Purposeless --Alan Watts

..."You pick up a pebble on the beach – look at it – beautiful. Don't try and get a sermon out of it – sermons and stones and god and everything be down – just enjoy it, don't feel that you got to salve
your conscience by saying that this is for the advancement of your aesthetic understanding. Enjoy the pebble. If you do that you become healthy, you become able to be a loving, helpful human being. But if you can't do that, if you can only do things because they are somehow, you are going to get something out of it, you are a vulture.

So, we have to learn – we don't have to, you don't have to do anything, you don't have to go on living –but it's a great idea, it's a great thing if you can learn what the Chinese call 'purposelessness'. They think nature is purposeless. When we say something is purposeless, that's put down, there's no future in it, it's a washout. But when they hear the word purposeless, they think that's just great. It's like the waves washing against the shore, going on and on and on forever, with no meaning.The great Zen master said, as his death poem, just before he died: 'from the bathtub to the bathtub I have uttered stuff with nonsense'. The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial, all this time I have said many nonsenses.

Like the birds in the trees go 'tweet, tweet, tweet!' what's it all about? Everybody tries to say 'ah it's the mating call, that's the purpose, trying to get their mate, you know, attract him with a song. That's why they have colors, butterflies have eyes on them, self protection' the engineering view of the universe! Why do that? They say 'well it's because they need to survive'. Well, why survive, what's that for? 'Well to survive'.

See, human beings really are a lot of tubes. And all living creatures is just tubes. And a tube has to put things in one end and let it out at the other. Then they get clever about it and they develop nerve ganglia on one end of the tube, the eating end called the head. And that's in it's got eyes, and it's got ears, and it's got little organs and tenons, things like these, and it helps to find things to put in one end so that you can let them out at the other. Well, while you're doing this you see the stuff going through, where's the tube out? And so that the show can go on, and the tubes have complicated ways of making other tubes, who go on doing the same thing, and at one end or at the other. And they say well, that's terribly serious, that's awfully important, we've got keep on doing this (ah ah ah). Now when Chinese say 'nature is purposeless' - this is a compliment. It's like the idea of the Japanese have a word 'Yugen', and they describe Yugen as: 'watching wild geese fly and be hidden in the clouds, as watching a ship vanish behind the distant island, as wondering on and on in a great forest with no thought of return'. Haven't you done this, haven't you gone on a walk with no particular purpose in mind? Carry a stick with you and you occasionally hit a doodle and wander along and sometimes twirl your thumbs. It's at that moment that you are a perfectly rational human being, you learn purposelessness. All music is purposeless. Is music getting somewhere? If it were, I mean if the aim of music, of a symphony were to get to the final bar, the best conductor would be the one who got there fastest! See, dancing, when you dance, do you aim to arrive at a particular place on the floor? Is that the idea of dancing? The aim of dancing is to dance! Is the presence. Well it's exactly the same with our life! We think life has a purpose. No.

Here is the choice: are you going to trust it or not? If you do trust it, you may get let down. And this it is yourself, your own nature and all nature around you. There are going to be mistakes. But if you don't trust it at all you are going to strangle yourself. You are going to fence yourself round with rules and regulations and laws and prescriptions and policemen and guards. And who's going to guard the guards? And who's going to look after big brother to be sure that he doesn't do something stupid? No go. To live I must have faith. I must trust myself to the totally unknown. I must trust myself to a nature which doesn't have a boss, because a boss is a system of mistrust. That is why Lao Tzu's Tao 'Loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them'." ~Alan Watts, Who Guards The Guards?...