Nietzsche observed, all that happens between humans is that two animals find one another, and that can never be a stabilizable relation because feelings and desires (appetites) are of all experiences the most mercurial and fluctuating.  Nothing like a human life can be erected on such a foundation of constantly eroding sand; emotions, needs, feelings, will be there in every kind or form of life, but they will not have at all the same kinds of authority, power, significance, or structured role to play.

Questions, as I long ago tried to teach my students, are like cellular acids that dissolve the glue holding our preconceptions, prejudices, presuppositions, etc. together in customary clumps. All the more is this dissolution a liability in societies that lack any aristic higher structure, any form of critical authority or penetrating logic that is proof against merely slavish or conventionalist taking-for-granted and also against sophist-cynical-nihilist disillusionment. One cannot see and cannot say what is what without then initiating in that bourgeois consensus a cascade of disillusionment, a process of abolishing one absurdity after another. Just the ability to see the meanings of one's own language, what it actually implies and signifies, is already the first step in a process of ultimate subversion. The scales are falling from one's eyes, one doesn't need someone else to lead one around by the hand anymore like a child. --The end of tutelage, the beginning of appropriating one's mind for one's own disciplined use: for a certain, horrified-by-everything kind of slavish personality, this independence or self-responsibility is the most horrific prospect of all.

CS has the same problems with evil that it does with corporeality and with the domain of nature; it cannot comprehend the possibility of a dimension of counterforces that will not comply with its too-saccharine or Apollonian vision of spirit.  It represents bourgeoisified spirituality, as Protestantism does in another sense, or modernized Catholicism in yet another, and New Ageism in still another.  Modernly alien principles of spirit are being subjected to occupying banausic-materialist and doulic-appetitive forces.  Precisely what CS thought it should "leapfrog" over was the phenomenological education in lower-order organizing forces that Hegel understood to be indispensable to actual rather than illusory self-mastery.  (Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, etc. indeed tried to outdo Hegel in this basalism or Dionysianism, and made that argument more phenomenologically elastic.)

We should bear the intelligence and taste of the architect or the gardener in how we shape the becoming of our self.  Too much precision ("stringency") is simply misplaced, a formalism inappropriate to the kind of matter we have to deal with (and to be).

All that the posture of skepticism accomplishes is to freeze the ego in an ignorantist poverty that never stretches or diversifies its resources of imagination or understanding.  Any uncultured cretin can close his eyes and try to reduce the issues down to linear simplisms and say, "I am doubting, I am proving my magisterial or sovereign control over my own mind."  Doubt is a useful and significant test of one's critical powers, but by itself it bears little if any significant cultural charge of enlightenment or satori; indeed it is the very opposite kind of thing.

With education as with the system of law, we confront a spectrum of humanity that ranges from virtual angels to virtual devils, although most humans naturally fall in the fattest part of the natural bell-curve of distributed traits:  it has been said that some humans are so virtuous and rational and self-disciplined that for them, the very existence of the law is superfluous; and some are so depraved and immired in their own self-interestedness that even the most horrendous sanctions of legal punishment are not sufficient to bind them to behave justly.  The same is true of the distribution of resources of philosophical intelligence and insight.  Some very few minds could reconstruct for themselves many of the major perspectives of previous thinking, but these would be only a handful out of the population of the earth every generation.

What we actually learn from trying to carry out the program of philosophical education or teaching in the humanities or liberal arts (no matter how it may be done or via what materials), is demonstrably a lesson in diversification:  if there is anything "universalist" or "uniformitarian" about human nature, it defies being evidenced.  Students as individuals and as groups are very differentially susceptible to learning the arts of self-mastery and self-criticism:  if every human being were equitably competent to penetrate and discompose his own illusions and delusions, not just philosophy classes but education at large would be mostly superfluous.  People in general could just sit and think for themselves. 

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with an impure mind
And trouble will forllow you
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
As your shadow, unbreakable.

How can a troubled mind
Understand the way?

Your worst enemy cannot harm you
As much as your own thoughts, unguarded.

But once mastered,
No one can help you as much,
Not even your father or your mother.

I know there are those who are convinced that seeing ego as a problem is an outdated perspective that only adds fuel to the fire, and that simply “accepting” and “making space” for it is the more “enlightened” approach. But I beg to differ. It may sound good in theory, but the ability to recognize ego for what it is, in all its gross and often very subtle manifestations, to “accept” it and simultaneously not act out of it, requires a level of self-mastery that, to be brutally honest, is attained by very few. I have found that for most, transcending what would traditionally be called our “lower impulses” may require the willingness to struggle as if our life depended on it. Because if we want to evolve beyond ego in a way that is truly going to make a difference, it literally does.

"Spirituality" in business sounds lofty. How practical is it?

The answer is “very.” There’s a fundamental way in which Spirit and consciousness contribute to worldly success—and it has long been ignored. [. . .]

As experts, authors and gurus often note, the game of business is to influence the external world. But here’s the point: How can you control your environment if you can’t even manage your own thoughts and emotions? In other words, how do you rule the world without first mastering yourself?

The cornerstone of effective leadership is self-mastery.

It doesn’t matter how one was brought up. What determines the way one does anything is personal power.

This knowledge would be of vlaue to me in my ministry.  The more I knew about my fellowman, the better I could understand and help him.  This was my mission in life: to help each man and woman know his real self and how to express his true potential.  This journey had helped me realize how much work there was for me to do and how much I had to learn myself before I could proceed with my life work.