Inspiration occurs anywhere and at any time. Typically, we say that a “new” idea simply pops into our heads unexpectedly. Whatever we are doing might be totally unrelated to the inspired thought. Inspiration happens randomly and often effortlessly. It is not a method of thinking; it is a product that differs from the process of meditation and contemplation, both of which might produce thoughts that we term “inspired.” One of the most famous of insights occurred to Albert Einstein when he had “the happiest thought” of his life, the insight that led him to explain General Relativity and change the Newtonian understanding of gravity.
There is no place that holds a universally accepted First Place among places where inspiration occurs. Ancient Greeks, assuming inspiration meant prophecy, designated Delphi as a place of inspiration because of its association with three muses. In noting those muses, I should also mention that the Greek goddesses of inspiration were the children—in most versions—of Zeus and Mnemosyne, that is Memory. Different cultures have marked high elevations and even ancient ruins (Stonehenge, for example) as sites that facilitate insightful thinking.
In some ways inspiration is dreamlike: There you are in REM sleep, partially unaware (you don’t fall out of the bed, for example, indicating some proprioceptiveness) of the environment and totally aware, somehow, of a dreamworld put together by random actions of neurons. That dreamworld can tell a story, as we all know, though it often violates the structure of consciously manufactured tales. Those somewhat structured and unstructured thoughts come from years of experience, the day’s activities, hormonal surges, anxieties, fears, and even hopes. The dreamworld pops up without effort and unfolds however the neurons make connections both random and ordered, but largely based on one’s past, thus Mnemosyne plays her role. Inspiration even occurs during dreams though many inspired thoughts are forgotten by morning, leaving only a hint that “Hey, I had a great thought. Now, what was it? Shoot, I just can’t remember exactly, but I know I had an insight.” There’s a scene in a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry wakes during the night, scribbles a joke his brain devised from a sci-fi movie he saw, and then falls asleep, only to forget what he scribbled illegibly during the night. When he finally deciphers his writing, he realizes that his inspired joke was, in fact, not funny. * The episode makes a significant point about inspiration acquired during sleep: Much of it is useless and meaningless though each inspired thought seemed profound during partial consciousness.
The word meditation, which is sometimes associated with having insights, has a complex derivation that relates the modern word in gerund form to “judging,” “measuring,”“rehearsing,” “practicing,” “studying,” “devising,” and, of course, “contemplating.” The noun would therefore be equivalent to “contemplation.” Before the rise in popularity of transcendental meditation during the Age of the Beatles, the word was associated in many minds with “thinking about religious matters, about a deity, or about a relationship with some higher entity.” After that, it seems to have become a secular process devoid of some specific religious connotation yet one that connects the individual to the Cosmos—sometimes in “out of body” feelings. Monks still meditate in the older sense, of course, but no one has to climb the mountains of Tibet or ancient Greece or to sit in a dark medieval monastery to meditate.
The word contemplation seems to have had a similar history with regard to its association with religion or religious matters. Templ in contemplation derives from the practice of marking out a space by augurs. To make it simple, I’ll say that before the advent of architecture devoted to religious practices, augurs threw their instruments of prophecy (bones, chicken insides, whatever) on the ground or maybe on a table. Eventually, places originally set aside became formalized in an edifice, like the temple at Delphi, where Apollo’s oracle and eventually three muses dwelt and spoke. And in that context, contemplation is associated with religion or with a “higher power.” *
Whereas inspiration pops into the brain from a partially understood process that seems to involve making analogies, meditation and contemplation are conscious efforts, and both seem to engender inspired thinking at times. People who meditate or contemplate will note that they can practice both in any setting, but a quiet setting is preferable to a noisy one. Clashing dishes, random noises and overheard bits of conversation in a local diner make concentration difficult even for the most practiced of meditators and contemplators. Thus, place plays a key role in someone’s efforts to meditate or contemplate. For this reason, “temples” (outdoor or indoor) serve as backgrounds for such mental activities. And for whatever reason, certain places, such as Sedona, become natural edifices for meditation, as many believe as evidenced by swirling lines of rocks set by visitors as “labyrinths.”
That some believe a nonphysical (“spiritual”) place exists is best exemplified by what Milton has Satan explain in Paradise Lost: “The mind can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” And it is in this ability to transform a place mentally that enables people under duress in captivity, for example, to ignore or minimize their circumstance, including even their pain: The mind fashions its own “temple.” That the brain has the capacity to make a world separate from the physical environment is both a strength and a weakness, the former because of “the will to endure,” and the latter because of “delusions”— for delusions might also be classified as “insights.”
It’s the bane of popular thinking that enables Americans, mostly young Americans, to associate opinion with insight and “truth.” Lacking experience (and, therefore, memory) and a willingness to pursue an idea through concentrated mental effort, Americans say, “Well, that’s my opinion, and I’m entitled to it.” Derived from “free speech” in a relatively “free land,” Americans have raised opinion to the level of insight. For many, opining is thus an insightful activity even when it is far removed from reality very much like Jerry’s dream joke that, upon true contemplation, proves to be meaningless.
By no means have I exhausted the topics of insight, meditation, and contemplation in these musings, but they lead me to ask you two questions: Do you have a temple, a place, for concentrating? Or do you carry one in your brain wherever you are?
*YouTube: “Jerry write something down in the middle of the night”
**Seems that the oracle at Delphi was under the influence of carbon dioxide that seeped from a
faults in the rocks. The gas made priestesses dizzy and often incoherent—thus, the confusion about many prophecies.
There is no place that holds a universally accepted First Place among places where inspiration occurs. Ancient Greeks, assuming inspiration meant prophecy, designated Delphi as a place of inspiration because of its association with three muses. In noting those muses, I should also mention that the Greek goddesses of inspiration were the children—in most versions—of Zeus and Mnemosyne, that is Memory. Different cultures have marked high elevations and even ancient ruins (Stonehenge, for example) as sites that facilitate insightful thinking.
In some ways inspiration is dreamlike: There you are in REM sleep, partially unaware (you don’t fall out of the bed, for example, indicating some proprioceptiveness) of the environment and totally aware, somehow, of a dreamworld put together by random actions of neurons. That dreamworld can tell a story, as we all know, though it often violates the structure of consciously manufactured tales. Those somewhat structured and unstructured thoughts come from years of experience, the day’s activities, hormonal surges, anxieties, fears, and even hopes. The dreamworld pops up without effort and unfolds however the neurons make connections both random and ordered, but largely based on one’s past, thus Mnemosyne plays her role. Inspiration even occurs during dreams though many inspired thoughts are forgotten by morning, leaving only a hint that “Hey, I had a great thought. Now, what was it? Shoot, I just can’t remember exactly, but I know I had an insight.” There’s a scene in a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry wakes during the night, scribbles a joke his brain devised from a sci-fi movie he saw, and then falls asleep, only to forget what he scribbled illegibly during the night. When he finally deciphers his writing, he realizes that his inspired joke was, in fact, not funny. * The episode makes a significant point about inspiration acquired during sleep: Much of it is useless and meaningless though each inspired thought seemed profound during partial consciousness.
The word meditation, which is sometimes associated with having insights, has a complex derivation that relates the modern word in gerund form to “judging,” “measuring,”“rehearsing,” “practicing,” “studying,” “devising,” and, of course, “contemplating.” The noun would therefore be equivalent to “contemplation.” Before the rise in popularity of transcendental meditation during the Age of the Beatles, the word was associated in many minds with “thinking about religious matters, about a deity, or about a relationship with some higher entity.” After that, it seems to have become a secular process devoid of some specific religious connotation yet one that connects the individual to the Cosmos—sometimes in “out of body” feelings. Monks still meditate in the older sense, of course, but no one has to climb the mountains of Tibet or ancient Greece or to sit in a dark medieval monastery to meditate.
The word contemplation seems to have had a similar history with regard to its association with religion or religious matters. Templ in contemplation derives from the practice of marking out a space by augurs. To make it simple, I’ll say that before the advent of architecture devoted to religious practices, augurs threw their instruments of prophecy (bones, chicken insides, whatever) on the ground or maybe on a table. Eventually, places originally set aside became formalized in an edifice, like the temple at Delphi, where Apollo’s oracle and eventually three muses dwelt and spoke. And in that context, contemplation is associated with religion or with a “higher power.” *
Whereas inspiration pops into the brain from a partially understood process that seems to involve making analogies, meditation and contemplation are conscious efforts, and both seem to engender inspired thinking at times. People who meditate or contemplate will note that they can practice both in any setting, but a quiet setting is preferable to a noisy one. Clashing dishes, random noises and overheard bits of conversation in a local diner make concentration difficult even for the most practiced of meditators and contemplators. Thus, place plays a key role in someone’s efforts to meditate or contemplate. For this reason, “temples” (outdoor or indoor) serve as backgrounds for such mental activities. And for whatever reason, certain places, such as Sedona, become natural edifices for meditation, as many believe as evidenced by swirling lines of rocks set by visitors as “labyrinths.”
That some believe a nonphysical (“spiritual”) place exists is best exemplified by what Milton has Satan explain in Paradise Lost: “The mind can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” And it is in this ability to transform a place mentally that enables people under duress in captivity, for example, to ignore or minimize their circumstance, including even their pain: The mind fashions its own “temple.” That the brain has the capacity to make a world separate from the physical environment is both a strength and a weakness, the former because of “the will to endure,” and the latter because of “delusions”— for delusions might also be classified as “insights.”
It’s the bane of popular thinking that enables Americans, mostly young Americans, to associate opinion with insight and “truth.” Lacking experience (and, therefore, memory) and a willingness to pursue an idea through concentrated mental effort, Americans say, “Well, that’s my opinion, and I’m entitled to it.” Derived from “free speech” in a relatively “free land,” Americans have raised opinion to the level of insight. For many, opining is thus an insightful activity even when it is far removed from reality very much like Jerry’s dream joke that, upon true contemplation, proves to be meaningless.
By no means have I exhausted the topics of insight, meditation, and contemplation in these musings, but they lead me to ask you two questions: Do you have a temple, a place, for concentrating? Or do you carry one in your brain wherever you are?
*YouTube: “Jerry write something down in the middle of the night”
**Seems that the oracle at Delphi was under the influence of carbon dioxide that seeped from a
faults in the rocks. The gas made priestesses dizzy and often incoherent—thus, the confusion about many prophecies.
RSS Feed