Expand and Refine. Master craftsman of Peat
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I was doing marshal arts a lot of last year learning with a very wise and knowledgable guy, probably the leading figure at his craft in the world.
My first lesson with him he pretty much told me how my journey in the martial arts game is gonna go and I think this applies to all areas in life. It's as Miyamoto Musashi says “If you know the way broadly, you will see it in everything.” and I think this is one of those principles that applies to learning any new subject or skill or maybe even anything.
Imagine a diamond shape with two singularities at the top and bottom, you start at the bottom and move up to the top but you could be anywhere in the diamond from the bottom to the top.
This is the diamond and at the top you are a master of your craft and have refined it to a tee realising the simpleness and ease of everything yet also the complexities that many get lost in.
At the bottom you are a novice and have only got to learn, you think it is easy and simple with no knowledge on the complexities. As you start you can only expand your knowledge and skills learning everything there is to know, every move every position.
Once you reach the middle you have learned almost everything but you are probably at your weakest here as you are a master of nothing and yet will still rely on your 'skills' that you think you have learned unlike the simpleton at the bottom who uses his instinct. They will probably beat you in a fight.
However once you have learned all there is to know then you can only refine. You refine your knowledge, chip away at the useless techniques that are unsuitable and inefficient, discard them. You continue to chip away until you are left with only a few moves that are able to in 99.99% of situations disarm your opponent and win you the battle. Once you reach this stage you are more similar to the novice in the sense that you rely on instinct but the difference between the master and the novice is that he has refined his instinct and crafted it, he learned his instinct and rediscovered it, he has deep knowledge on his own instinct and an explanation for every move. Yet even with this deep knowledge he does not think when executing because it is so ingrained that it is second nature.
The pyramid is to show the different stages that would be within the diamond, ignore the text within it.
I was thinking on a walk today about this. Ray always seems to recommend the same things and people get confused when he does. He has expanded his knowledge for so many years that he basically knows all there is to know in his field. He had no other choice but to refine his knowledge more and more and craft it into the integrated philosophy he has today. He says these recommendations out of instinct and wisdom knowing it's always the same things that are the culprit for most things and that the path of least resistance, the quickest path to the destination of good health is always the simplest thing (like the carrot salad for example).
I consider Ray a master, like a professional athlete or master swordsman. People forget the wisdom in his words and often when they don't know enough (or know too much) they end up thinking he is a fool. He is not a fool, his recommendations have taken years of expansion and refinement, decades all culminating into his recommendations. Like a master martial artists he will deliver the swiftest blow to knock out his target in the shortest amount of time or in this case the best protocol to knockout disease and degeneration in the safest and most efficient manner.
That's just my 2 cents for the day. Hope someone gets something out of this.