When reading biographies or autobiographies of brilliant men you can expect to be exposed to their particular field of expertise. Perhaps you are familiar with or at least somewhat knowledgeable in that field. Perhaps you are just curious. But with Ervin Laszlo’s work, Simply Genius!: And Other Tales from My Life, you are challenged on three fronts. Your curiosity has to span three separate and diverse areas of knowledge.
Laszlo, you see, excelled in three fields; first he was a child prodigy and star of the concert stage on the piano. Then, almost casually and for reasons it is easy for a “normal” person to understand, he decided to search out and master another field: science. Then, once again, some 25 years later, Laszlo underwent another paradigm shift and mastered, and founded, yet another field of expertise dealing with what he calls "quantum consciousness.”
Laszlo gave his first concert at age nine and for the next 18 years toured the world as the headliner for dozens of orchestras. Then, at the age of 27, Laszlo became a driving force in the fields of philosophical science, systems theory, and integral theory – or as it’s been called, the theory of everything. Then finally later in life he seemed to combine all of his genius into the foundation of a sort of spiritual science, the Akashic Field and the above mentioned field of thought called quantum consciousness.
Laszlo was born in Hungary in 1932 and spent his formative years living under the German occupation where his family was hunted by the Nazis because they had Jewish ancestors. His father owned a shoe manufacturing plant and his mother was a piano player of no great distinction or training. By the age of nine, young Ervin had demonstrated a remarkable ability on the piano, and was able to not only memorize extremely long and difficult classical piano pieces – he admittedly is worse than mediocre at reading music — but to master the physical technique to play them.
He tells a story early in the book of having insisted on playing Beethoven’s Appassionata, a piece considered to require great maturity not only to read and understand, but to convey the emotion involved in the work. His mother took him to the renowned professor Arnold Székely, who upon hearing Laszlo play it threw his hands in the air and said, "simply genius!"
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