Show 13 – Chuang Tzu’s Inner Chapters

On show 13, the ever-studious Tod Perry presents a book report on the first half of the seminal Taoist text Inner Chapters by Chuang Tsu. Here, we uncover the mystery of Tzu’s famous butterfly dream and discuss his timeless humor, insightful parables, and importance in the Taoist cannon.

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Hear Dr. Totton’s recent appearance on the “Inspire Me Show.”

Episode Transcript

Okay everybody, welcome back to What’s This Tao About? My name is Tod Perry and I’m here with Sijo, Dr. Carl Totton. It’s good to see you, Dr. Carl.

[Carl Totton]

Always great to see you. Gong hei fat choy. Happy New Year.

[Tod Perry]

Yes, yes. What are the exact dates on the Chinese New Year? February 8th.

Okay.

[Carl Totton]

Monday, February 8th. So in about a week or so.

[Tod Perry]

Yes.

[Carl Totton]

Okay. We’ll be celebrating the fabulous Year of the Monkey.

[Tod Perry]

Now, what are the special properties of the Year of the Monkey?

[Carl Totton]

Well, you know how monkeys are.

[Tod Perry]

Yes.

[Carl Totton]

They’re very mischievous and very active. And so this should be a very active year. We should all get a lot done.

[Tod Perry]

Oh, good.

[Carl Totton]

But we need to be centered so we don’t go off half-cocked.

[Tod Perry]

Go half-cocked in the Year of the Monkey. All right, sorry. I’m just getting our volume levels right.

So it’s been some busy times for you, Dr. Carl. I guess you recently – oh, before we get into that, today we’re going to talk a little bit about – we’re going to talk about Chuang Tzu. And let’s see.

In his book – I wrote on my notes five times Inner Visions, the Stevie Wonder album title, but it’s the inner chapters.

[Carl Totton]

Inner chapters, yes. The inner chapters of Chuong Tzu.

[Tod Perry]

And we’re going to go over a chapter of the Tao Te Ching. But before we get into that, Dr. Carl Totton, you released – you’re the co-author of a book recently that came out that there’s a link to on our website that you can – Excellent.

[Carl Totton]

Yes, I and a couple of other internal martial artists, you know, practitioners of Tai Chi and other types of arts, we felt that we had something to contribute to the world about how to deal with stress.

[Tod Perry]

All right.

[Carl Totton]

Because a lot of our martial art practice and our breathing and Qi Gong and meditative practices are all about how to get the level of stress keyed down enough so that we don’t go crazy and we treat our bodies well because stress can be a killer. Oh, yeah. As you know.

And also if you’re really under a high degree of stress, you don’t think very well. You know, the higher cortical functions of your brain are literally cut off and instead you stay down in your reactive brain, your rat brain, your reptilian brain, where you’re just in that fight or flight reaction or freeze. And you don’t think terribly well under that circumstance unless, of course, you’re running from a tiger or something.

Then that’s appropriate.

[Tod Perry]

Then you don’t want that part of the brain activated, right? You don’t want the part of you that’s like, well, how’s the tiger feeling?

[Carl Totton]

You know, you just want to get the hell out of there, right? Yeah, you want to fight or flight. But in your daily life, fleeing and fighting is probably not appropriate most of the time.

But yet we’re being innovated to do that. We don’t think that clearly and we tend to make poor decisions. Have you looked at the world lately?

You see a lot of poor decisions being made.

[Tod Perry]

Yeah.

[Carl Totton]

We’d like to move beyond that. And so our book, the book on internal stress release, has a lot of activities, exercises, meditations, breathing practices that allow any person to easily learn how to control all of that. So that’s what the book is all about.

[Tod Perry]

All right, just for a little bit of tangible advice right here. Let’s say I’m in my car. I’m on the 405 freeway.

I’m losing my mind. I’m stuck in traffic. I’m late.

What’s a practical piece of advice that you might be able to grab from the book?

[Carl Totton]

Well, a lot, of course, is pre-work. If you have worked on yourself previously and you know that this too shall pass, if I wind up five minutes later there than I should be, in the big scheme of time, over my lifetime, will this really make any difference? No.

See, it’s only when that grasping mind thinks, oh, I got to do this, I got to do this, I got to do that.

[Tod Perry]

Or it’s all over. Yeah. It’s done.

[Carl Totton]

Yeah. See, so a lot of it is philosophical. So if you philosophically understand that, like the tortoise, you’ll get there, slow and sure, wins the race, then you take a lot of the pressure off of you psychologically in the beginning.

[Tod Perry]

Yeah.

[Carl Totton]

And, of course, in the meantime, you can take a few deep breaths and just watch all that tension flowing out of your mouth, symbolically, every time that you exhale.

[Tod Perry]

Yeah.

[Carl Totton]

And then relax your shoulders. You’ll probably notice your shoulders and hands and arms and body stiffening up. And you just imagine like a wave of relaxation going through your body from head to toe and all that anxiety, just let it go.

[Tod Perry]

And now where can people get this book?

[Carl Totton]

Online, Amazon. Amazon.com. The book on internal stress release.

Great. Amazon.

[Tod Perry]

And also, you recently were on KPFK, right?

[Carl Totton]

Yes.

[Tod Perry]

90.7, it’s a big Pacifica radio. It’s a big public radio station here in Los Angeles.

[Carl Totton]

Pacifica Radio Network. Yes. I was interviewed a few weeks ago.

And last week, the first segment played, and it was great. They talked about my life. We talked about this show, the podcast.

Yes. We talked about Tai Chi and yin and yang and meditation and all kind of fun things. And the interview, in fact, was so long, they actually divided it into two.

And I think on February 5th, next week, the second half will be played.

[Tod Perry]

Cool. And then we’ll have a link up to that on the website. I’ll have right here on the show description, I’ll put a link so people can hear the podcast of that.

[Carl Totton]

It was on the Inspire Me show. Hosted by Layla Ashley.

[Tod Perry]

Okay.

[Carl Totton]

I’ve heard her before.

[Tod Perry]

Oh, she’s great.

[Carl Totton]

She actually was one of my Tai Chi students.

[Tod Perry]

Oh, okay. That’s how you got to know her.

[Carl Totton]

And so you can just go to KPFK online there and type in Inspire Me, and it pops right up. And you can listen to it from anywhere in the world, anytime.

[Tod Perry]

Perfect. So now moving on here, we’ve got the inner chapters of Chuang Tzu. Am I saying that right?

[Carl Totton]

Yeah. All right. Unless you’re Chinese, you probably can’t see it right anyway.

I know.

[Tod Perry]

Who was the Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tzu?

Yeah, yeah. So I guess I had never read this before, and it’s I guess what people would call kind of a companion piece to the Dao De Jing. Exactly.

By a gentleman named Chuang Tzu, and it was written, and I guess about what, 475 around then, B.C. B.C. Fourth century B.C. Yep. Yeah. And it’s basically, it’s an interesting book, because where the Dao De Jing is kind of like axioms or kind of poetry, Chuang Tzu is more, it’s like prose.

Yes. And there’s different styles of prose, where some of it is kind of allegorical, some of it is just kind of almost like stories of animals, and some things are kind of little historical takes on things.

[Carl Totton]

Yes.

[Tod Perry]

And what I really enjoyed about it, it’s kind of, Lao Tzu is pointing at humorous things in the Dao De Jing, but Chuang Tzu is almost like the Mark Twain of Daoism. Like there’s a lot of humor in it, and I like that. I got halfway through it, and I kind of highlighted the things that I found remarkable or interesting in the book, and do you have any background on Chuang Tzu, Dr. Carl, that people should know before getting to this?

[Carl Totton]

Well, like you said, he was a later kind of scholar of the Dao, and I think his works formed kind of a balance to some of the more Confucian ways of perceiving daily life. Because like you said, he kind of had his tongue in his cheek a lot of the times, and yet he was very profound and wise, and wanted to move us beyond form and being rigidly held to form as a way of existing in daily life and in structuring relationships. And what he was probably most famous for are these so-called seven inner chapters.

Because there was more written at that period of time, but scholars say that the only thing we can really be sure that he himself wrote were just these seven so-called inner chapters. The rest of me, I don’t know how much you know about Chinese scholarship, but it’s strange.

[Tod Perry]

It’s very strange. It’s not as rigidly documented as the Western.

[Carl Totton]

No, because sometimes somebody will write something really profound, but out of humility will say, oh, I didn’t write this. Buddha wrote this. Lao Tzu wrote this.

ChuangTzu wrote this. Not little old me. And then other times people will take things written by somebody else and put their own name on it.

What is Chuang Tzu’s ‘Butterfly Dream’?

So you have to talk about yin and yang. But the most famous part of Chuang Tzu is his butterfly dream. I love the butterfly dream, where he said this.

Once upon a time I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware I was Chuang Tzu. Suddenly, soon, I awakened, and there I was, verifiably myself again.

Now, I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly, there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.

[Tod Perry]

That’s awesome.

[Carl Totton]

So, what is existence? Is it what we perceive? Is how we are perceiving things accurate?

Or is it more fantasy? Is it wishful thinking? Is it projection?

[Tod Perry]

Is it maya?

[Carl Totton]

Is it illusion? Is it a dream? Now, on the other hand, out of imagination and out of dreams have emerged everything that we have ever created.

And so, I think here in the West, I’ve said this before, imagination gets a bad rap. And I think the most important thing that we as human beings have is our creative imagination because that allows us to dream and to vision things that have not been but could be. Things that are actually in the process of becoming.

It’s the potential. It’s the potential. And if you don’t have that, then what do you have left?

Karma. You just keep repeating the old patterns that you’ve been doing forever and ever and ever.

[Tod Perry]

So, this imagination is the fertile ground in which many of it, if you apply the day, the virtue in action, brings it into being. Exactly. And lots of these things, even like an abstract dream or something that touches you in these weird forms of conscious, change our everyday reality because then you have this weird idea that hits you and you meld it with something else, the creative alchemy.

And then suddenly now you have something in the world. But what began as almost a misfiring of brain synapses becomes present in the world one day. I was in my writer’s group.

I do a writer’s group every other week with a bunch of local writers. And one guy had this whole story. And the story was good.

It didn’t quite add up and it was a little kind of wonky or off. And I knew this writer is a very precise writer, so I was wondering why. And then he just told me this was a dream I had.

And the whole thing. And he just put it all down. And so it made sense.

But there’s that weird dream sense where there’s a feeling, a tone of something that makes sense or makes something climax or makes something feel whole even though literally they’re not. Like the end of 2001, a space odyssey, isn’t really a logical ending. But it’s a satisfying, something deep inside us is projected on the screen right there.

We all understand that putting into words like the Tao, we don’t quite have.

[Carl Totton]

Yeah, we know. What we just experienced was deep. And literally it is deep because it’s very, very layered.

It’s very measured. It’s very nuanced. Just like life.

Now, many people, of course, see things more black and white, this and that. They’re polarized and don’t see the subtleties, which of course leads to all sorts of problems because then my reality is going to clash with your reality if they’re contrasted that much. But if we are able to see the layers and experience that everybody, no matter how they seem, is breathing the same air, they have the same blood moving through their veins, everybody basically wants to be accepted and loved and cared for and to experience happiness and pleasure, we’re much more alike than we are different.

And so I think that understanding these messages from reverie, from dreams, from fantasy. One of my shaman teachers says this, the shamans dream their life into existence. The shaman dreams life into existence.

And so they’re always looking at potential and possibility and at your highest possible evolution. And it’s out there somewhere in space. It’s out there because in the universe of unlimited possibilities, everything is out there.

And we often will approach that first in the dream state. That’s why dreaming and keeping a dream journal can be so important to spiritual growth and psychological stability and well-being.

[Tod Perry]

You know, it’s interesting. You ever have a dream about someone in your workplace or someone you know or whatever, and then the next day you see that person and even though this came from a dream, your perception of them is different.

[Carl Totton]

Yes.

[Tod Perry]

You just dreamed in this new perception of this person, which will then change your interactions.

[Carl Totton]

Yes, because remember that our conscious attention, our conscious mind is only a teeny small part of consciousness. The rest of it is in the subconscious or the unconscious or the collective unconscious even. And these states are approachable most directly through the dream and through meditation in states of reverie.

And that’s why people for thousands of years have done that because they recognized what you just said, that our life and our interactions are enriched if we are in touch with this other reality, what Carlos Castaneda and Don Juan called a separate reality, the title of his second book.

[Tod Perry]

Yes, I read that quite some time ago. Yes. Also I was thinking, I think it was John Cleese, the comedian, was saying that creativity isn’t necessarily, the creativity is learning how, it’s like a process.

And as part of that process, it’s opening yourself up to that and not blocking yourself off and going off to this area. Like there was a movie Finding Neverland where Johnny Depp played J.M. Barrie and he’s talking to Kate Winslet and she says, you have this place you can go to in your mind where these ideas come and this whole thing is. And I think the creative mind is one that embraces that and sees it and tries to nurture it, whereas maybe somebody who isn’t is somebody that doesn’t see its value or doesn’t know it’s there, but it’s a latent thing in everybody.

[Carl Totton]

Yes.

[Tod Perry]

And one more thought on the dream thing, and as the dreams, this kind of thing can shape our reality and it comes in unconsciously and it comes in unchoosingly, these ideas come in, then they’re manifest. I guess when it comes to evolution, one of the things that affect genetic mutation are like cosmic rays, right? So you have some kind of cosmic radiation that comes out from the sun or something and that has an effect on the genetics of things.

It can actually change genetics. And so it’s this natural thing that hits the earth that changes something genetically and now the whole genome of the universe changes and now new things can arise in the same way that dreams can affect this reality as well.

[Carl Totton]

Much of reality we have no conscious awareness of because it’s too subtle. How many people can feel the effect of cosmic rays on them right now? Not really.

Or gravity. You can feel the weight pulling you down, but it’s affecting us on many, many, many other levels too we’re completely unaware of. Not to mention all the electromagnetic things in the air and God knows what else.

[Tod Perry]

And chemtrails. I got my tinfoil hat on now.

[Carl Totton]

And natural gas, right? Oh, jeez. Porter Ranch.

So we are being affected on so many levels. In fact, let me tell you something. It’s been estimated that every second in our subconscious over 11 million bits of information pass through your subconscious every second.

[Tod Perry]

Most of them are about football. But the rest are about the doubt. No, I’m kidding.

[Carl Totton]

And so we’re clueless. We’re clueless. We just think we know who we are, what we’re doing, and as I’ve mentioned before, not one person can tell you what their next thought is going to be.

[Tod Perry]

No.

[Carl Totton]

So how does that affect free will? If we don’t know what’s going on, if we’re clueless, we don’t know what our own mind, particularly at the unconscious and subconscious and collective unconscious levels, are dealing with and processing and assimilating, we have to put an effort towards remaining fully aware and conscious. Hence, meditation.

Hence, lucid dreaming. Hence, states of reverie. Hence, being mindful, watching the self.

All of these are tools to do what the Taoist, one of the Taoist immortals, the one who’s on my wall up here, Lu Tung Pin, he was famous for saying, you have to turn the light around. You have to turn the light of awareness around. And without judgment, just notice what’s going on.

Because until you know what’s going on, you don’t know. And if you don’t know, you’re acting in an unconscious manner, which means you are now a slave of karma again and are doomed to repeat it forever. And that’s a long time.

Chuang Tzu’s sense of humor

[Tod Perry]

That’s TaoistInstitute.com Ah, let’s see here. I have another thing. There’s a little anecdote I really liked on page 17 I have here, where I was really appreciating the Chuang Tzu’s humor.

Because for my readings of different spiritual things, I don’t find humor in much of it. And I find that one of the most beautiful things about Taoism and the way it’s written and the way it’s portrayed is the humor in it and the irony. I mean, humor and irony, it’s a metaphor for the greater big picture.

It’s pointing towards things we can’t get to in words. It’s the Tao that cannot be told. But humor can paint the picture.

[Carl Totton]

That’s why comedians can’t get away with saying anything that ordinarily is straight up, they’d shoot you.

[Tod Perry]

Well, nowadays you can’t.

[Carl Totton]

Look at South Park.

[Tod Perry]

Oh, yeah. The sad thing is that now people are getting so politically correct about everything that they’re taking comedy and in that safe space that is a comedy club or whatever where we work out these ideas, we work out this reverie, we work out these kind of outside, I don’t know, what do you call it, the outside, off the beaten path kind of ideas and it’s almost a laboratory for those ideas. But then somebody tweets out and everybody beats the comedian up and you’re kind of killing that.

[Carl Totton]

I know.

[Tod Perry]

In a weird way. It’s a weird thing where you want to build the most tolerant society ever and in a way of people trying to be so tolerant, they become intolerant, right? It’s a weird thing to kind of figure out the balance.

[Carl Totton]

That’s why when I teach classes on diversity, there’s always this talk about becoming tolerant and we have museums of tolerance and all kinds of things. Do you really want to just be tolerated? Yeah.

Or would you rather be accepted, loved, appreciated for the newness that you personally are adding to the mix? Right. There’s never been another person on this earth like you.

Right. You’re unique. Right.

Right? And so it’s all a big stew, right? But you’re adding your unique ingredients to the stew and we need to appreciate that.

Can you imagine how bland it would be if you had to eat the same food every day?

[Tod Perry]

Sort of the museum of appreciation.

[Carl Totton]

Right.

[Tod Perry]

Maybe tolerance is the first step for some people, right?

[Carl Totton]

Yeah.

[Tod Perry]

That’s true. After the text I got from my sister today. We’ll get into that later.

So page 17. The funny thing is these chapters in my version, they’re not labeled. There’s some stuff in Chinese which I assume is the labeling.

Huizu said, I have a big allianthus tree. Its trunk is so gnarled and full of nuts it is impossible to measure accurately. Its branches are too twisted and crooked for anyone to measure with a compass and square.

It stands at the side of the road but no carpenter would give it a second glance. Now your words are as big and useless that no one wants to hear what you have to say. The words are just as big and useless as this tree that’s knotted and gnarled.

I love the visual. A tree like that is kind of a metaphor for a man’s thinking. I always think that the interior of your car probably looks a lot like your mind.

If you have a big messy car that’s everywhere, I’m sure your thinking is the same.

[Carl Totton]

That’s why cleaning is such an important tool. I for one love big gnarled trees. What looks more interesting than something which has grown right out of nature into this unusual, beautiful, curved, carved, twisting configuration.

It catches your attention every time. Whereas just a regular tree, you’ll walk right by it and not even know it’s there. It’s just part of the landscape.

Again, that goes back to our uniqueness. If you’re gnarled and curved in a way that catches my attention, remember what I said earlier that Taoists are curious and that curiosity leads to then knowing which leads to understanding and then appreciation and embrace. It’s a metaphor for how we’re holding reality and things that capture our attention in reality.

[Tod Perry]

The funny thing is the guy who says this is talking to Chuang Tzu. Then in the end, he jokingly says, no one will try to cut it down. Nothing can harm it because it has no use.

Yes. The tree will live to fight again. That’s right.

[Carl Totton]

As will Chuang Tzu. You can tell he’s a chip off the old Lao Tzu block.

[Tod Perry]

Let’s see here. What else? Some other stuff I really like here.

There’s page 32 in my book. There’s a thing on distinctions.

[Carl Totton]

Ah, distinctions.

[Tod Perry]

When right and wrong appeared, Tao declined. Chao Wen played the lute, Xie Kuang kept time with the baton, and Hui Su leaned on a stump and debated. Each of these three masters was nearly perfect in his own art.

Their names will be remembered forever. And then the last thing is, not making distinctions but dwelling on which is unchanging is called clear vision. So we’re talking again the black and white mind that makes distinctions, that’s not open to the, that sees, as Alan Watts says, that sees the world in a prickly fashion.

Ah, I forget what the other one is. I always forget these things. You see, there’s the prickly and then there’s the wavy.

And the wavy is the Tao, and the prickly is the other. Yes.

[Carl Totton]

And again, it kind of alludes towards some of the distinctions, speaking of distinctions, between a more Confucian way of apprehending reality and a more Taoist or neo-Taoist way. And remember Confucius met Lao Tzu, and that day he was struck by his appearance and his words and his presence and his being, and he told his disciples, ha, today I met a dragon.

[Tod Perry]

Right.

[Carl Totton]

I met a dragon.

[Tod Perry]

We also have on page 40, Chuang Tzu talks a little bit about beauty. Mao Chang and Li Qi were considered beautiful by men, but if fish saw them, they would dive to the bottom of the river. If birds saw them, they would fly off.

If deer saw them, they would run away. Of these four, who recognizes real beauty?

[Carl Totton]

Interesting.

[Tod Perry]

I love that. You can look great, but in the entirety of things, what does it really matter? I always say that to myself.

I was like, what odd beings we are. We’ve got these arms, and we’re flopping around and everything, but to us, because it’s us, we’re fine. But I’m sure we look like aliens to my dog.

[Carl Totton]

We all know about the eye of the beholder, and human beings, we’re funny-looking critters. Yeah. Look at your hand.

What? You’ve got five little worms coming out, and they wiggle around and stuff, and you’ve got this fuzzy stuff on top of your head.

[Tod Perry]

Some of us.

[Carl Totton]

Some of us. I won’t even go into our more internal anatomy and how ridiculous that is. Biological life, as efficient as it is in many respects, is very inefficient in other respects.

It has to consume. It has to take in energy. It has to process it, and then it has to excrete it.

Is that the most efficient and effective way for something to exist in the universe? Well, it certainly has developed. It’s obviously meeting the adaptational needs of us as an organism, and all organisms in the universe have to adapt to change.

It has to have balance, homeostasis, and it has to have some way of feeding or nurturing itself. Ours just seems to be relying on food and water every day. It just seems to be kind of cumbersome, which is why the Taoist Adepts, the Taoist Immortals, what’s their diet?

Dew and air. Dew and air. And they ride the clouds with the dragons.

So that’s a metaphor for becoming less attached to these biological realities so that one’s spirit can soar at that dragon level, that level of transcendence and wisdom and evolution.

[Tod Perry]

As Alan Watts said, to some they may just consider us tubes.

[Carl Totton]

Yes. I cannot tell you how many times I have said that we’re just tubes. We take stuff in, we metabolize it, and we send it right back out.

Almost like a flatworm, right?

[Tod Perry]

Yes.

[Carl Totton]

Who do the same things. And we think we’re so advanced.

[Tod Perry]

Oh, right, yeah. Let’s see here. You know what?

We’ve got so much stuff from Chuang Tzu here, I think we’re going to just do Chuang Tzu and we can do our chapter of the next show and stuff.

[Carl Totton]

Okay.

[Tod Perry]

We can push it on. Let’s see here. There’s a real quick line on the infinite.

He says, Forget time, forget distinction. Enjoy the infinite, rest in it. And it’s like there’s a song by the Chemical Brothers and a guy, Noel Gallagher, it’s called Let Forever Be.

And it’s just release yourself in the infinite. Because if you look at things, when you have an atom, you could just keep splitting, right? You’re going to have a nuclear blast, some splitting, but things just keep getting smaller and smaller and they’re still things, right?

[Carl Totton]

Yes.

[Tod Perry]

Things are infinitely huge, like the universe, or infinitely small.

[Carl Totton]

Yes.

[Tod Perry]

And so there’s no real up or down, left, right, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We are in this kind of infinite space.

[Carl Totton]

Yes.

[Tod Perry]

And there’s such a power in that, that to release oneself to it, to give yourself up to it, sacrifice yourself to this infinite nurturing thing, is beautiful. And to realize that in Chuang Tzu, 400 years B.C. was on this.

[Carl Totton]

As above, so below. And as one of my favorite poets, E.E. Cummings, said, forever was never till now.

[Tod Perry]

Right. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s good.

[Carl Totton]

Right now. This is it. This moment.

But this moment is informed by what’s above and what’s below. What’s at that macrocosmic level, moving towards infinity, and in the other direction, also moving towards the infinitesimally small, the microcosmic level. And we, human beings, right here positioned between Heaven and Earth, are said to represent the fulfillment and the manifestation of those two cosmic forces within infinity, within the infinite nature of reality.

And that’s why we being here right now is so important. Because this is all there is. Right.

This is all there is. All right. Past and future all bisect this moment in space and time, right here, right now.

And waking up to this reality is what this Tao is all about.

Chuang Tzu’s story: Cook Ding Cuts Up an Ox

[Tod Perry]

Nice. I’m going to finish up with this last one. Page 55.

The Cook Ding Cuts Up an Ox. Which is another… This could seriously…

If it wasn’t so bloody, it could be a Disney cartoon. Infantasia or something. This is…

The Cook says, When I first began to cut open oxen, I saw nothing but oxen. After three years of practicing, I no longer saw the ox as a whole. I now work with my spirit, not with my eyes.

My senses stop functioning and my spirit takes over. A good cook changes his knife once a year because he cuts, while a mediocre cook has to change his every month because he hacks. However, when I come to difficulty, I seize up the joint, I look carefully, keep open my eyes on what I’m doing and work slowly.

Well done, said the prince, I guess who was talking to him. From the words of my cook, I have learned the secret of growth.

[Carl Totton]

Yes.

[Tod Perry]

I love it. I love it.

[Carl Totton]

Yeah. That’s why, again, using discernment to see at any given moment what is the most auspicious way to approach our existence, our relationships, our work, our play. If we’re precise, we don’t waste a lot of energy.

If we’re imprecise, if we just hack at it, we make a lot of errors and we create a lot of debris. It’s a big mess and you rub other people the wrong way because you’ve clashed with their perception of reality but if you are precise and more using, again, your powers of discernment, which means you have to slow down and notice and just allow your impressions to come to you rather than trying to force your reality on the external world. When we live out of that perspective, our life is so much easier.

That is the water course way to say it. That’s wu-wei. Right.

Acting without action. Effortless action. That is the way of the now.

[Tod Perry]

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