Conscious, Intelligent Self-control
Articles By Foster Bailey
Conscious, intelligent self-control is one of the most valuable assets we can have.
This is particularly so in this age of confusion when humanity is so rapidly maturing. We are today more responsible for our own future than ever before and we cannot control ourselves. At present the vast majority of human beings are controlled by their physical needs and their emotional urges. The immediate objective for man is mental control and the ultimate goal and destiny is soul control. To put it tritely, I am a soul and I have a physical body. The soul, or self, will ultimately become as real to us as a strong personal desire now is.
Meanwhile, we must deal with the present conditions of life or we remain as helpless children. Whether we control circumstances or are controlled by them is up to us. As adults we can and should control our own lives consciously and intelligently. Truly, as has been well said, our future is determined by the values we choose to live by now. The right to choose is an all important right essential to freedom. The only hope of a better world to live in is to preserve that right and to choose wisely. This requires intelligent thinking and thought leadership is the most needed leadership of all.
The most important study that our education system should promote is the study of man himself. We study everything else ad nauseam. We can learn much by studying human behaviour, even more by the study of man himself. The question is pressing in on us of what a man really is, which is the study of life itself. This includes man's relation to God and clarifying just what we mean by God. Is there a God, is not sinful to ask, and for an adult humanity the answer must be reasonable and not, as in the old days, on imposed authority under penalty of ending up in hell. Hence the importance of the injunction: 'Man Know Thyself', and the study of psychology.
Let us be as practical as possible in so profound a subject and consider man as he appears to be by his five senses; but now science has broken that limitation and we have mastery over many things our five senses cannot register. Indeed, we have so much power that, if misused, we could destroy humanity. We are increasingly destroying factors necessary for human life on this planet which we cannot replace. The greatest danger to man has become himself. There is so much evidence of survival after so-called death that the intelligent student can no longer ignore it, but immortality is quite another matter. The idea that I wan to be 'me' forever is rather unattractive in a world in which we are so uncomfortable. Definitely man is not merely a physical body and losing that body is not the end of him. Also there is a lot more to us than our desires and emotions, however strong, and it is only commonsense to train ourselves to control them.
This we can do by our own intelligence but it requires effort. It is the road to freedom and we need to free ourselves from ourselves. We can be objective about our own lives and be wise about the objectives we choose to live by but this necessitation self control and right use of the knowledge we now have. We have built a civilisation characterised by greed and cruelty and have become inhuman, which is to say more life animals. We are dominated by the motive of more for me which we can no longer justify because competition has become so dangerous, particularly between nations. Genuine, honest cooperation for the benefit of both parties must be the foreign policy of the nations if we are ever to stop killing and torturing ourselves. Indeed cooperation has become a must for survival.
Keywords: Conscious, Intelligent Self-control, commonsense, Foster Bailey, Intuition, Intuitive, Articles, UK, South Africa, Cape Town
