Becoming Supergenius, Part II: Creativity and Transformation

By Lincoln Stoller

Becoming Supergenius has grown on the scorched earth that is the current state of learning, teaching, and education. This is no small matter.

I asked thirty-five people, with over 1,600 years of accumulated experience, how and why they learned. From their answers I resolved 328 learning secrets that are part of any person's jou

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mind Strength Balance
• Release date: Jan 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781777420475

Lincoln Stoller

Lincoln Stoller works with clients who want to reinvent themselves professionally, mentally, medically, and spiritually. Moving through therapy, counseling, mentoring, and coaching, he explores cultures, lineages, and families, combining wisdom of the body and science of the mind. Change happens quickly when you engage with chaos.Lincoln Stoller has a PhD in physics, certifications in hypnotherapy, project management, and clinical psychology. He has 50 years of experience with personal development, a background in business software, brain biofeedback training, artificial intelligence, spiritual learning, shamanic healing, and psychedelics. An experienced mountaineer, certified scuba diver, and registered pilot, he's published in a dozen fields and has 8 books on topics from sleep to education.

Book preview

Creativity and Transformation

328 secrets from 1,600 years of experience

by

Lincoln Stoller, PhD, CHt

Then I took the little book out of the angel’s hand and ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth. But when I had eaten it, my stomach became bitter. And he said to me, ‘You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings.’

― Revelation 10:8-11, New King James Version

First Edition.

Published 2020 by Mind Strength Balance

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com

Copyright © 2020 Lincoln Stoller, All rights reserved.

Except for brief excepts in reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

Stoller, Lincoln, 1956- author.

becoming supergenius, part II : the inner world, creativity and transformation / Lincoln Stoller.

Includes bibliographic references.

ISBN 978-1-7774204-8-2 (mobi) | ISBN 978-1-7774204-7-5 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-7774204-5-1 (paper) | ISBN 978-1-7774204-6-8 (hard cover) ISBN 978-1-7774204-9-9 (audio)

Subjects: LCSH: Creative Ability. | Self-actualization. | Wisdom. | Genius. | Learning.

Cover Art:

etching Albrecht Dürer

tinting Polina Hrytskova

To my sons.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Preface to Part 2

I – Thoughts and Perceptions

Ideas

196. Think beyond yes or no.

197. Duality is not dichotomy.

198. Be aware of your whole mindset.

199. Math is not about numbers, it’s about thinking.

200. Avoid group thinking even when you feel compelled to conform.

201. Everything you see clearly, you see through some filter.

202. Are you the creator of your own problems?

203. Distinguish good from bad ways of thinking.

204. Let your mental states change.

Mind

205. Intuition favors the quiet mind.

206. Boredom leads to disconnection.

207. Think with thoughts, not words.

Feelings

208. When you’re unclear, you’re wrong.

209. Don’t doubt your desires.

210. Strive to remember.

211. Make note of your feelings.

212. Pay attention to how things feel.

213. Hear your fear and deal with it.

214. Where did you lose your intuition?

Inclinations

215. Similarity and proximity: inferring connections.

216. Parsimony and closure: making things good.

217. Continuity and connection: projecting beyond the known.

Actions

218. Work to develop different skills.

219. Recognize the goals for which the rules are designed.

220. What’s commonly presumed is logically flawed.

221. Use poor information when necessary.

222. Expect to vacillate.

223. Slow it down.

2 – Perception Bias

Anchoring

224. Recognize the assumptions.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

225. Admit failure often and quickly.

226. Leverage Failure.

Attention Makes Things Real

227. Aim for failure.

228. Distraction causes distress.

229. Control fear.

Backfire

230. Strive to see something useful in any criticism.

Barnum

231. You see everything through some filter.

232. Don’t doubt your desires.

Cherry-picking

233. Be aware of how you remain in the neighborhood of the familiar.

234. What works is not true and what fails is not false.

Confirmation

235. Confirm, don’t justify.

236. Don’t ask friends for advice.

Confusing Appearance with Reality

237. Pay attention to what you think is real.

238. Deeply consider new ideas.

239. Share what you know and learn.

Declinism

240. Don’t let your conclusions control you.

241. Disguising your feelings.

242. Communicate your emotions right away.

Framing

243. Endeavor to remember how you feel about important events.

Halo Effect

244. Be an astute listener.

245. Gamify learning situations.

Ignorance Error

246. Judgment is always flawed.

247. Design your own rules.

Negativity Aversion

248. Discomfort is necessary; comfort is optional.

Overestimating Others

249. Assume you’re misunderstood.

Feeling Unbiased

250. Imagine what you don’t perceive.

3 – Presentation Bias

The Fallacy of the Obvious

251. Address situations with faith in yourself.

Dunning-Kruger

252. Give weight to your insight.

253. Be disputatious.

Reactance

254. Defuse destructive criticism.

255. Criticism is often incorrect.

256. Digest criticism.

Weak Placebo

257. Things true in one situation are false in another.

Strong Placebo

258. What’s presumed is usually flawed.

Bystander

259. If you see an opportunity, take it.

Self-serving

260. Heartbreak is empowering.

Narcissism

261. You are less competent under stress.

Low Self-Esteem

262. Love yourself.

Groupthink

Cohesion

263. Work to develop different skills.

264. Be considerate to machines.

265. Avoid groupthink, even when you feel compelled.

Future Projection

266. Examine your assumptions.

267. Be aware of how you’re heard.

268. Create change.

269. Make it up as you go along.

4 – Gender

Gender and Authority

Violation

270. Consider sexuality in the affairs of people.

271. To get past differences, see things from an opposing point of view.

272. People of different genders think differently.

273. You find what you expect to see.

274. Women are more susceptible to stress.

275. Manage brain fatigue.

276. Get over differences quickly.

277. Distinguish between conflicts of values and conflicts of valuation.

278. Men focus on conflict. Women focus on support.

279. The prejudice you dislike is your own.

280. The victim always plays a role.

281. The assaulting male acts out of fear or greed.

5 – Journey

Skill

282. When you focus on making a difference, you become an expert.

283. Don’t focus only on the present.

284. Solve problems with the same thinking that got you into them.

Multi-tasking

285. You can’t multi-task, but you do, and you should.

286. Look at your situations as if they were a game.

287. The better player does not try to win.

288. Always be testing.

289. Perfection is for idiots.

Evolution

290. Tune your expectations.

Dysfunction

291. Don’t be neurotic, be grounded.

292. Don’t be psychotic, be centered.

293. Don’t be depressed, be real.

294. Find your insanity and tame it.

295. Find and follow the cycles.

296. People don’t change, for the most part.

297. People do change, but just barely.

Creativity

298. Be creative.

299. Live in confidence.

300. Live in self-respect.

301. Look for guidance, not inspiration.

302. Be committed to the work.

303. Develop your sense of value.

304. Develop an independent sense of direction.

305. Feel the contrast between the high and the low.

306. Patience.

307. Resilience, the ability to recover from lows.

308. Have an independent sense of appreciation.

309. Be curious.

310. Don’t be too cautious.

6 – Arriving

Coming Home

311. Change is energy. Move toward change.

312. Beware of patriotism.

313. The need for money fills an emptiness in the soul.

314. The secret of success is a non-attachment to results.

315. Act from your core.

316. Acting with faith is not wishful thinking.

317. Don’t set yourself the goal of making a difference.

318. Wider is more important than deeper.

319. Find wisdom, embrace ignorance.

320. Welcome discouragement.

321. Feel grateful for the stupid.

322. Fix broken bridges.

323. Recognize the source of conflict.

324. Recognize the potential of silence.

325. Think for yourself.

326. Have the courage to do it your way.

327. Try it, you might like it.

328. Don’t be in such a hurry.

7 – Summary

Departures

Return

Transitions

8 – Looking Ahead

Conscious Learning

Conscious Thinking

Lateral Thinking

Subconscious Thinking

Nonthinking

Dreaming

References

Quotation Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

I wrote these volumes because there was no encompassing collection of observations pertaining to the subject of learning. So many authors are playing the blind men and an elephant game, extracting one aspect of the subject and calling it primary.

They call it management, media, economics, science, athletics, education, philosophy, psychology, morality, artistry, or any number of subjects. Transformation is a part of every approach to knowing anything. When limited to a particular aspect of knowledge, the discussion is incomplete.

These institutions protect themselves through tacit alliances and disguised mandates. Their primary mandate is to be immortal. We live in their shadow.

Institutions create hierarchies beholden to them, withholding full knowledge from outsiders. Every institution drives from its garden of privileges and rewards any independent agent who knows too much. In this way, we’re left with a disintegrated understanding of creativity and transformation.

Few recognize as did Jesus Christ and Pablo Picasso that we are born wise as children and suffer for having this wisdom removed. The essential guidance of using one’s emotions is ignored.

I acknowledge all these people and their institutions, as well as a handful who do not identify with any institution. Their ideas and actions have given me the structure I’ve laid out here. I hope you’ll find it to be an interesting arrangement.

Preface to Part 2

These volumes enumerate lessons extracted from the thirty-five interviews inThe Learning Project, which were collected between 2008 and 2016. I added topics of my own—such as the benefits of bad teachers—and others recognized as important—such as the decision biases enumerated by the economists Tversky and Kahneman.

Various authors present guidance for thinking and learning and most have a prejudice regarding how you should think by espousing logic, reason, intuition, emotion, reward, or practicality. Most discussions are goal-oriented, and their goal is to make you become a better leader, artist, athlete, expert, scholar, businessperson, or sage. My goal is more general. It is to examine the interaction between the environment and our minds that affect how we learn.

I’ve invented the term supergenius to refer to something quite different from the superior over-achiever. We commonly associate aptitude, skill, and prowess with success, intelligence, and celebrity. But aptitude, skill, and prowess are things that can be defined objectively while success, intelligence, and celebrity are subjective terms defined by consensus.

I would venture that most supergeniuses are not recognized as successful or intelligent, and are not celebrated. They are connected to something deep within themselves and don’t give a shit what other people think. If geniuses blaze the trails we follow, supergeniuses blaze trails that we’re not yet ready to. You may wish you were a genius, but I don’t think you’d wish to be a supergenius.

My notion of supergenius is related to my notion of enlightenment, but the word enlightenment comes with too many presumptions and too much baggage. The notion of enlightenment that I’m referring to is not religious, awe-inspiring, or spectacular, but something that’s very private, perhaps hidden and unexpressed. It’s a kind of self-recognition that focuses one’s spirit and life energy to draw out one’s full potential, and to do this without regard to the threat of injury or the promise of reward. Supergeniuses can become mad scientists, starving artists, or both. Sometimes they get rich; usually, they don’t.

Most of the advice we’re told about how to elevate our actions and thoughts is only half true because every descent into error, failure, and regret is a learning opportunity, and the darker the situation, the greater the potential. In many cases, the most important lessons are only learned through error and failure. This is true not only for the outcomes of our experiments but also for the strategies we apply.

You’re giving up stuff that may be a good thing in your life because you’re so focused on a goal. And then, when you get it, you’re not even happy. Just because you have had an idea in your mind about what you wanted to do for X number of years doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the right thing to do. What I’ve learned is that a lot of things that seemed like they were the end of the world, turned out to be the best things that ever happened to me.

— Alice Placert, editor, from The Learning Project

We’re told the best teaching is done by the best teachers, but it’s often offered by the worst. The common decision biases that are derided as foolish—such as following the crowd, and seeing only what you’re inclined to believe—also reflect important truths. Following the insight that the opposite of any deep truth is another deep truth, I’m searching for the guidance in both what’s fundamentally correct and its opposite.

Consider Yogi Berra, the Major League Baseball, 18-time All-Star who was notable for such witticisms of seeming nonsense as: Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true, and When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Advice that makes no sense no matter which way you read it.

There is a wisdom in his statements, beneath the level of their contradictions, because they imply a middle road in which the truth is ambiguous. This, actually, is closer to how we experience the real world. The supergenius is someone who not only sees all sides, but also conceives of there being no side, the reality of the ambiguous, and even in this finds direction.

It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.

— Niels Bohr, PhD, physicist

It would serve each of us well to remember that we are all very ignorant.

— Albert Einstein, PhD, physicist

I – Thoughts and Perceptions

Awareness starts with perception. Thoughts are the vehicle of the mind. The mystery of our mind lies in the in-between; in what happens between perception and thought. Billions of years of evolution have developed mechanisms that operate in our minds that we have not yet even discovered because we are unaware. This actually isn’t saying that much since we know little about what drives life or creates consciousness.

We have some control over what we experience on either side of the divide between perception and thought. We exert some control over our perceptions, and we consider ourselves to be lords in the domain of our thoughts. But we are not in much control, in either case. We are aware of little of what goes on in our environment, and we have almost no control over the thoughts that enter our consciousness. However, with some effort, we can develop our skills in both regards.

A good part of my work as a therapist is to train people to expand their perception. What you perceive in the outside world affects how you think and what you are able to think about yourself. Developing a larger awareness changes what you’re aware of, changes how you process thoughts, and improves your powers of self-reflection.

This happens at a neural level. You can build finer resolution into your awareness in the same way that you can build faster reaction times through playing sports, and develop muscle memory through playing music. As you develop new awareness, new processes feedback on themselves to build cognitive systems that become part of your thinking. Once you learn to see more widely, you often cannot unsee. This is not always true, it depends on whether or not you use what you develop. If you continue to use new skills, you won’t lose them; if you leave them dormant, they will fade and can be lost.

The structure of your thoughts happens at a level that’s higher than memory. Thoughts add volition to your memories and observations. Volition is an elusive thing. Your will in thought and action is closely connected to the thoughts and meanings over which you think you have control. But since you don’t have much control over the thoughts you have and the meanings you feel, you also don’t have much control over the decisions you make.

The more distance you get from yourself, the more volition becomes apparent. Separating yourself from your instinctive, reflexive, or habitual thoughts is fundamental to self-reflection and if you have second thoughts, then those thoughts—the second ones—are thoughts you can call your own.

At these removed levels—beyond the instinctive, reflexive, and habitual—you can decide how you’re going to think and what you’re going to think about. This is the level of our well-formed ideas and our freer will. Most people’s consciousness consists of poorly formed ideas, ideas they have not really thought about. The first step in controlling your mind lies in reflecting on your thinking process.

Ideas

196

. Think beyond yes or no.

We naturally see the opposition in choices. We fabricate useful exaggerations that create allies and enemies. Dichotomies create equalities that bring allies together and inequalities that send enemies apart. Agreement is a resource and disagreement a warning or opportunity. Recognize that the way things are framed serves an actionable purpose. By reducing and clarifying options, the process of amplifying differences can move things forward. The purpose is to support action, not truth.

Creating opposition requires reframing that overlooks subtleties and similarities. We do this all the time, creating opposition, boosting contrast, and enforcing boundaries. It’s neural as well as logical, and it appears to reflect the truth in things but doesn’t. We are creating both generalities and specifics for the purpose of making sense out of the details.

There is information in details that lacks generality, as well as information in generalities that lack detail. And while it’s easy to state generalities, it’s hard to state accurate generalities. We generally opt for the easy path, the easy generalities we act on and believe in. This is how we make models for how things might be, but these are not the real things, as these are not the only models.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

― Karl Popper, PhD, philosopher

It is our habit to prefer specifics as it’s easier to agree to them, but it is generalities that move us. This is how sales works: you believe in the specific item or action you’re familiar with and you hope for the general result.

A connection to our inner selves and our stream of consciousness is undeniably what makes us creative. We all have the potential to become artists precisely because we dream. We should allow ourselves to balance the focused mind with the wandering mind, and skilled daydreamers do this naturally. It may be wise, then, to question whether we should always be living in the moment and whether this is the best way to foster creative thinking. Finding this ‘middle way’ between mindfulness and mind wandering can help us enjoy optimal benefits of both ways of thinking.

— Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, from Wired for Creativity, Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (2016, p. 43)

197

. Duality is not dichotomy.

Duality means there are two; dichotomy means two that are opposed. There is a duality between the general and the specific, but that is not a dichotomy; these things are not in opposition. You can be both expansive and specific, seeing things in the microscopic moment and the far distant future. It’s the weaving together of these two that is the fabric of creativity and wisdom.

A fundamental duality—perhaps the fundamental duality—is the distinction between the separate and the collective. The view of things as separate affirms a difference between separation and connection. Most people see this as a duality but it’s not, it’s a dichotomy.

The collective view complements the separate view. In the collective view, there is no collection of the parts because there are no parts. Instead, there are different states of the whole and these states differ by some property shared throughout the whole. You might think of this property as frequency, phase, turbulence, or motion. It’s a quality that’s evenly distributed throughout the whole.

States of the whole are quantitatively different, not qualitatively different. You can move from one state of the whole to another by changing one property, but you must change it everywhere. You cannot simply add more heat, light, or energy to one component because there is no one component. You must add it everywhere. Just as different parts are distinct across some boundaries in the separatist view, different wholes are distinct according to some pervasive measure in the collective view.

While the whole does not have parts, it does have places. The whole has some character that allows you to navigate within it, but what you see is the same in all directions. It is not featureless but it is repetitive. What you see when navigating within the whole is not different things within it, but different relationships. You see changes in how things are ordered.

In a culture which is based on mechanistic views of reality the atomistic/segmented view of reality is typical, and people’s ability to see wholeness is, in general, very much diminished… Most educated people do not see the wholeness of the world around them.

— Christopher Alexander (2002), from The Nature of Order

198

. Be aware of your whole mindset.

In the book Mindset, The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck (2007) distinguishes the fixed from the growth mindset. In the fixed mindset, your values and goals are given and you work within them. In the growth mindset, you view values and goals as changeable and evolving; you attempt to create and work toward them. Each has its own criteria for success and failure.

To some extent, these two mindsets are incommensurate, but not necessarily. The first focuses on optimizing for the present, the second focuses on the future. These goals will differ only if the future differs from the present. Optimizing for the present means doing what has worked before. Optimizing for a different future means inferring novelty and changing to meet it.

Our awareness is built on dichotomy, and our personality is built on contrast. We overlook wholeness as a decision-making concept. Unity does not admit choice but we can still be attracted or repelled by it.

We’re attracted to warmth, light, and comfort, and repelled from cold, dark, and pain. These are wholistic concepts and we are cognizant of them, and we often chose not to break them into their components. There are many whole concepts we choose to leave intact, but a good deal of insight can be gained when we examine things and resolve differences. The first step in resolving differences is to create duality. In most cases, the duality we perceive is what we have created, either we forced things apart or we’re overlooking their similarity.

We have the power to experience and manipulate holistic experiences. We can remove ourselves from pain, or we can maintain self-awareness without perceiving any world around us. We can create warmth in frigid environments, see light in darkness. This does not happen when we are in our familiar world, it happens in states of awareness that are open to alternative values and perceptions. We see the unusual whole when we extend ourselves into unusual states.

Trance states are such states. In those states, we experience the world differently. We dream in a trance state, but love and war are also trance states. In trance states, we can rearrange our sense of self and place. When we bring these rearrangements back to our normal, dichotomous world we can experience the normal world differently.

It seems necessary to disconnect ourselves from our experience of the normal in order to make changes to it. It’s sort of like changing gears: you need to disengage before shifting. Note that all states are trance states, we just call the ones we share normal.

There is a popular spiritual movement called non-duality and it is misconceived. Duality is essential, it’s dichotomy that’s optional. Without duality there are no boundaries and you are blind, without dichotomy there is no conflict and you proceed without resistance. This should be called the non-dichotomy movement.

The non-duality movement is largely about releasing resistance. Resistance also plays an essential role. It’s what keeps you on any path. Resistance is a judgment you make when you get to a boundary. That judgment might be error, conflict, or pain. All of these can be reframed, overlooked, or released, but there are consequences.

If the dichotomy is real—which is to say the conflict cannot be avoided—then you will encounter it. The dichotomy might only be symbolic, in which case you may be able to reorient yourself or repurpose the result. Some results, such as those associated with fear, might not exist at all.

It’s difficult to be sure of what’s real until you’ve tried to change it. The question isn’t so much what’s real as what’s changeable. You can’t change the physics of a wall, but you can change your perception of it. There is also the question of degree: you might actually be able to change the physics of a wall to some degree, but not appreciably. The question of changing reality then becomes one of having a practical effect.

In the end—for all intent and purposes—you don’t even care what’s changeable any more than you care about what path is the right path. You care about the process of moving forward, and even the forward part may be unnecessary. A process is a means and a goal is the object of a process. This is another dichotomy: goal versus process. In truth, one is not greater than the other. You need the whole and its parts, the network consisting of both together.

199

. Math is not about numbers, it’s about thinking.

Numbers are to math as rulers are to architecture, or