All [Not] in The Mind

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A question that seems often to be asked, no matter the context, is where is the next big idea coming from? It's such a commonplace question that no-one actually questions the question itself. What exactly is a big idea, anyway? The history of the financial markets is littered with the debris of failed 'big ideas', from the South Sea Bubble to the dot.com boom and bust, and one presumes onward to the inevitable collapse of the hyperventilating AI scrimmage currently taxing the tiny minds of market traders worldwide. No, these are not only not big ideas, they are not really ideas at all; merely fashions posing as ideas: trends from which to make a fast buck before getting out and onto the the next gravy train. Snake oil, no more, no less.

The true reality is that really big and significant ideas emanate from small but incisive insights, often in the unguarded moments of unfocussed thought that we usually characterise as daydreaming: these days much-derided as un-productive time better spent following some useless productivity algorithm in thrall to one's line manager in some crappy, low-paid job. If we valued people more as individual thinkers and less as monetary units in some spurious economic equation, we might achieve a better economic and social outcome for us all, long term.

People are conditioned to imagine that big gestures, funded by big money, are big ideas in themselves, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Mostly, big public gestures - currently one must look to Donald Trump's vanity projects for the remodelling of Washington DC into the kind of narcissistic fever dream that Hitler and Speer fantasised - are simply the egos of the rich and powerful made concrete in a vain [in both senses of the word] attempt to leave a personal, self-affirming legacy post-mortem, that their living ego cannot possibly conceive will ever dwindle or fade. Neither could that ego ever realise that they will not be around to notice one way or the other what happens to their fragile 'legacy' after they themselves are merely dust.

The big ideas that create and change histories; that transform human lives and societies for the better, come for the most part from accidental moments of thought when the human mind is disengaged from  ego: the kind of free thought that can only be achieved at a sub-conscious level, beneath the self-conscious discourse of 'focussing' on the present. Mindfulness gurus will carp on about being 'in the moment', and most completely miss the point entirely, as the true, insightful state is that of no mind. As a lens cannot focus on itself, a mind cannot 'know' itself: and when we 'switch off' and experience our senses without thought for them, profound insight often follows, as if from nowhere itself to be made manifest by the conscious mind and our subsequent actions in this world...

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