Let It Happen by Itself (feat. Alan Watts)

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 purposeful culture

Are busy getting everywhere

Faster and faster and faster

Till we eliminate the

Distance between places

I mean with the modern jet travel

You can arrive almost instantaneously

What happens as a result of that

Is that the two ends of your journey

Become the same place

So you eliminate the distance

You eliminate the journey

Cause the fun of the journey is to travel

Not to obliterate travel

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 who play fastest

And there would be composers who only wrote finales

People go to concerts just to hear one crashing cord

Because that's the end

Same way in 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

And put those savings away

And then when they're sixty-five

And they don't have any energy left

They're more or less impotent

They go and rot in an old people's "senior citizens" community

Because we've simply cheated ourselves

The whole way down the line

We thought of life by analogy was a journey

Was 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're 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

But you had to do that

You didn't let it happen

And so In this way

The human being sometimes becomes an organism for self frustration

Let's take korzybski called man a time binder

That means

That he the animal peculiarly aware of the time sequence

And as a result of this

He's 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 if that happening again

So he predicts

Thus 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 in the end you won't succeed

We're all gonna fall apart

By one way or another

It might happen tomorrow

It might fifty 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

This is as I said my basic metaphysical assumption

Which I won't conceal from you

That  existence is musical in nature

That is to say it is not serious

It is the play of all kinds of patterns

We could look upon different creatures

As we look at different games

Chess

Checkers

Backgammon

Tennis

At The tree game

The beetle game

The grass game

Or you can look at them

As you look at different styles of music

Mazurkas

Waltzes

Sonata

Etcetera etcetera

All down the line

Theyre 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 Tzu-Jan

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 the spontaneous process of going to sleep

Try to breath real hard

And you find you get balled up in your breathing

So if your gonna be human

You just have to trust yourself to have bowel movements

And go to sleep

And digest your food

Of course

If something goes seriously wrong

And you need a surgeon

That's another matter

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

So, with the whole picture that is fundamental to it

You've gotta let go

And let it happen

Because if you don't

You're gonna be all clutched up

Your gonna be constantly trying to do

What can happen healthily

Only if you don't try