>>>>>>>Each person has been given a measure by God of all those components which make us distinctly unique and individual.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>And there are other sources for these components. Even we heathens get ideas, believe it or not.
>>>>>
>>>>>The Universe? That's about a vague of a concept as God if you approach it objectively.
>>>>
>>>>I wouldn't go that far. Even though the Universe is everywhere, I still prefer to mark my brain as the source of my ideas.
>>>
>>>
>>>Do you by chance recall the chapter in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that discusses ghosts?
>>
>>No chance. Never had that book.
>
>
>"Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living."
>
>
>http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/pirsig.html

Thank you for a Proustian madeleine. I just had a very real sense-memory flashback to the exact moment when I first read that.