I was asked a very interesting question the other day. “Neale,” my questioner wanted to know, “are you living at a place of mastery?” Her question was neither impertinent nor ridiculing. I could see from her sincere expression that she genuinely wanted to know.
My answer was immediate, if non-conclusive.
“What is mastery?”
Back came, “You’re the spiritual messenger. I was hoping you would tell me.”
This led me to think about something I hadn’t thought about in a very long time. What is it like to live as a master? What is a “master,” anyway? Who decides that? By what definition, by what measurement?
“It feels to me,” I began my response slowly, “that there are as many different definitions of a ‘master’ as there are people. And it also feels as though there are degrees of mastery. A person can be a master of one thing, and not of another.
“Was Michaelangelo a ‘master’? Was Pablo Casals? How about Socrates, or Plato? Where would you place Ghandi, or Martin Luther King? Where, on the scale of things, would you place Mozart, Albert Einstein, or, for that matter, Babe Ruth? How about Siddhartha Gautama, Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad? What say you about Baha’u’llah, or Joseph Smith?”
We agreed at this stage that “partial masters”—people who had mastered certain skills or particular aspects of life—were not what we were talking about. Those people might be classified as “ highly talented” or even as “geniuses,” but they would not be defined as “masters” according to our measurement.
“Mastery,” we decided, was not about what one did, but about what one was. It was a state of being, not a process of doing.
Now we had to define what that state of being was.
“Peace,” I offered. “I think a master is a person who is…

…being Peace.”
But what about Joy, or Love? What about Forgiveness or Compassion? Was Mother Teresa a master? Was Paramahansa Yogananda? The latter was called “master” by many people. Does that make him one?
And what about length of experience? Did a person have to “be” whatever “mastery” was all of the time, most of the time, some of the time, part of the time—or was once-in-a-while good enough?
What about a person who has “episodes” of mastery, but also suffers episodes of being a somewhat more normal—and foibled—human being? Where is the crossover line? When a person is demonstrating mastery fifty per cent of the time? Seventy-five per cent? Ninety per cent?
To put this in everyday terms, do masters eat ice cream?
There is an anecdote about Paramahansa Yogananda, creator of the Self Realization Fellowship, and the day that he gathered three of his students after several hours of meditation, piled them into his car, and drove off to buy them each an ice cream cone. The Master, it turned out, liked ice cream, and gave himself this treat every once in a while. And that wasn’t the only treat he afforded himself, apparently. Yogananda was, by most fair descriptions, a portly man.
This leads us to another question. Are all masters underweight? Is it okay if they are overweight? Is there a particular physical profile for a master?
Perhaps it’s about health, not size or shape. Are all masters healthy? Is it possible to be ill and still be a master? Can one have physical ailments, aches and pains? Is it okay to need glasses?
What are the requirements here?
Some people have ventured that a master must be someone whose life can stand as a model for others. Is this the measurement? Is this the yardstick?
Or is there a yardstick? Might it be possible that there is no One Size Fits All answer to this question? Could it be that some masters are portly and some are skinny, that some are healthy and some have arthritis? That some are vegetarians and some eat meat?
Is it possible that some masters act badly some of the time, and do or say things that “normal” human beings do?
Could it be that some “normal” humans beings act extraordinarily some of the time, and do or say things that “masters” do?
What, then, makes a “master”?
“Your questions are all making me laugh,” my friend said. “They are the questions of a child.”
“Really?” I raised my eyebrows. “Then what are the questions of an adult?”
“There are three,” she said. “What are you choosing to be? What are your intentions? What are you seeking?”
I asked her to explain.
“It is not a question of what a person is doing, you are right. It is a question of what a person is being, of what a person is intending, of what a person is seeking.
“You can be doing the thing called ‘losing your temper,’ but if you are doing that because you are being courageous or because you intend to save a person’s life or because you are seeking peace, then ‘losing your temper’ may be the masterful thing to do.”
“So what you are saying is that it is not a matter of what you are doing, but why you are doing it.”
She smiled.
“So what about the person who has an ice cream cone? Or the person who is overweight? Is that person a master?”
“What is ‘overweight’? There is no definition of that. It has to do with whether a person is healthy of not. If an ‘overweight’ person does not have any health problems, then that person is just the ‘right’ weight! There is nothing standing in the way of that person being a master.”
“In other words, if a person is not healthy, they cannot be a master, is that right?”
“They’re not a master of their body.”
“Then are they a master at all? We’re right back to my ‘childish’ question. What is a master?”
“A master is one who has mastery of all three parts of the being: body, mind, and spirit, based on what you are trying to achieve in your lifetime. If you seeking to evolve into the highest being you can possibly be, then you would be trying to produce the highest level of health in your body, in your mind, and in your spirit. You would do nothing that is not healthy for any parts of your being.”
“But” I asked, “how do you define ‘health’? What is healthy for one person may not be healthy for another.”
“I knew you were going to ask me that question,” she laughed. “There is an answer to that. ‘Health’ can be defined as that which is life enhancing, life expanding, life supporting. Healthy things always support more life. If what you are thinking, saying, or doing does not support more life, then it is not healthy.
“So, if being overweight supports more life, go ahead and be overweight. But if you notice your life diminishing, your energy dropping, even your life expectancy decreasing, you may want to look at whether this is what is called ‘mastery.’ The soul always wants only one thing: more life, and grander and grander expressions of it. That is called evolution.”
“So what is the path to that?” I asked her.
“Well, first you have to know that you want it. You have to be aware that this is what you are after—a higher and higher experience of Life Itself, expressing in, as, and through you.
“If this is not what you want, if this is not what you have consciously decided, then you have to make that decision now.
“This is not a simple decision to make. It sounds easy, but it is really a very courageous and unusual decision. Most people are choosing less life. That is why they act the way they do. They may not know this consciously, but their subconscious agenda mitigates against having more life. Their behaviors have become so automatic, so culturally taught and accepted, that they don’t even know what they are doing. In a sense, they are sleep walking.”
I thought for a moment. “So then it is a question of consciousness.”
“Yes. You have to raise your consciousness above its current level. You have to start by looking at exactly where you are right now, what you are doing right now in your life.
“To be a master of Who I Am means to be always aware of who I am right now. Then I know where I want to go, and what I have to do to get there.
“Next, I watch my breath, focus on my breath.”
“Why?” I wanted to know.
“Because when I am watching my breath, then I will feel the sensation that I am Life, that I am the living form of Life Itself. When I focus on my breath, it gives me time to be aware of Who I Am, and to detach from the emotion that I am creating.”
“I don’t understand what you mean. I don’t get that,” I admitted.
“Have you ever found yourself becoming very, very angry, or very, very scared, and a person next to you says, ‘Just take a deep breath.’ Have you ever had that happen?”
“Yes,” I said, “Of course.”
“Then you know what I am talking about. That deep breath that you take gives you time. It literally gives you time to think. Time to experience, again, Who You Really Are.
“Wow. I never thought about it that way.”
My friend smiled once more.
“Tell me more,” I said.
“During this time, you get to choose again. Breathing deeply gives you an experience of You, of the Real You. It separates you in time and space from the outward encounter and the inner emotional feeling that you thought was you, and brings you back to reality. Back to Ultimate Reality, not the imagined reality of the moment, which is all an illusion.
“Now imagine what would happen if you focused on your breath not only when you are angry, or scared, or in some kind of ‘breathtaking’ situation, but also when you are not. Imagine what would happen if you ‘took a deep breath’ every day, many times a day, as a matter of spiritual practice? Isn’t that an amazingly simple idea? But it works. That’s the really amazing thing. It works! It takes you back to yourself, because what you are breathing in is Life, the energy of Life Itself, and that means you are literally giving yourself more of yourself, more of Who You are.
“Then the third thing I do to experience mastery is to detach. Detach from, especially, the emotions. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have emotions, it means that I don’t attach to what comes up for me when I have them.”
“What does it mean to attach to them?” I wanted to know.
“It means to give them meaning. An emotion is just an emotion. It is nothing more than that. Meaning, on the other hand, is what you decide about that emotion. It is your thought about the emotion. And most people’s thoughts are based on their preconceptions.”
“Okay, you lost me,” I admitted.
“People have preconceived ideas about everything, and especially about who they are. They think what they have been conditioned to think. So they create a closed circle here. First they have a preconception, then they have an emotion, then they have a thought based on their preconception. They’re right back where they started.
“The trick is to detach. If you detach from your emotion—just let yourself have it, but don’t attach any meaning to it—then you have automatically detached from your thought. So your thought cannot lead you back to your preconception about yourself. In this way, detachment gives you a whole new idea about yourself.”
“The also creates a circle, but it is not a vicious circle. It is a Circle of Completion. You have completed your understanding of Who and What You Are. Now you are the Whole You. Coming from this place, the next time you face a particular situation you may experience an entirely different emotion—or, as in the case of some masters, no emotion at all.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that.
“Do I really want to have no emotions?”
“Remember,” my friend said, “I have said nothing about feelings. I never said you would have no feelings. But feelings and emotions are not the same thing.”
“Emotions come from preconceptions. Feelings are simply the energy of life, moving through you. Love is a wonderful example. Emotions are energy-in-motion. In other words, E+motion. Feelings are the experience of the energy itself, internally. Emotions are the outward expression, the ‘pushing out’, of your feelings.
“I like to say that emotions are what we do with our feeling. Feelings are what we have, emotions are what we do with what we have. Emotions flow from our preconceived notions about ourselves. But if we have detached from our emotions, and from the thoughts which flow from them, we wind up with a new conception of ourselves.
“In this way, we literally recreate ourselves anew in each moment. We experience each moment as it is actually happening, without adding stuff to it. To me, this is mastery.
“Mastery is deciding who you are right here, right now, and who you next choose to be. And it is about always making the highest choice, the choice which enhances, expands, and produces more Life.”