Course XIII - Teaching 5: Self-control

The technique of meditation exercise technique must be perfectly handled.
Perfect technique does not imply mystical realization, but shows great mental and emotional mastery attained.
Divine realization is impossible without an absolute control of the mind and heart. A man without self-control is not truly free. Men feel themselves free because they can move to and fro, and speak and think at will. If this were the fruit of their true individual will, it would show that they are actually free; but very few beings are free to think, feel and act. Everything made and said by a man in the name of his freedom is a continuous evidence of his own ties and limitations.
A man not always wishes what he needs. His thought is free; it is determined by ceaseless change of emotions and sensations, by external circumstances, by his mood, and by environment and life.
Just a perfect inner and outer control gives knowledge about what one is or not; about what one actually wants, and about what one wishes under the influence of Nature, beings and things.
Freedom cannot be attained by satisfying at once fickle whims of one’s imagination and feeling, but by checking the power of desire in order have self-control. Thus one is aware of the inner forces, both good forces and harmful forces as well; so one’s will is handled to make of it a liberation tool. Just the mastery of body and mind makes a man fit for liberation, and the effort of man to achieve it is the ascetic method ruling over spiritual life.
Self-control is the first step on the Renunciation road. Spiritual is not possible not going out of the instinctive emotional level.
The Renunciation state manifests in the soul through total and continuous control. At the same time, the discipline of self-control, sustained by the Only Idea, leads quickly to the Renunciation state-.
This self-control is basically different from nervous emotional control usually practiced, which brings easily psychophysical stressing states. It is a control exercised by the highest part of consciousness, which neither thinks nor analyses, but observes; and in observing, it knows.
Usually, control is established on the same level of inner struggles, so the soul brings about a mental and emotional conflict by identifying itself with the same forces that the soul is fighting, and it cannot go out of a duality of triumphs and failures, and of winning and losing. Renunciation to a personal triumph over oneself, Renunciation to a positive goal as realization is, transforms the volitional effort into technique, so control is a mental super-power overseeing and leading the inner and outer forces. Inner control is outer control, and it is power over universal forces.