Correction Paroles Life is a Journey par Alan Watts

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But 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 purposeful culture, are busy getting everywhere faster and faster and faster; until we eliminate the distance between placеs. I mean, with modern jet travеl you can arrive almost instantaneously. What happens as a result of that is that the two ends of your journey becomes the same place. So you eliminate the distance and you eliminate the journey, but the fun of the journey is to travel, not to obliterate the travel.

So then, in music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition, the point of the composition.
If that was so the best conductors would be those who play fastest, and there would be composers who wrote only finales! People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord, because that’s the end! Same with dancing. You don’t aim at a particular spot in the room, that’s where you should arrive, the whole point of dancing is the dance.

Now, but we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our every day conduct. We’ve got a system of schooling that 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 now you go to kindergarten. And that’s a great thing because when you finish that you 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. Now you’re going to go to high school, and it’s revving up – the thing is coming. Then you’ve got to go to college, and by Jove then you get into graduate school and when you’re through with graduate school you go out and 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 gonna make that. And all the time that 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 at about 40 years old you say “My God! I’ve arrived! I’m there”. And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve 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, put those savings away; and then when they’re 65 they don’t have any energy left, more or less impotent; they go and rot in an old people’s senior citizen’s community. Because we’ve simply 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 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.
Well then, this is as I've said my basic metaphysical assumption which I am conceive upon 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.

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