Episode - 064 - Genius, Prodigies & Polymaths

Stop Making Yourself Miserable

I’ve always been amazed by the fact that there are genius levels of human intelligence that are far beyond the ordinary. Some people seem to be born with remarkable talents and capabilities that the rest of us clearly don’t have. That’s not to say that these people don’t need to work and practice to perfect their skills. They clearly do. Still, they possess brilliant talents that are far above those of the average person.

Take music for example. My mother was a real lover of classical music. She attended concerts regularly and had a great collection of records that she would play in our house all the time. And without question, I knew that her fondest hope for me was that I would become a concert pianist, not that I had ever shown any talent or the slightest bit of interest in it.

Still, she made sure that I took piano lessons every week for about six years, until the painfully obvious became painfully obvious, and she finally let me quit. On some level though, I’ve always been kind of sorry about it and I’ve tried to pick it up every now and then. I’ve even taken a few lessons here and there but still, all I can do is play a few basic scales and bang out a couple of elementary songs, and that’s it. As a result of all this, to say that I have the keyboard finesse of an aging chimpanzee would be more kind than accurate.

So, it always makes me wonder - what’s the story with these geniuses, who are able to play as if the music is pouring out of their very soul. They perform these outrageously difficult compositions by heart, without reading any music at all. In a state of pure inspiration, they don’t even open their eyes half of the time and yet, these magnificent melodies flow out of them in perfect timing and sequence, seemingly with no effort at all. It just boggles the mind.

If you want to see a truly amazing example of this, watch Leonard Bernstein conduct the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Lincoln Center in 1976, performing Rhapsody in Blue. The multi-talented maestro conducts the fifty-piece orchestra while he performs as the piano soloist at the same time. I’ve probably watched it over twenty times and I still can hardly believe my eyes and ears.

But this astounding manifestation of genius intelligence also has two other forms of it that are just as hard for me to grasp. They are child prodigies and polymaths.

We’ve had child prodigies among us for many centuries. For some inexplicable reason, certain young children manifest extremely advanced talent and abilities at a very early age, and no one has been able to figure out why this happens. Probably the most famous prodigy in musical history was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

By age five, he was already extremely competent on the violin and piano and he began composing music. At six, he embarked on a three-year career, playing before the crowned heads of Europe. Can you imagine that? Think about what you were like at that age. By six I had memorized the theme song to the Mickey Mouse Club and my parents probably thought I was a genius because of it.

Anyway, there have been child prodigies in dozens of different fields including math, science and the visual arts, but it’s still pretty rare. The current thinking is that it’s only a one-in-ten-million phenomenon. And staying within the realm of music, even though it’s quite a stretch from Mozart, Stevie Wonder was clearly one of them, as well.

Born six weeks premature, he went blind from having too much oxygen in his incubator. Still, in his early childhood he taught himself how to play the piano, harmonica and drums and along with his powerful singing voice, signed his first recording contract in 1961 at age eleven. Since then, he has won far too many awards to list here, including, twenty-five Grammies, eight Honorary Doctorates, an Academy Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And in all this time, he hasn’t slowed down a bit.

Now, let’s go on to the polymath, which is another manifestation of intelligence that I just can’t fathom. Simply put, these are people who are able to excel in several different fields, which are often completely unrelated. Some of the most famous ones have been Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. But there have been other, quite surprising ones as well.

I was pretty amazed when I found out that Danny Kaye, the famous performer from the golden age of movies and TV, was one of them. He was an extraordinarily gifted actor, singer, and dancer. But it turns out that his genius as an entertainer was just the tip of the iceberg.

He was also an expert jet pilot who flew his own plane. He owned a Lear Jet and flew it to sixty-five different countries, mainly on UNICEF tours for the United Nations. In addition, he spoke eleven different languages and although he couldn’t read a note of music, he was a talented conductor of symphony orchestras and spent fifteen years giving benefit performances with the finest orchestras in the world including the National Symphony, the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic.

He was also a bit of a sports nut. He was a single digit golfer who grew up a die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan. And as a lifelong lover of baseball, as well as a savvy businessman, he was one of the founders of the Seattle Mariners.

But that’s not all. He was also a master chef, particularly in Chinese and French cuisine and he is still the only non-professional chef to ever be awarded France’s highest culinary award, which is bestowed by the Sorbonne.

And finally, and probably the most unexpected, he was an honorary member of the American College of Surgeons as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics. He had always wanted to be a doctor, but his family couldn’t afford higher education, so he went into show business instead. Still, he always maintained his serious interest on medicine.

But it went a little further than that. He was close friends with the heart surgeon who performed history’s first coronary bypass. He would observe operations, which they would later discuss in great detail. “Danny has had no medical training, but he knows his way around an operating room” the doctor said. “He’s so intelligent he picks up immediately what he has observed.”

This was all absolutely remarkable to me because I had been aware of Danny Kaye as an entertainer for many years, but had never heard about all of his other abilities.

When it comes to observing this kind of extraordinary talent, I had a similar experience when I ran across someone who was a child prodigy, but was also a budding polymath as well. It happened when I was beginning to explore the world of personal growth, which was really just a by-product of having been a die-hard Beatles fan for over a decade.

Capturing global attention, the Fab Four had gotten into meditation in 1968 and had been studying under a teacher named the Maharishi, who was a classical Indian guru, with flowing white robes and a long, grey beard.

Like the millions of other Beatles devotees throughout the world, I basically mirrored whatever they did, so I started practicing the same form of meditation. But I wasn’t very sincere about it and after a couple of months, I stopped.

Then, a few years later, a friend told me that he had started practicing a deeper form of meditation that was doing him a lot of good. A little while later, he told me that the teacher of that meditation, who was supposed to be a major authority on inner growth, was coming to Philadelphia to give a talk about it. It sounded interesting until he told me that the teacher was only fourteen years old.

I don’t remember what my exact reaction was, but I’m pretty sure I burst out laughing because it seemed ridiculous on the face of it. I mean the Beatles’ guy looked like he was in his mid-eighties and this kid was barely a teenager. What could he know about the evolution of higher consciousness?

Out of deference to my friend, I decided to do a little research and I learned to my surprise that in the East, this kind of thing does happen from time to time. There were child prodigies who were renowned spiritual teachers.

There was Sri Ramakrishna, a globally respected teacher during the mid-1800s, who had been recognized as a spiritual master at the age of nine. His successor, Swami Vivekananda, was recognized in the same way at age of nineteen. And the current Dalai Lama assumed the full authority of his role when he was fifteen years old. As an aside, in our culture, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became a fully ordained minister at nineteen.

Anyway, this fourteen-year-old teacher was named Prem Rawat, and when I went to hear him speak at the Irvine Auditorium of the University of Pennsylvania, I found him to be surprisingly impressive.

There was a calm, but extremely powerful presence about him, and he seemed to really know what he was talking about. I observed him rather carefully from the time he entered the prestigious auditorium until he left, and perceived nothing about him that had anything to do with his age whatsoever. Rather than seeming like a young teenager, he had the presence of a secure adult about him. In fact, he seemed to be the most centered individual I had ever seen. But there was also a subtle, yet clearly present joyfulness about him that seemed foundational to his being. Again, it was quite impressive.

By the way, as far as being a child prodigy is concerned, he had been in this teaching mode for quite some time. He had begun his work at the age of four and started meditating at six. At the age of nine, he became the recognized teaching authority to several hundred thousand Indian meditators.

But there’s also a profound element about being a teacher of inner growth that I found to be most intriguing. It’s different from being a genius in art, music or science because in those realms, you can tell if someone is truly a master of their craft just by observing their work. You look at the art, listen to the music or watch the dance, and you can quickly get a sense of how good they are.

But with a teacher of inner growth, it’s quite different, because the purpose of the teaching isn’t just to entertain and inspire you, it’s to actually help you expand and grow your own consciousness. And the only way you can tell if the teacher is truly a master of the craft is by the actual experiences you start having within your own awareness.

And this is not just in the short-term. It pertains to the long-term as well. Are you continually growing beyond where you were? Are you becoming kinder and more compassionate? Are you feeling more connected to the larger and higher consciousness? You have to determine all this for yourself. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, what matters is what’s going on inside of you.

Along these lines, that night at Penn, Prem made a statement that I still remember. He said if you find his information to be helpful, then enjoy it. If not, then immediately leave it and move on.

So, as a child prodigy, I found him to be most impressive, but surprisingly, he was also blossoming into becoming a polymath as well. Over the years that followed, while his primary focus was always on teaching meditation and inner growth, his considerable other talents spread out into seemingly unrelated fields.

For instance, in the aviation world alone, his accomplishments are truly noteworthy. He is a fully licensed jet pilot, with tens of thousands of hours of flight time, and was one the youngest pilot in aviation history to be certified to fly a certain sophisticated jet aircraft. He is also a helicopter pilot and a veteran helicopter instructor as well.

More down to earth, he is also a master car mechanic and one of his hobbies is the total restoration of antique automobiles, of which he has completed several. In addition, he is also a prolific photographer on a professional level, and several of his photographs are hung in galleries around the world.

On top of all this, as an author, his recent book on personal growth is a New York Times best seller. And on the lighter side, he is a tremendous chef and has been approached a few times to host a cooking show. And get this last one - he writes his own computer code and is a master programmer. For some reason, to me that one really takes the cake. After using a computer for over forty years, I still have absolutely no idea how they work.

Well, so much for geniuses, prodigies and polymaths. In essence, as impressive as they are, this episode isn’t really about just listing their incredible accomplishments. It’s really about the fact that they exist at all and what that says about human intelligence, and our possible potential.

For starters, it puts things into perspective. If they’re only one in ten million, then the nine million, nine hundred thousand, nine hundred and nine of the rest of us have an opened door to feeling truly humble. We’ve all heard the phrase - a jack of all trades but a master of none. Well as far as I’m concerned, I’m not even one of the jacks.

Still, to close, here are a couple of quick, rather optimistic things to consider.

First, neuroscience believes that within the next hundred years, we will find methods that will enhance our intelligence exponentially, taking us into levels of existence that are inconceivable to us now. According to them, we all have genius potential within us and as the brain sciences evolve, we will find ways to bring it into the forefront.

And they also say that we all possessed genius intelligence through the age of five, so in one way or another, we were all child prodigies. And finally, the essence of our intelligence shows that we are all inherently positive beings, biased to the highest. And that is revealed by the simple fact that we have a finite capacity for suffering and pain, while we each have an infinite capacity for happiness and joy. I don’t know about you, but all of this inspires a great deal of hope in me.

So that will be the end of this episode. As always, keep your eyes mind and heart opened, and let’s get together in the next one.