Yeah this is kind of circling what I keep coming back to recently. I was watching ‘one day’ on Netflix and there was 1 bit that kind of summed it up. It was a convo between the 2 main characters, one of which was an aspiring writer and doing anything but actually writing. The other character mentioned that as a writer you are either writing or you are wasting time.
So with actualism there are all these subsidiary things that you might end up doing but they are not the thing. And it seems the common trajectory is to put the cart before the horse with all those ‘extra things’ being confused with the application of the method.
So then it’s like - “I have ticked all the boxes and still it’s not working”, but there is 1 big thing missing here which is the actual doing of it.
It seems the same with any genuine pursuit, for example weightlifting, there are countless training programmes, exercises, diets etc and yet it seems that the guys who do well were always going to do well regardless of which specific approach they applied. Because there is something fundamental driving their progress, which is a full commitment to doing the thing over and over, actually doing it.
The problem seems to be that the rest of us who prefer to sit on the fence will look at these persons who succeeded and then try to deduce ‘things’ they did that made them successful. “Oh its because he always did A followed by B but never C on Sundays - this is the recipe”
And isn’t this specifically the master/disciple structure? That there is 1 individual who blasts through to something which others can only seek to emulate but never live. The best the disciples can do is to parrot the masters teachings and hope for a reward or get disillusioned when it is never granted.
But this is forgetting that the one who went all the way did not go through ‘the teachings’, they were always going to go all the way regardless.
This is something that I was always very poor at and still am, there is a cowardice to it of only being able to step forward if the way ahead has already been revealed. Then I am still not actually moving forward, I am just sitting back forever and playing with things in my mind.
I was putting this question to myself yesterday - “Why do I need to ‘know’ in advance as opposed to actually finding out”
For example I am working this new bunch of BJJ techniques and I was driving home and going over and over in my head, trying to imagine how they will gel together (even though I have not practiced these sequences before), there was this compulsion to feel (via imagining) like I know the answer already before the experience has been had.
Then there was this thought of, “why not actually find out, and then I can know with certainty”?