What Is Mastery? Or: A Portrait of the Master as a Young Noob

A look at the stages of mastery. Reflections on a recent piece by Hilarius Bookbinder.

Jan 19, 2025

A few days ago, I read

’s recent post “Do Your Own Research” — a much needed splash of cold reality for those among us who severely underestimate the amount of knowledge required to become an expert in a given domain. As they point out, reading a few pop science books or watching a bunch of YouTube videos does not an expert make. Expertise is a long, grueling process, a sort of mythic journey from apprentice to master, complete with all the field-appropriate “wax on, wax off’s” that you would expect from such an endeavor. You’ll have to paint the metaphorical fence, so to speak, and you won’t always like it.

While I have a few nitpicks with the post (I don’t think expertise requires “get[ting] a PhD from a real school” — that’s a pretty narrow definition), I agree with the overall point: it’s important to know where you rank on the knowledge/mastery/expertise ladder, and we should be honest with ourselves about what our standing is.

Of course, accurately estimating our expertise requires some mileposts to judge it by. To that end, Hilarius Bookbinder presents the following framework:

The novice. Knows nothing about the topic, but may have heard of it.
The observer. Reads several popular, but responsible, discussions of the topic.
The deep diver. Writes a 2500-word investigative think piece for The Atlantic, Aeon, Quillette, or… Substack.
The professional. Writes a 10,000-word article for a scholarly journal.
The expert. Writes a 100,000-word book for a scholarly, big five, or otherwise legitimate press.
The monomaniac. No holds barred, devotes one’s life to the topic, with decades of study and a river of peer-reviewed publications.

For the most part, I like this framework — perhaps partly because it gives some clear check boxes for me to tick off on my way to being able to say I’ve definitely “done the thing” (the author explicitly says not to think of it in those terms, but I’m a loose-cannon philospher who doesn’t play by the rules).

And yet, something felt nonetheless off about it to me. As much as I like those juicy, achievement-based metrics, I couldn’t help but wonder: what if someone wants to be an expert in writing think pieces? How could they ever move up the ranks?

How does a philosopher like Thoreau, who never published in a scholarly journal, fit in?

How about Irad Kimhi, whose entire scholarly output consists of one ~44,000-word manuscript published in 2018 (25 years after he got his Ph.D) and a single journal article that came out 5 years later? The very same Irad Kimhi who has been covered by the New York Times for his cult-following among professionals in the field and has been praised as “truly brilliant, a deep and original philosopher” by the esteemed philosopher Robert Brandom?

What about the big S himself—Socrates—whose thought we know of primarily thanks to Plato, who communicated his master’s thoughts in writing, a medium that Socrates himself decried and refused to engage in?

And what about all the guitarists, painters, novelists, gymnasts, and composers whose expertise and mastery rarely has anything to do with academic credentials and publishing? How do they fit into all this?

It seems to me that Hilarius Bookbinder has got something right: these rungs connect to some fundamental, underlying truth about mastery, but they are just one expression of that truth. To really get to what lies beneath the superficial landmarks of these paradigm-specific achievements (even within an academic field like physics, some of the marks in the framework would only be relevant for the past century or so), we would need to look at how similar mastery-ranking frameworks function across wildly different fields, and then see what type of deeper shared, structural transition points undergird them.

That’s what I’ll attempt to do (in brief) here, using one alternative mastery framework in particular as an anchor, which I think is sufficiently abstract to apply to practically all endeavors. Overall, I’ll be arguing the following points:

The most important shift occurs between 3 and 4 (deep-diver to professional) on Hilarius Bookbinder’s scale.
That shift occurs from a merging of know-what and know-how (aka propositional/explicit and tacit/implicit knowledge).
Once that shift occurs, you know how to achieve mastery, even if you haven’t yet become a master.
“Complete” mastery is necessarily individualized and will be expressed differently between every master, as it requires moving off the beaten path and mapping out new, untouched territory — if you’re following in someone else’s footsteps, you’re not working at the level of subtlety and nuance required for true mastery.

Mastery vs. expertise — a quick note

Before moving forward, I want to call out a potential point of confusion here: Hilarius Bookbinder’s piece talks about expertise, but I’ve been talking about mastery — are these really even the same thing?

While I don’t want to use too much page real estate constructing an argument for this, as it’s not quite the main point, my stance is basically this: mastery is the umbrella term, and expertise is one type of mastery in a specific type of field. Other terms we use for someone who has attained mastery include virtuoso, guru, sage, artist, maestro, arahant, doctor, champion, etc. This piece will attempt to look at what unites all of these and makes them fall under the purview of mastery.

A portrait of the master as a young noob

Every master starts as a noob — or “novice” as Hilarius Bookbinder puts it. They know practically nothing of the topic, except its name and what sort of thing it is. For example, a novice artist knows what art is but doesn’t know how to make it, and a novice scientist knows what science is but doesn’t know how to do it. The novice knows the end product in some sense, but not the way to get there.

You can spot a novice by the types of questions they ask: what’s the best audio software for music production? What books should I read to learn philosophy? What tools do I need to start painting? The novice isn’t even really on the path yet — they’re still at the visitor’s booth looking at the map and asking the help staff where the beginning of the trailhead is.

After a fair amount of work, they’ll get their bearings enough to take the right lifts, pay the right fees, and make their way up to the trail. That might include having to go home and change after an employee says “you’re going to go in that? You’ll freeze to death/get eaten by bears/break your neck!”

In other words, they’ll get their equipment in order (skis, paints, book lists, software, etc.), and in the process, they’ll have learned some of the basics of their craft — they’ll know that painters use these types of tools, music producers use these pieces of software, and philosophers have read at least some of these books. They’ll be ready to leave the visitor’s booth and walk toward the trail.

It may not seem like much, but simply being able to list out some names like Hegel, Kant, and Epictetus, or name a few music production tools, like compressors, equalizers, and saturators, will be enough to make them sound like an expert to someone who just arrived at the visitor’s booth: “oh, you want to do music production? Well, let me tell you, you’re gonna need a DAW — that means digital audio workstation, in layman’s terms. Ableton is the best by far. And you’re going to need a bunch of plugins, like compressors and equalizers. All good producers use an LA-2A on vocals, for example.” Half of what they’ll say is wrong, but other novices won’t know that. And if you snickered at the parody above, congrats: you’ve passed the novice stage in music production.

The observer

At this point, the novice has made it to the starting gate, and that’s when they become an observer — or perhaps you could say they begin their training. Their skis are strapped on — their pencils are sharpened, their software is loaded up, their notebooks are open — and they begin to watch how others work. They’ll feel trepidation as they watch people go down the slope as they stand their shaking in their boots, gripping their ski poles. They’ll make mental notes: “ok, most people turn this way when they get to this point…look at that guy’s posture…ok, this doesn’t look so bad, I can do this…” And then they’ll shove off.

Their first attempt won’t be groundbreaking, but it’s far more than most people have done — most have never gone down a ski slope, painted a still life, written a song, or read a philosophy book. Even if their work is total slop, it’s a significant accomplishment — it’s the beginning of their experiential knowledge of the field. For the first time, they have switched from knowing-what into knowing-how: this is how it feels to engage in the work.

This first taste of experiential knowledge, this initial embodiment of their field, is necessary to even be able to properly observe what others are doing. Before this, you see someone making a strange jerking movement while going down the slope, and you have no idea why. Now, you know: “oh, so that’s why! I struggled with that turn too!” The know-what that they accumulated just barely starts to fall into place: all those people recommended these ski poles because the others would crack on that turn, this brush size was suggested because any smaller would be a nightmare to hold. And thank god they talked you out of starting your journey into philosophy with Heidegger — Plato’s “Apology” was hard enough!

The observation stage is essentially “monkey see, monkey do”. You look at what other people are doing, assume it’s right, and copy it. You don’t have the expertise to know what you’re doing yet or be critical of what you’ve been taught, so you’re blindly following the rules set out for you and hoping and praying that whoever gave you these rules does know what they’re doing so you don’t waste your time — or worse, develop bad habits.

For an artist, this is the well-known imitation era. A musician, for example, will spend their time sitting listening to songs by their favorite artists, trying to play them by ear, and attempting to write music in that style. A painter will try to make work that looks like the greats.

But it applies beyond just the arts: a budding skier will watch interviews with their favorite Olympians and take everything they say as gospel, not realizing that the advice only makes sense for that specific skier’s unique situation. A novice scientist or philosopher will follow their supervisor’s guidance about which classes to take, but they won’t necessarily know why those are important.

Overall, the observer stage is characterized by beginning to do some practice work in your field and following an example that’s been set out for you — you’re working on your craft, but not producing work that anyone cares about. Importantly, you don’t really know why you’re doing what you’re doing, beyond that this is what you see other people doing. You’re plagued by constant doubt, but you adhere to the rules, and they guide you through well enough.

The deep-diver

The deep-diver is a tricky category — if I were to write this framework from scratch, I might skip it entirely. But I do think it exists to some extent, and since it’s already there, we might as well run with it.

The deep-diver, in my opinion, can be sort of grouped in with the observer — they’re still on the outside of the field, not truly in it, but they understand where the borders are. They’ve skied down the standard slopes enough times to become comfortable, but they’re not yet ready to go off-piste. They can give advice to beginner skiers, summarize the basics quite well, and they’re likely respected among other amateur skiers as being very knowledgeable. However, they’re not seen as a great skier — no one would expect them to compete in the Olympics anytime soon.

We can look at deep-divers as knowledgeable amateurs or knowledgeable outsiders. Intermediates, if you will — journeymen. If working in a scholarly pursuit, then they know enough that they can write a think piece that summarizes the current boundaries of their field and asks some interesting questions about what comes next, but they can’t quite develop those questions to a level that would make a working scholar really raise their eyebrows with interest. They can go quite far career-wise, especially if they have another related skill, like public speaking, teaching, or writing, that allows them to fill in important gaps that people at higher levels of expertise might not be so good at (or might not want to bother with).

If working in an artistic pursuit, such as music, this is the point where professional musicians would begin to take an interest in their work — they’d know they haven’t really developed a voice of their own yet, but the music is listenable and enjoyable nonetheless. It reaches the so-called “professional standard” but doesn’t expand it or contribute anything new to it.

At this stage, they’ve come to understand the boundaries of their endeavor, but they haven’t pushed past them yet — they haven’t expanded their field or really contributed to it. However, it is this comprehensive understanding that enables them to move onto the next step, where the real quest towards mastery begins.

The big switch: entering the stream

To understand what happens in the switch from deep-diver to professional, I want to draw on another mastery framework: Buddhism. I’m choosing Buddhism not only because I am very familiar with it, but because Buddhism attempts to create a mastery framework for the mind, which I see as the most fundamental thing you can master. If the Buddhist mastery framework applies to the mind, then it should apply to all other endeavors — and I think it does so quite well.

Bear with me for a moment if this gets a bit in the weeds of Buddhism, as I need to cover the background to be able to apply it. But I’ll bring it back around — promise.

The Buddhist mastery framework

In Buddhism, there are four stages of enlightenment: stream-enterer (sotāpanna), once-returner (sakadāgāmi), non-returner (anāgāmi), and awakened/worthy one (arahant).

For our purposes, stream-entry is the most important. A stream-enterer is one who has had their first “direct experience” of the Dhamma (“the Law”) — a kind of eureka moment where everything just clicks. Canonically, the stream-enterer’s Dhamma Eye has opened, and they now see the Dhamma for themselves. They stop guessing what it’s all about — now they know. That vision may be somewhat unstable, and they need to work to stabilize it, but this much is certain: a stream-enterer now sees the path to enlightenment (mastery) for the first time, even though they are not yet enlightened.

Most importantly, a stream-enterer has attained Right View: they now have a vision of how everything fits together.

A stream-enterer is characterized by having cut three fetters:

(Deep) doubt: A stream-enterer is no longer just guessing about their practice. They know why they are doing what they’re doing, and they know what they need to do to improve. There will be some surface-level doubts about specifics, but they don’t have any deep, fundamental doubts about what the path is and how to improve in their practice.
Rites, rules, and rituals: Due to their intuitive understanding of Dhamma, they no longer do anything just to follow the rules. Instead, they do things with a full understanding of how they relate to their overall practice. If they meditate, they do it because they know that’s what they need to work on at that moment, not because they’re just trying to get their 30 minutes in for the day (unless perhaps they’re working on consistency specifically). It’s the end of “magical” thinking — doing something without understanding why, and hoping that it’ll magically get them to the goal on its own.
Identity view: Although this one is fairly Buddhism-specific, I’m including it for completeness’s sake (and it does apply to some extent, albeit it less). The stream-enterer no longer takes any aspect of their experience as “I”, “me”, or “mine”. They see the practice as in service of something greater than their ego, not as just an intellectual exercise or a way of showing others how clever they are. (If you’re interested in learning more about this, take a look at my post, The Negation of Self.)

What’s particularly important to understand is that stream-entry is a major, black-and-white switch — a gestalt shift, of sorts, that decidedly marks the before and the after. You’ve either reached stream-entry or you haven’t. There are no in-betweens, no grey areas.

Before stream-entry, one is a puthujjana, an “ordinary worldling” or “uneducated person”. They do the practice and learn about the Dhamma, but they’re essentially just guessing with everything they do, constantly needing reassurance from their teacher as to whether they’re doing it right or not. After stream-entry, everything just falls into place: the practitioner understands why they’re doing what they’re doing, even if they’re not yet perfect at it. They switch from being a puthujjana to being an ariya — a Noble One. Notably, they also become a sekha — a trainee, one who has entered the higher training. It’s said that stream-entry is the point at which one first sees and actually starts practicing the Eightfold Path — before that, they’re just trying to figure out what it is in the first place.

Every expert is a “stream-enterer”

With that background out of the way, let me bring this back around to mastery in general: I think that every expert, every master, regardless of which field they’re working in, goes through a process akin to stream-entry, during which they switch from deep-diver to professional on Hilarius Bookbinder’s scale. It may not always occur in one flash of insight, but there is a distinctive before and after. Borrowing from a classic analogy in Buddhism: if you’re working with an axe for many years, one day you may look down and see the handle has worn out. You don’t know precisely which strike of the axe broke the camel’s back, but you know that each strike contributed, and now the handle is done for — you’ve made the switch. There’s no doubt that something has shifted.

To avoid appropriating a Buddhist term and changing its meaning, I’ll engage in a time-honored Western tradition and create a new term for this based on Greek (all the English terms I’ve come up with are either awkward or carry with them connotations that I don’t like). The Ancient Greek verb συνοράω ( “sunoràō” or “synorao”), meaning “to see together, recognize, comprehend”, fits quite well. It’s built from the well-known stem συν (“syn”), meaning “together”, as in “synthesis”, and the verb ὁράω (“horàō”) for “to see, comprehend”. From now on, I’ll use “synoria” to refer to what I’ve so far been calling “stream-entry” or the state of “seeing together”, and I’ll use “synorates” (the Greek agent noun form of the verb, pronounced “sin-or-a-tess”) to refer to someone who has reached that point.

Let me give you an example of how synoria works:

Imagine you’re a mathematics student. You’ve been working for a long time on a hard problem that interests you for your thesis, but you can’t quite crack the code. You’ve seen the problem a million times, but something continues to elude you no matter how you look at it. You’ve tried applying this technique and that technique, borrowing from distant fields of mathematics at times just to see if they lead anywhere, but to no avail. Despite your diligence and your huge internal database of mathematical knowledge, there is something nonetheless haphazard to all this — you’re throwing things at the problem, hoping they stick, but you don’t feel confident in being able to discern between what is a viable avenue of inquiry and what is a waste of time.1

But then a change occurs. One day, you sit down with the problem again, and in a flash of insight, you suddenly understand how all the myriad techniques you’ve learned up to that point come together. Before, you worked with differential equations and set theory, but you didn’t really understand how they connected — you just did the problem sets because you had to, each one sort of siloed off from the other. But now, something is different: you intuitively grasp the purpose behind everything you’ve learned — you see the techniques you learned as tools, and now you have an intuitive sense of when to apply them, and when to set them to the side. You’re no longer trying to be fancy or clever: you see the goal, and you know how to get there, even if some of the details are fuzzy. The problem becomes clearer: you can apply this here and that there, and it’s obvious that you shouldn’t apply this there and that here — why would you ever do that? When experts speak to you about your topic, you now understand what they mean on a deeper level. The words may stay the same, but there’s a new subtext there, an almost psychic understanding, that unites you with them. They may be more skilled than you, but, somehow, you understand them. You’ve reached mathematical synoria — you’ve entered the professional arena.

One more example:

Say you’re a songwriter working on a new song, and you can’t quite get the chorus right. You’ve applied all your tried-and-tested techniques — modulating to the relative major, switching up the harmonic rhythm — but it’s just not working. But then you have a thought: what if you just…didn’t use a clever compositional technique? What if you just let the chorus continue with the same chords as the verse? What if you focused on making the music sound good instead of following the rules? This thought has come up before several times, but you always rebelled against it: “no, that’s basic and boring! Good songwriting needs to have a level of sophistication!” But then you push those thoughts to the side and give it a try.

And it just works. Suddenly, everything becomes clear: you had been clinging to these rules about what makes a song good and bad, doubting your own intuitions because you didn’t yet know what sounds good, but now you can let that go and just know. You understand when it makes sense to modulate, and when it doesn’t. You understand how all those techniques you’ve learned fit together in service of some greater goal — they were not ends in themselves, but means to an end. Now, the entire field of music feels wide open. You know what you’re doing. You’re a musical synorates.

No matter what field you’re in, you’re not yet a master, but you know how to get there. You know what you’re doing, which means you also know when you’re doing it wrong. And that means you know how to fix it.

What happens during this shift? The merging of know-what and know-how

Before going any further, I need to take a brief detour into an important philosophical concept: the distinction between know-what and know-how.

Know-what is a type of knowledge that can be expressed explicitly as a fact or proposition, i.e. “Brutus killed Caesar.” Know-how, on the other hand, is knowledge that relates to how to do something, like riding a bike. It’s possible to know all the facts about how to ride a bike (push off with your right foot, push down with the left, balance, steer, etc.) without actually knowing how to do it: despite being able to say those steps out loud, you fall over as soon as you get on the bike. There’s a lot of debate among philosophers as to what the difference is and whether there really is a difference at all, but for now we can continue with this general understanding2.

When we talk about people who are really good at something, we tend to use a common refrain: they know what they’re doing. We’ll say it about electricians, doctors, artists, mathematicians, you name it: “that guy knows what he’s doing”. There’s a sense that some people are just fumbling around, even if they know quite a bit about a topic, while some seem to just get it in ways that others don’t.

But there’s something misleading in this phrase. We talk about people knowing what they are doing, but if you look at the examples above, then it seems pretty clear that this change occurs without a new “what” or fact being learned. In both of the examples, no new facts have been learned, but something changes all the same: how the entire network of accumulated facts fits together to create a coherent “What”. It’s this capital-W “What” that we are referring to when we say someone knows what they are doing: we mean that they have been able to piece together the individual scraps of whats into a unified What that can now be wielded as a singular whole — a sort of composite tool. And for every tool, there is something that can be achieved with it, and a how to use it. The person who knows what they are doing understands how to use their tool and, consequently, knows the What that they can do with it. In other words, the synorates has developed know-how regarding how the facts of their field all fit together. Before, the facts were disjointed, but now they’re unified thanks to this new know-how — this “skill” that’s hard to pin down precisely.

This sort of unified vision of a field, this field-specific “Right View”, isn’t a “fact” — it’s not something that can be expressed propositionally. Any proposition you make about a field, i.e. “physics is x”, will necessarily just be expressing a singular aspect. The type of vision I’m talking about here isn’t propositional knowledge at all, it’s implicit or tacit knowledge.3 It’s implicit in the sense that there is some larger context you have gained that allows you to look at individual facts with this new understanding of the entirety of the network always implicitly in mind. You don’t gain new facts, but you become wise about the facts you know.4 And since wisdom is always inexpressible explicitly and this network is so vast, this newfound knowledge is never explicitly expressed in the face of a given fact — that would be impossible, requiring you to always recite every fact you know and how each of them relates to one another every time you encounter a fact. Rather, it changes how you relate to, react to, or integrate any fact that you consider. It’s a subtext — you’re either in on it or not.

All arts, sciences, crafts, and skills are tools aimed at truth, and it is at the point of synoria that one discovers what type of tool one’s field is, and, consequently, what type of truth it aims at. Now, all that’s left is to get good at using it.

Quine’s web

As I arrived at this point in my thinking about this topic, I was reminded of W.V.O. Quine’s holism, as expressed in his paper, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, which I think can provide a visual representation of what occurs as one makes this switch:

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. … But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.
-W.V.O. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism5

Here, Quine describes scientific knowledge as something of a web. On the borders are all the facts determined through experience, like “water freezes at 0°C”. Those facts then connect in various ways according to sets of logical laws to create a network of statements in the center that are not determined purely through experience, like “when water freezes, the molecules become locked in place”. In other words, scientific knowledge is not some simple mass of empirical facts, but a sort of holistic, emergent web that comes out of those.

I don’t want to import Quine’s theory wholesale, but I think some of the imagery can be applied here. We can imagine all the various fields in which mastery can be attained as webs or networks of facts. For the novice, the field might look something like this:

They know only a few facts about the field, but it’s enough to get them interested. As they observe others, they accumulate new facts and draw some connections between them, but those connections are few and unclear:

The deep diver develops that network with more confidence so that they can reliably talk to some extent about a variety of topics within the field:

But at synoria, something profound happens. Through an intuitive leap, something jumps out at them, and the practitioner catches a glimpse of something radically different:

Who’s that Pokemon? It’s a hammer! Even though they can’t wield it masterfully yet, and the vision isn’t yet stabilized, they understand what it’s for, what they’re doing with it, and how to use it. They’ll never mistakenly use the hammer to pour a glass of water or saw a piece of wood in half, but they might hit their finger by mistake sometimes. Clumsy as they may be, they know how to continue practicing to one day achieve mastery. It’s just a matter of putting in the effort.

One day, at the end of their path, the vision will eventually stabilize. They’ll achieve mastery:

The master skis off-piste

I said at the beginning that the most important switch occurs when going from deep-diver to professional — what I have called synoria, the point at which one establishes the right view of their field and sees all the facts together. Judging by the fact that we’re at the end now and most of the time has been spent on that step, I think that its importance has been clearly established. But what happens after synoria? Haven’t I only gone half way?

Yes and no. There’s an idea in Buddhism that, compared to the novice, observer, and even the deep-diver, the stream-enterer is basically enlightened:

I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Savatthi at Jeta's Grove, Anathapindika's monastery. Then the Blessed One, picking up a little bit of dust with the tip of his fingernail, said to the monks, "What do you think, monks? Which is greater: the little bit of dust I have picked up with the tip of my fingernail, or the great earth?"
"The great earth is far greater, lord. The little bit of dust the Blessed One has picked up with the tip of his fingernail is next to nothing. It's not a hundredth, a thousandth, a one hundred-thousandth — this little bit of dust the Blessed One has picked up with the tip of his fingernail — when compared with the great earth."
"In the same way, monks, for a disciple of the noble ones who is consummate in view, an individual who has broken through [to stream-entry], the suffering & stress that is totally ended & extinguished is far greater. That which remains in the state of having at most seven remaining lifetimes is next to nothing: it's not a hundredth, a thousandth, a one hundred-thousandth, when compared with the previous mass of suffering. That's how great the benefit is of breaking through to the Dhamma, monks. That's how great the benefit is of obtaining the Dhamma eye."
(SN 13.1: “Nakhasikha Sutta: The Tip of the Fingernail”. Trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu)6

So, while it’s true that someone who has reached this stage isn’t yet a master, there isn’t another fundamental switch that needs to occur: it’s just a gradual deepening of their practice in whatever field they’re in.

Further, since the synorates is fully aware of what they need to do, their path becomes individualized, meaning there are no clear landmarks anymore. In a Buddhist context, for example, this might mean that a practitioner who is very inclined to academic study of the Buddhist texts needs to push themselves to sit longer in meditation, whereas an avid meditator may need to get themselves off the cushion and read more suttas. Canonically, one monk achieved arahantship by cleaning a cloth, while another achieved the goal by seeing a set of very white teeth.

There is a famous story about a Thai Buddhist master, Ajahn Chah, who gave two monks apparently opposite instructions. The monks discussed their lessons amongst themselves and realized that the two directions were seemingly incompatible. They approached their teacher to ask what this meant, and Ajahn Chah said something to the effect of, “well, if you’re walking along the road side by side, and there’s a ditch on each side, I would need to tell one of you to go left to avoid the ditch, and the other to go right”. It’s this level of intuitive understanding that’s required to reach mastery.

The key takeaway here is that at these levels of higher mastery, there are no marked paths or clear rules anymore — you need to create your own. You need to ski off-piste. Your goal here is to pick up on the tiniest nuances that anyone below this stage can’t even see. Maybe you need to spend all your time cleaning a cloth. Maybe you should spend all day looking at pictures of teeth. At this point, you know what you need to do, and it’s up to you to do it. If you need a framework to judge yourself by, or you’re still not sure what direction you need to go in, you’re not there yet.

Back to the beginning: how to measure your mastery

All good works should end where they begin, so let’s revisit the original purpose of Hilarius Bookbinder’s post: how to gauge your level of mastery.

I think that, overall, it would be a mistake to try to measure your mastery in terms of achievements, as one’s understanding can sometimes far surpass one’s visible accomplishments — this should be especially clear when looking at the case of someone like Irad Kimhi. Instead, we should gauge mastery by the way one relates to the information or techniques they’re practicing: do they have the right context, the right view of their field? Have they developed enough wisdom to engage at a high level?

This is obviously not possible to judge for oneself before one has achieved a certain level of mastery. But you can get a general sense of where you stand by examining what types of questions you have and the general feeling you have about your field: are you unsure, doubtful, and relying on others? Or do you just have an innate sense that you basically know what you’re doing, even if some of the details are fuzzy? Most people will lie to themselves about their standing and say they’re farther than they are, so this framework will be less externally or practically useful than Hilarius Bookbinder’s, but more internally helpful for those who are truly honest with themselves. Ultimately, if you lie to yourself, you’re harming your own development. Don’t do that. Honesty is necessary in the pursuit of truth.

If you’re trying to decide what level of mastery you’ve achieved, the most important questions are these: Have you developed a facility with your knowledge? Can you wield it as easily as you can move your own two hands?

In other words: do you know what you’re doing? Or are you still just guessing?

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Otto Unbinding

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