“The standpoint of the fool is that all social institutions are games.
He sees the whole world as game-playing, and that’s why—when people take their games seriously and put on stern and pious expressions—the fool gets the giggles: because he knows it’s all a game.
Now, when I say that he sees everything as a game, this does not mean mere game. Hamlet, although it’s a play, is not mere entertainment.
Or when you go to listen to a great orchestra, it is playing music indeed, but you are not seeing something purely frivolous.
The idea of game, basically, is this: that the nature of the world is musical. That is to say, it is doing all these forms of trees and stars and people and all their complexities just to do them. It has no purpose beyond doing it.
And in exactly the same way, in music: music has no destination. It isn’t aimed at the future. It does travel in time; that is true. But it doesn’t aim at a goal in time.
The point of music is every phrase as it unfolds itself, and as you perceive the relationship of those phrases to earlier and later phrases.
But music itself is dance. It’s dancing with sound. And likewise, in the art of dancing, you are not traveling, you are not aiming at a particular place. You are dancing to dance.”
~ Alan Watts
GreatCosmicMothersUnite 