What's This Tao All About?

A lighthearted Taoism podcast hosted by a journalist and Tao philosopher.

Month: September 2015

Episode 5 — Te (or the Tao In-Action)

September 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments

We open the show with a discussion on how to become a practicing Taoist. Later, Dr. Carl and Tod tackle the oh-so important Tao concept of Te. The Te helps put the Tao in action, Dr. Carl discusses how you can make it work for you. We end with a brief talk on chapter four of the Tao Te Ching which helps you find your own cosmic nature.

Subscribe to What’s This Tao All About? on iTunes >>

Episode Transcript

[00:00] [Music]

[00:30] Tod Perry: You’re listening to What’s This Tao All About? A lighthearted look at Taoism, featuring Dr. Carl Totton and Tod Perry. Carl is the founder of the Taoist Institute in North Hollywood, California. Tod Perry knows a little about Taoism and is mainly here because he owns a few microphones. Now, let’s learn: What’s This Tao All About? Welcome back to What’s This Tao All About. My name is Tod Perry and with me is Sijo, Dr. Carl Totton. We’re here at the Taoist Institute to bring you a little more discussion on the Tao Te Ching. To try to put this mysterious, magical, wonderful thing into exactly what it doesn’t want to be put into words. So, we’re gonna start out here with talking about starting out. So, people who have ventured this Chances are you’re interested in the Tao Te Ching. You’re interested in some kind of practice. Carl, how do you feel how do people start out in kind of being a practicing Taoist or what you know what I’m saying? What’s the people know how to practice like Christianity? You know you kind of go to church, you model the behaviors in the Bible. What would be the way to be a practicing I guess Taoist?

[02:00] Dr. Carl Totton: They’ll be a great answer. You know, people who have read the Tao Te Ching, they were call me, Tex me or come to see me and say, you know, my gosh, I just realized I’ve been a Taoist on my life. Because some things were just resonate within the Taoist perceptions that make sense to them. And so I think that of course, I always advise people to start with the Tao Te Ching. Because that lays The well spring from which so much richness has emerged and I think that even though people may not understand everything in there because understanding of trying and attempting to quote understand is actually part of the problem. But yet the Tao Te Ching throws you into a position of both wanting to understand while realizing the limitations of attempting to understand. And that puzzle meant captivates people. It’s fascinating. And it opens them up because you’re what is this? You have to expand the way you’re thinking or to grasp all of it or attempt to grasp it. Exactly. To try to figure out what’s this Tao All About? Right. And so people say, well the word Tao means the road or the path or the way. The way to what? Well, It’s a way to, you know, they say that the action of the Tao is always to do what to return. Yes. To revert to return to the source. What’s the source? Well, as I frequently say, you know, all of us are here in this world, in this universe, to live a meaning for life. And in order to live a meaning for life, there’s some conditions that help support living a meaning for life.

[04:00] Dr. Carl Totton: Knowledge or experience. What knowledge or experience? Well, most people at some point want to know that what they’re doing is actually something that is important in the context of who they are. So it goes back to who am I really? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? What am I doing here? And so part of the Taoist experience is To become quiet enough and synergy enough and stably enough to begin to intuit some of these answers. Nobody can give another human being the answers to those questions. But yet, since each one of us is actually part of the field, this whole field of energy that constitutes the Tao, the answer is embedded in the experience. But it’s not in the words, it’s not, you know, it’s in, Actually having an experience, unpack that a little bit. And lived experience. But what gets in the way of lived experience? Well, most people after a while, they have a job to go to, they have bills to pay, they have responsibilities, they have kids to raise, they have to do things all the time. And in the doing of things all the time, they may have gotten away from something that internally, They might say they’re a heart’s desire, maybe they’ve always known that they were a painter or a musician or a crafts maker or a writer or whatever. Whatever at a deep level they intuit is would really bring joy and happiness and meaning to their life and harmony and harmony balance, but you have to aren’t doing it. They’re busy thinking and doing other things.

[06:00] Dr. Carl Totton: Who have gotten into a profession that they love, the demands of the profession get so specific that all the joy has left. Right, yeah. There’s no fun anymore. You know, you hear the thing. Are we having fun yet? No. We’re not having fun yet. Right. And my teacher, one of my teachers, you know what he said? Number one is fun. Number one is fun. Because if you aren’t engaged in a joyous way We’re missing something. We’re missing something. We’re so busy and we’re missing something. What is that something that we’re missing? That is what the Tao is all about. It’s getting to that something. Getting to that something. It’s different for everybody. But I am convinced that everybody has it. Why? Because everybody is part of the field. Everybody is part of the Tao. The Tao is all that is. And everything that is is what?

[07:00] Tod Perry: Which is both good and of course is brought us some problems. So to practice kind of the Tao is to keep returning to it, almost in your day, returning to that something. Returning to that field and through certain practices, whether they be meditation, contemplation, being quiet, engaging in activities where you kind of turn off your mind and go into the zone. All these things are ways to return

[07:30] Dr. Carl Totton: to the Tao. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. I picked something up here. Yes. The sense of being engaged, you know when you’re really engaged in something that you enjoy, how time just flies. Oh, hours can go by and it feels like five minutes. It’s time for a moment. It’s time for a moment. And it’s been recorded the show and every once in while look down to a time check to figure out, you know, to kind It’s a certain way, yang, we get absorbed in what we’re doing. Music is a wonderful way to do that. Time and literally write some of this down because the things they’re just in are ahead sometime. You know it could kind of come in one ear and go out the other. But if you actually write it down so you can kind of return to it and look at it. And what should you write down? Well, what do you really enjoy most in life? What makes you happy? What you know I said number one is fun. What’s really fun for you. Yeah

[09:00] Tod Perry: Then you can look at that and say, hmm, lmao, You’re gonna be your pro, enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself. Get the most out of it, learn and then impress on. Right. And become the dust. Right. But look forward to it. Exactly. And I find that such a revolutionary thing, especially in the realm of philosophy or religion which takes itself so seriously or everything so sacred. And the Taoism more like, get out there, engage by the ticket, take the ride, have fun

[10:00] Dr. Carl Totton: While you’re doing it and that’s what life is. And it’s so simple and it’s almost like if you were to go up to somebody and go, what’s the meaning of life or how should I be living or what should I be doing? And you go up to them and go, no, no, it’s all about having a good time. Well, that’s not serious. Right? That’s not meaningful, but it is. It’s nothing more When you feel that it just radiates from you and it’s actually contagious. And other people are going wow, why is he having so much fun? What could I do? You know, they equally have fun. Not doing what they do but finding my own path. And Taoism is about helping each individual find their own way, find their own path. Same time understanding that we’re all part of this mix. You know, we’re here to support each other. I think a lot of modern life has become very competitive. Oh yeah. People are competing for a position. Completely. Competing for property, competing for money. Look at the history of the world. It’s a competition for resources. With one group trying to take somebody else’s resources and dominate, manipulate and control other people to get it. But what I don’t know what the truth is. Ch And that has led to gross global instability in terms of the environment, in terms of the ozone, you know, in terms of the basic conditions for life are now kind of teetering in the balance. We’re poisoning the life well.

[12:30] Dr. Carl Totton: It can go either way. It can go either way. And we wanted to go the right way. And so supporting people’s consciousness to make the right decisions that will influence the people who think they are in charge, right, the politicians, the industrialists, you know, these people are supposed to be representing who the people. People really want to have fun, to live a life that’s meaningful and to have peace, to have harmony, to have balance. And if our quote leaders are not providing that and they rarely do. Then I think that’s what leads to so much unhappiness and uncertainty and a sense of being frantic in this world to dance. And the anxiety that that creates. That leads to violence and depression and you know. It leads to both internal imbalance, like you just said, you know, depression, anxiety and external imbalance, you know, calls for invasions, war, just activity, you know, I do know how to use it. I do know how to use it. I do know how to use it. I do know how to use it. I do know how to use it. I This is a struggle and is in this competition with each other from the drums. Yeah. That all is over. Is that a way to live your life? No. You want to spend the next 30, 40, 50 years just doing that? Really? I don’t think so.

[14:30] Tod Perry: The Hollywood, California. Check out the Taoistist Stute.com. See their schedule of classes including Taoist meditation, kung fu and qigong. That’s TaoistInstitute.com. Tell me if I’m wrong here. The character for day is I was reading. It means upright heart or virtue and also combined with left foot which is stepping out. So it’s finding that virtue that one discovers on the on the Tao, on the road, taking that virtue and then putting it in action. So it’s actually not just living a life that’s you know you’re returning to yourself. You’re finding your Tao but also how to put that into the world around us and how to interact with people, and interact with the environment. So it’s kind of the I feel and correct me if I’m wrong. The external practice of the Tao. The motive energy for this act of creation for putting something out there. If you will.

[16:30] Dr. Carl Totton: Not getting anything done or fixing anything or changing anything because you don’t have that energy behind it. So, could the day be kind of that animating energy behind the framework of the doubt? Exactly. Exactly. It’s that energy that allows things to become what they are. Okay. You know, often we might even know kind of what to do or how things should be done, but if we don’t have the mechanism for actually putting it into place, It doesn’t happen. So things remain in this nebulous, unresolved, unmanifested state. So it’s almost like the motivation, the creative force, the creative energy to put it out there in the world. It’s what takes it from the inside and puts it to the outside. And when the outside and the inside connect and are in harmony in balance, ooh, life is good.

[17:30] Tod Perry: That’s when you’ve kicked into the next gear. You have this returning feeling of the Tao where you say to yourself, I want to become a cook or use, in the day, is that thing that puts it into practice. It’s the correctly and with right mind and right order going out to execute this meal you’re going to.

[18:00] Dr. Carl Totton: And the activity of internally picturing, you know, the way that we live as human beings, the way that we live in a sea of images to, you know, in order to do something, you have to see it as possible. You have to have some image, but some picture of whatever it is in your mind. But if it just stays a picture in your mind, it’ll never happen. And then I think this is the key. When you’ve taken what’s inside of you, put it out there as an absolutely attainable reality and then allow that attainable reality, which at some level has already happened in a universe of infinite possibility. It’s actually already happened. And so when we take this picture from the inside and actually Find it outside and then allow that to just draw us into it. That is the day. That is how you actually created. It’s this law of attraction if you will. This law of manifestation. And that’s exactly how it works. But then, another thing is that you have to actually see it, think it as if it has already happened. That’s the key. It’s already happened. How would you feel if it’s already happened? Why’d be excited? I’d be so happy. You gotta feel that. And then how would your body feel? My body would feel really loose and strong and really intact. And when you put that mental and that emotional and that physical all together at the same time and place as you are envisioning this reality as if it’s already happened, bam, it manifests. That’s the day.

[20:00] Tod Perry: So for the people listening at home, they have, they’re kind of figuring out their way, their Tao, and then to put it into action in your mind. And obviously it’s not just wishful thinking. It’s actual action, but when you have in your mind, your desired outcome, and you begin to feel like it’s already happened. It’s going to be easier for you to go out and achieve those things, because you have that confidence, you have

[20:30] Dr. Carl Totton: Relay of life, you’ve got to baton and you’ve got that goal to hit in its fully visualized. Right. And like I said on three levels, it has to be mental, emotional and physical. Okay. All three. And no doubt, it has to be like no doubt that it’s actually real. Because it actually is real. Some are out there. It just has to manifest it real in your life experience. Yeah. Right, that step, leap of faith. But you’re not just jumping into something where you literally have no concept. You’ve taken the inside, externalized it, and then used the external picture to pull you into existence. That is the process of manifestation. One more thing, a lot of people try to do what I just said in their mind, just try to use the mental way of creating it. That does work, but unfortunately because our minds are polarized, what you create, you will also create in these unconscious something that will uncreated. And you’ll get backlash. You’ll get sabotaged somehow. However, if we go to an actual more powerful creative place, the heart, where in Chinese they say the shin, the spirit, lives in the heart. The character for the day was a bright heart or virtue. Yeah, it goes back to the heart. Because the heart unlike the brain is non-polarized. It’s a place of unity consciousness. And it’s pure. And that’s even Christian, isn’t it? The pure of heart shall see God, right? And the beatitudes, all that, right? So if we go to this pure place in the heart and create it from there, and it

[22:30] Dr. Carl Totton: It’s many times more powerful than the one that actually comes off the brain. Actually. So this is the place to actually do the creation. And so if we get in touch with our hearts desire and then let this process of manifestation emerge from there, it’ll happen. Without creating the conditions to sabotage and uncreated at the same time. The polarized brain can help itself. You know, we got right brain, left brain, four brain, back brain, to high We, we, it’s split, it’s separate and therefore we wind up splitting things into many, many different dimensions of experience and that leads to separation. Yeah. And separation is in many respects the problem. So yeah, I’ve been recently trying to kind of start my own because I work as a writer kind of during my normal when I’m not out cultivating the Tao I’m writing at a desk and I’ve been looking towards

[23:30] Tod Perry: Starting my own kind of in-home writing business where I have a bunch of different clients that I write for different things and I’m unlocking myself from the cage of having to be, you know, serve one master or whatever, even though the people work for quite wonderful but did kind of do my own thing. I’m ready for that in life. And so I’ve had this, I’ve had this thing I’ve been working on and I have moments where I think, These moments where I was about just ready to kind of step in but I feel like something’s pulling me back. There’s that weird thing where my heart has been consistent in my desire. My mind sometimes is no, you know what? Play it safe. Don’t go out there, don’t do it. And then late, it’s inconsistent. But my heart, I feel in it, has been consistent the whole way. So there’s a…

[24:30] Dr. Carl Totton: 5% of the time, the heart and mind have not been aligned. So it’s a point of keeping those things or just telling the mind shut up. Do the work. And ultimately what you just said is actually something very profound. Which is that the heart and the mind need to connect. Usually the average person is certainly here in the west, the mind is dominating most of the time. Left brain is pretty much in the boss, right? So now we’re trying to find this whole new way of existing and being getting in touch with this unified consciousness of the heart. Now, the heart has, you might say there’s two heart fields. One is the emotional heart, right? And we’re all familiar with the emotional heart, right? All the passions, the jealousy, the envy, the anger, the fear, right? That, and then we want to be coming from. There’s a deeper place in the heart that’s usually only found in certain types of meditation, by the way. That’s another reason why meditation matters. And so when we find this other place, so called sacred space of the heart, of the tiny space of the heart, it’s an actual physical place in the heart. But we actually have to move to that place and experience that as a real entity, a real It’s like the entire universe is in there. It’s where the Tao resides in every human being. And that’s where we can approach our highest nature and the highest component of all that connects all of us. Because we’re all in the same boat. We’re all in the same universe. We’re all from the El emanating from the same field. Exactly. And so if we can find that place and it’s not that difficult, you just have to know where it is and how to get there. And then turn to the Taoist Institute.

[26:30] Dr. Carl Totton: Our attention up to the brain, really to the pineal gland, if you will, and feel that connection between the heart and the brain. Now they become a single unity, a single unified field. So that the heart and the brain actually are perceiving the same way, maybe for the first time in your lives. Wow. And when you can do that, you’re home free. Wonderful. I think that’s a good place to stop with day. That was very good. I like when we can talk about these things in a non-abstract, I mean it’s abstract in a way but actual… Here are tangible things to do. It’s not just words about that aren’t connected to your personal experience and your personal practice. See everything needs to support everything else. If we’re gonna use words and that we have to, you know, unless we’re telepathic, we’re gonna have to use words right now. Understanding that the word is not the thing that we’re really trying to convey. It’s pointing, right? It’s pointing in that direction, but then we each have to find how that resonates in our own experience. And every individual, that’s your birthright, is to do that. And our job is, It’s to point that out, you know, that you have the capacity to do that. And here’s some tools that might help you. But we can’t walk the journey for you. But we can point to the fact that you have a journey and there’s a path and we will support you when you walk there. You’re not alone. You’re not alone. You’ll never walk alone. We’re all in this together and we know that.

[28:30] Tod Perry: So let’s get on to chapter 4 of the Tao Te Ching. And I think this one from my notes aligns with what we’ve been speaking. I love how, and this isn’t always intentional, how we have a topic, we’ll have a, you know, some things we discuss, in lo and behold we come to the chapter, and the chapter echoes exactly what we’ve been discussing. How about that? Yeah. How about that? Yeah.

[29:00] Dr. Carl Totton: Dr. 4 of the Tao Te Ching I think really concerns the notions of emptiness and infinity. So what does it say? Well, the Tao is an empty vessel. It is used but never filled. All unfathomable source of the 10,000 things. Now I love the 10,000 things is the metaphor for every. Everything in existence. Everything. So that was just a big number back then. Ten thousand. Right, they’re just throwing it out. That’s a lot of things. I mean, they could have said, you know, ten million or ten billion. They do go play. Whatever word you say is a five year old. A trillion. But I like how there’s that child like feeling of the Tao. There’s ten thousand. Yeah. Arbitrary. Yeah. But it’s unfathomable source of 10,000 things. You know, if you go back to the beginning, what’s our beginning as far as we know? The big bang, right? Right. Out of this big bang, everything came into manifestation, into existence. Well, what was before the big bang? Um, we don’t know. What, you know, where did everything come from? Before there was anything, what was there? Some people say there were some kind of few of the energy. We don’t know, we can only hypothesize. But in order for everything to exist, it does seem to have come from a one point, one source. From this one source, everything expanded and contracted.

[31:00] Dr. Carl Totton: Things are opening, things are closing, things are coming, things are going, things are living, things are dying. Even the biggest brightest star will live, glow, blink out eventually. And go down to a hard rock. And that’s what we are. A billion stars exploded, billions of light years ago. This is a monic energy actually went out into space and eventually, coalesced, cooled and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin and yin It is magic, it is a magic, and that’s magic. And the fact that we look like we’re the solid beings, the wall, the chair, the ground. Everything looks solid, it isn’t. It just atoms just floating around in a pool of energy, interconnected energies. Can you imagine if we all looked at each other like that? And we just saw ourselves as these balls of light energy, just glowing and all interconnected? Can you imagine without due to

[32:30] Tod Perry: That’s the truth about what we really are. Yeah, right not that I think the lie we’ve been told or we it was the great line by Yoda in the Empire Strikes Back where he says Master Yoda. Yes Master Yoda says luminous was it luminous beings are we? Yes not this crude matter. Yes. Yeah, it’s it’s amazing. Speaking the truth now if I can only have that in front of me 24 hours a day or you I’m going with my luminous piano, the wife, or you know, that piano. But it’s true. It puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? Yes. Yes. In a major way. And so he goes on to say after that, blunt the sharpness. Talk about arguing. Blunt the sharpness. Untangle the knot, right? Right. Thinking we think ourselves into knots every day, don’t we? Yes. Blunt the sharp I was reading that and I was looking at the emperors and I guess they were saying that emperors were like a Chinese idea of God or the gods that were ruling everything. And in the Tao they’re saying this unfathomable thing is from

[34:00] Dr. Carl Totton: Be on that. You know what I’m saying? It’s that. And to merge with the dust, I guess with some kind of metaphor for death and to almost dance with death. And we’re all cosmic dust. That’s what we are. It’s true. And that’s where we come from. We will return to that. Even the Christian, from ashes to ashes, from dust to dust. There’s so many parallels. I think that at the beginning people observed things and they had experiences and then they tried to codify that somehow by writing it down and then creating some type of system, some sort of structural system. To manage it, to continue to manage the information. It was primitive information management. And then add these things to make sure you adhere to it. You’ll go to hell unless you adhere to it. And the spiritual which then became religious then became the state. Very often became the state. And every state is concerned with what? Power and power. And how can you know, through manipulation, dominance or an. See so what started out as an inside as an understanding. Ending, I think is more into something else. A misunderstanding. Yes. And so I think Lao Tzu, yin, he’s always, it’s like the Tao Tzu Ching is like a mirror. It’s always in a very practical way saying, okay, take a look at yourself. Blunt the sharpness, untangle the knots, soften the glare. Because in our daily existence, we’ve got lots of knots, lots of glare.

[36:00] Dr. Carl Totton: I’m doing everything. And lots of sharpness. Sharp tongues. Oh, just to take a look at our current political debates. Oh my lord. It’s like life has become a reality TV show. I don’t know what the heck happened. I don’t know where everything went wrong. I think Lao Tzu’s way back then. He’s saying he’s illustrating how he’s going to be. All things can go wrong and pointing back to where we need to return in order to feel renewed back to the source. The source of these 10,000 things. Everything has a source. And if you can abide in the source rest in the source, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. Because then you feel like you’ve rediscovered yourself. You’ve found yourself. And how many people say that they want to find themselves? Blessed. I wanna find myself. I wanna figure out who am I. And then I think they struggle with that for a while and then they accept some answer, oh you’re this, you’re that. Now go to school, learn this, become that. That’s who you are, that’s what you are. And then when does that one becomes hopefully successful doing that. And then at the end, on their deathbed, people look back and they go, h

[37:30] Tod Perry: One, word of the time go and two, why did I spend all this time doing something that doesn’t and didn’t bring me joy and happiness? Isn’t this man guy? With the businessman guy you’re gonna have certain values and morals and adhere to those or you can go out and you can be the hippie guy and have these values and morals. You can be some compet- you know, you could be the- you know, there’s all these prescribed archetypes of people that- people are trying to fit themselves into. I find it to myself many times and I try to get out of that. So as we wrap up today, do we have a good solid takeaway or something that people can do to enact their day or you know. Well, there’s always so many things, it’s a matter of just trying to come up with something that’s simple and obtainable, and it’s a very good idea to do it.

[39:00] Dr. Carl Totton: So, and easy to do. If it isn’t easy people aren’t gonna do it. And so I always think it has to be easy. So, one of the meditations I like to do is to think about visualizing all of your dreams. What is your ultimate heart’s desire? Think about that as a dream. And actually see, by the way, when you go to sleep at night, With this, it’s almost like having a word at the tip of your tongue. You want to have this image of this dream of what you really want most in your life, right at the tip of your consciousness and then fall into a dream state and see where that takes you. Because one of the keys I’m convinced is to not have such a divide between our conscious and our subconscious. How do you take that down? Wow! And you can control and play within that. You can play. You talk about fun. Oh my goodness. You will be ecstatic. All night and then all day. Because ultimately you’ll come to realize it’s all a dream. Alright am I a man dreaming he’s a butterfly? Am I a butterfly dreaming he’s a man?

[41:00] Tod Perry: I think we’ll leave with that, I think that’s a perfect note to end on. See, Joe, Dr. Carl Totton, thank you so much for joining me here today. Thank you. Alright. Perion Twitter, ah, @TodAPerry. Now, don’t follow leaders and watch your parking meters.

[42:00] [Music]

Epiosode 4 — Meditation

September 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

We open the show speculating whether some of the greatest minds of the last century were secretly Taoists. Later, Dr. Totton teaches the basics of starting a meditation practice, and we end with a breakdown of Chapter Three of the Tao Te Ching.

Subscribe to What’s This Tao All About? on iTunes >>

Episode Transcript

[00:00] [Music]

[00:30] Tod Perry: You’re listening to What’s This Tao All About? A lighthearted look at Taoism, featuring Dr. Carl Totton and Tod Perry. Carl is the founder of the Taoist Institute in North Hollywood, California. Tod Perry knows a little about Taoism and is mainly here because he owns a few microphones. Now, let’s learn: What’s This Tao All About? Hello everybody and welcome back to What’s This Tao All About? My name is Tod Perry and here is Dr. Carl Totton, Sijo and we’re gonna continue our discussion on the Tao Te Ching today. What we’re gonna talk about our big stuff is chapter 3 of the Tao Te Ching and we’re gonna talk about meditation a bit and we’re gonna open up a little bit. I’m gonna discuss some people throughout history that might have been seen Crit Taoists, some people who have said things that are, I think in line with the Tao, kind of quotes I’ve liked throughout my life. So I’m gonna run these by Carl and see what you think. Excellent. Alright, one of my first things is, it’s a George Bernard Shaw once said that life is not about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself. Now is that, is that with the Tao? Because the Tao is a lot about finding

[02:00] Dr. Carl Totton: And so the art of finding verses creating, you know, building on to something, not sure. Yeah, you know in a way, it’s like a different way of saying something else. As so much is Tao. Tao, a lot of it has to do with discovering, uncovering what’s already there. Right. And then when you allow that to just manifest naturally to flow and And goes with the flow. Then one is at one with the process of ongoing discovery and creation. And so it’s not in the sense that we are thinking about something and planning it and then experimenting and trying this and trying that and creating something in that manner. It’s a way of uncovering something that has already been laid down. But because we’ve been so busy thinking Planning and scheming and manipulating, we lost it, we didn’t see it. It’s also like the act of creation and destruction is kind of simultaneous. Right? Yeah. And the Tao, everything is both being created, if you will, and being uncreated at the same time. Right. No. No. Every time anything is said or done, it’s there for that moment and then it’s gone. Right. Yeah. It’s gone, wu, where did it go? It’s gone, it happened. It’s like, quick, quick, too late, too late. It’s like, uh, it’s with the Dutch boy with the the wall and there’s a leak in the wall and he puts his finger in the wall and put his finger in the other one and then the other side of the water is coming through and this is not enough fingers and hands to, but that

[04:00] Dr. Carl Totton: Just let it be because if it leaks what we will also do, oh, the water all of the crops and then everybody will be fed. And so sometimes things have to allow space for things to happen and at the same time be mindful that there might be a plan. You might be a bigger picture. And too often, almost always we see things from what position our own narrow perspective. Almost every human being does that.

[04:30] Tod Perry: Unless we actively do something like meditation to counteract that and try to go on to bigger things. We’re gonna get to that in a minute. Meditation. Another great quote I’ve always liked is, life has become immeasurably better once I’ve been forced to stop taking it seriously. By Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. But I like reading Hunter S. Thompson’s work. And it’s very true that I every once in a while I look up around I go, you know, why am I taking life so serious when, you know, it’s fleeting, it’s going to go. I’ll be gone, I’ll be with the dust at a certain point or everything around this that I’m attached to. Life is a joyous experience and not to get too pulled down into the weeds and not

[05:30] Dr. Carl Totton: Walk through it with such heavy feet, I guess. Yes. Every moment is here for just the second. Then it’s gone forever. It’s gone forever. And yet what do we do? We try to cling to those moments. Like it’s a life raft or something. That’s somehow gonna save us. The cling to what happened just the second ago. Our job is to be fully present every moment and then let it go. Why? So that we can welcome

[06:00] Tod Perry: You’re a kid and you’re at like Disneyland or whatever. The whole day like this is just the best perfectest thing ever. And then you have that weird moment where you go, oh no, I’m gonna have to leave Disneyland. And then you don’t enjoy anything. It’s like on Sunday you go, oh I got work tomorrow. I’m at this we’re doing Sunday right now. I might have just ruined my day. But you know, oh man Is the nature of the Tao.

[07:00] Dr. Carl Totton: Something on a previous show we were discussing, I was saying to you, do you think that most people are walking around concerned with the bigger questions of life or asking what why they’re here or the meaning? And I was like, I’m sure people are just not talking about it and you said, no, no, maybe lots of people just kind of aren’t. You know? I agree, I think most people are just busy living their lives. Yeah. But unfortunately

[07:30] Tod Perry: Clinging to moments and trying to create or extend or just adjust or adapt to something that they miss the bigger picture. And often, the old saying you can’t see the forest for the trees are only too true. I found this great, it was like this sheet of notes by the jazz player, Thelonious Monk. Oh yes. And he had this whole thing of notes that he wrote for himself. It was almost like to reflect, you know, to Put himself in the zone when he’s playing music or you know just kind of true you know the true things he learned in life. And one thing he wrote was the inside part of the tune, the bridge you know your big change in the middle of the song is the part that makes the outside sound good. So if he puts in a big a big change in the middle of the song that takes you out of the your normal verse chorus it’s by going way out there The rest of the song then sounds fresh. Yes. It’s almost like I went to Hawaii a few weeks ago and the fact that I got out of my element, I took it way out there and I went to another place, different frame of mind. I came back and I

[08:50] Dr. Carl Totton: appreciated my normal everyday life. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Often by going to the extremes, we absolutely learn to appreciate what we have here in the moment It gives us that sense of dimensionality that makes life seem richer. Right. Yeah. And also by contrast, here in a third dimensional world, in a world that is framed by yin and yang, if you will. It’s by exploring the things that look like their opposites of each other that we come to find the totality of our experience. Ultimately it’s really all one whole existence. We see the forest from the trees. Right. But most human beings, most of us can’t do that type of just being one with the flow and integrating all of the extremes simultaneously, moment by moment without clinging or holding on, few people can really do that. Yeah, no. You would probably become schizophrenic or either that or sage.

[10:00] Tod Perry: What’s This Tao All About? is recorded at the Taoist Institute in North Hollywood, California. Check out the TaoistInstitute.com. See there’s schedule of classes including Taoist meditation, kung fu and qigong. That’s TaoistInstitute.com. Alright, so let’s get into this here. Let’s talk a little bit about meditation. And I know you teach meditation classes right here at the Taoist Institute. Oh, yes. Now my big question is I’ve, I’ve, from time to time sat and attempted to meditate. I’ve had a couple positive experiences with it. I haven’t integrated into my daily life. And, and one of the questions I always have is, I feel like there’s different forms of meditation, right? And different ones like there’s like transcendental meditation and you gotta pay 1500 bucks to learn it. And I always go, is that a scam or is it, you know, why don’t they just make this available to everybody? You know, why don’t they reveal their secret, you know?

[11:30] Dr. Carl Totton: You want? Oh great, yeah. That’s awesome. Just on tell anyone. Yeah. Our little secret. This is how publicly now come. So is there a better way in order to say what is the difference in the different forms of meditation, if you will? Or is it just all the same thing that people are calling different? No, it is an all just the same thing. People have been trying to kind of solve this riddle about who am I, And where am I going? In other words, what is the meaning of life? And almost everyone, sooner or later comes to the realization that all of this doing and trying and thinking and thinking and overthinking is taking me away from realizing this essence of what is the meaning of my life. And so sooner or later, people around the world for thousands of years have realized that unless I sit quietly And so all cultures and peoples and spiritual groups have at one point or another come to the realization that they have to alter something about what they’ve been doing. It’s in the doing and overdoing and overthinking while overdoing where we get lost. So I think that ultimately meditation is really a very natural state. It’s what happens before we start doing. It’s what happens before we start talking and thinking. And our thinking of course is always in what? Words, right? And words as we know, words are a representation of something, they’re not the thing. And so meditation is to try to get to the thing.

[13:30] Dr. Carl Totton: And so if you’re talking and thinking too much, it’s going to be very difficult to realize the nature of what underlies our existence. And so that’s what meditation is for. Now, there are 100 ways about knowing more than that, a thousand ways to actually try to do that. Essentially, meditation can be divided in general into active forms of meditation and more Past of forms of meditation. Act of forms of meditation, you do something. Maybe you chant something. Maybe you focus on something. It might be something even very peaceful like focusing on a cloud drifting across the sky or a river flowing down the stream. But so something grabs your attention and as something grabs our attention and we begin to follow that, track that, guess what happens? As that immersion increases the internal chatter that self-talk does to decrease. I could use that. Yes, we can all use that. So that’s actually very useful. So that’s active. That’s active meditation. Because you’re doing something in order to decrease our attachment to what we usually do. Which is doing and thinking and planning and on and on and on. Okay. What’s your…it’s actually probably more difficult. You know, is it more rewarding because it’s more difficult? Not necessarily. You know what they say? All roads lead to Beijing or Hong Kong or Rome or someplace, right? So, however one gets there, it’s fine. As long as you get…again, return to the source. Okay. So passive forms of meditation, it’s more difficult because sometimes people will tell you what, I’m sure

[15:30] Dr. Carl Totton: of nothing but who can do that? I’ve thought of nothing like four times in my life. And then I go, I’m thinking about nothing. Right. And so typically what is easier for people is to think about something different than what they ordinarily are thinking about. So again, it might be a word, it might be a breath. You know what I tell people to do? What’s going on in your mind right now? Oh, okay, that’s interesting. Now, look at that. Watch those thoughts. And while you’re watching those thoughts, what’s going on in your body right now? Notice that too. Don’t think about it. Just notice it. Oh, how about your breath? You notice that? Oh, okay, just notice that. So, as you sit here and you’re noticing your mind and you’re noticing your body and you’re noticing your breath, what part I don’t know. Great. Now, just stay with that experience and just see where that takes you. And now I’ll put on some nice music. I’ll turn out the lights. I have a black light here. I’ll put on black light and it looks kind of mysterious and kind of kind of, no it’s really soft in there. And what happens is that people get so engaged in this exercise and really mindfulness. You know, being able to not be In your body, in your breath, but rather coming from a place where you are all of these things simultaneously without having to divide and separate them. At that moment, an amazing thing happens. We stop thinking. You might realize, I know this has happened to you. Haven’t you been driving sometimes on the freeway and you noticed that, gosh, I just drove the last

[17:30] Dr. Carl Totton: 10 miles and I didn’t have one thought in my mind about driving. Yes. It’s the same thing in meditation. How did I get here? How did I get here? Why am I in the valley? Like I was in the valley. I switched lanes, I avoided cars obviously, I drove the speed limit, I wasn’t bumping into people, I didn’t drive off the road and I did not have one thought about driving. The same thing happens in

[18:00] Tod Perry: You can just be. Right. It’s beautiful. So, about let’s see. So if I wanted to kind of start going towards that place, just by myself, at my house, you know, maybe woke up in the morning, had a cup of coffee, and then I get ready to go to work and I want to take this 20 minutes to get to that state. What are the kind of real simple ways to get into that? I always talk people,

[18:30] Dr. Carl Totton: Natural state. I think a lot of what we do and say and think all the time is really quite unnatural. Okay. Alright. And so there’s something that pervades that, that’s beneath that and above that and beyond all of that. Something that just is. Right. And so the easiest way. That’s the easiest way. You know, my teacher taught me when I, the first day of meditation, my Taoist teacher, he said, just said and Observe your breathing. Feel the air come in. Feel the air come out. Just notice that. Just watch that. And as I watch that and then began to just watch my thoughts and watch my body. Maybe I had some imagery in my mind. Maybe I was remembering something and event. Do you try to then stop that or do you just let it play out? You just watch it. You just observe it. You don’t participate in it. You just let And now you’re back to square one. You’re out of it. You’re out of it because you’re too into it. Right. Okay. So it’s a matter of this. It’s interesting because on one hand, people always say that to meditate, you have to do what? You have to focus. You have to concentrate. You hear that all the time. It’s a brilliant experience. And when that will kill meditation

[20:00] Tod Perry: Cold for me.

[20:30] Dr. Carl Totton: Ultimately, we’ll be capable of. It takes a while, just like anything else. It took you a while to learn how to ride a bike, drive a car. Anything. And it’s the same thing. But once you’ve kind of groove that pathway into this deeper aspect of the self, it definitely becomes easier and easier. And you know what? You like it. Because you like it, you want to do it more. So so much better than Dorfins in my brain. Why do I not do this every day? But at first it does what? It’s a pain. It hurts. It hurts. I walk up a trepago. Oh my sore back. This is gonna hurt. We actually move into a state of what’s often called pure awareness, where a whole other world opens up inside of us. Busy doing those other things, there’s an entire dimension of experience that will miss. That will miss. That is in everyone. It’s in every human being. It’s in a we’re all part of the Tao. One spirit. And so the Tao being vast, having no beginning, having no end, existing on all dimensions throughout time and space, can you imagine? No, you can’t imagine. It’s beyond our imagination. How much there, how rich and how deep this experience of this domain actually contains. Okay. And so meditation, every time we do it, we’re allowed entry into another, another little corner of experience in that realm. And it is so rich and so nurturing that it’s like tasting pure honey years. Right. It’s so sweet. I love it. Okay. So I was reading a book and it was,

[22:30] Tod Perry: See, this is me. I read all these books, right? But the practice and the discipline of the practice, it alludes me. But it was a book called, Catching the Big Fish by a filmmaker, David Lynch. And he was saying that when he… Oh, he’s good. Yeah. When he started meditating, he realized as a creative person that the big fish were at the deeper levels, the big fish, the big ideas, that he And he was working and bringing into his art. He would meditate and the deeper he got, the bigger and more nurturing the fish were. Is what he said when he would dip into it. And I thought that was a wonderful metaphor for what I should strive for when attempting this

[23:20] Dr. Carl Totton: practice. So, what’s the best time to meditate is it in the morning at night? Anytime. Anytime. I mean, everybody’s, you know, their lives are different They have zugging things to do and they don’t have time and so the evening or night before they go to bed is a better time. You know, ultimately, I think we want to get to the point where meditation is not this separate experience where we have to, it’s only when we’re sitting down doing meditation that we are engaging in meditation. We would like meditation to just become part of our natural, normal state of being. Because that’s what meditation is It’s a state of expanded awareness, awareness of what? Awareness of what is? Well, what is? Well, you’ll know when you find it. Ah, that’s a nice way to go out on it. Do you have any more words on meditation? Just that don’t complicate it. It’s very simple. And our tendency, particularly here in the West, is to complicate things. And you’ll find books and books and books and things Written on how to meditate. And there’s all these different ways and so a seeker can get very easily confused. Yes. Because every many of the books say something very different. But if we remember that meditation is a natural state and it’s a state of immersion into what is. Because a lot of what we’re doing is an avoidance of not doing and meditation is definitely associated with not doing.

[25:00] Tod Perry: We’re doing less. Doing less. The minimal of us. Yeah. Because when you get to zero, where you’re not doing anything, then you can finally live and be everything. Is it kind of like if you look at an hourglass, right? You have the stuff at the top of the hourglass and they have that real thin waste, right? And then you have a different thing on the other side. Where we’re normally on the top of the hour

[25:30] Dr. Carl Totton: That there’s a whole other vessel of consciousness or whatever it is. Is it like that? At that moment we are fully in tune and in touch with the Tao and we are just filled with inspiration. It’s almost like a download from the field of consciousness, a field that we are part of but because we’re so busy, we’re not aware of it. Once we let go of those expectations and just immerse ourselves, In the Tao, the richness of that fills every moment. And at that moment, those questions, those eternal questions, who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? And where am I going? The answers become crystal clear. And that’s precious. You can’t buy that. Let’s move on to The chapter of the Tao Te Ching today. We’re gonna do chapter 3 of the Tao Te Ching. Who’s a meditative existence? Not just a practice, but a meditative existence as a prescription for living wisely. And so in chapter three, it’s very short, almost all of them are, is he says not exalting the gifted prevents quarrelling, not collecting treasures prevents stealing, not seeing desirable things, prevents confusion of the heart.

[27:30] Dr. Carl Totton: What’s he talking about here? And then he goes on and he says, the wise, therefore, rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies. By weakening ambitions and strengthening bones. If people lack knowledge and desire, then intellectuals will not try to interfere. If nothing is done, then all will be well. So this letting go of attachment from the heart or the mind while focusing on essentials like health, eating, right? right. allows things to kind of just settle into place and define their own innate rhythms. You know, every organism has a rhythm and the rhythm is trying to do what is trying to ensure survival. Through adaptation to create homeostasis, balance. And if we can do that then everything just flows and everything is beautiful and everything is fine. But look around. Is everything just flowing? Is everything just beautiful? And is everything just fine? No. And therefore things since so much is being done that is not in a course. Or with our inner natures, people aren’t feeling what they need. They’re feeling that what they’re doing is meaningless. Or has a meaning maybe to someone, some things, some outside entity but not to them. It’s not the heart’s desire. Then they wind up feeling dissatisfied. No matter how much money they’re making, you know, no matter how much of the material external rewards they may be getting, they’ll at a deep level.

[29:30] Dr. Carl Totton: If you ask them they will tell you something is missing. I feel like I’m just spending my wheels. And yeah I’m doing everything that everybody says I should be doing. And there’s nothing is gaining traction. It’s not, you know, it’s not amounting to anything besides you know, paying the rent. Yeah, and life is a lot more than going to work and paying your bills. Yes. I assure you. And so he says if people lack So we’ll not try to interfere. If nothing is done, then all will be well. Now the intellectuals trying to interfere. What is that relate to? Well, there are always people in every society who try to guide what people are doing by claiming that they know best. The intellectuals. The intellectuals. Often it’s politicians, critics, who are offering critiques about society. I’m sure people would call him a big thinker in a way but yet he’s constantly advising us to do what? Not think, right? Not think so much. And so here maybe the biggest thinker of them all is saying don’t think. And what was the very first thing out of his mouth in the Tao Te Ching? The Tao that can be spoke with. And is not the eternal Tao. Right. And what are our thoughts? Words. Words. Right. So the very first words out of his mouth are don’t trust this. Right. Don’t trust this. And don’t trust the authorities that are trying to tell you how to live your life. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Trying to push you one way or the other. Exactly. There’s so many levels of abstraction away from the immediacy of what he taught.

[31:30] Dr. Carl Totton: Person is experiencing. And every person has to be the arbiter of their own experience. Nobody else can tell you what you are experiencing, what you should be experiencing, what you’re thinking, what you should be thinking, what you’re doing, what you should be doing. Nobody has that authority to do that, unless you give it to them. Unless you give it to them. And unfortunately, if you look at the history of the world, what do we see? People are very willing to give up to the author. And then authorities are more than willing to try to take control through power and manipulation in order to attain more material goods. Or even worse power over others. Power over others so they can increase their gain of material goods. And so now look at the world. We’re in a crisis. We’re in environmental crisis. We’re in economic crises. We’re certainly in political crisis. It’s sad in many, many respects to see how far away we’ve gotten from this self-regulation, this homeostasis, this balance, we’re all organisms, especially us, getting our needs met and we’re filled and creative. It’s about creativity. You know, I tell everybody, the most important thing that you have is your imagination. Because think about it for me. And this fuels it, I feel. Yeah, I agree. Because if you look at human history, has not every advance come through imagination. Yes. Every single thing. We thought being the caves, right? We didn’t have imagination. If someone didn’t look out there and go, you know what? We could do

[33:30] Dr. Carl Totton: Fish was cooked. Yeah, right, yang. See, it allows us to creatively meet our needs in a fuller manner. And by unleashing greater creativity, you’re gonna unleash a greater more creative, you know, better society. Yes, for us. Yes, it’s a living. So I’m advocating for what? A new Renaissance. Yes. We need a new Renaissance. Right, yeah. A creative liberation. Yeah, the creative liberation of the human spirit I’ll take up a banner and wave it behind you. It’s like be free, be free. But to do that we have to claim and own our freedom. And too often society conspires to get us to subvert our freedom. To give up our freedom. I think it’s a natural state of having it subverted to begin with and then realizing it later in life. You know, not to say that I’ve come to some great point. I’ve completely gotten, you know, gotten, become liberated from all the structures around me. But I’m just saying, yeah, you do get to a certain point where you see the matrix. Yes. You know, you see the cage that you’re in and then you realize two things. One, number one, I’m in a cage. Somehow I’m restricting my life. I’m constricting and restricting my life. I’m in a cage. Now, where And most important, who has the key? And is it some force out there? Is it somebody else? Did I give somebody else the power to confine me? And therefore my liberation is dependent on them, some external authority or some intellectual or better and worse at the same time that I lock myself in this cage. And I’ve got the key and I’m not liberating myself.

[35:30] Tod Perry: Oh my goodness. What do I do to myself? I mean with the moment you see that, you go, oh no now I have a response to my self to enact that to fully unlock that cage. 100% responsibility to do that. That’s daunting. That is very scary. Scary for me, I think it’s probably scary for most people.

[36:00] Dr. Carl Totton: This writing is like the Tao Te Ching. Really is to ultimately give each human being courage that there are other people who have gone down this path, down this road and we know how difficult it is and we support you. You’re not crazy to think that you want to get out of your cage and be real. That’s great and we support that. Wonderful. You’re not alone. Yes. So do we have any takeaways for this week? Tickle stuff that people can get into before our show comes out next week. Things to think about. Well, I always like to give a practice, of course. Yes. Because practice makes perfect. Yes. And so a nice exercise is to simply notice what you have in your life that you personally are grateful for. Every day, every day you should get up and think. Hmm. What do I have to be great for people? For Rather than the lack of abundance. Because when you’re feeling lack, you tend to attract what you’re feeling. So you’ll just attract more lack. And number two, you’ll never be satisfied. You’ll never be satisfied. You have to choose to be satisfied. So just appreciation of the simple things, synthesizes us to the natural beauty of life as it is. Just as it is.

[38:00] Dr. Carl Totton: At the sunrise, how about the smile on a baby’s face? The gracefulness of a cloud, the sound of a court of music, the taste of good food. All of these little appreciations bring joy to life and went overlooked because we’re pursuing the big things, then life tends to lose its vitality and we wind up feeling frustrated and unsatisfied. Let go and let it be. Just let it be what it is.

[38:30] Tod Perry: You’re like it! Awesome, well, for this week it’s time to let it be and we’re gonna let this show be for right now and we’ll be back next week with more What’s This Tao All About and preview for next week’s show. Now we’ll just let you see what happens. We’ll talk you soon. Thank you.

[38:56] Tod Perry: To learn more about the show, check us out online at WhatsThisTao.com. Akan, Fall The Show on Twitter at What’s This Tao? Follow Tod Perry on Twitter at @TodAPerry. Now, don’t follow leaders and watch your parking readers.

[39:30] [Music]

Episode 3 — Social Status, Yin and Yang

September 14, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Recently, Tod got stuck riding the bus to work, prompting a discussion on social status and how it relates to the Tao. Later, we get into a conversation on the Taoist principal of Yin and Yang. This week’s Tao Te Ching reading is from chapter 8.

Subscribe to What’s This Tao All About? on iTunes >>

Episode Transcript

[00:00] [Music]

[00:30] Tod Perry: What’s This Tao All About? A lighthearted look at Taoism featuring Dr. Carl Totton and Tod Perry. Carl is the founder of the Taoist Institute in North Hollywood, California. Tod Perry knows a little about Taoism and it’s mainly here because he owns a few microphones. Now let’s learn: What’s This Tao All About? The other day, my boss at work, we have a very kind of small parking lot and he hit my car. I have like a Nissan Versa, I don’t know, it’s not. My car goes unnoticed in this world. You don’t look at it and go, alright, that’s terrible. How does he get to work every day? I had to go wild that guy spent $100,000 in the car. It moves through life unnoticed, my Nissan Versa. But it got hit so I had to keep it in the shop for like five days. So I live in Long Beach for the people listening, I live in Long Beach and my work is in Marina del Rey, which takes me about an hour and 10 minutes to get to work every day, which is very frustrating. So I had no car and I said, do you know what, my boss, he writes my paycheck, I’m not going to hit him up for getting me a rental or whatever. I’ll just take public transportation, which in LA, we don’t have the best public transportation system. So I would have my wife dropped me off at the Blue Line train, then I’d take it to the Green Line, and then I would take the bus to the office. So this would take an hour and 40 minutes every morning for me to get to work. So I get into work and I’ll talk to how’d you get into work today, you know, have your car. And I said, oh, you know, I took two trains and a bus and it’s like the looks you get in West Los Angeles saying, oh, I took the bus because it’s almost like a status thing where if you write the bus, And it’s like low class or you know, kind of thing and I thought I like not to brag but I like the fact I developed in myself and I think through the Tao reading about the Tao about how water, I think we’re gonna get to that chapter later in the book about how water resides in the lowest of places. And that water nourishes everything and that water is kind of without status and it asks for nothing from anything. And I thought that from the I’m trying to remove any sense of status from myself that I could again get to work where other people might have had a block and thinking, oh, that’s, you know, only poor people ride the bus in LA or whatever. And, uh, that to me, it gave me freedom and not having to abide by a status. And, like, I was like, I would love to as a human being exist as a statusless being that I could walk into a room and, uh, you know, if I was the richest man in the world no one would know, or if I was dirt poor no one would know. And it may try to not communicate my status to others and just kind of be myself. And but we, there’s so much pressure I feel on people to have that nice car or to have that, you know, not a functional car necessarily. And it’s almost like I look at it and I see the guy with the nice car and go, wow, that’s just just way too much effort to be trying to impress your status upon me. But I think that the Tao and understanding of that helps remove people from that kind of cycle

[04:07] Dr. Carl Totton: in a healthy way. You know, I think something that we were kind of speaking about earlier reminds me of that too. I already told you that often children and people, you know, so-called people who live a very simple life seem to be very content. Yeah, very happy with their existence. You know, the everyday they’re living pretty much to the full fullness. And yet they have by our standards wrote into a little, yeah, maybe nothing, you know, they don’t have a car, they don’t have a, you know, 60 inch TV. I’m sure they don’t have a computer. Yeah. But yet they’re content. Believe me, in my journeys and some of the things I’ve done, I’ve met people who are worth many, many, many millions of dollars. Yeah. I’ve met people who. Their films have so over a billion dollars worth of. theater tickets. Yeah. I’ve been some people that I’ve met and even taught and interacted with in one level or another. Having more and more and more does not lead to content. Yeah. Being contented in life. Yeah. It just means we have more stuff. They’ve been responsible for. That’s how it’s a game. What’s the saying, the movie Fight Club, what you own owns you? I was just as happy as I am now having a mortgage. Right, right. That’s why I said that the Taoist knows when they have enough. Enough is gonna vary from one person to the next, but I think a lot of our notions about what we should, quote, should, have, come from the media and it comes from media-fueled expectations about what the good life is. You know, and so if you’re watching TV and you’re watching, you know, the housewives of Orange County or the Housewives of New York or New Jersey or whatever it is, you’re going, oh, or the Keeping Up with the Kardashians or something. Oh, this is what happiness is, right? Yeah. Yeah, so I have a life like that. Yeah. You really think those people are really happy? No, that’s it. There’s really. And we play that. The media is kind of selling the lifestyle because people want to, you know, fantasize about that. But the same time the people are screaming at it, so the whole thing.

[07:03] Tod Perry: I don’t know if my wife watches like the real housewives and that’s, I say honey, you just watch people in expensive shoes scream at each other for a half hour. She’s like, oh, I love it. I don’t. I watch trashy TV all the time myself, but like that brand of it, I can’t. I’m like, this just annoying.

[07:22] Dr. Carl Totton: But, and so I think our expectations, again, it goes back to who are you? Who are you really? And what do you really need in order to feel that your life? Would you count your money? Would you go buy another car? What would you do? I guarantee you not one person will spend their last hours doing anything that has to do with acquiring more. Not one. Not one. Most people will want to be with the people who they love and care for the most. Some people will want to sit and meditate or pray to be in touch with their God or however they see what gives them spiritual comfort. And so if these are the things that really matter, shouldn’t we maybe create space for these things? Right, yeah.

[08:46] Tod Perry: in our lives, maybe? Yes. And that’s been so much time kind of like a rat in a cage just running around faster,

[08:53] Dr. Carl Totton: faster, kind of spinning our wheels. And I think that this notion of water in the Tao, like you said, everything’s on level. In fact, the low level tends to settle to we are what, 70, 75% water. I think our brains are more like 85% water. And so we need to learn, I think, how to allow this notion of how water adapts to any environment that it’s in. It naturally folds itself around in anything, any container that it’s in. Any obstacle, it just naturally goes around it over it under it. Yet we tend to try to fight for things. We tend to get some things in the way we want to just break it. We’re constantly striving for more and more. And yet when we get it, we’re still not happy. So we think that since I got this and I wasn’t happy, I must need more. We don’t get it. We don’t get it. Even though life is teaching us every second, that’s That’s not the way. It’s not the answer. And yet we don’t listen to our own experience. The Tao is, again, it’s just nagging little voice over your shoulder going, listen to yourself. You know, should you believe your own lying eyes? I was thinking the other day. There’s always all this talk about, you know, why in America we have so much kind of violence. Like if you go to Canada, you go there and your chances of being shot by somebody in Canada is, you know, on a 1-100 of.

[11:40] Tod Perry: You don’t have to say it, and it leads to a violent culture. I think you’re right. I think it’s part of it. I think it’s a multi-faceted complex issue. Yes violence in America. Violence in the world. Violence in humanity’s nature in fact. It’s the same violence as we could spend, I’m sure 100 shows talking about violence. Yeah, so just that. Yeah, yeah. I’ve got a lot to Part of it is that for sure. And in alignment with that is the fact that our society, Western society, especially in America, the disparity between the haves and the have-nots is increasing. It’s huge now. It used to be less. And a lot of these other countries that you mentioned, it’s much less. And in fact, there have been studies that show that the wider the disparity between the top and the bottom

[12:40] Dr. Carl Totton: The bigger that gets in any society, the more social dysfunctions you have. Violence, prisons, drugs, teenage pregnancy, high school dropouts. I mean you just list almost any kind of societal ill and the more there’s this disparity, meaning that there’s less harmony in a society. Because some people are having it all. And a very comfortable life and other people having to struggle and struggle and work harder and harder for less and less. This creates tensions and tensions result in something. Something has to happen. Something’s got to give. Something’s gonna blow up. And too often yang things are literally blowing up. And bodies are dropping and blood is being spilled. And so I think that remember the Taoist knows when they have enough.

[13:40] Tod Perry: And let me ask you something. Have you ever just given something to someone not with expecting nothing in return, maybe a child, maybe a homeless person, maybe someone sick or handicapped, ya know, just people who have less than you and you helped them out. I’m sure you have and what do that feel like? Oh, it feels wonderful. I almost don’t want it to feel good in a weird way because I feel like that then it becomes a selfish act. If I do something for somebody and then I feel good about it, I almost feel like if I do it it should be completely selfless and I should almost not like doing it because then it’s not a selfish act.

[14:18] Dr. Carl Totton: No, it’s okay. It’s okay because I’m just a guilty human being. Maybe so. No, I think the idea of giving without expecting anything in return is important. But the fact that you get just joy out of other people’s enjoyment and happiness, that to me is just being a good human being. Right. Okay. That’s okay. Empathy. Empathy. Empathy for others. And remember, I told you one of my Taoist teachers, that’s what he said. He said that by being curious, we want to know what other things, the other people are like. And when we find out, we can relate to them with empathy and compassion. And it cultivates it because your curiosity for your fellow man cultivates your empathy. Yes. And then once you know them, understand them and understand that really they’re very much just like we are. Right. They have the same blood. They have the same desires and thoughts and feelings and emotions. They’re much more like us then different. Then we can relate to them compassionately with empathy, whereas the more different we see people as the more violence there is in society. And if people are, if we really see them as being nothing like us at all, then we demonize them and we tend to want to kill them. Right, yeah, look around. Very easy, yeah. Very easy to kill something that you see as being not like you. Yes, definitely. Look around the world. Right,

[15:48] Tod Perry: What’s this Tao about is recorded at the Taoist Institute in North Hollywood, California. Check out the Taoist Institute.com. See there’s schedule of classes including Taoist meditation, kung fu and qigong. So do we have a really big topic here on the show I want to get to? That’s the Taoist concept of yin and yang. And again we could probably do 400 shows on yin and yang, correct? But this is a huge concept in the Tao. Now to back it up a little bit is the Tao, the first place where the concept of yin and yang stems from or was it in other Chinese thought?

[16:54] Dr. Carl Totton: There actually was an earlier school, literally called the yin and yang school in China, from which Tao borrowed. So some of these notions were floating around in various places and then they were consolidated within Taoism. And some later it became consolidated in the 5th century common era in China, Zen Buddhism, which is kind of a marriage of some traditional Buddhist notions with Taoist notions in China. And so ideas borrow from each other. And since we’re talking about universal laws, that should be seen as natural. That it would occur. Yeah, it just allowed to, you know, made up this stuff and say, oh that sounds good. And Taoism has always been seen as a philosophy and then later a spiritual religious system, which is in touch with nature. Taoists look at nature as we have said before and notice that the sun rises and then the sun falls. We have a daytime, we have a nighttime. We get up in the morning, wake up, we’re energized, we do things, but then we have to go back to see how we can get into the sun. Sleep, doing nothing, letting go, not doing, allows you to therefore be able to create the energy to do. And so these states are complementary. They aren’t really the opposite of each other. Now, language, right, wrong, good, bad, yes, no. Are language forces us often into these dichotomous states, which are not really true. That’s not true. We think they’re true, but and that’s therein lies the problem. The problem is between our years. We’re thinking. Because we’re thinking in very limited linguistic structure that forces us to choose between this and that. It’s almost the things we used to define the 10,000 things are incorrect. It imprisons us very often. It’s almost like if you could go back and recreate language. In the English language, rather language, maybe Chinese gets closer to these concepts than English possibilities. Because it’s using pictograms, right? Using images. Whereas we’re actually trying to use words that stand for other things. Words that mean something, Heels. You know, the father of General Semantics, Krasibsky wrote an amazing book called Science and Sanity in 1930s. Brilliant book, one of the best books I think of as really as being kind of the Western Tao Te Ching. Okay. Okay. Science and Sanity. Where he’s saying this very same thing about the limitations of language and how language forces us to separate yin and yang into these dichotomous categories that are actually not true And so coming from a Taoist perspective where we’re trying to harmonize yin and yang, I think requires us to pause, not do, wait, and at the same time to take in the entirety of things on levels that transcend and go beyond words and language. Language is, I mean, it’s our medium of communication, we, most of us, we don’t know telepathy, right? And can’t just communicate non-verbally, but yet, think about some of the more profound moments that you’ve had with people that you really love, perhaps your wife. I bet you don’t have to say a word very often, they have the most profound experience with her. If you have a decent relationship and I hope you do, I know that has to be true. Yes, yes. Look at each other’s eyes and smile and you said things that can’t be said. The subtlety and the inflection of how she says my name can mean a thousand, there’s Todd, and there’s Todd, and there’s a billion different ways to communicate so much. Exactly. Exactly. And I think that this notion of yin and yang, it gives us the freedom to be open to that level of experience. And also, I think equally as important, is that things happen in their own way and in their own time and for a reason that we don’t always see at the very beginning. And often we will label something as, oh, this is unpleasant, this is negative, this is bad. When actually that is just part of a cycle of something that is in the process of becoming, and in order for us to appreciate this, whatever it is, and its totality, we had to have this initial period of discomfort. for yeah unpleasantness Something that we might label as not good or even bad. When actually in the long run, it’s actually which is part of the natural unfolding of things as they are. And a lot depends on how you look at things too. Two different people, much less a million different people. We’ll look at the exact same thing and come to completely different conclusions about it. You know the old saying one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

[23:19] Tod Perry: And what’s good and nurturing for you might be very toxic and out of balance for somebody else. It’s like you’re talking about vitality and health. We’re off mic, we were discussing and the personal humors in one’s body, react to things, fortunately or unfortunately, health should be taken on a personal basis. I was thinking, what are the individual characteristics of yin and yang?

[23:49] Dr. Carl Totton: Yeah, some of the notions associated with yin are receiving passive, again, being receptive, being the night, being cool, more towards the feminine, if you will, the gentle, the being open to things. Yang, more the active, More of the dominant, more of the projected, more of the warmer, hotter, again more activity, the masculine way of approaching things, if you will. And much of the Tao is about, yin and yang, of course it’s about seeing these things as not as opposites of each other. For example, could you really just have men without having a woman? No. Without having some notion of heat in there somewhere? No. Does a day make any sense without a night, some kind of co-create each other. And in Chinese medicine that’s very much so. They actually will tell you that if you study Chinese medicine, then these things intermingle and co-create each other. And if you take one to the extreme, for example, if you get too hot, you get feverish. What happens to you after a while? You’re completely collapsed. You go right to the other side. You become total yin. You can’t even get out of bed. You need fluids. And then the other hand, if you don’t eat and you just have nothing but a weakness and you just become so destitute in terms of nutrition and water and everything else that you just start to kind of wither away, you’ll get a horrible fever, your whole body So So it’s a natural law of nature and we violate natural laws of nature to our peril.

[26:37] Tod Perry: It’s interesting that man is from nature, right? So man is natural or whatever, but can act outside of nature, right? Very much so. You know, like my dog is always doing something, you know, it’s weird that man’s inner nature can violate the basic rules of nature. Figure we just all work together, right?

[27:02] Dr. Carl Totton: And I think that’s what Lao Tzu was really getting at because he came up in a time where the Chinese were having so-called warring states, there was disharmony, war, violence, everywhere. And he’s going, you know, you guys are blowing it here. Look at this. This is the way farmers should relate to their fields. This is the way emperors should relate to their constituency, you know, by not doing, by not imposing, by being almost invisible. In fact, that was the best leader, was the one who was the most invisible, but yet everything got taken care of, right?

[27:41] Tod Perry: Right, yeah, yeah. You know, there was nothing to fight against.

[27:45] Dr. Carl Totton: And when you’re not in the fight against, then you can just meet your needs. Right. Right. And so yin and yang, I think is a it’s a way for us to kind of check in with ourselves every day and say, where is the balance and harmony in my life? Am I overdoing something, am I leaving something important out? Am I missing something? And if I’m putting in X amount of energy over here, in order to

[29:15] Dr. Carl Totton: You have one side and the other. There’s no wholeness there. And when there’s no wholeness there’s no harmony. There’s by definition there’s disharmony. And when you have disharmony you have problems. You have problems. You have to have your problem. You have to have your problem. You have to have your problem. You have problems. You

[29:45] Tod Perry: The Supreme Good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to. It flows to low places loathed by all men. Therefore, it is like the Tao. Live in accordance with the nature of things, and dwelling, be close to the land. In meditation, go deep to the hearts. In dealing with others, be gentle and kind. Stand by your word, govern with equity, be timely in choosing the right moment, one who lives in accordance with nature, does not go against the way of things. He moves in harmony with the present moment, always knowing the And the truth of just what to do. The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the 10,000 things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao. Very humble. And dwelling be close to the land. In meditation go deep in the heart. In dealing with others be gentle and kind. In speech, be true. In ruling, be just. And business be competent. In action, watch the timing. No fight, no blame. Wow. So the highest good is like water. So is that that’s. There’s an element of that I was talking about status earlier. And it’s almost like, you know, put on some robes and walk the earth, right?

[32:09] Dr. Carl Totton: But everything has to also seek its own nature and everything on this we’re a water planet, right? Yeah. We’re water planet. But as that chapter states, the water doesn’t blame, it doesn’t judge. It gives everything exactly what it needs. The acorn needs a certain amount in type of water. The. The huge oak tree needed something else. The birds and the bees and the cats and the dogs, they needed that water as well. Yeah. Right. So everything sort. Everything kind of. Went to this well. This. Common Source and Drink, it’s full and received exactly what it needed. But yet every single thing became its own unique self. Right, yeah. But yet it came from the same source. But yet everything became completely different and unique and creative. Isn’t that interesting? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Isn’t that fascinating. The Tao is like that. We should be like that. If we were like water, we would be more like that. And so this is a I think it’s a reminder because we are water and we have to drink water, you can get by without food and you can buy a lot of things but you cannot live without water. You cannot. You will wither up and dry up and die soon if you don’t have water. And if you don’t have what? What comes out of this interaction? Air, right? Air, oxygen, right? Even quicker you’ll die.

[34:26] Dr. Carl Totton: What is yin and what is yang? Well, sun is definitely yang because it’s hot, right? Right. And it’s penetrating. Yeah. And it’s the heat. And water, since it’s in its natural state, it’s cool, right? It’s soft, it’s nurturing, it’s buoyant and enveloping, right? It’s very yin. Okay. It’s like the mother. It’s the mother. And the sun Voila, we have life, we have life, we have life. And we need, and that energy of this yang energy and this yin energy through that dynamic balance relationship, all things can move to their fullest nature. Everything can become what they are. And that is the ultimate way of the Tao, everything becomes what it is. And the action of the Tao is to return.

[35:53] Tod Perry: We have to be in harmony. I think we need to dwell on the land. Now, in modern society, what does that mean?

[36:04] Dr. Carl Totton: I tell all my students and all my clients that they have to be in harmony. I tell them to be in harmony. I tell them They need to do this. They need to take time out and return to the land. Because they’re literally are things, energies that you cannot get any other way. You know, Chinese, the Taoist and Chinese medicine, they spend a lot of time talking about chi, about energy. And there is an energy that comes out of the earth and being close to the earth, literally having your feet on the earth that you really can’t get any other way. And if you don’t get that, then our body has to do what? It has to make up for it somehow, often by leaching something from someplace else, if not really supposed to. And so in dwelling, be close to the land, follow nature. I think it’s another way of saying being in harmony with nature, Taoism being a nature philosophical system. And and Lao Tzu and the yin-yang school before him, all the ancient Taoists looked at water, looked at wind looked at the sun. And he said that the birds looked at the seasons of life, right? Spring, summer, winter. They saw these natural patterns coming out of the earth, out of the land. And they felt that if we could live in harmony with that, then we would also reach our fullest inner nature as well. Right. Right. And you’d have less conflict. Yeah. And look at most of the conflicts around the world. Doesn’t have something to do with people wanting to That’s what’s happening. You’re right. We’re depleting the purity of the land, the water, the air, the ozone.

[38:20] Tod Perry: When you move out of harmony with nature, you lead towards your own destruction. Ultimately, it’s stupid because you’re killing yourself. But we’re doing a lot of people don’t realize that. I know. I know. So it boggles my mind that we don’t realize that, yeah, you made another billion dollars, but you just took 100 years off of our life span. Right. Yeah. the Earth’s life. So at the end of the day, what’s it worth? What’s it worth? What was your extra billion dollars worth? Nothing. I think that’s a good place to wrap up today.

[39:01] Dr. Carl Totton: The Tao is about life and death, life and death. And by living in harmony with nature, we can live a full life and have a death that comes when it was supposed to come, and not because we lived out of harmony with nature and violated the law, the natural law, and wound up killing ourselves. Much less our planet.

[39:28] Tod Perry: Yeah. Well, thank you. Dr. Carl Totton. Thank you, thank you. And we’ll see you guys on show four. All right. To learn more about the show, check us out online at whatsthistao.com. Follow Tod Perry on Twitter at @TodAPerry. Now, don’t follow leaders and watch your parking meters. Wow. Really? Bye.

Episode 2 – Busy Brags vs. the Art of Non-Doing

September 6, 2015 / / 2 Comments

In this episode, Tod and Dr. Totton explore how being busy for the sake of being busy can be a detriment to being connected to the Great Tao. They also try to uncover the secrets of wu-wei, or the Taoist art of acting without doing.

The conversation also dives into Chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching, where beauty and ugliness, having and not having, and action and stillness arise together. 

Subscribe to What’s This Tao All About? on iTunes >>

Episode Transcript

[00:00] [Music]

[00:29] Tod Perry: You’re listening to What’s This Tao All About? A lighthearted look at Taoism featuring Dr. Carl Totton and Tod Perry. Carl is the founder of the Taoist Institute in North Hollywood, California. Tod Perry knows a little about Taoism and is mainly here because he owns a few microphones. Now let’s learn: What’s This Tao All About? We’re in the episode two here. We don’t have a name yet for the show, but it will appear in the credits of the show. So we will know the show that cannot be named like the Tao Te Ching. So, uh, Sijo? Yes. Sijo. I was, I found this article the other day online and I love that when you open yourself up to things like we were discussing on the last show, the magic happens, right? And I was, I was thinking to myself, I said, you know, I need some ideas to talk about on this show to help get into things. You know, you need these sparks that help, you know, the conversation happened. And so being open to it, a buddy of mine on Twitter posted this article and I, that’s what we need to be speaking about. I allowed for the magic to happen and lo and behold, the magic happened. So I found this article the other day called the Cult of Being Busy by a lady named Dina Kaplan and says, over a leisurely lunch recently, a good friend lamented that he was too busy to read. I smiled. Our meal lasted an hour and a half and then we strolled to a nearby restaurant evaluating the menu for an upcoming dinner party. My friend then headed to a meeting about a conference. I like the, going to a meeting about a conference, right? That’s a busy man, right? You can’t just go to the conference. I have to have a meeting about the conference because he’s a successful entrepreneur. And he didn’t plan to attend, but he ended up going. And by the time he returned to work, it would be 430 more than four hours after he left for lunch. He had filled the day. He was busy, but the things that made him busy were the result of his own decisions. He didn’t lack the time to read, he was simply choosing not to. Throughout the day, we faced a number of decision points about how to spend time. Too often we approach these decisions passively, as if our hand was being forced, our free will compromised. Let me add one caveat. If you’re, you know, if you have young children, a bad commute, several jobs, this piece should be meaningless because you are generally busy. My friend at lunch reminded me of what the Buddhist monk, Sogyal Rinpoche, I’m not sure, Rinpoche, calls active laziness, the filling of our lives with nonessential tasks so we feel full of responsibilities or as he calls it, irresponsible. And I was thinking to myself, I said, you know, active laziness that when I heard that I was like, it kind of hit me like a mild lightning bolt. I said, my day is filled with active laziness whether I’m sitting on social media, looking at stuff that really isn’t germane to my life or I’m sitting in an office when I could have got my work done in about three hours and been done with it, staring at a computer screen and this active laziness pulls my focus from anything of importance. And I become kind of a slave to those random noodling thoughts. And I think, and then on the, another side of this, we’ve, as a culture, plays so much importance on being busy. We’re like, if you’re not busy, then you’re not important. You’re not doing anything worthwhile. And people, they call it a busy bragging or like, you see people, oh, I’m so busy. I worked till 11, like there’s a guy on my office like I was here till eight. And I’m like, that sounds horrible. Why would you want to do that? You know, I want to think to myself, gee, maybe you’re not very efficient if you were here till eight, right? You know, maybe you’re working too hard on the wrong things or, you know, whatever. You know, one thing I liked about that article is that is where she says in there that maybe, maybe being busy should be a confession, not a boast. Yes, yes, I love that. Yeah. Oh my God, I’m busy. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Poor me. Yeah. What are we busy doing?

[04:59] Dr. Carl Totton: We’re busy filling up our time. with things with chores, with jobs. And at the end of the day and at the end of a life, what does it all mean? You know, I’ve worked with people who are dying and on their deathbeds, I guarantee you not one person ever regrets that they were not more busy. Right. In fact, their big regret is that they were too busy, too busy to enjoy life, too busy to have fun, too busy to spend more time with the people they loved, too busy doing everything except living. Yeah. Really living. Yeah. And I think the Tao is a way that it’s like this little bug on your shoulder that’s going all the time. Are you living? Are you living? Are you just talking? Are you just existing? And at the end of that of your days, are you going to look back and bemoan the fact that you weren’t busy enough? Or that maybe you were too busy? And now, and you missed it. And you missed it. Yeah.

[06:12] Tod Perry: You missed it. Yeah. And the Taoist feels it’s a shame to miss it. Yeah. Right. It’s so missing. It’s happening right now. It’s right now. Yeah. That’s why I love the title of that book by Ram Dass, Be Here Now. Yes. That’s very Taoist. Yes. Definitely definitely. And so this might be a bigger topic. We’re going to discuss wu wei on today’s show. And the second this the second verse of the Tao Te Ching. Now how is you know, we’re saying don’t, you know, don’t occupy yourself unnecessarily with busy, don’t. But how then does one quote be is being sitting down meditating is being taking a walk is being because those are almost activities in their own way. You know what I’m saying? What is, what is the antidote to the busyness? Is it just allowing life to happen and not planning anything and just sitting down and interacting with the world in a non desiring way?

[07:17] Dr. Carl Totton: You know, there’s the Taoist gathering every year up in Oakland. And a few years ago, I was the keynote speaker. And my topic was being and becoming as a matter of fact pertinent that you should bring that up.

[07:54] Tod Perry: Yeah. What are we supposed to be doing? Are we supposed to be doing anything? Yeah. It was funny. When I was in, I went to India and I noticed it. Everybody in India was in a hurry to do nothing. That was my takeaway from that country. And there were people, they weren’t homeless, they weren’t, they didn’t appear to be homeless, but people would just lay down on the sidewalk or in the middle of the street and just, you know what, I’m just going to lay down for like nobody in LA unless you’re drained. You know, just lays down on the phone. But you’d walk and you’re like, who’s not the guy just just doing the most nothing you could do? He wasn’t even trying to be in a specific place of doing nothing. You’re just like this street right now, I’m just going to lay down and this to nothing. Talk about not doing. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I not do all my couch. All right, not doing this guy was just not doing nothing. You know, it was like, there was part of me that really admired him. You know, I was like, this guy has got it. He’s got it together. Yeah. But, but you know, but I think it’s an important question,

[08:42] Dr. Carl Totton: because all of us, every human being is certainly here in the West, we’re confronted with every day. What are we doing? And what does that doing have to do with our being, yeah, who we are and who were in the process of becoming? Yeah. And can all of that be somehow harmonized so that they don’t conflict? Yeah. Um, since Taoism encourages us to really fulfill our own inner nature, you know, there’s every human being has a clock kind of going off inside of us. You know, we start off very yang, right? Yeah. In fact, if you go back before birth, we’re just a little cell, right? Yeah. Then what about four cells and then eight and they keep dividing? See, so the nature of things, certainly from the beginning, is to grow and expand and become more, right? And we’re born in every day, every second, as any parent will tell you, the kid gets bigger, it seems every few minutes, right? After they’re born. So we’re busy being born as Mr. Dylan said, yeah. And then we contract. And in fact, if you look at the universe from a prospect of a quantum physicist, They will tell you right now that the universe is doing two things simultaneously at all times. It is expanding, ever since the Big Bang. But at the same time, it is contracting, it is like breathing, it is expanding and contracting, and out of that interaction of expansion and contraction comes reality. Things are birthed into being. I think every human being, as a Taoist practitioner, I look at every human being every second as becoming, expanding, but yet contracting. Because we are heading towards what? Non-being. We are headed towards death. And what is the cause of death? Birth. Birth is the leading cause of death. Exactly. In fact, it is the only cause of death. But in between, what happened? We were busy. We were busy. We were being. We were doing whatever we were doing. And if we took the fact, if we go to the end and we take death, and we look at that at all times as something that is stalking us, haunting us, calling to us, because we are moving there. It is calling us. But if we know that, rather than death being this awful, horrible, scary thing out there to be afraid of, death actually becomes a teacher. It teaches us every second to make the choices to really live in a fulfilling, complete manner that will make us at the time we get to that last day in our final breath, say, you know, I did okay. I’m ready now. I wasn’t so busy. I missed me. I missed it. I missed this whole adventure. I was too busy doing stuff rather than being me. And that’s what I think that’s getting to. Can I be me every moment? And what does that take? What type of courage does that take? Am I able to choose my freedom to do that? Understanding that I don’t understand at all, but still be willing to keep going. Based on what’s in my heart, what’s in my heart. And the Tao is a reminder. The Tao, to me, is kind of like a correction. You know, we get so busy doing this and doing that and then the Tao is going, it’s like this little nagging thing on our shoulder going, you know, you’re going to die. You were born and you’re going to die. But in between, what are you doing? What are you doing?

[13:06] Tod Perry: What’s this dal about is recorded at the Taoist Institute in North Hollywood, California. Check out the TaoistInstitute.com. See their schedule of classes, including Taoist meditation, kung fu, and qigong. That’s TaoistInstitute.com. Sijo. Yes. Wu wei? Wu wei? Sometimes thought of as being kind of like effortless action or not doing, if you will. What does that mean? What does it mean to do something without effort to simply allow something to be? How is that going to give us a guideline for how to live in a more fulfilling way?

[14:15] Dr. Carl Totton: And, you know, the Tao recognizes, as we’ve been discussing, the things have their own natural rhythm, things progress in their own way. As long as the basic ingredients are there for life and for progression, things will have their own inner clock. They’re going to progress in a way that is natural to them. And we have our own inner clocks that we have to learn ourselves, which is the weird thing. It’s my clock. But only now as I get to the age of 38 or whatever, I have an understanding of it. much deeper than I did when I was 20. And the clock keeps changing. But I feel

[14:58] Tod Perry: It often referred to as circadian rhythm, right? Yes, yes. .owned biological clock that every human being has. But because I think we’re so busy, we often are out of sync with that

[15:13] Dr. Carl Totton: biological clock. And when we really feel like we should be resting, what are we doing? We’re working over time. When we really feel like, “I’m kind of hungry, I should be eating.” Well, we might take time to eat, you’ll go grab fast food and just shovel it in and then get right back to work. Or we might just kind of starve ourselves and then massively overeat at the end of the day or something. What we didn’t do was when we were, they know that Chinese say when the sage is tired, he sleeps. When he’s hungry, he eats. He’s a tune. The sage is a being who is a tune to their own inner nature and their own inner clock. And they don’t get so busy doing that they avoid not doing when that’s in their best interest. Since everything has an ebb and a flow, in order to shoot an arrow, what do you have to do? Pull it back, you have to increase the tension and then you have to let it go, you have to release it. So all of nature is following this rhythmic cycle of tension and letting go and releasing and then it starts a new. When we violate that, because we’re so busy doing something or we have a desire and going into something that we have to violate the natural rhythm of something and then you probably get a non-satisfactory result. And think about this in your own life. It’s certainly been true in my life. Think about something

[16:57] Tod Perry: you really, really, really want it badly. Yeah. And the trash compactor in the Star Wars story when I was a kid. I just wanted the Death Star playset with the trash compactor in it. So I wanted it. And two things frequently happen as a result of this attachment to desire. One, we get it and then it’s not what we thought or it breaks or it’s our interest evolves and this thing we wanted so badly yesterday, now we couldn’t care less about. Or we don’t get it and we find out that the best thing possibly that could possibly happen is the fact that we didn’t get that because not getting that opened up the possibility of getting what we really needed down the road. That’s happened to me with jobs, with all sorts of things. And so this being so stuck on doing often works to our disadvantage and the book of the Tao indicates that sometimes through not doing, through pausing, through waiting, through being patient, things move into their own natural harmony and rhythm. And then when we put our energy behind that, it works better. Yeah. But it took us pausing and allowing things to develop in their own time in their own way for it to manifest in its suchness and its fullness. Right. So to let a completely bloom or you know, I found that this concept works in my relationship with my wife as a married man. I realized this the way the Tao of Mrs. Perry is that whenever she’s introduced to something new or whatever, she always first pushes against it first. No, this is terrible. No matter what, no matter what news is, it’s just no matter, even if it’s good news sometimes she’ll push against it. But 10 minutes later, it sits, it sticks in her mind and she absorbs it and then she’ll always come back and go, you know what? That’s not such a bad thing or that’s a fine. Now, for years, I would, the moment she’d push back, I then push back. Right. And then it would become a fight. How’d that work out for you? Terribly. And so it’s, I feel like it’s almost like a wu wei thing that I say it, she has a reaction. Yes. I wait. I acknowledge. And then 10 minutes later, she, oh, that’s fine. So now it’s no longer a conflict in our relationship. Right. But it took me so long to not, my desire was to have her react in the way I wanted her to react. And it’s never going to happen. Right. So, but the moment on your own time table, to my exactly, the X and Y axis, it had to be the outcome that I want. A, B and in the time I wanted it, the actually I get the outcome I want, or else maybe I wouldn’t stay married to, so 10 minutes down the road, and now it’s fine. But that feels to me almost like what Wu Wei is, but not just in dealing with my wife, but in dealing with, if I’m pushing a wheelbarrow, right, you know, I’m working with the wheelbarrow, or if I’m cutting a tomato, my dad used to always say, he would say, Todd, let the knife, make the effort. Don’t try to chop the tomato using your hand or your muscles, the knife is a perfect instrument that cuts it. You just don’t get in the knife’s way. See, your dad was a Taoist, I like that. He was a West Virginian Southern Taoist, yeah. That’s cool, yeah, yeah, that’s cool.

[20:38] Dr. Carl Totton: And as a psychologist, you know, and I have to do marriage counseling sometimes, and family therapy sometimes, you see this, of course all the time happening in relationships, where people just push and push

[20:50] Tod Perry: and push each other until they push each other

[20:53] Dr. Carl Totton: right out of their lives. Right, right. Whereas if they did what you just suggested, just pay attention, be patient, wait, listen,

[21:02] Tod Perry: often people really just wanna be heard. Yes, right, yes.

[21:06] Dr. Carl Totton: Then if it’s meant to be, it will happen. If it is, and it won’t. Yeah. And that’s a very Taoist way of looking at things, that is a Wu Wei way of looking at things. Right about the Wu Wei of marriage.

[21:19] Tod Perry: Also, I’ve learned that, I don’t know who said it or where I learned, is you know, you can’t change people, but you can always change how you react to them, and then they will change. Like so, I can’t say, “Sijo, stop doing this” or that, right? I can’t do that. But if I react differently to that behavior from you, because everybody’s in a symbiotic relationship, you will change. Exactly, exactly. And I’m sure you’ve discovered that with your wife. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m sure you have. I’ve learned to stop acknowledging certain behaviors that maybe drive me up a wall a little bit. I love the gap, but yeah.

[21:59] Dr. Carl Totton: And when I talked to couples that have been married for 50, 60 years, you know what they tell me? That, the reason they were able to make a 50 year marriage work is because they accepted each other in all of their idiosyncrasies, and in these different time alignments, they, you know, an old man said, You know, sometimes she’d say this or that and I’d go, you know, she doesn’t really mean that. It’s okay. He’d just wait and then the moment would pass and then they’d go right back to loving each other. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s doing nothing. And then the moment with the Western mind, it’s kill it, hit it with the hammer, hit it over the head. Thanks. Not just, it just let it go. Right, right. And that’s a very, that’s very telling of the kind of the Western way of trying to accomplish a lot of things. We want to beat it over the head. You know, if we have a germ, we’ve got to kill it right back out antibiotic, you know, where is the Chinese way Chinese medicine. It’s much more let’s support the system that support the immune system that’s make the entire organism healthier and then it would just balance itself out. Right, we don’t have to try to kill this and kill that. You know, it’s a system is healthy. It will do naturally what needs to be done. It will naturally do. And that’s a way allowing things to just happen naturally the way they occur. But that only happens when a you respect that there is a natural rhythm to things and b you create an environment and milieu within which that can happen. It involves a lot of trust. And total, I think that’s the hard thing. You’re you’re it’s a complete almost devotion or faith in the Tao in the way to let it go. You know, my life control things. My life became a lot better years ago when I realized something that nothing ever turns out to be as bad as I think it will. Yes. Once I got that to my thick skull.

[24:07] Tod Perry: It’s a lot of hard thing though to get through your skull. Right. You know, it’s very hard because we want to try to control the outcomes. We want to try to fix things. We want to try to make things happen. We want to try to impose our ego our will on reality and the world is looking at us going. Yeah, right. The line is a lyric by the songwriter Pete Taogherty says, you know, boy kicked out at the world in the world kick back a lot harder.

[24:38] Dr. Carl Totton: And there’s an F bomb in there somewhere. But that’s always the way it works. You kick out of the world. The world always, you know, come kick back at you. People always ask me about way and I just like the Tao or Yin and Young. And we could talk about wu wei. I’m sure forever. Yes. forever. Not doing, not doing. Doing without doing. Effortless action. You see, not doing doesn’t mean that you do nothing all the time. It means you do what needs to be done, the amount it needs to be done at the time that it needs to be done. And in the way in which it needs to be done. In other words, you’re moving so in harmony with the flow of how something is naturally different. The second verse of the Tao Te Ching, under Heaven all can see beauty as a beauty. Only because there is ugliness, all can no good, as good, only because there is evil. Being in non being produce each other, the difficult is born in the easy, long is defined by shorts, the high, by the low, before and after go along with each other. So the sage lives openly with apparent duality and paradoxical unity. The sage can act without effort and teach without words. Nurturing things without possessing them, he works but not for rewards, he competes but not for results. When the work is done, it is forgotten. That is why it lasts forever.

[27:08] Tod Perry: So the chapter? Yes, our chapter of the day is chapter 2, correct. Yes. All right, and I will read the English portion, not the Chinese.

[27:26] Dr. Carl Totton: on the book. And this is chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching. Under Heaven, all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil. Therefore having a not having a rise together, difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short contrast each other, high and low rest upon each other. Voice and sound harmonize each other, front and back,

[28:28] Tod Perry: He’s a big fan of his beauty, only because there is ugliness. These things are always thinking to myself that you’re never going to get out of certain cycles in life because if we lived in a perfect world where there was no quote unquote violence, there would always be violence because you wouldn’t have somebody shooting somebody but a slap from one human being to the other would be the most worse violation, right? It would be almost as serious as a murder if you just change the spectrum, right? You’re always going to have inequality because maybe if the richest man in the world had two dollars, a very impoverished man would have one dollar versus a billion dollars versus twenty dollars. You’re always in these cycles that are inescapable in a certain way.

[29:23] Dr. Carl Totton: This ability to kind of tolerate, even appreciate the rule of polarity in life, I think is at the heart of much of Taoist philosophy, yin and yang, you will. We’re challenged every day with people, nations, traditions which insist that their way is the only way. And many of us individually have become attached, even addicted, right? It’s things that we feel, you know, we have to have in a certain way. But yeah, look at your own hand. You know, you have the top part of your hand and you have the bottom part of your hand. You have the smooth part of your palm and you have a rough, more grainy part of your palm. And in fact, if you actually turn your hand over the other side and all that suddenly just got reversed, right? Yeah. But yet, do you need only the top smooth part of your hand or do you need the other part too? Yes. You know Having some money, having no money— See, that’s the same level of anxiety. So, all this abundance, what did it mean? Because we keep adjusting our activity to be at the level with where we think we can afford in terms of just monetary. Taoism, a Taoism knows when they have enough. That’s tricky. Which means that we’re conditioned to want more. It’s never enough. If you have $10 million, the next thing you want is 20. Once you get 20, oh you want 40. There’s no end to it. There’s never enough. You’re always busy. You’re always striving. And then when you get it, are you satisfied? No. You want still more. Where’s the happiness and peace and contentment in that?

[31:57] Tod Perry: It doesn’t exist. And I think if you look at our society, you see that everywhere. It’s right around the corner. I’m gonna have, I’m gonna finally be happy once I get that. Once, yeah. The grass is always greener. Yes, somewhere else. I was, sorry to cut you off here. I was thinking back to the first sentence here and to under Heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugl He goes to the gritty streets, like downtown LA and he takes pictures of skid row and he takes pictures of homeless people and my brother-in-law said he says you know you always take pictures of things that are ugly you know and I was thinking no the fact it in his whole work he is taking photos of these things that are ugly that we don’t want to see because they make us appreciate the other side of things but it almost I feel like as a Taoist in correct me if I’m wrong looks at that so-called ugliness and says this is amazing I’m so glad for this ugliness because without it I would not appreciate beauty it’s like the idea of the vinegar tasters right where you have a Confucius tastes the vinegar and he’s upset about it because it’s bitter and the Buddha

[33:21] Dr. Carl Totton: takes the vinegar and says oh life is suffering how bitter this is and Lao Tzu tastes the vinegar and smiles because it’s supposed to taste that way that is its nature. Its nature. Exactly and so like I also that story tour I love that that you say your father. Yeah my father-in-law. Yeah I love that I used to spend time doing that too actually going down to skid row going down to poor parts of town and just watching how people exist yes they have struggles yes they have challenges but yet you know if you go to a small village somewhere where people by our standards have almost nothing yeah and yet you look at the smiles on their faces you see how they treat each other you see how they enjoy the play of their kids the kids may have quote nothing except some rocks and some twigs and some leaves and they are just engaged in the most imaginative adventure you you’ve never seen yeah whereas over here all I need my Xbox and I need you know all of my equipment in order to have any fun you know kids over here whereas these kids with just a string and a rock and a leaf are totally engaged in life and being creative and that not having allows them to develop that where which you may not if you just if you have the Xbox but just having those rocks and twigs that child’s mind could expand to be even more creative you know and the people there who are living so simply They truly are appreciating every moment that they have with each other. You can see it in the way they look at each other. Whereas here we’re too busy to really look at each other most of the time. We’re just seeing each other in passing. And of course most of our time we’re looking into our smartphones have half the time. I want to set it on fire. Just get away from me. You can see what you can make out of the things you find on the ground. And what does it feel like to have your feet in hands actually on Mother Earth. While you’re looking up at the stars, I’m telling you it gives you something that you can get any other way. You’ll never find that in your Xbox. So you will find it in just having a handful of soil out of which the Earth comes what? Everything. Everything that we have. So

[36:57] Tod Perry: Yeah, that is what was, there’s not an atom in your body that wasn’t forged in the furnace of the sun. I think that was Carl Sagan. And that’s the most powerful thing. You think about the petty kind of things you deal with on an everyday basis and get wrapped up in and focused on anything. I am made of the coolest thing in the world. This is amazing. This is, I get to experience this right now is

[37:57] Dr. Carl Totton: And when people miss a lot, they have to replace that with something else and that something else I think are all the things we tend to be concerned with day by day. Just to get back to this, we don’t miss out in any of it. We can juice this fruit here, we have in front of it. Therefore, having and not having arise together. You need, I had to experience where I had like a job interview for a job I really wanted

[39:27] Tod Perry: So, this dynamic balance between having, not having, getting, not getting, appreciating things just for what they are. And if you don’t get something, appreciating the fact that because you didn’t get that, A, it may have opened, it did, opened up other opportunities. Because if you had gotten that, other doors would have closed. Right. That’s something that maybe wasn’t in your best. And that’s why I say a little while ago that my life became a lot easier once I realized that nothing ever turns out to be as bad as I think it will. Often it turns out to be much better. And that’s forget about it being bad. It becomes so much richer. If I had taken that, I never would have done all these other things that were very good.

[40:29] Dr. Carl Totton: But if we look at things that, oh, I didn’t get where I wanted at this moment as being a tragedy, that attachment limits our opportunities. And I think that’s one of the things that Lao Tzu was getting at when he wrote these words. Therefore, the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no talking. What is it by teaching no talking? Like meditation. In other words, for meditation. And pausing. And remember, words can only express a portion of reality, a tiny portion of what we’re thinking. Right now, on so many levels, we are experiencing all kinds of things. There are hormonal things, neurochemical things. There are things in our subconscious. If you listen to a lot of the traditional psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, they say that maybe what 5% of our entire consciousness is actually in the conscious domain. And the rest is subconscious or unconscious. There’s things going on of which we are unaware. And only a teeny fraction of that can we actually put into words. Right. So, by not doing, by not talking so much, we allow ourselves to participate in that rich inner life. That much deeper substantial. Yes. Yes. And if you’re talking all the time, you’re going to miss it. Yes. You’re going to miss it. There’s no room for it. And think you’re too busy. And thinking, thinking, thinking, talking because we think and what, words. We’re thinking in words. And so, all that was spent a lot of time not talking, not thinking, not doing, because that allows more of reality to actually come into existence. Yeah, it was already there, but it wasn’t in our existence because we could not perceive it. We were too busy thinking, too busy talking, too busy doing, too busy working, too busy doing something, then allowing these things that are already there to become a part of our existence. So it’s like not talking, not doing is its own act of creation. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So I’d like to thank everybody for tuning into our

[42:59] Tod Perry: I’d like to thank Dr. Carl Totton. I pronounced that correctly. Perfect. And I’m Tod Perry and we’ll be back on the next show and enjoy it. To learn more about the show, check us out online at whatsthistao.com. Follow the show on Twitter at What’s This Down. Follow Tod Perry on Twitter at @TodAPerry. Now, don’t follow leaders and watch your parking meters. Oh, really?

[43:51] [Music]

Categories

© 2026 What's This Tao All About?

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑