How Do I Become a Master?

We all want to be the best at what we do. But how do we get there? We look at some of the best to learn their secrets.

Chinese medicine and Chinese martial arts—like shaolin kung fu, ba gua zhang, xing yi chuan—are all known for their sages and their masters. Many of us dream of being able to study with someone who is truly a master. Unfortunately, traditional apprenticeship has been on the decline during the 20th and 21st centuries. What can we learn by looking at great masters in music, medicine, cuisine, and more? How can we understand more about ourselves, our trades, and our arts by looking at them?

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COOL STUFF I MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
Joe Hollis' YouTube Channel (Mountain Gardens) — https://www.youtube.com/user/mountaingardens
Joe Hollis' Website (Mountain Gardens) — https://www.mountaingardensherbs.com/

Thor Sigstedt's Ranch Website — https://www.adventuretrailsranch.com/

Davie504's YouTube channel
Some of my favorites from Davie504's bass solos — https://youtu.be/wuO6GM5XDjc?t=285
https://youtu.be/09hWCkA2mNg

Fuchsia Dunlop's "Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking"
Fuchsia Dunlop's "The Food of Sichuan"
Fuchsia Dunlop's "Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province"
Fuchsia Dunlop's "Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China"

Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's "Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking"

Najmieh Batmanglij's "Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies"
Najmieh Batmanglij's "Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes & Kitchen Secrets"
Najmieh Batmanglij's "Joon: Persian Cooking Made Simple"

Li Dong Yuan's "Treatise on the Spleen & Stomach" (Source text for Bu Zhong Yi Qi Tang)

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Music Credit:
"Let Yourself Be Huge" - Cloudkicker (under Creative Commons License)

Transcript

Greetings and welcome to “Classic of Difficulties: Difficult Questions in Medicine, Acupuncture, and Beyond”. I am your host, Dr. James Mohebali. I’m a doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and I will be your armchair-philosopher-in-residence and your tour guide as we try to ask some difficult questions about medicine, health, alternative medicine, and maybe the meaning of life. My goal in this podcast is that, by asking and unpacking these tough questions, we will maybe leave with a couple of answers, but we will definitely leave with more questions than we had at the start.

This is episode 8: How do I become a master?

This episode is going to be a little different than our other episodes. The reason why is that, all in all, we won’t be talking that much about medicine. Don’t worry, medicine will come up, and we’ll learn a lot about medicine by the end, but this won’t be one of those theory heavy episodes, where you wish you had a glossary of Chinese terms and a timeline of Chinese dynasties in order to keep up. See, one thing that I have been fascinated with recently, and one thing that is continually on my mind since I am a younger, less masterful practitioner of Chinese medicine, is this idea of mastery. We all want to be a master. We want to be the best at what we do. As a student of Chinese medicine, and I imagine even moreso with students of Chinese martial arts, I always have this very romantic image in my mind of traveling up to the most remote corner of such and such sacred mountain, and learning from a sagely doctor with a long white beard, whose wisdom far surpasses anything I could ever dream of obtaining.

If only life were like a kung fu movie. But it is not. So far, when it comes to white-haired sagely mountain men with seemingly infinite wisdom, I have only managed to find two. I am lucky to have even found the two, but they weren’t Chinese. One was from Michigan originally. And we weren’t in China. One of them, by the way, is Joe Hollis, of Mountain Gardens. He runs a very unique herbal medicine farm in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Joe Hollis is most certainly a master of what he does. His website is linked in the description below, and his youtube page is linked up above and below. The other one was Thor Sigstedt, a master builder and structural artist, and we used to live on his ranch in New Mexico. His website is also linked below.

So the plan for this video is simple: I’m going to think about and talk about some of the best, coolest, smartest, most talented people that I know of, and we’re going to try to figure out what makes them so awesome. I’m going to borrow experts and masters from the culinary world, from the herb-farming world, from the medicine world, from the music world, we are going to take any and all comers. Why are we going to cast such a wide net? Because I think that mastery is something transcendent, something universal. I also think that it’s possible to appreciate mastery regardless of the discipline. In fact, I think it’s possible to appreciate mastery even if you have no knowledge of the subject matter at all.

To start this off, let’s talk about music. Everybody likes music! But instead of talking about the common go-to people for mastery of music, your Bachs, Beethovens, and Mozarts, we are going to take some modern examples. One person who I’ve recently become HUGELY fascinated with is Davie504. Davie504 is a youtuber, and he is a bass guitarist. A SLAP bass guitarist. Davie’s channel is linked above, and in the description below. He has millions of subscribers, and probably billions of views on his channel. Part of the reason why he is so successful is that he’s incredibly funny. But another part of the reason why he’s successful is that he’s probably one of the finest bass guitarists that I’ve ever heard. Like ever. I will link a couple of my favorite of his bass solos above, and in the description below.

But what makes him so good? Both at youtube, and at bass guitar? I mean, it’s hard to say. It’s certainly not the kind of music that I would put on if I were just wanting to listen to some music. I just don’t really gravitate towards funk music. And, generally speaking, the best slap basslines are at least a little funky. But, regardless of your interest in funk, anyone can hear how talented he is and how magnetic his bass solos are.

What makes him talented? Is it his speed? Is it his rapid utilization of complex techniques? Is it his knowledge of musical theory? I would argue that it’s actually none of these technical aspects. I don’t personally believe that technical proficiency is the same as mastery. I think it’s hugely important to be technically proficient, and it would be a little bit unusual to find a master with no technical skills, but I certainly don’t think it’s the end all be all of mastery. There are many technically proficient musicians, many technically proficient composers, many technically proficient artists and chefs whose work is ultimately lacking in life. And without life, without vitality, I would argue that there is no mastery.

Consider, for example, some of the most memorable basslines of all time: Seven Nation Army, by the White Stripes; Come Together by The Beatles; Money by Pink Floyd; Another One Bites the Dust by Queen—all of these powerful, unforgettable basslines are all beginner-level and fairly easy to play. But mastery takes these basic things and transforms them into something else. When you hear Davie play these basslines, it just sounds different, it just sounds better than when your average bassist plays them. There’s something more going on there. Think about listening to a cover band play your favorite song. No matter what, no matter how accurate the vocalist, no matter how talented the guitarist, it always sounds a little different than the original. Sometimes covers come out better than the original, but, inevitably, any cover will always be a little different.

In Chinese thought and Chinese medical thought, we would consider the source of this difference to be the Qi of the musician. Different musicians have different qi, and the better the musician, the better and more refined the qi they have. This idea of qi is very often applied in Chinese music, but also in calligraphy and in archery, which are two of the most exalted Chinese art forms. Beautiful calligraphy, the beautiful penmanship comes from someone whose qi is perfectly controlled, and perfectly expressed. Even though computers can precisely and accurately copy your handwriting, there’s always going to be something about it that looks a little different. A little inhuman. We, as humans, can always kind of recognize when another human wrote something. It’s like, when you look at their writing, you can kind of see the person who wrote the words hidden behind the letters, like they left behind a little piece of themselves, like a ghost.

The thing about qi, and the reason why we like to look at calligraphy and watch Olympic archery, is that the trained eye can tell the difference. You can see how calm they are, how their whole body is perfectly controlled in order to execute that one shot. It looks majestic, like a deer jumping, perfectly elegant, perfectly orchestrated, like everything is moving in unison to a common goal. And with calligraphy, the trained eye can distinguish between the Qi of two different calligraphers, and it can distinguish between the quality of their qi. The trained eye can tell from the end product when your elbow is resting on the table, it can tell if you had a bit of hesitation because of your insecurity, it can tell what you were feeling and thinking internally as you were writing.

So becoming an expert in calligraphy, just like in acupuncture, and arguably, just like in any discipline, involves being able to practice awareness of your own internal state, your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own qi, so as to better control the fine motions of your hands. If you are angry when massaging a patient, for example, they’ll feel it. If you are thinking about lunch when you are massaging a patient, they’ll feel it. If you are totally and completely focused on exactly what you are doing at that exact moment, the patient will feel it, and this last one will be the most effective and most meaningful treatment.

So Davie504, Victor Wooten, all of these bass masters must be controlling their qi in order for them to produce sound in a way that is superior to your average bassist. I mean, just think about the level of complexity in the motion of a single finger plucking a single bass string to produce a single note. How fast is the finger moving when it touches the string? How fast does the finger pluck? And how quickly does the finger release the string? Now take those questions, and apply them to literally every single note played in a given song. And that’s just covers one of the two hands. These little questions are helpful guides for how we can understand the qi of the musician, and how we can break it down and analyze it. Unlike machines, real life has infinite variation. As far as I know, there’s no computer complex enough to play Bach as good as Glenn Gould. But what’s interesting about all these questions, is that they actually serve as a springboard for students to learn to how to control their qi. During the process of practicing, a student asks themselves these same questions, how fast is my finger moving, how quickly am I releasing, and so on, repeatedly, over and over, until finally the motion of the perfect pluck becomes second nature. At that point, they don’t have to think about it anymore.

I can still remember the postural and structural advice given during my piano lessons as a teen. Opening up the shoulders, keeping the elbows gently bent, breathing properly, sitting with your feet on the floor or the pedals, sitting on the edge of the piano bench, sitting up straight, all of these things that, at least to my teenage mind, had nothing to do with the song I was playing, and, in my mind, had no effect on the notes I produced. Of course, I was wrong. These things do make a difference in sound: when you’re playing notes very quietly, if your qi is tight and locked up, then you’ll end up completely missing notes by accident. And, of the notes you do hit, their volume will be uneven and the whole thing will sound choppy.

What is most interesting, perhaps, is that the body mechanics advice from my piano lessons turned out to be identical to the advice that was given to me later on when I became an acupuncturist, that is when I started to learn to needle and to manipulate qi in that way. It’s also the foundation of most qigong exercises, and most martial arts. Whether you want to play piano, whether you want to sing, whether you want to do calligraphy, or archery, or acupuncture, the rules are the same. It’s the rules of the body. One and the same body. And you have to work with your body to be able to execute things with mastery. You have to be able to control yourself, in order to control your output. You must master yourself, both your body and your inner self, in order to master your world.

So mastery. We must master ourselves, we must master our inner world, and we must master our body. After all, everything that happens to us, happens through the lens of our body.

But there is another aspect to mastery, common to many disciplines, and that is THE INSTRUMENT. The tool. The master cellist has a cello. The master chef has his wok. Man reaches perfection through his use of tools.

But having an instrument is a bit of a double-edged sword, in that it makes things a little more complex, but it also makes things a little simpler. It’s more complex because having an instrument actually requires us to extend ourselves outward into the instrument in order to play it masterfully. The mind, the intention, the focus, it goes into the instrument, the guitar, the paintbrush in order to control it properly. In acupuncture, we emphasize that your mind, your qi, your everything should be at the very tip of the needle. If you do that, your treatments are effective, and your insertions are painless. You can’t be thinking about lunch, you can’t be focused on something else, you have to be right there, at the tip. If you fail to do this, what happens is that, inevitably, your insertion hurts a little bit. Patients notice. Patients notice when you’re not paying attention. Instead of a nice smooth painless skillful acupuncture insertion, it just feels like they’re getting jabbed with a needle.

Keeping yourself in the needle is a discipline unto itself, and requires a lot of practice, but the very fact that we can do this, that we can project ourselves into our tools, is an interesting aspect of the human consciousness, the shen in Chinese thought. How does it happen? Obviously you’re not IN the needle. Nobody thinks you’re IN the needle. It’s a separate object from you. But somehow, whether or not you’re “in there” creates an objectively perceptible difference that patients notice. The character for Shen, which is translated as spirit or consciousness in Chinese medicine, involves the radical for extending, to extend. The action of the spirit, of the consciousness, is to extend outward into things, into the world. It’s why we’re here. It’s the meaning of life. We’re not here to be isolated little clams that just suck new experiences into our tiny little world, like Bing in that one episode of Black Mirror, we’re here to go out, and to experience things, and to grow.

So mastery in music, mastery in calligraphy, mastery in acupuncture, it’s not just a matter of controlling qi, not just a matter of controlling your body, it’s a matter of your shen. And everyone’s shen is different. Everyone’s soul is different. Everyone is unique. That’s why no human being will ever play the bass exactly like Victor Wooten. He’s the only one. The way that he plays the bass is a perfect expression of his soul, it’s a perfect expression of that mysterious divine spark inside of him, and all of the unique life circumstances that he’s gone through. It’s a perfect expression of his childhood, of his relationship with his mother and father, of the time period when he was born, of who he is in a profound way. And mastery involves being able to bring all of that to the table, and putting it on display for everyone to hear. Victor Wooten’s technical skills and his highly refined qi all serve the purpose of one thing: letting you hear his shen, letting you hear his spirit, his soul.

So that’s how including an instrument makes things more complex, but there’s also a way that having an instrument makes things SIMPLER. I’m going to have you do an exercise here. You can do it for real, or you can just imagine what it would be like. Hold up your hand, as though you’re holding a pen. But don’t have a pen in it, just pretend like one is there. Now try to write out a paragraph, or your name, or anything, but do it without the pen. It’s a difficult thing to do. When you write, when you do this exercise, you’re not moving exactly like you would if you were really writing. You kind of make it up a little, and fudge it here and there. It’s just not the same. There’s a way that having a pen, having a needle, having a bass guitar, or a paintbrush makes it EASIER to express ourselves, both physically and in terms of shen. This is part of why we have instruments, they’re tools that allow us to express ourselves better and manipulate our world better.

But what happens when you remove the instrument from the equation? Is Glenn Gould still a master without his piano? Is Victor Wooten still a master, even if he never touches a bass again in his life? I would argue that, even once the instrument is gone, there’s still something special about Victor Wooten, there’s still something special about masters. The instrument is simply a tool that we use to refine something within us. We use it to draw our attention to certain aspects of ourselves, and to work on them. But once the tool is gone, we still have the fruits of all that labor. We still have our mastery. The internal bodily control and refinement acquired from practicing acupuncture, could just as easily be applied to massage, for example. Or, really, it could just as easily be applied to singing, although there are obviously some other skills involved there that might need to be polished. This flexibility really sheds light on why arts education is so important for young people—it’s not just about developing practical skills, art education is really about developing a whole way of interacting with the world. A whole sense of the path to mastery, that can then be applied to whatever discipline people might encounter later.

What’s more, like I was saying before, the end goal of this process with the instrument, of this process of mastery isn’t just the manipulation of qi, it’s the manipulation and expression of Shen. The expert chef, the expert bassist, the expert acupuncturist, they’ve all learned something about themselves and about the world that they live in that, once again, they’ll always have even if they walk away from their art. They’ve discovered some truth about themselves, perhaps a truth about being human, that they can then share with the world.

And, if, like most people throughout human history, you believe in the persistence of the soul after death, as do the Chinese, as do the ancient Greeks, as do Buddhists, as do Christians, then this perfection and refining of the shen through mastery takes on an even deeper significance. Just like I was saying before, once the instrument is gone, the refinement of qi remains. And, in the same way, once the body is gone, the refinement of shen remains. After we die, all of that mastery continues on, just like the soul. All of that work that Bach put in, that Beethoven put in, it all matters, and it will ALWAYS matter. If you work on your soul, if you polish it and refine it and beautify it, it makes a permanent difference both in this world and the next.

Pretty cool stuff. We’re going to take a 180 here and we’re going to look at a totally different kind of mastery—culinary mastery. Obviously, there’s the technical skills, but I have recently been enamored of a few culinary masters who are cookbook authors. They have some excellent cookbooks, and these are all linked down in the description below. With these chefs, their MASTERY transcends themselves and their cooking. In fact, when I cook with their recipes, their mastery actually extends into me and my cooking. Pretty wild. FYI, my particular interest in this arises because CHINESE HERBAL MEDICINE is transmitted in a similar way. Chinese herbal medicine is prescribed in herbal formulas, it’s always a bunch of different herbs together to treat a certain person and a certain condition they have. But what is an herbal formula? It’s a list of herbal ingredients, that is, plant, animal, and mineral ingredients, prepared in a specific way, in specific ratios, just like a cookbook recipe. And somehow through proper application of these herbal recipes in the proper circumstances, you can actually treat, cure, and prevent disease. So to understand how to be a master of HERBAL MEDICINE, and maybe even a master of NATURAL SUPPLEMENTS AND PHARMACEUTICALS, we can learn a lot by examining how to be a master of CUISINE AND COOKING.

We ended our discussion of acupuncture, music, and physical mastery by discussing the shen, by discussing the spirit, and the fact that masters extend their spirit outward into the world. This discussion of shen is particularly fascinating in the case of these amazing chefs, with Fuchsia Dunlop, with Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, with Najmieh Batmanglij, because, as I said before, their mastery doesn’t end at them and their qi in the kitchen. They can transmit it to me, so that the food I make is imbued with life. This may not seem that mystical right off the bat, it might seem like it’s just as simple as writing down the best ratios and being clear about each step to follow. But, if you look at these cookbooks, you’ll understand why it’s a bit of a different thing. See, each of these chefs, their cookbooks involve a tremendous amount of cultural information, information about ingredients, information about cooking methods, and ways to understand what it is that you are doing in the kitchen, and what role it serves. It doesn’t just teach you how to cook a dish, it teaches you how to be Chinese, for example, and, in Fuchsia Dunlop’s case, specifically how to be Chinese from Sichuan province. And they teach you how to smell, see, and taste, when an ingredient is cooked properly, how to smell, see, and taste when your ingredient is high quality. They teach you how to smell, see, taste, and think like they do. They teach a whole RELATIONSHIP to food, a whole way of thinking, a whole way of being, that these chefs have mastered, and that they are capable of conveying.

In fact, I think transmission is pretty key to mastery. This might just be my opinion, but I think you’re really only a master if you’re able to convey your knowledge to someone else. And I don’t necessarily mean in terms of writing, or even in terms of spoken language. Remember, masters traditionally have apprentices. Historically, the path of apprenticeship was the way to gain mastery, the way to BECOME a master. And what does the apprentice do? Spend time with the master, working with the master, eating with them, sleeping in the same house as them, they did everything with this person. They learned, not just the technical aspects of the trade, but how to live and breathe like this person. And what happens when the apprentice becomes a master? Well, they’re expected to take on students, to take on apprentices. Because part of the definition of master is that you are capable of teaching and transmitting.

So somehow, through these texts, through reading between the lines, through pictures, through adjacent stories, and through the recipe itself, we get a glimpse of what it means to be Fuschia, what it means to be Eileen, what it means to be Najmieh, and how we, the apprentices, can embody some of the virtues that they have obtained.

And, this part here is really significant, how did THEY obtain these virtues? Obviously by doing a lot of cooking, but we’re talking about something deeper. Just like Victor Wooten is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his family, his childhood, his time period, his cultural circumstances, all of these chefs, all of their shens are like a beautiful crystal, formed out of the circumstances in the earth that they were formed. Through tremendous pressure, heat, and transformation, their spirits are polished and perfected, and they become a better, clearer reflection of the light around them. Fuchsia Dunlop isn’t just a Sichuan chef, Fuschia is the first white person to graduate from the Sichuan culinary academy, and she’s originally from the UK. Najmieh Batmanglij didn’t just write a Persian cookbook, but a Persian American cookbook. Her sensibilities and substitutions reflect the unique character of the Persian American immigrants to the US, that were displaced by the Iranian revolution. They reflect a longing for the old country, a pragmatic approach to substitution when traditional ingredients are difficult to find, and a vision of healthy cooking that is foreign to traditional Iran, but right at home in 20th and 21st century Washington DC. Eileen Yin-Fei Lo isn’t just Cantonese, she’s a Cantonese immigrant who fled the cultural revolution and spent her life cooking and teaching authentic Chinese food in the landscape of deep-fried, MSG laden American Chinese food in New York City. All of these masters have established something that transcends the test of time. However, none of them can truly be understood entirely without understanding the MATRIX within which they were formed.

This is a particularly relevant idea for herbal medicine, where we are often taking 2000 year old herbal formulas and applying them using modern theories. This can be particularly problematic when the theories used for prescribing are Western medical theories, which have no relationship, or at least no well-delineated relationship, to the matrix of Chinese medical theories that formed alongside these herbal formulas over the past two millenia.

Fortunately, many of these herbal formulas are so great that you could definitely get some good results from prescribing them out of context, without the theoretical backing. Great news for beginners! Culinarily speaking, it would be a little bit like cooking up a beautiful dish of kung pao chicken, but serving it over French fries instead of rice. But if you take that same herbal formula, and you apply it according to the author’s matrix of understanding, apply it according to the circumstances and theories that were integral to the development of the formula and the mastery of the author, then your results become incredible. And your accuracy becomes incredible. And the diseases that you thought were incurable are all of a sudden curable. All because we pay heed to the universal beauty of mastery, while simultaneously understanding that it has a TEMPORAL aspect, that that person’s mastery happened in time and space, and that they were a person with a story.

So Chinese herbal formulas might need to be prescribed as the author intended in order to get the best results. Unfortunately, this means that a standard TCM understanding of major formulas like Bu Zhong Yi Qi Tang might actually be insufficient. It could be that, in order to get the best results from the formula, you actually need to go back, study Li Dong Yuan, and study how he and his disciples prescribed the formula. We might need to do a little bit more archaeology, and understand the past more, in order to understand how to apply it in the present. And perhaps, more significantly, in order to understand who we are in the present, and how OUR circumstances are the unique matrix for OUR lives and our transformations.

So, what makes these chefs, what makes these herbal medicine doctors into masters? Let’s look at Fuchsia Dunlop again. She is a master because she has a deep understanding of soy sauce. She has a deep understanding of black vinegar. She understands, perhaps better than most of the world, the real nature of the substances she uses. And I don’t just mean this in a technical way, I mean this in a really deep, ontological way. She has somehow seen beyond the curtain, and grasped the metaphysical form of soy sauce, and she has brought that wisdom back for all of us to know. From this understanding, she knows the exact ratio of soy sauce to black vinegar, the exact ratio of soy sauce to chili oil, and at what exact moment in the cooking process to add the soy sauce so that its true nature is revealed to the taste-buds.

If soy sauce was a person, Fuchsia could write its memoir. And she could write the memoir of every ingredient that she uses, I’m sure. But the incredible thing is, again, what this deep understanding, this deep connection does for the human spirit. We don’t just care about this knowledge of ingredients for the sake of the ingredients themselves, or for the sake of cooking. Once you die, there’s no more soy sauce, and no more Chinese food. We love mastery because it shows us something about the world in a deeper way. It can be hard to see the transcendent nature of mastery of food and herbs, since they are material, since they are substantial, and EARTHLY substances—but, again, earth is our laboratory, our realm for experimentation and development. Knowing about soy sauce in this way again transforms us, and gives us tremendous information about OTHER things as well.

To illustrate what I mean by this, I am going to talk about one last master: Joe Hollis, the white-bearded man in charge of Mountain Gardens. Joe Hollis is an expert in plants and herbs and botany. Perhaps most importantly, he is an expert in the exact plot of land he has been farming and living on for over 40 years, perhaps 50 at this point. Joe Hollis is certainly a well-read person, but that’s sort of beside the point, because his main attribute, the main thing that comes across when you meet him is that this man has essentially become a medicinal herb. He knows so much about plants in a direct, experiential way that it’s totally transformed him, and it’s transformed him for the better.

Now one day, I had the opportunity to hear Joe read the first chapter of Zhuang Zi. Zhuang Zi is a very important early Daoist, basically as important as Lao Zi, the author of the Dao De Jing. But unlike the very poetic, mysterious tone of the Dao De Jing, Zhuang Zi’s book is funny, irreverent, and bizarre. It starts off with a description of a giant bird, and goes into great detail about the size, attributes, and behaviors of this giant bird. There’s also a cicada and a dove that are watching this giant bird, and kind of commenting on it. Like the peanut gallery. Certainly to the average modern American, it’s a bit hard to understand why this supremely important Daoist text is talking about this giant bird, especially why they’re doing it FIRST THING, which is arguably the most important part of the book. 

Well, I didn’t understand either, until I heard Joe read it. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had clarity on this giant bird, this cicada and this dove, and why all of this was so central to Daoism. And all of this was possible because Joe understood plants so well, and maybe he understood cicadas and doves so well, that he also understood this giant mythical bird, and he also understood Zhuang Zi. And maybe he even understood the Dao.

The light of the spirit, the light of the refined spirit, is able to shine onto other things, and to bring them to illumination. By clarifying and perfecting our art, and clarifying and perfecting ourselves, we can turn into a lens by which we can understand truth, and by which others can understand through us. It’s an incredible thing that masters offer to us; the ability to see the world clearly, perfectly, and beautifully.

I will leave you with one last thought. And that is that, Davie504 lives in Italy. And Joe Hollis lives in Western North Carolina. And both of them have youtube channels where you can binge-watch their respective mastery to your heart’s content. And all of these cookbooks and all of these international ingredients are easily accessible, and can be shipped to your front door, and the books can be read and the foods consumed one after the other in no time. We have greater access to masters and mastery than any other time in human history. We don’t have to take the long hike up the mountain to see the hermit in seclusion—we can just beam him and his teaching into our smartphones.

It’s not just that we potentially CAN do this. It’s that we ARE doing this. Davie504 has millions of people that are watching him play bass. Without question, the next generation of bass guitarists will be something completely different than we’ve ever seen before. The rate of transformation, the rate of evolution that we’re all undergoing far exceeds anything mankind has ever experienced.

And if this mastery has spiritual implications, then this rate of transformation is a pretty big deal. What’s coming next? I don’t know. But it’ll definitely be interesting!

And that brings us to the end of this episode of “Classic of Difficulties.” I hope that you enjoyed it, I hope that I’ve inspired you to SLAP out some funky basslines, and I hope that you’ll tune in for more next time. Please SLAP that like button, share this with your friends, and leave a comment down below telling me about the masters that you know, from any field. As always, keep asking questions, and stay difficult!