Episode 077 - The Sleeping Genius

Stop Making Yourself Miserable

Welcome back to the Stop Making Yourself Miserable Podcast and I certainly hope that you had a wonderful summer.

As you may recall, in the last episodes before the hiatus certain key chapters from my memoir, Wilt, Ike & Me, were presented along with the subtext behind them as I delved into some of the deeper meanings of the story for me. The response from many of you has been quite gratifying and I want to express my sincere thanks to all.

Now, as we return to our regular podcast schedule, I want to start presenting some information about my next project, the Higher Mind Training (HMT). To begin, let me give you a little bit of background about it.

You probably remember that for my entire adult life, I have been a writer, researcher, speaker and most importantly, practitioner in the field of personal growth. I’ve been seriously involved in it since it first began to emerge in popular American culture in the late 1960s. Along those lines, about three years ago I began to construct an educational program which I called, the Higher Mind Training.

Simply put, over the years, I have found that everybody wants to grow internally. Everyone wants to live a happier, more fulfilled life. And true personal growth, the evolution of our inner awareness, holds the key. But it seems that we each have our own individual roadblocks and currently there is so much confusing information out there. On top of that, our lives have become so busy, that the task of finding an approach that really works for us has become truly daunting. So most people don’t even consider it.

To address this need, my basic idea is to take the very best understandings and methods that I have used over my decades of research and personal experience and put them into a basic format that is simple for the everyday person to understand and easy to put into practice. Nothing special is required – just average intelligence and the simple desire to grow into a better human being.

Now, I have mentioned the basic concept of this training in some previous episodes, but in broad strokes, you can look at it as information that is drawn from sources as diverse as Ancient Wisdom, all the way up through modern neuroscience. And it turns out that modern neuroscience is actually validating the key fundamentals of Ancient Wisdom, which is a remarkable phenomenon which I have found to be extremely powerful.

Let’s take a quick look at it. So to begin, what is Ancient Wisdom? When you consider it, the answer is pretty astounding because throughout every culture in the world since the beginning of civilization, certain deeper understandings have emerged about fulfilling our purpose for living and realizing our highest human potential.

And it boils down to just a few key points. These are - as human beings, we have a greater potential than we currently understand. There is a higher state of consciousness that is available to one each of us and it can be realized through self-discovery. This will lead us to fulfilling our greater potential and the vast treasures that await us in this new state of consciousness are truly immeasurable. That’s an extremely basic introduction to it.

Now the format of storytelling has been largely the norm. And although the customs, cultures and languages have been vastly different throughout the ages, this basic message remains the same. Along with the caution that although we can spend our entire lives searching for happiness and satisfaction in the outside world, what we are really looking for is actually within us.

There’s also one other idea to consider - on the deepest, intuitive level, we all know this. And because of this intuitive understanding, at the very root of human consciousness is the built-in compulsion to grow towards it. If we don’t grow on an inner level, our life becomes an inner prison where we are trapped by our own limitations.

Now, this may seem overly simplistic, but just because something is simple, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Quite often it’s the other way around. The simplest things can be the truest.

So, that’s a very quick outline of the make-up of Ancient Wisdom and the question becomes, what do these thousands of years of wisdom have to do with modern neuroscience? Well, that’s exactly what I wanted to know when I first became aware of the unlikely relationship between the two about fifteen-years ago.

And although as I researched it, I found it to be quite startling at the time, in retrospect it makes perfect sense.

To put it in a nutshell, modern neuroscience has begun to scientifically verify the beneficial effects that are produced on us by the understandings and practices of Ancient Wisdom. Before the current modern era, we knew that practices like prayer, contemplation, and meditation seemed to produce exalted feelings that expanded our awareness. Now we know why, at least on a physiological level.

And all this really hit me, because as I’ve mentioned many times before, I’ve been exposed to many different forms of higher understandings throughout my adult life. But I’ve always been a pragmatist about it. Maybe a bit on the creative side, but a pragmatist nonetheless. Of course, I’m a big fan of wisdom, but I like the practical kind and I’m probably not alone in that. I think we all feel more secure with our feet on the ground.

Along these lines, two old practical sayings come to mind. The first one is attributed to Zen and it says this, “Before Enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After Enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.” Depending upon your perspective, I guess the meaning is self-explanatory. For me it says that no matter what may happen with your inner consciousness, the laws of three-dimensional life remain the same. The view may be different but the task remains the same. So pay attention.

Another similar saying I’ve always like is, “Feet on the ground. Head in heaven.” There are many traditions which carry similar sayings, but the message is simple. Just because you may become an enlightened soul, you still need to know your zip code.

So this fact - that the basic underlying ideas behind Ancient Wisdom continue to be verified by advanced neuroscience - served a great role in inspiring me to develop the Higher Mind Training.

And there was another element that provided further inspiration to me when, about ten years ago, I happened to watch a TED talk by Dr. George Land.

You may be aware that NASA once commissioned a study on creative genius to be applied to its work force. They were facing several serious issues and because they had a large base of top-level professionals in their work force, they wanted to see if they had any creative geniuses in their employ that they could tap into to help solve some of these critical problems.

They commissioned Dr. Land to devise and conduct the test. An astute scientist, he was one of the pioneers in the study of creative intelligence in modern America and was the founder of an internationally renowned research institute. His key principles are still used by over four hundred organizations throughout the United States.

The test he devised was extremely successful for NASA and he decided to extend it into the general public. He began by applying it to register the creativity of 1,600 children ranging in ages from three-to-five years old who were enrolled in a Head Start program. He re-tested the same children at 10 years of age, and again at 15 years of age. The results were astounding.

98% of the five-year-olds proved to be in the genius category. When he tested ten-year-olds, the percentage had dropped to 30%. At age fifteen, only 12% tested genius and by adulthood, in tests administered to 280,000 adults, only 2% were functioning on the genius level.

Dr. Land then concluded that from birth through the age of five, an astounding 98% of us were geniuses. Then, one way or another, society seems to program the genius out of us. According to him, this mass reduction in our overall intelligence began when large factories first emerged in society. We had to build factories to create workers to fill the factories and creativity was certainly not welcomed there. He said these “worker creator factories” were called “schools.”

But then Dr. Land threw another remarkable idea into the mix. According to him, we all still have that creative genius inside of us right now. It’s still there. It didn’t leave us, we left it. And according to him, we can each recover it. And not only that, we can recover it fairly quickly. It all has to do with learning how to use our imagination.

So, to sum things up, with my decades of positive experience in the study and practice of personal growth, and with the fact that modern neuroscience is proving the benefits of it beyond question, along with the findings of Dr. Land, that we were all born creative geniuses and that we can still recover our higher level of intelligence, you have the basis of my efforts in developing the Higher Mind Training over the past few years.

As you can imagine, this is just the tip of the iceberg to the story, but it’s a perfect place to end this episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open. And let’s get together in the next one.