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Life is one big idea.
The blend of curiosity, intellectuality, and poverty is the mother of great ideas.
The possibility of stepping into a higher plane
is quite real for everyone. It requires no force
or effort or sacrifice. It involves little more than
changing our ideas about what is normal.
My life is -- as if each person I know was born with a beautiful book with golden edges on each page -- and each of us can read the language of our own book -- containing our own unique values, ideas, insights and direction, yet we cannot read the language of anyone else's book, and they cannot read our book. And, then, you and I started talking and I discovered that while the words in your book are different from mine, the language of your book is exactly the same as mine -- and words flow and flow between us without effort. Then, I looked closer in my book and I saw beautiful, happy pictures of you and your family...and I smiled.
I'm not entirely sure, but I'm pretty sure that you can be fairly sure that there is absolutely nothing you can be sure of. If you take the time to think about it all, you start to realize that absolutely everything we experience might not even be real. For instance, it is actually possible that our thoughts might not be entirely our own. Our words have no absolute meaning. In example, when someone mentions the color green it can be assumed that everyone would think of a green color but it can also be assumed that they are not all thinking of the same shade of green. Any time you come to a conclusion about something you are probably wrong or at least not entirely correct. Why else would there be so many varying philosophies, religions and social concepts and always more to come. It can be assumed that we can't know everything about everything for sure.
Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said.
Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
Said the boss to his employee,
"Thank you for giving me this idea, which I have borrowed and made better."
"How did you do that?" Responded the employee.
"By attaching my name to it!" Replied the boss.
In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.
What is the most powerful force in the world? And I think you would agree that is a big idea if it is in the hands of an entrepreneur who is actually going to make the idea not only happen, but spread all across society. And we understand that in business but we have need for entrepreneurship just as much in education, human rights, health, and the environment as we do in hotels and steel.
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
My view: we can't step twice into the same spiderweb of ghostly presuppositions, the intricate skeletal chemistry of language is just too complex to reconstruct that particular experiment. The world of normative and conceptual and cultural forms is infinitely more capillary than we can articulate. I had some residues of a naive Platonic faith in the universal structures of logic and intellect for years and years until about 15 years ago when it occurred to me that Kierkegaard knew exactly what he was talking about--some ideas occur to you only once in your whole lifetime. Some ideas are truly the rarest of rare species, delicately balanced and inflated little soap-bubbles.
I have found that there are two factors that inhibit our ability to think creatively as adults: 1) knowledge/expertise, and 2) the need to look good.
"Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many."
I have a lot of energy. I have a great desire to absorb information. I'm not a sponge exactly, but I find that something I look at -- just walking around Williamsburg, for example -- is a great opportunity for ideas. I've been here before, I've seen things before, but now my eye gets keener and keener. So I can pick up little things: just the pattern of a brick walk, or the way they've attached a light to a house.
Small minds discuss people,
average minds discuss places,
and great minds discuss ideas
The best way to determine the value of an idea is by watching the effect in our daily lives. Our actions determine succes or not, our body, our person, are the tools. To reach mastery you need deep wisdom and perfect control over these tools.
The human MIND seems to work best in the presence of reality.
The brain that contains the problem
probably also contains the solution.
IF the conditions are right, the huge intelligence of the human being surfaces. IDEAS seem to come from nowhere & sometimes STUN US.
Never fear having your ideas stolen. Your creative idea is a image you are painting like a picture on a canvas, they may "steal" your idea, however they cannot steal your paints.
Outside ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field. I'll meet you there.
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
"Ideas and not battles mark the forward progress of mankind. Individuals, and not masses, form the culture of the race."
~Science of Survival by L. Ron Hubbard
I often joke with my audiences that I make most of my income on a ski pole. People smile but they get my point. You need to make time for your genius to flow. We get our creative bursts, those idea torrents that take our business and personal lives to the next level, while we are skiing or drinking coffee in a Starbucks or walking in the woods or meditation with a sunrise. Those pursuits are not a waste of time. Creativity comes when you are relaxed, happy and enjoying the moment. And when it comes, it brings ideas that rock your world.
Because of the very intimate character of philosophical norms and criticisms, a teacher in philosophy has to be like Alexander the Great: never issuing dictates as to what his soldiers ought to do that he was not ready and willing to leap into doing himself. An excellent teacher is one accomplished in serving as an exemplar, every act of every kind of thinking and every form of perspective must be something he is prepared to illustrate by carrying out himself. Students need to see the incandescent arc-welding that joins ideas together into thoughts. If one is saying something that inflicts suffering, one by all rights had better be prepared to suffer along with the student, to sympathize and assure them that the profit for this agony consists in freedom and clarity.
" Faith is the womb in which all worthwhile and spectacular things have ever been born."
Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats
"An essential part of seeing clearly is finding the willingness to look closely and to go beyond our own ideas."
Desire for an idea is like bait. When you're fishing, you have to have patience. You bait your hook, and then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in--those ideas.
