Digging deeper, every idea is an energy pulse that floods parts of the brain to be fire or inhibited. This cascading effect happening oftentimes within milliseconds through millions of connections. So complicated is this process that modern science, with its ability to record terrabytes of data, cannot even map the full signaling of the brain for complex thought patterns–the creation of a new idea being one of them.
And where does this conceptualized thought come from, that is before the brain’s neurons and glial cells fire in a specific order with which the idea is realized by the consciousness? That is a question often answered by mystics or religion, by Zen Koans, gurus, religious authorities and ancient texts.
Intrinsically, it is energy passing through the brain that interacts with the billions of experiences the brain has had, which interacts with the trillions of neural connections that created the person’s view of reality which stems from the quadrillion of inputs in the universe that affected the context of he person’s reality.
In fact, the sheer scale of the number of things that had to occur to create that idea is so large that the probability of that idea being of a random chance approaches zero. The idea for randomness in the universe is nullified when contrasted with the understanding of what had to occur in the appropriate probabilistic scenarios to get to this point, the point of a new idea.
Could I be arguing for no free will, for predestination, and more? Well that’s for another discussion which involves the contemplation of consciousness, ego, and time.
For now, I rely on precedent notions including the universe, God (in all the various references), energy, and so forth to aid in defining what an idea is, be it a message from God, miracle, will of God, temptation, desire, impulse, calling, or universal resonance.
Consider this: All that existed in the past to get to this point, the present–the now–is staggering. And yet, here we find ourselves with this, a new idea–at least new to ourselves, our conscious awareness. The number of ideas which we have new ones of that come to us are countless. To whittle this down to the ones we reflect upon provide a more tangible number, even better, hone in on the ones we hold onto by acting upon and we have converted the unfathomably numerous to the manageably few.
What is in us that takes this energy and combines with what we have created through a lifetime of sensory processing, to compel the creation of an idea that we develop ownership over it to the point that it compels us to action–to devote a multitude of thought processes, neural pathways, time, energy, and actions to embrace, adopt, enact the thought?
Where playing with an idea and letting it go can be a beautifully complex mental activity that comes and goes within milliseconds to days, what is unique about those ideas that are held onto for months, years, even lifetimes and generations? What is so compelling, so unique that those ideas drive behavior of individuals, societies, the world for millenniums? Could it be as Richard Brodie describes, A Virus of the Mind?
And that is where I find myself now contemplating new ideas. Perhaps that idea is not one that motivates the world for millenniums to come, but still remarkably enough, for an individual in the present moment–to start something.
When analyzed thusly, the beginning of something new is not a simple concept, but rather a complicated interaction of countless factors that is so difficult to grasp it is terrifying to contemplate recreating from scratch. And yet, for me–and many others–the concept of starting something new is an idea so simple and easy it is so often aspired to for the excitement it brings in its potential for a change of pace.
But perhaps, that perspective is faulty in trying to define things as new and old as already existing or the status quo. Rather, think of every action taken by every person as requiring such complicated occurrences that no matter what the context or precedent, it should be viewed as starting something new, and with it all the dualities implicit.