When enough is enough 4 The Pathway to Mastery

In the previous letters, I’ve been talking about the problems that the magic community leaves us with. It’s not just the magic community, it’s a much wider phenomenon. The modern world.

The modern world leaves us wanting to be constantly stimulated, entertained, and busy. Our number one enemy, boredom.

Boredom seems to be the worst thing that can happen to us. “Tonight is going to suck, I don’t know what to do”. But is that really true? Do you really not know what to do? Don’t you have enough things to do?

Usually, we have more than enough things to do, even more than enough things that interest us. But, we feel paralyzed because none of these things seems interesting enough to us at the moment. None of these things will give us that sense of dopamine and excitement that we require and because of that, we feel like we have nothing to do.

Nowadays we all want instant results without any of the work that is required to get those results. If we’re overweight and we could take a pill in order to get the body of a model we would instantly take it. If we could take a pill to play the piano beautifully we would instantly take, we would take all of these instant solutions at the cost of our human depth.

Yes, working towards mastery doesn’t just teach you about the art that you’re trying to master, it teaches you about yourself. As you’re mastering the art you’re mastering yourself.

“As they were perfecting the material, they were perfecting their souls.”

The above is a statement from alchemy. We know alchemy as people who were trying to create the philosopher stone. Something that was both a solid and a liquid at the same time. Something that could turn lead into gold and could make a human being invulnerable.

That is how we know alchemy on the surface, but alchemy goes much further than that. It was a spiritual practice where they were trying to perfect their inner being, their inner state. Perfecting the material is a metaphor for perfecting their view of the world. We see with our thoughts, with our internal experience. They realized that as they were working on this material, creating the philosopher stone, they were crafting something much more valuable in the process of it.

Internal

Now why is this important?

A lot of the problems that we’ve been talking about come from a place of insecurity. A place where we well like we’re not good enough, where we should be better, and even worse, where we feel like everyone around is much better than we are. This insecurity combined with our search for dopamine then brings us to a place where we are consuming rather than learning. We kind of turn into that overweight person with the weight pill. “Take my money and make me great at magic”. That’s the snake oil doctor dream that they’re trying to sell to us.

We’re never going to become better like that, but trying to master something on the other hand, that will give us a lot, not just the mastery of magic.

Just like the alchemist who were mastering the perfect material and in the process were perfecting their souls, so will mastering magic teach you the exact same things.

It will give you a deeper appreciation for magic and its depth. It will give you a better understanding of how people perceive the world. And it will force you to a high degree of self-awareness. You have to put a magnifying glass on yourself and you will start to inspect all your own actions. Why you’re saying certain things, why you’re making certain movements. You will even start to look at how you feel in certain scenarios and the effect that that will have on your audience. Then slowly you learn how to better deal with those emotions and often irrational feelings and thoughts and you start to master the performance aspect of magic.

Now for the physical aspect (the sleight of hand) you will start to master your body, the language, the techniques, the finger movements and you will become proud of yourself. You’re able to do things you were not able to do before and before you know it you have a wide ability to perform sleight of hand. This will also improve your sense of confidence; you’ll get to a point where you can do things that other people can’t do. This then is also the reason why terms such as “self-working and easy to perform” are so unattractive to me.

Mastery

Mastery has multiple phases to it, and even though I could explain all of them to you, it’s way too much to go over in this newsletter. Two very good books I can recommend on this subject if you want to learn more though are:

Mastery, by George Leonard

And

Mastery, by Robert Greene (I’d recommend the concise edition).

Both these books are great sources on the process of mastery and take a look at previous masters and their processes.

But to put it very concisely, the first thing that you have to do is to decide that you want to master something and put your mind to mastering it. You also have to realize that in the beginning, you’re going to have the feeling that you’re progressing much faster than later in the process. This is normal, as the contrast between knowing nothing and knowing something is huge. Whereas the contrast between knowing 10 and 11 things is quite small.

This is an important thing to realize as these are usually called plateaus. You’re going to hit many plateaus on your journey to mastery where it feels like for a while you’re not progressing. This could for example be with a second deal. You keep practicing it and you can keep hitting it sort of, but never as perfect as you’d like to hit it. And then all of a sudden, from one day to the next, you can do it perfectly. You have just put in enough time to reach above the plateau.

The process of mastering something is not always as glamorous as people make it sound. It can even be said that it can be painful. The masters have endured a large amount of pain. But then again there is also a big sense of meaning connected to mastery.

If we remember the dopamine balance from the earlier essay on dopamine, leaning towards this pain side will also bring us more peace, and eventually a longer sense of pleasure since we’re willingly tipping the balance towards pain.

So after we’ve set our minds to mastering something and we’ve realized that there are going to be plateaus we have to search for our sources of information. For me, as a rule of thumb, nothing beats 1 on 1 teaching with someone who knows a lot about the art. But, since that luxury isn’t available to all of us, books are our second-best option. In the beginning, we should take a good magic book, from a good master and study those books intently. Take all of the information in those books as true and do it exactly as the book proposes. There is no reason to change moves, to be creative, or to think that you know better than the master. You shouldn’t change things because they are too difficult or because you think they will look better in your hands (yet). At this phase, your sole purpose is to master the techniques and routines and to understand the master. Understand why he did certain things, why certain lines are at the points where they are, and why certain techniques are there instead of other techniques.

Once you’ve learned, performed, perfected, and internalized all of the material, then there will be a moment when you start to change things, and you start to disagree with the master.

This moment of disagreement never comes out of a skill perspective. It never comes from a point where you are unable to do something or where something is “too hard”, if you are still there you haven’t reached this point yet. Furthermore, this point where you start to disagree is never forced, it’s something that will come naturally. You will start to have your own view on magic and how it should look, how it should be performed. And so, you’re starting to distance yourself from the master and you start to begin your journey towards becoming a master yourself.

You have now developed a taste and a vision, from here you will start to experiment, to think, and to analyze everything that you’re doing. Your ideals will start to develop and you will force everything to fit those ideals.

Once you’re here you will be looking back at yourself and realize that you’ve completely changed for the better. Both as a person and as a performer. Nothing feels as good as mastering something, so I invite all of you to join us on our path to mastery.

-Rico

This newsletter is part of our Merry Month of Meditations series, bringing to you 10 newsletters in December in total!

If you enjoyed this one share it with all of your friends, it would mean the world to us.

The schedule for the upcoming letters looks as follows: