Alan Watts\u2019 words making us think\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn\u2019t going anywhere. That is to say it doesn\u2019t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. But that it is best understood by analogy with music. Because music, as an art form, is essentially playful, we say you play the piano. You don\u2019t work the piano. Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Music differs from say, travel. When you travel, you are trying to get somewhere. In music, though, one doesn\u2019t make the end of the composition the point<\/em> of the composition. If that was so the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only<\/em> finales. People would go to a concert just to hear one crackling chord, because that\u2019s the end! Same when dancing, you don\u2019t aim at a particular spot in the room for where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, but we don\u2019t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We\u2019ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It\u2019s all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system, with a kind of come on, kitty, kitty, kitty and now you go to kindergarten, you know, and that\u2019s a great thing because when you finish that you\u2019ll get into first grade. And then come on, first grade leads to second grade and so on and then you get out of grade school and you go to high school and it\u2019s revving up, the thing is coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then you\u2019re gonna go to college and by Jove then you get into graduate school and when you\u2019re through with graduate school, you\u2019ll go out to join the world. And then you\u2019ll get into some racket where you are selling insurance and they\u2019ve got that quota to make and you\u2019re going to make that. And all the time that thing is coming, it\u2019s coming, it\u2019s coming that great thing, the success you\u2019re working for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then when you wake up one day about forty years old, you\u2019ll say, my God I\u2019ve arrived. I\u2019m there! And you don\u2019t feel very different from what you\u2019ve always felt. Look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away. And then when they\u2019re 65, they don\u2019t have any energy left, they\u2019re more or less impotent and they go and rot in an on old people\u2019s senior citizens community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ve simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. And 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 you\u2019re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alan Watts\u2019 words making us think\u2026 Existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn\u2019t going anywhere. That is to say it doesn\u2019t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. But that it is best understood by analogy with music. Because music, as an art form, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts"],"blocksy_meta":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imruls.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imruls.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imruls.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imruls.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imruls.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/imruls.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imruls.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imruls.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imruls.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}