Music as an art form is essentially playful. We say you play the piano, you don’t work
the piano. Why? Music differs from say travel. When you travel you are trying to get somewhere.
And of course we because being a very compulsive and purposive culture are busy getting everywhere
faster and faster and faster till we eliminate the distance between places. i mean with a
modern jet travel you can arrive almost instantaneously. What happens as a result of that is that the
two ends of your journey becomes the same place. So you eliminate the distance you eliminate
the journey. Cause the fun of the journey is to travel, not to obliterate travelling.
So then, in music though, one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the
composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those that played fastest. And there
would be composers who wrote only finales. People got to a concert, just to hear one
crashing chord, cause that’s the end. Same when dancing, you don’t aim at a particular
spot in the room. That’s where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is
the dance. Look at the people who live to retire. Put those savings away. And then when
they’re 65 they don’t have any energy left. they’re more or less impotent. And
they go and rot in an old people’s senior citizen’s community. Because we’ve simply
cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy with a journey.
With a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to that
end. Success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after your death. But we missed the point
the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or dance while
the music was being played. But you had to do that. You didn’t let it happen. And so,
in this in this way, the human being sometimes become an organism for self-frustration. Let’s
take, Korzybski called man a time binder. That means that he’s the animal peculiarly
aware of the time sequence. And as a result of this is able to do some very remarkable
things. He can predict. He studies what’s happened in the past, and he says the chances
are so and so of that happening again. So he predicts. Thought it’s very useful to
be able to predict. Because that has survival value. But at the same time it creates anxiety.
You pay for this increased survival ability involved in prediction. By knowing that in
the end you won’t succeed. They’re all gonna fall apart by one way or another. It
might happen tomorrow, might happen 50 years from now. But it all comes apart in the end.
And people get worried about that, they get anxious. So what they gained on the roundabout
they lost on the swings. So then, if you see on the other hand that existence, that existence
is musical in nature. That is to say that is not serious. It is a play of all kinds
of patterns. We can look upon different creatures as we look at different games. As we look
at chest, checkers, backgammon, tennis. There’s the tree game, the beetle game, the grass
game, or you can look at them as you look at different style of music. Mazurkas, Waltzes,
sonata, etc, etc. all down the line. They’re all these different things doing their stuff.
And we’re doing that. Now existence you see, is something that is spontaneous. The
Chinese word for nature zi ran means that which happens of itself. Your hair grows by
itself. Your heart beats by itself. You breathe pretty much by itself. Your glands secrete
their essences by themselves. You don’t have voluntary control over these things.
So we say it happens spontaneously. So when you go to sleep and you try to go to sleep
you interfere with he spontaneous process of going to sleep. Try to breathe, you know
real hard, and you find you get balled up in your breathing. You’ve got to be human.
You just have to trust yourself to have bowel movements, to go to sleep, and digest your
food. Of course if something goes seriously wrong and you need a surgeon that’s another
matter. So with the whole picture that is fundamental. You gotta let go. You gotta let
go, and let it happen. Because if you don’t, you’re gonna be all clutched up. You’re
gonna be constantly trying to do what can happen healthily only if you don’t try.