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Author Topic:   Genius
Valus
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posted September 22, 2009 09:04 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message
.

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Yin
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posted September 22, 2009 09:38 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Yin     Edit/Delete Message
Chop wood, carry water...

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T
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posted September 22, 2009 10:49 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for T     Edit/Delete Message
Nice poem.

I think genius comes and it goes. Like wisdom and folly.

We all occasionally tap in.

What do you think?

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Valus
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posted September 22, 2009 02:40 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message

Exactly.

And I think we could talk about it for hours and never say all there is to say. As I define it, there are many forms of genius. Their relative value has more to do with personal taste than eternal truth. Genius is like a lense, that helps one man to see, and clouds the vision of another. Various forms of genius are variously sized prescription lenses. One man responds to painting, another to print. One responds to Picasso, another to El Greco; or Da Vinci; or Dega. Not everyone can respond with equal receptivity to the genius in Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Beckett. In fact, nobody can. Genius is different every time it is perceived, for it is always perceived at a different depth, from a different direction, and through different eyes. When it manifests, in the writer, the artist, the photographer, the cabby, or the clerk, I believe there is an energy, subtle or impassioned, that passes through the person, or channel. But this rush of energy is not the genius itself, only the water tossed up on the banks by a rolling wave. The wave begins somewhere unknown to us, and ends up inspiring people we don't know. For an instant only, as it passes through us, we are geniuses. If it happens to some of us more often or more effectively than to others, that is not to our credit, but only a relatively insignificant consequence of how God has presently ordered the world. We may praise the valley, if a river passes through it, but is it really to the credit of the valley? Or to God, who fashions the geography?

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Yin
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posted September 22, 2009 02:55 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Yin     Edit/Delete Message
How can you keep yourself open to that? It's sooo illusive... hard to keep. Or do we need to keep ourselves open? Maybe it's all instinctual. Maybe we are open by a divine spark when the time is right.

Or maybe...

Chop wood, carry water.
Hope for the best.

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Valus
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posted September 22, 2009 02:57 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message

Its working with us all the time. Teaching us how to open. Through trial and error. Teaching us to receive and reflect genius of many kinds and colors. The wood-cutter learns to chop with the grain, so his axe is barely dulled. The water-carrier learns to balance a pot on her head, so she may carry two in her hands. All things tend to perfection, awkwardly mastering the steps.

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cpn_edgar_winner
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posted September 22, 2009 03:01 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for cpn_edgar_winner     Edit/Delete Message
a vessel of devine inspiration....very good.
one thing is, we have to take oursELF's out of the equation I would think

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Yin
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posted September 22, 2009 03:03 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Yin     Edit/Delete Message
LOL, cpn.
How the hell do you take yourself out of... yourself?

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Valus
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posted September 22, 2009 03:15 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message

cpn, i think that raises questions about the nature of soul and spirit. Is divine inspiration exclusive to the spirit, or may it manifest in the soul? Perhaps it may even manifest in the personal ego? Can genius manifest in one of these, and not the others? Is it of a finer quality, if it is purely spirit, and not soul? Or is it better if it reflects the beauty of both? How human can divinity be, and still be divine? Is it the nature of genius to illuminate the divine within the human, or to dissolve the human in the divine? Or is one of these more fitting on one occassion; and another more fitting on another occassion?

Do we get out of the way,
or place ourselves squarely
in the path of spirit?


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Valus
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posted September 22, 2009 03:29 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message

"What's the difference
between Soul and Spirit,"
you ask?

As I see it: soul is the unconscious, including emotions, and all the ideas that have ever occurred to anybody in history.. maybe going back before mankind, and including animal data, and the memory of the earth, or even the sun. I do not see a clear distinction between soul and spirit, but spirit is like a void, a light, a space, a silence, or something that meditates on love and/or oneness. Spirit is masculine, or Yang. It is singular, purposeful. Like a straight line. Soul is feminine and wild and multifaceted, like a mystery or a dream. Spirit is the answer. Soul is the questioning. But they feed each other.

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cpn_edgar_winner
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posted September 22, 2009 03:36 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for cpn_edgar_winner     Edit/Delete Message
i don't know, it has to flow through you and not from you, if I had it figured all the way out I would be a great artist...

who knows, i am probobly wrong anyways, but I think we have to "lend" ourselves so to speak to be used to create, when we inject too much of ourselves, it muddies the water...probobly doesn't make sense.

sorry yin.

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Yin
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posted September 22, 2009 03:37 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Yin     Edit/Delete Message
cpn, you're a love. Don't be sorry.

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cpn_edgar_winner
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posted September 22, 2009 03:40 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for cpn_edgar_winner     Edit/Delete Message
but then valus has a point too...perhaps we knowingly take what is given to us and create from that point.

which of course we are born with certain talents.

so that also makes sense. perhaps it is a perfect balance, a mergence of spirit and soul.

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cpn_edgar_winner
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posted September 22, 2009 03:44 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for cpn_edgar_winner     Edit/Delete Message
thanks valus, i missed this you know. meeting somewhere on some kind of common ground and talking. it helps me through.

thanks yin.

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Valus
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posted September 22, 2009 04:02 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message

no problem, cpn.

I guess the view I'm taking is the one "they" take when they say that a writer should write what he knows. I think we create from ourselves, and the details make it our unique story, -- but they are also, maybe paradoxically, what make it universal. The energy, or inspiration, comes from above. And maybe you are right, and some impulse of selflessness triggers the receptivity to genius. But what manifests is something deeply personal, involving the channel, or individual, on every level. I spent a year reading Marcel Proust; immersed in his world. Proust created a thoroughly, ornately, personal vision of his favorite haunts in France, and gave his critical eye over to delineating the minutiae of the affectations practiced in late 19th and early 20th century French salons. His world could hardly be further removed from my own, and, yet, it was perhaps this strange and foreign element which most enchanted me; as it took me so far away. And these differences, I think, lent potency to the moments of correspondence and universality. What does it matter that we are alike, if we have not traversed distances, and differences, in order to meet on common ground? I think that the more God comes into our life, the more we honor the self, and all our personal loves, antipathies, idiosyncracies, and such. Only in loving ourselves, and all that makes us unique, can we see, and love, ourselves in others, and all that makes us alike.

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AcousticGod
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posted September 22, 2009 05:36 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for AcousticGod     Edit/Delete Message
On the theory of various form of genius, I often ponder upon the opposite, the various forms of being in a state of being deceived. There are objective truths available, but it seems none of us has the facility to view and understand them all.

I have this ongoing fantasy about what heaven is like, and for me it's a very Mercurial thing. I imagine that if there is a heaven we find our way to, that we will get the opportunity to review our lives. Anything we have questions about will be answered. Lately, my fantasy tacks on the ability to see plainly what we couldn't at the time. I think it would be fascinating to learn about our wrong thinking.

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T
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posted September 22, 2009 05:49 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for T     Edit/Delete Message
quote:
I often ponder upon the opposite, the various forms of being in a state of being deceived.

Same here!!!

Youre fantasy on heaven is familiar too.

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AcousticGod
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posted September 22, 2009 06:14 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for AcousticGod     Edit/Delete Message
Awesome! Good to know I'm not the only one that ponders such things.

I also think my fellow former earthlings may be gathered around a tv watching a highlight reel of my most embarrassing moments when I get there. I've got mixed feelings about that.

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Valus
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posted September 23, 2009 09:02 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message

It would appear as though any objective truth would defy perspective, as it would somehow have to include and reconcile all perspectives. I would say that the truth is distorted differently by everyone, and yet, it is also revealed differently to everyone. In some sense, everything is true, and everything is false. Even the gurus we most admire have distorted the truth to some extent, while revealing it. Perhaps you could say that distortion and revelation go hand-in-hand, and distortion is the sacrifice that truth pays for the sake of revelation. Perhaps everything that's manifested is simultaneously a distortion and a revelation. That's how I tend to see it. Everything with a grain of salt.

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Yin
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posted September 23, 2009 09:22 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Yin     Edit/Delete Message
So deception is not necessarily dishonesty then?

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Valus
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posted September 23, 2009 09:26 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message

LOL. That's an inside joke. And I never said deception. Deception seems to imply that there is a God willingly deceiving us. I never implied this. Except, maybe, to the extent that some degree of deception may be necessary for the sake of revelation. But, in that case, more would be revealed than hidden, so, in the final tally, you could hardly call it deception. Its like knowing something instead of nothing. The something may not be entirely accurate, but its something.

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