On Ideas

The word ‘idea’ is an abstract noun, but what is it actually, I wonder, and where does it come from? I’d like to think that, in forming my ideas, I am free, unrestricted, and authentic, but I am also aware that I am starting with baggage.

Whilst pondering on this quest, in my imagination I see a vast pool of water, deep and dark, the bed of it thick with matter composted over years, centuries, millennia. From this mystical, cosmic sea idea formations rise, saturated with repeated patterns, ripe to be re-recycled, manifested through my personality and my humanness.

I want to question these formations, heavy with historic sediment and transmute it into something new and current. The process can be sluggish and frustrating, I feel an unconscious pull towards the before and the past, as if there is a giant vortex luring me into the abyss of conditioning.

Whatever I can think of, it seems that there is already in me something pre-conceived, because what am I, if not a re-arrangement of what was here before, albeit a uniquely differentiated one.

But, life spins around me, full of fertile seeds leaving me pregnant with impressions. Conversations, reels, objects in the room, books filled with words and images, a cat across me, blinking knowingly. I find that the secret in creating anew is hidden in the power of receptive attention. The bright beam of conscious presence melts away the stagnant, the repeated and unveils a brand new layer that has not yet been seen.

There lies my freedom, in this open observation. The golden nuggets of my conscious seeing, still formless but with the voice eager to be woven into new ideas.  This meditation leaves me unified with and grateful for my lineage and ancestry so I can build on what they left in the vast sea of our collective memory.  In this way, creating is communing with those who came before.