Transcription
You see, we are so often caught in a very peculiar trap. We are convinced that life is a journey, a pilgrimage with a serious purpose at the end. And the goal is to get to that end successfully, meaning with a certain sense of virtue, of accomplishment, to have achieved something, to have left our mark.
But what if the entire affair is rather more like a piece of music or a dance? The meaning of a symphony is not contained in its final chord. The meaning of the dance is not to get to a particular spot on the floor. The meaning of it all is in the playing itself, in the dancing itself. So the question I'd like to explore with you is this. What happens when we stop taking this musical dancing, swirling star-like existence so dreadfully seriously?
You know, we have this immense burden. We walk around with a constant low-grade anxiety that we are not doing it right, that we are not living properly. We are forever preparing to live. We think I must get through school to get a good job. I must get a good job to have a secure life. I must have a secure life to raise a family. I must raise a family so they can get through school to get a good job. It's an endless cycle of purpose where the purpose is always elsewhere. It's never right here. It's never now.
We are like people reading a novel who are only interested in getting to the last page. And so we skim, we turn the pages frantically, missing all the poetry, all the drama, all the lovely descriptions just to see how it turns out. And then when we get there, we close the book and say, "Is that all?" And the whole point of the book was in the reading, in the living through it. We are missing the show because we are too busy looking for the meaning behind the show. We are like a person at a concert who does not listen to the music but instead reads the score checking for mistakes. The music is playing all around him and he is missing the entire point. This is what happens when life becomes a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be experienced.
We build up this enormous structure of seriousness. We have to have the right credentials. We have to have the right job title. We have to have the right kind of car, the right address. We have to be seen with the right people. It's a colossal act, a performance. And we are terrified that the audience will see through the cracks, that they will see we are just making it up as we go along. And of course, we are. Everyone is. The secret that nobody ever admits is that nobody really knows what's going on. We're all just playing roles. The doctor, the lawyer, the businessman, the mother, the father, they are roles. They are games. And games are fun so long as you don't confuse the game with your fundamental reality. The problem arises when you forget you are playing. When you think you are your role, that you are the mask. Then the game becomes a prison. It becomes serious and you have to defend it. You have to prove you are a good, serious, upstanding, purposeful person.
But what is the alternative to all the seriousness? It seems frightening. If I am not serious, if I don't have a purpose, then what am I? I become a nothing, a wash out, a failure in the eyes of the world. But this is where we have a profound misunderstanding. We think the opposite of seriousness is frivolity, shallowess, a kind of irresponsible laughter. But that's not it at all. The true opposite of taking life seriously is to see it as play. To see the universe itself as fundamentally playful.
Look at nature. Does it look serious to you? Look at a kitten chasing its tail. Look at waves lapping against the shore. Look at the patterns of migrating birds in the sky. Do they look like they are on a grim mission? Do the clouds look like they are filled with existential dread? No, they are simply playing. They are expressing themselves. The universe is at heart a musical phenomenon. It is a dance of energy. And a dance has no destination. It is its own reason for being.
We have this idea that everything in nature has a purpose. The bird sings to attract a mate. The flower is bright to attract a bee. The butterfly has eye spots to scare away predators. It's all an engineering project. But this is just us projecting our own purpose-driven anxiety onto the world. Why does the bird really sing? Why does the wave really break on the shore? Why does the star really shine? Is it not perhaps for the same reason a child sings or skips for the sheer joy of expression? For the fun of it, we say the bird sings for a purpose, to survive. But I must ask, why survive? What is that for? To sing more songs. To have more babies who will sing more songs. You see, it becomes a circular argument. It's like saying the purpose of music is to get to the end of the composition. It misses the point entirely.
The Chinese have a wonderful concept. Wu wei, often translated as non-action or effortless action. It doesn't mean doing nothing. It means acting without straining, without forcing. It is the way of water which wears away the hardest rock by yielding. It does not strive. It simply flows. And in that flowing, it accomplishes everything. And they have another word for this attitude towards nature. Purposelessness. Now to our western ears, that is a terrible insult. Purposeless, that's useless. That's a waste of time. But to the Chinese mind, it is the highest compliment. They look at nature and see it as purposeless. The mountains just are. The rivers just flow. They aren't going anywhere. They aren't achieving anything. They are simply expressing their own nature. And in that they are profoundly beautiful, profound and trustworthy.
We think trust means believing that nature will always give us what we want, that it will be safe and comfortable. But that's not trust. That is a demand. Real trust is like the trust you have when you throw a ball. You let go of it. You have faith in the process. You don't hold on to the ball and run to the other person and carefully place it in their hand. You throw it. You let it fly. Life requires that same kind of trust. It requires you to let go. To stop trying to hold everything so tightly, to stop trying to control every outcome.
If you do not have this trust, if you do not trust nature, and by nature I mean both the world outside you and your own inner nature, what is the alternative? The alternative is what we have created. It is a world of total mistrust. It is a world where we feel nature has got to be watched. It has got to be controlled. We can't trust our own instincts, our own desires, our own emotions. They are too dangerous. They are too messy. So what do we do? We create authorities to manage it all. We create rules, laws, systems, bureaucracies. We create a world where the most important thing is not the living of life, but the recording of it. It is more important that your files are in order than that you are a kind person. It is more important that the university's records are perfect than that its library is full of inspiring books. We are so busy measuring life that we forget to live it.
We become our own jailers. We are so afraid of making a mistake of looking foolish, of not being serious enough that we fence ourselves in. We create a life that is, as they say, all jail and no prisoner, a structure with nothing alive inside it. But life is inherently messy. It is inherently playful. It is inherently spontaneous. You cannot schedule a moment of awe. You cannot program a belly laugh. You cannot force a genuine insight. These things happen when you let go. They happen when you stop taking yourself so seriously.
A true scholar in the original sense is not someone who studies to get a degree. The word scholar means leisure. A scholar was a person of leisure who studied things not because they were useful but because they were fascinating, because they were delightful. They studied the charming irrelevances of life. The things that do not contribute directly to survival but that make survival worthwhile. Poetry, art, music, philosophy, the patterns of stars, the shapes of shells. This is play. And if you do not have room in your life for the playful, life is not worth living.
But and this is a very important but if the only reason you play is because it is good for you because it helps you work better afterwards then you are not really playing at all. You are just working in a different form. You must learn to do things that have no purpose. Pick up a pebble. Look at it. Don't try to get a sermon out of it. Don't try to make it mean something. Just enjoy its texture, its color, its shape. Just enjoy it. Do not feel you have to justify the moment by saying it advances your aesthetic understanding. Just enjoy the pebble. When you can do that, you become strangely a healthy human being. You become able to be a loving, helpful person. But if you can only do things because you are going to get something out of it, you are what I would call a vulture. You are circling over life waiting to profit from it instead of landing and joining the dance.
So the first step is to see the incredible weight of seriousness we carry. to see the structure of purpose we have built around ourselves like a shell and to begin to wonder what if we could set it down just for a moment. What if we could, as the Chinese say, learn purposelessness? What would that feel like? It would feel like the moment you stop striving and simply listen to the rain. It would feel like watching wild geese fly and be hidden in the clouds. It would feel like watching a ship vanish behind a distant island. It would feel like wandering on and on in a great forest with no thought of return. Haven't you ever done that? Haven't you ever just gone for a walk with no particular place to go? You twiddle your thumbs. You hit a stick against a stump. You are in that moment a perfectly rational human being. You have learned the great art of purposelessness. And in that space, life stops being a problem. It becomes a song and you begin to hear the music that has been playing all along.
But this is only the beginning. We have seen the weight. Now we must look at the dancer. We must look at this you that is trying so hard to be serious. What is it? Where did it come from? And is it perhaps also part of the game? So we find ourselves carrying this immense weight. We are playing a role and we have forgotten that it is a role. We have become convinced that the mask is our true face. That the part we play the banker, the mother, the student, the failure, the success is who we are fundamentally.
But this you that you take so seriously, this ego, this personality, what is it? Where did it come from? If you look for it, it's rather elusive. It's a collection of memories, a bundle of desires and fears, a certain pattern of behavior. It's a story you tell yourself and others about who you are. I am a person who likes this and dislikes that. I am someone who did this and failed to do that. It is a concept, a thought. And like all thoughts, it is fleeting. It has no solidity. You cannot locate it in the body. Is it in the head, the heart? The brain is an instrument, a fantastic computer, but it is not the operator. The eye cannot see itself. The tooth cannot bite itself. The thinker cannot think itself.
This "you" is a vibration, a pattern, a whirlpool in the stream of life. A whirlpool is a recognizable pattern. You can say there is the whirlpool. But if you try to grab it to take it out of the river, you get nothing but a handful of water. The whirlpool is something the river is doing. It is an activity, not a thing. In the same way, what you call "me" is something the universe is doing right here and right now. It is a temporary dancing pattern, a gesture. And like a gesture in the air, it is fundamentally empty. It leaves no trace.
Now this can sound frightening. The idea that I am not a solid enduring thing can feel like annihilation but is it or is it the discovery of your true vast nature? You are not the whirlpool. You are the whole river. You are not the wave. You are the ocean. We are all actors in this fantastic divine play. And the problem is not that we are acting. The problem is that we are bad actors. We are method actors. We have gotten so absorbed in the part that we've forgotten the curtain will fall. We've forgotten the audience. We've even forgotten that there are other actors on the stage and we think our role is the only important one. A good actor knows he is acting. He can play the part of a king with tremendous conviction. But when he walks off the stage, he takes off the crown and has a beer. He doesn't go home and order his family about because he was a king on stage. He knows it was a game.
The whole of life has a similar nature. It is a drama. It is a play of energy. And when you know that, you can play your part with immense verve, with passion, with compassion, with everything you have. But you won't be deceived. You won't take the tragedies backstage. You won't cling to the triumphs as if they were your permanent identity.
You see, when you don't take your ego so seriously, a wonderful thing happens. You begin to relax. The constant low-grade anxiety of having to protect this fragile fictional self begins to dissolve. You can afford to be more spontaneous. You can afford to be foolish. You can afford to make mistakes because it's all part of the play. A wave in the ocean is not anxious about crashing on the shore. It's what waves do. It's part of the rhythm. It will gather itself again. In the same way, your successes and failures are just part of the rhythm of your expression. They are not the final judgment on you because there is no "you" to be judged in that solid fixed way. There is only the dancing, the flowing.
This is why the Chinese sages praised purposelessness. They saw that nature is not going anywhere. It is just expressing itself. A tree does not purpose to grow. It grows because it is a tree. A bird does not purpose to sing. It sings because it is a bird. We are the same. Our purpose is not some distant goal. Our purpose is to express what we are right now. And what are we? We are the universe. We are nature. We are that same energy that blows out the stars, that shapes the galaxies, that curls the waves. You are not a stranger in a foreign universe. You are this universe and it is you.
So how do you live this? How do you stop taking the mask so seriously? You don't do anything. That's the great joke. You cannot try to be spontaneous. You cannot make an effort to be effortless. That is like trying to bite your own teeth. All like a person hearing a funny joke and then stopping to think, "I must laugh now to show I understand." The real laugh comes from nowhere. It happens to you when this realization dawns. Life ceases to be a problem. It becomes a game. A very serious game sometimes, a tragic game sometimes, but a game nonetheless. And you can play a serious game without taking it seriously. A good chess player is utterly absorbed in the game. He cares deeply, but he does not think the fate of the universe rests on whether he wins or loses. He knows it's chess.
So you can go about your life. You can do your job, raise your family, pay your bills, but you do it with a lightness. You do it as an expression, not as a means of validation. You work not because you have to prove you are a worthy person, but because the work is there to be done, like a mountain is there to be climbed. This is what is called working for the work's sake. Singing for the song's sake. It is action without attachment. You pour yourself completely into the moment and then you let it go. You don't cling to the result. A cat does not pursue a mouse because it has a philosophy of predation. It does it because it is a cat. It is totally absorbed in the pursuit. It is a perfect expression of catiness. And when the moment is over, it is over. The cat stretches and goes to sleep. It doesn't lie awake wondering if it was a good cat or if it could have caught the mouse more efficiently. It is simply itself.
We can learn from that. We can learn to be simply ourselves. Not the idea of ourselves, but the living, breathing, immediate reality of ourselves. When you are no longer defending a fragile self-image, you become incredibly strong. Criticism doesn't shatter you. Failure doesn't define you. Success doesn't inflate you. You can flow with circumstances. You can adapt. You can be like water, which is soft and yielding, yet which can eventually wear away the hardest rock. This is not passivity. This is supreme intelligence. It is action that is in accord with the total situation, not just with your narrow selfish desire. It is the action of the whole universe expressing itself through you.
So you see the answer to the burden of seriousness is not to become frivolous. It is to become playful to see the cosmos as it is. a joyous, spontaneous and yes, sometimes painful dance and to see yourself not as a lonely dancer but as the dance itself. That the dance has a rhythm. It has a certain pattern. And to understand that pattern is to understand the deepest joke of all.
Now having seen the weight of our self-constructed seriousness and having glimpsed the illusion of the separate solitary ego, we are left with a question. Not a question to be answered but an invitation. An invitation to participate. What is left when you are not busy building a monument to yourself? What remains when the constant narration in your head, the commentary, the judgment, the planning begins to quiet down. What remains is the experience itself, the raw unfiltered isness of things. The feeling of the wind on your skin, the sound of a distant bird, the coolness of water. This is not a trivial reality. This is the fundamental reality. The world is not something you have to figure out. It is something to be tasted, touched, heard, and seen. You are not a passenger in the universe being taken for a ride. You are the universe experiencing itself. The eyes you look out of are not your personal possession. They are the eyes of life itself looking out at its own creation. The energy that animates your body is the same energy that spins the galaxies. This is not a mystical fantasy. This is the most practical thing in the world. When you know this not just as an idea but as a feeling in your bones, your relationship with everything changes.
You begin to see that life is not a journey with a destination. It is a musical thing. You are here to sing, to dance, to play. But we have been taught that playing is frivolous. That it is only for children. But I ask you, what is the alternative? All work and no play does not just make Jack a dull boy. It makes him a nervous wreck. It makes him a tyrant. It makes him a machine. The alternative is to join the dance. to understand that your very existence is your justification. You do not need permission to be. You do not need to earn the right to be here. You are here because you are here just as a rose is red because it is a rose.
So how does one live this way? You don't try. Trying is the energy of the separate ego, the energy of seriousness. You simply begin to notice. You notice the moments when you are already not trying. The moment you are captivated by a piece of music and forget yourself. The moment you are so absorbed in a conversation that time stops. The moment you are walking in nature and your endless internal chatter simply ceases. In those moments you are there. You are fully present. And in that presence there is no problem. There is only the dance. The goal is not to make those moments happen. The goal is to notice that they are always available because the dance is always happening. Your very breathing is part of it. Your heartbeat is the drum beat.
This is the great liberation to understand that you are already free. You are already what you are seeking. You are not going to become happy, peaceful or enlightened at some future date. You can only be those things now. Any effort to become something is a rejection of what you already are, which is the energy of the cosmos. This does not mean you become passive. Quite the opposite. When you are not wasting energy defending an idea of yourself, you have immense energy available for life. You can act with tremendous efficiency and compassion. Because your action is not about you. It is about the situation itself. It is the universe responding to itself. You become like the Zen archer who does not shoot the arrow. It shoots. There is no arrogant archer separate from the bow, the arrow and the target. There is only the one event, the shooting. This is action without strain. This is wu wei.
And so the call to action is not a call to do something new. It is a call to see something you have been overlooking. It is a call to trust. to trust yourself, to trust your own nature and the nature of which you are a part. Yes, this is a risk. Life will sometimes let you down with a wallop. But the alternative, the life of total mistrust, of control, of constant surveillance of yourself and the world. That is not a life at all. That is a prison of your own making. The call is to let go. to join the dance that has been going on for billions of years, to sing the song that is already singing itself through you. You are under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago. You are under no obligation to be serious. You are under no obligation to justify your existence. Your only obligation, if there is one, is to be true to the deepest truth of your being. That you are a unique, irreplaceable and temporary expression of the whole universe. And the universe is not serious. It is playful. It is joyful. It is a great cosmic game of hide-and-seek where it is both the hider and the seeker. So go on, play, experiment, be foolish, be magnificent, fail gloriously, succeed lightly, love, lose, feel it all. But whatever you do, don't miss the show by being too busy looking for the meaning behind it. The meaning is in the music. The meaning is in the dance. And you, you are the music. You are the dance.