Nature loves a mystery and each soul born is a mystery waiting to be revealed, a meaningful story waiting to unfold. No one can prove it, nor can it be simply disproven. But all the old stories depict it and our dreams hint at it and life at critical times requires that we act as if it were true. The awakened individual has always been an agent of change and an assistant to creation ongoing. Human beings are both a genius production of nature and the genius producers of culture. The awakening of our genius self allows us to deliver the gifts we have been given and contribute meaning as well as beauty too the world. An old idea found in many traditions holds that each person comes to this world of change at a time when they have something meaningful to offer. Meaningful solutions to the overwhelming problems of the world would be closer at hand if it was better understood that each person born bears within them a gift that the world might need.
Great crisis and impossible tasks can uncover hidden resources and reveal veins of genius that can alter the course of history. The threat of collapse and utter loss can also serve to awaken genius qualities and radical solutions. Each soul desires to be part of something greater, something "larger than life," for we each harbor within ourselves a larger life and a greater self waiting to become known. Everyone intuits the possibility of a greater life; yet this greatness now tends to be imagined as something outside ourselves. Most campaigns that promise liberation - be they political or spiritual, base advertising, or high-energy motivational programs - direct us toward outer goals. Meanwhile, there is a greater self within that tries to surface at each turning point in our lives.
The genius of human nature involves innate capacities for creation and invention that are important in the life of each individual and essential to the balance of the world. The true individual who, by virtue of being himself or herself, enters a state of partnership with the ongoing acts of creation and thereby adds something to life that was not there before. When the troubles are all around us, everyone can find some place where they are needed, where they can help all that is wounded and help protect all that is threatened.
To borrow from the genius of Emerson again: "This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it." Yet, knowing what to do with the conditions of the world may depend more than ever on knowing how each of us is naturally threaded to the world.
- Michael Meade
Excerpted from The Genius Myth
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