..."Now
existence you see is something that is spontaneous, the Chinese word
for nature (Tian ran), means that which happens of itself. Your hair
grows by itself. Your heart beats by itself. [...]
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 the spontaneous process of going to sleep. [...] But by and
large, the healthy human being doesn’t right from the start of life
need surgical interference. And he lets it happen by itself. And so with
the whole picture that is fundamental, you have got to let go and let
it happen. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be all clutched up.
You’re going to be constantly trying to do what can happen healthily
only if you don’t try. But we have a strange anxiety in us; that if we
don’t interfere then it won’t happen.
Now that’s the root of an enormous amount of trouble. The basis of it all is this then. If we say you must survive, or I must survive, life is earnest and I’ve got to go on. Then your life is a drag and not a game. Now it’s my contention and my personal opinion (this is my basic metaphysical axiom, shall we put it that way) that existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere. That is to say it doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. So then, in music though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition – the point of the composition. If that was so the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord, because that’s the end. Say 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."
-- Alan Watts
Now that’s the root of an enormous amount of trouble. The basis of it all is this then. If we say you must survive, or I must survive, life is earnest and I’ve got to go on. Then your life is a drag and not a game. Now it’s my contention and my personal opinion (this is my basic metaphysical axiom, shall we put it that way) that existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere. That is to say it doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. So then, in music though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition – the point of the composition. If that was so the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord, because that’s the end. Say 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."
-- Alan Watts
