Or it can point to something of significance: self-mastery. Loazi said, "The one who masters others is powerful, the one who masters the self is more powerful still." Self-mastery is the holy grail of a well-lived life. But it's quite illusive.
Self-mastery raises questions first about the self. The self is that often troublesome "me" with all its insecurities, worries, flaws and foibles. Scholars have given us a number of ways to think about the self. It is the ego, the false self, the socially constructed self. It is the corrupted "fallen" self, the "old person." It is a bundle of perceptions or experiences, linked together as the links on a chain, with no abiding or continuing reality. The self is illusory—there is no self.
Each attempt at explanation is helpful in its own way, just so long as each explanation is accepted as such—a way of thinking about that which is ultimately unthinkable. Perhaps we know the self only phenomenally and not noumenally—we never know the self "in-itself."
Self-mastery, then, is mastery of the phenomenon of the self, the self as it appears to us to be.
And how does the self appear to us? Often as unruly—the spoiled child who wants her own way, who wants the universe centered on her, who is unmindful of the Other.
It is that self which needs to be mastered.
Yet, self-mastery is unfashionable. At least since Rousseau, our culture has played with the idea that the best thing to do with the self is leave it alone, let it express itself, for the self is ultimately good. Given free rein the self will prove good. There is some truth here. But only half-truth. The unfettered self is capable of some very silly and some very bad things.
It helps me to think of a differentiated self—the true self and the false self, or else the inner and the outer self, or the I and the me, the noumenal and the phenomenal self. The trouble we have with the self is with the false or outer self. Self-mastery is learning to live in the true self and so to master the false self. "I" can master "me."
But how to do it? That is the question.
The answer at the heart of the popular Lenten "give something up" is to point to a discipline that says "you will not have mastery over me." In the archetypal case, Jesus says to food "you are not my master, I can live without you, at least for a time." In the trivial case, "M&Ms, you shall not have mastery over me. I shall ignore the urge to eat you!" The taking something up for Lent is simply the reverse, in adding some good practice, some way of controlling the false self through a discipline.
It seems that these simple disciplines have the effect of controlling the unruliness of the self and of allowing us a way in to the inner, deeper, truer self. Of course, it is not magic. Giving up M&Ms for the six and a bit weeks of Lent will not make one a sage. But then, neither will forty days of total abstinence from all food. The disciplines are little steps that make up a life practice. It is the life practice that makes for self-mastery. Each little step helps.
+Ab. Andy