No Idea

Yesterday, as I wandered around my partner’s apartment, I reflected on a project my brother and I had many years ago called the Commodity Project. This was after I ranted against art as commodity in a phone conversation and, admittedly, felt a little sheepish afterward, reflecting on this Commodity Project project.

I remembered that I used to have all of these ideas. And really now, I don’t have a lot of ideas. And there was a certain sadness about this.

Recently, I went to a TrueAnon live show. I love TrueAnon, and there was a brilliant interpretive performance of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails—not what you would think it would be, as we all come to know more and more about Epstein, but sort of about his ideas. I wonder if there’s a YouTube clip I can find and post. It was sort of like he was sending an email full of all these brilliant ideas that he had—and they were all pretty ridiculous.

I was going through some old journals as I’m moving into a new place with my kids, cohabitating with my new partner. I started reading through them, and then reading aloud to my partner. I said something like, “category theory, ecstatic metaphysics,” and she turned around to me and said, “You know what that sounds like?”

And I said, “The Epstein emails.”

Which, even now, is sort of horrifying.

And this brings me back to this no-idea moment.

I’ve said before—I often say—we don’t have ideas; ideas have us. My friend Stefanie says this too, I think, quoting Nisargadatta Maharaj, or maybe somebody else. The idea that everything is ours except for our emotions and our thoughts.

Sympathy and love for all -

In a lot of esoteric literature, there is this concept of an egregore. An egregore is a thought. I sort of imagine it as a virus, maybe a meme. Maybe egregores are memes. Annie Besant, the theosophist, has this great book on egregore images with Charles Webster Leadbeater.

So perhaps egregores are also like sigils, right? They’re little machines, or like yantras. You could have the egregore of capitalism, of communism. Ideologies are egregores. Or family. We go through our life—I have this experience of being with my children, and we decorate. We make paper ornaments for a Christmas tree, the first Christmas tree I’ve ever had.

But I don’t sit and think, this is family. I’m just having an experience.

So bringing me back to my no-idea moment: this is very hard for me. And I feel like it’s very hard in our society, where everyone’s having ideas all the time, and what’s the next big idea.

But I really am in a moment of having no ideas, or no idea.

And this is also perhaps something that allows for an ecstatic experience of life, unmediated by the conscious mind.