Beingness: Working With The Shadow

In this episode of Beingness, David and guest Mark Talbot talk about the modern media landscape, working with the shadow, and being comfortable in silence. Mark is the founder of Xplore.Design: Storytelling in Three Dimensions.

Transcript

This is Beingness,

I'm David Scott.

My guest today is an old friend of mine,

Mark Talbot.

He's the founder of Explore Design,

Storytelling in Three Dimensions,

And a surfer of Liminal Spaces.

Mark,

Thanks for doing this.

Thanks for having me,

David.

It's really cool to see you.

It's always wonderful to hang out with you.

We talked about the philosophy for how we wanted to approach this.

The kind of conversations that you and I have are always wide ranging and go pretty deep.

I wanted to approach this a little bit less presentationally than one normally might.

This is not going to be an interview where I ask you questions and you come up with brilliant answers.

It's just going to be a conversation between friends.

Is that what you had in mind?

It's perfect,

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Let's let it be organic.

What's been on your mind?

Mind and heart,

Maybe even more appropriately.

Turbulence in the mind and steadiness in the heart,

Shall we say.

You spoke about the liminal spaces.

It just seems like it's such a transitional time right now.

Shockingly so.

I mean,

Almost every day I'm met with how different this day is than the past,

How little of the same old,

Same old,

The dirge and the grind.

It just seems to be dropping away.

So the mind struggles with that.

Our eight programming really loves to have constancy and a steady,

Just a steady unchanging environment and that's all to the good,

Right?

And yet here we are,

Every day brings a fresh new appearance of a fresh new tragedy or upheaval or whatnot and so here we are finding ourselves navigating this space.

And a great time to sort of rest and bask even in that turbulence in those walls crumbling down all those institutional calcified ways of being and operating top-down,

Hidden,

Getting flushed through with transparency,

Flushed through with the antiseptic light of attention.

I like that antiseptic light of attention.

Boy,

It does feel like that.

The difference between satsang and a PowerPoint presentation,

The difference between being present and allowing life to unfold and unfurl itself moment to moment rather than,

As you say,

Hoping to live in a world of set expectations in which everything is comfortable and to be understood as stable.

This conversation I hope can be an emblem of that.

Nothing is scripted,

Nothing,

Whatever arises in the moment is what's correct and that's why we didn't talk about topics ahead of time,

Did we?

I don't think.

No,

In fact I'm glad for that.

I'm glad for the lack of scripting.

Most people are uncomfortable with that.

I've done a lot of interviews with people.

Give me the list of questions.

I want to know what we're going to be talking about.

You can sense that too.

I mean in this world of endless podcasts,

Right?

You know that,

You smell that when it's there and then you smell authenticity also when it's there.

It's a very qualitatively different thing.

Well,

We live in a TEDx world too.

Nothing against TEDx for what it has been and what it was but what it could be is so much more than me standing up,

Vomiting up a bunch of stuff that I've memorized about the world that was dead yesterday and it was dead a year ago and it was dead 10 years ago.

The presentational model of I'm going to come up and educate you and enlighten you about this,

That,

And the other thing,

Like give me a break.

Just get out of here.

I don't want to hear it.

I don't want to hear it.

I don't care how brilliant the person is.

But funny you mention that because I used to.

It was TEDx.

TED and TEDx was sort of my go-to for a lot of things.

I think it's fine in as far as it goes and yes,

The diálogos,

This that we're doing here,

True dialogue,

That feels more dynamic and real and just genuine I guess I would say.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche had many interesting pearls that he'd lay out there but one of them that I remember distinctly was silence is also very much part of the conversation.

And I think silence makes people uncomfortable because the habituated state in this world of polished media,

Which isn't,

You know,

And let's keep that distinct from actual journalism,

Right?

Yes.

I think there's such a,

Well there's just a habituated built-up expectation that it's just going to be the constant blotting on and back and forth and witty repartee and as you said,

Sort of this performative scripted thing that has become so much of media.

We're fighting people talking over each other whether it's Fox News or whether it's MSNBC,

It doesn't matter.

It's not a politically left or right thing.

It's people loving to defend their dogma and their ego and their way of constructing the world.

They're going to talk over each other and be there over their head like those French dolls,

Those French puppets fighting each other.

Punch and Judy.

Punch and Judy.

Yeah,

Right.

It's just so,

You know,

It's just concussive.

There's nothing,

There's no meaning that comes out of that.

It's just another form of gladiator sport,

I think,

That's come to the fore like much of politics is.

People love to smell the blood.

And if you don't have a side,

If you don't pick your tribe,

Your side is going to kill you for it,

The other side is going to kill you for it.

So you're just sort of,

You know,

It's a lose-lose proposition not to have a very concrete calcified structured worldview that you're trying to defend at all times.

Someone like Narendra Modi does pretty well at having what I would consider a deeply spiritual,

Deeply meditative quality being and state in him and still being able to lead a country,

Which is really a fascinating dynamic,

But it's not going to happen anywhere else than India,

But we're at that kind of place.

For that to happen in America,

It's going to be a long road of evolution until we get there,

If we ever get there.

You've got everything to lose and nothing to gain by being receptive to the perfection of everythingness.

That's the nature of duality.

Those guys over there are the bad guys,

We're the big guys,

Why don't you be one of the good guys?

And if you don't pick a side,

You're dead in the water.

As a politician,

As a journalist,

Sadly,

People say,

Oh,

The New York Times is so liberally biased.

I don't think they would think they're liberally biased.

They're sorely mistaken though.

Fox News would consider themselves fair and balanced,

Which is just a joke,

Just either delusional or a lie.

No,

They're not fair and balanced.

That's exactly what you're not.

And so you have,

It's almost like specialization among humans,

To specialize is what we do,

To diversify,

To have competition.

These are good things.

I'm not urging anybody to have kumbaya and come together.

That's just one phase in the evolutionary process.

I mean,

Aggression,

Competition,

These are really important motive energies for getting us where we are,

But they're not necessarily the end game.

I don't think they're how things will operate in a default state in the future that you're describing us walking into now.

Is it possible that we can.

.

.

People say,

Can't we all get along?

That's just as obnoxious to me as Punch and Judy,

Frankly,

Because we are getting along.

We can't do anything but get along.

That's all we've ever done.

It's just the level at which you enter into the apprehension and understanding of that mechanics.

All the trillions of cells in our body that are just whiz-bang working in absolute synchrony and consolience,

Moment to moment to moment,

We have nothing to do with.

It's just on autopilot.

So is the rest of the world.

Same thing.

Is the rest of the cosmos.

As far as I can tell,

It's only in this limited dual consciousness that we seem to be born with.

That that looks like anything but beauty.

I think I've talked to you about this before,

And this is a had tip to John Dobson who brought this idea to me,

But the parsing of paradox,

And this isn't the exact etymology of it,

But it goes something like this,

A para in line with,

Dox,

God.

When we run up against these seeming paradoxes,

All the sound and the fury for naught,

Like what's actually there?

You may well be at the bedrock of the divine,

Because that's the place where these seemingly irreconcilable opposites are held in some kind of perfect tension,

And the mind just has to let go of that.

You just described what the guru does.

I mean,

You just talked about chögyam trungpa,

Crazy wisdom,

That whole tradition.

It's not just in Buddhism.

Ramana Maharshi,

Jesus,

Spoke in paradoxes.

You said this yesterday and now you say this,

And what about you told that person to go left and you told me to go right.

Well,

Yeah,

That's because you were coming toward me and they were going away from me.

The paradox is meant to,

As you say,

Kind of rattle loose that death grip we have on what's real.

And on our positionality,

Our need to have this flag planted on some hill,

Some ideological hill.

Right,

And we see one of the sad things that happens in guru culture is that I think a lot of them who are true crazy wisdom masters are misunderstood for the kind of confusion they sow in people's lives.

Oh,

He ignored me,

Or she sowed all this discontent among us or turned us against each other or told us things that were totally contradictory or she would love us one day and then ignore us for a week.

That's the path.

That's what you signed up for.

And I think that's what I think about it.

I think about it as a way of saying that you're not going to be able to do something like Vajrayana.

You knew what you were getting into.

The teacher told you at the beginning,

Don't be surprised now that you feel like a little child left out in the cold because you're being asked to based in your own nonsense,

In your own mind stuff,

And your own striving and bowing and scraping and trying and just being.

But we're also walking into a new age of accountability.

And there is such a thing as crossing the line with these teachers,

Whether that's sexual abuse,

Whether it's really badly mishandling money or lying to people about money.

We're being asked to walk in integrity in ways that we've never had before,

Whether you're a teacher of any kind or a mentor or a parent or a good friend.

We're being shown the cautionary tales in the media every day about people who are canceled by saying one thing.

And on the face of it,

It's totally absurd,

But it's also a lesson to the most inner heart.

Sometimes I think I mentioned this the other day,

If I'm grinding on an idea,

Grinding on some argument I'm having with somebody,

I had a disagreement with somebody and I'm looking at my wall of teachers,

Anandamayi Ma is on there and Jesus and Ramakrishna and many others.

And I'll find myself looking at Jesus and saying these words,

You low down dirty so-and-so,

And I'm thinking about this person,

You know.

I'm looking right at Jesus.

And what is he telling me?

He's telling me,

Remember who you're talking to.

Everything you see is a manifestation of me.

Remember who you're talking to.

Those moments to go inside and see in the lives of other people who have been taken down so readily with such seeming ease because of a sentence they said or a word they said or a behavior that was taken a certain way.

Part of you say,

Gosh,

In some of these cases it's just a miscarriage of mob justice.

In other ways you say,

Actually that's a message to myself to walk in integrity carefully.

Thank you for that.

That's an excellent reframe for something that,

Because I'll find myself in this kind of righteous indignation where someone,

And of course because I'm biased,

Because I like this person or I enjoy what they have to say or appreciate it,

And then I see the mob pile on and then my righteous indignation,

My fist in the air rises up and oh,

Cancel culture and oh,

I get so and.

But as you just pointed out,

No love,

This is just you,

Just the reminder of the need or the encouragement or what have you,

Just the guidance to stay in integrity at all times.

Be uncancellable.

And we should say,

Knowing you and knowing me,

This is not a political statement,

This is not a conservative value to recoil and horror at some of the cancel culture,

Because I'm neither liberal nor conservative.

It's nobody's business anyway,

But that's just how I am.

I don't take a side.

I enjoy the dance.

I appreciate the offense and defense of it.

But there's people from both sides of the aisle and both genders and all ages that have been shuffled to the back of the deck.

They're for them,

But they have some issues too.

They should do some soul searching and I'm sure they have.

And if they don't,

There's a huge missed opportunity there because they are myself.

If they're in liberation,

I'm in liberation.

If they are attacked,

I'm attacked.

If they're walking out of integrity,

I'm walking out of integrity.

I drive all those blames back to myself.

In a holographic universe sense,

In a Vedantic sense,

They are very much myself.

This whole thing arose this moment.

It seems like it's got some durable continuity to it,

A past,

Present,

And future,

And thousands of years and billions of years of history that we can go dig into the fossil record to understand.

That all arrived fully formed for us to start rooting around in.

There was no birth,

There is no death.

We're just here.

So all those lessons,

All those people learned,

Thank you because I don't have to do that now.

You did it for me.

Thank you for that.

And for all those who took all of them down,

Thank you for your attention.

Thank you for your heart and holding people to account.

Yeah.

Boy,

Isn't that something to just expand into.

It just represents such an absolute responsibility.

This is all on me.

This is all on me.

Even the great scriptures that we learn to see as our bedrock are melting.

And only the essence of what they couldn't touch in language is what's remaining.

Only what they pointed at is remaining and not the finger.

Yeah,

I feel,

Well,

In kind of the Ken Wilber school of thought,

We transcend and we include.

It feels like we're going to include a lot less as we move forward.

Well,

It's going to be quite a leap.

It is quite a leap and it feels right now like there's just nothing but chasm underneath.

Yes,

There will be some of the previous structures,

But it's going to be so.

.

.

It's not a step,

It is a leap now.

We're heading into something that's going to look so little like what it did.

It's collective mastery as you talk about it.

That's how I'm saying it because all the intellectual work we put in,

That doesn't go by the wayside.

That gets folded in.

That's included and transcended as you say.

All the work that we've done parsing and understanding and dissecting and reassembling reality,

Whether through philosophy or through religion or through the arts or just on a personal level of self-inquiry and inquiry into the other,

That goes into the record.

All those minute precious little brush strokes,

Painterly little fussy little brush strokes,

Become one swath of a brush to suggest the side of a vase if you're Matisse.

So it's still in there.

That's still encoded.

That becomes part of the mastery.

The fussy little practice steps running a scale on the piano,

Yeah,

That disappears because pure music can be channeled now with total alacrity.

It's just got the divine impulse comes through as Shakti through the system to be able to create the music one wants to create in the moment because of the work we've done.

I'm talking about you and me as individual humans.

I'm talking about humanity as well and life in general and beingness ultimately perfecting itself.

A student practices until she gets it right.

A master practices until she can't get it wrong.

I love that.

That's part of what we're walking into.

The era of can't get it wrong.

The Pure Land.

The Promised Land.

Heaven.

You swim through the tides when the sun not gone.

Where we are in the American Southwest,

It's early morning,

The birds are starting to chirp,

The light's starting to come up.

The inexorable movement of those cycles,

Inarguable,

Unstoppable,

Or moving into a final understanding of that and being with that and participating in that and flowing with that.

It used to be the province of just the ascended masters and gurus and the spiritual elite to be able to have these kind of miracles and synchronicities coalesce around them all the time and all their chelos and devotees scratching their heads all the time going,

How does this happen?

The new Kurali Baba is sitting under a blanket,

No food is in the ashram and busloads of 150 people show up and he starts producing little snacks from under his blanket and they just keep arising and arising and 150 people are miraculously fed.

How does that happen?

He is so bowed to the perfection of the existing as to become the genesis of all movement,

The genesis of all change,

The genesis of all birth and death,

That one being,

That's the source.

And he didn't do it by arguing a philosophy or talking somebody into something.

So here's where my mind rears up and the ego shows up because while I have certainly had numerous occasions to feel that that you've just described,

That effortless flow and dance,

The mind then comes up with all of its arguments of,

Well,

We're always going to fight,

We're war-like apes,

Who would we be without our strife and our struggle?

Who would we be?

It's a fundamental question.

I have come to equate suffering with grace.

I think Ram Dass said something really similar,

Suffering is grace.

I look at my own life as an emblem of the social movement you're talking about,

The larger collective movement.

If I look at just one person's life,

Everything good that I've ever done came from suffering.

Every drop of compassion I have for other beings comes from my own suffering.

I need to know what they're basing in in order to understand it and in order to be present for that.

Periods of great contraction followed by extraordinary expansion and I started to understand that one is pinned to the other.

There's a helical movement where we're not starting over,

We're going higher every time we go back to ground zero,

But it's a little higher.

Spiraling.

Spiraling up like the helix of the DNA.

Everything of wisdom that's ever been gifted to me by grace has been because it hurt being in ignorance.

And hurt being in disharmony and hurt being around other people separately.

So I was forced to develop capacities to address that.

I used to think it was bringing light or transmuting.

It's not transmuting anything.

It's understanding the mechanics of darkness and light.

That darkness is the stuff of light.

That coal is the stuff of the fire.

It's not something to be dismissed and swept away and gotten rid of or jumped over or overcome.

It is the very substance of the light.

That's the mechanics of evolution,

Of Kundalini rising,

Of the Shakti moving,

Of perfection overtaking and perfection.

My mind will do the same thing you just described.

Isn't that just the mechanics of it?

Isn't that just the architecture of how we got here and how we'll continue to get where we go?

While we look at the battles in the skies out in the cosmos between apparent races who are fighting out there and living in different dimensions than we are,

Maybe that's a special kind of cooperation.

Battling each other,

Finding each other's weaknesses,

Not being afraid to call each other out.

Not afraid to call my enemy out and poke him or her in the ribs when they least expect it,

Because that was a spot of weakness.

Because if I hate somebody,

I don't mind beating up on them.

But what I'm actually doing is shoring up all their weaknesses,

Challenging them,

Goading them to become better.

Competition breeds success.

So on the surface,

It may look really tempestuous and terrible.

And combative.

And yes,

And that's the dance.

That's the dance.

It's a rough dance.

It's a not particularly elegant,

Rough dance.

Some of our friends are best friends.

You're one of my best friends.

I can call you out when I think there's BS.

You can do the same thing for me.

I can challenge you.

I can question you.

It's a piece that I appreciate deeply.

For years I've been seeking out.

And to have finally arrived here is just breathtakingly beautiful.

To know that I can have these deep friendships where truth can be spoken and none of it has to be taken personally.

And it's a bow and a thank you.

And ah,

It's that dance.

It's that,

Oh,

There's the vulnerable white underbelly.

And I'm not going to go in and eviscerate you,

But I'm going to poke at that.

Ah,

Thank you.

Thank you.

Even if there is a little bit of chafing of egos,

Sometimes the whack-a-mole comes up,

The ego loses its head just a little bit and there's a little bit of chafing there.

That friction,

That's that Leonard Cohen idea that the monks polish each other like pebbles in a bag.

Even that is okay.

It comes from a place of mutual respect.

And both of us happen to be on a path,

If I can speak for myself at least,

Of dropping some of the less productive trappings of ego.

No problem with ego except it just thinks too small and it thinks it's separate.

And that's not where we're living anymore.

And it takes a great deal of really honest and careful and brutal introspection in one's own inquiry.

And it helps to be persuaded from another person a little bit in that same direction.

I mean,

That's what the Gru is,

Essentially just a.

.

.

Think of it like R2-D2 that shoots out that little projection of Princess Leia.

That Princess Leia is the Gru in this analogy.

She comes only from my own heart and she is there to say a message that can't be said unless I'm looking at other beings saying that to me.

So to have another person,

Whether it's a friend or a teacher or someone,

Give you that pure light of reflection,

Not to compete with you,

Not to hurt you,

Not even to help you,

But just because it arose.

I need to help anybody,

I'm not helping you,

I've never helped you as far as I can tell.

I hope you've never tried to help me.

Don't help anybody,

There's no helping.

It's just the truth that comes out.

That pure witnessing.

Pure witnessing.

My opinion isn't needed.

My guidance isn't even asked for.

That's what a good friend does too.

I mean,

You touched on it.

I mean,

If I come in and I'm really hanging my head about something and looking my wounds over something and things are going really bad,

Not to come in and fix anything for me.

There's no fixing.

There's no helping.

It's just to be a capacious enough container for that space in that moment.

And especially challenging for us as males in this culture where fixing it,

Right?

I got a tool for that.

Yeah,

I got a tool for that.

Listen,

I know how to hack that.

People talk about this idea of service.

I need to do service.

I need to help people.

Help yourself.

Start there.

That's where you can do a lot of very productive work.

Go to your own heart.

Meditate.

Get still.

Do that work.

Don't worry about knitting something together out in the world.

That's just a fool there.

Another externalization.

Yeah,

And for people who do that,

God bless them because they're the reason we are on the cusp of paradise.

That model is falling away a little bit.

I need to fix things for people.

But I need to point the finger back to me because I'm an evangelist for something too.

I've got an idea.

Otherwise I would be talking.

Even Maribella.

45 years in silence.

That was his idea.

He executed it and brought it forth very eloquently.

But as long as we're contained in this body,

We have an ego.

We have a point of view.

To me it's just a question of how panned back and how expansive can that view be?

How much can it include everything?

Zoom out.

Zoom out.

Zoom out.

When I feel the contraction in my own life,

That is one of many of the mantras that I bring forward.

Zoom out.

Because the contracted state is very zoomed in.

And if you put any of your life under the microscope,

Of course you're going to see all the bacteria and the protozoa and the nematodes and all the viciousness of the microcosmic world going on there.

But when you zoom out,

That is an expanded state.

That is a,

Ah,

I see.

Ah.

That's important though.

That's part of the dance.

Steven Soderbergh talks about filmmaking that way.

You're making a giant mural but as a mosaic up close.

There's always that zoom in,

Zoom out.

The perfection of the making.

Some of the great teachers,

Ramana Maharshi,

Excelled in the perfected workaday life,

Just the technique of daily living.

It wasn't just about grand ideas and spiritual insights.

It was about,

I told you the story about how he would wake up early,

Meditate with people,

Go in to the kitchen around 4 a.

M.

In the ashram in India and start cutting vegetables with the cooks in there,

Peeling vegetables.

The peels went out to the animals.

If he dropped even a mustard seed,

He would pick it up with his fingernail and put it back in the jar.

It was a perfection of how to exist in the world with the senses as a human being.

His clocks were always up to the minute.

He always read the daily paper.

He would read multiple papers.

He would read letters coming in.

He knew what was going on.

He wasn't subtracted from the human experience.

He was the human experience.

Immerse.

Yes.

Back to that.

How can we expect to wake up fully unless you experience all of it?

All of it.

I think there's this,

Certainly I'll speak to myself,

My own experience was,

And I think this is fairly common,

But getting on the path as we say.

There's this allure and promise of,

Well,

In our culture,

We say,

Well,

You'll just be zenned out.

Which is to say,

Well,

Just some kind of perfect bliss on the cushion sort of thing.

And so maybe that's the carrot.

But the actuality of it,

Wow,

So often feels like a stick.

Oh my goodness,

The depths of darkness even in my own mind.

Wow.

I mean,

I've been going back through that here again of late.

Having returned here to our little mountain readout in the desert Southwest in this cloistered and beautiful studio,

I can go days without human interaction,

Which brings me up fully to see myself.

And when there is that quiet as there is here,

When there is that cloisteredness,

As I can cultivate here,

You get to see how that mind will start to kick up the dust.

And God,

I will admit readily in the last several days,

I have had just been absolutely revulsed by my own mind.

Oh my goodness.

And of course then understanding this is the ego that brings in its commentary on itself.

Like,

Oh,

Well,

Paolo,

You thought you were past that.

You're not past that.

Oh,

Look at you.

You've achieved nothing.

Yes,

Exactly.

I've achieved nothing.

Because that's not what it's about.

It's not about getting.

This isn't about getting.

This is about just,

Wow,

Humble,

Humble.

Sweetheart let go of those things.

Let go of the idea that you're here to get something on the spiritual path,

That you're here to attain something.

That's actually,

You're here to lose all of that.

It's all going up on the altar.

Go up there.

Grab that sacrificial scimitar.

Slice the beast's throat.

Let it bleed out.

And I mean,

Yeah,

It's gory.

Let it bleed out and burn it up.

Throw it on the fire.

Drag it up to that altar.

Light the match.

Throw it on the fire.

It's all going.

And you have to live that.

You have to fully experience it in order to grok it.

Love and light.

Well,

Sure.

But deep and dark.

Jurgen Trungpa,

Again,

The pitfalls of spiritual materialism.

I think you and I,

I think I know you pretty well as a friend,

Fellow traveler.

You and I both have come to terms with that,

Migrated through that as ego dances.

What's left after all that work is what I'm seeing emerge now.

Not just in us,

But people we know and the rest of the world who is ready for that and wants that.

God is taking over the work now.

The guru can goad you into your own sadhana and doing the work and having skin in the game,

Putting in the work that needs to be done for you to attain mastery eventually.

You need to do the work.

You need to do the meditation.

You need to suffer through these things.

You need to have them burnt off in time.

You need to have sympathetic practices that cultivate that.

You have to make all of the effort,

But there's a point at which the guru takes over and you can't make any effort anymore.

The guru is doing it for you.

And I should explain,

My definition of the guru is very much like Ramana Maharshi.

It's no one other than myself.

It's no one standing outside of me as a being who's better than I am.

There's only the deepest reflection of my most inner self showing up in human form.

And in a through the looking glass Vedantic quantum entangled way,

He or she is very much myself.

There's no separation.

God guru and self are the same.

One of my great teachers,

Gangamah in Tiruvannamalai,

India,

Descendant of the teachers of Ramana Maharshi abides in that space of perfection.

She's a perfected human being.

Her presence is perfection.

Her silence is perfection.

We talked about uncomfortable silence is no such thing in her presence.

Comfortable silence.

So warm,

So robust,

So full of all life,

So full of everything.

It's the container of all things.

Hers is the heart of all beings.

And she excludes no one.

God is so emblematic of love that she could be in that realized state and I think likely choose.

.

.

Being to come down to help the rest of us.

But not even help.

Just choose to be here to dance.

To enjoy it.

Just to recognize the fullness of that.

And I would imagine to have the choice to just ascend into what shall we call it,

The rainbow body,

Whatever's next.

And instead say,

Hello,

Beloveds.

I love you so much.

I choose to be here dancing with you,

Accepting every single emanation of myself.

Thank you for taking the time.

I enjoyed this.

I enjoyed our dear logos.

Likewise,

My friend.

I'm floating in an ocean that I can't absorb.

I can't hold on to the surface.

I can't hold on to the surface.