It's really a very unorthodox and unacademic thing to do, to start a discussion with a
 group of psychologists on the subject of metaphysics. But we have to do that. Because a lot of people
 say that their approach to life is scientific, as distinct from metaphysical, and that metaphysics
 is Bosch, anyway. But everybody, by virtue of being a human being, is willy-nilly a metaphysician.
 That is to say, everybody starts from certain fundamental assumptions as to what is the
 good life, what he wants, what are his, shall we say, axioms for living. And I find that
 psychologists tend to be blind to these fundamental assumptions. Maybe it's truer of psychiatrists
 than it is of psychologists, but they tend to feel that they are scientists. They're
 rather bending over backwards to have a scientific status, because that, of course, is fashionable
 in our age. But you know, it's so amusing that when, say, let's take psychoanalysis,
 for example, as pointed out to many philosophers, that their philosophical ideas are capable
 of being shown to have a psychoanalytic reference. For example, John Wisdom wrote a book about
 the philosophy of Berkeley, in which he attributed a great deal of his point of view to his experiences
 in toilet training as a child. The philosopher is very grateful to the psychoanalyst for
 revealing to him his unconscious and its emotional contents. But the psychoanalyst must in turn
 await a revelation from the philosopher as to his philosophical unconscious and the unexamined
 assumptions which lie in it. So, if I may start by insulting your intelligence
 with what is called the most elementary lesson, the thing that we should have learned before
 we learned 1, 2, 3, and ABC, but somehow was overlooked. Now, this lesson is quite simply
 this, that any experience that we have through our senses, whether of sound or of light or
 of touch, is a vibration. And a vibration has two aspects, one called on and the other
 called off. Vibration seems to be propagated in waves, and every wave system has crests
 and it has troughs. And so life is a system of now you see it, now you don't. And these
 two aspects always go together. For example, sound is not pure sound, it is a rapid alternation
 of sound and silence. And that's simply the way things are. Only you must remember that
 the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or
 troughs without crests, just as you don't encounter in life people with fronts but no
 backs, just as you don't encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails. And although
 the heads and the tails, the fronts and the backs, the positives and the negatives are
 different, they're at the same time one. And one has to get used fundamentally to the notion
 that different things can be inseparable. That what is explicitly two can at the same
 time be implicitly one. If you forget that, very funny things happen. If therefore we
 forget you see, that black and white are inseparable and that existence is constituted equivalently
 by being and non-being, then we get scared. And we have to play a game called, "Uh-oh,
 black might win." And once we get into the fear that black, the negative side, might
 win, we are compelled to play the game, "But white must win." And from that start all
 our troubles. Because you see, the human awareness is a very odd mechanism. I don't think mechanism
 is quite the right word, but it'll do for the moment. That is to say, we have as a species
 specialized in a certain kind of awareness, which we call conscious attention. And by
 this we have the faculty of examining the details of life very closely. We can restrict
 our gaze, and it corresponds somewhat to the peripheral field, I mean the central field
 of vision in the eyes. We have central vision, we have peripheral vision. Central vision
 is that which we use for reading, for all sorts of close work, and it's like using a
 spotlight. Whereas peripheral vision is more like using a floodlight. Now civilization
 and civilized human beings for maybe 5,000 years, maybe much longer, have learned to
 specialize in concentrated attention. Even if a person's attention span is short, he
 is, as it were, wavering his spotlight over many fields. The price which we pay for specialization
 in conscious attention is ignorance of everything outside its field. I would rather say ignorance
 than ignorance, because if you concentrate on a figure, you tend to ignore the background.
 You tend, therefore, to see the world in a disintegrated aspect. You take separate things
 and events seriously, imagining that these really do exist, when actually they have the
 same kind of existence as an individual's interpretation of a Rorschach plot. They're
 what you make out of it. In fact, our physical world is a system of inseparable differences.
 Everything exists with everything else. But we contrive not to notice that, because what
 we notice is what is noteworthy. And we notice it in terms of notations. Numbers, words,
 images. What is notable, noteworthy, notated, noticed, is what appears to us to be significant,
 and the rest is ignored as insignificant. And as a result of that, we select from the
 total input that goes to our senses only a very small fraction. And this causes us to
 believe that we are separate beings, isolated by the boundary of the epidermis from the
 rest of the world. And you see, this is also the mechanism involved in not noticing that
 black and white go together. Not noticing that every inside has an outside, and that
 the inside, what goes on inside your skin, is inseparable from what goes on outside your
 skin. Do you see that, for example, in the science of ecology, one learns that a human
 being is not an organism in an environment, but is an organism-environment. That is to
 say, a unified field of behavior. If you describe carefully the behavior of any organism, you
 cannot do so without at the same time describing the behavior of the environment. And by that
 you know that you've got a new entity of study. You are describing the behavior of a unified
 field. But you must be very careful, indeed, not to fall into old Newtonian assumptions
 about the billiard ball nature of the universe. The organism is not the puppet of the environment,
 being pushed around by it. Nor, on the other hand, is the environment the puppet of the
 organism, being pushed around by the organism. The relationship between them is, to use John
 Dewey's word, transactional. The transaction being a situation like buying and selling,
 in which there is no buying unless somebody sells, and no selling unless somebody buys.
 So that fundamental relationship between ourselves and the world, which is in an old-fashioned
 way by people such as Skinner, who have not updated his philosophy, interpreted in terms
 of Newtonian mechanics. He interprets the organism as something determined by the total
 environment. He doesn't see that in a more modern way of talking about it, we're simply
 describing a unified field of behavior, which is nothing more than what any mystic ever
 said. That's a dirty word in the modern academic scientific environment. But if a mystic is
 one who is sensibly, or even sensuously, aware of his inseparability as an individual from
 the total existing universe, he is simply a person who has become sensible, aware through
 his senses, of the way ecologists see the world. So when I'm in academic circles, I
 don't talk about mystical experience, I talk about ecological awareness. Same thing.
 And so the next aspect of our metaphysical introduction must be about games. Do you know,
 I think there are really four questions that all philosophers have discussed from the beginning
 of recorded time. First is, who started it? The second is, are we going to make it? The
 third is, where are we going to put it? And the fourth is, who's going to clean up? When
 you think these over, it poses a fifth question. Is it serious? And that's the one I want to
 discuss. Is existence serious? Like you say to a doctor, after he's looked at your X-ray
 picture, is it serious? What does that mean? It means, am I in danger of not continuing
 to survive? The question is, ought I to continue to survive? In other words, must I survive?
 If life is serious, then of course I must survive. If it is not serious, it really doesn't
 matter whether I do or I don't. Now, in Western culture, it is practically a basic assumption
 that existence is serious. This is particularly true among people who call themselves existentialists.
 When they talk about a person who exists authentically, they mean that he takes his life seriously,
 and other people's lives seriously. But the poet and essayist G.K. Chesterton once observed
 that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And if I may venture into mythology,
 if the angels take themselves lightly, how much more so the Lord of the angels. But you
 see, we have been brought up in a mythological context where the Lord God definitely does
 take himself seriously, and is indeed the serious person. So that when we go into church,
 laughter is discouraged in the same way as it's discouraged in court. This is a serious
 matter, and everybody has to have the right expression on their faces. Because this is
 the great, great authority figure. This is Grandpa, who says, "Buh, buh, buh, buh, buh,
 buh, buh, all you kids," you know. And we don't realize that he has a twinkle in his
 eye. But 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, 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. 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'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 purposive 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. And what happens as a result of that is that the two ends of your journey
 become the same place. So you eliminate the distance, and you eliminate the journey. Because
 the fun of the journey is to travel, not to obliterate traveling. 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 played fastest. And there would be composers
 who wrote only finales. People go to a concert just to hear one crashing chord, 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.
 But we don't see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct.
 We've got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It's all
 graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system with
 a kind of, "Come on, kiddie, kiddie, kiddie." And now you go to kindergarten, you know,
 and that's a great thing, because when you finish that, you'll 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, you go to high school, and it's revving up, the thing is coming. Then you're
 going to go to college, and by Jove, then you get into graduate school, and when you're
 through with graduate school, you go out to join the world. And then you get into some
 racket where you're selling insurance. And they've got that quota to make. And you're
 going to make that. And all the time, the thing is coming. It's coming, it's coming,
 that great thing, the success you're working for. Then when you wake up one day about 40
 years old, you say, "My God, I've arrived. I'm there." And you don't feel very different
 from what you always felt. And there's a slight letdown, because you feel there's a hoax.
 And there was a hoax, a dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything by expectation. Look
 at the people who live to retire, and put those savings away. And then when they're
 65, they don't have any energy left, they're more or less impotent, and 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 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'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 thing. You didn't let it happen. And so, in this
 way, the human being sometimes becomes an organism for self-frustration. Let's take
 Kozibsky called man a time binder. That means that he's the animal peculiarly aware of the
 time sequence, and as a result of this is 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 of that happening again. So he predicts. This is 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 that in the end you
 won't succeed. You're all going to fall apart by one way or another. It might happen tomorrow.
 Might happen 50 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 that it is not serious. It is the play of all kinds
 of patterns. We can look upon different creatures as we look at different games, as we look
 at chess, checkers, backgammon, tennis, there's 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, etc., etc., all down the line. There are all these different things doing their
 stuff, and they're going to do-to-do-to-do-to-do-to-who-do-do-to-do, you know, in different rhythms. And we're doing
 that. If you were in a flying saucer from Mars or somewhere, and you came and looked,
 trying to make out what was living on this world, from about 10,000 feet at night, or
 early morning, you would see these great ganglia, with tentacles going out all over the place.
 And early in the morning, you see little blobs of luminous particles going into the middle
 of them. And then in the late afternoon or early evening, it would spit them all out
 again. And they say, well, this thing breathes. And it does it in a special rhythm. It goes
 in and out, in and out, in and out, once every 24 hours. But then it rests a day and doesn't
 spit so much. It spits in a different way. That's a kind of irregularity. And then it
 starts spitting all over again the same way. Well, you see, that's very interesting. That's
 the kind of thing we have. See? This is something that goes this way.
 Now existence, you see, is something that is spontaneous. The Chinese word for nature,
 zhizhan, 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 breathe, you know, real hard, and you find you get
 balled up in your breathing. So if you're going to 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 himself. So with the whole picture, that is fundamental to
 it. You've 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. And when people, when you think a bit what people really want to do
 with their time, what do they do when they're not being pushed around and somebody's telling
 them what to do? They like to go, they like to make rhythms. They listen to music, they
 dance or they sing or they do something of a rhythmic nature, playing cards or bowling
 or raising their elbows. Everybody wants to spend their time swinging. That's the nature
 of this whole thing we're in, you see, it likes to swing. That's why it does it.
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