The Vibrant Child Inside Every Genius

Many characteristics that we witness in children seem to have unfortunately been lost in many, if not most adults - like curiosity, openness to new ideas, and unrestrained creativity. Perhaps high IQ people are like children who never lost these characteristics.

High IQ people, like children, are highly curious and ask far more questions than those around them. They are less likely to simply accept facts that are given to them and often question the answers they find. Asking the primal question “WHY?” is a very important part of being a normal human.

Indeed, it is when children stop asking questions that the true loss of innocence begins. Think about a three or four-year-old. The question WHY often dominates their exploration of the world around them and their conversations with others. Unfortunately, the answers that they receive are often not conducive to learning. Sometimes the answers are polite “Daddy’s busy right now. Ask me again later”… or the answer can be harsh “I’m busy. Don’t bother me.” or worst “You’re too young. You wouldn’t understand”. The answers they receive may be nice or rude, but after receiving responses like this twenty or thirty times, the children finally do learn something that is life altering. They learn NOT to ask questions anymore. Eventually, they learn and believe that they are too stupid and accept and internalize that fact. Then after enforcing this belief for a few more years, we send them off to kindergarten and wonder why they have problems learning.

It is because we may have inadvertently taught them to stop questioning and trying to learn about the world and people around them.

Perhaps high IQ people are those who as children received different types of answers. Perhaps High IQ people are those that remain curious, because they were never taught that they were too stupid to understand. Perhaps High IQ people think outside of the box because they were never placed in one and told to stay there. Perhaps High IQ people were children who were invited to play with ideas as earnestly as they played with their toys and they never lost their intellectual innocence, or had it beaten into submission or taken from them.

Perhaps all children are born with much higher IQ than we suspect and that, unfortunately, most children are taught not to ask “WHY” and not to bother mommy and daddy with such stupid questions. Children learn what they have been taught and when you encounter adults who are narrow-minded (or close-minded), unthinking, and incurious, consider what they must have been taught when they were young and how well they learned those lessons.

High IQ people may be more child-like in some ways, simply because they never had those curious, marvelous, insightful, unrestrained characteristics taken away. They may have simply never lost them… and that is part of what makes them different from others, or special.

TK: Being Present in the Moment

 

America's Social Order is Unraveling

The unraveling of America's social order is accelerating, and denial will not save us from the consequences of the plundering of the social contract.

What kind of nation boasts a record-high stock market and an unraveling social order? Answer: a failed nation, a nation that has substituted artifice for realism for far too long, a nation that now depends on illusory phantoms of capital, prosperity and democracy to prop up a crumbling facade of "wealth" that the populace now understands is largely in the hands of a few families and corporations, most of which pay little to support the citizenry they dominate politically and financially.

The social order sounds abstract, but it is all too real. The social order has two primary components: social cohesion, the glue of common purpose and shared sacrifice binding the social order, and the social contract, the implicit contract between the ruling elite, the state (government) and commoners (the middle class, the working poor and state dependents) that their labor, taxes and sacrifices will nourish a society with a level playing field, broad-based opportunity and security.

America's social cohesion has been lost, ground under the heel of soaring inequality, a two-tiered economic/political order, systemic unfairness and the elite's divide-and-conquer manipulation of the political and cultural orders.

Historian Peter Turchin characterized this social unraveling as disintegrative: people no longer find reasons to cooperate and share sacrifices to work towards a common national purpose. Rather, they find a multitude of reasons to offload sacrifices onto others, hoard their own wealth and seek to expand their power by accelerating the disintegrative forces.

There is no debate about the collapse of America's social contract, there are only varying levels of self-serving denial. Commoners have awakened to the emptiness of the conventional promise to get a college degree, work hard and you'll be rewarded with security and prosperity. Huge swaths of America are a ransacked, decaying shell of a society reminiscent of developing nations suffering under the jackboot of kleptocrats.

America's fast-expanding class of billionaires are doing their best to mimic the clueless French nobility just before France's convulsive revolution in 1789: America's billionaires bleat that they should pay more taxes while their lobbying bulldozes gigantic loopholes in the tax code, enabling Apple and other global giants to escape U.S. taxes.

America's billionaires are busy building $500 million private yachts and private spaceships while proclaiming their globally distributed sweatshops are raising all boats in a tide of money conjured out of thin air by the billionaires' central bankers.

America's ruling elite has rewritten the social contract to benefit itself at the expense of the bottom 99.9%. Studies have confirmed that the bottom 99.9% hold virtually no political power, and the bottom 90% collect a pitiful 3% of all income generated by capital and hold an inconsequentially thin slice of the nation's wealth.

Actions have consequences and cultural revolutions result from the suppression of legitimate political expression and the failure of the regime to meet its lofty idealistic goals.

When there is no relief valve in a collapsing social order, the explosive pressure is eventually released in a Cultural Revolution that unleashes all the bottled-up frustrations on elites. These frustrations have no outlet politically because they're threatening to the status quo and therefore suppressed at every turn.

Put another way, if the pendulum is pushed to an extreme of exploitation, suppression and inequality, when it's released, it will reach an equivalent extreme (minus a bit of friction) at the opposite end. That could be an unexpected but entirely foreseeable Cultural Revolution.

Those who claim that can't happen in America are safely outside the pressure cooker, protected by a delusional confidence that since I'm doing great, everyone is doing great. Since real political agency is no longer allowed, the pressure will find release outside the political system. The lobbyists will still be haunting the hallways of governance, but no one will care, for The falcon will no longer hear the falconer.

By Charles Hugh Smith, June 25, 2021

The Soul in the Flesh

"There is no difference between the energy that shapes your ideas and the energy that grows a flower, or that heals your finger if you burn it. The soul does not exist apart from nature. It is not thrust into nature. Nature is the soul in flesh, in whatever its materializations. The flesh is as spiritual as the soul, and the soul is as natural as the flesh. In your terms the body is the living soul. Now the soul can live, and does, in many forms — some physical and some not, but while you are material, the body is the living soul. The body constantly heals itself, which means that the soul in the flesh heals itself. The body is often closer to the soul than the mind is because it automatically grows as a flower does, trusting its nature."

— Seth, The Nature of Personal Reality, Chapter 7: Session 630, December 11, 1972

Body Art Painting idea by Ram Prongs

State of the Union

Running from Lions

Today I have time to write. It is a day of rest, the unplanned result of sustaining an overuse injury to the tendons of my left calf muscles – gastrocnemius tendonitis, specifically. It is my own fault; I'm too old to be so ambitious and run as fast as I do. As I begin my recovery, I already am setting a plan of avoidance through adjusting my physical aspirations and maybe placing added emphasis upon stretching more in the future. With rest on the horizon for the foreseeable future, I stop to look carefully at the aging image staring back at me in the mirror and consider a re-examination of my current path.

I wonder how I would deal with this tendon injury if I was one of my ancestors on the savanna of eastern Africa. While the young hunters follow the herds in hopes of running down an exhausted animal for the tribe's dinner, I wonder if I would be able to keep up with the trailing troupe of women, children, and other older veterans of the hunt as they follow behind. Could I still rise up to hobble the distance and advance with the tribe to share dinner and survive with them another day?

Sitting down to rest and recover was not an option then any more than it is today. One either kept up with the tribe in its daily movements, or became lion bait. While lions no longer present a threat in my modern world (most days), the insidious predator of aging ever lies in wait to pounce if I slow down or stop hobbling.

We all belong to the same tribe from those times of antiquity, whether we consider it or not. My survival has always depended upon keeping up with my tribe, no less today than before I became so “evolutionarily advanced”. So, as I look in the mirror, that is the question that confronts me in my immediate crisis: Can I still keep up or will I become food for the lion?

I have committed my life to a pursuit of freedom and cannot allow something as distracting as an injury to trip me up in my dance toward infinity. If I stop now, then what was the point of all the hard work? The trick is to continue whatever it is that got me here... which for me has been a life of exertion and risk-taking. Injury is not an excuse for laying down.

Old age is the final adversary I face before I spin off into infinity. It is the cruelest of all the enemies I have faced. It presents a constant reminder that I am but one step away from being swept away in defeat. I fight the good fight, without fears; I keep a clarity of mind despite a lingering desire to just rest. If I give into the desire and yield to the soothing thought of taking a break, the predator who is always waiting in the wings will cut me down in my final battle. There can be no retreat.

The cult mind of the collective is not something I resonate to. I have pushed the boundaries relentlessly in every respect to escape the mold of what the average man has become. Through a cultured clarity early in my life and a chosen sobriety I figured out that I did not want to live the common life in the mold of most people. I look around me and see the majority of those I call friend being consumed by the predator during the past year or so. As I look in the mirror, the seer looking back reaffirms that I will not yield for reasons of age or injury or infirmity. Now is no time to pull over to the sidelines and ease the fight. Infinity can wait. The lion can go hungry for awhile longer. I shall keep up with my tribe for as long as I have the resolve to hobble on, hobble on.

Running on the Edge

...you can experience no greater sense of freedom than what you feel when you run on a ridge that seems to hang in the air.  It's like running along the edge of a blade of a sword, taking care not to fall over one side as you accelerate with every step to leave the blade and the danger behind, though at the same time you don't want it to ever end.  There is danger, but you can think only of flying, of giving your legs the freedom to go faster and faster, letting your body dance as it keeps its balance.

Kilian Jornet, p. 86 in Run or Die

Fear of Falling

I'm not afraid of anything. I've said it many times. Sounds rather arrogant. Perhaps I overstep, but honestly, fear is an emotion I have largely learned to manage. It wasn't always that way. I grew up fearful of a lot of things – snakes under the bed at night, bears in the closet, bullies at school, intimidating teachers, public speaking, relations with girls, and so on. But sometime during my service in the the Marine Corps I chose to change my perspective and master my fear response. Since then I have been in many fearful situations, real and imaginary, and through experience and practice I have honed my reaction to the world around me and learned to hold steady at insecure times.

With fear seemingly rampant in the last year and a half during this pandemic contrivance, I have given fear more thought as it invades my space more and more by those around me. It is always an option, especially when I play in high places, but I have learned that it does not serve me well, so I gravitate to other mechanisms to deal with challenging circumstances.

Aside from the instinctive fight-or-flight response, fear is essentially a thought or even an attitude. Since we each chose how we perceive the world, our thoughts and attitudes become the foundation for how we interpret what we perceive as reality. Ultimately, it is our thoughts, imagination, and attitudes which create the world we believe we perceive. Therefore, it behooves us to guard what we think about and what plays in our imagination at all times.

Consider that fear really only exists in our imagination. Without our ability to imagine our place in the future, to work out the consequences of a particular possible outcome in all its gruesome details, we would all be fearless. Those who survive serious car crashes, drownings, avalanches, and long falls from high places generally relate that it all happened so quickly that they did not have time to be afraid while the event was taking place. It's as if so much is happening to you, your mind is being bombarded with so much information that you have no time to imagine an outcome. Survivors tell of things seeming to happen in slow motion, as if the speed at which the mind is operating is affecting the actual perception of time.

However the future unfolds, it is simply a matter of fact, an emotionless reality. What will be will be. It is only what is happening at this very instant that should concern us. All any of us can do is experience the present moment, the now. Any extrapolation of the now into an unknown future is purely imaginary. Deprived of the ability to imagine the future, we would all be fearless. Suddenly, there would be nothing to be scared of. You wouldn't ponder the significance of death or what it might feel like or what happens to you.

In a cataclysmic accident of fall, when things happen so quickly, there is no time to project the imagination into the future. We lose the future, but we also lose the past. Losing all possible reasons for fear, you can't imagine what you might lose or what you might become. Time is frozen during such times of immediate crisis; there is no time to draw emotional conclusions. I'm falling fast. I'm about to die. This is it. That is the reality of the moment, one in which there is no time for the frivilous luxury of fear.

Fear, like balance, in not inherent; it is a learned response. Even the fight-or-flight response is not instinctive; it is a carefully learned response. Anything that can be learned can be unlearned. That is what I figured out during the time I was engaged in the challenges of military training.

Fear can be controlled, rationalized away, understood for what it is, and ignored. All of us do it to some degree, but some are better at it than others. Should you cross the intersection or will you let your impulsive imagination hold you back from action out of fear for what might happen?

Still, fear is a positive, helpful mechanism. It warns us all of the time – watch out here, look out there, slow down, don't do that, mind your step – without which you would likely soon be dead. In a world full of loud, conflicting information continually hammering our minds, it is good to have fear as a sentinel in our minds, always vigilant for the accident waiting to happen, alert for the slightest sign of danger.

The trick is to sample fear. Select the fear that you want or need to react to and get rid of the rest. Examine each fear as it presents itself, understand just what it is warning you about, and then act accordingly. As a mountain climber, one who chooses to play in a world of life and death choices, I operate continually in a state of controlled fear. Only when the level of fear becomes intolerable do I back off when I know I am reaching my limits. At any given moment while climbing I will do whatever action is necessary to avoid fear's alarm, whether it be lunge for a new handhold, retreat, or remain motionless. I will not do something if there is a fear there that I cannot control. Perhaps it is only my belief in control that keeps me moving forward. If a moment arises where I suspect I am losing control, then I know that fear is edging into that fragile balance between my sanity and insanity.

While most people have a fear of death, it is the archetypal forms of dying like drowning, falling, or burning that terrify us most, even though most people have absolutely no experience with coming close to dying these ways. Our imaginations take over and imagine the worst pain and terror during numbing events like crashing a car or plunging down a mountainside when in reality they happen so fast there is no time for emotion. If anything, a catastrophic experience like these is generally experienced as a deep calm resignation of utter helplessness and an emotionally bereft profound knowing that there is absolutely nothing at all we can do . At least that has been my experience with near death episodes of drowning, falling, and severe physical trauma.

Uncontrolled fear is very destructive, gnawing away at the fabric of sanity, screwing one into a frightful aching state of anxiety. Am I good enough? Will I hold up when things get tough? Will I crack under pressure? Will I disappoint? Am I good looking enough? Are my children safe? Am I a failure? Will I appear boring or foolish? Do people like me? Where will I get the money I need to pay the bills this month? There is nothing but sickness in this sort of worry and fear, a sickness of the mind that is nonconstructive and produces no answers or resolution, leaving you in a helpless anguishing limbo. At least with archetypal fears there is the fight-or-flight reaction where adrenaline moves you to act, confronting whatever the terror immediately.

In all that I do in life I chose my fear willingly. I embrace the future and everything it throws at me with open arms and a clear mind, confident that I can control my emotions and succeed. I no longer have parental anxiety, or doubts about business decisions, and no longer identify with the world of the lonely or heartsick. Indulging in these kinds of fears holds us prisoner. They are penance for thinking too much. I say I am not afraid of anything, but what I really mean to say is I am free and in control.

One of the reasons I enjoy climbing mountains is that I can leave behind the world of anxiety. When facing challenges moment to moment on a climb there is no time or room for such unproductive distraction. All that matters as you step forward or reach for another handhold is surviving. Anything other than focus on the moment erodes confidence and may compromise survival. It is a pure and simple way to engage the world.

Living for the moment, for nothing but the present, brings with it an unexpected bonus. It allows one to escape the need to know the future and frees one from the constraints of the past. An absolute freedom arises from living in the moment. Managing simply to exist affords one a greater freedom than one could possibly imagine otherwise. The moment is the only real world worth living in. Anything beyond that is deceptive – including hopes, dreams, ambitions, and expectations.

I attempt to bring the essence of living in the moment back from the mountains to experience in everyday life under every circumstance. I accept a high degree of risk in the mountains and in daily life and fully take responsibility for every outcome. I attempt to bring this into every action I take, knowing full well that I am in control, steering the boat, creating my own reality moment to moment.

There are special moments in the mountains, and in life, fragile transient times, when the borders between life and death seem to overlap, when the past and future cease to exist, and all that remains is freedom... when you seem able to spread your wings and fly to eternity without a care. Edging along the fragile connection between life and death, sometimes it is as if I am immortal, neither alive nor dead. I look upon such fearless moments as being heaven, Nirvana, enlightenment... magical. And so I return again and again to this very real world to taste the nectar of infinity. Fear is all that stands in the way of sharing all of this with more people.

Conquistador of the Useless, Compulsive Addict of the Absurd

Why do I love to climb mountains? It is a question whose answer requires no justification for my part. It is who I am, and what I have chosen to do. If you do not climb rocks and you ask, you will never understand the answer anyway. It's about freedom. It's sensing deep within that being in the mountains hanging perilously from some vertical face is the most liberating experience one could ever know, even though it is quite the opposite of everything the world reminds us is important and worth doing. I share below an attempt at a cogent answer by Joe Simpson on pages 119 to 121, and 232 in his book This Game of Ghosts:

There is a perverse delight in putting oneself in a potentially dangerous situation, knowing that your experience and skill makes you quite safe. To stand with a friend in eerie moonlight at the foot of a vast mountain wall and be certain that you can safely reach the top – that is a wonderful feeling of self-confidence. It might seem an absurdly pointless thing to do, but to have the nerve to go and try it, just to see if you can, is an affirmation of everything noble in humanity. The task has been rationalized, and carefully weighed, and now you must act and do it right; it is a suspended moment. As you step up on to the first hold or drive the first axe blow you step into a new perspective, a world that is absolutely and cruelly real. The power of it is indescribable, as vital on the first step as it is on the last, at the base or on the summit, and the intensity only gradually fades on your return to the valley.

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote: “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is... In Life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait.”

If memory could recall exactly the sense of a past experience, nothing would be done. We would sit out our days and fantasize about the past. Why challenge the present if the past can be so good? Fortunately our memory is kind. It blurs the bad times and softens the good. And as life in the valley, in the real world, if that is what it is, erodes the transient lingering memory of your last climb you understand that you must go back and stand under the shadowed wall again and commit everything.

At the same time there is a taint of insanity about it. How can I possibly justify losing my life, or that of a friend, in the pursuit of something so ephemeral as a passing state of mind, an achievement of the truly irrational? Why ascend a mountain by its hardest, most dangerous face when you can walk, hands in pockets, up the other side? Or, in some cases, sitting in a train or a cable car? If it were simply adrenaline that you were after, you could take a ride on a roller coaster, snort a line of cocaine, or indulge in a fraught extramarital affair, any number of things that have thrills without kills. Why be a conquistador of the useless, a compulsive addict of the absurd?

The eighteenth century theologian and philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, developed a theory he called 'Deep Play', whereby what the player stands to lose is completely disproportionate to what he can possibly gain. In climbing there is the death of yourself, or your friends, or the loss of toes and fingers, to set against the transitory pleasure of a summit, the thrill of the adventure, the fleeting satiation of an irrational desire. The fact that the desire can never be fully gratified is the addiction. Perhaps the desire is deeply rooted in the very absurdity of the undertaking. It is so wonderfully pointless and meaningless that it has to be done.

You create the potential for death by going to the mountains and taking the risks, and yet you do not want to die. It seems to make no sense. It makes no sense until you have stepped too close to the edge. Then you understand why you went there and perceive that you have enhanced your life, affirmed what it is to be alive by realizing what it could be like to die. It has been argued that climbing mountains, tip-toeing along the knife-edge between life and death, is a way of looking into the ultimate unknown.

In his book The Great Blue Dream, Robert Reid wrote:  "In the curious playgrounds of their sport, mountaineers learn what primitive people know instinctively – that mountains are the abode of the dead, and that to travel in high country is not simply to risk death, but to risk understanding it."

He goes on to suggest that the reason for death being so essential to the mountaineer is that it enables him to see life for what it truly is. Climbing prepares one for death, leads one towards the edge of another world into which one can look without fear. In the urban world our greatest and deepest anxiety is the fear of death, but in the natural world of the mountains it is possible, he argues, to overcome this fear. Far from being separate from life, Reid believes that death is really a smooth continuation of life, and for this reason the mountaineer can move easily to the edges of each world. In so doing he can discover the true beauty of life through having experienced the essential nature of death.

Living Excessively

 Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.

Edwin Land

If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

Ayn Rand

Skyrunner's Manifesto

Redefining what is possible.  These are the words Kilian Jornet reads each day before he goes out training:

Kiss or kill. Kiss the glory or die trying. Losing is death, winning means breathing. The struggle is what makes a victory, a winner.How many times have you cried of rage and pain? How many times have you lost your memory, your voice and your judgment because of your tiredness? And in this situation, how many times have you been thinking: Try again! A couple of hours more! Another hill! Pain does not exist, it is only in your head! Control it, destroy it, delete it, carry on! Make your opponents suffer, kill them. I am selfish, am I not? Sport is selfish because one has to be selfish to be able to fight and suffer, to love loneliness and hell. To stop, to cough, to be freezing, not feeling one's legs, to feel nauseous, to vomit, have headache, a shock, blood running down your body... Have you got something better to offer me?

The secret is not in the legs. It is to find enough courage to go out and run when it's raining, windy, when it's snowing. When flashes of lightning hit the trees. When snowballs or ice rain hit your legs, your body and make you cry. To continue, you have to dry the tears from your face to be able to see the stones, the obstacles, the sky. Forget some hours of party, face tens of reproaches, say no to a girl, to the warmth of the blanket covering your face... Send everything to hell and go out in the rain until your legs bleed after having fallen down and risen again to keep running up... Until your legs shout: ENOUGH! And leave you alone in the middle of a storm in unknown mountains... until death.

Shorts drenched by the snow, brought by the wind that slaps you face and freezes your sweat. Light body, light legs. Feel the way the pressure of your legs and the weight of your body are concentrated on the metatarsus of your feet's fingers, exerting a pressure capable of breaking stones, destroying planets and moving continents. With both legs in the air, flying like an eagle and running faster than a cheetah.

Or when you are going downhill, when your legs sink in snow or mud, just before pushing forward, and make you feel free to fly, scream of rage, of hatred and love in the heart of the mountain, where only the bravest rodents or birds can become your confessors, hidden in their nest under the rocks...

They are the only ones who know your secrets and your fears. Because losing means dying. And you cannot die without giving your best, everything, without crying because of pain and injuries, you cannot give up. You have to fight until death. Glory is the greatest thing, you cannot reach it without giving everything you have. You have to fight, suffer and die. Without that, nothing is worth it. The time to suffer has come, the time to fight has come, the time to win has come. Kiss or die.