THE BODY BEYOND: THE ART OF THE CATALYST
Along with Emceeing, DJing and Graffiti art, Bboying (breakdancing for the layman) is one of Hiphop's four primary skillful means or methods of enlightenment. We can use it to wake up to the full potential of the body and mind, to explore our deepest values and ways of experiencing a greater sense of social interdependence. Often times the body is written off as something used to feed and pleasure or used to attract or dispel others. Despite the body being our closest friend and ally, we may only rarely turn to the body as a source of wisdom. One of my Buddhist teachers refers to the body as our first home. We've lived in the body longer than any structure that we will ever inhabit and will have it for the rest of our lives, so why not start here when looking for answers to how to bring about genuine contentment, peace and purpose?
Ultimately dance is the interplay between matter and space, form and emptiness. When a dancer no longer realizes the difference between subject and object, between experience and experiencing, freedom and liberation arise. When awareness becomes aware of itself (when a dancer recognizes "im dancing") a sort of freezing takes place, an instance of fear and insecurity that paralyzes the moment and brings about a sense of separateness between natural spaciousness and what is experiencing the space itself. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master describes the experience as if the ground were suddenly removed from beneath you and you begin falling endlessly. If you're anything like me, first you would freak the fuck out and then maybe you'd have some deluded notion that maybe you could call upon some repressed atavistic gene and learn how to fly before you hit the ground, but in the territory of awareness there is no ground; there is nothing to hold onto and nothing to provide any sense of security. In that space I'm forced to endlessly fall, but as Chogyam Trungpa goes onto say, there's no ground; just vast space. If that is the case, if we're all endlessly falling through the winds of life, how can we find comfort and control (if there is any) in the groundless experience of our everyday lives? How can we dance in space or dance AS space?
I sat down with Baltimore resident Talbolt Johnson, a highly respected and revered performer and dance instructor about how his program the Art of the Catalyst, holographic meditation and self interrogation can introduce us to the power of our nature through dance.
>>JUSTIN: Who are you and what do you do?
>>TALBOLT: My name is this Talbolt Johnson. I also go by the name Bolt Three Thousand. I'm an artist. I live in Baltimore City, Maryland. That's a really really simple version of the answer to that question.
>>JUSTIN: So what are you most widely known for?
>>TALBOLT: I am definitely definitely probably known for my dancing.
>>JUSTIN: That's actually originally how I met you. I don't know if we met that first night a couple of years ago at the The Windup Space but that's how I met you. I saw you dancing at the four hours of funk and I was blown away 'cause you were so ill. I was like who is this guy? After meeting you and talking with you, I realized that this wasn't just dancing. You know what I mean? To you, this wasn't just you going out and try to be necessarily impressive or entertaining but that you had your own unique take on what it is that you do. And I'm wondering if you can help me and you can help the rest of the world kind of explain how you understand what it is that you do.
>>TALBOLT: Definitely definitely. Best way I could do that I guess is to talk about my stance. My stance is hip hop culture hip hop dance - popping, which is more synonymous with funk style in the 60s 70s 80s - associated with black culture, street culture, urban culture. My inspiration of things - I'm going to jump around to a lot of things because it is a long long story but my inspiration in dance I discovered is a relationship with my body that was essentially teaching me about myself and about different aspects of life that you would not originally like assume you could learn through studying movement you know? Now at the same time while all this was going on for me, I'm also undergoing a lot of spiritual awakening, a lot of interest in spiritual concepts and identities, purpose and our relationship to any type of higher power or higher intelligence - that's also coming into my head during these years of me studying the body and its inner senses - how we communicate with that. So the more I studied my history and the more I studied the aspects of different things like how the shaman gather around the fire in circles; it is a very powerful information passed down from generation to generation. I started drawing a lot of parallels in hip hop culture when it comes to earning your name and earning your title, respecting your elders, having someone that puts you under their tutelage and teaches you that the purposes for a lot of the cultural paradigms and rituals in hip hop culture - there's a reason behind all of it and it all breaks down elementally. So my interest has been allowing me to look at dance in a way that I had to think about myself as first a historian.
>>JUSTIN: Sure.
>>TALBOLT: That's what the original idea was; that I was going to tell narratives. Basically make use of archetypes and characters, and find a way through the dancing to speak to people about it in a fashion that makes them feel like they related to what the character went through; what was being communicated in the scene. So that got me along in a way. Then I started doing what we call popping. It looks like I'm being robotic. I started using these techniques that I learned in popping to make these statements, these broader statements about the human experience on a spiritual level. So I definitely became a storyteller.
>>TALBOLT: Now that's the identity part of it. What does this all mean in my own personal spiritual life is that there's a level of, I don't know what you would call expertise - I wouldn't call it that, but a level of relationship with the movement that I was doing, with the actual style, with my body, that it sets it far past the concept of technique and application. It was no longer about what am I doing as far as like this move or that move. And it was no longer plastic, so to speak. It wasn't a technique anymore. It was more - it was much more complex than that, much deeper than that. It became about the relationship that I have with my spiritual life and what changed with that relationship as I become more in tune with my body. And I thought on it a lot more about the kinesthetic experience - inner body and outer and I started drawing conclusions between inner body knowledge and communicative experience - how we communicate through gesture and two very basic truths about what being a human being is and the body itself. How breathing works, how perception works, how time and space works in relationship to the human experience. And it helped me to - I don't know. It helped me go pretty far as far as my understanding of spiritual concepts. Right now, I'm preparing a classroom in my shop where I can teach a holographic meditation class. Now here's the funny thing - if I hadn't had this experience or joined this movement, I would never have stumbled upon the concepts that I'm now about to share with a large group of people, you know? So like my whole gist of it is (and this has been written about in multiple fashions), but my whole gist of it is to exhaust one's self in an art form, in a culture, in a specific path, in that art form or culture, in order to learn more about yourself and who you are as a human being; more than to just learn about that particular path, that technique or experience. There's a good philosophy about that; the unfolding of a path. When you just start doing something you have an interest in it. I wouldn't call it a shallow perspective. You're drawn to it and then maybe your personality glues you to it. It could be a number of things. But essentially you're drawn to it and you want to be the best at it. You want to be good at it. The next stage is to fall in love with it and with the inner workings of it, the science behind it. Power is in the body because biologically you are all of these things. You fight through technique. You fall in love with the application of whatever this act is. I'm going to give a quick synopsis on this - the last stage is when doing the action, ends up - other than the act of studying it and the act of mastering it, it ends up giving you realizations about life and the human experience that are profound. You know, the equivalent of what in many cultures we call the level of mastery. It's a more over-arching concept, more spiritual in nature.
>>JUSTIN: So I'm glad you brought all this up because I knew you were teaching a class today and I'm interested in the approach that you're going to take. You have a group of people today that come in that may be neophytes. They may have some moderate experience of dancing. They may think of themselves as experts. But regardless of their experience what is it that you are going to talk about today in the class that on a practical level that you think is going to help them to access that kinesthetic wisdom?
>>TALBOLT: Let me clarify what I was talking about. The class I'm about to teach in the next 45 minutes is a meditation class. It is very heavily impacted on my kinesthetic learning. And I also have a dance workshop later tonight at an art museum that is similar to the meditation practice but it is the application of movement. But essentially what we are talking about is that the outcome for people in the class is the human being itself, like you yourself is the source of not only your expression but also your perception of what and who you are.
>>TALBOLT: In my kinesthetic understanding, I have come across five interesting relationships between the impact that my perspective has on my own expression and also the impact my perception has on that which inspires my expression. And this can lead to the concept that you have a lot more power over how to receive our experience than we think we do. There was the popularity of this book called "The Secret" or something like that. I never read it. I saw a little bit of the documentary and I never knew what everyone was talking about when I started talking about these concepts, and they were like, "well this sounds like The Secret". I'm like what's secret? This is not a secret. This is really how things work. This idea that what you put out impacts what you get back. That's the law of attraction. I did come to find out what people were talking about, I was like oh, this is commodified. This is all about good feelings. It doesn't really accept what good and bad even is as an illusion, you know? It doesn't really accept the accountability we have to have to ourselves existentially. These things are really important - metaphysical existence and application. So, what I'm attempting to communicate to people today is to think less of being powerful and manipulate the experiences around them, saying I'm going to use the law of attraction to make this thing happen, which is a very cultured idea and a very Western concept of power, or dominant concept of power. Now I want to shift everybody's viewpoint over to the idea of empowerment, where you recognize the role in a universal play and you don't have the ability to micromanage or manipulate the specifics of how reality manifests around you. What actually influences how reality manifests around you is your choice of how you perceive yourself in relationships.
>>JUSTIN: Sure.
>>TALBOLT: And what we're going to do is zoom in on that and take advantage of that. I learned that the way I perceive myself in the moment when I do what I do, when I'm up there and I'm Bolt 3000, the way I perceive my self relationship, the way I perceive the other people in my environment, my physical environment, the music in my environment, all of those things impact what my body is capable of producing. An effective dance or an ineffective dance or emotion is what's most important. This is similar to some Buddhist concepts. And my perception literally holds the key to anything I want to create or express. Nowadays when I move, if I want to create or express a feeling of some kind or communicate something, I know exactly what I want to do in the moment that I'm doing it. I'm wired for expressing that. I can dance how I want. Now that comes from literally a shift in my perception of what I'm doing in that moment. But what's occurring in that moment? What is the concept? If that makes any sense...
>>JUSTIN: It does make sense. And what keeps coming up for me is - today when you're going to hold the class - because you describe it as you know this is a meditation class which is really ill - what are the techniques that you plan on teaching or that you plan on guiding the attendees through today? What are those techniques that can help them to be more aware of their own perception, be aware of their own awareness....
>>TALBOLT: Well one of those techniques that I'm going to focus on is really, really powerful for the individual. I call it interrogation. So you'll just check yourself. In some discussions people call it checking in with yourself. Some people call it becoming mindful, but the way I call it is the dude is interrogating himself. Interrogate what your body is doing. What is my body doing right now? And really feel that. This is how I fulfill the destiny. Interrogate what your thoughts are without having a critique. Ask yourself what I'm always thinking about right now? And why am I thinking about it? Interrogate your feelings. What am I feeling right now and how am I feeling about it? Interrogate what yourself without having a critique. Ask yourself, "What do I really feel I need right now?". "What do I need vs. what do I want right now?" Gathering information about your inner world because this is what we do - this is something I learned to do as a dancer when I was training myself for a new form or movement, I would ask myself how does this feel being in this position. And can I teach myself to recognize what this is like in this moment so that when I come back I know what to do with it and how to utilize it.
So the benefit is definitely in the part where people are taught to self interrogate. We're not going to interrogate our outer experience dramatically; we want to see ourselves. We usually think seeing is believing and evidence is driven by the analytical mind to try and pick apart everything else to do our bidding. So we are switching from power and switching it back to empowerment; focusing all the interrogation on the inside. So hopefully through this self interrogation you may be able to draw conclusions from certain situations in life. Something you thought was one thing is actually another thing. Or you're thinking and feeling in one fashion, but really all you have to do is take a nap or eat or something. And that's the larger part of what it is I'm bringing to people called the Art of the Catalyst. Today is the first class, so I'm not giving them too much stuff, I'm really trying to use this class to really get through something that makes sense right now but we're still just beginning to engage with. I just call it - well I don't know what to call it yet. But it's based off of checking in and seeing that what you're doing adds up in a natural hierarchy of needs. This idea of am "I providing for myself basic things?" Am I making sure that I sleep or rest well enough, making sure that I am keeping myself safe from the dangers of cell phones, keeping myself from being sick - these basic ideas. And then asking yourself now do I believe in who I am? Am I confident in what I feel I am or I think I am? Doing this type of self interrogation allows you the time you need to find out. "OK, if I'm having an issue in life right now where I feel distressed, how can I pin point where that's coming from?" Doing that from an epicenter of an accountable place, not blame yourself or question yourself but ask yourself, "In my day to day actions, and in my day to day thoughts and my days of living life, am I providing for myself A, B and C.?" So what I'm offering is a way - it is a movement of sorts. It's a movement on the inside though. It's a shifting of a lot of things on the inside. Like finding out what your rhythm is in life and working with that rhythm by taking step by step actions to start accessing - to start behaving and ritualizing your day to day action in a fashion that moves the focus towards self love and empowerment, rather than all these other things that may possibly have us giving our power away. That's just one of those techniques that I teach - self interrogation.
>>JUSTIN: What you're talking about is really interesting because a lot of it mirrors the techniques in Buddhism - very fundamental techniques in Buddhism - you used the word mindfulness earlier. And you know the original teachings on mindfulness came out of Buddhist teaching called The Satipatthana Sutra, and in the Satipatthana Sutra it's all about investigating the physical body. It's about investigating the thoughts. It's about investigating feelings. It's about investigating your sense perception. And that technique is associated with something called Vipashyna, which translates into insight or insight meditation. And in some Buddhist traditions, this is taught as the main technique. Like, that IS the technique. The techniques are meant to introduce you to what the mind actually is. What actually is going on versus what I perceive is going on. And in other schools of Buddhism there are techniques that are taught prior to this in order to still the mind first, in order to make it more possible for you to actually see what the mind is.
>>TALBOLT: That's interesting. As we were talking about this, it reminded me of some other things that I want to do today to help create the environment is a thing that is present to activate - to interrogate oneself without getting caught in the pitfalls of, like, searching for an answer or simply resisting the interrogation and doing nothing with it. And it's - well it's a practice where we give ourselves permission to think, permission to feel, permission to have these opinions. You give yourself permission to have these things going on inside you. And we make an agreement with ourselves that we are not going to pass judgment or make any critique of it all. But instead we are going to move to critically inquire about what we need to critique. I need to make a decision eventually. But we are going to free ourselves from that necessity - that something that needs to be done and just look at it for a while.
>>JUSTIN: That's right. That's right.
>>TALBOLT: But I feel like it helps in groups like this to have mantras or affirmations where we say all right - verbally you are giving yourself permission to do this. Because we may not actually be giving ourselves permission to not judge our thoughts or feelings or we're hiding from that, so today we're just going to give ourselves permission to feel and think and have and own all of what's going on inside us. So it can show itself first, and then we can take a look at it.
>>JUSTIN: I think that a lot of times people's relationship with meditation is that they need to get rid of something, that something here is not acceptable or I need to try to make something happen. I need to gin something up, you know? I need to bring something in. But what you're talking about more sounds like some sense of balance between self acceptance, curiosity, inquisitiveness and saying let me be brave enough to accept what comes up for me and to look at it, not necessarily for any purpose as if I need to do something with it, but to just be able to be with it, to be able to be genuine and to be able to not necessarily get caught up in the content of what I'm doing but the act of acceptance in and of itself produces some sense of I'm OK. What goes on for me and what I experience is good enough.
>>TALBOLT: Yes exactly. I believe - what I have discovered and I have heard before is this correlates with certain paths, certain studies culturally - but I myself shy away from taking on any titles or words or roles. I do pay homage to anything that I feel is very similar or something that inspires me - another culture, but I very much respect the traditional value of something like for example Hiphop culture. So I appreciate the parallels in certain respects to certain things. I do want to acknowledge that even though you may have brought up some parallels to Buddhism, andI know that there is an entire world, lifestyle and history that is taken on by individuals who are on that path, that I do not take ownership of that process.
>>JUSTIN: At the same time I think everything that I have talked about and everything that you have talked about are human because they are not based on creating something. They aren't based on conditions, you understand what I'm saying?
>>TALBOLT: Yes exactly.
>>JUSTIN: So anyone who is associated with a tradition or a path all those people did was look too. They just looked and they just interpreted - you know what I mean? They interpreted...
>>TALBOLT: That's exactly how I have been. The focus for me is really not asking ones mental conditioning for answers at all. It is to be aware of your conditioning and then see if it's you're the one that has been conditioned. Because there's a spirit you have as an artist where you find this place inside yourself when you are expressing and you feel that it is difficult to describe space and time. It is difficult to describe if you had an identity at that moment or that you have ownership of anything. There is this level of purity that you experience that is actually as simple as using this word essence.
>>JUSTIN: Yes, there you go.
>>TALBOLT: I am helping create the potential and the environment for the potential for the individual to perceive themselves as, or choose to find out how, in actuality we are quite empty when we are in a place of pure expression, of pure discovery. So in order to get there, I do believe that there needs to be a step taken to recognize what the mind is doing and what perception is actually doing and where we relate - where and how we relate to that. It is important, as the individual having the experience, that I can't tell you what this is. I would rather create an environment for you to say to yourself I am certain I feel this now. To find out how in actuality we're quite empty when we're in a place of pure expression or pure discovery. Because we can get to the point where we can say that there is nothing that needs to be done, but yet there still is action in the world. So then for what purpose do we take action and what purpose is creation even going to occur? What purpose is it manifesting for? And so yeah, the goal of the class is to help people reach a level of purity and essence that we see something that I often refer to, the idea of how one is none. And about - I always allude to how, in all these creation theories, we see how something simply "arrives" and that you need this essence, you need this attribute of nothing meshed in order for something to have a pure understanding of what it is. So the class is to challenge people - to challenge people to see the conditioning and let go of their conditioning and discover that even with the lack of all these things that there is a nature still present and in that present nature, then we now have a lot more freedom to see. We'll have a lot more freedom in our daily lives actually.
>>JUSTIN: Sure.
>>TALBOLT: Essentially, you know? I colloquialize to the concept of rhythm. Being in rhythm with the flow of our lives, being in rhythm with path I'm on, it's almost like we're all watching this movie or we're all in this dance that's happening - this play. We have to get a really good measure of tools with which to interact with the different situations and the stimuli, the different sounds, the different instruments, you know, in the song that we're talking about. The words become very poetic and very metaphorical; we're trying to pack together in concept, something that can not be packed together in concept.
>>JUSTIN: It sounds - again, it's amazing the amount of correlation with what you're saying and in the wisdom traditions, especially the higher teachings of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism etc. they all talk about emptiness, but you were also saying that emptiness is not empty, right? If I rest within that emptiness then I will see as you said, that there is a sort of nature there and that the nature is not dead.
>>TALBOLT: It's full of potential.
>>JUSTIN: Exactly. Full of potential, full of aliveness, full of intelligence and how can I recognize that emptiness without the need to find some sort of stability within that emptiness; Some sort of ground to find something to hold on to because that's what we do, right? We sometimes unknowingly even enter into that state through life events that will put us in that state of "oh shit". That "oh shit groundlessness". And then we start looking for ground. Looking for ground means, you know, that could be drugs, that could be another person, that could be - trying to find anything that's going to make me feel like I'm not just falling through space right now. You know what I mean? I'm trying to find an asteroid out here you know? Trying to find the nearest planet out here.
>>TALBOLT: Exactly. So this first course is like a crash course. I want to bring people to a place where they can see all of the aspects of their life that they interact with in this very same relationship that we talk about - this level of purity and natural essence. It's very similar to a process that came my way which I was very interested in that was introduced to me while studying the Bhagavad Ghita and that process is the process of renunciation.
"That idea of like if a tree falls in a forest and no one's around here it does it make a sound? If you become the Buddha in a forest and no one is around to say hey you're the Buddha, are you the Buddha?"
>>JUSTIN: Talk about renunciation brother. Talk about that for a couple minutes.
>>TALBOLT: Renunciation - that's a word that comes with a lot of stuff behind it. There's one particular form of renunciation that I've come to learn and there are many different ways that this is approached, but we have the idea of being completely unattached from the corporeal realm and by the corporeal realm, I mean like the physical realm. And that extends into the mind, memory, personality, my house, my car, my cigarette, my sandwich. These things come but they're not here to stay. Even the body itself is also part - it has its existence in the corporeal realm. Our bodies are specifically designed biologically to break down all the time. It is a natural thing. It's entropy. So part of my discourse in the art of the catalyst eventually is to get people to see the relationship of emptiness to renunciation. There's a distance between the individual and the identification with all their experiences. What I find to be powerful is this whole idea that you could have somebody who thinks that they are completely enlightened in nature but they have all of the inner characteristics of one who is not. There can be some who have no material belongings. Who have all these other things that they feel makes them wise. Yet they have an unchecked inner desire that they have not attended to. And then in renunciation one can have a guru who is just as confused as the next guy, and you can have a king who is sitting in the seat of soul and is truly unattached to the events around them. And they do not let the events or the causality around them define their understanding of their true nature. Now that's not necessarily easily - that's not something you're going to do. You don't just wake up today and be like I'm going to renunciate.
>>JUSTIN: What do you think gets someone to renunciation?
>>TALBOLT: I think that a lot of stuff that we were talking about earlier can lead such an inspiration. Just starting at the interrogation, starting at the "looking at", and then beginning to ask about who is looking. That's a good question man.
>>JUSTIN: It is (laughter).
>>TALBOLT: It is kind of like the inspiration behind all the work I'm doing. You know what I mean? What does it take in this contemporary context of society for everybody in the street to taste what that feels like? To find that self-empowerment. You know, to be grounded in absolutely nothing. By the way, there's a phrase that I like to use to communicate about what it feels like to sit in that space. We're going to sit and talk about Maya, the illusion, the ethereal realm of the dream as a reflection of all of these incredible things that sprang out of us, like the primordial being-ness, that fuller potential that is us. If we're going to admit that this a dream and this is also a reflection of us, the way I look at it is like this - I think about the Buddha under the Bodhi tree and Maya came out and was like "what's up yo?" You know, "you really think you got it?" "you think you bad?" You know what I mean? He got big with him. And it didn't work. But what I got out of that is when you realize that you're able to stare into the eyes of your own reflection, but neither you nor the reflection question any more which one of you is real. You may very well be sitting in that seat. When the need to interrogate for the sake of defining authenticity falls away, I very much believe you may have found yourself in a very beautiful state of being.
>>JUSTIN: Yeah. It's funny you said that because if you remember the end of the story, after the third temptation of Mara the last thing that the Buddha did was he touched the earth.
>>TALBOLT: Man, you beat me to it. I was about to say that. The other thing I get from that that always blows my mind - I am so glad you said that because I mention this to people all the time. Recently, inside, it was like "well how do you know you are IT?" The question was about the authenticity - that's another aspect of the interrogation. I talk to people about the concept of conviction. And conviction is a very powerful thing. I love that. What the Buddha did was like the Earth was his witness. When I tell people in our groups that no matter where you are on the planet, the one that's a witness to every human action is Earth because it's all happening on Earth. So there is your conviction. That idea of like if a tree falls in a forest and no one's around here it does it make a sound? If you become the Buddha in a forest and no one is around to say hey you're the Buddha, are you the Buddha? But the very purpose of that is to not be the personality or the person to identify authenticity in the first place.
>>JUSTIN: And that's what it was. It was a verification of - as you said, my conviction, my 100 percent my 125 percent assuredness that this is what is real. And this is what it is and "I AM". And it's interesting, maybe the correlation between the Earth - touching the earth but also touching in with the body, you know? Touching in with something that is right here, that is right now, that I carry around me all the time. My teacher likes to say that our body is our home. You know, the body is our first home and that's something that can always be touched if we ever need to be reminded about who and fundamentally what we are. And that's not a body divided from a mind but a fundamental ground that you carry around with you that you can always touch back in with.
>>TALBOLT: It's about being in touch with the body to help me understand a simple truth that the body and the mind are not separate, and that the deeper recesses of the mind manifest physically as the body and our experience with the body. Now I'm still new at studying this stuff, but I've come across a lot in my experience of life and managed to find the higher correlation among an immense amount of different scientific understandings. Even the sub-molecular processes that is carried out - events that occur in the brain that are responsible for the release of what we call hormones or different body chemicals that give us the sense of emotion or feeling. That's just a sub-molecular process. The sub-molecular - it's very basic components that could map out the feeling of joy, taste, sex, happiness, excitement. We experience them emotionally as feeling. What I've seen in that is the evidence of the reflections, I mentioned earlier, not questioning their respective authenticity. A lot of people ask me sometimes when they see me and I'm eating sometimes and I don't pause so quickly to give thanks. But I take my first bite, my first sip and I say "Ase". They're like what are you doing? And I tell them I've come to learn that what makes up my body is the same material that makes up the earth itself. And so in the same way that my ancestor stick to the earth, they also stick through me. So what I eat and what I drink every single moment, I am offering to those before me. You know, now that doesn't always work for everybody. Some people have to stretch what is a part of their cultural conditioning and say "look, this is not how you pray". I don't want to piss nobody off, but in my experience of reality, I know that to be true. That goes with my conviction.
>>JUSTIN: And you know for those other folks who may practice a tradition or a bless their meal prior to eating it you know to give respect, when you pray for something that you feel is external to yourself and give thanks for the meal, there's still that connection where I'm saying to something that's seeming outside of myself, "I realize that I did not make this happen, that this was not just a self centered event, that there had to be some goodness present in the world in order for me to even take this one bite of food". And that's a very second person perspective. But then when you get into other traditions, more indigenous traditions, more native traditions, the blessing may take on the third person component where I see spirit in the actual food itself. You know that the food - the animals or the vegetables - that this food is fundamentally made out of spirit. And so it doesn't necessarily matter what your tradition is. That there's really taking on one of those three perspectives. It's either taking on a first person, a second person or a third person perspective and it's really hard to get around taking on those perspectives about how this food got on my plate, you know? My mom would tell me that my dad - my dad was not a pray-er - You know he didn't pray before he ate. And one time she asked him she said, "Well where do you think this food came from?" And he was like, "shit, I bought it." You know, it came from me going to work. It came from working hard and putting food on the plate. But from his vantage point, it was a very first person thing. It was that "I" did this, you know what I mean? That there was something in me that had the motivation to go out and earn this money in order for me to go to the grocery store and buy this meal so we could cook it up and eat it. And so it's like even if you're an atheist, even if you're an agnostic, regardless of what you what your traditional affiliation is, it's really hard to get away from that perspective - from any perspective - that says even if there is a first person, second person or third person perspective that this meal, or any event is a sacred event, you know? It's special for whatever reason and that this has something to do with there's a relationship between that perspective and my body.
>>TALBOLT: At the end of the day, the thing I always look for is when I see anything like that is just the acknowledgement of the unmanifested and manifested in some form of conversation or relationship. Just the awareness that that is happening and the beauty and the gift, because of the power of our perspective. It really comes to manifest to us in any fashion that we choose. Culturally, to have a worldview of a universal human relationship to the un-seen but felt and known, that brings us back to the very idea in the first place about Hiphop culture and what has come from the past in any culture - it has all of the necessary components to lead you on a path of self-discovery.
>>JUSTIN: Brother, you hit the nail on the head twice.
>>TALBOLT: Because that's the whole point.
>>JUSTIN: You know, that's the whole point man.
>>TALBOLT: And so I see a lot of incredible wealth of information in that concept; that it's the human being that is the most valuable tool for all of these concepts. It is through us these things begin to attract and then impact our idea of who we are.
>>JUSTIN: I was just going to say that's the underlying theory of all of my work is that through Hiphop - Hiphop in and of itself is a path, and that through Hiphop you know depending on how you look, depending on your method of looking and depending on the effort that you put into looking, you could find all of the world's greatest wisdom teachings, you can find some passion, love and understanding, knowledge, all of it. You know what I mean? It's there because it's human because none of it is devoid of our humanity. And you don't have to jump ship. You don't have to jump to a different path in order to for you to wake up. All you really have to do is look very deeply at what it is you're already doing.
>> TALBOLT: It's very funny you say that because that's the whole point I think that I was making in the first place. The question is what occurs in the human being. How can a human being allow their environment to produce healthy human expression, connection and relationships, and that those connections, expressions and relationships on a larger scale produce the environment to create fully self-realized beings in a very naturalized sense?
>>TALBOLT: You know, I live in a place where I see the real possibility that's so out there and far away from us that it is the antithesis of the contemporary standard of the popular cultural understanding available for our disposal. Because there are other factors in the human world that you have to take in while you travel within it. This is politics, diplomacy, nations etc. Something that we started being conditioned to accept at an early age, and that doesn't improve with money or status. My whole goal is to put those down for a while, and be with you for a while, to have some peace when you have to walk out in this stuff to get to the core of the human being around you, you know? So yeah. Very much like Hiphop. It's very much a warrior's path. It's not easy. It's not about good feelings. It ain't about like we're going to make everything feel good all the time. It actually may feel horrible.
>>JUSTIN: Yeah and it actually should feel horrible. I actually think that if it doesn't feel horrible at some times, then there's no growth in it.
>>TALBOLT: I agree.
>>JUSTIN: Yeah something's wrong and you're not growing. And if you're not growing you're not learning.
>>TALBOLT: And there's an outcome - a successful child is not necessarily reared on a bed of down.
>>TALBOLT: Reared on a bed of downs. You don't go into your full self and become successful by laying on a set of pillows all day.
>>JUSTIN: You're signing up for the pain baby.
>>TALBOLT: And hopefully another class I'll talk about that. I have a different relationship with pain other than the popular opinion. Pain is internal power. Pain on the one side turns to progress on the other side. You seek progress out of the pain.
>>JUSTIN: That's right. No pain, no gain.
>>TALBOLT: Yeah exactly. And this is not to inspire people to become sadomasochistic. I'm just saying that it's an inevitability that you're going to feel pain. But if you can learn what pain is and what it's there to do, you may be able to choose not to suffer.
>>JUSTIN: Sure, and maybe learn the difference between pain and suffering. And I tend to think that pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice.
>>TALBOLT: Yes suffering is a choice.
>>JUSTIN: OK, brother. I really, really, really appreciate this conversation. I love talking to you whenever I see you.
>>TALBOLT: Yeah you, too, man. It's been far past time. Record some more of this. This type of dialog is needed.