So this goes very deep into us. It goes deep, deep, deep into a problem we have about guilt. I wonder often if there’s any relationship between guilt and gold – that the Love of money is the root of evil. Very true saying.

Because you see I was saying yesterday that the difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money.

And there are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that, that kind of work because of mechanization.

But if you do a job, if you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd. Because if money becomes the goal, and it does when you work that way, you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness – or with pleasure.

Yes, one can take a whole handful of crisp dollar bills and practically water your mouth over them. But this is a kind of person who is confused, like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell.

It goes back you see to the ancient guilt that if you don’t work you have no right to eat; that if there are others in the World who don’t have enough to eat, you shouldn’t enjoy your dinner even though you have no possible means of conveying the food to them.

And while it is true that we are all one human family and that every individual involves every other individual … while it is true therefore we should do something about changing the situation.

The one way of not doing anything about a situation is feeling guilty about it, because when people feel guilty about a situation they most usually, instead of doing something practical to change it, they resort to all sorts of symbolic methods of expiation. They go to confession. They see an analyst.

They do all kinds of things which will be ways of actually not doing anything about the problem, but feeling all right about it instead.

And guilt invariably produces that sort of reaction. It is a destructive emotion. And instead we need to have a different attitude to our mistakes and to our misdeeds.

Walt Whitman always admired animals because they do not lie awake at night and weep for their sins. Animals are practical in the real sense as are children who haven’t been taught this extraordinary hang-up of guilt.

Because if you have done something wrong and you’ve made a mistake and somebody makes you ashamed of it and guilty, you run around licking the sores of your wounded ego because you feel your pride has been hurt.

The first thing to understand is that it is not a serious failing in a human being to make mistakes. Everybody has to make mistakes. There is no way out of it. You can’t learn anything unless you make mistakes.

So likewise I know a very great anthropologist who was taught music, playing the piano in the same way I was. When I was taught music the school mom who taught me used to put an India rubber, an eraser it’s called in this country, on the top of each hand so that I would have my hands in good posture. And every time I’d play a wrong note she’d hit my fingers with a pencil.

And this great anthropologist that had a similar thought about musical education, and when confronted with the piano in the presence of an absolutely marvelous teacher in San Francisco, she said she was amazed he was completely incapable of reading notes. He blocked out everything.

So another great teacher of the piano I knew said simply: You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it. Play it wrong and then eventually go over it again and you’ll eventually get it right. But you must not block.

Always keep the same rhythm going, even if you have to slow it down. But keep the proportionate rhythm of one note to another and if it’s the wrong note, play the wrong note, as long as you play something, in the right rhythm.

So you know this is a way of taking away peoples’ blockage, peoples’ guilt and shame about making mistakes. So you absolutely … freedom means basically the freedom to make mistakes, the freedom to be a damn fool.

And then not to recriminate with yourself when you do finally realize that it was a mistake, but simply don’t do it again. Or at least do it less often.