Now, what I would call a really swinging human being is a person who lives on two levels
 at once.
 He's able to live on the level of being his ordinary ego, his everyday personality, and
 play his role in life and observe all the rules and so on that go with that.
 But if he's only on that level, if he's only playing that kind of thing, and thinks that's
 all there is, it becomes a drag.
 And he starts being the kind of person who feels that he's just got to go on surviving.
 See?
 It's terribly important to go on surviving, to live.
 And he works at that.
 And his children learn the same attitude from him.
 And he says, "Well, I've got to survive because I've got all these children I've got to support,"
 and so on and so forth.
 And then they take the same attitude.
 And they breed up children, and they feel compulsive about supporting them, because
 they've got to go on.
 And so nobody really has any fun.
 It's just, "We've got to make this thing," you see?
 And you don't have to.
 See whenever I get somebody who comes to me and says, "I really can't go on, and I have
 to commit suicide," I say, "Well, that's entirely--you're right.
 There's really no reason why you should go on, and if you want to commit suicide, do
 it.
 You can check out."
 Of course, this reduces anxiety.
 When they feel free to commit suicide, they don't really have to commit suicide so much.
 You know, you can commit partial suicide.
 So the sense that you just have to go on living, see, that life is a must.
 When you say to anything spontaneous, see, life is spontaneous.
 It happens in the words of the Taoists, "Zi Ran," which means "of itself so."
 That's their Chinese expression for nature.
 What happens by itself, what isn't pushed, but it just pops up, you see?
 Like gee, I'll never forget, there was a great Zen master I knew once in New York.
 He was giving a lecture one evening, and he was dressed in his gold ceremonial robes,
 and he was sitting in front of an altar like this sort of thing, but he had a table in
 front of him with very formal, with candles on it, and a sutra, scripture on a little
 desk, and he was lecturing on the sutra.
 And he said, "The fundamental principle in Buddhism is no purpose, purposelessness.
 When you drop fart, you don't say, 'At nine o'clock I drop fart.'
 It happens of itself."
 You know, all these pious Western devotees, you know, kind of put their handkerchiefs
 in their mouths and try not to laugh.
 So that's the meaning of something that happens of itself, like drop fart or have hiccups,
 or just you came into being, you know?
 It happens in a kind of a plop way like that, see?
 Now you can't tell that process.
 You ought to happen.
 You must happen.
 Because that puts a bind on it, in the same way as when you have a little child and all
 the relatives have come to a party on Thanksgiving, and you put the child into the middle of all
 the relatives and say, "Now, dear, play."
 See?
 It absolutely bugs the child to do it like that.
 And so this is the problem for every artist, because an artist is a man who makes his living
 by playing, whether he's dancing or painting or playing music or whatever it is.
 And he has to overcome this problem.
 He has to know how to play in public at a given time on an appointment.
 See?
 Now that's not an easy thing to learn, but when you catch on to the trick of it, you
 can do it.
 To play on demand.
 That's the hardest lesson of life, to contrive what is called by my Japanese artist friend
 Saburo Hasegawa, a controlled accident.
 The thing is that...
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