Interview with Dr. Ervin Laszlo in NYC
Book Tour: SIMPLY GENIUS
Dr. Ervin Laszlo
BACKGROUND
A child prodigy on the piano. The holder of the highest degree of the Sorbonne(the State Doctorate), four honorary Ph. D's and numerous awards and distinctions, including the 2001 Goi Peace Award and the 2005 Assisi Mandir of peace Prize. The Author or contributor to more than 80 books and is the two-time Nobel peace Prize nominee. A former professor of philosophy, systems theory and future studies educator, and the founder and president of an international think tank-the club of Budapest, as well as of the General Evolution Research Group.
1. What led you to start these institutions and what was your mission statement?
When you are looking at the world around you and you see the kind of problems that we face, you ask yourself what kind of ideas we need to get past it. Why are we stuck with the kind of things that are only creating more heat than light? There was no kind of preconceived plan that I sat down and said now we are creating this group, this think tank. It comes together and when the opportunities come, the thing is to seize them and to not allow them to slip by and say okay, now there is something possible to do and let’s raise the issue and see what happens; and sometimes things may go.
2. What prompted you to write your current book "SIMPLE GENIUS"? I know your friends encouraged you, I did see that part, but was there anything intuitive or instinctive that kind of propelled you to say now is the time?
Actually I resisted it initially because I was not interested in talking about myself. I want to talk about ideas and what to do, how we can join together. When people came up with this idea, they said well maybe there is something of interest to see what made me, which has happened to other people, shift from one field to another and what made me to go in this direction, I’m going in? And so, when people ask me that and journalists have asked me off and on, and I had a couple of set anecdotes you know and it started with; how did I shift from music to philosophy?; how did I meet my wife?; what led me to the UN and that type of stuff? And so I wrote those down and that was very fast, because I had them in my hand, in my head and I wrote them out. Each one took only a couple of hours to do. Then after a week or so I had a handful of, half- a-dozen of stories. Then Friend said, why don't you write this and that about what happened later and what happened before and I started having fun. I lived myself living back into those days, like I have a lot of recollections to go with NY. Like my first debut recital at 15 years old and I joined the UN for 7 years and so I was working there, so I have many recollections about NY and it's wonderful to live yourself back into it. Now if you are back some place, then those things come. But also, mentally as an artist you would appreciate that you can lift yourself back into a period of your life and you can begin to see things and remember things. It’s enjoyable to pretend that there I am again, a 15 year old or maybe a 35 year or whatever; I'm doing this or that. How was it in those days? Eventually that made up and became a book.
3. As a former musician, what did you discover about yourself at that very young age?
Music is something that I can express myself. It's not, I was never thinking of music as a profession or career. It is a kind of part of show business when you are doing it when you are doing it professionally, you have to play in public, you have to get engagements, get good reviews, you try to etc..., but that’s not the part that interested me. The part that interested me always is the experience. When you play music, you feel that you are entering another world, another dimension and then you play to people, public and you can help other people move onto that and there is the reinforcement and a marvelous feeling. And that's what always drove me, that's what my interest in music, is the experience. It’s the same type of experience that ultimately took me on to science and philosophy, asking myself, what kind of world do we live in and how can I contribute to it? And then allowing the ideas to flow... That’s what one does in art and that’s what one does in music and I think it does that same thing in science as well. Because the great discoveries and the great ideas don't come by little by little, by doing the ground work...You need to do the ground work also, they come, and all of a sudden a key idea pops into your head and then you work it out.
4. How did these discoveries serve you in your life?
It’s a great sense of being able to do something meaning to me and meaningful to others and that can also help, also provide, and pave the way towards something, a better condition in this world.
5. You referred to a shift in your life as "An Epiphany in the Alps”, could you tell us about that experience and how it changed your life?
It came about the time when it was 9 months or so after my 1st son was born and I asked myself at that point, what do I want to do with the rest of my life? Do I want to continue in this way traveling all over the world or do I want to think about some of those things that I heard about as a child, because my uncle was a philosopher and I had a lot of contact with my Uncle. We would take long walks together, when I was a child and those questions were in the back of my mind. So I said should I also devote my time to looking at those things and then I started reading, writing and attending courses and launched, entirely on my own a second career, that ultimately became dominant and then it just I had to leave the first one, because you cannot do everything at once, because there is not enough time for that so. I allowed myself to go after this hunch at that moment in the Alps looking out at this sunlit landscape, New Years Eve asking myself, is that what I want to do or what is it that I want to do with my life? I allowed these intuitions to come and the next morning I said yes. Now I started seriously thinking about it, reading, taking courses and talking to people and seeing what I could come up with.
6. At the TEDx Youth Day Dare to Dream conference in Hong Kong, you spoke of the internet of Nature or the Akashic Records, where everything is recorded. Is there a way to access this internet of nature to better serve humanity?
I think we all do to some extent, but most of us suppress it, its intuition. But those who have experience with any form of art, poetry of music, I think have a direct experience and that is an access already to this basic, a field, call it whatever you want, a basic dimension in the world where all the wisdom, where all the, everything that has ever happened in some sense is maintained and you can get an access to that, you can kind of feel what it is, you can get these hunches and intuitions if you allow your mind to relax. That's the basic idea of deep prayer and meditation, your mind relaxes and you allow the things to flow in and so sure we can. And people are intuitive, people who are more spiritual, who are more artistic and also very creative people can, they can just well in the sciences and in art. When you are creative, your information source comes from there. There’s a very interesting quote from Thomas Edison, this I mention in my book who wrote in a little article in an Indiana Newspaper at the time, "people said that i invented things, I never invented anything. All these things came to me."
7. In an excerpt, produced by the Graduate Institute about the vital role of higher education, you speak about the role of the generation of new thinkers. What practices can be introduced and implemented to facilitate the transformation in our youth, to bring forth this new consciousness to sustain our planet?
We have to develop a consciousness that is inherent in all people. It was inherent, and much more community expression in traditional cultures, which were more in touch with each other and nature. It's suppressed these things and this suppression is the repression of our natural instincts is a temporary fault. It's going the wrong way for the past 50-60 years. This humanity going the way of only thinking of oneself and short term interests and thinking that it doesn't, everybody’s out for themselves and it's all a jungle. If you think it's all a jungle, then it is a jungle, then it's a chaos. Then you realize eventually that the world has a harmony, as a base to it where all living things are a part of this harmony. We ourselves divorced ourselves from it and it’s now time to get back into it. That way, I think you allow yourself to become more whole, to become more yourself, more your true nature. I don’t think human nature is this pitiless, merciless struggle for survival. It's not in the nature for that. People said Darwin said that, but it was an element of what he said. He said that Nature is operating by symphony, by working together, by cooperation and not fighting each other. So we have to get back to life on this planet, which is a whole harmonious system of which we are a part and we have to be a positive part.
8. If there is one vital advise you would give to humanity that could make an immediate impact on their lives and those around them, what would it be?
Wake-up and become yourself. In a sense, we have artificial identities. We believe we are separate, mechanistic beings who are manipulating the world around us and the one's that are the most aggressive will win. All these are artificial and wrong ideas. So I say to the young people wake-up and think of yourself as being a part of this tremendous web of life and become part of it. Go with it. Go with and become a positive part. We can do it, because we all have it in us, but it takes a moment. Take a little distance. Stop the rat race. Stop this fight for short term advantage and just look a little bit and see what is it that you are here to do on earth and then you'll get the answer.
Anthony Austin of En La Escena www.enlaescena.com, in association with T. Cleo Austin of Mercury Muze www.tcleoaustin.com , would like to thank Dr. Ervin Laszlo and his staff for the opportunity, honor, and pleasure of speaking with you this sunny afternoon June 18, 2011 in NYC on his book tour. We wish him all much success in all his current and future endeavors.
