Being More: The Intrinsic Spring in Our Lives

The Intrinsic Spring

In preparation for this first blog post, I asked a few friends just what Intrinsic Spring meant in their lives. They told me – so let’s get their funnies out of the way before we get down. Intrinsic Spring is not a car part, an upholstery support, a bar, a plumbing emergency, a prosthetic limb, a jack-in-the-box, a watch drive, a revised Fosbury Flop, a sprightly walk, a joke cushion, an indoor fountain, an outdoor foundation, a pacemaker or a new kind of Pogo Stick. Thanks for that!

Joking aside, Intrinsic Spring refers to the stuff of everyday slipping bye, renewing, transforming, resetting the scene as the bees busy in the geraniums that I watch whilst I write; the granite crystals in the nearby hills that once sluggishly selected minerals from hot magma to coalesce and grow and now very very slowly decay, slip downslope in soils and drift out to the sea in river muds; the electrons that dance continually in and out of existence; and me growing older second by second. Intrinsic Spring refers then to the source of transformation of all things and, like life and death, it is one of nature’s little mysteries, the Tao and Yin Yang of being.

“The Tao is the way of the Universe. If you can talk about it, it ain’t Tao.”

From Tao Te Ching, by Laozi (Old Master) circa 400 BC.

More recently, the English poet Philip Larkin found it on the coast just outside the city of Hull:

“And past the poppies bluish neutral distance,
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach,
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.”

Philip Larkin, English poet

Intrinsic Spring in this way is mysterious, transcendent and the stuff of everyday.

From somewhere or nowhere, transformative change happens – it is the only constant in this world. You cannot escape its processes for it is you and it is the world we inhabit. It is all the complex, interdependent and interactive relations that weave your daily existence. Most of the time, we ignore it.

Not that we should spend all our time meditating on existence – although a little mediation is a good mental hygiene practice. No, Intrinsic Spring is about action and the action that we can extract from the source of transformation is to see the world afresh, free of the responsibilities, worries, wants, habitual oversights and the gigabytes of memories good and bad that lurk inside adult brains propping up our values and concomitant self-images. Intrinsic Spring needs the all-seeing, inquisitive, willing to learn, fresh and generous valuations that a child brings to the world – as Shel Silverstein observes;

“Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
and we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
for the children, they mark, and the children, they know,
the place where the sidewalk ends.”

Shel Silverstein, American Writer

We urgently need to dig deep and pull out some radical solutions right now for the world has too many problems from climate change, species extinctions, pollution, overcrowding, soil and freshwater loss, resource scarcities, and existent – and wannabe – dictators, extremes of wealth and poverty, abuse of women and and and….. the list is endless but the Spring can help.

The Intrinsic Spring can help with a reboot. Too many proposed solutions do not deal with core issues so they tinker and tweak and ultimately solve nothing. Fresh ideas are needed as per Einstein’s famous dictum:

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist

Being Silly

So where does the original thinking come from? As per Einstein, we cannot retrace well-worn, rational, synaptic trails in our minds, the habits, the concepts derived or imposed, those sneaky ingrained, unchallenged assumptions that reproduce our worlds and too frequently support a dreary, daily grind.

Therefore, we need to expand our thoughts using that dynamic and transformative origin to find an unformed and fresh, child-like state-of mind that is receptive, eager, free, inquisitive, engaged and… well… silly.

Yes Silly. Why not? If being silly worked for arguably the greatest, most original, most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, it might just work for us!

“If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, Philosopher

So how can being silly make us intelligent enough to solve global problems? Is this any more than a sophisticated oxymoron? How would it work?

I think it works just fine if you follow the sequence; i.e. being silly precedes and grounds subsequent intelligent actions and impacts. So step one is to draw from the Intrinsic Spring and its effusions for original vision and step two is to proceed intelligently laying new foundations and creating new concepts and ways derived from that vision. For now, we can just be silly and build intelligently later, with your help, in the blog.

So here’s the silliest thing I have so far extracted: we need to stop valuing excesses of money. In today’s social milieu, can you think of anything sillier?

Instead of wanting more and more money, we need to balance our lives, our businesses and our development within all the worlds we inhabit. Another blog, the Transformation Blog, gets into this more but in short we need to replace economic maximisation goals with optimised ecological, social and economic ones. But most importantly, we each need individually to live with this balance and aim for sufficiency with regard to possessions and then get on with living better quality lives by being more.

“Wealthy people set the tone on consumption to which everybody aspires. That’s where the toxic effects are.”

Halina Brown, Professor of environmental science and policy, Clark University

So let’s get at the wealthy: an income of £79,000 ($93,300) p.a. puts a person among the top 1% of global earners according to Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute (As an academic I was just about one of the 1% at the end of my career!). What a super silly an idea!

Nevertheless, we do need to free ourselves of wealthy-money obsessions, find enough for our needs and fill our lives with this Being More.