a subcreator's field notes, #1: The Path of Mastery
## issue 1 - The Path of Mastery, or Toiling on the Great Plateau
Every issue of this newsletter needs to do three things for me to consider it a successful outing:
1. It has to entertain, inspire, or enlighten you.
2. It has to move the needle in some way on my subcreative goals, viz Turiya, however indirectly
3. It has to be fun for me to write.
The nice thing about the third requirement is that it contains and transcends the first two requirements, so that it becomes, in a sense, the only requirement. If I thought I was wasting your time and mine (the necessary obverse of 1 and 2, respectively), then I wouldn't be having any fun, and I would go play Zelda instead.
And speaking of Zelda, that brings me to what I want to share with you today. (Don't worry, there will be no spoilers for the new game — only a useful metaphor drawn from the last one.)
### the path of mastery
I recently read a book by George Leonard, entitled Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment. Being that it was published sometime in the 90s, I suspect the publisher pushed to add the word "success" to the title. Because this compact little gem of a book is really about long-term fulfillment — about living well.
The most important thing I took away from the book was my working definition of "mastery" — that it's not some perfect, static state that you reach when you get so good at a skill that you can't improve any further. Rather, it's a state of being, a way of living, a commitment to show up for whatever you've purposed to master.
And to ground that lofty sentiment, to bring it down to the earth and sit with it in the mud, there is this vital insight into the nature of attaining to an advanced degree of skill in any discipline: most of the time you spend learning a skill is spent working with no subjective sense of forward progress. In other words, you spend a lot of time toiling on the plateau.
What does happen is that, at certain points in our journey, all of our learning and training accumulates, and we "suddenly" (subjectively speaking) become better, reach a new level. But the vast majority of the time, you're toiling on the plateau.
Where Zelda enters into it: in Breath of the Wild, you start out on the Great Plateau, where you are forced to acquire and master the fundamental skills of the game before you're able to leave and journey off into Hyrule.
To commit to the path of mastery is to commit to falling in love with the fundamentals. To fall in love with toiling on the Great Plateau. The true master never feels that he or she has arrived. There is always something new to learn, some depth of subtlety as yet untapped.
### how not to be a master
The upshot of this way of looking at things is that anyone can resolve to live the path of mastery. In a way it's simple, though of course it's not easy.
Leonard identifies three common ways of being that are opposed to true mastery, three archetypes. These are the Dabbler, the Hacker, and the Obsessive. All of these can be defined in terms of their response to reaching a plateau. (And all of these is us, you and me, sometime, with respect to something.)
- The Dabbler reaches the first plateau and is suddenly super excited at having attained a modicum of proficiency. But when they remain on the plateau for longer than they expect, they lose heart and give up.
- The Hacker reaches a certain plateau and calls it good, and decides to take no interest in improving beyond that point.
- The Obsessive reaches the first plateau, and then, not grasping the nature of learning, pushes hard, becomes a perfectionist, works harder and harder. He might even reach a second plateau that way, but by operating at an unsustainable level of intensity and laboring as he is under a fundamental misapprehension of the nature of things, he eventually burns out and gives up.
I have to jump off the book summarization train for now [^1]. But I'll throw this on as a button: daily life is a valid and a necessary domain of mastery. Living as if most of your time — whether your job, your chores at home, your relationships, or any other area of your life — "doesn't count" is a recipe for a fragmented and dissolute existence.
Let me bring it back to Turiya, and bring it all together by telling you what the logo of this newsletter means.
### the AUM triune
Astute (/nerdy) readers will have recognized that my logo is not unrelated to Zelda_._ It is indeed inspired by the famous triforce; and it is indeed related profoundly to Turiya. It is, in fact, much more than a logo: it is my emblem, my personal seal, my family crest.
A handful of years ago, I decided to go to game design school. That decision was spurred by my experience with Breath of the Wild (to greatly simplify the complex motivations underlying a major, sudden life decision for the purposes of telling a simple story, as you do)_._ At the time I was also trying, in some misguided fashion, to embrace the Hindu spirituality of my ancestral blood.
The Zelda game that made the biggest impact on me, maybe apart from the original NES game, was Ocarina of Time. In that game, the triforce — a mystical artifact that in the series up to that point had been a transcendent physical object — was revealed to be found on the back of the hero's left hand.
Combining these things — the triforce and Hindu spirituality — I conceived and commissioned a tattoo for the back of my left hand. At the time, each of the triangles represented one of the principal Hindu deities (Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva; the Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer, respectively); with the om (better rendered as aum for reasons I'll explain later) — the syllable of God — in the center.
Later, when I would embrace the Catholic faith I now hold, I wondered if I had been too rash in getting this tattoo. But I had some dim intuition, difficult to put into words, that my new faith was not a rejection of my Hindu roots or the many profound truths to be found in the Hindu/Vedic tradition, but that it fulfilled and completed them in a profound way.
In the course of my reading, I discovered that the AUM symbol can be found chiseled into churches in India, dating back to the first century, when St. Thomas (Doubting Thomas as he's commonly known) went to evangelize there. The "syllable of God" expounded in the ancient Vedic texts became identified with the Greek Logos: often rendered as the "Word", but tellingly rendered in Chinese as the Tao. And what's more, the structure of the sound of AUM — A-U-M, [represents a triadic or threefold nature](http://yogananda.com.au/gita/gita1723om.html) of the Godhead (or of Existence) intuited by the ancient rishis [^3].
So my tattoo represented and expressed, in a deep and iconic way, the unity I felt. My Zelda-inspired Hindu tattoo was, and is, profoundly Christian.
None of this is to paper over or gloss over the real differences between the two religious traditions, or pretend that "we're all the saaaame, maaaaan." It's only to convey that creating Turiya is my attempt to express and develop my intuition of this deeper unity, the ground of truth as I sense it — and to do it mythically and narratively, in the mode given to me by talent, temperament, and desire.
I believe I am called to this work. And the work is the thing, not the outcome. As the Bhagavad Gita counsels, action itself is the reward; we must not be attached to the fruits of action.
This newsletter is a part of the work, and you who read are also an integral part of it too.
### a note about religion
I don't expect my readers to share my religious convictions, or indeed to have any religious convictions at all. I'm not interested in preaching, but in storytelling. In the [first issue](https://buttondown.email/ajairaj/archive/a-subcreators-field-notes-0-testing-the-waters/), I explained that the title of this newsletter comes from J.R.R. Tolkien and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Both were literary greats, master storytellers, profound students of human nature, and convicted Christians. Their devotion to the integrity of their craft is why their work has stood the test of time.
I hope that mine will too, and for the same reason.
### Turiya progress updates
I should add a section like this, to keep myself honest. And to keep you updated on the thing that this newsletter is nominally about.
- Today I spent about an hour organizing what I've written digitally so far on an Obsidian canvas (basically a big digital pegboard).
- This week I've been reading about the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization, to draw inspiration for the world of Turiya and how it might be organized, politically and geographically.
- I'm about to spend some time working on a small flash fiction piece after I send this issue. It's not directly related to Turiya, but along the way I have to develop and hone my fiction skills and sensibility. And I have to start getting published, so that I can be somewhat confident that my skills are developing as they ought to be. But I am not overly concerned about the timeline like I was when I was engaged with fiction as a hacker/obsessive.
- I have a long, long, long list of books to read — everything from the great Indian epics to books on the philosophy of science, complex and subtle theological texts, studies in Sanskrit and Biblical Hebrew, books of history, books on the craft of fiction, the great fiction works that have inspired me.
- In general, the scope of this project freaks me out whenever I stop to think about it, but I continually remind myself that I'm on the master's path, and it's a lifelong path. And as I begin to develop, commit to, and execute on a plan of attack, I'll share my readings and learnings along the way.
### The Attitude of the Knife
...and I'm at nearly 2000 words. I'll end with one of my favorite quotes from Dune — a series I re-read recently and about which my feelings are deeply mixed. But one thing you can't take away from Frank Herbert: the man could sure write an aphorism. I may have to unpack this some other time.
> Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now it's complete because it ended here.''
[^1]: I might return to Leonard's book in a future issue; I've taken notes breaking down the book in detail, and one direction I'm considering for this newsletter is offering access to detailed book notes for paid subscribers. Just thinking out loud. I'll never put absolutely everything behind a paywall. But I need to value my creative work and open myself up to being supported, and give you as a reader the opportunity to support me if you feel so moved.
[^2]: Ninan, M.M. - Isavasya Upanishad: Doctrine of the Immanence of Christ. Don't recall the publication date offhand.
[^3]: I don't endorse every interpretation on this page, but it is a cogent expression of what AUM means and how that meaning might be thought to correspond to the Christian doctrine of God's triune nature.