Ideas that use us

When we look at creative lives, past and present, that have been made great by great ideas, it brings to us a very stimulating message, a challenging message. It is THAT YOU AND I NEED NOT BE VERY GREAT TO CHOOSE AND BE USED BY SOME VERY GREAT IDEAS. An inspiring message to us is that the wake we leave behind us as we live our days will be more significant and more monumental as our wake has been filled with some of the great ideas of civilization.

We are constantly being used by ideas and if we are not being used by great and noble ideas, we are being used by small, petty and trivial ideas.

In every generation the great ideas and the sick ideas must find human beings that they can use or they would die out. Generation after generation, human beings come and go, but ideas remain and words live on. Human beings die but ideas survive and knock on a living mind and say, “Let me use you now in your time.”

So, the “bottom line,” as they say, is this:

THE ULTIMATE MEANING OF OUR LIVES AS HUMAN BEINGS IS TO BE FOUND IN THE IDEAS THAT WE ALLOW TO USE US.

We magnetize into our lives and thinking whatever ideas we hold in our thoughts. In every generation the great ideas and the sick ideas must find a human mind that they can use or they would die. Human beings die but ideas and words survive.

Ideas are not a person’s private property. They are historic. They cannot survive with a human being representing them. I hear a speaker put forth an idea, I read an idea in a book, and I say YES… YES I will represent you with my life and thought.

Thomas Jefferson approached death in bankruptcy. They made Socrates drink the hemlock. They died, but knowing that they had lived their lives to the fullest and had allowed only the greatest ideas to use their days on this earth. Jefferson said that when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, he had used the greatest ideas of civilization, known to him, to be included. But we do not have to be a Jefferson or Socrates to be used by great ideas. Water is represented not just be large lakes or an ocean, but water is represented also by brooks and small streams.

Being used by great ideas makes the wake we leave behind one of substance for those in its path. There is an immortality to the ideas we leave in our wake. There are more people today reading Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus, Meister Eckhart, Voltaire, Erasmus, Jefferson, the philosophers of Athens and Rome, than in their own time. The immortality of words and great ideas leaves a wake of gigantic importance and influence that widens and prolongs our human path and contributes to its fanlike expansion.

It is true that the more we associate with and read great and giant spirits, the more we are liberated from trivia.

We are being used by ideas every minute of every day and through those ideas that we allow to use us, we create the wake we leave behind us in this life as we approach our terminal point, our last living days.

But one truth remains clear and factual. WE HAVE MAGNETIZED INTO OUR LIVES THE WORDS AND THE THOUGHTS OF THE IDEAS WE HAVE ALLOWED TO USE US. You and I have had no need to be very great, to be used by great ideas.