learning and mastery

Learning is reiterative. What that means is, you have to revisit what you learn several times to master it. This quality of learning is not a failure on the part of the one who is learning. You aren't the worst learner who ever lived when you think you understand something and find out, in the lesson's next unexpected iteration, that no, you hadn't mastered things after all. Not yet. Try again please. This discovery is not bad news. It's how learning works.

Appreciating how learning works is especially important on the spiritual path. Nowhere will life hand you more unwanted reminders that you don't have things mastered yet than there. That's what the spiritual path is actually about, one reminder after another that you aren't a master. The road to mastery is paved with bulldozed masters. At the far end of the road, where each trampled master believed he was heading, is the bulldozer itself, coming right at you again. See your reflection in the blade? Smile! Squish.

The tricky part of mastery is there isn't a master. How do you become a master? You realize you can't. How do you remain a master? You remember there isn't a master. All the time. This may sound like a lot of hocus pocus, but it needs to be stated. I don't want you fighting that bulldozer forever, only long enough to admit defeat, and thereby gain victory. You are on a path of learning, friend spirit, and the learning never stops. The truth of your being is fathomlessly deep and mysterious. Admitting how completely outside the realm of mental comprehension it is is just the beginning, although a fine one at that.

I want you to cut yourself a break. I want you to see what you're getting into and after a moment or two of understandable rationalist vertigo about it, open up to the deeper response of appreciation and eagerness. What you're getting into (and there's no choice anymore, there's no lasting retreat to sustainable aloofness about these things) is a way of life that leads unendingly into the unknown. You will never know again. Everything you thought you knew and still think you know, whether you recognize those things yet or not, will come deeply into question, one after another in the perfect sequence for release from them all.

I can't put enough stress on the first word in the previous sentence: everything. Friend spirit, they wouldn't call it the unknown if you were allowed to keep bits and pieces of what you think you know already and go in there anyway. That would be called, well, it already has a name: bullshit. You've heard of that before, yes? We're all sooooo full of it. There's not one of us who isn't. I am too. Awfully eager to agree with me on that point, eh? If so, that's your initial burst of rationalist vertigo operating. It will pass. You'll surrender. What the hell else can you do besides surrendering that isn't more bullshit? Everything we know is plain old B.S.

Now before you write me off as a nihilist, allow me to clarify a few things. First, the word nihilist rhymes with stylist. That doesn't mean anything really, but I thought it was cool. Second, there is obviously a place for knowledge, for the known. I don't want to freak you out that nothing we know, such as scientific insight or how to tie a shoe, is without its beautiful place in the whole of existence. How could things be otherwise? All I'm trying to say is those things, the ones we call knowledge, just don't cut it on the spiritual path. They freeze life into a false conceptual stasis, from which all the real quote-unquote "life" drains away.

You are "life". Everything you think you know about who you are is the false conceptual stasis. Do you want to be yourself or your conceptual discomfort zone? As life I'm asking you. Life to life. It's an intimate conversation here, addressed at you: Life, do you want to be life and live, or is a false sense of comfort and security so important to you that you'd rather die keeping it? That's what keeping it is: it's your death, Life. Every moment. The known is perpetual suicide to you. You are cutting your magnificent throat with every stubborn concept and idea of who you are. And you know it. I know you do. Better yet, you can feel it. Feel the concepts betray you. Feel them flick their serpent tongues. They're at your heels, Life. Run!

Run to the unknown, where they don't exist. They can't. It's the definition of them not to. They can't go where definitions are impossible. But you can, and must. You thrive there. You gain freedom there. You discover that happiness is so ridiculously easy there that you don't know what took you so long to accept it on its own terms. You don't care that it took you so long because you remembered again, and that's enough. You're enough without knowing anything. You don't know anything and you're enough. You overflow. You enchant.

Lose yourself and gain the world. That's what a great teacher once said on this subject, but we have to refresh the teaching so we hear it right again. Will you do that with me? Here's how: tuck the little phrase "all your concepts of" between the words "lose" and "yourself". Go ahead and say it that way to make sure you've got it down. Then trade the word "world" for "Truth" with a capital T. But that word is up to you also. Use whatever word is transparent enough to indicate that which is so sacred to you that you'd be silent in the presence of it. Absolutely inevitably silent. Silent to the point of beholding it and forgetting you. Completely forgetting you. That silent.

Imagine that. Silent in the presence of it. Have you ever been out walking and suddenly you encountered a deer or any wild animal? Do you remember how quiet you got, not wanting to scare it away, but quieter than that really? You were quiet before your mind could even churn out a reason for being quiet? That quiet. That silent. The quiet and silence that precedes the thought process. That was the quiet you experienced then. That's the unknown. That place before your mind. That's what's sacred in this life. That's what life is. That's what you are. Lose all your concepts of yourself and gain that.