Insight

Yes, I'm back. You may now all perform the customary sharp intake of breath warranted by this sudden turn of events.

Pardon my theatrics. But I have an idea for you (or is it my idea anyway?). That is, are the thoughts that you have, creative or logical (or perhaps even illogical, hopefully not too often or else I'm not getting through to my intended audience, truly yours to begin with?

From whence exactly do we, as human beings, ostensibly individuals, truly glean ideas? Do they come from your brain? What inspires them? Or did they exist elsewhere and your brain just absorbs them, crediting the individual that is you with the idea? As far as capitalists are concerned, it makes sense to credit individuals with ideas, insights and creative works, so that corporations may come and exploit such people under the banner of intellectual property rights, of course. But my question to you is as follows: Are these ideas manifestations of entirely individual thought processes?

Naturally, we all gain our inspiration from the world and our subjective experience of it. But some of us forget how much we owe to it for providing us with these thoughts and ideas. Instead we exploit or allow others to exploit these ideas for personal gain. And most of us do so not greedily and selfishly,but rather, in accordance with the system requiring us to earn money to surivive, just to make our survival that much more likely and comfortable - even at the cost of the free use of the idea.

My view, though, is that these ideas stem from the collective consciousness and that when you chance upon them, you should be grateful, and you owe it to the collective consciousness to express these. For you, with your free will, have a unique ability to express it, in a way no-one else can. The ideal, then, is for any ideas to be freely disseminated so that they can be enhanced further by other 'individual' aspects of the collective consciousness - improved, and then perfected. For that is all I believe we are, in the end, a unique aspect of this unknowable, ethereal substance we call consciousness.

In effect, I believe that what you are reading right now, in a blog typed by Dave Dornbrack, is an idea that is manifest in the consciousness itself, and that I am merely expressing this idea, using my gift of language, this particular variety that is known as English, to disseminate across the interwebs. All I am doing is increasing the palpability of a preexisting, if dissolute cogntion.

Something to consider: Sometimes, in a certain species, if enough individuals learn a behaviour, it can become instinctual to the rest of the species without ever being taught.

Make of that what you will.