You are a sovereign being. Sovereign essentially means “self-possessed”, or in other words, you own yourself. Nobody else is capable of directing or governing your body or your mind except yourself.
You ARE the Authority in your own life, and not even you can change that, even if you wanted to. Because we individually are the sole legitimate “worldly” Authority over ourselves and our lives, as a consequence, we must take up the proper responsibility that comes with that sovereign authority.
Let’s do a thought experiment to observe how inescapable our sovereignty really is.
You are considering submitting to a spiritual master (such as a guru). You have full trust and faith in this master, their teachings, their methods, their life, everything. Furthermore, you view this master to have infinitely more wisdom than you, so naturally you want to be their disciple.
In choosing to follow your new spiritual master, you give away all of your sovereign authority on your life. You trust the words of the master more than you trust yourself, you trust the master has greater wisdom and can lead you to greater truth(or whatever you’re looking for). Your personal feelings, opinions, and hang-ups all get dispensed with, overwritten and repressed in the shadow of your faith in the master. All your prior convictions are sacrificed at the altar of faith in your master. It could only be that the master knows best, not only for himself, but for me.
You willingly give this master the authority to tell you what is good, and what is bad, what is better, what is worse. The master can now define life and your proper place in it, for you. The trajectory of your life is now determined by the road the master sets you on.
Your constant role and sovereign choice is simply your complete faith in the master.
Explanation:
Whether we attempt to give our authority temporarily away to a spiritual master or not, in both cases, it was our sovereign self doing the choosing.
At the time of choosing, we must have believed in our ability to make a good decision in choosing a master to submit our authority to. We relied on our sovereign experience, our discernment and critical faculties to determine what, we thought, was a good, or at least the best of available options.
Given this starting position of believing in ourselves, why would we suddenly undermine that belief in ourselves at the altar of a master. Why would we give away the authority to believe in ourselves at least as much as we believe in the master? Why would we give away our authority to set boundaries, proclaim and do what, we think, is best for us?
The thought experiment is designed to demonstrate the impossibility of relinquishing our sovereignty and the vain redundancy in imagining one could foundationally exist under any worldly authority besides their own Sovereign experience of Self (God).
As a well-intentioned disciple, you may bask in the light of the master, but in reality, you are still not the master, and no image of perfection, real or imaginary, becomes your own through simple association or identification with the master. Surrender to a master has no further guarantee of divinity or goodness than surrender to ourselves. It only guarantees that “the master” will have his way with you.
If we take it one step further, given that we cannot escape our sovereignty, and we are always doing the choosing, why not invest in ourselves and increase our ability to wield that sovereignty?
Each of us is or has an individualized self, and that self provides a lifetime project of growing, maturing and learning which can only be directed by its true master, The Sovereign Self(also called God). The voice for God in our psyche is called conscience. Conscience describes our innate intuitive knowledge and awareness of God/Self in our experience of our psyche.
The main issue comes when we idolize someone or something into a master. We feel inadequate by relative comparison, and consequently devalue ourselves. But this is completely unnecessary. We are fully equipped with a whole self and everything we need to blossom into a beautiful and honourable person.
There is only one caveat. There is one master, we cannot avoid. It is the One entity which is all-pervading and never ending, within and without us. A master which respects no boundaries but his own. That master is God, life or reality itself.
The only legitimate authority in our lives is God, which in worldly terms, could be said as, the only legitimate authority in our lives is our conscience(in the psyche), which resides inside our personal direct experience of God/Reality.
NOTE: I would like to highlight that teachers, and discipleship are wonderful options and resources. My emphasis is only on the fact that it is an illusion to believe we are capable of operating under any worldly authority other than our own self, or that we could somehow be more than we already are through mere faith or association with a worldly master.
