The Circle of Mastery

When Pablo Picasso blew open the art world with his experimental painting techniques, he was already an accomplished artist in the Realist and Primitivism techniques. Henri Matisse, another of the first popular Modernists, also started as a student of landscape and still life painting. The key is that these masters didn’t start their avant garde explorations in a vacuum. They started as masters, then deconstructed their mastery.

This circle of mastery – from ignorance to knowledge to expertise to knowledgeable departure – appears in all kinds of areas in life. Throughout the arts it is readily apparent, with examples including Picasso, Mozart and Kubrick. But we also see this in extreme sports athletes who perform death-defying feats atop skyscrapers and invent flying squirrel suits to define a new sport in base jumping. We see this in the creators of cryptocurrency, who understand how technology and finance work and choose to make something completely different.

Extreme Sports Versus Jackass

Frequently we see people who decide to go their own way, and fail miserably at it. They choose to live off-grid and are miserable, or choose rebellion over subversion, or kill themselves street racing.

There is a huge difference between ignorance and departure from mastery.

• We all start ignorant.
• Many of us strive to become experts, knowledgeable in our fields of interest.
• Not many then allow life to break us out of that expertise. But many believe they can without the expertise.

When The Secret was first published, my partner Steve was quite annoyed. Not because it spread lies or misdirected anyone, but because it put post-expert knowledge into the hands of people who didn’t have the discipline to use the knowledge.

The Secret is a retelling of the Law of Attraction, most recently popularized by Abraham through Esther and Jerry Hicks. What we think creates our experience, which reinforces what we think, which reinforces our experience, and so on. Its main premise was that we could create any experience we want just by thinking hard enough about it.

Lots of people tried this to create financial independence. Lots of people lost the shirts off of their backs.

Not because the information was wrong, but because they weren’t already experts at managing their thinking. They hadn’t done the work of rooting out their limiting beliefs, so that they could stop thinking and start allowing.

I’ve mentioned this arc in a couple of previous articles here and here, but I hadn’t realized the common thread.

Learning, Then Unlearning

We need to go through the entire arc. We need to first become masters of our existence before we can allow that mastery to express itself without our control.

As children we are emotionally expressive but not reflective. As we grow, we are taught to repress ourselves, but rarely are we taught to reflect on the emotions we’ve repressed. But as we learn to reflect on them, we learn to release ourselves from the emotional triggers. Our emotions then give us insight beyond what our minds are capable of generating. But frequently we are afraid to do the reflection, to unearth and release the painful experiences that produced those triggers, and instead we treat our triggered emotions as intuition and crash into the same walls that created the triggers in the first place.

Similarly, I see many spiritual people on the edge of starvation and penury because they haven’t gone through the effort of learning how to allow their power to flow. When we “go with the flow,” our souls take us through life at the level at which our personal power allows. At times things will work in our favor. When they don’t, the mastery comes from our ability to accept what is happening and then acting. Frequently I see people go “This is how it is” and walk away. The power comes in “This is how it is. What is being asked of me?” And following through with that.

The main key I see is differentiating between bravado and confidence, impulse and calling. With bravado and impulse, we are listening to our minds wanting candy. “I want that! Let’s do that!” And we’re ignoring the messages our body tells us that it isn’t healthy, or that we aren’t actually ready to tackle that. With confidence and calling, there is a calm focus and intentness. Our entire being is primed in that direction.

That calm and intentness comes from a bodily awareness of our capacity. Even if our minds aren’t quite ready to accept our abilities, our bodies have a knowledge of what we have taught them. Years of training to understand how, say, computer programming or art or rock climbing or dancing or financial markets or entrepreneurism or woodworking work. When that training is embedded into your being, it becomes available at a visceral level that allows you to focus without thinking about it. The body simply draws or programs or climbs for you, giving you the capacity to allow the body find its way for you.

In that journey, the soul discovers new ways to use the existing knowledge. New dance movements progress from the instinctual knowledge of how the body flows. New art designs emerge from the instinctual knowledge of how paint or pixels flow. New methods of self-sustaining come from the instinctual knowledge of how people exchange energy in commerce.

None of this works without the original outlay of energy and gathering of expertise.

So when you consider “going with the flow,” consider doing this with intent and knowledge. Being a master of flow is so much more invigorating.