Manila Dreams #6

(I am publishing some but not all, of my private musings of my week in the Philippines studying their beautiful and lethal martial science)

9:26 AM

Manila Dreams: #6

My internal alignment was skewed all my life, warped by the need to succeed and survive. I stepped outside the duality of black and white into a triumverate of white-Asian-black (mixed) with a cultural core going back to Vedic India.

Tai Chi/Kali

Bottom of the ladder (again! Always!)

“”For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing…” Socrates (quoted by Plato)

One of the beautiful things about Manila is that, more than in any context I’ve been in the last decades, I was a pretty rank beginner. Everyone there had spent more time in a specific branch of FMA than I have, because my primary familiarity came through the Inosanto system, which is very, very eclectic. This is a matter of 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 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.

So I have more “freedom” than structure in this sense. But paradoxically, structure IS freedom, like a cocoon you build to metamorphize, and then chew your way out of. This can be a teacher’s bliss or nightmare: the most capable students absorb technique until it connects with their emotions and spirit, at which time it expresses differently.

Get this? 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 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 the old BKF school looked the same. All the black belts looked different, but in that difference, they were the same: a genuine expression of THAT man or woman’s essence, 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 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 matter: “who am I?” and “what is true?”

The fact is 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. 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.

Every day Tananarive is new, and I have to meet her where SHE is.

Every day Jason is new, and I have to put what I know of his past at “unconscious competence” and see where HE is today.

Every story is exactly the same as every other story…but also totally different. Take the “known” and root it at Unconscious competence, then seek the new expression of your deepest understanding of the principles involved. I NEVER start a story knowing I can complete it. There is always fear. The fear keeps me safe — you can’t do “hack work” when you are 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. This is the glorious adventure of it all.

And in martial arts, I remember Gichin Funakoshi, the creator of Shotokan karate, said on his deathbed: “I’m just beginning to understand a punch.”

Get it? You are the center of a circle. Sit, and the horizon is the same distance in all directions. Move, and the horizon remains distant, but the territory is new. And 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. Danny’s pedagogy was different, deeply influenced by Bruce’s teaching and perspective. It is a path. This is a different path, one that created the men and women who taught Dan, so its all a part of the Tao, all part of the totality.

Can I humble myself, forget about having this or that rank, these or those teachers…and simultaneously honor and NEVER forget them? If they taught 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 cannot be Niven or Pournelle. I have to be Steve Barnes…or else I never really learned. If I can SEE the 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 for us to find our own ways. It is one of the great joys of my life that Steve approves of me, as a fighter and as a man.

Whatever happens next, a door has opened. I can see it, stretching from a childhood where these things are learned for pure play and schoolyard games, through adulthood and fighting for life and family, through old age, where there is 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. Teaching empties the cup so that more learning can take place.

This is the path of evolution, and 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.” 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 put myself back together, keeping only the pieces that actually connect to my being. And in my marriage and fatherhood, my writing, my teaching and my martial science, I now have the clearest view of who I actually am, what I have been, and the path I’ve struggled to walk that I ever have.

This is the beginning of the next act of my entire life. I thank the experiences and companions which/who supported me in getting here, or conversely OPPOSED me, and by so doing, forced me to find strength and clarity I’d never have been forced to find. 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.”

No matter how I excoriated myself for not doing more, or 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 are drying rapidly.

Can’t wait to fly. “Caterpillars do not become butterflies. Caterpillars die, so that butterflies can be born.”

This was always going to kill me. Ain’t it cool?

Namaste

Steve

www.stevenbarneslist.com