The 5 Master Keys:
- Instruction
- Practice
- Surrender
- Intentionality
- The Edge
For a Master, the rewards gained along the way are fine, but they are not the main reason for the journey.
"How long will it take me to master aikido?" - "How long do you expect to live?" is the only respectable response. Ultimately, practice is the path of mastery. If you stay on it long enough, you'll find it to be a vivid place, with its ups and downs, its challenges and comforts, it's surprises, disappointments, and unconditional joys. You'll take your share of bumps and bruises of the ego as well as of the body, mind, and spirit - but it might well turn out to be the most reliable thing in your life.
What is mastery? At the heart of it, mastery is practice (goalless practice). Mastery is staying on the path.
Intentionality fuels the master's journey. Every master is a master of vision.
Ancient Eastern adage: "Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water."
Change - and dealing with failed resolutions
Homeostasis, remember, doesn't distinguish between what you would call change for the better and change for the worse. It resists all change.
If an organization or cultural reform meets tremendous resistance, it is because it's either a tremendously bad idea or a tremendously good idea.
To learn is to change. Education, is a process that changes the learner...the best learning of all involves learning how to learn - that is, to change. The lifelong learner is essentially one who has learned to deal with homeostasis, simply because he or she is doing it all the time.
Energy
A human being is the kind of machine that wears out from lack of use. There are limits, of course, and we do need healthful rest and relaxation, but for the most part we gain energy by using energy. Often the best remedy for physical weariness is thirty minutes of aerobic exercise.
1. Maintain Physical Fitness
2. Acknowledge the Negative and Accentuate the Positive
3. Tell the Truth
4. Honor but don't Indulge your own Dark Side. - A young child is like a lively ball of energy. But the parents don't like certain parts of the ball so the kid in order to keep the parents' love hides or puts away that part of his personality or his energy. Schooling does the same thing it restricts kids and they feel they need to hide different parts of their energy to the point that when we are young adults only a thin slice of our original energy is left. "But the energy we've hidden away can still be available to us. And putting those forbidden parts of our personality to work doesn't involve indulging ourselves and literally acting out the submerged part. Anger, for instance, contains a great deal of energy. If we've repressed that emotion so effectively that we can't even feel it, we obviously can't use the energy that goes along with it in any conscious, constructive way. But if we take our anger out of the bag simply to indulge it, if we let anger become a knee jerk response, we dissipate its considerable power. There are times when its appropriate to express anger, but there's also the possibility of taking the fervid energy of indignation, even of rage, and putting it to work for positive purposes. In other words, when you feel your anger rising, you can choose to go and work furiously on a favorite project, or to transmute the energy beneath your anger to fuel that you can use on your journey of mastery."
5. Set your Priorities - "Before you can use your potential energy, you have to decide what you're going to do with it. And in making any choice, you face a monstrous fact: to move in one direction, you must forgo all others. To choose one goal is to forsake a very large number of other possible goals. A friend of mine, 29 and still looking for a cause, a purpose in life, said, 'Our generation has been raised on the idea of keeping your options open. But if you keep all your options open, you can't do a damned thing.' It's a problem: How can any one option, any one goal, match up to the possibilities contained in all others?"
"Ultimately, liberation comes through the acceptance of limits. You can't do everything, but you can do one thing, and then another and another. In terms of energy, it's better to make a wrong choice than none at all."
6. Make Commitments. Take Action. - "Whatever you can do, or DREAM you can - begin it...Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
7. Get on the path of Mastery and stay on it.
Pitfalls on the path:
Vanity -"If you're always thinking about appearances, you can never attain the state of concentration that's necessary for effective learning and top performance."
Dead Seriousness - "Without laughter, the rough and rocky places on the path might be too painful to bear. Humor not only lightens your load, it also broadens your perspective. To be deadly serious is to suffer tunnel vision. To be able to laugh at yourself clears the vision."
