Finding my True Will
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@Los said
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@Faus said
" Mistakes of emotional nature are deeply rooted in that primitive part of the mind that generate dreams, so they can be affected by imaginary and ritual manipulation. Personify the feeling and deal with it as if it was something external and independent.After this, just keep the practice of watching and making corrections, and evaluate if the mind is more or less obedient."
I don't necessarily disagree with this, but in this case, the "discovery" of the True Will is still being accomplished by watching the Self in real time and "course correcting" in daily life. Ritual, in this case, is one of the tools that could, potentially, be a tool that the person finds useful as a preparation for the real work of observation."
Is it this hard to say that we agree?
My experience is that it is a tool of huge power if well used and from the writings of Al it also was useful for him. At least they deserve a more careful look. -
I think one can appeal directly to the words in libre samekh
hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib800.html
Several lines sound contradictory to each other, most notably the idea of a god who dwells in the void place of spirit, or a god where there is no god. And how about a woman of whoredom who is also a virgin of both sexes? Logically these things cannot both be true. The result of saying something like that is to shut down the logic, or rather, to stop making sense so that one can shut down that part of the mind.
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@Bereshith said
"But how do you know it's really your True Will?"
I determine the best label to give it by reasoning about it, exactly as I've been saying to you.Labelling is a rational process: the experience, by itself, doesn't do any labeling. Reason does the labeling by comparing and contrasting the experienced thing to other experienced things.
Let's use the process of labeling the thing in front of me a "computer" as an example. In the case of the computer, I experience this thing in front of me, but the experience doesn't explain what the thing is: my reason does, by comparing the thing in front of me to other things I've encountered. I've encountered similar things before, and I've (rationally) learned that "computer" is the label we put on that class of thing, so I now can reason about my experience and decide to (rationally) label the thing in front of me "computer."
It's exactly the same with "True Self." I experience it in meditation. When I stop meditating and start reasoning about what the experience was, I contrast the memory of it with my experience of other inner states (which I class as "mental phenomena," including thought, emotion, memory, imagination, etc.). I conclude that the inner state I experienced in meditation is something categorically different from the other ones, and since I know from my study of Thelemic texts that, in Thelema, we label the experience "beneath" these mental phenomena "The True Self," I decide (rationally) to label that experience an experience of "The True Self."
"I mean, it comes from an altered state of consciousness."
"It" (the label) doesn't at all "come from" the experience of it. The label comes from reasoning about the experience.As I've been trying to get you to understand, experience has no explanatory power: only reason does.
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@Los said
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@Bereshith said
"But how do you know it's really your True Will?"
I determine the best label to give it by reasoning about it, exactly as I've been saying to you.Labelling is a rational process: the experience, by itself, doesn't do any labeling. Reason does the labeling by comparing and contrasting the experienced thing to other experienced things.
Let's use the process of labeling the thing in front of me a "computer" as an example. In the case of the computer, I experience this thing in front of me, but the experience doesn't explain what the thing is: my reason does, by comparing the thing in front of me to other things I've encountered. I've encountered similar things before, and I've (rationally) learned that "computer" is the label we put on that class of thing, so I now can reason about my experience and decide to (rationally) label the thing in front of me "computer."
It's exactly the same with "True Self." I experience it in meditation. When I stop meditating and start reasoning about what the experience was, I contrast the memory of it with my experience of other inner states (which I class as "mental phenomena," including thought, emotion, memory, imagination, etc.). I conclude that the inner state I experienced in meditation is something categorically different from the other ones, and since I know from my study of Thelemic texts that, in Thelema, we label the experience "beneath" these mental phenomena "The True Self," I decide (rationally) to label that experience an experience of "The True Self."
"I mean, it comes from an altered state of consciousness."
"It" (the label) doesn't at all "come from" the experience of it. The label comes from reasoning about the experience.As I've been trying to get you to understand, experience has no explanatory power: only reason does."
haha. You're all so reasonable you've forgotten ART
The True Self (as you call it, I know no "Thelemic" doctrine about this in those words) seems only half present in your description.
Let's take the human computer. Reason alone is not all of it. It has a right hemisphere brain (so they say) and a left hemisphere brain (so they say). You only seem attentive to the left hemisphere. How can you be True if you are not whole?
HOLY LASHTAL BATMAN!
He's not on to anything.
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@Takamba said
"The True Self (as you call it, I know no "Thelemic" doctrine about this in those words)"
Really, now.
“The True Self is the meaning of the True Will: know Thyself through Thy Way!” – Heart of the Master
“I have never liked the term 'Higher Self'; True Self is more the idea.” – New Comment
“The Angel * the True Self of [the Adept’s] subconscious self, the hidden Life of his physical life." – Liber Samekh
“you must accept everything exactly as it is in itself, as one of the factors which go to make up your True Self.” – Duty
“all conscious Opposition to thy Will, whether in Ignorance, or by Obstinacy, or through Fear of others, may in the end endanger even thy true Self, and bring thy Star into Disaster.” – Liber Aleph
“the Aspirant must well understand that it is no paradox to say that the Annihilation of the Ego in the Abyss is the condition of emancipating the true Self” – New Comment
“The essential Attainment [of an 8=3] is the perfect annihilation of that personality which limits and oppresses his true self.” – One Star in Sight
“Spiritual experience soon enables the aspirant to assimilate these ideas, and he can enjoy life to the full, finding his True Self alike in the contemplation of every element of existence.” – New Comment
And the above quotes are just a handful of the ones I know, from memory by the way, that specifically use the term “True Self.” If we were to include the ones that strongly imply “True Self,” the number of Crowley quotes that discuss this idea is vast indeed. [For instance, from Little Essays: "[men] must begin to realise that Self is hidden behind, and independent of, the mental and material instrument in which they apprehend their Point-of-View.")
Are you seriously telling me that you’re unfamiliar with this kind of stuff?
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@Takamba said
"Let's take the human computer. Reason alone is not all of it."
Well, duh. There are all sorts of non-rational parts of the human, including...wait for it...the True Will (which isn't rational).
But the part that does the labeling and deciding what's what is the rational part. So when we're discussing a matter of procedural knowledge -- such as, for example, how to discover the True Will, which just happens to be the topic of this thread -- then the subject demands that we employ our reason to come to conclusions about how to do it.
That means we need to reach (rational) conclusions about how to label stuff and what to do to the labeled stuff to get the stuff we label as the result. The other alternative would be to randomly guess and hope we're right. I can tell you which option I prefer.
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@ Los
But how can you know it's not just some false experience, Los?
How can you know?
How can you KNOW?
And that's all there is to your attack on ritual's use - your own doubt and mistrust - perpetually.
See...., doubt of the method can continue forever as long as there's someone to fear and mistrust the method. And what satisfies one individual will not satisfy another.
I'm afraid that it's oh-so-much more individual and subjective than you'd like.
Which is why I've not argued against your own method, but against your predjudicial attempt to exclude others, particularly the stuff that worked for me.
And you are arguing for the exclusion of magic. You've said as much - despite the other things you've also said.
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@Simon Iff said
"I can't understand how no one in this thread has yet asked this:
Los, would you kindly submit your definitions of True Will and True Self?
Thank you!"
Asked and answered thusly.
@Los said
"By the way, you can demonstrate to yourself right now that there's something to what I'm calling the "True Self": sit down and meditate for a few minutes a day, and "shut off" your mind. You will find that even though your thoughts are "off," there is still something that is aware and has preferences. That's what I'm calling the "True Self" (or "Khabs," if you will), and the goal is to manifest its preferences more and more, to get your mind out of its way.
Once the individual has improved the faculty of observation, one has to watch the mind and catch it making mistakes in real time. There's no one way to do this, but we're all familiar with having acted in a certain way on the basis of a mistaken impression of ourselves. It's that distance between the Self and one's idea of the Self. If you catch yourself doing this even once, you know what you're looking for. Whenever you catch yourself doing it, you pay attention to your will instead of the mistakes of your mind and you "course correct."
That's what "discovering the True Will" is, and you basically keep this up, getting better and better at it, until you die. And then that's it."
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@Bereshith said
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@Simon Iff said
"I can't understand how no one in this thread has yet asked this:Los, would you kindly submit your definitions of True Will and True Self?
Thank you!"
Asked and answered thusly.
@Los said
"By the way, you can demonstrate to yourself right now that there's something to what I'm calling the "True Self": sit down and meditate for a few minutes a day, and "shut off" your mind. You will find that even though your thoughts are "off," there is still something that is aware and has preferences. That's what I'm calling the "True Self" (or "Khabs," if you will), and the goal is to manifest its preferences more and more, to get your mind out of its way.
Once the individual has improved the faculty of observation, one has to watch the mind and catch it making mistakes in real time. There's no one way to do this, but we're all familiar with having acted in a certain way on the basis of a mistaken impression of ourselves. It's that distance between the Self and one's idea of the Self. If you catch yourself doing this even once, you know what you're looking for. Whenever you catch yourself doing it, you pay attention to your will instead of the mistakes of your mind and you "course correct."
That's what "discovering the True Will" is, and you basically keep this up, getting better and better at it, until you die. And then that's it."
"That is not an answer to my question(s).
The above description is simply an experience that starts to happen shortly before one comes out of what I would term "attempted meditation" and nears a state of Dharana (what I would term "beginner meditation"). A lot more is to come after that. If that is the "True Self", many layers of even "Truer Selves" are going to pop up beneath that.
And the True Will is simply the reduced difference between consciousness and self image? Nice start, but - same as in the above meditation example - a start only imnsho.
Again, I want a clear definition. Without knowing exactly what we are talking about we don't need to talk at all.
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@Los said
"Don't take this the wrong way, but what exactly makes you think that performing a ritual is going to enable you to gain insight into yourself, let alone enable you to discover your True Will?
Yes, I understand that you say the goal of the ritual is to "purify the personality and perceptions, prompting the Khabs to flow out" and yada yada yada, but what makes you think that performing a ritual will do this? The fact is that no amount of "ritual work" is going to get an individual even a jot closer to discovering his true will."
Stating personal opinion as fact... and in the context of the original new-poster's questions...
The rest maybe suffices for him, and I have no comment on it.
Hopefully checking out for the day.
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@Simon Iff said
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The above description is simply an experience that starts to happen shortly before one comes out of what I would term "attempted meditation" and nears a state of Dharana (what I would term "beginner meditation"). A lot more is to come after that. If that is the "True Self", many layers of even "Truer Selves" are going to pop up beneath that.And the True Will is simply the reduced difference between consciousness and self image? Nice start, but - same as in the above meditation example - a start only imnsho."
That is the problem of using labels outside a particular intellectual structure, wrong labels, wrong conclusions and really nasty communication.
The experience of a “observing self” floating above the waves of the mind is quite distinct from experience of a “True Self”. Especially when attention is trained to perceive even more subtle streams of thoughts than can be easily mislabeled True Will if you are confusing the “observing self” with a “true self”.
But there is no problem in the end. Steady practice usually gives new experiences that break wrong conceptions.
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@kasper81 said
"Btw True Will is the action of our Real Selves isn't it?"
I have no problem with that. (I'd want to pick over and clarifty some iof the words like, say, "action," "real," and "self," but I get your basic meaning.)
I think the immediuate point of the question, though, was what one particular poster means by the term.
My own most concise definition is, "the vector of an infinite being." This, however, also requires a setup of distinguishing word meanings, and relies on points of view that some people on this thread would dismiss. The longer version of the same definition is, "the inmost nature of a being, expressed through its most fundamental course or movement through time, space, and experience."
A core idea in both cases is that being itself is not measurable in its stillness, but only in its motion (doing is the first "delta," or measurement of change, in the variable being); and Will is inherently dynamic and in motion. (a "going," not a "beiomng").
As a way of communicating with people the feel of what I'm talking about, borrowing a phrase from Parker J. Palmer I sometimes say exactly the same thing in describing True Will as "the place where your deep gladness mneets the world's deep need." (The terms need some clarification, such as the word "deep," but the meaning conveys well to most people.)
Within Temple of Thelema, we are most interested in bringing people awake to who they are deeply within the specific context of their current incarnation and the life they choose, so our most common functional definition of True Will within the Order is, "The resultant of all vectors (conditions and characteristics) expressed through the focus of a specific incarnation; nearly synonymous with life-purpose or deepest impulse of self-expression."
I think you can see, Kasper, why I'm comfortable with your definition.
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@Los said
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@Takamba said
"Let's take the human computer. Reason alone is not all of it."Well, duh. There are all sorts of non-rational parts of the human, including...wait for it...the True Will (which isn't rational).
But the part that does the labeling and deciding what's what is the rational part. So when we're discussing a matter of procedural knowledge -- such as, for example, how to discover the True Will, which just happens to be the topic of this thread -- then the subject demands that we employ our reason to come to conclusions about how to do it.
That means we need to reach (rational) conclusions about how to label stuff and what to do to the labeled stuff to get the stuff we label as the result. The other alternative would be to randomly guess and hope we're right. I can tell you which option I prefer."
Now here's the part of you that attracted my attention to this conversation in the first place, your intent to tell us (restrict me?) what we "need." I don't disagree that randomly guessing is a waste of time, but not all conclusions are rational. As has been stated before, it is fine for you if you want to remain uber-rational about all things, and if this helps you, then it helps you. But it is not acceptable to tell me what to do. Ever. Tell me how you feel, then I may change my behavior, but attempt to control me and I will not harken to your plea. My point with you (the mistake regarding higher self & True Self aside) is that you appear to only express the purely mathematical nature of your Self, not your "irrational" (or rather, I'd say, intuitive, imaginative) self.
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@Simon Iff said
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@Bereshith said
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@Simon Iff said
"I can't understand how no one in this thread has yet asked this:Los, would you kindly submit your definitions of True Will and True Self?
Thank you!"
Asked and answered thusly.
@Los said
"By the way, you can demonstrate to yourself right now that there's something to what I'm calling the "True Self": sit down and meditate for a few minutes a day, and "shut off" your mind. You will find that even though your thoughts are "off," there is still something that is aware and has preferences. That's what I'm calling the "True Self" (or "Khabs," if you will), and the goal is to manifest its preferences more and more, to get your mind out of its way.
Once the individual has improved the faculty of observation, one has to watch the mind and catch it making mistakes in real time. There's no one way to do this, but we're all familiar with having acted in a certain way on the basis of a mistaken impression of ourselves. It's that distance between the Self and one's idea of the Self. If you catch yourself doing this even once, you know what you're looking for. Whenever you catch yourself doing it, you pay attention to your will instead of the mistakes of your mind and you "course correct."
That's what "discovering the True Will" is, and you basically keep this up, getting better and better at it, until you die. And then that's it."
"That is not an answer to my question(s).
The above description [...]"
For our purposes here -- discussing a matter of procedural knowledge, how to discover the True Will -- all I have to do is describe and identify the thing in question and explain what to do with it. One doesn't need to exhaustively "define" the object in question or explain its ontological nature or anything like that.
For example, if I'm explaining how to change a lightbulb, I don't need to exhaustively define a lightbulb or explain the ontological nature of what a lightbulb "really is." I just need to describe it so that you can recognize what one looks like. And I have to tell you what to do with it. That's all that's needed to explain a matter of procedural knowledge.
There's no reason to think, a priori, that a task like discovering the True Will isn't like any other task, like changing a lightbulb. As long as someone knows what the pieces look like and what to do them, one can do it.
"is simply an experience that starts to happen shortly before one comes out of what I would term "attempted meditation" and nears a state of Dharana (what I would term "beginner meditation"). A lot more is to come after that. If that is the "True Self", many layers of even "Truer Selves" are going to pop up beneath that."
There's no doubt that seriously meditating is going to produce some really strong mental fireworks, but I consider these fireworks almost beside the point entirely when it comes to the task of discovering the True Will.
As Crowley puts it -- and to be clear, I'm not quoting Crowley because "OMG it's Crowley, and we all have to listen because what he says goes!" but rather because Crowley in this place nicely phrases a point that I agree with --
"It cannot be said too strongly that any amount of mystical success whatever is no compensation for slackness with regard to the technique. There may come a time when Samadhi itself is no part of the business of the mystic. But the character developed by the original training remains an asset."
In other words, it's not the "mystical experience" that enables someone to attain: it's the character -- I would say the ability to pay attention to the Self -- developed during meditation that is actually of practical use in discovering the True Will (because remember, the actual discovering happens when course correcting in daily life).
Someone could sit in asana for several hours a day, achieve the highest Samadhis, and then get up and slip right back into delusion if he's not carefully paying attention to his mind and Self during daily life.
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@kasper81 said
"Btw True Will is the action of our Real Selves isn't it?"
Correct. The True Will is the dynamic aspect of the True Self -- or, to put it slightly differently, the True Will is what the True Self does in a particular situation. They're two sides of a coin: you can only define True Self in terms of how it functions or acts. And you can only define how it functions or acts in terms of the objects toward which it is driven (think Wands and Cups in the Tarot).
Another way to put it is that the True Will consists of the preferences of the True Self, but that's just another way to say that the True Will consists of the kinds of things that the Self is driven to like in a given situation.
The union of the Will with its objects is called "Love" in Thelema. All experience is an act of "Love," and hence we are told that "Love is the law, love under will." The meaning of this phrase is that our acts of love -- our experience -- needs to be put strictly under the control of our Will, so that we are conducted in the path of "love" most suited to our natures.
To try to restrict our love by imagining that we "should" do such-and-such a thing "because" we're such-and-such a person or "because" it's the right thing to do...that is the primary way we thwart our acts of love, frustrate the True Self, and produce inner conflict. The practices of Thelema are aimed at reducing such conflicts in the long term.
[And note: you see I used "because" multiple times in illustrating those errors. This is the reason that Liber AL condemns reason. The Book of the Law does not condemn reason as a tool for gaining knowledge about the universe -- in fact, Crowley, in his commentary, says that the Book makes reason the "autocrat of the mind." No, Liber AL condemns reason only insofar as it tries to tell the Self what the Self "should" be doing, "because" of such-and-such. The practices of Thelema aim to ameliorate the influence of the mind and its because statements to allow the actual preferences of the True Self to be revealed and manifest]
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@Jim Eshelman said
"My own most concise definition is, "the vector of an infinite being.""
I consider this to be so vague as to be pretty much entirely unhelpful in any practical sense. As you yourself go on to point out, it would require one to define all of these terms, and it involves some premises -- reincarnation? -- that no good evidence at all exists for.
So I'm going to label this definition as useless. Remember, I'm critiquing ideas, not attacking people.
"A core idea in both cases is that being itself is not measurable in its stillness, but only in its motion (doing is the first "delta," or measurement of change, in the variable being); and Will is inherently dynamic and in motion. (a "going," not a "beiomng")."
Well, this is better, but still not very clear. Motion and doing -- unqualified -- tells us nothing about what kind of motion comprises the True Will. One might get the mistaken idea that all one has to do is act in any way and the universe will magically, through some unspecified method, just automatically "right" the individual into his "proper course," which, of course, will not happen without effort (at least, according to Thelema).
While I do tend to think that acting is often better than non-acting, it is most often better to act with a clear idea of what one is trying to do.
"As a way of communicating with people the feel of what I'm talking about, borrowing a phrase from Parker J. Palmer I sometimes say exactly the same thing in describing True Will as "the place where your deep gladness mneets the world's deep need." (The terms need some clarification, such as the word "deep," but the meaning conveys well to most people.)"
I'm going to strongly disagree with this. What this sounds like is the kind of mental fluff that Thelema is encouraging people to clear away from their perceptions. "Deep gladness" just isn't the right idea at all, since it implies following the emotional content of the mind. And being concerned about the world's "deep need" is utterly antithetical to Thelema. The Book of the Law is insistent that the individual need not care one bit about anyone else -- or anyone else's "need" -- aside from his own True Will.
I understand that you personally agree with the sentiment of this phrase, but I think it is very, very misleading as a summary of Thelema's idea of the True Self, and it could throw a student off track for a long time.
Now sure, maybe it's possible to redefine some of the terms in it so that it coincides with Thelema (for example "deep gladness" could mean "one's actual inclinations, perceived beneath the 'veil' of the body/mind complex" and "the world's deep need" could mean "those objects toward which one's inclinations impel the individual"), but by that time, we've completely changed the meaning of the phrase you quoted.
No, I very much disagree with this phrase and think it comes dangerously close to expressing exactly the wrong idea.
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@Takamba said
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@Los said
"Are you seriously telling me that you’re unfamiliar with this kind of stuff?"My brain did a strange thing to me. For some reason I thought it was "higher self" when yes, True Self is what you were talking about. My mistake."
Fair enough. It's funny: a lot of the times, the people I debate with -- not you, obviously; I'm talking about other people -- are convinced that Thelema is all about the "higher self," when in fact Crowley explicitly says that that's not what he's talking about.
We'll chalk this one up to an honest mistake.
"Now here's the part of you that attracted my attention to this conversation in the first place, your intent to tell us (restrict me?) what we "need.""
Again, it's not "restriction" -- in the Thelemic sense -- to state facts. A person who wants to intelligently practice discovering the True Will needs to know exactly what he's trying to do, how to do it, and how to tell that he's done it. That's just a fact. It's not restriction to inform you of that, any more than it's "restriction" for your math teacher to mark one of your answers wrong on a test.
"I don't disagree that randomly guessing is a waste of time, but not all conclusions are rational."
All conclusions, by definition, are rational. They are rational constructs about the way something in the universe works, produced by the faculty that draws conclusions from evidence (which we call "reason").
I guess a "conclusion" that you just randomly guessed wouldn't be rational, but I would dispute that it's a conclusion at all if you're just guessing and not basing it on evidence.
"But it is not acceptable to tell me what to do. Ever. Tell me how you feel, then I may change my behavior, but attempt to control me and I will not harken to your plea."
Who exactly is "attempt* to control [you]"? I'm a dude expressing a point of view on a message board. It's not an "attempt to control [you]" to inform you of the facts. You can do whatever you like with what I say, including completely ignoring me, which I'm sure you're going to do anyway.
"My point with you (the mistake regarding higher self & True Self aside) is that you appear to only express the purely mathematical nature of your Self, not your "irrational" (or rather, I'd say, intuitive, imaginative) self."
I have no clue what you mean here. I'm trying to explain what one actually has to do to discover the True Will. In order to explain that, I have to be crystal clear in my descriptions and explanations.
Now what someone's Will turns out to be may involve creating art, performing interpretive dance, doing ceremonial rituals as a kind of performance art, being a stock broker, being a teacher, being a professional hippy.
I'm not trying to suggest that one can never do anything that the world will judge as irrational. That would be stupid to say. I'm suggesting that the process of discovering the True Will is a relatively straight, direct, and clear one and that having a firm grasp on how to do it will make it vastly easier to do.