People Don’t Have Ideas

“People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.”

This Jung quote churns around and around in my head for years. At first, it hurts the ego. You want to think of the ideas that occur to you as YOURS. An opportunity for credit and validation.

But the more you talk to people and read, the more you realize the possibility that you may have never had an original idea in your life.

What kind of arrogance does it take, then, to demand credit for the conclusions that you drew from a random collection of input data?

And even if the thought is original, what do you credit that originality for? Your effort? Perhaps partially. But such a thought is just as much a consequence of the intelligence you were born with and the information available to you at the age you were born.

Credit for an idea is a useful tool to garner power, but rarely a reflection of reality.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

A couple of years later I start meditating.

And boy, was my second impression ever correct.

I can hardly stay with my breathing without getting “caught up” in the endless flow of ideas that speed through my consciousness at lightspeed.

How much control do you exert over your thoughts? They can come and go as quickly as a mood. It FEELS like we own our thoughts but that’s the beauty of the possession: we are blind to everything that we aren’t focusing on. And the longer we focus on the thought, the longer it possesses us.

Just go two weeks without an orgasm and see how many ideas enter your head without permission.

There is self-mastery on the other side of such an experiment, but it’s just one example of how subservient we actually are to known and unknown forces.

We relate to our ideas like possessions. Do we own them? Or does the attention they demand from us actually rob us of agency?

This is the reason many religious traditions portray enlightenment as ultimate surrender (Christ on the cross, Budah meditating, what have you): it’s not about your ideas or your possessions or even your life — it is the simple surrender to what is. What will be. What has been. A relationship to the way everything is connected. Ego death.

We are possessed, continually.

The religious, political, and practical implications are many. I shall describe them elsewhere.