Mozart and the unpredictable.

The appearance of a Buddha doesn't happen with a clock-like regularity, because it is not a manifestation of an inexorable law, or any sort of law of regularity, and this is what one would expect because it does depend upon individual effort, so there's no predictable pattern. So if Enlightenment is not predictable, anything which concerns genius is unpredictable.

If you listen to a Mozart symphony, there is a point at which ... going on happily, tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti, ... other composers in the eighteenth century would have gone along like that all the way, but suddenly he shoots off in a direction which you could not have anticipated from what had gone before That's the characteristically Mozart touche, nobody else could have done it. So it was unpredictable from what went before, though you might have thought you were able to predict because the music was sort of chugging along in a quite conventional way, and you might imagine that you knew what was coming. But no, not with Mozart, you don't know,you don't know what's coming next, and that is one of the manifestations, one of the hallmarks, you could say, of genius - unpredictability.

And it's the same in the spiritual life. This is why it's said in some Hindu texts that the Enlightened person appears just like a ghost, you don't know where he's come from, or as the Buddha says in the Dhammapada, the track of the Enlightened Ones is like the path of the birds in the sky, they can't be traced, they can't be tracked. Perhaps putting it in a slightly different way; they can't be followed, but neither can they be anticipated, they can't be predicted.

You can read Sangharakshita’s thoughts and reflections on:
Nietzsche, Milton, Handel and artistic inspiration.
Nietzsche, Goethe and the enemy.
Nietzsche, Zen and Sudden Enlightenment.
Kant, the Buddha and the limits of reason.
The limits of space and time.
Baudelaire and awareness of others.
Spiritual friends.
Giving style to one’s character.
Anarchism.
Schopenhauer and the will to live.
Schopenhauer and aesthetic appreciation.
Mozart and pauses.
Mozart and the unpredictable.
Mozart and the concentrated mind.

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Dernière mise à jour:
04 avril, 2007.