Manila Dreams #6

It. So, Steve Barnes here. I think I've done one of these since I got back from Manila. I'll let everybody know tomorrow exactly why that was. But I've been doing a tremendous amount of internal integration physically, emotionally, mentally. And I have a clarity on my life and my path that I've never had before. And I have to combine that with the subject of today's talk, which is basically about knowing nothing. And this is an essay that I did because I wanted to have my thoughts a little bit more formally laid out than I usually do, because this is important and I didn't want to get it wrong. So this is the six. I've done six essays that I mostly keep to myself, but some of them I've been sharing. And this is number six. So my internal alignment has been skewed. My whole life warped by the need to succeed and survive, or basically survive and succeed. Manila was about stepping outside the duality of black and white, which has been a really dominant aspect of my life, into the triumvirate, the natural triumvirate of white, Asian, black, black, white, Asian, however you want to put it, anchored in a culture that goes all the way back to Vedic India. There are connections between Tai Chi and Kali. There are connections between African rhythms. It's interesting. It's not the same. And one of the things that happened was that I was absolutely in the beginner's group and it was appropriate. Socrates said, according to Plato, for I was conscious that I knew practically nothing. This has been interpreted as Socrates saying that he knows nothing and that he is the wisest man in Athens because he knew nothing. One of the beautiful things about Manila was that more than in any other context, I've been in the last decades, like I said, I was a pretty rank beginner. Everybody there had spent more time in a specific branch of Filipino martial arts than I have, because my primary familiarity came through the innisanto system, which is very, very eclectic. His approach is pretty much giving you a buffet from which you draw the pieces that lead to your own personal revelations. The traditional method is that you learn this and then you learn this until you have a certain level, at which point a good teacher will advise you to go and train with another instructor or two, sometimes his brother or cousin, certainly close friend, with a letter of introduction quite often. So whereas I had more freedom, I had more freedom than structure in that sense. But paradoxically, structure is freedom. Like a cocoon that you build to metamorphize within and then chew your way out of this can Be a teacher's bliss or nightmare, depending on how you look at it. Because the most capable students absorb technique until it connects with their emotions and spirit, in which time it expresses differently. And they often then go off and create their own thing. You get this. In other words, to be like the teacher, you have to do what the teacher did, not just what they say. Sometimes this is the same thing. Sometimes a teacher will conceal their path, and sometimes they honestly believe that they have a better way. And of course, human progress comes from studying such mutations and evaluating their efficiency and effectiveness. All the brown belts at my old BKF school look pretty much the same. All the black belts look different, but in that difference, they were the same. A genuine expression of that man or woman's essence. But with the Kenpo basics anchored into their unconscious competence, techniques and belts will not save you. Your spontaneous expression of the principles and attributes, however, will. Every instructor at that workshop looked different. Now. They were doubtless chosen for their quality of artistic expression as well as practical capacity. So it's a little bit of a rigged game, but it would make sense to me that an art intended to enhance survival against superior weapons, numbers and resources would have to ultimately take you to the only questions that who am I? And what is true? The fact that we learn most rapidly when we are playing as children, without the ego that says, wait a minute, I have these belts, I have this training. Empty your cup. What they were saying was train for fun, to fight for life. If the reality is that the instant we feel like we know everything, we have to break through to the next level at which we are beginners again, this applies in all areas of life. Every day with Tananarib is new, and I have to meet her where she is. Every day with Jason is new. I have to put what I know of his past in unconscious competence to see where he is today. Every story I write is exactly the same as every other story, but also totally different. You take the known about story and you root it in unconscious competence and then seek the new expression of your deepest understanding of the principles involved. I never start a story knowing how I can complete it. There's always fear. The fear keeps me safe. You can't do hack work when you're afraid. You can't do it because you can't. You can't. But the process will change you. You won't be you. By the time you finish, they'll be a new you. That's the glorious adventure of it all. And in martial arts, I remember, I think it was gichen Funakoshi, the creator of Shotokan karate, said on his deathbed, I'm just beginning to understand the punch. You get it. You're the center of a circle. You sit in the horizon, in the same distance, in all directions. You move, and the horizon remains distant. But the territory is new, and in its newness, the same. To start over again at the beginning is simply trusting your deep mind that all you have known in the past is still with you, if you ever really learned it at all. Danny's pedagogy was different, deeply influenced by Bruce Lee's teaching and perspective. It is a path. This is a different path, one that created the men and women who taught Dan. So it's all part of the dao, all part of that totality. Can I humble myself? Forget about having this or that rank? These are those teachers and simultaneously honor and never forget them. If what they taught was true, then what they gave you sank to the marrow. And it changed you. I think about Larry Niven. What he and Jerry gave me was true. It changed me. But I could not be Niven or Pornell. I have to be Steve Barnes, or else I never really learned. If I can see this skill, I'm not in the place of creativity. I think about Steve Muhammad. What he gave me was so damned real, it changed me. But I cannot move like Steve Muhammad because his movement was and is an expression of his being. What he wanted for us was to find our own way. It's one of the great joys of my life that Steve proves of me as a fighter and as a man. Proving me as a man is even more important. Whatever happens next, a door has been opened. I can see it stretching from a childhood where these things will learn from pure play and childhood games, through adulthood and fighting for life and family, through old age where there's nothing left to prove. But you still attend the gatherings to help the young ones on their path in a context where all have agreed to learn and grow together. Mastery is a path, not a position, a verb, not an adjective. And the path of mastery is to be always learning, always doing, always teaching. Learning fills the cup. Doing marinates in the brew. But teaching empties the cup so that more learning can be added. This is the path of evolution. You can map it onto any discipline, intellectual, physical, emotional, spiritual. I stepped outside my social context with all the positives and negatives that implies, to see another facet of the thing itself, this thing called humanity and consciousness. As any path taken deeply enough addresses those core questions and those questions are the fastest doorway to genuine spiritual growth I know of. This was not a quest to learn some snappy skills. It was a five year journey to answer just a little more clearly, who am I and what is true. It blew me apart. Now I can start putting myself back together, keeping only the pieces that actually connect to my being. And in my marriage and my fatherhood, my writing, my teaching and my martial science, I now have the clearest view of who I actually am, what I have been in, the path I've struggled to walk ever since. I knew that there was a path that I had to take. This is the beginning of the next act of my entire life. I think the experiences and companions who supported me getting here or conversely opposed me and by so doing forced me to find the strength and clarity I never have been forced to find. I need to thank them too. It could have broken me. So I also thank the countless teachers who opened the path to me and said, here it is, Steve. Take all you can carry. Remember, it isn't that what does not kill you makes you stronger. What kills you? What doesn't kill you could cripple you or discourage you. It's what doesn't kill you that you have the time, energy and resources to reintegrate from before you get hit again. That's the trick. To learn what period of time you need to reconstitute and grow and then make sure that you have that amount of rest in between your workouts. But as they say in weight training, every day is kidney day. Your working has to stay below your capacity to reintegrate. So you have to be constantly assessing that and you have to constantly empty yourself so that you are open to learning. But then you also have to be sure that you're opening yourself to the right people, people who are trustworthy, that you develop a deeper, deeper sense of who am I? What is true? How do I determine what is true? I thank the countless teachers who helped me along the way and they said, pretty much, here it is, Steve. Take all you can carry. No matter how I excoriated myself through the years for not doing more or doing better, I've always done the best I could with the resources I had. I simply have new resources now and they've helped me chew through my cocoon. My new wings are still wet, but they're drying rapidly. I cannot wait to fly. There's an expression, caterpillars do not become butterflies. Caterpillars die so that butterflies can be born. This process was always going to kill me. Ain't it. Cool. Take care. Namaste. I'll see you again very soon. Bye. Bye.