Unlocking Our Genius Potential

The term genius comes from the Latin root that means to produce or give birth. In ancient Rome the term came to be associated with a guardian spirit. Over time, the term evolved to be associated with an individual’s capacities, skills or creative powers. This shift from the universal to the individual, however, has subtly misdirected our attention as to the source of ‘genius’. We believe that it is associated with high intelligence or creativity linked to specific favoured individuals. If we reflect, however, on the original meaning of the term, we can come to a quite different conclusion about the nature, source and potential for genius development.

The illusion of the ego-personality, the illusion of the external view of our existence makes us believe that we are born with certain capacities based on our genes, and that we are furthered in our development by the connections we have, the society we are born into, and the interaction between our developed capacities, educational process and our opportunities to put these to work through our network. Nature, and nurture, together bring about the result. In this view, certain favoured individuals are chosen to shine, while everyone else simply finds a way to get along and somehow survive. This view believes that we are the creators of our ideas, our inspirations, our flashes of intuition that lead to extraordinary results.

There is, however, another view. We note that sometimes the same idea, invention, creative inspiration occurs in multiple individuals far separated in the world, around the same time. If the nature of our capabilities lies in our ability to receive, assimilate and express forces at work in the universe, recognising that our being is not independent of that universal consciousness, but a receiving and transmitting station, then the concept of genius can be seen as the ability to receive and the ability to utilise what we receive.

Nikola Tesla famously stated: “My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”

Albert Einstein noted: "A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

For most people, the chakras are only partially open and active to capture the energies, the vibrations of particular frequencies. The development of the capacity to open up the chakras to receive a higher intensity of energy and utilise it, is one that takes place as the being matures, over lifetimes. As the chakras open, and as the higher chakras develop, the individual can become a nexus of powerful creative forces, dependent on which chakra acts as the receiving and transmitting focus.

The question then turns on what stands in the way of such development. We observe that we live by habits, instincts, protocols about how to live our lives and fit into society that have developed through the socialisation process over countless millennia. We grow with expectations placed on us, we are fixated on various forms of outer status and markers of success, we fear doing something that will make us appear abnormal, different or unusual. These expectations create an obstacle that circumscribes our lives and our willingness to look at and try new avenues of development. In some cases, we allow the external focus to channel our attention and energies into dissipating directions. We participate in the process of our own limitations through our desire to be part of the social network within which we are born.

Those who take up the practices of spiritual development, of yoga, of meditation, devotion, concentration, find ways to systematically enhance the energy flow through the chakras, and thus, may find opening of new capabilities and powers that they had not previously considered. Each chakra reveals new opportunities for growth and expression that were not evident before the opening occurred.

When the individual shifts his standpoint from the external being to the psychic being, he is liberated from the attachments to all the external forms and expectations, and this, too, opens up a pathway for a freer action of the forces, liberated from the fear and limitations we have built as the external personality we wear in life.

The Mother notes: “You can multiply your possibilities, enlarge and increase them; you can suddenly bring up something you did not think you had…. When one discovers one’s psychic being within, at the same time there develop and manifest, quite unexpectedly, things one could not do at all before and which one didn’t think were in one’s nature. Of this too I have had numerous examples….”

“I used to know a young girl who was born in a very ordinary environment, who had not received much education and wrote rather clumsy French, who had not developed her imagination and had absolutely no literary sense: that seemed to be among the possibilities she did not have. Well, when she had the inner experience of contact with her psychic being, and as long as the contact was living and veyr present, she wrote admirable things. When she fell back from that state into an ordinary one, she could not even put two sentences together correctly! And I saw examples of both kinds of her writing.”

“There is a genius within everyone of us — we don’t know it. We must find the way to make it come out — but it is there sleeping, it asks for nothing better than to manifest, we must open the door to it.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 6 More Lights on the Psychic Being, pp. 183-184