{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Mastery of Self","description":"A similar theme repeats itself across all faiths. It's a discipline I have little of. ------ A friend of mine claims he\u2019s a genius. He has little evidence of this. Just an over-confident assessment of his himself. He\u2019s quite entertaining. He believes the lunar landings were a hoax, but of his own genius, he\u2019s certain. Last night I told him I was struggling for a topic for this week\u2019s commentary. I hadn\u2019t seen or thought or felt anything that moved me to write about it. So, I asked him for ideas. He blustered and bloviated and finally got around to saying this: The greatest enemy each of us face is staring at us every morning, every afternoon, and every evening before we go to bed. That enemy can be found in the mirror. It\u2019s us. It\u2019s me. It\u2019s you. We\u2019re our own enemy. We sabotage ourselves every day. Things that we know we should do, we avoid. Things we know we shouldn\u2019t do, we do. It ranges from having too many cookies before bed at night to not making the sales calls, or having the tough conversations that we know need to happen. The list infinitely long. We blame others, we blame bad luck, even blame the devil from time to time. But the vast majority of the time, our greatest enemy is ourselves. Now I would love to tell this self-proclaimed genius he\u2019s wrong but, he\u2019s right. And his description certainly describes me. I have remarkable discipline about some things in my world and remarkably little discipline about others \u2013 like gobbling a fistful of cookies on the way to bed at night. I know I shouldn\u2019t do it but down the hatch they go. And I eat them quickly hoping the guilt will go away quickly. Another enemy is when I try to make a joke when my inner-knower is whispering for me to hush, that I\u2019ve gone too far. The joke may be more hurtful than funny. That happened on last week\u2019s commentary, and I heard about it and I\u2019m sorry. I ignored my inner-knower. Next to my bed lie a stack of books. One compares Jesus\u2019 and the Buddha\u2019s greatest messages and how similar they are. Another is by Father Anthony DeMello who was a Catholic Jesuit priest from India and knows many of the stories of the Indian deities and shares their lessons alongside the lessons of Christianity. I frequently return to a wonderful book on the lessons of the Bhagavat Gita, a story out of India written 500 years before Christ. All these religions, these faiths, these pursuits of spirituality, while vastly different in important ways, emphasize so many of the same points. And it\u2019s these similarities that fascinate me. That catch my attention.   One that shines through repeatedly is the mastery of self. Heaven, bliss, enlightenment, you name it. These spiritualities claim they can only be achieved through mastery of self. Self-control. I have so little. I know it. And I think about it each time I gobble the cookies and make the bad jokes. And I can already hear friend demanding a commission for this commentary. I\u2019m Cam Marston and I\u2019m just trying to Keep It Real. ","author_name":"Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston","author_url":"https:\/\/cammarston.com\/keepin-it-real-with-cam-marston\/","html":"