The Sacred in the Web of Life
“The sacred, at the core of all physical things, expresses itself in patterns of the Web of Life of the Earth. These patterns are a part of that living bible of the Earth.”
—Stephen Harrod Buhner (American Poet, Writer, Ecologist and Psychotherapist, 1952-)
“One Spirit, Many Peoples: A Manifesto for Earth Spirituality” (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
Enlightenment
Regular readers will know that I have been collecting wise words from around the globe for many years, and I now have almost 40,000 of them broken down into more than 500 topics. It has taken years not just to collect them, but to try to check the sources and wording. But if you find errors, please let me know!
Here are 23 of my favorites comments about enlightenment.
I do hope that you find them as useful and inspiring as I have.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
–Carl G. Jung (Swiss Psychologist and Psychiatrist, 1875-1961)
“Be a lamp unto your own feet; do not seek outside yourself.”
–Buddha (a.k.a. “The Awakened”, a.k.a. Siddhartha Gautama, Indian Religious Figure and Founder of Buddhism, c.563 B.C.E. – c.483 B.C.E.)
“When the divine vision is attained, all appear equal; and there remains no distinction of good and bad, or of high and low.”
–Sri Ramakrishna (a.k.a. Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Indian Hindu Mystic and Promoter of Universal Religion, 1836-1886)
“We loosely talk of Self-realization, for lack of a better term. But how can one realize or make real that which alone is real? All we need to do is to give up our habit of regarding as real that which is unreal. All religious practices are meant solely to help us do this. When we stop regarding the unreal as real, then reality alone will remain, and we will be that.”
–Ramana Maharshi (Indian Hindu Mystic and Spiritual Teacher, 1879-1950)
“We attain enlightenment when we love truth for the sake of truth, and not for the sake of self-promotion or worldly gain.”
–Emanuel Swedenborg (Swedish Scientist, Mystic and Philosopher, 1688-1772)
“Once and for all, dedicate yourself to the service of a high ideal, to the coming of the kingdom of God, and do not be concerned with what will become of you. This ideal will bring you everything."
–Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (Bulgarian Spiritual Master, 1900-1986)
“The holy instant is the recognition that all minds are in communication. Every thought you would keep hidden shuts off communication.”
–A Course in Miracles (Book of Spiritual Principles Scribed by Dr. Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1975, and First Published in 1976)
“If you are enlightened, you are not free, as some people say, but you are freedom itself. Not like a bird in the sky, but like the sky itself.”
–Wolter A. Keers (Dutch Advaita Teacher and Editor, 1923-1985)
“The reason why so few people find enlightenment is because they have free will and punish themselves by making wrong choices. Constantly, enlightenment is being offered to them, but they refuse to accept it. Therefore they refuse to accept it. Therefore they are being taught problems that are set before them, since they refuse to make choices voluntarily.”
–“Peace Pilgrim” (a.k.a. Mildred Norman, American Peace Activist, 1908-1981)
“All the riches of this world are too less a price for a single word which enlightens the soul.”
–Hazrat Inayat Khan (Founder of the Sufi Order of the West, 1882-1927)
“To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the enlightened mind the whole world sparkles and burns”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Poet and Essayist, 1803-1882)
“Enlightenment must come little by little, otherwise it would overwhelm.”
–Idries Shah (Afghan-born Sufi Philosopher and Writer, 1924-1996)
“Out of compassion I destroy the darkness of their ignorance. From within them I light the lamp of wisdom and dispel all darkness from their lives.”
–Bhagavad Gita (Ancient and Sacred Sanskrit Poem Incorporated into the Mahabharata)
“If these little sparks of holy fire which I have thus heaped together do not give life to your prepared and already enkindled spirit, yet they will sometimes help to entertain a thought, to actuate a passion, to employ and hallow a fancy.”
–Jeremy Taylor (English Anglican Clergyman, Writer and Bishop, 1613-1667)
“The great beacon light God sets in all, the conscience of each bosom.”
–Robert Browning (English Poet, 1812-1889)
“God reveals himself unfailingly to the thoughtful seeker.”
–Honoré de Balzac (French Novelist, 1799-1850)
“There is no difference between an enlightened man and an ignorant one. What makes the difference is that the one realizes it, while the other is kept in ignorance of it.”
–Hui-Neng (a.k.a. Daikan Eno, Chinese Chan Monk, A.D. 638-713)
“You may have expected that enlightenment would come Zap! Instantaneous and permanent. This is unlikely. After the first "ah ha" experience, it can be thought of as the thinning of a layer of clouds…”
–Ram Dass (a.k.a. Richard Alpert, American Spiritual Teacher, Author and Lecturer, 1931-)
“God realization does not begin in a cave high atop the Himalayas. It begins in the pots and pans of the kitchen. Treat all your tasks, however small, as opportunities to see God and serve him.”
Sri Swami Sivananda (Indian Physician and Spiritual Teacher, 1887-1963)
“Enlightenment is not an attainment: it is a realization. When you wake up, everything changes and nothing changes. If a blind man realizes that he can see, has the world changed?”
–Dan Millman (American Writer, Philosopher and Former World Class Trampolinist, 1947-)
“Enlightenment is the highest good. Once you have it, nobody can take it away from you.”
–Siddharameshwar Maharaj (Indian Spiritual Teacher, 1888-1936)
“Is enlightenment really possible for the average person? Yes. Big Yes. Enlightenment is very possible for the ordinary individual. Actually it is easier than for some one who thinks that they are special…. whenever someone is ordinary, simple, innocent and natural, that is enlightenment.”
–Sri Sri Ravishankar (Indian Spiritual Teacher and Founder of the Art of Living Foundation and the International Association for Human Values, 1956-)
Becoming Cosmopolitan
I grew up in a country where football – that’s the soccer variety – is almost a religion and it’s virtually impossible to go through life without attaching yourself to one team or another. It all becomes rather tribal. But it reflects a need to belong to groups or clans. Many of us eventually grow out of that need to belong to a group and detaching like that is an essential part of personal and spiritual growth and development.
One of the most pernicious ideas is born of a myth that we are separated and segregated into groups that are defined by criteria like gender, language, race, religion or some other kind of boundary. And it is easy to see that these boundaries are a major cause of conflict.
I just finished an enthralling book – Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers – by Kwame Anthony Appiah, in which he challenges this kind of separative thinking by resurrecting the ancient philosophy of “cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all of humanity belongs to a single moral community. This is contrasted with ideologies of patriotism and nationalism. This school of thought dates back almost 2500 years to the Cynics of Ancient Greece. They first articulated the cosmopolitan ideal that all human beings were citizens of the world. Later on, these ideas were elaborated by another group of philosophers: the Stoics.
According to Appiah, a Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, the influence of cosmopolitanism has stretched down the ages and through to the Enlightenment. He takes Immanuel Kant’s notion of a League of Nations and the Declaration of the Rights of Man to be two manifestations of this ancient idea.
Appiah sees cosmopolitanism as a dynamic concept based on two fundamental ideas. The first is the idea that we have responsibilities to others that are beyond those based on kinship or citizenship. Second is something often forgotten: just because other people have different customs and beliefs from ours, they will likely still have meaning and value. We may not agree with someone else, but mutual understanding should be a first goal. I think that most of us can agree with that.
In parts of Europe, there have recently been misgivings about the growing diversity and multiculturalism of countries like the United Kingdom, with people asking whether it is doing no more than fracturing society. Appiah has this to say, “If we want to preserve a wide range of human conditions because it allows free people the best chance to make their own lives, there is no place for the enforcement of diversity by trapping people within a kind of difference that they long to escape. There simply is no decent way to sustain those communities of difference that will not survive without the free allegiance of their members.”
Cosmopolitanism, balances our “obligations to others” with the “value not just of human life but of particular human lives,” what Appiah calls “universality plus difference.” He remains skeptical about simple maxims for ethical behavior such as the Golden Rule. He demonstrates its failings as a moral precept. He argues that cosmopolitanism is the name not “of the solution but of the challenge.”
Cosmopolitanism is an important concept that bears close examination, particularly in the light of some of the new discoveries about ethics and the brain and also about the fundamental inter-connectedness of all life. I shall have a little more to say about that in another post.
Of Horses and Hearts
I live on a horse farm, so I see the interactions between horses and between horses and humans almost every day. Horses are extraordinarily sensitive creatures with their own sets of emotions and highly developed sense of propriety. They are also very good barometers for the emotional states of humans. We could not work out why one of the horses at another farm was consistently bratty with one particular rider, until we discovered that she was high on ecstasy. Her “energy” was a mess and it totally confused the horse.
On the other hand, horses are often used therapeutically with emotionally and mentally ill and handicapped children and adults. My old horse – Mr. Black – was a perfect therapy horse: nothing ever fazed him.
There is now some more research demonstrating one of the possible mechanisms by which horses may be able to pick up on a rider’s emotional states.
I have a couple of times mentioned some of the work being done at the Institute of HeartMath in California.
Some of their work is controversial, but most has been quite convincing.
I have for several years now been interested in the phenomenon of Heart Rate Variability (HRV). As the name implies, it is a measurement of the beat-to-beat variation in the heart’s rate. Alteration (primarily reductions) of HRV has been reported to be associated with various pathologic conditions like hypertension, hemorrhagic shock, and septic shock. It has found its role as a predictor of mortality after an acute myocardial infarction. It may also be disturbed in major depressive disorder.
I knew about it from the days that I worked at the National Heart Hospital in London, but Roger Callahan – the discover of Thought Field Therapy (TFT) – has been able to show that TFT is one of the few therapies that can normalize it. We also discussed it in the context of the vagal nerve and compassion.
From a pilot study by the Institute and Dr. Ellen Gehrke from Alliant University it appears that a horse’s heart rhythms reflect their emotional state and can respond to the emotional state of a nearby human. When in contact, a horse’s heart rate may mirror a human’s emotions, implying a close unspoken form of communication between the two.
The study took place at Dr. Gehrke’s ranch in San Diego, where electrocardiogram (ECG) recorders were placed on her and also on four of her horses. All five were monitored during a 24-hour period in which the horses were under a variety of normal conditions and activities such as eating, grooming or being alone. Measurements were also done while they were being ridden and accompanied by Dr. Gehrke.
The ECG recorders projected increased coherent HRV patterns for the horses during times of close, calm contact between them and Dr. Gehrke. Coherent HRV patterns have been shown to be the result of positive emotions and facilitate brain function.
Dr. Gehrke said, “Horses receive information from body language and give feedback. They don’t think very much, they feel. They are very emotional and honest. They also have a powerful impact on your sense of self and ability to lead.”
I don’t think that cardiac coherence is the whole story. They also respond to micro-movements – small movements of the legs, arms and trunk that are all but imperceptible to humans – and we have seen many of them sense events at long range. I travel a great deal and come home at odd times. But several witnesses saw Mr. Black start to become very excited 20-30 minutes before I would arrive home. In England, Rupert Sheldrake has amassed a considerable body of evidence to support those observations.
Nonetheless, this is very important research and I shall be very interested to see the final version once it has been subject to peer review.
“There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”
–Sir Winston Churchill (English Statesman, British Prime Minister, 1940-1945 and 1951-1955, and, in 1953, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1874-1965)
“A man on a horse is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot.”
–John Steinbeck (American Writer and, in 1962, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1902-1968)
“Wherever man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilization we will find the hoofprint of the horse beside it.”
–John Moore (American Man of Letters and Former Archivist and Librarian for the State of Tennessee, 1858-1929)
“I’d rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.”
–J.D. Salinger (American Writer, Student of Advaita Vedanta and Recluse, 1919-)
And finally:
“In my opinion, a horse is the animal to have. Eleven-hundred pounds of raw muscle, power, grace, and sweat between your legs – it’s something you just can’t get from a pet hamster!”
–Unknown Author
The Maharishi Effect
In 1976, researchers associated with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi first described that in communities where there were large numbers of serious meditators, crime rates went down as the number of meditators went up. This has become known as the “Maharishi effect,” and some of this research has been published in highly reputable journals. You can see a summary of some of the research here. I also discuss this whole fascinating issue in more detail in Healing, Meaning and Purpose.
As you can imagine, it is controversial and has stirred up some heated arguments. But mounting research is pointing to evidence of a global consciousness that is developing and evolving.
More data on this effect was presented at a news conference on Wednesday, November 1, at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. Scientists reported on a rigorous, controlled econometric analysis of the first 100 days of a $12 million scientific demonstration project to monitor the effects of 1200 advanced Transcendental Meditation practitioners on quality of life indicators.
The research is said to show that since the project began on July 23, 2006, the Dow Jones Industrial Index and the S&P 500 have posted total gains of approximately 12%, and the NASDAQ has climbed nearly 18%. The Dow has repeatedly hit all-time record levels, the S&P reaching a 5.5-year high, and the NASDAQ climbing to a five-year high.
If true, this is astonishing.
I don’t doubt the sincerity or scientific expertise of any members of the research teams. I’ve checked out some of the other work that each has done, and it has all been of the highest order. The one problem is that this is like a pharmaceutical company having a press conference to tell the world about a new wonder drug before anyone outside the company has had a chance to check out the research. Yes the data is out there, but there are a hundred and one messy little details that need to be checked over.
We have no reason to doubt, except that doubt has to be the perpetual mind set of the scientist. Many factors can make the markets go up and down. And until the research has been checked and validated by every interested person in the world we have to remain skeptical.
Let me tell you how this checking is done. Last week I was sent a research paper by a prestigious journal with a personal note from the editor asking me to see what I thought of the research. I read through the paper in great detail, checking the citations, the methodology, statistics and even the spelling.
This is a task undertaken by every senior academic, often once or twice a week. We don’t get paid for doing it, and the whole process is anonymous: I don’t know who did the research and they don’t know who is passing judgment on their labors. We do this work for the common good. Earlier this evening I completed my report to the editor. But it doesn’t stop there. One or two other experts will have done the same with the paper and then the editor decides based on all of our reports.
Then there are two more steps. If the editor decides to publish, then the global scientific community will crawl all over the research to see if we reviewers have missed anything and if the research looks okay. Finally others will have to replicate the study.
This is why research often seems to progress at a snail’s pace. In actual fact it isn’t. It is going very quickly, but each step is being checked extremely carefully. Even with all of this conscientious effort, research regularly gets published that turns out not to be correct after all.
And with such extraordinary claims we require extraordinarily good proof.
If, as I suspect, the research is indeed found to be correct, it could change the world forever.
Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication
The idea that there can be direct communication between people at a distance sounds like the stuff of science fiction.
I will be quite honest: I was always intrigued by the idea of direct contact between brains and I’d had more than my fair share of personal experiences of them. When I was a young student, long before I had started being trained, I suddenly blurted out some very specific information about a classmate that almost lead to a fight: he was enraged, not because of what I said, but because he thought that another friend had betrayed a confidence.
I spent a lot of time poring over experiments done by J.B. Rhine and others, and it all seemed to make sense. But I always had a problem: because I could not understand the mechanism of mind-to-mind communication I remained a bit skeptical. But now the evidence is gradually building up. A few months ago I wrote about some of the intriguing evidence concerning nonlocal interactions of neurons.
If all this is correct and mind-to-mind or brain-to-brain communication is really possible, it instantly changes everything about how we see ourselves and reality. So it is utterly essential to ensure that such extraordinary claims are indeed supported by extraordinary data, and that neither is undermined by shoddy explanatory models.
That is why, as ideas and observations have come forward, I’ve always been at great pains to see whether or not they have been accurate. One of the reasons for going on about the misuse of quantum mechanics has been that the entire topic of parapsychology and of direct brain-to-brain communication is so incredibly important to our worldview.
Unless we have a clear view of who and what we are; what it means to be human; what it means to be an inhabitant of this planet and this Universe and of our place in the grand scheme of things, it is very difficult to devise sensible strategies for healing ourselves and our planet.
I think that I’ve said enough about the misuse of science, but it is just as bad when people misuse the Ageless Wisdom. I’ve just read an article in which the writer talks about the Law of Correspondences, an old Hermetic term that was adopted by the Rosicrucians and Theosophists. The writer said that this Law explains why atoms are just like little solar systems, except that they have electrons whizzing round a nucleus, rather than planets orbiting the sun. This is the kind of silly comment that could only have been made by someone who never got beyond 8th grade physics. For anyone who is interested I can give you chapter and verse as to why the Law of Correspondences does not apply in this situation.
Does this blooper matter? Well yes, because it encourages people to construct an inaccurate view of reality that is based on a very limited visual metaphor, when what is needed is the imagination to stride into a new vision of reality.
So with that, back to brain-to-brain communication. There is a nice article on the topic by Robert Charman in the month’s issue of the Paranormal Review. Sad to say the article is not available online, but the Review itself is available through the Society for Psychical Research in London.
Robert has identified eleven articles that have found evidence of direct brain-to-brain communication using functional MRI and evoked potentials: someone send a signal, there is a blip in the brain of the sender and then a corresponding blip in the brain of the receiver. (Here are some references that I’ve checked out: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.).
His conclusion is that these high-tech studies have confirmed the possibility of brain-to-brain communication at a distance. I think that he is probably correct, though I know from personal exerience just how hard it can be to analyze data from MRI and EEG measurements of the brain.
Something that I find particularly interesting is that using this technology there seems to be a slight delay in the “communication,” though one study showed that the “receiver” might have an electrical potential in his or her brain before the “sender” had sent the communication. These observations may simply reflect the equipment being used, this observations implies that the mechanism is physical.
However some experiential evidence indicates that there is another type of direct persons to person communications that is instantaneous. For this there is no good scientific evidence, just a lot of experience. The difference between the two forms of communication – delayed and instantaneous – is similar to the difference between instinct (physical, brain and body based) and intuition (nonlocal and transpersonal).
This research and these papers are doing us an enormous service. To quote Robert Charman:
“…The data demonstrating episodes of direct communication between brains exists and will not go away.”
And we know from experience that many if not most people can be trained to improve their ability to communicate at distance both in a time-limited and time-independent modes. The keys? Relaxation, meditation, practice and above all, belief in the possibility that you can do it.
You may remember when Luke Skywalker said to Yoda “I don’t believe it,” to which Yoda responded: “That, is why you fail.”
The Death of Fish
“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”
–Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist and Philosopher, 1817-1862)
The BBC has just run a gloomy report based on an article published this week in the journal Science.
For years now, fisherman have been reporting that many of the larger
game fish have been getting smaller and younger, and the same has been
reported of smaller fish in the major fishing grounds.
Now this research, which seems quite impeccable, predicts that there will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by 2048 if current trends continue. Stocks of fish have collapsed in nearly one-third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is accelerating.
When the first reports came out, they quickly became fodder for the late night comedians: “You think they use a lot of batter now? Just imagine how much they’re going to have to put around a minnow, come 2050.”
But that quickly gave rise to an understanding of he gravity of the situation: the decline in numbers of fish is closely tied to a broader loss of marine biodiversity. And that is the point. I’ve heard people say, “I’m a vegetarian, so I don’t care,” or “I don’t like fish anyway.” The ocean, like every other known ecosystem, is like a vast interlocked organism.
Everything that lives in the ocean is important. The diversity of ocean life is the key to its survival. The areas of the ocean with the most different kinds of life are the healthiest. If we knock out entire species the whole will cease to function, and then we have dead oceans. Ocean fish filter toxins from the water. They protect shorelines, and they reduce the risks of algae blooms such as the red tide.
In addition, a large and increasing proportion of our population lives close to the coast; the loss of services such as flood control and waste detoxification can have disastrous consequences.
These findings are not a computer model, or some prediction of future trends. They are based on actual observations of what is happening right now.
Why are we talking about this issue in a blog dedicated to personal growth, integration and wellness? Because seeing the larger You – the You that is interconnected with the rest of the Universe, the You that transcends your physical body, your brain and your emotions – is crucial to all of those three goals.
Yes, you can certainly feel a lot more healthy by eating better. Breathing exercises are valuable too. Do the two together and you get the advantage of synergy: they leverage each other. But you will really make progress when you begin to feel, really feel in a deep down visceral way, that You are something much larger and more grand. And that You also have responsibilities for the welfare of the planet. Because You are part of it, and it is a part of You.
Once You – the whole Big You – really “gets that,” you will feel the need to leave an enduring legacy, and You become an unstoppable force for good. Then you progress rapidly. Not because you are working on yourself, but because you are now acting from your Higher Self.
“I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself.”
–Carl G. Jung (Swiss Psychologist and Psychiatrist, 1875-1961)
“In the end we all must turn to the inner Source of all our best human sources, to the Guru of all the gurus, to the Overself. Then why not now?”
–Paul Brunton (English Spiritual Teacher and Author, 1898-1981)
Searching for the Laws of Life
In the book of Genesis, God’s fifth act of creation was to create life on earth. Of course, modern science has a different myth.
In the beginning, there was a simple soup of inorganic chemicals: water, ammonia and methane. And into this soup came a bolt of lightning that brought into being the amino acids that gradually assembled themselves into peptides and proteins and the nucleotides from which came RNA and DNA. And the DNA learned the art of becoming self-replicating and so began the ascent of life.
I recently reviewed a fine book – The Fifth Miracle, by Paul Davies – on the Amazon website. Paul points out that believing the scientific myth demands an act of faith and credulity as great as believing in the literal truth of the Biblical story. He is one of many scientists who have calculated the seemingly impossible odds of all this happening by chance. This is not some back door into intelligent design, but instead an exploration of some profoundly important ideas in biology that make us realize that there are some gaping holes in our current models.
We know that inorganic processes tend to run down and become disorganized over time: they show entropy. By contrast living processes become progressively more organized, a process that requires massive amounts of information. It is not difficult to calculate that the amount of information required for even the simplest organism far out strips the biochemical processes of an organism. Thus the implication that life requires a new fundamental law of nature that is yet to be discovered.
If this is true, and the mathematics indicate that it is, it would imply that life should exist everywhere, and wherever it is found it would march toward progressive greater and greater complexity, that would eventually lead to sentience.
The most likely candidate for this natural law is information. The book and CD series, Healing, Meaning and Purpose is dedicated to this notion that a fundamental property of the Universe is conscious awareness and that the first content of awareness is information, in its technical sense. And it is this information together with energy that generates the subtle systems that animate biochemical processes.
Long after I wrote that, I came across an important paper by someone whose work I like very much: William Tiller. In the paper he examines homeopathy as a form of “information medicine,” and comes up with some interesting mathematical modeling to support his conjecture, which I feel sure is correct.
There is also some older data that supports this idea of information. A study from Brazil examined highly diluted thyroid gland extract on the rate at which tadpoles developed into frogs. The extract increased the speed of metamorphosis of the tadpoles, despite the fact that the solutions were so dilute that there could not have been any molecules present. This work was in fact a replication of work done in 1995 in Graz, Austria.
There is a much larger literature than most people realize on this idea of information in biological systems, though most has been presented at meetings or written about in textbooks.
But I’d like to leave you with an interesting paper that is easily accessible. It has the title “Paranormal phenomena in the medical literature sufficient smoke to warrant a search for fire.” The author has done us a great service by collecting a large number of cases of phenomena – collected by physicians and other educated people – that cannot be explained within the current biomedical paradigm. He includes some splendid examples, including the well-documented cases of people being able to speak foreign languages of which they have no conscious knowledge. The most parsimonious explanation for the observations? Information transfer between individuals, even if sometimes separated by many miles.
“Disease of the body as we know it, is a result, an end product, a final stage of something much deeper. Disease originates above the physical plane, nearer to the mental. It is entirely the result of a conflict between our spiritual and mortal selves. So long as these two are in harmony, we are in perfect health: but when there is discord there follows what we know as disease.”
–Edward Bach (English Physician and Creator of the Bach Flower Essences, 1886-1936)
Child Prodigies
I’ve recently had cause to look at the published literature on child prodigies and there’s not much there. It is very surprising that such an interesting subject has been so little researched.
First a definition from a paper by David Feldman: A “prodigy was a child (typically younger than 10 years old) who is performing at the level of a highly trained adult in a very demanding field of endeavor.” There are three fields in which high-level creative results have been produced before the age of 10: Chess, Mathematics and Music. There are other fields such as art and writing in which young people may be precocious imitators. Pablo Picasso exactly mimicked his father’s drawings. There is an impressive list of child prodigies in other fields as well, but it seems that only in chess, mathematics and music have profound, original insights been contributed by preadolescent children.
There is an interesting association between mathematics and chess: many top chess players are also extremely good at mathematics. In a previous post I mentioned the English Grandmaster John Nunn, and there are many other examples. Men dominate both fields, but that does not necessarily mean that there is a natural gender difference. There’s a very interesting book entitled Breaking Through, by the chess Grandmaster Susan Polgar who was herself a prodigy, as were both of her sisters. Girls have been excluded from many of these events, or they’ve been forced to play only against girls or women. I know a young person who as a pre-teenager wanted to join the school chess club, but only went once, after discovering that all the other members were boys. A shame: she was already quite a strong player.
Both chess and mathematics involve highly developed non-verbal and visuospatial skills. The writer and critic George Steiner had this to say: “The solution of a mathematical problem, the resolution of a musical discord or conclusion of a contrapuntal development, the generation of a winning chess position can be envisaged as spatial regroupings, that have their own internal logic.” He went on to speculate, “All three fields involve enormously powerful but narrowly specialized areas of the cortex. These areas can somehow be triggered into life in a very young child and can develop in isolation form the rest of his psyche. Sexually and socially unformed, very possibly backward in every general respect, the child virtuoso or pre-teenage chess master draws on formidable but wholly localized synapses in the brain.”
In the book The Exceptional Brain, Lee Cranberg and Marty Albert suggested that these “localized synapses” lie in the right hemisphere of the brain, which is primarily involved in non-verbal visuospatial skills and pattern recognition. They also suggested that gender differences in proficiency in chess support the right hemisphere idea. But after reading Susan Polgar’s book, and spending a great deal of time analyzing the world literature on gender differences in cognition, that last point doesn’t convince me.
It is striking that three of the code breakers at Bletchley Park during the second World War, were outstanding international chess players Stuart Milner-Barry, Harry Golombek and Hugh Alexander. These code breakers who helped win the War also utilized similar skills to those needed to master a chess position or to calculate a mathematical problem.
The child prodigies seem to have some things in common:
- An unusually strong talent in a single area
- Reasonably high but not necessarily exceptionally high IQ: some people with astronomically high levels of intelligence have had problems with interpersonal adjustment, unless very carefully nurtured as children.
- Focused energy.
- Sustained effort to achieve the highest levels in their field: even chess prodigies need thousands of hours of practice, and mathematical prodigies need to work at their field.
- Unusual self-confidence.
Adults who want to improve in chess are constantly told to practice as much as possible, and to work on pattern recognition and problem solving. It is just the same in music and mathematics.
Although child prodigies may simply have better neurological equipment, usually coupled with extraordinary encouragement by their parents, I am left with a question that I posed in an earlier post. Mozart often said that when he was composing he felt as if he was taking dictation from God. That he was not the one composing, but that he was in effect picking something up from the Universe. I’ve seen countless highly gifted people tell me that their greatest insights in science, music philosophy or chess just “came to them.” The former chess World Champion Tigran Petrosian once said that he could tell when he was out of form when his calculations did not confirm the validity of his first impressions. All this implies unconscious processing to be sure, but I am not sure that it is all in the brain.
Because there is another phenomenon that has also not been much researched, and that is the phenomenon of simultaneous breakthroughs: two or more people in different parts of the world coming up with new creative solutions at the same time and without any personal contact. I shall have more to say about this in another post, but it speaks to the fundamental interconnectedness of all of us.
Maybe the child prodigies not only have special brains and special parents, but they also have access to a store of information not available to everyone.
At least not yet: We already have training methods that help people access accurate information that they did not know consciously. A story for another day.
“Genius is characterized just by the fact that it escapes classification.”
–Leopold Infeld (Polish Physicist, 1898-1968)
The Global Consciousness Project
The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) based at Princeton is one of the most significant experiments in consciousness that has ever been attempted.
Recent results released by the GCP indicate that the combined mental energy of millions of people may have some impact upon world events. After measuring the readouts from random number generators stationed all over the world for the past seven years, the group appears to have found spikes of decidedly non-random activity surrounding a number of major events like the 9/11 attacks and the Indian Ocean tsunami.
This is such an important topic that it’s only right and proper that everyone should have the chance to scrutinize the data, and that’s exactly what’s happening.
You can find an interesting summary here, together with some excellent comments on both the positive and the skeptic sides.
You will also find a discussion about the GCP and some related projects in Healing, Meaning and Purpose: the Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life. If the data is correct, and I am persuaded by most of it, the implications for all of us are just stunning.
Everything that you think and do causes ripples to spread out into the world, that have consequences for you, your family, friends and the world at large.
“There is no such thing as a vacuum. All things are connected in Spirit.”
–Emanuel Swedenborg (Swedish Scientist, Mystic and Philosopher, 1688-1772)
