Mastery: Love or Fear or…?
Mastery: Love or Fear or…?
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In that book I'm studying THE ART OF PRACTICE (and unfortunately, I've gotten a note that at least one reader found the author's site offensively marketing-heavy. Beware) there are two apparently contradictory statements. Rephrased, they are:
"Masters" are motivated by love. Eternal novices by fear.
Human beings are twice as motivated to move away from the things they don't want to happen than motivated to go toward the things they do want to happen.
I'm simply going to ask myself what it would mean if both of these are true.
The first thing that comes to mind is that to the degree both are true, it is normal and "typical" to develop a middling level of skill at things. Enough to remove the fear that motivated you. But then, going further is actually a risk: practicing new skills means neglecting old ones (or so the voices in our heads say). So we will practice more to KEEP WHAT WE HAVE than we will to GAIN A NEW LEVEL OF MASTERY.
So we get stuck in a rut. I experienced that in the martial arts.
I was afraid of racists and bullies.
This led me to practicing martial arts--until I got good enough that the fear of external attack diminished.
At that point, I started attracting the attention of the black belts, who wanted to spar with me, triggering new fear
Which made me miss classes or even quit the school…
Until I started losing those skills, at which point the EXTERNAL fear overpowered the INTERNAL fear, and I went back.
I looked at that for years, and the pattern was killing me. I remember driving down La Brea boulevard, tears streaming down my face, asking God to either take away my desire to practice the arts…or just let me DO IT, GOD DAMMIT!
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I looked for a lot of answers about why I was caught in this loop, and have some good ones. But its possible that there's another piece here, viewed through this particular lens.
I had built an ego image as a child to help me survive the twin fears of "being crushed if I didn't succeed" and "becoming a target if I succeeded." Both afraid of power, and afraid of lacking power. Bad, bad, dilemma.
To grow forward, the fear of being asked to spar wasn't really enough to stop me. I'd never been hurt sparring, ever. I was in fact quite good at it. The memory of being bullied wasn't enough either.
But the ego identity I'd created to survive would NOT survive the transformative fire of the manhood test I had chosen for myself. "I" would DIE. But some part of me knew that if I didn't get through this, the bullies and racists who had triggered the fear would win, my entire life. If I didn't conquer this, I'd never really be an autonomous human being. I could never, ever, really be a man.
So in this case, fear was the floor and the ceiling. I could only fall so far down, or rise so high, before fear stopped me. I was "in the bottle" and thank Goodness I could see it.
I've seen people do similar things with their weight, their finances, their careers, their relationships.
What I THOUGHT I needed was to eliminate the fear. NO. I needed to UNDERSTAND my fear. To gain clarity on what it meant, what it was trying to do for me, how it was trying to protect me.
Understand this, and you can USE your fear to actually drive you. "Masters" in the above quote, are the ones motivated by love. They do what they do every day because they love it.
I think I take exception to that. I don't think it goes far enough. "Mastery" at the highest levels would be a road to full human awareness. And THAT isn't fear OR love. It is the dissolution of the boundaries twixt the two, returning those two fractional emotions to the root sensation: EMOTION.
"Real EMOTIONAL content. Not anger (or fear). Now try again!" Bruce Lee, Enter The Dragon.
Pure emotion. Fear motivates beginners, the eternal amateurs. But as soon as they know enough or have done enough to ease their fear, the motivation diminishes, and they stop progressing.
Love motivates aficionados, fans. They surge toward the thing they love, and often become amazing.
But MASTERS, in the sense I believe is most valid, use BOTH fear AND love. They are pushed from the back, and pulled from in front. "Put your fear behind you, your love in front of you, and run like hell" a coach once told me. But if you keep growing, you find yourself in new territory for your life. And if Impostor Syndrome or some such doesn't stop you, and you are on a transformative body-mind path, eventually you wake up one day and are a different person . If you have the courage to keep going, that new person is beyond fear and love in an "ordinary" sense.
They have resolved the duality. That "non-dualistic" thought and emotion is the last stop of the ordinary mind, and the last point at which ordinary language helps at all. The rest is just experience.
I don’t' know if I believe what I just wrote is accurate. It is "true" in terms of trying to see as clearly as possible, but some of this stuff is "Heisenberg Uncertainty" territory: I can see the path, but not my position on it. Or, I can tell you who I am, but at that moment I cannot see the path. I CANNOT DESCRIBE BOTH AT THE SAME TIME.
Wow. That just came to me, and its strange. And wonderful. Anyway, I'm going to go over this tomorrow on the FIREDANCE: THE NEXT LEVEL show: using BOTH fear and love to motivate and transform our lives and sense of self. Join us!
Steven Barnes is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Firedance...The Next Level
Time: Jun 3, 2023 12:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84839490050?pwd=aHN3NWlIUno2VEZ6d0dqeFNvaUZLQT09
Meeting ID: 848 3949 0050
Passcode: 951502
