10/31/2019 - Halloween, Mastery, Tea and Mead

Give mead

to those that are close to death. -Proverbs

I love Halloween.

I love getting weird.

Today, I have a rainbow collared shirt on and a pink patent leather jacket.

Chris Herr and I had our morning meeting and in addition to the day to day things of running a meadery - ordering materials, checking on product delivery plans, etc… we touched on the difference between knowledge and experience, and then touched on the concept of mastery.

Halloween is an interesting time to think about mastery.

In mead, to me, mastery is being able to pull the best parts of the ingredients out in a way that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts and makes the person you’re serving the mead to light up from the inside.

They should take a sip of the mead master’s master work and stop what they’re doing, as if the drink has reached up and pulled their consciousness down into the glass and the drinker should say something like, “wow… that’s good.”

Is every work a master piece? No, but as a master’s competence and breadth of work grow, that frequency will increase and the whole mead industry will rise.

There are trade-offs in chasing mastery. It takes work and humility and dedication, time and money…

But, what are we here for if not to create beautiful things and share them joyfully?

…

The concept of mastery and Halloween elides in my mind because of a tea ceremony I went to last night. My new friend Adam Meyer - www.modernmysticmovement.com - hosted a tea ceremony at another new friend’s acupuncture office.

(For my more traditional friends who may be reading this - acupuncture is rad. I met a Navy Seal veteran last night who does acupuncture to treat PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. It’s about minor intervention to redirect the flow of subtle energy in the body… a different topic but one of the ways that science and what some might call magic, overlap in a beneficial way in this world.)

At the tea ceremony, Adam shared that the tradition of tea and meditation goes back to the monks in Asia, who would use it as a meditation aid (some super cool neuroscience here about caffeine and L-Thiamine and Gabba and simultaneously stimulating, relaxing and balancing the functions of the brain all at once). The monks got the idea that the act of making and serving tea could be a meditation too. Thus tea ceremony entered the world.

Apparently there are many types of tea ceremony but two of the most prominent ones are Gung Fu and Bowl Tea. Gung Fu is focused on making the best cup of tea possible. Bowl Tea is focused on making the most sacred cup of tea possible. Gung Fu has all of the details defined. Bowl Tea is free flowing and flexible.

How does this relate to Halloween and mastery? Well, it goes back to something Chris said this morning at our meeting in response to a comment recognizing hat we both had words and concepts to think about mead recipe design that would be hard to explain to most people from square one.

Chris said that knowledge and experience are different.

Details and Feeling are different.

He said something to the effect of, “knowledge can be written down in a book, but it won’t make sense and change the way someone approaches a project if they have no experience.”

So maybe, to be a master, you need to be fluent in both.

Knowledge informs experience and experience grounds knowledge.

One leads to the other building and building until that other takes the lead and the first does the building.

Details, and feeling. Knowledge and experience. Yin and Yang. Gung Fu and Bowl Tea.

So, how does this lead in to Halloween and mead? Well, hopefully the mead parallels are obvious. Mead making is both an art and a science.

You need to be fluent in both aspects to create something of value that inspires/delights/lights some one up and delivers on quantifiable quality and consistency .

The Halloween part, well, that’s where it gets a little weird. And as I said, I like to get weird. Hopefully you do too, otherwise you probably would have sopped reading by this point.

If you’re of the purely materialist persuasion, I’m probably going to alienate you a bit with what you’re about to read, but either way, please hang in there and engage with an open mind. As we all know, the world needs more of those, and Ghandi said we need to be the change we wish to see in the world.

So, they say that Halloween is the time when our european/celtic ancestors used to communicate with the spirit world most easily. What does that mean?

Well, Spirit, to me, means the “unseeable” forces that exist and move us subtly. It can get a bit overwhelming but most of us can relate to history as an unseen force that influences us. Nature, or more generally the feelings that being immersed in nature can generate, that might be another way to understand the spirit realm. Memories of loved ones. Values. Beliefs. These might all be ways to understand the unseen forces that exist and move us subtly.

Then, if you meditate, and get to the point in meditation where you’ve learned to still your mind and allow the thoughts that come up to pass, until thoughts come up that seem unbidden and previously unknown, then you might start to wonder where those thoughts/images/feelings come from.

And some might tell you that’s the spirit realm.

And you might become curious about the spirit realm. And you might start learning about indigenous cultures who see very little difference between the three dimensional material realm we westerners call “reality” and the spirit realm. And you might revisit the classic works you learned about or read when you were younger. Like Plato’s Republic, and The Bhagavad Gita and The Holy Bible among others and you might start to revisit these ideas of the Realm of Forms/Plato’s Cave and Krishna saying that among the Pandavas, He is Arjuna and Jesus saying that the Kingdom of Heaven is inside You…

And the line between heaven and spirit might become less thick.

And the line between spirit and here and now might become less thick.

And on Halloween, that line might dissolve pretty thoroughly… until what’s here and what’s there and who you are might get a little weird…

And that my friends, is when the light inside you gets to shine.

And the light in those around you gets to shine.

And the word enlightenment - the word that inspired in large part the founding of our country and in many ways the modern era we find ourselves in now - might take on a new meaning.

And the balance between fact and feeling, and the middle point between them, might become more than a concept.

But of course reading about it and experiencing it are two different things.

And what you do with it when you have experienced it is an open quest…ion.

But that, it seems to me, is the path of the deepest mastery, to be between both realms, and serve the unfolding of what is virtuous and beneficent an beautiful in both and to witness and help heal what is painful and broken and suffering. And being there, between those forces, fully present, feeling and knowing, doing and witnessing, giving the way you would wish to receive, whew! that is the path of the master.

Tonight, I will be trick or treating. Then, I will meditate. Maybe with a glass of mead in my system. I hope to see you out there in the spirit realm or at least hear how it goes for you..

Lots of love and Happy Halloween!

Ooo, also!. I hope I get to see you at the Meadery on Friday (tomorrow). Bring a costume, try on some costumes. Drink some mead, and let’s see what magic unfolds.

Cheers,

Frank