The unknowable nature of creativity

I once watched a TV feature on how musicians create music. It was supposed to help understand the creative process using brain-mapping techniques. To participate in it and to be a guinea pig by undergoing an MRI while he listened to Western classical music was the famous musician Sting. At the end of the program, the music-loving researcher told Sting he had a map of his brain at the moment he was conjuring up grand images of Cathedrals with huge chambers, high ceilings and flying buttresses in symphony with the music that he heard. Amazingly, looking at those patterns, Sting became coy of any further inquiry into the matter. 

 The reason I gave that example was not only to highlight the unfathomable nature of creativity but also to shed light on more general questions of life: how each of us evolves to be the person he or she is; what is the fundamental reason for life itself or why do we live. The question of the nature of life has been tackled by so many philosophical traditions. A view from the Hindu texts is that life is divided into the four phases of Artha, Dharma, Kama and Moksha. This is such an all-encompassing tradition that it offers no answer to any questions; it simply encourages the individual to explore his life and find for himself his own answers. But there are other views which lay strict emphasis on doing as is stipulated, in their interpretation, by a book or a single individual who is taken to be The Enlightened One. There is a fundamental difference between both kinds of traditions at their core. One seeks to stop people from understanding their own nature by enforcing upon them Dos and Donts while the other allows people to try to understand their own selves. 

 The question is whether we can ever really know the reason we are here. Can evolution and habit be sufficient? Every differing view of life is defined by how they approach these questions. If one believes these are impossible to answer and hence life is, at a fundamental level, never in our hands then one is bound to feel that the nature of life is suffering. But another view could be that life being as it is, and our own existence being inextricably linked to it, the best thing to do is to live it as it comes, without ever being so arrogant as to consider oneself above life’s vicissitudes. Perhaps such acceptance can lead to a happier life as you realise the ephemeral nature of the present and strive to make the best of it. Either way, if it is impossible for us humans to know why we are here, shouldn’t we at least take what we have, and also give when we can? Sting may not have been wrong when he said he did not want to know how he created music.