A father said to a son:
“In jazz terms, to succeed at ThisThing  you must be capable of truly original,
mental improvisation, and not rely on just --  playing-licks;
not knowing what they are going to say next, everyone relies on their brain to make their tongue play sketches of already recognizable tunes (thoughts)
that will be found acceptable by other human ears (minds)  --
so in that sense (employing old boppers’ lingo):
the whole human band is just playin’ licks --
(the mechanical playing of clichés, arpeggios, scale fragments, and musical quotes
from other songs, and repetitions of things you have already played before).
The mortal mental orchestra is a mickey-band  --  a Lawrence Welk style group
technically proficient players perhaps,
but whose every note is written for them, and meticulously rehearsed,
(the absorption of other people's ideas);
who play only tunes that are known to their audience  --
music that everyone can dance to (ideas that automatically make sense to them).

Such an approach keeps ordinary bands (minds) alive and working, and gives all of humanity something to do in their spare time (entertaining themselves with the arts).
 

In this allegorical picture, everyone is born into the band and plays music --
most people, of a most pedestrian and predictable sort: music they find agreeable,
(the songs that are the conditions of civilization itself).
Some within the common cache are born with a programmed urge to expand
the status quo, and something more in music than whatever is presently being done.
The more intellectual be one’s wiring, the more the urge will show itself in
scientific discoveries, or technological inventions,
and if the genetic schematic be more artistically inclined,
it will result in the creation of a new school of painting, literature or music,
but whatever form their creative urge takes it will still operate within the established framework of the area in which it manifests itself.
 

This outline covers 99.9% of the human orchestra at all times,
but a few men are born hearing totally unusual tunes in their heads,
so foreign to their peers’ ears that it has no apparent outlet;
they are the point-one-per-centers for whom all of the musical forms
normally exercised in the ordinary conditions of human existence are inadequate;
the tunes commonly played and enjoyed by their contemporaries, have to them, become worn and hackneyed by the time of their puberty --  and furthermore:
these musical outsiders soon discover that as pleasantly distracting as they can be, standard intellectual and artistic activities also fail to fit their hunger;
from the bourgeoisie perspective: a man can play jazzy TYPE riffs on
established themes (in literature, painting, political, religious and social models, etc),
but slight variations on well known tunes is not the same as original, individual improvisation (something by the way, my boy,
much, much harder to prosecute than it sounds,
just ask any city artist, who must constantly struggle to find new ways of shocking, thereby gaining the attention of the public,
or try yourself to image a totally new animal,
one not consisting merely of rearranged parts of present beasts;
hearing Beethoven’s work performed, even magnificently,
is not the same game as Bud Powell's blowing of his own, on-the-spot-composition).
 

So, while many men and their minds feel an urge to be original,
wanting to be, and discovering HOW to be
are as different as a diminished chord and a pickled herring.
The brains of normal people are not wired nor programmed with the ability to produce original thoughts --   (and on paper, such a feat is literally impossible anyway --
but since the certain man is wired and programmed to ignore this apparent reality,
we will speak of the matter a bit further),
but the point-one-per-centers have some nervous-system anomaly that not only drives them to seek inner originality to a degree far past that of any scientist or artist, but somehow allows a few of these few to (from their purely private view) -- succeed.
Their brain brings forth (or alternatively: permits to flow through)
an originality of thought so extraordinary in type and intensity that men have given it
a special title: Enlightenment  --  Awakening  --  Liberation,
(or as I sometimes call it:  the-realization-of-what’s-going-on).
 

Those who speak knowingly in these terms are not the ones who, by experience,
know fully there about;
there is but one original thought  --
the same one that all who achieve the realization have --  and it is unspeakable  --
O, you may try to speak it, but as soon as you do,  its originality vanishes;
although your attempted telling of the thought can be closer or further away from
its reality (depending on your own experience and wiring),
any description that purports to be literally it   --  is not.
 

On a special night, when the temperature in the club, the location of the stage,
the price of drinks, the lighting, the size of the crowd, what he had to eat that day,
and the tides in Bali are all just right --  a jazz performer’s struggle to create
original music in-the-moment  --  on-the-spot  --  can be truly exhilarating;
in ordinary life, the performer hopes it is so vis a vis the audience and critics --
while with the certain man (struggling to get to the bottom of things)
the excitement he seeks is strictly for himself.
Even his amateur attempts to blow original thoughts
as he works his way to the ultimate big one thrill him --  but he quickly learns  --
thrill no one but him,
his talent for even semi original mental improvisation is enjoyed by none save him
(not surprising) for among even the most sophisticated of cows
there is no audience for work-in-progress descriptions of Butchering  --  which,
in a faithfully-tracking symbolic sense is what the ultimate original thought is.
 

Normally programmed brains simply are not interested-in, cannot conceive-of,
are unable to digest-when-confronted-with the one & only true originality of mind;
such is not required for the maintenance and orderly growth of man's-collectively-civilized-life;
what is needed there is an orchestra in which the majority plays and accepts
the music presented them as it is written,
and with a segment always thereof who are driven to continually expand the standard repertoire by slight, gradually introduced variations of the existing themes:
this is ordinary man’s set up.
 

Then, just off the main stage is the certain man,
totally familiar with all the music ever played,
and not an irrelevant, ridiculous critic thereof,
but rather a man with a strictly personal taste for something else  --
something certainly difficult for him to describe even to himself (impossible actually, up until the very instant he is entertained by the ultimate original thought),
yet he persists in his off-site struggle (if, that is --  he does persist),
and some hot night  --  if the temperature in his private mental club is just cool enough - and if he is standing in just the right spot on his brain’s stage of consciousness --
and if the audience of his own uninvolved neural connections are in the proper mood the magic may strike  --
his mind begins to soar  --
his thoughts string themselves together in totally new musical lines –
and it culminates in the grand climax of his brain suddenly realizing

*J.S.B. also noted: "It's either: keep composing, or --  start changing diapers."