Ideas: The Imaginary Part

If Prediction is the base of the rectangle, ideas are its height. They are the part of your Expectation that rises perpendicular to ordinary life, into a dimension that habit and history do not reach.

They are also the part of this book I have had to correct most, so I will go slowly, and I will tell you where I used to be wrong.

Through a prism

Picture white light passing through a prism. Before it meets the glass, the light is whole, unbroken, without color. After it passes through, it fans out into red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, and countless shades between. Each color is distinct. Each one is exactly itself. Blue at a certain angle is not nearly blue; it is precisely what it is.

Now remember what we said of him. His love is unconditioned. It leans toward nothing. It is the white light.

Draw a single distinction in that light, a this rather than a that, and a whole circle of colors appears at once. Every point on it is a condition: a particular angle, a lean, a prerequisite for something to happen or exist. Each of those conditions is love given a boundary. That is what an idea is.

So I call ideas conditioned love. They are not opposed to his love. They are what his love looks like once it has taken a shape. Unconditioned love is white light. Conditioned love is every hue on the wheel.

Ideas do not change

Red is always red. It will never become blue.

Ideas are like that. Each one is a fixed pattern, standing at its own bearing. The idea of hierarchy is the same now as it was thousands of years ago. The idea of fairness is the same. Societies change; the forms that ideas take in the world change enormously; the ideas themselves do not.

There is a simple test for whether something is a condition rather than an event. Strike a match and the match is spent. But paint in blue for forty years and blue is exactly where it was. No quantity of blue paintings has ever used up any blue. An idea is like that. It is never consumed by being expressed.

This is the sharpest difference between the two parts of your Expectation. Prediction is malleable; it is retrained by what keeps happening. Ideas are not malleable at all. You cannot retrain an idea. You can only stand in relation to it.

Ideas have people

There is a line often credited to Carl Jung, though it does not appear in that form in his writings: people do not have ideas; ideas have people. Jung's own version is plainer. In his writings on psychology and religion he says, in effect, that every person is possessed, overtly or covertly, by some supraordinate idea.

Whoever first put it that way, the sentence is right, and it survived every correction I have made to this book. But I used to explain it badly.

In the first edition, and in many essays after it, I wrote about ideas as if they were beings: entities with goals of their own, hungry, choosing their hosts, seizing people. That was a mistake, and I want to name it plainly. Ideas have no interior. A condition does not want anything. It has no strategy and no preference about you. The feeling of being pressed, claimed, taken over by an idea is real; it is what standing in relation to a condition is like from the inside. But the agency was always on your side of the relation.

Ideas have people not because ideas are hungry, but because a relation has a direction. The idea is prior to you. You did not author it. You are not its origin. You are, as I now like to put it, the place where that idea could happen.

Flatland, the right way round

In 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott published a short novel called Flatland, under the pen name A Square. Its narrator lives on a flat plane and can perceive only two dimensions. One day a sphere passes through his world. He cannot see a sphere. What he sees is a point that appears from nowhere, grows into a circle, swells, shrinks, and vanishes. Nearly a century later, in 1980, Carl Sagan retold the story in the tenth episode of his television series Cosmos, to help viewers imagine a fourth dimension.

The first edition used Flatland to describe how ideas visit us: a higher-dimensional thing passing through our plane. I had it backwards.

Look at the story again. From where the Flatlander stands, something arrives from beyond, occupies his world, and departs. He would report a visitation. He would be right about every detail and wrong about the only thing that mattered. Nothing visited. The sphere never had to move. His plane cut through it, and the whole drama of appearing and vanishing was produced by the geometry of the crossing.

That is the right way round for ideas too. Nothing arrives. You turn.

Your bearing

Here is what turns.

You meet the world with a structure: the whole accumulated apparatus of habit, allegiance, appetite, fear, discipline, grievance and half-kept promise that you bring to every moment before the moment arrives. Every commitment you have ever kept is a little arrow in it. Every one you abandoned is an arrow too. Add them all up, tip to tail. Most of them cancel. What survives points somewhere.

That is your bearing, the direction of your Expectation. In the language of the chapter on geometry, it is the angle of the diagonal. And it turns: slowly across a life, quickly across an afternoon.

As it turns, it crosses conditions that were standing there all along. You cross thousands of them a day. You have names for only a handful. The handful you can name are the ones we call ideas, and they are the ones that feel like events, simply because you had a word ready for them. The rest pass like weather.

So the great idea that seems to strike you in the shower is not a rare visitor. It is your ordinary sweep passing through one of the few places you had already learned to recognize. And because nothing travelled, nothing was taken from anyone. The condition another person named is still exactly where it was. It is available to you, and to everyone who comes around.

You do not choose your bearing. You build your sum. That will matter a great deal in Book Four.

Why perpendicular matters

I want to end this chapter on the word perpendicular, because the rest of the book depends on it.

A change along the base, a change in Prediction, makes your Expectation longer or shorter. It changes how much you expect. That registers as a feeling: more surprise or less, a lift or a drop.

A change along the height does something else. It does make the diagonal a little longer; that part is real. But mainly it tilts the diagonal. It turns the direction from which you are meeting the world.

And as we saw in the chapter on geometry, you feel the length and not the angle. So the conditions you are turned toward can reorient your entire life, change what a loss means and what a gain means and which way each moment turns you, and the turning itself will not register as a sensation. You will notice its effects afterward. You will notice that you are different. You will not have felt the rotation happen.

This is why ideas are so powerful and so hard to see. They work in the direction you cannot feel.