Could it be that giftedeness needs another dimension to free its joy?

We are intense. We are obsessive. Our work ethic can make us dismissive of others.

Especially others whose casual ease with luxury can seem a moral insult.

Yet by denying ourselves the same ease we also deny ourselves some access to love and perhaps to the full extent of our potential.

How? I suspect that to achieve the profound connection and love we deserve, we must learn to embrace luxury. To indulge ourselves. To seek ease, comfort, and the benefits of riches.

Open to everything – including love

I am so conditioned into believing that personal denial is the only path to truth that it was almost impossible for me to write: “benefits of riches”.

But I don’t trust the message of my own conditioning. It doesn’t ring true.

So I’m going to suggest that every gifted person needs to discover the benefits of luxury.

And hopefully I’ll convince myself at the same time . . .

Excess is essential

Here’s a bit of autobiography. It helps explain my early conditioning around luxury. It may have echoes for you, even if in different ways at different times.

I was born in the UK, just after WWII when shortages were at their peak.

Not a label from a jail uniform but approved Civilian Clothing 1941

The world I entered was marked by rationing, the utility label and – more importantly – the moral ethos such things evoked.

It was definitely ‘good’ to do without and to make the most of what you had. Every self-sacrifice benefited society and honored those who had died or been wounded.

It was therefore definitely ‘bad’ to be self-indulgent. Especially when so many of the wealthy were identified as having profited from the deaths and the shortages of war.

There is a corollary today in the thousands of lives that have been ruined by the actions of the banks and the governments that support them.

Moral puff-ball

I find it almost impossible not to be self-righteous about all this.

"If it weren't for my moral superiority you'd think I was just a silly bird."

The puffed-up moral judge inside me declares: “THEY did it. THEY are the evil men.” and points to the generals, the politicians, the bankers, the black marketeers. Or to the women who proudly set them on their ‘evil’ paths.

All the people who apparently profit from the suffering inherent in vast human tragedies.

But the reality is so much harder to accept: that death and suffering from war and depression are caused by ignorance, by fear, by the ubiquitous limitations of human nature.

And we’re all in that soup together.

So there are no evil people. Or good ones. There are just people.

Despite my knee-jerk need to deny it, luxury is not a moral issue but an interesting behavioral phenomenon. And the fact that it exists suggests to me that we need it.

Giftedness is all about being excessive

Luxury and giftedness have one thing very much in common. They both appear excessive to the mainstream of society.

• Gifted individuals push whatever they are doing to the limit.
• They don’t see the point of just going for a run: their exercise has to fit into a planned training program.
• They can’t just stand at a party discussing bling. They have to be recruiting for their campaign to save something that others haven’t even noticed yet.
• They can’t just buy something – it has to be the right thing. They have little tolerance for a half-measure solution, knowing that it will just irritate on a daily basis. They’d rather go without.

A quick scan of my etymological dictionary tells me that luxury has its root in luxuria, meaning excess.

"You bad, bad tree! Won't you ever learn enough is enough?"

And that’s certainly the sense in which ‘luxury’ is usually used.

It basically implies something more than is needed.

But I ask: says whom? Who is the great assessor of who needs what?

I haven’t bothered to check but I wouldn’t mind betting that the first people to ‘discover’ that you’d be better off poor were the religious leaders.

“They say: “Send your money to the Lord”/ But they give you their address.” as Hank Williams Jnr sang so profoundly.

And it’s a rich tradition to try to buy your way into Heaven. Or at least to hedge your bets by sending a donation to the Pope or some similar after-life insurance broker.

Who needs things?

The close alignment between fear and wealth has been explicitly recognized at least since the Buddha took to the road.

Yet the trappings of the wealthy – and sometimes their means of acquiring wealth – can leave them outside the circle of sympathy that we readily apply to the less materially fortunate.

“What’s s/he got to worry about?” we ask. And: “We’re all miserable but at least s/he’s rich.”

As if it made any difference.

Pain is pain. Fear is fear. Death is the end.

And they all bypass the means test.

"Come on Chanel! At $261,000 you ought to include the pooch."

So if you need to carry a pedigree puppy in a £6,000.00 handbag in order to stave off the terrors, that’s fine by me.

And if you, you gifted ascetic, need to wear a wealth-rejecting hair shirt to stave off your own terrors that’s fine, too.

But I think there’s a better solution for both:

Embrace luxury, discover love.

Trust replaces hurt

The rich person – especially the inheritor of wealth – has a hard time learning to trust love.

It’s not just that s/he attracts gold-diggers. It’s because the daily privileging of external objects over internal ones leaves him or her untrained in matters of emotion.

The gifted person – especially the one whose sensitivity and idealism have led them into many painful encounters – also has a hard time learning to trust love.

Gifted individuals have a set of expectations – logical enough in their way – that the objects of their love rarely reciprocate.

And the gifted also mistrust their own attraction to wealth because they are so unfamiliar with managing its seductions.

After all, you fear, if you were really really rich, just think of all those books you’d buy. Far more than you could ever read. Just like those hundreds of pairs of shoes that Trust-fund Trudy will never wear.

Barricades against the banshees

So where am I going with all this? To this:

Whether gifted with wealth or giftedness, start seeing luxury not as something shameful and excessive but as a natural outcropping of a particular natural climate.

Zug's climate and gold ethos make it the rain-forest for billionaires.

Luxuriant growth is simply profuse growth, whether we’re talking rain-forest shrubs or Zug billionaires.

Gifted people are all about profuse growth – of knowledge, of talent, of human understanding, and even, sometimes, of material wealth.

The ‘particular natural climate’ that promotes profuse vegetation growth tends to be a bit extreme and excessive when measured against climatic norms.

And the ‘particular natural climate’ that promotes the growth of gifted humans is a complex mix in which we, as individuals, play only a small part.

So trust your luxurious urges. They’re totally natural.

Surrender to your desires

Virgil, an acute observer of human nature, wrote:

“Trahit sua quemque voluptas.” Broadly, “Everyone is drawn on by their own longing.”

So if you wish to be drawn on, to develop your potential to the utmost, you most open yourself to your longing.

This means ALL your longing(s). Not just the bits you regard as morally superior.

Trust the process

It’s safer than you might think.

If your heart be reasonably pure your longings will be reasonably constructive, even if they come under the heading of ‘wicked indulgence’ in your internalized Book of Judgments.

Also, the outcome of allowing your longings will be reasonably constructive even if, at the outset, you have no idea that there will even be an outcome.

Look:

Archimedes took a bath and discovered what made us float.

"Eureka" indeed. Afloat, of course.

I don’t know whether the bath was a luxurious jacuzzi but it might well have been. Without that indulgence we’d have no “Eureka!” moments – and ships might sink.

Robert Louis Stevenson neglected the family orange plantation while he sat under a tree and imagined – “Treasure Island”.

Isaac Newton did the same in an apple orchard and came up with gravity. (Or should that be down?)

Christian Dior said “Poof!” to post-war fabric restrictions and came up with the New Look and a whole new industry and art form.

Not just material luxury

I want to urge you (and me) to seize your excess and see what comes of it.

"I've embraced luxury, but I'm still taking the 'bus."

There are many who find it hard to permit themselves to indulge their material fantasies while there are so many in the world living below the poverty level.

There’s probably no connection between the two things but guilt isn’t rational.

First, therefore, seek to negate that irrational guilt.

If that fails, look to indulge yourself in forms of luxury that don’t trigger guilt. For example:

• Give yourself some time.
• Take in that exhibit that you glimpse as you hurry past on your way to work every morning.
• Give yourself the effort to find a parking place so you can take a walk in the park.
• Take two minutes longer in the shower so you can really reward yourself for your efforts in the gym.
• Pay a bit more for that shirt or top so its feel and fabric will remind you every time you wear it what a special person you are – and what a joy it can be to be simply human.

And on the subject of clothes, cut those scratchy labels out. Their cheapness and nastiness only serves as an uncomfortable reminder that you could be the unwitting beneficiary of some sweatshop in China.

• Open yourself to luxury because luxury begets creativity.

Even fierce Ludwig could see it:

“Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.”

Surely, if indulgence was good enough for Beethoven it must be justifiable and valuable for the rest of us?

And finally . . .

Despite all the above, do you still think Lack is Virtue?

The enduring interdependence of luxury and art: the Queen's collection

If so, don’t be hard on yourself. There is such a long tradition of the virtues of asceticism that we can be forgiven for believing ourselves to be better off by being worse off.

By denying ourselves the rewards of luxury, the thinking goes, we are contributing to the forces of truth and probably helping to save the planet at the same time.

But . . . no wealthy, indulgent patron means no truth, no art.

Just ask Michaelangelo da Vinci.

You never heard of him?

Precisely!

Now I’m off to indulge myself, repeating:

• Luxury is nutritious; luxury is good;
• Luxury is natural; luxury is good;
• Luxury is fruitful; luxury is good;
• Luxury is gifted’s twin; luxury is good.

Luxuriate!

"After thirty years I can resist my conscience no longer."

The man had long labored under an injustice. For thirty years he’d been held responsible for an act of destruction that had actually resulted from an accidental oversight of his sister’s.

Now the fault was to be remedied . . .

“It was thirty years ago,” he said. “Surely you can tell Mom the truth now?”

“All right,” said the sister, turning to confess to the mother: “It wasn’t him,” she said, “it was me. I let it happen.”

The man felt a wave of relief wash through him. At last the truth was out.

Until: “Oh no it wasn’t, darling,” said the mother briskly, “you’d never do anything like that.”

Both brother and sister were left staring at each other, mouths agape.

For love of the truth

Gifted individuals love the truth.

In the terms of the last post – Essential nutrients for the gifted – the truth supplies essential nutrients to one’s intellectual environment. It is therefore a primary motivator for each of us, gifted or not.

There is a place for the truth. But can you pay the price?

However, the gifted are more demanding than average so their passion for the truth – their profound need for the truth – is likely to lead them further down arcane paths than the average person.

It also leads them into acting on the truth – walking their talk – to a greater extent than less-gifted others.

The result of this quest – this compulsive exploration – is where originality, creativity and exceptional results of all kinds spring from.

It is also the path of isolation and loneliness and even possible death. The truth can force us into a community of one – and a hated community at that. Just ask Galileo.

The absolute truth is . . .

Scientists such as Galileo make their observations and report them. But they acknowledge that their current understanding is just that: a snapshot of what things seem to be at the moment.

"Don't look so taken aback, Galileo! We've told you before: the truth is no defense."

There is no way to prove that today’s observations will be the same tomorrow. So all our scientific ‘facts’ are really working assumptions. They are assumptions sometimes supported by a lot of evidence but they are assumptions nevertheless.

Some people use this to argue there’s no such thing as absolute truth, or that everyone’s truth is different. I can’t prove it, but it seems to me there has to be an absolute truth, just as there has to be an absolute set of laws that define the universe.

However, the existence of such absolutes doesn’t mean we know them or can even discover them.

In the absence of knowing such absolutes it seems that we pursue the most convincing working assumptions and refer to them as ‘the truth’.

What about truth-blindness?

The mother in the opening story of this post found it necessary to dismiss the truth even though it was agreed by the only two people present at the original event. What would make her do that, especially if the quest for truth is such a powerful human motivator?

The answer is that she had a huge investment in maintaining the original myth.

To her, women are incapable of doing damage. So to accept that her daughter caused the accident would be to open the door to the possibility that, as a female, she might also have caused accidents.

Her sense of identity was massively dependent on a belief in her own perfection and so such an admission was impossible. Ergo: the original event didn’t happen the way her children said it did.

A rule of thumb, therefore, might be:

We act from truth to the point where the consequences threaten unconsciously held false assumptions that we believe our lives depend on.

Community of fiction

As gifted individuals we may feel with some justification that our ability to live by the truth is greater than average. However, we must be aware that the same constraints apply to us as to everyone else: in humans, psychospiritual needs will always prevail over our truth needs.

The evidence for this is everywhere.

Can you spot the sheep?

To take an obvious example, billions of people hold religious beliefs that are scientifically untenable. Because?

Because belonging to an organized religion meets a whole stack of needs relating to meaning, to community, to easing anxiety about death, to providing a set of moral beliefs, and so on.

On a deep personal level, such beliefs are about identity and a sense of security. For many, being one of the crowd is an essential part of survival. It doesn’t make sense to allow their life-prolonging affiliations to be threatened by the truth. In the animal world, that’s why there are so many cattle in the herd and just a handful of mavericks.

Of course, many of the gifted see such affiliations not as life-prolonging but as life-threatening. They don’t want to be in thrall to those whom they perceive as less competent than themselves. So as far as possible they go their own way.

A huge risk for the gifted

The root of this separatist drive is a wonderful source of joy and excitement for the gifted. It embodies the sense of autonomy and power that feels like a transcendent life in itself.

"Being gifted, I see things more accurately than anyone else - er - I think."

Yet therein lies the risk. That glorious gifted intelligence and awareness may feel transcendent but it is just as constrained by our psychospiritual limitations as anyone else’s. It’s just that we get further with it before being caught.

This is because the intellect – the digestive system for truth nutrients – is always in the service of deeper forces and drives. As writers such as Antonio Damosio and Jonah Lehrer have made clear to us, we are not rational animals but rationalizing ones. We ignore this at our peril.

Some would argue that the gifted are actually more vulnerable than most because their emotional development is so often in arrears of their intellectual growth. Ironically, the competence of the gifted means they can go a very long way before they discover they’re on their own. And that it hurts.

Also, the gifted powers of intelligence, imagination and originality work as powerfully in creating delusion as they do in opening up the truth. No-one is as dynamically dumb as the genius who unconsciously dedicates his intellect to self-delusion.

Avoiding the quicksand of delusion

Given that the process is unconscious, there’s not much we can do to protect ourselves. However, we can identify the quicksands where we most need to be on guard.

These are the life domains where we are almost certain to delude ourselves.  Here our deep inner processes will drive us to see what they want us to see rather than permit us the clarity of vision and insight we might have when watching someone else. We must beware around:

• Ourselves
• Our parents
• Our children
• Our siblings and their extended families
• Our spouses
• Our friends
• Our work colleagues
• Our finances
• Our physical condition

We constantly delude ourselves around these relationships and concerns. We  have been conditioned at such a deep level it is near-impossible to access our relevant false assumptions.

It therefore makes sense to sharpen our judgment by gaining objectivity with outside help if serious issues arise in these areas.

You are remarkable

As a gifted individual you are truly remarkable.

"The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." Albert Einstein

You have a remarkable ability to tolerate the adrenalin jolt of new reality.

You are much further along the truth path than your neighbor will ever be because you have learned that you would rather take the truth-hit, fall down, reconstruct yourself and then move on.

You are in a very small percentage of the population.

But even you have your limits.

As you go about your business of life, observing, assessing, responding, please dilute the elixir of your perceived truth with the words of the bumper sticker:

“Don’t believe everything you think.”

Or everything your very convincing gifted friend thinks, either.

And maybe you won’t be fooled again.