A Daily Reminders reader had been musing on this notion of generally being disinterested in our thinking, and what it meant for performance.
Suddenly, they had a really good idea, around the topic. Something fresh, new. An insight! And in their own words:
“It came to me just as I was about to fall asleep. Not unusual, but for the first time in my life I acted and wrote it down rather than assume I'd remember in the morning (0% success rate across 45 years of research). Which I guess begs the question, where did the idea come from and who decided to write it down?”
Brilliant questions, thank you! Let’s take each in turn.
Where did it come from?
Now, I’m an expert on this stuff, so I can state categorically that I honestly don’t have the first clue.
😂
I mean, seriously – who the hell knows?! I certainly don’t. Part and parcel of this amazing, mystical, inscrutable journey we make through the world of form is to make up our own minds about what’s going on, and be cool with that, without attaching to our ideas too strongly (because they’re made up, and by definition, wrong).
Generally speaking, it seems like we do a lot better when our attention isn’t on the mind’s itty-bitty little theories, but rather the expansive creative flow of life, coming through us.
So the less time we can spend pondering why something happens the way it does, instead relaxing into the acceptance that it happens… well, that’s a good thing in the Giles Ego Construct’s 📦 book.
As Michael Neill put it in his excellent book Creating The Impossible,
“The emergence of fresh new thinking and unexpected synchronicities (i.e. ‘luck’) is 100 percent reliable and 98 percent unpredictable.”
~ Michael Neill
For the record (since you asked), my headcanon version for where ideas come from is more and more that all possible thoughts are already there, ‘in the ether’ and our minds act as receivers, pulling them down, with what we perceive being a function of how ‘open’ we are in any given moment.
But I could be sat here typing that wearing a tinfoil hat, for all you know, so take it with a pinch of salt.
Who decided to write it down?
Again, that’s a big fat I don’t know. But it seems fairly clear that it’s not this notion of ‘self’ (the Reader Ego Construct 📦) that insists it made the decision for you and is driving the bus in general.
Try as hard as you like, you’ll never find it, or pin it down. It’s only there when you’re thinking about it (i.e. it’s a construct), and all the rest of the time, life carries on happening, regardless.
(‘Better’, you could almost say 😬)
I really like Chris Niebauer’s book on this topic, No Self, No Problem, in which he says,
“It is the process of thinking that creates the self, rather than there being a self having any independent existence separate from thought. The self is more like a verb than a noun. To take it a step further, the implication is that without thought, the self does not, in fact, exist.”
~ Chris Niebauer
Which is why I think of any ‘ill’ behaviour happening on my watch these days, as ‘Giles-ing’. Because I’m always caught up in that notion of self, when acting like a dufus.
💁🏻♂️
Seeing it’s just a collection of ideas, really helps.
You can take ownership
All that said, the aperture I mentioned above—how open we are, to be receiving these ideas—that’s you-shaped. What shows up takes its form from all your stuff – the experiences that have happened on your watch. I don’t think there’s any escaping that.
(Which is why you can read this and know it’s been written by me – you recognise the ‘Giles-ness’ of it.)
As for why the writing-it-down thing occurred to you all of a sudden, for the first time, well, again, that infinite creative force—life-energy—has to come through you, and part and parcel of that data repository is the fact that you’ve been around the Daily Reminders for a while now.
Let’s face it, I’ve written a fair bit about the MECHANICS of the mind, as it pertains to productivity, so I’m guessing in that moment, it just made sense!
All the more reason to stick around.
😘
Giles
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