Zero Point Energy

Hello, this is Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live. This is a little bit surprising to me that I'm doing this today. I thought that I was going to be getting out with the wife to spend a little bit of time thinking and driving and just sort of getting my head together, which I like to do during one of my weekend days. But because there's some homework stuff that needs to be done, I'm still here right now. So I thought that I would have a conversation with you. Even though I don't have a specific agenda worked out in advance, this is a little bit more informal, and it's as much asking questions as it is offering answers. Because I'm over my head. I'm dealing specifically with an approach to consciousness that is beyond my pay grade. You know, one of the things that I do and I enjoy doing and have always enjoyed doing is finding people who are clearly superior to me. It's something that I care about. I mean, I love that. I mean, I will drive a thousand miles to spend 10 minutes with someone who can give me an answer to something that I don't know. It's. It's the secret. If there is a secret to my success in life, if one considers my life successful, it is that I have always looked for people who could help me understand things that I did not understand. I love teachers. I love learning. I love teaching. I love being. And in this particular instance, I had reached out to. I known that in order for me to submit my position at this next level of my life. Actually, it was more a matter of trying to get to that next level. There were some very specific opportunities that were facing me and that I wanted to be the very best I could be in order to reach them. Tracy says Tananarive is a patient and wonderful woman. Steve, you bet she is. She really is. I have got to be a pain in the butt to live with. I really do. I don't doubt that at all. So you're completely correct. I knew I needed a coach who was beyond my point, and I found one in a gentleman named Dr. Carl Tot. He's a PhD in clinical psychology. He's a grand master of the martial arts. He's a shaman, he's a daoist priest, and he runs the Taoist Institute in Burbank. And I'd seen him moving in my martial arts circles for quite a long time. He'd been on the COVID of martial arts magazines, and the people I respected respected him. And he always had that kind of Buddha baby energy, just kind of smiling and happy and solid. Well, I reached out to him and asked him how much we could begin a coaching relationship. He was kind of curious about me, and so he made time in his schedule, and it's been a wonderful experience. I talk to him once a week, and I got the blessing dance that I do every day with Tananarive, and it really anchors our love and our relationship from him. I got other things from him, but one of the things that's happened is he introduced me to his teacher. He really is. He's more advanced than I am in a couple of arenas that I care about in terms of the martial arts and in terms of spirituality, his formal understanding of these things. It's my take on him that he is further down that road. I am okay with it. He's not currently in a relationship. He considers that he's had those relationships in his past lives, and he doesn't need to work through that right now. You know something? I accept that from him because he never speaks of loneliness in that way. So as far as I'm concerned, he's taken that aspect of his humanity and focused it in a way that I am really blessed. I feel very blessed to have the opportunity to speak with him. But he introduced me to his teacher, so he's talked about who he goes to, and he has. Has introduced me to some of them in terms of, you know, this book, this audio, this video, and in one case, it's a gentleman named Yohoon Kim Johun. If you look at. If you go onto YouTube, you will find videos of this gentleman. Y o capital H o o n yo hoon. And according to Dr. Carl, Johun is a genuinely enlightened human being, one of the most, you know, enlightened on the planet. We kind of agree that at any given time, there might be a couple dozen truly enlightened people on the planet. And Yohun strikes me as possibly being one of them. I mean, that one of my things about finding people who are better than I am, further down the road than I am, I then talk to them about who do they see that's further down the road than them? Because if I can identify this person, that means that they're not further ahead of me than somebody standing on the horizon. You know, I can see them. They're on the horizon. It's a tiny little figure. It's a tiny little figure, okay? But the question I'm going to have is, well, what does the territory look like to you? You know, from where you're standing, you look further ahead. Who do you see out there? Because what I'm looking for is to see, you know, are the things that I'm doing putting me on that path? Am I legitimately, you know, are my meditations taking me in the right direction? Are my actions taking me in the right direction? Am I living my life according to my deepest values? I can't see it. I need people to look at me, but I also need them to help me see whether or not the path that I'm on is the path of the masters in that particular sense. In that sense, mastery being a verb, not a noun, a process. But there is an end point in terms of disassembling the ego cocoon that is the I self. Every time I say I, I'm relating to my ego cocoon. Without that, there is no I. And we'll talk about that a little bit. It is germane to the point here. I have been listening to and watching Johun's videos every morning for a couple months now. Every single morning, I will put him on for 15 minutes to an hour because he's blowing my mind. Not with all sorts of profound comments, although that's there. It is with the simplicity, what he has to say, that in that sense, it's as if enlightenment is what we're born with. Then we develop our egos to protect us and get us to adulthood. And then if we take a spiritual path, we can voluntarily begin to disassemble that process so that what we get is someone who has the wisdom of an elder and the aliveness and curiosity and openness of a child. Without the sense of the I, now the I gets in the way. You probably have noticed if you write, if you dance, if you do anything, as long as you're thinking, I'm sitting here writing, you ain't right. As long as you're doing 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. I'm dancing, you're not dancing. The dancing is its own thing. The writing is its own thing. What Stephen King refers to as the boys in the basement. The unconscious part of you that you have to access that is accessed through flow. And you reach flow by having the most basic aspects of your skill at unconscious competence. So you don't have to think about it, you can just do it. You can just be it. As long as you're looking at the sex education book, you're not making love, you're not making the connection with the person that you care about. What Johun Kim talks about is the zero point. It's at the center of your being. It's the eye of the storm. You are. There's a lot of activity, perhaps, but within you there is stillness. And I'm going to run out of language here because all because I don't live in that space. I have visited that space and I visit it more and more often. And if I keep going down this path, that ego cocoon will disassemble and I will be. I will lose that sense of being. Steve Barnes, the part of me that got here. What music do I recommend for meditation? Whatever it is that calms you, if you're just beginning, I would strongly suggest jazz, some sort of soft jazz, Ocean sounds. Vivaldi. Largo rhythm. 60 beat per minute Largo rhythm Vivaldi. Something that takes you into a calm state. In that calm state, what you're looking for is to be present. What will happen is that you will either as you move towards being more present and by the way, thank you for that question, Sylvia. I can talk about these things, but it's going to be best if I'm an interactive with people. You look for the moments at which you are totally present, but you're not aware that you're there. The thing is there, the breath is there, the heartbeat is there, the light is present within the body. But you're not thinking. I am observing this happening. The instant you think that you are observing it, you've popped out. If you go to sleep, you've popped out. So it is to find. And somebody asked Johun, and once again I'm referencing him because he's one of those guideposts along the path. I honestly believe at this moment that he's the real deal. Somebody said, what is the best time and place for meditation? There is no best time and place for meditation. The only question is, are you meditating? Are you. Are you in that space? Are you bringing yourself to it? So you might do that during Tai chi or yoga or washing the dishes or working in your garden or sitting in a meditative position in full lotus or walking down the beach or any number of different things. The question is, are you totally there? Are you there at that moment? If you're thinking about the past or worried about the future, you're not there. If you're observing yourself doing it, you're not there. What, what you're looking for is that thing called that 0.1 way to look at it. When you're flowing. If you're doing writing or dancing or yoga or Tai chi or playing with your dog or making love or any number of different things where you're moved into the danger zone, where the dancer becomes the dance. The intensity of an orgasm is in direct proportion to the amount of your ego that you release at that moment. You step through the page, into the story. Those sorts of statements are all talking about the flow aspect of this. And flow is the doorway into it. It's not the thing, it's the doorway into it. Flow in that sense, is the last stop of ordinary mind. You go through flow into this place where you are not separate from the thing that you're doing. It might be looking at a flame, might be listening to a piece of music. It might be any number of different things in that space. One of the things that comes from that space is a deep and abiding sense of who you really are and what is true. People who can access that space have their answer to the question, who am I? And they have their answer to the question, what is true? To the degree that you do not have those. To the degree that you don't have the natural power, meaning the Warrior's Journey program that I am proud to be a part of and to have brought into the world. The question is not. When people say, well, if I'm promising that you're going to be safer walking down the street and, you know, in 10 hours of listening to audio or 10 days of following, that doesn't relate to, you know, a couple of months or a couple of years of martial arts training or several years of martial arts training. You know, a black belt doesn't. Doesn't make you invulnerable. We're not talking about technique. We're not talking about fitness. We're not talking about strategy and tactics, although all those things are in there. We're talking about whether or not you have connection to who you really are. Because who you really are is on one end, an animal with 100% access to your animal right to survive, which means all the rules out the window. If you're worried about rules or how you look or what might happen after any of that stuff, you're not in that space. Now, I'm not suggesting that. That you have to be in that space, but the audios. Okay, let me. Let me put the address www.real warriors journey.com. and I totally. I totally support what we did in this set of audios in this course, but I'm trying, I'm not trying to sell it to you right now, what I'm doing. I'm trying to talk to you about something. I'm trying to understand here. So I'm almost asking for your help. The place the eye gets you into the adult world. You know, I drive, I study, I love, I this, I that. It fulfills many purposes. But in order to reach your greatest performance, even in the mundane world, you have to move beyond the I in. Into that place of it is here I am connected to it. In order to do that, you have to move beyond fear. Fear reinforces the ego, reinforces the eye, because the eye in that sense is helping you survive. I must fight, I must run, and so forth. I am being threatened, so it serves a purpose. But the warrior, the artist, the lover, the teacher, the shaman has to move beyond the eye into the it is. And as soon as we do that, we run out of language. There just isn't any language to express what's happening there, because language depends upon shared reference. And unless you've had that experience, you don't have it. So I can say, you know, you've experienced that driving on the freeway, you've experienced it making love, you've experienced it. If you go deep into your art, you might have experienced it with Runner's High. You might have experienced it any number of different times, when the activity is in rhythm with your thought and your motion, your emotions, and it is happening rather than you are partial, fragmented, observing it happening. Johun calls this the zero point. And from that point, you are free of everything. You're stepping outside of time, even, because all there is is this moment. And in another moment, there'll be another moment, but it's still the same moment. And after that, there'll be another moment, but it's still the same moment. It's like each of these moments is a separate window in on the same moment, which is eternity. And I think that when people talk about immortality, they're referring to somebody who has stepped outside of time. Their body hasn't stepped outside of time, so their body will die eventually. But I do notice that these people do tend to live longer and healthier and accomplish much more. Are there higher levels where life is extended to some degree that would be difficult for us to rationally justify or believe? You know, I don't know. I do know that there are more things going on on that level than a purely Newtonian, Aristotelian view of the universe would suggest. But where it goes that I can't tell you. What I can tell you is that what you've always been looking for is peace. What you've always been looking for is love. What you've always been looking for is joy. That the process of life in that way is sort of like starting from being a child and developing an ego and then learning to avoid the pain of punishment, spankings and bad grades in order for you to get the things that you need and then making the transition between doing things to avoid pain and doing them to gain pleasure. When you make that switch, you put yourself in a position where the more you do what you do, the better it feels. Compare that to trying to lose weight, for instance, because you're afraid of losing your partner, or you're afraid of death, or you're afraid of people laughing at you. You're afraid of the doctor's opinion of you if you don't. In that instance, you're using pain to motivate yourself to have a discipline that you didn't have ordinarily because your beliefs and your emotions have been driving your behaviors. But your fear then can push you out of that temporarily. Temporarily. The instant you've lost enough weight that the doctor stops giving you the long face, or your partner stops complaining about your size, or you can walk up a set of stairs without being scared of it. The instant you do that, the fear decreases, the motivation decreases, and now you're back in your old pattern. Unless you change that pattern, the underlying pattern and the underlying pattern is connect. Well, let's save that for a second. If, on the other hand, if you're doing something that you love, that will also get you the result that you want of losing the weight or whatever, you know, I love eating this kind of food, or I love dancing, I love hiking. So I will do these things because I love doing it. The more you do these things, the better you feel. So that becomes a self reinforcing loop instead of a self extinguishing loop. So pain and fear are great for short term motivations, but they're trash for long term motivations. For long term motivations you need to connect to love. But the zero point back to that between fear and love is the place where you're neither running away from fear nor running towards love. You are happy where you are that that. Running away from fear implies that you are out of harmony with the universe. Running towards something you love implies that you don't already have what you need. So these people have by in some way, either naturally because their parents did it, or their society supported it, or they went out and found masters to help them. They found the way that they could be at that zero point between fear and love, between pain and pleasure, where nothing is happening, but everything's getting done. And Johun Kim, when he's speaking to students, will be in this space and he will answer the questions from that space of calm. There's a slight sense of amusement. It's very interesting. And if I have not been misled, not just by my current coach, but by my study up until this time, there are not gradations to this, that what he is is as the Buddha was, or depending on how you look at it, you know, Muhammad was, Christ was, that there is full realization of what we are and nothing more than that. That nobody's more a child of the universe than anyone else. It's just that there are people who have more awareness of it than others, and that that awareness allows you to function in different ways. On a mundane level, you're talking about being good at martial arts or being good with your children, or being good at writing or dancing or something like gymnastics or something else where you want to be able to flow with it. But it requires some technical skill to get there, some knowledge to get there. What you really want to do is to express your art. This is me. I am expressing myself in this moment. And masters then would just be people who are on that path. They have their basics, they're doing their chopping wood, carrying water, they're doing their thing every day. And if that is a path that is true that they're on, then the process of doing this will begin to dis, tinguish, to extinguish, disassemble the ego cocoon, so that what remains is the true person. If you don't do that, then what the Sufis say is that enlightenment is the door of awareness that opens at the moment of death, that the seeker simply is attempting to open it before they get there. So, Johun Kim, then, to the degree that he is the product as advertised, that I think he is, that I feel that he is, is a person who's on the other side of that doorway. His physical body is on the other side of that doorway. Instead of being like most of the rest of us, we live in this world, but occasionally visit that one. He lives in that world, but occasionally visits this one. That makes him a bodhisattva. That makes him someone who has completed the journey, but returns to offer advice to those of us who are trying to make the journey. Trying to understand what he's saying, the words that he is expressing, in order to try to describe the territory as he sees it is my challenge. It is that sense of, you know, how do I relate this to my experience. How do I relate this to my conceptualization of the universe? How do I relate this to action in this world, to inaction in this world? There are many, many questions to ask, and I don't have the answers to them. The advantages that I am the answers that what I'm looking for is within me. That what I have to do is to connect to that, is to be aware of that. And that answer is within each and every one of you. In that sense, we can have a conversation, but I don't have anything to give in that level. I can say, this is what it looks like to me. This is what I'm experiencing. What do you think about that? That's really as far as I can go when it comes to this sort of thing. I can just try to do that, try to express that the zero point and the boys in the basement and flow state that all these things are talking about the same road that leads to the same destination. That the end point of that destination is a real thing. There is a point where you know who you are and you know what is true. And I have been in that space often enough to be able to say that with confidence. Staying there is another matter. You guys have seen me get knocked off balance. If you paid any attention. There are things that, you know, conversations about race in America would do that. Because fear for my children will knock me off my center. I mean, it just does. Anybody who knows me knows that I spent most of my life studying how to hurt people. And yet all I ever wanted to do was to be loving. The question of why in the world would I have spent so much of my time studying taking people's bodies apart when all I wanted to do was embrace their hearts. If you can resolve that apparently contradiction, you understand me. And to the degree that you see yourself in me, then if I understand you, I understand myself better. And if you understand me, you understand yourself better. And we can help each other grow. So that's all I wanted to do today, was to talk. It was just kind of a chance to talk through that question of the zero point. That thing that is on the other side of the door of flow. That place that you probably have been in times when you were totally present. You weren't worried about the future or the past. You weren't concerned with the observer or the observed. You were just there. In fact, there was no you. It was there. You know, Bruce Lee talked about, you know, I do not hit. It hits. That's what he's talking about, you know, we have that capacity to exceed ourselves, but we have to give up everything that we think we are. We have to give up the very tools that got us here in order to get to the next place where we can bring everything we have. What I'm trying to do right now with my career and my life is more important. Taking care of my family, embracing these career opportunities, being the martial artist that my teachers expect me to be, the teacher teacher that they expect me to be, demands that I kill Stephen Barnes, that I that the ego construct that got me here. Ain't it so let's see. Renny Sheree said Reiki. It is similar to what my Reiki master taught us about accessing the universal healing energy that is within each individual and is the collective connection that we all have. There is no time. Today is forever. Renny, I absolutely salute you. That is absolutely what I'm talking about here. It is absolutely the path that is laid out before me that I feel the eye, you know, can't get there. The camel can't go through the eye of the needle. Moses can't enter the promised land. The Steve Barnes that started this journey cannot get there. And it's okay because I was never that guy. I was never the construct that I created to get me here. I was always something else. And to the degree that I can let go of what I thought I was, let go of the definitions, the names. Now I can not only be, but I can be of service. I can help others, I can teach, I can guide, I can say, don't pay attention to me. I'm not important and I never was. I'm not even here. But there is this path and that path will teach you everything that you need and give you everything you need, which is basically just access to who and what it is you always were in the first place. Thank you very much for sharing this time with me. I treasure being able to have these conversations and I hope that if there's anything that I can do to clarify anything that I've said or be of service in any way, you'll reach out to me and let me know. You take care. If you enjoyed this, please share it. It's the only way we know which conversations are reaching people. And by looking at the comments, it's the only way I know how I can best serve. Take care. See you next time.