Everything has to start somewhere, no matter whether it’s the first sandwich someone ever put together, the first igloo constructed by an Eskimo in the Arctic, Newton’s theory of gravity and its associated apple tree, or the beginnings of Buddhism when Siddhartha Gautama sat under a bodhi tree at the place now called Bodh Gaya, in India.
Even though this is obviously true, we rarely pay much attention to where we are when we have a new idea, a new perception, or even an illuminating experience. There is little conscious connection between our current location and whatever our minds happen to conceive of there. In fact, ideas are sometimes said to have appeared, ‘out of the blue’ – as if they came from the sky. Or, perhaps, from nowhere at all.
