The Magical Gift of Entertaining Ideas by greggechols

I continue to find myself refusing to open up to higher possibilities, and it just might be because I'm afraid of the responsibility. On the other hand, the responsibility might not be what I think it is!

Am I refusing my call? Am I refusing to bring onto this plane the magical ingredients that are waiting on another level to be born here in this realm?

Have I refused that responsibility?

It is as though I sense things in the ethers that are hovering around me, wanting to be born through me. Why won’t I allow myself that gift, that possibility? It’s as though it’s an impossibility for me because I won’t open myself to it!

I read an article in Rolling Stone magazine about the producer Rick Rubin this morning—finally, over a week after I first spotted it. My brother, David, brought the magazine and left it for me when he was in town from Dallas last week. When I first read a couple of paragraphs a week ago, I knew there was something mystical and spiritual about this guy who produced the Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, Run-DMC, and, now Neil Diamond. This morning, finally, the magazine called to me again—I’d left it out, open to this page, in the kitchen for the past week!

As the song continues, he begins to softly sing harmony on the chorus. The only words I can make out are, “I hope, I hope…” As he sings, he waves a hand, as if he’s still a magician, conjuring the sound from thin air—which has always been Rubin’s secret: He believes that there is something out there, in the ether, whether it is another spiritual plane or the perfect version of the perfect Neil Diamond song, one that only Rubin can hear and that, like a medium, he might be able to contact and share. When the song ends, he opens his eyes and says, “Wait until we’re finished.” (Mark Binelli, Rolling Stone 983, p. 84)

Yes, there’s something out there that is seeking birth here on this realm, on this plane, and I have access to it—but am, for some reason, ignoring it, hiding from it, avoiding it. Is it because I don’t want the responsibility? Am I too lazy, too independent, too self-serving? Or am I too fearful: fearful of not being able to properly serve this unborn thought, or unborn idea, or unborn creative project, hovering above me in the ethers?

I imagine I don’t trust myself enough: I don’t trust myself to be able to hold this energy, so, therefore, I don’t allow myself the impossible. I feel as though I will fail! How sad! I am afraid of failure, so I won’t attend to the impossible. This is part of my old way of doing things. Aren’t the dreams telling me to move away from the old?

So I must lose this baggage, this fear: I must allow myself the freedom of venturing into unknown lands and spaces; the freedom of accepting the visits by these strange and unknown thoughts and ideas, and allow myself to entertain them! That’s all I’m doing in this realm, entertaining. These guys know what they want, and they know what they are seeking on this plane. I feel in this moment that it is simply my responsibility to entertain these guys, and let things fall into place from there.

It is as though by listening—that’s all I have to do, listen—I am serving as a container, a receptacle, for these ideas and thoughts and possibilities, so that they have a home here on this plane and may then grow and venture forward. I must give them attention and nurturing, but I am not responsible for the direction they grow, or the means by which they grow: that is their own organic process—their own doing. I am simply a host, a container, and in serving the thoughts and ideas in this way, I am being responsible.

You see, I continue to have this image and this idea that I am so completely responsible for thoughts and ideas that in accepting them, I own them. Well, no—it’s not like that. I don’t own them. I host them. The ideas and thoughts have ideas of their own! I simply serve as a container for them, a space from which they grow. It’s that simple.

Now, I have had flickering ideas about these concepts, and have written about these particular concepts on several occasions—but I’ve yet to live them! That is the key: I’m not living them! It’s like the man who receives the magical box, but never opens it! I’ve been given the magical box and have been too afraid to open it! And, so, I don’t even move a muscle. I freeze, and the box sits there, unopened.

The depth psychologist James Hillman says, “one of the great difficulties in our American life is that we don’t have places for entertaining ideas.” And, he adds, “that is precisely what we’re supposed to do with an idea: entertain it.”

I guess that’s been part of my problem: I’ve thought I’ve had to do something with these ideas, and that’s not it at all. “Isn’t it a shame that we can value ideas only when we have them in a harness. It breaks their spirit,” adds Hillman in his essay “Entertaining Ideas” (1986). I am not giving the ideas themselves their proper respect, and, thusly, I have had the wrong relationship with them.

This means having respect for ideas themselves: letting them come and go without demanding too much from them at first, like their origins…maybe our ideas have arms and legs, too, and are crazy and want to get out and meet other ideas, air themselves, spend time with each other in public…just the ideas wanting to appear and be received, welcomed, entertained for a while. (in Stirrings of Culture: Essays from the Dallas Institute, Pp. 3-5)

Perhaps my relationship with ideas will grow healthier if I simply open myself to them without creating requirements for their presence. Maybe I can develop a new way of being with them, opening myself to their own inherent possibility without imposing my ideas upon them! That’s certainly a start. I think I’ll try that. I know the ideas will approve!