The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
You have to live life for today and for this moment.
If people tell you that you should live your life preparing for the future, do not believe them. Real Life is found only in the present.
This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.
When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
To live in the present, we must deeply believe that what is most important is in the here and now.
...this moment... is the only physical reality you have.
The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.
And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
Even if you're not releasing songs, the act of creativity is important. That's the part I love, when you're in the moment. The rest of it I'm not particularly interested in at all.
Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.
'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
The conventional wisdom is - people say this all the time - you should only write something when you're far enough away from it that you can have a perspective. But that's not true. That's a story that you're telling. The truth of it is here, right now. It's the only truth that we ever know. And I'm interested in that truth and the confusion being part of the experience and sorting it your way through and figuring it out.
There is only the moment. The now. Only what you are experiencing at this second is real.
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.
You, and you alone, decide what something means to you. Yet this is a decision that most people make based upon past feelings, experiences, understandings, or future fears. None of this has anything to do with what is going on right here, right now.
I think when people talk about art imitating life, you're in real time.
Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts - that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man.
I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.
From the moment I saw 'Camelot' as a kid, the organic inclination of performing before a live audience is raw and visceral. Once you're out there, there's no yelling 'Cut!' or any such thing as a do-over because that moment has passed, and you're in it as it's happened and gone, sharing it with everyone.
Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.
There's something interesting about playing live; you're in the moment, and I think it would be beneficial.
I think what we should concentrate on is what it feels like to be a working artist in the day to day. One doesn't imagine what comes down the line.
