“I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied energetic life form. They’re completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us, albeit strangely. Ideas, have no material body, but they do have consciousness as they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse — to be made manifest, and the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner, it is only through a human’s effort, that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual“.

*a quote from the book Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, that I found out about from Wild Geese podcast (Anna Howard on YouTube)

So according to the book, from what I understand, the author (and many other people that agree with her) believe that ideas are alive conscious entities, that can interact with human beings. They don’t come from us as humans, but come to us from outside. And they can also leave us just the same way they visited.

I haven’t even read the book, but thinking about it reminds me of an instance that probably majority of us experienced in life, when you had a cool idea for a long (or maybe short) period of time, but you never took action on it. And sometime later, you see some random person actually embody this idea and create something with it. I usually feel jealousy in this moment, thinking to myself “this was my idea!!! I should have been the one who did this!“ and think to myself, as I’m aware that people can’t read someone’s thoughts, that “they stole this idea from me!“
Kinda funny, isn’t it? Putting it on the outside through text like this makes me realize how entitled and absurd it sounds. Nontheless, I think all of us are familiar with such situation.

Thinking about ideas in a way that Elizabeth Gilbert suggests makes me think about how beneficial it actually would be to dicenter our ego and our nature of getting attached to things (even ideas and thoughts) as if anything in this universe even belongs to us. And how taking each idea as rather this independant entity that honored us with a visit and picked us as it’s partner for manifesting itself into the realm of reality, instead of taking it as just a soulless thought that occured in our “unique genius mind“. Because the second we feel attached to it like we own it, it’s when our potential for manifesting that idea gets under threat. We become so comfortable with a feeling that this unique idea will always stay with us until we decide to take action on it, that creates illusion that we have all time in the world to embody it, which we actually don’t. And sooner or later after getting the idea but not taking any action on it, it will abandon us and find somebody more deserving to visit, since this other person is actually going to materialize this idea, while we would end up waiting forever, if we could live forever.

I think it’s a beautiful perspective that sets us free from illusion of attachment or ownership of things, and encourages us to take action on a unique perception of our human experience and ideas that choose to interact with us, and I think even the fact that we as humans often can find alike minds and people sharing similar or even the same ideas like us, kinda indirectly prove, that ideas indeed have ability of traveling from one person to another and, in the end of the day, choosing the one that is worthy of actually making this idea manifest into the real.

Ideas Are Alive and You Are Dead

The tyranny of ideas