Speaker 1: The existence the physical universe is basically playful. There is
Speaker 1: no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn't going anywhere. That
Speaker 1: is to say it doesn't have some destination that it
Speaker 1: ought to arrive at, but that it is best understood
Speaker 1: by analogy with music, because music as an art form
Speaker 1: is essentially playful. We say you play the piano, you
Speaker 1: don't work the piano. Why music differs from say travel.
Speaker 1: When you travel, you are trying to get somewhere. One
Speaker 1: doesn't make the end of a composition the point of
Speaker 1: the of the composition. If that were so, the best
Speaker 1: conductors would be those who played fun and there would
Speaker 1: be composers who wrote only finales. People go to concert
Speaker 1: just to hear one crashing cord because that's the end.
Speaker 1: Same way in dancing, you don't aim at a particular
Speaker 1: spot in the room. That's where you should arrive. The
Speaker 1: whole point of the dancing is the dance. Now, but
Speaker 1: we don't see that as something brought by our education
Speaker 1: into our everyday conduct. We've got a system of schooling
Speaker 1: which gives a completely different impression. It's all graded, and
Speaker 1: what we do is we put the child into the
Speaker 1: corridor of this grade system with a kind of come on, kiddy, giddy, giddy,
Speaker 1: And now you go to kindergarten, you know, and that's
Speaker 1: a great thing because when you finish that, you'll get
Speaker 1: into first grade and then come on, first grade leads
Speaker 1: the second grade and so on. And then you get
Speaker 1: out of grade school and you got high school, and
Speaker 1: it's revving up. The thing is coming. Then you're going
Speaker 1: to go to college, and by Joe, then you get
Speaker 1: into graduate school. And when you're through with graduate school,
Speaker 1: you go out to join the world. And then you
Speaker 1: get into some racket where you're selling insurance and they've
Speaker 1: got that quota to make and you're going to make that,
Speaker 1: and all the time, the thing is coming, it's coming,
Speaker 1: it's coming. That great thing, the success you're working for.
Speaker 1: Then when you wake up one day about forty years old,
Speaker 1: you say, my god, I've arrived. I'm there, and you
Speaker 1: don't feel very different from what you've always felt by expectation.
Speaker 1: Look at the people who live to retire and put
Speaker 1: those savings away, and then when they sixty five, they
Speaker 1: don't have any energy left. They're more or less impotent,
Speaker 1: and they go and rotten. An old people's senior citizens
Speaker 1: community because we simply cheated ourselves. The whole way down
Speaker 1: the line. We thought of life by analogy with a journey,
Speaker 1: with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end,
Speaker 1: and the thing was to get to that end success
Speaker 1: or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead.
Speaker 1: But we missed the point the whole way along. It
Speaker 1: was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing
Speaker 1: or to dance while the music was being played.