Notes from the Genius Master

Red-Bellied Woodpecker

Sparkill, NY

May 26.

Today will be a day which takes place only in the immediate circumstances I’m in.

It’s these immediate circumstances I’m interested in. The mind, along with the media and the Internet, invites us to participate in this vast sprawl of ideas and scale. Yet this isn’t how human beings evolved at all; our whole organism is biologically attuned to the perception of the immediate.
The word perceive is derived from two Latin roots, -per, ‘entirely,’ and -capere, ‘take’. So it means, in shorthand, to take everything in. That everything, per our sensory apparatus, is what takes place in my immediate circumstances. The intellect has the capacity to expand its interests well beyond that; yet in doing so, I frequently overlook what’s taking place right around me.

What is taking place around me, in its own turn, overwhelms what is taking place in me; and when I don’t see what is taking place in me, it metastasizes. That is to say, it loses touch with the intimate intelligence and perception of my own Being. I immediately fall under the influences not of my own perception and experience, but imaginary things of greater scale. These things tend to usurp my relationship with life.

My relationship with life can be much more intimate and directly related to my body and my sensation. It’s impossible to overestimate the usefulness of this relationship, if I can discover it. Until I do, I think I know everything. My intellect is incredibly assertive and bossy; it runs around like a wild animal, proclaiming its opinions about all and everything. It’s a nearly unstoppable force. If one ever gets a chance to see it in operation from an inward perspective that sits apart from it, one is astonished by its versatility as an invader: Atilla the Intellect.

It can’t, in a word, be trusted. It’s too clever and imaginative; it doesn’t root its conclusions in the act of breathing in and out, of perceiving the immediate.

Yet in fact the immediate is where everything truly important takes place.
It doesn’t do me any good to know what Boris Johnson is up to if the dishes don’t get done. The WHO response to stats on the use of hydroxychloroquine and death rates won’t sweep the kitchen floor.

Zen Buddhism is rife with tales of how the the guy in the kitchen, who seems to be a dull nobody quietly pushing a broom, ends up being appointed as the new master of the monastery—over all the resident Genius Masters of Buddhist doctrine.

These stories are about attention to the immediate and presence. The Genius Masters are super clever, but they don’t attend. Every human being I know, including myself, has a hyperactive clan of Genius Masters in them.

Life can become far more interesting if they shut up for a little while.

I recently tried to explain this to a friend. They got very upset over a one-sentence remark I made about how one is never going to awaken the intelligence of sensation with the intellect.
This person called me and delivered a seven-minute soliloquy on what I didn’t understand, how wrong I was, the way in which I subtly disrespected them and their practice, and so on. My answers to this were commensurately brief; there's no way to come up against the thinking part and win. It’s absolutely certain in its own mind that it is the Genius Master of every situation. The broom pusher isn’t worth the time of day.

Yet there’s more value in this pushing of brooms, this simple attention to the detail of daily-ness, than in all the thinking one can do. Thinking is actually more useful, on the whole, in the small-scale than the large one. If I think carefully about my next action, for example, making sure there is nothing I can trip over in my workspace while I’m moving about in it, it’s far more likely to have an immediate positive effect on my Being that thinking about the world economy. If I trip, I’ll injure myself; I can do something about that.

I can’t control the world economy.

So thinking on the scale of the world economy, which my hedge fund manager friend does all day and all night, isn’t useful for me. I suppose perhaps it’s tremendously useful for him; he wants more money. To him, that is the immediate. But it’s none of my business, is it? I’m not a hedge fund manager. And perhaps it's what I imagine myself to be that is important. Or, put in even more precise terms, it's what I experience myself to Be that’s important. I’m not a thing, a profession, a writer, a musician, a textile executive — I’m a creature, a human being. All these other roles are just roles that come afterwards. If I’m truly intelligent, my being is rooted in my existence, not my role. Existence exists within the immediate, not in the thoughts that attempt to fold it into a specific form.

Those are the thoughts this morning from the Genius Master. From time to time he’s not a total idiot.

He just acts like one most of the time.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.