7th floor iii)imaginary school supplies department

Some people label playing with opposites and wedding dualities the essence of genius. I don’t believe geniuses label it as genius. I think they just think in this playful way. I think they enjoy the tension between the expected and the unexpected. They attend to some detail that attracts attention A seemingly unimportant detail repeatedly overlooked begins a cascade of interesting ideas or phenomenon. On this plane, we have left the predictable rules behind in favor of altered perspectives.

What we assign to genius might be a set of principles that we all could practice. My list includes the following.
-new juxtapositions
-altering time or place axes
-making simple comparisons, the heart of metaphor
-applying a foreign concept to a familiar situation
-applying a simple concept to foreign situation
-noticing an underlying false assumption and correcting it
-understanding a principle from another context
-following an intuitive insight
-persevering
-experimenting
-redefining impossible as improbable and selecting a bias to increase probability

Duality Exercise #3: Inner Genius

A foundation for our own inner genius encourages us to think more openly. We too quickly allocate the playfulness of a genius’ mind to them, excluding ourselves. For each of the examples above, dust off a memory of a discovery about life. Include in the list things we learned later represented a distortion of truth. I think geniuses treat errors fairly leniently. The error simply invites us back into the process of discovery. In this case playfulness serves as a way of holding simultaneous perspectives of the known universe. That universe becomes expansive or contracted depending on what experience engages us. Or we could say by where we feel our breath. By definition this represents a dynamic wave of awareness into which we check in and out depending on our level of engagement.


Now turn this list of real or imagined discoveries into a little chart. Annotate the chart with some related or unrelated detail about when the discovery occurred. Set up a simple genius chair. A favorite chair will do nicely. Place the reminder sheet under the cushion. No cushion? Then tape it or attach it in some other way to the chair. Invitation: use this chair for reverie.

Here's how i started my chart, I make them up.
-new juxtapositions: plastic toy collections by color
making smoothies out of frozen bananas
-altering time or place axes: numbering sequential journal pages;
stopping professional work to write this decade long oevre
-making simple comparisons, the heart of metaphor
comparing myself to a wave on the sea...