Which one's Kate? The triumph of love over fear.

It can be a painfully distorted condition.

But at its best it’s the most powerful statement a couple can make as to their mutual faith in the power of love over fear.

I’m happy for William and Katherine, royal bride and groom.

I hope they’re able to build something of sense in the nonsense of their societal context.

And therein lies the rub.

No gifts for the gifted

I wish I could doff a union jack hat

Happy birthday, big guy! You're looking great!

and join the Royal Wedding Party.

But I can’t. It would feel like sharing a bottle of scotch with a chronic alcoholic in order to celebrate his birthday.

Typically gifted, I can’t bring myself to support destructive behavior when it is clear before me.

And the royal wedding is emblematic of the destructive nature of the English monarchy.

To try and explain

The value of the monarchy can be challenged on four grounds, of which I think the fourth is the most significant:

• Morality. It is unfair. And even if nature is unfair that’s no reason to build unfairness into human institutions.
• Absurdity. The idea that the desired qualities of a head of state can be passed on genetically is nonsensical. Just look at your children – or your neighbor’s children – to see how different they are from their parents.
• Democracy. Democracy, a delicate flower at best, can only exist within a meritocracy. Once people are granted powerful positions by right of birth, or by association with it, any hope of democracy goes out the window.
• National wellbeing. This is the reason that drives me most powerfully. It is also the one that will probably speak loudest to other gifted individuals because we tend to be highly motivated to correct those things that we see to be causing damage.

A necessary caveat

When it comes to the English royal family it’s almost impossible to separate the people from the posts.

Calls to end the monarchy are often greeted with responses such as: “But the Queen’s a wonderful woman and does an impossible job incredibly well.”

Indeed she is and does. But it’s not a job that she should be required to do. Or her offspring.

It’s hard to look desperate when you’ve two palaces and a couple of castles to run and hide in. But the reality is that the royal family is locked into an impossible (as in non reality-based) situation by determinants way beyond its control.

And the collective English public responds in a classically co-dependent way to take care of them.

Let Wikipedia explain:

Trapped into a fiction. The ever-smiling Windsors in the co-dependent zoo.

Wikipedia includes, as part of its definition of co-dependence: “It [codependency] also often involves putting one’s needs at a lower priority than others while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others.”

The English public demeans its own needs by embracing a form of social structure in which inherited wealth and, in particular, inherited titles are recognized as being of higher social standing than real-life achievements.

This is anathema to the gifted. And, I believe, poison to all the healthy.

Bowing and scraping

The English routinely put their own healthy needs aside to maintain the fiction of the superiority of the royal family.

Gender confusion? More bow than curtsey but still the achiever deferring to the inheritor.

At royal events, powerful achievers from many domains demean themselves as they bow or curtsey to a royal person who has done nothing to earn his or her position.

The goal of a knighthood or some other royal-bestowed honor is a singular focus for legions of politicians, business-people, and even entertainers.

And this means that their behavior and their methods are constrained because in the end their actions can’t be allowed to threaten the possibility of the desired  outcome.

What a neurotic and codependent way to force conformity.

What a brilliant way to ensure that nobody of real excellence or creativity will ever get close to power.

And yes, that includes you and me, fellow gifteds.

A new king at (tennis) court

People have a lot of difficulty with the idea that the monarchy is so destructive.

So here’s an analogy to try to explain how fundamental the problem is: how it ultimately distorts the psyche of every cogniscent being.

Imagine this:

Rafael Nadal wins the men’s tennis championship at Wimbledon. As he lifts the cup over his head he proclaims:

King Rafael I. By Divine Right, with all his successors, Eternal Champion of Wimbledon and all other tennis venues.

“From now on, this cup will be won each year by me or one of my children and by one of their children thereafter down through the generations.”

The spectators cheer.

The officials nod their approval.

King Rafa is born.

And from now on into eternity the rules of the game and the reporting of the game will have to be constantly amended to keep up the appearance that King Rafael and his offspring are indeed the best fitted to be the crowned heads of Wimbledon.

• Better players will have to be persuaded to take second place or take up another game.
• Promoters will constantly have to present the Nadals as the highest tennis family in the world.
• Legions of amateur players must be taught to start seeing themselves as subjects of the tennis monarch, a personage whose athletic supremacy cannot be questioned even if s/he’s in a wheel chair.
• Millions of people must distort their thinking and build aberrations into their inner psychological architecture so as to accommodate the tennis fiction.

This is exactly what’s happened in the English game called “Head of State.”

Its ramifications are destructive from the highest family in the land to the lowest (to borrow a royal designator).

Also, though it may not seem relevant, this perverse structure threatens the integrity of everyone in the world.

Humans cannot tolerate an unlimited number of logical inconsistencies and, let’s face it, the English queen is pretty much queen for the world.

Create your context

As with all things gifted, we must develop strategies in order to remain unaffected by this massive daily absurdity.

To protect yourself, first recognize that you didn’t create this situation and that there is something you can do about changing it: http://www.republic.org.uk/

Change won’t happen fast but it’s very relieving to make a healthy assertion in the face of a suffocating national neurosis.

Then recognize that you are unique and that if you adopted the same labelling system as the royal family your uniqueness would be as obvious in your name as it is in theirs.

Not just Tom, Dick or Harry but Thomas I, Richard III and Henry VIII. One only of each.

Selling your birth . . . right

The Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha family – or the Windsors, to use their alias -  have done a brilliant job of selling their birth up, making it into a luxury brand that supersedes all others.

Each one a bold and unique work of art. Keith Tyson's "Large Field Array"

And you can do the same. Make of your giftedness a golden crown of specialness. Be grateful for it and humble in your accepting of it. Noblesse oblige.

Too often we gifted individuals suffer so much that we become angry and resentful (Moi? Surely not!).

Instead, we can try to be gracious, recognizing that we have been given much.

Don’t let the sheer size of the world’s population defeat you. Instead of seeing yourself as lost in a crowd, or a loner outside the crowd, imagine yourself as a unique object in a collection of unique objects: an original artwork of the MaPa school.

And wait, there’s more . . .

Do the other things the royal family does.

• Epithet yourself. To differentiate yourself is to take power. I’ll be Christopher the Gifted, worthy successor to Ethelred the Unready or William the Conqueror. And happy counterpoint to dreary Edward the Confessor. When you pick your own designator make sure it feels just a litle bit ostentatious or surprising. Ivar the Boneless might not sound too terrifying (except in a Stephen King kind of way) but he was a potent Viking whom we still remember.
• Point to the Divine Right of the Gifted. This is your source of power. Put simply, it means you recognise that you are a child of the universe and it is to the universe that you owe your accountability. And no-one else.
• Publicize yourself and your message. Put: “By the grace of the universe, Gifted and Defender of the Truth” on your metaphorical coinage.
• Have a Gifted Wedding. Learn to appease the multitude – or your immediate family – with flags and geegaws while you get on with the serious business of consolidating your power.

You will not perpetuate codependency by doing these things. Unlike the poor old royal family, you have fundamental truth on your side. Truth – as in natural law – must ultimately prevail. Even when we don’t know what it is.

A toast to the happy couple

And so a toast, to send them on their way:

"I wish I'd been less of a gent, more of a Robespierre. For the good of the country, of course."

“Good luck to you both.

“May you have a long and happy marriage.

“And I hope you, William, will never be king and you, Kate, will never be queen.

“I hope you’re freed to head off and enjoy the billions you’ll inherit without fear of paparazzi or having to live within the constricting shell of a forced persona.

“If this happy state of affairs should come about, please recognize the debt you owe to the gifted who’ve been pushing for it for centuries. John Ball; Oliver Cromwell; Thomas Paine and all the rest.

“Set up an Institute to Promote the Interests of the Gifted.

“And I’ll forego the Baronetcy.

“Ciao!”

cjc

"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.

“The Gifted Way” covers the same kinds of topics as “Dynamic Living”, but in a more spontaneous and light-hearted way. I suppose it’s actually more dynamic.

Too stuck to change, so with sorrow I say: "Goodbye, not-so-Dynamic Living™"

Many of you discovered that the effort of creating a new ezine each month eventually proved too demanding a task for this sole practitioner.

I’ve now adopted a more sustainable format – the blog – and tested it for a couple of months to be sure I can maintain it. I don’t want to let you down again.

I hope you’ll take a look at it, scan some of the posts from months past, and decide to stay with it. I’m also adding the archive of “Dynamic Living” articles.

What to do next

If you wish to continue to receive notifications of new posts to “The Gifted Way” you need do nothing. They will come to you automatically.

If you wish to stop your notifications, click on the “Get email alerts” link at the top of this page, enter the email address you’re ‘alerted’ under, and click on “Unsubscribe”. That applies if you have a duplicate email address, too.

If you wish to change your email alert address I regret to say that you’ll have to first unsubscribe and then resubscribe with your new email address. Clumsy but effective. Go to the same “Get email alerts” link at the top of the page.

Interactive communication

I’d like to acknowledge the fact that this path of adopting an interactive blog format was first suggested to me several years ago by Toronto-based creativity coach (and much else beside) Carol McBride.

I looked into the idea but I couldn’t see how to go about it. The technology was too challenging, making it difficult to create a visually-appealing blog.

Also, my decades of working in many forms of the printed word had left me with an internalized communications structure that didn’t transpose easily into the less formal blog structure. And I wasn’t dynamic enough to adapt.

Three things have happened since then:

• The technology has radically improved, making the whole process much simpler to implement.
• 

  Casting bread on the waters for the gathering ugly ducklings

  I’ve learnt to let go and trust the universe rather than feeling I had to produce something of a certain length, in a certain way, at a certain time so as to please those critical creatures that on some level I thought “my readers” to be.

• Like Ecclesiastes, I’ve discovered that casting our bread on the waters really does work. Honorable efforts elicit honorable responses. And “my readers” are actually “my collaborators” in our efforts to improve our lives for ourselves and others.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new format and that you’ll pass the word around. To tell your friends about it, click on the: “Tell Your Friends” link [duh!] at the top of every page and send them a link.

And please feel free to comment on the posts. It makes the process more interactive and increases the value for everyone.

A triumph of collaboration: pork tenderloin with chocolate beef cream broth.

That means that once again these are much longer than typical posts and cover these topics:

• Prorexia: a cure for a jaded appetite for life.
• How to maintain your autonomy in a collaborative partnership.
• How effective a collaborator are you?

The articles on collaboration have a link to a PDF containing the test forms described in “How effective a collaborator are you?”. You can download the PDF and copy it as many times as you like, using it to test your friends, family and work colleagues.

You’ll find the new articles by clicking here or on the “Dynamic Living Archive” tag at the head of the page.

I hope you find them tasty and easily digestible.

These articles tend to be much longer than typical posts and cover these topics:

The compelling power of "Dynamic Living" as portrayed by John Singer Sargent.

• What is Dynamic Living?
• Issues for Gifted Adults (By D. Lovecky Ph.D.)
• Profiting from your own intelligence system.
• Is there such a thing as a Geographical Cure?
• Love: a practical understanding, and
• Love yourself and grow powerful.

You’ll find them by clicking here or on the “Dynamic Living Archive” tag at the head of the page.

Happy reading!

Poetry in motion: universal truth.

The extraordinary beauty of his movement as he went into top speed was breathtaking. Keats might not have been there to see it but this is surely what he meant when he wrote:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

An active manifestation of truth; a physical manifestation of universal life force, or love.

———————————————-

I’m sorry they wouldn’t let me embed the video here, but if you haven’t seen the run it’s worth clicking on the link and letting it take you to YouTube.

Click here to view the embedded video.