The Human Game

Now existence, you see, is something that is spontaneous.

The Chinese word for nature, zizhan, 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 go 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 itself.

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.

But we have a strange anxiety in us that if we don't interfere, it won't happen.

And that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.

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.

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.

Now, 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, kitty, kitty, kitty.

And, yeah, 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, this thing is coming.

It's coming.

The 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 let down, 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 citizen's 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 Kozybski called man a time binder.

That means that he's 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 of that happening again.

And so he predicts.

Well, 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.

It 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.

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 a 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, et cetera, et cetera.

All down the line.

There are all these different things doing their stuff.

And they're going to do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.

Who-do-do-do-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, try and 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.

See?

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 just spits in a different way.

That's a kind of irregularity.

And then it starts spitting all over again the same way.

I say, that's very interesting.

That's the kind of thing we have.

See?

This is something that goes this way.

You see?

Just like music goes.

Did you ever see a lady go this way, go that way?

That's what it does.

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.