INNER MASTERY IS A REALIZATION PROCESS, THE INNER MASTER IS AN ILLUSION.
Knowing how to differentiate a state from an attitude is one of the greatest secrets of personal empowerment.
If I tell you that the inner master is inside you and you believe it, you’ll be in great trouble, because it will be the ego who is believing it (or the character that runs our life). The fallacy of empowerment comes from the need of not wanting to depend on anyone (we believe we are able to do everything by ourselves, but we are not able to yet). Sometimes a crawling child wants to walk but they are not strong enough to take steady steps. A great crack arises from the difference between what they believe or what they want and what they can actually do which may cause an earthquake at any given time. Every belief creates a sensation of reality. If you convince yourself that you are in a higher place than you really are, or that you have arrived at such a place, that you are now ready to hold conferences, write a lot of books or even give lectures, but from the fallacy of having found the inner master, not from the reality of living your life from a place of mastery.
“The inner master is a squatter, that takes a position it hasn’t been given to imitate a role that leads to nowhere.”
THE LIMITATION HIDDEN IN THE SEARCH OF INDEPENDENCE:
If you show children how to learn by themselves, on the one hand you are motivating their independence and their ability to resolve matters without any external help, but on the other hand you will be exposing them to very serious inconsistencies on the foundation of learning. This is because every learning system should fundamentally transmit trust, without it implying a separation from the outside but rather a coming closer. Gratitude and acknowledgement towards the one who supported them in their process of discovery shows that they opened themselves to receiving. All kids need to trust the person who is guiding them. This is how trust is born, by relating with the outside. The only thing a master or a teacher should do, really, is teach how to trust. But the process may be inadequate, and the outcome may be the exact opposite. You may want to liberate someone and instead you are enslaving them even more. How is this opposite effect produced?
It’s true that if you condition someone you enslave them, but it is also true that if you don’t condition someone you also enslave them, because human experience includes both realities. Unconditionality is required for such a journey in order to navigate between conditioning and unconditioning, in the majestic ocean waves of mystery.
“Being unconditional is loving both slavery and freedom”
On the other hand, if you teach dependence you are enslaving the other and if you teach independence you’re enslaving them as well. The need to be independent is a very sophisticated type of dependence, because it makes you depend on the idea that you can be independent and on the need to demonstrate you are independent. What I’m saying here, is that the human being is highly resistant to interdependence. I depend on others and others depend on me. This is a marvellous situation that allows me to be disciple and master at the same time. That will never allow myself to believe that I have already found my inner master. But rather I’m in an inner mastery process in which I’m learning how to be dependent and independent at the same time, both conditioned and unconditioned at the same time. This is how eternity moves about in the finite nature of the material world.
“Inner mastery stands on the pillars of unconditional support and interdependence.”
SOME DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE INNER MASTER AND INNER MASTERY.
The master is an idealized figure, something fixed. A state that one aspires to reach, a goal to achieve. The desire of being a master is the exact opposite of the essence of what inner mastery is all about. Mastery is a skill, an attitude, a great acquired ability. An extraordinary and experienced way of handling things is knowing how to move about between what’s difficult, complicated, unknown and dangerous without letting fear and insecurity take over. Inner mastery is a group of unprovoked movements, “nobody” is executing them. If there’s no- one, then there is mastery. If there’s somebody guiding there’s an inner master. If you ask someone who is experiencing the process of inner mastery: who’s guiding you? The answer will be “I DON’T KNOW”. There exists guidance but not a guide. If there’s someone guiding that will be the character, that even though it is able to accomplish its role, it doesn’t have the ability to lead us beyond its limitations.
At this point of my life and with all the experience collected over many decades of work, I can assure you that when one speaks about the inner master, they are speaking of a very beautiful but unrealistic fantasy. Being a master of yourself or others is a mental construct based on polarities, because it forces you to be one thing or the other. But when I speak about INNER MASTERY there’s integration of polarities, what’s external inspires, supports, provides, backs up, clarifies and guides. Inner wisdom spontaneously arises in this maturity process of the Being based on interaction with others. When an individual dedicates himself only to receive without the need of giving or returning, the time will come when they will be filled with comprehension and love. Compassion is the most refined comprehension that exists. Then the natural outflow begins, the need to release everything we have filled ourselves with. This is a healing process in which you allow something new to enter and something different and transformed to exit. When the things you receive from the outside go through the center of our Being, it is inevitable that they come out as something different, superior and refined. This inner transformation process is what I call INNER MASTERY.
The master doesn’t exist, wisdom does. God doesn’t exist, creativity does.
Wisdom and creativity. Potentiality and divinity. They are all activated through an inner mastery process that has nothing to do with the identity or the idealized figure of a master. Believing there is a master (inside or outside) is wanting to reach a certain state: the master one. While entrusting yourself to the mastery is realizing that there is no state you can reach, but rather surrendering to a process that has already begun and will inevitably lead us to transformation.
I’m in favour of you searching for your internal or external master, each one of us is living their own moment. But if you do, I suggest you ask yourself these questions: Who is looking for it? What master can you find? Inside a human being there’s nobody, there never was and there never will be. Us humans have created “someone” to fill that empty space, and we have done so through identifications that lead to creating false limited and insufficient identities. You can call it the “ego”, “me” or “character”, but behind that mask there’s a divine essence, a potentiality, a pure non-being that can be anything and everything it wants. In this way, finding the inner master on the path of realization is a tragedy, because we will come to believing that the work has already been done based on having reached a certain state. That’s when inner evolution stops, and self-deceit and the illusion of empowerment arise. This fact proves that no advance has been made towards conquering inner mastery. If someone were able to see this, at least they would move forward by discovering the lie they were believing.
If we affirm that the inner master is the one who knows, this will be yet another demonstration of the suspicious effectiveness of the inner master. Because what inner mastery teaches us is that you can never know anything. Knowledge is something unreachable. The maximum power we can gain access to is to rescue our inner wisdom, but it has nothing to do with arriving at a library that contains everything, or where you can get to know everything. But rather the opposite. You get to access an empty space where everything can come up at any given time because you are living in trust, creativity and mystery.
Imaginary people appear when we speak about the inner master. Who is it? How can we find it? Who has discovered it? How can we tell who has found it? The need for knowing grows more and more instead of letting go the idea that you can know something.
“Wisdom is an endless source of mastery, mastery is an endless source of wisdom”
Great concerns arise when we talk about inner mastery because feeling that there isn’t an inner master guiding me, but that I am the inner master, is the transformation of the idea we have of what we are. The precious ability of finding our way back comes from the process of recovering the memory of what we are. Inner mastery is that inner journey that leads us to the Being, not to the inner master. For me the Being is the doorstep of non-being. That’s why there isn’t such thing as an “inner master” inhabiting the Being. In any case, that inner master is like a doorman to a labyrinth who is prepared not to let you in to a space where you will lose yourself. When it is actually in losing yourself where the solution lies. When you have no references, nothing or no one to have your back, is when you are entering the mystery.
I must recognize that there are a lot of people taking this inner journey who are finding the entrance but not going in because they ran into this spiritualized character (the labyrinth’s doorman) who’s waiting for them, slowing down their evolution process. He will leave you outside making you believe that you have already arrived and there’s nowhere else to go. He doesn’t want you to go in. Going on an inner journey looking for our inner master is no guarantee you will find inner mastery, because most human beings have this vital internal space filled with this egoic entity (the identification with wounds) that, as if it were a squatter, has invaded the core of our personal power. It wants power, it wants to be superior, it wants to be independent, it wants to be free and autonomous. Therefore, for most people, going in means finding an elaborate egoic monster, that has you believing that it is a master and as long as you have it you’ll need nothing from the outside. The great disappointment that presents itself in every seeker is near, just like an executioner coming to kill every fake idea of what you believed you had accomplished. This is part of the dying process that’s essential for mastery to arise.
If such a consciousness blessing has happened to you or were to happen, you are ready to start all over again. You have transcended self-deceit, the greatest enemy of inner evolution.
Alberto José Varela