Tag: active laziness

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. 

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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?

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