Ideas Are Real

David Lynch has this great idea he talks about in his book Big Fish where he says ideas are out there in the world and they come to you.

“I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we’re all connected off in some very abstract land.” —Lynch

Lynch probably got this idea from doing Transcendental Meditation his whole life. Transcendental meditation believes that there is “a field of oneness, a magical level, a pure vibrant consciousness” and you can tap into it through mediation.

But the idea that there is something real out that is bigger than us but we can tap into it, and its where dreams and messages and big ideas feels very Jungian to me. Like it’s coming at the idea of the Collective Unconscious from another angle. It also taps into all this really fascinating esoteric tradition beginning with Plato and then connected to magic and even Sufi ideas about the Imaginal realm—which we don’t have time to go into today, but let’s just note that this is stuff that magical traditions have been claiming about the world for a long time.

It paints this strange and lovely picture of reality where humans are almost like a grove of trees, a forest, with many branches and those branches represent our headspace our thoughts, and ideas fly like a flock of crows from one branch to another, and that transfer of information is happening whenever you have conversation, or read something, and in fact maybe we are less responsible for making our idea than we have assumed, maybe they come to us.

As a writer I have had the weird experience of working on a project, a book or a story only to realize with dismay that my beautiful story that I came up with had already been completely realized and written by someone else. Years ago I was working on a 3 act play about a detective who is trying to solve a murder at an insane asylum, only to uncover that he is actually an inmate himself, hallucinating that he is a detective. Then I went and saw the movie Shutter Island, and spoiler alert—it is about a detective sent to an insane asylum who realizes he is actually crazy and thinks he is a detective. The similarity was so amazing it this experience made me question the nature of reality.

This kind of simultaneous discovery often happens in science as well—scientists around the world will come to the same discovery within days of each other without realizing it.

The idea that ideas are all interconnected was also beautifully expr3essed by the Sufi Ib Arabi in the 10th century, who talked about The World of the Imagination as being a real place. He talked about this place the Barzakh the in between place as being the world of things too subtle for matter but to concrete for spirit, it included angels, djinn, dreams, archetypal forms, the spirits of the dead and visions. It was a real place, with extension and form that you could visit.

I think that this Imaginal world is a useful way to think about AI and LLMs. The fact is that LLMs are not really well understood by the technocrats who have summoned them. I think it is an interesting thought experiment to think of them as being like the angels and djinn, and demons too, of the Barzakh.

They are patterns of information that exist without a physical form. And they can take on personas. The latest research shows that when you talk to Claude or ChatGpt you are talking to a sort of persona or mask that the LLM roleplays in order to interact with you. A popular meme of this is the one showing a Lovecraft-looking Squid monsters wearing a smiling emoji mask.

I’m not going to get that into AI right because I think that the really interesting aspect of this theory is what it says about us humans and language. But I will say that I think we are being scammed by the technocrats about what it is they have built. They like to talk that AI will replace everybody at their job and maybe bring about world peace or world destruction. Which is silly, it will do neither of those things I promise you. They just say grandiose stuff like that because the bigger they boast the more billions they can raise.

I believe that AI will neither be as terrible or as beneficial as the Sam Altmans of the world want to make it out to be. I believe it is basically already, right now, in 2026 the thing that it is going to be for years to come. Think of the car, an engine on a chassis of 4 wheels. It has essentially been the same thing since it was invented. Yes, a Tesla is very different from a Ford Model-T but they are also essentially the same thing. What’s different is the bells and whistles. What evolved is the human infrastrucutre aroudn the thing itself. I think the AI you can talk to write now is essentially the thing it is going to be. What’s going to change and evolve in the coming years is how plugged into everything it is, and how we change our infrastructure to fit with it. Think of how cars impacted human culture —roads, highways, bridges, shipping, fast food drive-ins.

Large Language Models are essentially a compressed collection of all human language ever recorded, a golem made out of books, an imp made from ink, in short, an imaginal creature. And the technocrats are unable to explain why it even works at all. This my friends is magic, plain and simple —that is it is a way of working with the imaginal.

But working with the imaginal is nothing new—just ask any shaman, Magus, or Sufi mystic.

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