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Jan. 28, 2025 - Clif High
09:03
testing
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Time Text
Hello humans, hello humans.
January 28, 4 41 a.m.
Cold as hell out there.
Well, not quite as cold as hell.
It's uh 30 degrees.
It's gonna probably go down to 28 degrees by the time I hit the beach this morning.
Uh the beach freezes in an interesting fashion, and uh the dogs like sniffing everything because the smells are so um much more uh revealed by the cold.
Um in a sense, the cold air and the frozen sand and everything locking in all the smells uh provides uh a field of testing for the dogs for their nose and the testing of the scent.
They can follow a scent longer when there is not that much confusion.
And we get a lot of there's a lot of smells on the beach anyway, and we get people through there and stuff, but the dogs are pretty good, you know.
A dog can smell um 20,000 times better than a human.
So it's a decent thing.
But what I wanted to talk about was um uh testing and red tape, okay, my red tape.
So um I'm a uh martial artist.
I started when I was basically 10, almost 10, through circumstances.
And I've been doing it continuously, and I do all my training every day, even at age 71.
Uh I tested uh in the early days in judo, but I never uh accepted rank.
And that's the point of testing, right?
Do you know the moves?
Can you can you do them effectively, that sort of thing.
Uh and then other people judge your ability to do that by seeing you do so.
Um, and then sometimes there might be tests where uh you would have an actual um uh uh session, uh uh sort of a work it out kind of session.
You're gonna demonstrate, right?
You're gonna demonstrate with somebody.
And the more advanced you get, the more need there is for somebody to aid you in this testing.
But the testing is always about yourself.
It's always about um show well, okay.
So at its core, that's what it should be.
Um nowadays in the organizations, you have people with organizational minds.
They, in my opinion, it's like uh, you know, they don't quite get the point of the art, which is not to accumulate the belts, not to accumulate the rank, but to accumulate the skill.
And so I got into fights very early.
I under, you know, at a very young age, so I understood the point of um of having skill in fighting arts was not to obtain a belt, but be able to use it in in practice.
And that's um that that part is not really covered by the testing.
So um so my understanding, even as a kid was because I was getting into fights all the time, was that uh the real world is the ultimate test, right?
That testing for a belt, testing for rank wasn't it didn't really mean much.
Now, a lot of this is from my uh father's attitude, okay.
He was a um uh draftee in Korean war and and got a battlefield promotion.
Those are very rare.
Uh that caused ripples in his military career because every other officer he ever met knew that this man had done that to get that battlefield promotion.
So it made all their schooling, all of their ways of getting into that um the rank that they had.
It depreciated them, right?
And my dad didn't give a shit one way or another.
He was from Missouri, you know, he was used to wrangling mules, he said, and you know, everybody's stubborn some way.
Anyway, so this is the thing.
Um we're all being tested constantly, continuously, in each and every moment.
That's the nature of this reality.
Sometimes the tests are violent when someone attacks you, but most often they're not.
Most of your life will be spent facing tests on a continuous basis that you do not see that way.
And so sometimes you get irritated, you know.
It's the uh the heavy muscle hangover from having had to take the the your kid to the ER the night before, so you're gonna be uh slow and sluggish at work, right?
And it makes you feel bad and it eats on you and it weighs on you.
That's a test.
All of these things that are irritating and so on, they're tests.
They're not only tests of Can you do it, you know, whatever is required, but they're also tests of you, how you do it, right?
How you feel about doing it, your experience of doing it.
Universe wants you to have that experience, but you have the right to control as much as you may how you feel about it and how you do it.
The way this materium works and the way that our life experience is set up, you can easily do things like drive yourself crazy, spiraling in on all these questions, you know.
Uh why am I resistant to testing?
Should I test, you know, is it the whether or not I take that test for this particular rank?
Is that the test?
And and you know, I do know people that do that.
It really does affect their life and their their day because they're constantly seeing things in that uh view, and they have a certain level of anxiety about it.
My approach is that you know, I will pass or not.
Uh it doesn't really, you know, the outcome of that is not in my control.
So in testing, for instance, in the martial arts, you might go before uh the black belt and uh say the four or five senior uh belts underneath him in a dojo.
Then you would perform a particular move, and then everybody would sort of judge you on it, right?
Well, their judgment is always going to be subjective to them, and I realized this at a very young age that you know, I cannot, no matter what I do in my motions or whatever, um, get across to them how I am experiencing the expression of that art.
So, in that sense, their opinion is very, very, very limited, and it's derived from their own experience.
And, you know, I admit it, I was an arrogant bastard, even as a little shit, and I said, eh, I don't care about their experience, and I don't care about their opinion.
It's just the way I was made, right?
Okay, so in testing, um in life, the real test is life, in my opinion, right?
And and as I say, you can spiral in on this stuff uh too deeply and uh and lose yourself in minutiae that you need not bother with, because no matter what, you are not responsible for the outcome of that particular test.
Whatever it is, uh, you know, um your kid gets sick and you take him to the ER.
That was the decision you made in that moment, and in that sense you faced a test.
And the outcome of that decision is not in your hands.
You cannot control the nature of the illness or the reaction at the ER or the drive there, or any of this kind of stuff, right?
All you have control over is your decision and how you think about it, how you feel about it, in and of this particular instant, this particular instance of the ever-present, eternal now.
We don't have a future, and we don't have a past.
Past is memory, future is anticipation.
Neither of them are existent.
I can go into the next room over here, right?
I can go and kick a hole in the wall over there.
There's physical matter there.
I can exist now, and I'll still be existing uh in the future, in what we call the future, but I have absolutely no control over that.
So, part of testing is to center yourself, to be in the now, to understand that your only responsibility and the only possible uh responsibility you have is for the action you're about to make in this instant.
And if, if you're smart enough to do that on ahead of those decisions, to understand that you're at a decision point, you're pretty much already past that test because you're examining yourself in respect to the reality and what's being presented to you within the event stream that's facing you.
And that's a huge thing, guys.
I mean, you cannot discount the idea of being aware within the moment, seriously.
I mean, that's why we work in the martial arts and all this stuff.
That's why all the years and zen meditation and this sort of stuff, and it really pays off.
So I'm doing these little things as shorts, so they won't drive you crazy, right?
Uh a few minutes on a particular subject.
And I think I'll do another one today, but um uh it's gonna be a little bit um haphazard as we go forward because I've got some projects and stuff.
Anyway, so that's it.
So bear in mind you're participating in testing all the time, and even within each and every test, it's your attitude that you control and your actions.
So, you know, basically have fun with it and and learn.
Learn to do the testing well.
I never did.
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