Innerstanding

"I am 80.  So now I take chances I never took before...now I let go
and enjoy myself and to hell with everything except the music."
Arthur Rubenstein

Innerstanding is a word originally used in alchemy.

It refers to intuitive comprehension as distinguished from knowledge or understanding through analysis or logic.  It is what we would probably call intuition today.  But innerstanding is a little different and perhaps more essential to creativity.  The adept or student of alchemy, by studying ancient texts and principles, learned not only factual data about mixing chemicals, but also something primary about his or her inner life.  You could not be an alchemist – not a successful one anyway – without going on a journey of personal discovery.  Learning the craft was both about the outer facts and the inner truth.  Alchemy had as much to do with psychology as chemistry.

This is a good word to keep in mind…and a good ingredient to add to the Ingenarium mix.  Creative work, after all, is not just a process of making new things; it is a process that alters the individual as well.  It is about growing and knowing as much as it is about doing and making.  To be a creative person is to explore one’s own capacities and the world and our place in it.

Innerstanding means having a sense of one’s own strengths and weaknesses, talents and challenges, and the way our life experiences have shaped our beliefs.  Very often an ability to turn problems into projects relies on just this kind of innerstanding.  Inventor and designer Buckminster Fuller, for example, always claimed that his poor eyesight was one of his secret strengths.  He wrote: “I was born cross-eyed.  I could see only large patterns…Lenses fully corrected my vision.  Despite my new ability to apprehend details, my childhood’s spontaneous dependence only upon big patterns has persisted.”

This ability to turn weaknesses into assets is an important part of the creative process.  But it also suggests that one has to have – or develop – a sense of oneself in relation to the problems that are worth solving.  This is true for any creative pursuit whether in engineering, science, or art.  Or even just living a full life.

Innerstanding gives us a sense of who we are and what we can do.

Part of this internal awareness includes a willingness to identify ourselves in certain ways.  One of the most common attitudes of creative people is that they tend to think of themselves as creative.  Whether this is the result of an inherent belief or family support or even an artificial posture is irrelevant.  It is the identification with a creative life as a deep innerstanding that helps propel us through the rough terrain of innovation.  The painter Larry Rivers wrote:  “I produce art, I make art.  Is it out of some overall interest in art, or is it just a constant concern with myself as an artist, having been identified as an artist, and continuing that identity?”  In other words, being or thinking of oneself as a creative person is crucial to actually functioning as one.

And yet, just as with the alchemists, there is another side to this coin.

Innerstanding requires a kind of selfish probing of one’s own inner being but it also calls on us to be selfness too.  It is easy to think of creativity as ego-centered, focusing on unique skills and talents and goals.  But that is never enough because creative people do what they do in a complex world of others.  In this sense, innerstanding also includes a selfless sensitivity to the world at large, to other people and their needs.  The alchemists were trying to improve themselves but also trying to change the world.  Empathy, awareness, sympathy, consideration…these are all part of innerstanding too.  Artists who communicate, engineers who improve, scientists who solve, innovators who design…these people are not simply following inner muses; they are also aware of and trying to reduce the suffering in the world. 
And that awareness is no small thing to have in our Ingenarium.