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What we see…Part Two, Perspective

21 Nov

 

 

Kids tend to enjoy optical illusions. And many gifted kids are struggling these days, like us, with images of the state of the world we are offered most often in our so constantly connected digital world. We may use illusions to help them (and ourselves) see things in a different way.

The image above on first look seems to be a two dimensional (flat) image of many pink roses. But for most people that is not the only way to see it because it is a stereogram, a computer-generated image made popular in the ‘90’s by Magic Eye books. For those with good binocular vision it’s possible to shift one’s focus to create a three dimensional image of a heart, that stands well “in front of” a background of roses. Both technology and my own eyes can change what I perceive.

Caveat:  Those with astigmatism, or some other vision problem that affects the way their eyes work together won’t be able to see the heart at all—the image remains stubbornly one of roses. So if you can’t manage it don’t keep trying till your eyes are tired. Below are other optical illusions that work other ways.

On the left you may see either a white goblet or two profiles in black of human faces–or even both at once. On the right you can “choose to see” an old woman with dark bangs, a large nose and a sharp chin, wearing a babushka and a fur coat, or an elegant young woman with up-swept hair, a fur coat and a choker necklace, looking away. Some find it easier to see one, some the other.

All three of these images are reminders that one “picture” can offer at least two interpretations, equally real, but quite different.

And then there’s the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, where touching only one part of the elephant gives each man a totally different “vision” of what he is touching. Is it a snake or a rug or a spear, a tree or a wall or a rope?Okay, so the point here is that the idea that what you see is what you get, while very often experientially and psychologically true, is far more complex than it seems.

Consider a photographer who wishes to capture a landscape scene that includes a vast plain and a jagged mountain. Where she chooses to stand creates the perspective of the photograph. Is she out on the plain, looking across and up at the peak? Is she on the peak, looking down its rocky sides to the plain below? The camera captures the image before it, regardless of the location she has chosen. The other tool the photographer has is the lens. If she changes lenses, the image the camera captures changes.

But our eyes are not the same as a camera. They’re connected to our minds. And our minds are at work all the time. It isn’t just that looking at something from one physical location gives you that location’s perspective and another location gives you another. Our minds are actually always creating both the “location” itself– the mental place we’re standing–and also the focus.

I have a Face Book page called StoryHealer, where on most days I post a quotation with an image I’ve chosen to go with the words. I am always looking for positive, uplifting quotations, because the world we live in right now is full of horror stories, fear stories, hostility, anger, threat or despair. Those stories that saturate our consciousness are busy, whether we realize it or not, whether we want them to or not, creating mental/emotional locations from which it’s difficult to see anything else. From those locations and with that focus, it can become genuinely difficult to find and capture images of joy, of love, of gratitude or even of hope.

What I try to offer to those folks who find or have “liked” the page, is a different location, a different focus, from which to see the world, even for a moment. Or possibly to remind them that there is a different perspective available always.

We can do this with our kids and help them see that perspective also comes from inside us, and that we are able to do the choosing. If we are looking through a lens of our own hostility, how will we notice kindness? If we are standing on the rock of our own sense of victim-hood, how likely are we to see compassion? Or from a platform of absolute rightness, a totally different and valid-to-the-perceiver point of view?

It can be challenging to change perspective, or even to notice how where we’re standing affects what we see. And to realize that where someone else is standing inevitably gives a different view. If we can find a way of looking that connects us to the vast landscape of human caring, helping, loving, compassion and kindness that is part of our species’ nature the world may not seem quite so dark, nor other humans quite so threatening. We don’t have to “look away” or “become blind to” the dark side of human experience. Nor do we have to accept the other person’s perspective. We can, however, choose to acknowledge the difficulties all others face, and attempt to look with kindness, with compassion, with forgiveness at the larger picture. And then, to do our best to be, in our actual closeup daily experiences, as kind and compassionate as possible so we won’t find ourselves adding to the darkness the larger landscape always includes.

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What we see… (Part I)

14 Oct


Imagine that you live in a house with a window that looks out on the view above. I suspect, whether you would prefer oceans or mountains or woods or city scape, most of you would think this view is a pretty good one. Beautiful, in fact. As you look at it, what do you notice? The mountains in the background? The pond? The trees and expanse of green? The sunset glow? How might it make you feel to be sitting in your own house looking out at that view? Would you enjoy and take comfort from such a view?

Now let us consider some of the aspects of that landscape that might not be apparent from this window. Might there be deadly-disease-carrying mosquitoes around the pond? Ticks in the grass? Poisonous mushrooms growing under those trees? Hornets nests? Snakes? Wolves or coyotes or bears that could attack if you went out, or gobble up one of your pets? Maybe a fast-moving storm with lightning that would start a wildfire in the woods? Are any of these things likely to come immediately to mind on looking out this window?

 

If you were to say yes, those are exactly the sorts of thoughts such a view would engender, I might advise you to start looking for a good therapist. It’s true that any of those things might be in the world outside that window, in fact some of them almost certainly are, but to perceive mostly threats in a view of such calm and beauty would suggest an unhealthy level of paranoia.

Now think about the other kinds of windows in our world:  television, email, Face Book and Twitter feeds, cell phones, or even, here or there a newspaper. And think about the view they show us of the world just outside, or maybe beyond (or even very, very far beyond) our immediate surroundings. There is so much focus on the threats, whether there is anything we can do about them or not, that it’s difficult to see anything else. Statistics show levels of anxiety and depression skyrocketing in many or most of what are called “the developed” countries. If every time you looked at the scene above you could see only images of ticks and predators and wildfires, why wouldn’t you be anxious and depressed?

Some years ago I gave a talk about “Good News” at NAGC. Back then it was possible, with some persistent searching, to find compilations of positive stories from around the world, in spite of the “if it bleeds it leads” pattern of news programming. One major network in the United States (I believe it was ABC then) had newly decided to end each half hour national news program with one short positive story. Others now have taken up that policy. Most of these short positive stories actually take fewer minutes from the allotted broadcast time than a single commercial break, while before that final story, almost every other segment tells of catastrophe, violence, political struggle, warfare, medical threat, injustice, accident, mass shooting, storms, earthquakes, or other horrors. And now “the news” provided by our media, isn’t only half an hour in the evening; it’s 24/7 and very difficult to avoid.

Parents who attempt to limit their children’s exposure to this kind of news coverage are fighting a losing battle once the kids start school or get their own phones. And the brighter kids are the earlier they begin to take an interest in what goes on outside their own homes or neighborhoods. It isn’t that this is an entirely new phenomenon. When our older boys were kids, one of them came into the living room one night when we happened to be watching an old war movie. He started to tell us something and then said, “Never mind, I can tell you after the news is over.” During his whole lifetime the evening news had devoted much of its air time to the war in Vietnam.

But now it is next to impossible to escape being deluged with the worst of human experience, no matter where it is happening in the world. I remember when parents were advised to tell their children, when there was shocking news from the other side of the world, “Don’t worry, it isn’t happening here.” And I pointed out to parents then that gifted kids know that much of this isn’t happening here, but it isn’t themselves and their own families they are worried about. They worry about kids wherever they may be threatened, even on the other side of the world. And they worry about the apparent depravity of the human species, especially when that is very nearly all they “see” out the technological windows on the world.

And of course, now, they hear about every school shooting and instead of the “duck and cover” nonsense method my generation was given in school to protect ourselves from a nuclear bomb, they are given “active shooter” drills from kindergarten on. In addition, along with Greta Thunberg, they worry about the fate of the planet they are going to inherit. “Will there still be a world for me to grow up in?” many of them are asking. And it can be especially scary when they see that much of our culture goes on as if none of this were happening.

If “what you see is what you get,” we need to consider not just what we see, but how we look. It is possible to focus more attention on what is going right. We can begin the effort to see beauty and caring and the willingness to help.

Instead of focusing on how much school violence there has been, we could, for instance, use the resources of the internet to estimate how many schools there are in this country and consider how many kids, therefore, have not faced gun violence in their schools. It doesn’t diminish the tragedy of what has happened, of course, or the need for positive change—it just helps change our perspective. We’re told it is foolish to say “It can’t happen here,” but it’s also foolish to allow every child to set out for school expecting that at any moment it may happen here,

Both parents and schools can make a constant, serious, and determined effort to find and report to our kids (and show them how to go looking for) stories of the massive efforts on the part of real humans to counteract the threats that exist in the world. Focus whenever and wherever possible on the other aspects of the view through our windows. There are organizations formed to work on most of the problems we face. As Mr. Rogers’s mother told him, watch the helpers. For every story of catastrophe there are more stories (though not always as easy to find) of individuals, organizations, often massive nationwide efforts to help. Encourage kids to find ways they, too, can get involved.

Studies were done back during the Cold War when the threat of a Russian nuclear first strike made the possibility of nuclear winter and human extinction seemed very, very real, that showed children whose parents had themselves become involved in organizations working for peace were less likely to be afraid than children whose parents only watched the news and talked about it. Any actual action, no matter how small, gave their children a sense of hope and possibility. Often, now, it is kids who are pushing the adults to do something! We need to encourage that and join them when we can.

How we choose to look has a great deal to do with what we see, of course. It is not denial to change our focus to find the best in humanity, and more often than not turn off the news that focuses on the worst.

Part II of this post will come soon…

P.S. New addition: Here is one of the “good news” sources: https://www.findhorn.org/programmes/an-introduction-to-project-drawdown/

 

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Knowledge, Belief and Experience

16 Jul
creativity

An “image” for consciousness?

On April 13th 2018 I wrote a post here titled “Deep and Deeper,” after speaking at the annual Seminar for IEA’s Caroline D. Bradley Scholarship students. The theme of that year’s seminar was Intersections. In that post I wrote: “…the new depths that interest me may not appeal to everyone. The title of my CDB workshop [ “From Indra’s Net to the Internet: Intersections, Reality and Consciousness.”] refers to both the mystical image of Indra’s net and the material world reality of the internet, two very different ways of perceiving intersections, the connectedness of all things. What I will be doing here in future is exploring both kinds of “deep.”

That’s what I’m doing again today. During the first week of July I had the honor and privilege of giving several presentations at PGR, the multi-day Colorado retreat for families of profoundly gifted kids. It was held at Glen Eyrie Castle, a conference center adjacent to Garden of the Gods, National Natural Landmark in Colorado Springs.

My two main presentations at PGR this month were focused on “both kinds of deep.” The first, Intelligence: Intellect and Intuition dealt with intellect as the fairly standard definition of intelligence and went deeper into the mostly (or at least often) overlooked but vastly important intuitive aspect. The other, Science and Consciousness, focused on two subjects that have long both interested and frustrated me. The frustration comes from the difficulty many scientists have finding a way to account for the relationship between these two. Science (materialist science) as a discipline is a creation of the human mind, yet consciousness—or mind itself—remains one of its greatest puzzles—the “hard problem” as it is often called. It is a hard problem because mind is manifestly immaterial. And that leaves materialist scientists with the curiously unsatisfying explanation that mind is a more or less “accidental” byproduct of the chemical and electrical functions of the brain. (But mind—of course—is what got me into the whole realm of the highly gifted in the first place!)

It is clear that mind and brain are intimately connected. Obviously, when the brain is damaged or malfunctions, or hasn’t fully formed during development, or is altered by drugs or chemicals, the individual’s mind does not function normally. But to assume that because of the need for a working brain to allow an individual to exhibit normal mental processing means that the brain is somehow manufacturing that mind is a bit like assuming that a working physical computer manufactures the messages in your email account or on your social networking sites. True that the brain is a living system while a computer is a mechanical/electronic one, but one still needs a way to account for the origins of the information that living system processes.

Actually, if one looks for scientific evidence that the brain does not create consciousness (awareness, thoughts, ideas, dreams, fantasies) it isn’t impossible to find. One does, of course, have to actually go looking for it. As Eben Alexander, the neurosurgeon whose brain was devastated by a raging infection that put him in a deep coma (from which no medical experts expected him to awake at all, let alone without severe neurological impairment), writes, he had dismissed the idea that mind could exist without a functioning brain because—without investigating—he had, as a medical doctor, “known” that it couldn’t be true. The idea that his own consciousness could experience and then later remember those experiences he had while the machines in his hospital room were showing his neocortex essentially nonfunctional–“offline”–went against all his medical training, training that he would have called “truth” rather than “belief.” His experience, however, annihilated his previous belief system. Once he began to research new science he had never known existed, he discovered that his previous certainties about the relationship between mind and brain were part of a scientific belief system so pervasive that relatively few doctors question it.

Perhaps because I’m a writer highly dependent on imagination (an aspect of mind that’s also difficult to define scientifically), I know that it’s possible to create with words entire worlds and characters that a reader can “feel” as she reads to be somehow real, though made entirely of thought that can be shared by many other minds. So I have an overwhelming respect for human consciousness that includes both thought and imagination. And in a way, the fact that a person’s belief system can be so strong that it can dismiss any amount of external or written evidence that contradicts it, gives us a clue to the power of mind not just to gain new information, but also to reject it utterly. We writers have to pay attention to the need for our readers to sometimes “suspend disbelief” in order to stay with our story. And that can be tricky sometimes. “Seeing is believing” is a common saying. “Believing is seeing” is probably more accurate.

One doesn’t have to look far to find advocates of materialist science’s worldview who reject Dr. Alexander’s new view created by his own experience. But that experience has changed not only his way of life, but his whole definition of reality. Since his book was published many people have shared with him the way their own life experiences have shattered their old beliefs but have opened their own conscious awareness to more possibilities than they could ever have imagined, let alone believed. The world turns out to be full of people whose experiences, though unique to them, offer corroboration of his own.

Several PG teens who attended my talk about consciousness were, let’s say, “highly resistant” to its content. For a time I entertained their questions and objections to what I was presenting, but I had considerable information about the growing “science of consciousness,” that I had come to share with the people who had come to my session at least willing to consider it. I pointed out that I didn’t expect everyone to believe everything I was saying—my own ideas about these complex and challenging issues are based not only on my considerable readings in the field of consciousness, but also on my own lived experience.

After a while I had to give the kids the choice to stay in the session and listen, or to leave. Some left, some stayed. I don’t write about it here to criticize their behavior. They were super bright teens with their own strong belief in the mainstream, materialist science they had explored and learned about. And I was, after all, challenging some of the basic tenets of that science. It’s possible that one day one of them could bring new ideas, information or “interpretations” into science as it moves ever forward.

It has been said that science progresses “one death at a time.” People whose lives, careers and reputations have been built on ideas, explanations, “beliefs” that are being challenged by new information, may be utterly unable to relinquish their cherished assumptions. I talked a bit about Hugh Everett, whose “Many Worlds” interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics was originally almost universally rejected, and whose career in physics was basically halted by the scientists who couldn’t let go of their own beliefs. I pointed out that recently an astrophysicist on my local NPR station was discussing the difference between the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum physics championed by Einstein, and Everett’s idea that every time one of two opposite outcomes might occur that both do and the worlds split. The shocked interviewer, clearly sure this was a totally crazy idea, asked how many “actual physicists” accept it. The answer given was that, in spite of overwhelming early dismissal, probably about fifty percent of physicists today agree with it. “And in some circles it would be 100%,” he added.

And here’s a synchronicity. A friend shared this quote with me today, just as I was about to write this post: “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”  — Peter Diamondis

Why do I want to write about this here on The Deep End? Because this blog is all about extreme intelligence in an ever-changing world. No matter how brilliant any individual is, even Einstein, who refused to believe in “spooky action at a distance” explained that it is curiosity and mystery that drive scientists to do their work. They wonder. They hypothesize. And sometimes they discover something that challenges even beliefs that have previously been accepted as truths. Whether we consider ourselves scientists or not, as we live our lives, our experiences may well take us into “other worlds” that we may have thought impossible based on what we were taught or learned to believe. And no, I can’t buy the idea that mind, consciousness, is nothing more than  a byproduct of our physical brains. It is essentially mystery and is likely to remain intriguingly worth exploring.

My own imaginings and wonderings about what’s possible, and the answers I encounter as my life experiences change, have left more than sixty years of beliefs behind. I hope that none of the new ones I’ve developed (most immediately the concept that consciousness is the foundation of the universe itself) ever become so rock solid that they can’t change when my own life changes around them, or new and unexplored worlds open up. I hope for any readers here the same thing.

Meantime, yes–I have experienced what neurobotany suggests, that trees can communicate not only with other trees, but with humans. For indigenous peoples this is not a “new” idea, but a very old one.

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Calling All Readers and Writers!

21 Feb

 

Some of you who read this blog may also see my DeepEnd page or my author’s page on FaceBook and so may already know about the issue that is the focus of this post. But to others of you what I am writing about today may come as news (and probably also a shock, as the discovery was to me).

Many, if not most of you who follow this blog are readers; some of the children and the adults in the highly to profoundly gifted population may also write, or may one day want to write books. And all of you use “devices” and the internet, of course, or you wouldn’t be reading this. I assume most of you frequent libraries as well. So the convergence of books, readers and writers, libraries, and the internet is no doubt important to you.

For the last 40 years I have made my living, such as it is, mostly from being a writer, and mostly writing fiction for kids and young adults, though I also, of course, write nonfiction, both books and articles (plus FB and blog posts) about the gifted. In the image above the top shelf has my fiction and the lower shelf has books I have chapters or stories in, my nonfiction books, some translations and some plays. Physical copies! And all indubitably “mine.”

A few weeks ago, the Authors Guild, of which I’ve been a member for decades, advised its members to check something called Open Library, to see if it was making any our work freely available without our permission, in violation of our copyrights. In those weeks I have learned a great deal, most if which is deeply disturbing, which is why I’m writing this post.

On Open Library I found two serious problems—one was that about a dozen of my books, seven of which are still in print and available for sale, were there for downloading (so-called “borrowing”) for free. On “my page” two of my books were listed as having a co-author named Alex Hill. I had no idea who this person might be—certainly not a co-author. I clicked on his name and was taken to a page where I found the second serious problem. ALL of my books published before 2008, both fiction and nonfiction—including Guiding the Gifted Child, in English and in German, which I wrote with Elizabeth Meckstroth and James Webb,—and including a play, “Bridge To Terabithia,” which I wrote with Katherine Paterson and Steve Liebman. Nowhere on this other page could my own name be found. Everything there was simply listed as “By Alex Hill.”

I contacted Open Library and demanded that they take down from “my page” at least the seven books still in print, and in a second communication demanded that they take every one of my books off “Alex Hill’s page.” They complied with this second demand within 24 hours. It took another day before I got the message that they had taken all of my books down as ebooks for borrowing from my own “page” on their site.

So began my journey through the vast and (for me at least) horrifying world of digital copying. I had not known that my books were available this way, which means my permission was not sought before Open Library’s “parent organization,” Internet Archive had my books scanned and made them available through O.L. for download to anyone who has internet access.  

Once Alex Hill was no longer being credited as the author of my books, I asked how this massive “error” could have been made, and Open Library’s answer to me was that the site is a wiki, explaining that anyone—ANYONE—can change its “metadata” at will. And although they have claimed to me that there is no way the content of a scanned book can be changed by anyone once it has been made available on the site [though the author’s name could be changed any time by anyone apparently] I have reason not to believe them about content, because apparently users can also scan books and have them included in this “catalog,” which is what they call Open Library. They thought this information that they’re a wiki should somehow comfort me. Not! My son discovered that the change of author’s name was done by a “rename bot”—and he thinks the bot could have been created and unleashed “accidentally.” This also does not comfort me. Unlike Wikipedia, Open Library doesn’t have hoards of people passionately trying to make sure the material there is accurate.

The original concept for Internet Archive was a noble one—to scan books that are in the public domain and/or historical documents so that people anywhere could freely access them. But Open Library went vastly beyond that mission and began just scanning any books they could buy or get donated (many, many of which are donated) and putting them up, without asking the author’s permission. 

Copyright exists as a protection against unauthorized copying! There are well over 100,000 public “town libraries,” to say nothing of school and university libraries. These “brick and mortar libraries” buy books or contract for ebooks with the publisher, paying either for the ability to lend them a specific number of times or for a specified period of time. Open Library has no such limitations, though they claim otherwise. 

It’s true that some writers get very wealthy (Stephen King says writing makes him a “good living,”—Yes!) But a recent Author’s Guild survey determined that the average yearly income for a writer is around $20K. The standard contract with a hard cover publisher gives the author a 10% royalty on each book sale. That percentage may go up higher if sales reach certain sales targets. And for ebooks, though all other “subsidiary rights” are standardly shared 50/50 between author and publisher, the ebook percentage for the author is (also standardly) only 25%.

Writers’ incomes have been falling steadily for a decade. Surprise? Every writer I have told to check Open Library has found many, most or all of their books available there, always without permission and most often while still in print. Internet Archive began in 2006 and most of us didn’t know it. Open Library, apparently started four years later, also went unknown from the authors whose work they were illegally scanning. They claim this right to scan whole works under a theory they call “Controlled Digital Lending” (CDL) but it is not actually either “controlled,” or “lending.”

I’m not writing here to bemoan my own loss of royalty income, though that clearly does count some for me. I’m writing here because the ability to scan any book and put it up on line is threatening the entire system of written works and the sharing thereof. Brick and mortar libraries serve a geographical location and people in their area who have library cards—Open Library can reach an infinite number of computer users anywhere in the world, and give them the books. While O.L. claims books are loaned one at a time and for a specified period, in the FAQ published (link below) by opponents of this theory, that claim is shown to be untrue. At the end of the specified time period a “borrower” can’t send the book back to O.L. the way you take the physical book back to the library. It is still in their computer’s cache if they wish to keep it. And each ebook “sent” is a separate file, of which O.L. can make an unlimited number.

Our super bright kids are digitally literate, and this technology has brought many great opportunities into the world, but the“piracy” situation of CDL genuinely threatens anyone’s ability to make a future living writing books—of any kind—so that it threatens not only the kids’ own futures as writers, should they want to choose that path, but also the variety of books that will be available to them. Eventually only the most popular, the most famous, the most mainstream or the most infamous writers would be left creating new works, either of fiction or nonfiction. BTW, I’ve checked the nonfiction works of many writers about the gifted and–surprise–they’re on Open Library, too.  Furthermore, how will it be to use a “library” in which the content or authorship of the books can’t be certain.

I would love to see some of our brightest kids take on the challenge of finding ways to protect information and literature from unauthorized scanning and sharing. My imagination conjures wild ideas like paper that would react to scanning by going dark instead of recreating the images. Or the embedding of digital “locks” in physical books that need a specific digital key to allow scanning access—a key available only from the publisher or author. There must be lots of real possibilities that our digitally literate kids might be able to come up with. And surely there can be methods of compensating the authors somehow when their books are made available to readers. 

We need free libraries—many or most of us writers are among the “people too poor to buy every book they want or need to read” that the folks of Internet Archive and Open Library say they want to serve. I would point out that Robin Hood didn’t rob the poor to help the poor! There are copyright laws for a reason. In the long run they don’t just protect writers, they protect readers as well.

Here are some links for anybody who wants to find out more about this issue:

https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/cdl-appeal-to-readers-and-librarians/

https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/controlled-digital-lending-cdl/

https://nwu.org/book-division/cdl/appeal/?fbclid=IwAR0IP8MyJ15JPrVn1CvVVYzAN0zoQoB6_NDX-mFZDiDSj_Tp0FCtSHCtmNY

https://nwu.org/book-division/cdl/faq/

 

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On Authenticity

7 Aug

A while back I titled a blog post Deep and Deeper and my last post, Who Are We?, led me to return to the intention that motivated that earlier post. Death (along with individual identity) is certainly a subject that can be described as deep or yet deeper. So deep is the subject of death, in fact, that many, perhaps most people in our culture, do their best to avoid talking or even thinking about it altogether.

Back in 1992, when the five women who began the Columbus Group, gathered at my house in Columbus, Ohio to try to come up with a different definition of giftedness than was currently in vogue (a definition centered on academic achievement) one of the very first examples of the qualitative difference between highly or profoundly gifted children and other children of their age [the difference we would soon name Asynchronous Development], was the case of Jennie–and death. Four year old Jennie was traumatized when her grandfather died. Extrapolating a principle from one subject or event to another, as profoundly gifted children tend to begin doing even as toddlers, she began to worry that her mother or father might die as well. Her mother, doing her best to comfort this very little girl, told her that she didn’t need to worry. They were not going to die, she assured Jennie. “Grandpa died because he was old. I’m not old. Your father isn’t old.” Jennie was not in the least comforted by this story. She watched the news on television, after all. “Other people die,” she said. “Even children die!”

The problems very young children have with asynchronous development is that their minds outdistance their emotional maturity, so the simple cushioning stories that adults often give young children to soften the impact of painful truths don’t work well with them. Not only do such stories not provide the cushioning the children need, the stories’ simple platitudes, so obviously untrue, are likely to be taken as adult dishonesty. Jennie had not long been identified as profoundly gifted, and her mother didn’t yet realize that she needed to deal with such issues as the inevitability of death on a much more adult level with Jennie than she had expected.

The deep and deeper human issues need to be addressed with super bright kids both more honestly and earlier than we might be prepared for. Examples of these issues—our inhumanity to each other and other life forms, our predilection for violence and warfare, our failure to protect the planet that is our only home—the list is long and more and more “in our faces” these days. Which means, of course, that we have to face these issues ourselves on a deep enough level to address them honestly from our own perspective when we talk to these children (or even when they’re within earshot). As Stephen Sondheim reminds us in a song from “Into the Woods,” Children will listen!

Many of us got our first stories about such issues from the religions of our parents or grandparents or our ethnic culture. Or from other kids, or science text books or the “mass media.” Often, as we grow up, whatever we were told from whatever source, begins to feel wrong or untrue. For myself, I long ago rejected the version of reality that was provided by my religious education—some of what was labeled wrong no longer seemed wrong to me, and what was right sometimes had begun to seem distinctly the opposite. Even worse than the loss of religious certainties in some ways, was the realization that what I had learned in school as undisputed fact (history, for instance, or even science) had too often been either purposely distorted to support a kind of cultural propaganda, or just an error that had continued to be taught even after it had been superseded or at least challenged by new information and new theories.

For myself, various “truths” began to disintegrate when my own personal experiences contradicted them. As a fiction writer, I had always intended to write “realistic fiction,” until the line between imagination and reality or between what could be and what really was could no longer be firmly drawn. There were things I experienced that I didn’t talk about in public because, except when I was talking to children, my audiences didn’t seem to me ready to hear what I would have said.

But when I was speaking to an adult audience dealing with kids at the far right tail of the curve, where unusual experiences become more common, I began to stretch the boundaries a bit. Back in the days of the Hollingworth Conference for the Highly Gifted, I explained in a keynote, for instance, that becoming a Reiki practitioner—I wasn’t yet a Reiki Master, able to teach the method to others—had ended my problem with seasonal allergies. (Reiki is an energy healing modality that originated in Japan.) All these years later, I still don’t have those allergies! One year someone wrote on a conference evaluation form that I was “too far out.” (The next year I titled my keynote “On Being Too Far Out.”)

I had, of course, found those “far out” things well-supported in books written by leading edge scientists, some of whom I knew personally, though the ideas hadn’t yet shown up in school text books. What had once been labeled “New Age” and outside the realm of rationality, began to fill the shelves at book stores even before the internet had made them readily accessible to anyone with an interest. I still find it odd that after nearly 100 years of challenging the certainties of material science and Newtonian physics, quantum physics is apparently still not a standard offering in most high schools.

Between 1992 and today, my thinking about “deep and deeper” has moved from the need to be willing to honestly talk to super gifted kids about the difficult emotional issues of human life, to being willing to honestly address questions of consciousness, reality, values and spirituality (which may or may not include religion) with them. The most important word in that sentence is “honestly.” About these issues there are seldom certainties for us other than personal experience. Being honest with them, of course, means admitting that there is “mystery” involved—as with the orbs (mysterious and sometimes colored “balls of light” often with internal mandala patterns) that show up all over the place in photographs taken both indoors and outside at Camp Yunasa—so in talking to campers about them I make no effort to explain the phenomenon. This tends to drive the campers a little crazy. All I can say is that none of the “standard explanations” involving dust particles, moisture, or the closeness of lens to flash in digital cameras, explain them either. During my “orb slide show” last year kids got out their cameras and began taking photos and sure enough, a few orbs showed up at first, and the more photos they took the more orbs appeared. Photo above taken as two of Yunasa’s Fellows walk back to our bunks after Spirit Journey–August, 2017.

 

I don’t usually write—or talk—to persuade people any more (though I used to, for sure). I write to share my thoughts, and usually some of the reasons I think them—especially when they aren’t mainstream, or not mainstream in the gifted realm. Ernest Holmes, author of Science of Mind, said, “The child-like mind is more receptive to Truth than the over intellectual.” He suggests this, I think, because children tend to be more open to mystery than those of us proud of our very good intellects. We tend to have minds stuffed with facts we’ve learned and beliefs that we think of as true, but Ernest is after something larger (and deeper), something (Truth) that he dares to capitalize without defining. And since one of his principles was always to “stay open at the top,” I’m pretty sure he would have said that Truth for us changes as we and our perceptions change. And change we humans do, if we allow it.

When I started The Deep End Facebook page  back when I was new to social media, I hoped the page would encourage discussions of some of the nonrational capacities and experiences of the highly gifted that are quite common among this population (which those of us with long experience know, even though many parents are hesitant to talk about them, for fear of disbelief or ridicule). As soon as such discussions began on that page, however, some folks who limit their ideas about consciousness to the purely rational, and apparently about science to the purely material, launched attacks that closed those beginning discussions down. It can be psychologically dangerous to talk about nonrational experiences among hyper-rational gifted folk all too poised to attack. So okay, this is a blog instead, and I write it. I get to choose what I write about.

After I posted “Who Are We?” I heard from some folks that they appreciated my honesty. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in this “gifted biz” for a long time, or more likely it’s because I believe what Anita Moorjani (author of Dying to Be Me, a book about her amazing Near Death Experience) says about the need to be one’s essential self. It is that need that led me to share with Yunasa campers last year (my final year with the camp) the “evidence” I have that there is life after death. There, too, I didn’t ask them to share my interpretation of that evidence. They have to make up their own minds, as do we all. But unless we share what is deep and deeper in our own lives and experience, how will openings to new perceptions and awareness come about?

For me, it is easier to talk about death these days now that I am totally convinced by my own experiences and some astonishing evidence that it is illusion—transformation not ending. But I don’t try to convince people. I believe that honesty and authenticity have real and lasting value, no matter how others respond. (Also, I’m old enough not to care so much what people think of me as I used to.) But I must also add here that while taking the fear of death out of the picture is astonishingly liberating, it does not save us from the grief of such loss. Believe me, I know.

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Tolan Memorial 2013

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Deep and Deeper

13 Apr

“All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. This we know: Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.”–Chief Seattle

“When we try to pick out something by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”–John Muir

It has been an absurdly long time since I wrote something for this blog. But today it’s time. Last month I did a workshop for the Caroline D. Bradley Scholarship program’s annual seminar, sponsored by IEA, the Institute for Educational Advancement. The theme of this year’s seminar was “Intersections” and my workshop was titled “From Indra’s Net to the Internet: Intersections, Reality and Consciousness.”

To prepare for the seminar it was suggested that the attendees watch this TED Talk about “multipotentialites”:

https://www.ted.com/talks/emilie_wapnick_why_some_of_us_don_t_have_one_true_callingIf you don’t have time to watch the talk (though I highly recommend it), let me explain that Wapnick uses the term multipotentialite to describe a person who can’t relate to the idea of finding “one true calling.” If they commit to a job or a subject matter, as soon as they have learned or mastered it they need to move on to something else; there are always lots of other paths (interests) pulling them to explore. Many of “our kids” will recognize themselves in this talk.

Watching it, I realized that I am an “elder multipotentialite.” My 6th grade teacher told my mother that I would never amount to anything because I was interested in “too many things.” Miss Shreve deeply believed in the saying “Jack of all trades, master of none.” She was not, you may be sure, one of my favorite teachers! I am lucky, though. I’ve managed to have the best of both worlds. I do have one true calling, but it is writing, a calling so broad and varied that there is no limit to my ability to follow it for a lifetime and yet avoid boredom.

Most of you who read this blog came to it because you share, for your own reasons, my personal passion for serving the needs of super bright kids and adults. This blog and much of the rest of my nonfiction, along with much of my public speaking, has been about extraordinary intelligence, and what I’ve written and talked about on this subject is best known in the gifted community.

But many of you also know some of my fiction for kids and young adults. Certainly Welcome to the Ark and Flight of the Raven, along with my much earlier novel A Time to Fly Free, are specifically related to highly gifted individuals, but I write other kinds of children’s books as well. And my plays, most of them written in collaboration with Katherine Paterson—author, among many other award-winning novels, of Bridge to Terabithia—are meant to appeal to a broad audience of kids.

Most recently my interests and my life experience (some of which I’ve written about here) have led (or pushed) me in a new direction, the first book from that path being my book Change Your Story, Change Your Life. Some of you may have found it through my websites http://www.stephanietolan.com or www.storyhealer.com.

I expect more nonfiction writing will come from the spiritual perspective that the losses in my life forced me to discover and that the current chaos in the world we all share continues to test and expand.

The theme and title of this blog refer to the metaphorical “deep end” environment that mermaids (unable to survive long on dry land) need to survive longterm. But since I created the blog, the term has taken on a new meaning for me—has become, if you will, even deeper. I will not lose interest in the subject that led me to begin it (how could one get bored in the realm of the gifted mind—as broad a territory as writing itself?) but the new depths that interest me may not appeal to everyone. The title of my CDB workshop refers to both the mystical image of Indra’s net and the material world reality of the internet, two very different ways of perceiving intersections, the connectedness of all things. What I will be doing here in future is exploring both kinds of “deep.”

And meanwhile I’ve begun the intense work of writing the third book of the “Ark Trilogy,” Within the Dark. Because, of course, fiction is a fundamental part of my “one true calling.”

 

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Parenting, parenting, and then one day…

10 Oct
HC20677

Newborn

 

Many of you may have seen a recent research article: 

High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities

 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616303324 

And you may be forgiven for saying, “Well, duh!” This research shows what those of us who are and are raising highly intelligent folk (“cheetahs” or “mermaids/men”) have known all along. There are downsides to this “gift.”

When our kids are little and driving us crazy with their messy rooms, or forgetfulness, or endless arguments, or intensity, or sensitivity, or the scary downsides that the above article addresses, we may wonder about upsides. This post is a celebration of upsides, and a follow up to an earlier one, (Feb. 12, “On the Lighter Side”) in case you missed it.

If you’ve never read it, you might want to take a moment to go up to the top right hand side of this blog and click on “An Open Letter….” When I was in the trenches, learning about high range giftedness and coping with school issues and asynchrony (which hadn’t been named yet), nobody told me that it might not be a good idea to “out” my child to the larger world—so when it was decided to make the open letter I had written to my son’s teachers a chapter in Guiding the Gifted Child, 1982, it didn’t occur to me to hide his identity. Luckily, he didn’t seem to be hurt by this (except for the embarrassment of having the words “Gifted Child” as an on-screen caption during an interview with me on the Today Show when he was an adult working in New York City).

“On the Lighter Side” tells the history of the Applewhites books, including my idea (back in 2012) to ask RJ to collaborate with me on the third book my editor had been urging me to write. He agreed, amazingly soon came up with the initial plot outline, and so we began to write, discovering in the process that neither of us was entirely thrilled with the need, sometimes, to let go of a brilliant idea of our own to embrace the brilliant idea of the other. It wasn’t all roses and sunshine but thanks to its being about the Applewhite family there was a lot of laughter. And then the book got sidelined by family tragedy in 2013. It didn’t come to life again for a very long time. But finally it called us back to our keyboards. Laughter had won out!

So we will have a great celebration party next Tuesday, October 17, at Books of Wonder (18 West 18th Street, New York, NY), when Applewhites Coast to Coast is officially launched. It is impossible to fully express the joy of working together, sharing the ups and downs of life and of the creative process. And the fun of celebrating this birth together!

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Mother/Son Selfie

 

 

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Mind’s Diversity

4 Jun

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.  We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”–Albert Einstein

In the midst of the current world chaos when people encounter the word “diversity” what probably comes to mind first is what might be called obvious diversity—race, religion, ethnic origin, culture, citizenship, gender, economic status. What I am writing about today is less noticeable and for some perhaps rather more controversial—I think of it as diversity within mind.

I don’t mean the differences between gifted and more typical minds, between left and right brain dominance, between math/science and humanities preferences, or even Dabrowski’s OEs. There is much to be said about all of these, and of course much has been written about all of them in the gifted literature.

What is less discussed in that literature, less discussed in the academic community, except obliquely, is the fact that the human mind has two primary modes of operation. They could be called ways of accessing information or even ways of knowing. These two entirely different modes are Intellect and Intuition. The first is the aspect of mind measured by most intelligence tests—intellect. It is the dwelling place of reason, logic, rationality. It is generally thought of as a specifically human attribute, the mental capacity that allows us to learn, explore reality, understand, share ideas and knowledge, create, and invent. When some people use the term mind what they mean is just this—intellect. If they think about intuition, they consider it to be some vague and unreliable something that, if it exists at all, is akin to what in animals we label instinct, a lesser kind of consciousness that might occasionally surprise us when the phone rings and without seeing the caller I.D. we have a “hunch” about who is trying to reach us.

In spite of Einstein’s words, above, intuition is not most generally a serious focus of attention when considering the unusual or extreme intelligence of gifted individuals. While intellect is rational, many refer to intuition, therefore, as irrational, and dismiss it on those grounds. I far prefer the term nonrational, which acknowledges its difference without dismissing its genuine value. A couple of years ago when I was in a FaceBook group created to discuss giftedness, any mention of the kinds of unusual awareness that are available to us through intuition was met with hostility and ridicule. I probably posted the Einstein quotation before I left the group, tired of the futile attempt to broaden the conversation to include the aspect of mind that allows direct knowing. Yet in a kind of linguistic U-turn, in earlier times to say that someone was “gifted,” or had “the gift,” actually meant that the person had highly developed and powerful intuition, sometimes known as second sight, sixth sense, or psychic ability.

Interestingly, speaking to a diverse audience about mind and giftedness when I ask people to raise their hands if they have ever experienced an accurate, intuitive “hit,” a majority raise their hands. For some this sort of direct knowing is frequent and common enough to be relied upon, for others their intuitive experience was a one time, goose-bump-raising, highly memorable event.

I’m among those who argue that intuition is a valuable and basic aspect of the mind, every bit as worthy of being recognized and developed as intellect. For those who distrust it or disbelieve in its existence, I would remind them of a time (I’m old enough to remember it) when elementary school children in this country (especially in Catholic schools, but elsewhere, too) were discouraged or even punished for using their left hands instead of their right. Handedness was not yet understood as an innate aspect of the individual’s brain structure. As we learned more about the brain, we realized that being left handed—or ambidextrous—is not only natural to some, but is associated with some unique and worthwhile attributes.

In the Myers-Briggs inventory of types, one of the variables (N) stands for intuition, the method of taking in information that is opposed on the scale to sensing (S). Those who prefer Sensing on the N-S continuum look for information that is concrete, can be accessed through the senses, and includes details and facts. Those who prefer Intuition are more likely to get hunches and trust them, and to perceive underlying structures and patterns and make assumptions based on those. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines intuition as “…the immediate knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning; instantaneous apperception.”

Both N and S are natural capacities that may be more or less developed, more or less used, according to nature, but nurture is involved as well. When we do not respect or allow intuitive ways of knowing, we may do as much to shut it down in those whose natural capacities are closer to N on the continuum than S, as forcing the exclusive use of the right hand distorted for many the attributes of left-handedness. Those who have been told (or believe) that intuition either doesn’t exist or is vague and unreliable, are much less likely to develop and use it than those in whom its presence is acknowledged, supported, valued.

As we are more and more inundated with information, more and more challenged to keep up with the constant flow of new information on almost every topic imaginable, it’s likely that we are going to find it more and more critical for the individual to acknowledge and gain access to that “other” way of knowing that is entirely outside the realm of reason, rationality, logic and intellect. We need to have a way of sorting through the deluge to limit our intake, to get accurate hunches about just what pieces of information in that stream we most need in any given situation or any given moment. When we do get such hunches we need to respect them rather than dismissing them automatically, even though they may be given to us in a “still, small voice” easily over-ridden by the loud and confident intellect. As we begin to trust them, they begin to work for us more and more often, more and more accurately.

One of my colleagues is affectionately known as “Nancy Drew” because she’s able to find information other people can’t. She is led to that information intuitively. Though she reads incredibly fast, she is often able simply to go directly to the right shelf, the right box, the right file drawer in the midst of an archive that might take another person weeks or months to sort through in a more rational, methodical way. She trusts her methods, and seeing her results lets the rest of us trust them, too. Books she needs have even been known to fall off the shelf to get her attention.

I knew that my Myers-Briggs results showed me to be far out on the N side of the N-S continuum, but I didn’t realize that many psychics refer to themselves as Intuitives. So I often said, “I don’t have a psychic bone in my body.” Then several professional psychics told me I was one of them. Thanks to my strict, rational-materialist upbringing and education, I dismissed their suggestions. Then one of them told me that while I could learn to access my intuitive nature, people with highly capable intellects (“the gifted”) are among those most difficult to teach to do that. I was lucky, though. I’m a fiction writer and have made much of my living with my imagination.

Once, while doing research for my novel Welcome to the Ark, I went to hear the grandson of Edgar Cayce speak, and he quoted his grandfather, saying “Imagination is the doorway to intuition.” Imagination and intuition are not the same thing, since intuition is a way of knowing and imagination is a way of exploring (or creating) possibilities. Imagination allows us to escape from the tyranny of what is already known, from facts previously established, and from the “real world” to explore new territory. In that new territory intuition may then encounter its truth.

Einstein famously said (in a 1929 interview in The Saturday Evening Post) “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Much of what Einstein gave to the world came from a combination of imagination and his own thorough grounding in what was already known or theorized and the extraordinary intellect that let him devise ways to test and share his sudden insights. But it certainly was the free flight of imagination that allowed him to make intuitive leaps to entirely new ground. He also famously said that to encourage children to become scientists one should nourish them with fairy tales.

Intellect feels safer. One can follow its trail from fact to fact, from source to source, from concept to concept, thought to thought, reflection to reflection. The accomplishments of intellect can be traced, diagrammed, understood—unlike the “Eureka!” moment, when, like a kaleidoscope turning, an entirely new pattern suddenly emerges in what feels like a magical way that could not have been predicted or understood by analyzing the trail.

While it’s true that some people are intuitive super stars, able to tune in to information, “vibrations,” others cannot sense, that is no more of an excuse not to train ourselves to use this aspect of mind than it would be to say that no one other than the profoundly gifted should work to develop their intellect. I have been working at developing my own long-neglected intuition for a number of years now (over the often strenuous objections of my rational mind), and I’ve come to believe that it is essential for the future of humanity, not only to accept intuition’s apparently magical existence, but to respect what it can give us that reason cannot. Some of its aspects can seem “paranormal” and unsettling, since we have no way to really understand them. But I remind myself regularly that we don’t actually understand intellect either. Consciousness itself is still one of the great mysteries.

Personally, I’m not sure I would want to hand the task of helping children develop their intuition over to our schools, since they are overburdened as it is. But—as I’ve said often before, I think it amounts to educational malpractice not to tell kids that it exists, that it is a powerful natural aspect of mind, and that it can be developed. And schools can certainly do far more than most do now to help children value imagination, use it, practice it, and most of all respect it. Respect for imagination both allows and encourages the opening of that door to other ways of knowing.

Meantime, there are many people who are intuitive masters already engaged in teaching people how to access, develop, and use this aspect of mind. There are many books and workbooks for this, some designed for adults, some for children. Parents may have to be the ones to find the resources for this, but from my own childhood experience, I can confidently say that telling children that their moments of direct knowing are dangerous, unreliable, and should not be accepted or used, is like forcing left-handed kids to use only their right—a kind of purposeful crippling. It is only when we respect and encourage the development and best use of  the whole mind, both intellect and intuition, that we access humanity’s highest intelligence. Edgar Cayce said imagination is the doorway to intuition; I would add that intuition is the doorway to the infinite.

 

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On the Lighter Side

12 Feb

It’s been said that laughter is the best medicine. And right now we need as much of it as we can get.

So—this post is not a serious post about the world, or even about the needs of highly to profoundly gifted folks. It is a post to go with a “cover reveal” for the third book about the homeschooling Applewhites and their visiting “bad kid,” Jake Semple.

Back in 2002 I published the first one—Surviving the Applewhites. I had written it precisely because laughter is medicine, and the book of mine that had come out two weeks after 9/11 (Flight of the Raven—sequel to Welcome to the Ark) was set in a terrorist compound. I had therefore had to spend a year of my life while writing it, living in the minds of terrorists, and I really, truly needed to lighten up.

While laughter might be medicinal, funny books seldom win major literary awards, so it was a surprise to many that it won a Newbery Honor in 2003. After 29 years of writing for kids and young adults, I had become an “overnight success.” 

Meantime, I had also become a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Educational Advancement (IEA) and helped to create Yunasa, a camp for highly gifted kids, where I have worked every summer since. My son RJ, whom some of you may remember from the Open Letter in Guiding the Gifted Child (1982) told me I should write a sequel, and that in it the Applewhites should start a camp. Though I wasn’t eager to write a sequel (sequels are tricky and writing humor even trickier), my editor also encouraged me, so I did. Applewhites at Wit’s End, dedicated to the Yunasa campers, and including the disclaimer that “any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental,” came out ten years after the first book.

That, I thought, was that. Done! And then RJ (most of you know how persistent and sometimes maddening highly gifted offspring can be) said I should write a third, because it wouldn’t be “a series” until there were three books! I said no. My editor pushed a bit. I said no.

And then it dawned on me that it might be fun to do if RJ, who is a very funny guy and a very good writer, would collaborate. I hesitantly suggested this first to my editor and then to him. She said yes, he said yes, and I was actually at Yunasa when I got the word that we had a contract for the third book. Great! I thought. Now all we have to do is get an idea. And write it. A few weeks later RJ took care of the first part. And we began.

Long story short, it is done. Brett Helquist has created a splendid cover (as he did for Wit’s End and the new paperback of Surviving) and Applewhites Coast to Coast will be available from HarperCollins in the fall of 2017. One of my favorite parts about the whole project was when our editor said she couldn’t tell which one of us wrote what. Yay! (For some of it, we aren’t even quite sure.) This is the sort of thing that makes all those years of parenting not just worth it, but an amazing, splendid, delightful gift!applewhitescoast_final-s

And as I was posting this, I encountered a really great quote, from Bobby Sands, an Irish activist (1954-1981): “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”

Uniqueness

19 May

Sometimes (maybe in some ways always) this blog gets personal even though I write it as an advocate. But today it becomes very personal. So skip it if that bothers you.

Today I write as a highly gifted, highly creative, highly sensitive kid currently living inside the body of a grandmother. Please understand that I am writing to the highly gifted kids in you adults who are reading here, as well as the highly gifted kids in your lives for whom you are advocates. Two days ago I went to see the new movie “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” based on the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar, a profoundly mathematically gifted young Hindu man who gave the world mathematical formulas that are still, 100 years after his death at age 32, helping scientists to understand the universe we live in.

I happened to be alone in the theater when I saw it (though it was sold out when I tried to go on Sunday) and I had to sit in my seat all the way through the very long credits before getting up to leave because I didn’t want to be seen crying in the lobby. Since then I’ve read various reviews of the mpatel-ironsovie by film critics and mathematicians and they grump about various aspects of the movie, from Dev Patel being thin and gorgeous (well, truth be told, that’s my word—the words the reviewer used meant close to the same thing) when the real young man was chubby, to inaccuracies in the back story, to the fact that Jeremy Irons, who plays Ramanujan’s mentor, is “too old” for the part. This last is explained by the fact that it took 10 years to get funding for the film because it was clear that it wasn’t going to be mainstream and popular. Well, duh! It is about a young man who was one of the world’s most exceptional minds.

There are various reasons I cried at the end—the most obvious of which is that Ramanujan, though finally having had his mind and his work accepted, dies in the end. But more than that is the same reason I cried in “The Imitation Game” (about Turing) when the brilliant young woman tells Turing how much having found an intellectual equal means to her. Both movies show vividly how the world treats the profoundly gifted whose ideas, thoughts, and behaviors are very much outside of “the norms.”

The highly creative and highly sensitive parts of me are easily triggered. I live stories I encounter that touch on human emotional realities, and I feel them deeply. I always have. I cried on and off for two whole weeks after reading The Yearling when I was nine. I have not (and will not, it seems) outgrow that. It can be a challenge sometimes to live that way.

Also, recently, I posted on FB that I’ve been re-watching the first season of HBO’s dramatic series, “The Newsroom,” by Aaron Sorkin while riding my stationary bike. I suggested that everyone disturbed by the current political climate in this country might want to see those early episodes, where Sorkin pretty much predicted the state we’re in today and showed us how we were on our way to getting here. Today, again, watching the fifth episode, I found myself in tears. Emotional overexcitability causes that, plus the frustration of feeling myself (like the main characters in the show) far outside of popular culture and all too aware of and pained by the current chaos.

It is mostly for these reasons that I have become so great an advocate for finding a way to meet the spiritual needs of our gifted kids, for understanding that their hearts are in as great need of understanding and support as their heads. This is perhaps the greatest asynchrony of all, the need our cheetahs and mermaids/mermen have for heart-felt meaning in their lives. For some this is a need answered by religion. For many others it is a need almost totally unrecognized. As Viktor Frankl said, in Man’s Search for Meaning, if one has a “why” to live, one can bear with almost any “how.”

Neither “spirituality” nor “meaning” are mentioned in “The Newsroom,” but they are actually the driving force (presented as morality and ethics) behind the series itself. There is an emphasis on caring, on humanity, on connection, on—as the Dalai Lama would say—kindness. However short we humans fall in meeting our best intentions in these areas, the effort is essential.

As for “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” here is what Preston Wilder, reviewing it for the Cyprus Mail, said that captures what moved me the most about this movie:  “The film works best as a moral/mystical debate – process vs. intuition, Man vs. God. GH Hardy (Jeremy Irons) is the Cambridge professor who becomes Ramanujan’s mentor – and Hardy is a proud atheist (though it may be more accurate to say, as his protégé puts it, that ‘you do believe in God, you just don’t think He likes you’), trusting only in science. ‘It’s the only truth I know; it’s my church,’ he declares – but the film contrasts his insistence on supplying proofs for everything with Ramanujan’s trust in fully-formed truths emerging intuitively, and it also opens with Bertrand Russell’s dictum that ‘Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty’. Maths is an artform (our hero says his equations are ‘like a painting’), possessed of beauty and quasi-mystical origins. ‘How do you know?’ asks a bewildered prof when Ramanujan solves a problem out of thin air. ‘I don’t know,’ comes the reply; ‘I just do’. Richard Dawkins [the “militant atheist”] can’t be very happy with this movie.”

For Ramanujan, a Hindu, his religion is the vessel for meaning, and for Hardy meaning comes through mathematics itself. But even Hardy’s atheism and insistence on proofs must finally allow for both mystery and meaning in the workings of Ramanujan’s extraordinary mind.

There are plenty of reviews out there about this movie with plenty of quibbles. But I wish all those people who suggest that the very idea of giftedness is elitist, that “all children are gifted” or that extraordinary contributions to human knowledge could be made by nearly anyone who “practices” 10,000 hours or more and has plenty of grit, would see it. Ramanujan had an inborn, unique–and let us remember that the meaning of unique is not just “different” but “one of a kind”–mind with a unique passion. There is deep, if deeply mysterious meaning in humanity’s infinite variety-within-oneness, in our individual differences.

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