"We are all butterflies flapping our wings in far-flung places, causing hurricanes (or immense, world-changing blessings) in other parts of the world. Exactly how will you flap your wings?" - Lois
I have recently been reading a book first published in 1981. I do not know where I was first exposed to Buckminster Fuller's ideas, but it was before the book was written. We studied him during the height of his work in the 1960's. I first heard of Fuller when I was about 19 - 20 as an art student at North Texas State University, from an art history professor named Bill. I was very fortunate to have been guided to that University. Bill was one of several art professors who encouraged us to be individuals, to fully be ourselves and not imitative when making art, as well as while living our lives.
Buckminster Fuller is probably one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century, right up there with Einstein, but many people under the age of 40 have never heard of him. He invented the geodesic dome, among many, many other things, including the concepts of synergy and tensegrity. He had lots and lots of patents. In 1981 he published a book he wrote, reluctantly, at the age of 85, at the height of his brilliance. It is entitled "Critical Path" which is about the survival of the human race, and truths he felt we must all embrace in order to survive. I highly recommend everyone read it.
At this point, let me say that I believe we are clearly on the path to survival, yet everyone still needs to do his or her part to bring this path to complete fruition.
Fuller moved in very powerful circles in his lifetime, and listened to the secrets of some of the most powerful people in the world. He got to watch important events unfold and drew certain conclusions from this vantage point. He also kept journals over the entire period of his life to judge how long it took phenomenal/brilliant ideas to be embraced by humanity after someone introduced them. Some took as long as 60 years.
I would love for you to read below, when you have time, some of the things Fuller has said about what it will take for humanity to survive. I had to read it slowly, over and over, to really get what he was saying. I hope that you to forward this to everyone you know, and lastly, I want you to fully be yourself. After you read this, you will know what I mean.
Bucky's reasons for writing the book "Critical Path" were fourfold. I think that they are important, and that everyone needs to read them. I now quote him. In the early 1980's he wrote the book:
A. Because I am convinced that human knowledge by others of what this book has to say is essential to human survival.
B. Because of my driving conviction that all of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly - right now.
C. Because I am convinced that humanity's fitness for continuance in the cosmic scheme no longer depends on the validity of political, religious, economic, or social organizations, which altogether heretofore have been assumed to represent the many.
D. Because, contrary to C above, I am convinced that human continuance now depends entirely upon:
1. The intuitive wisdom of each and every individual.
2. The individual's comprehensive informedness.
3. The individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned thinking.
4. The individual's joining action with others, as motivated only by the individually conceived consequences of so doing.
5. The individual's never-joining action with others, as motivated only by crowd-engendered emotionalism, or by a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions.
We all see things diferently. Seeing is sensing, Hearing is sensing. Touching is sensing. Smelling is sensing. What each of us happens to sense is different. And our different senses are differently effective under ever-differing circumstances. Our individual brains coordinatingly integrate all the ever-different sensings of our different faculties. The integrated product of our multifold individual sensings produces awareness. Only through our sensings are we aware of the complementary "otherness."
Fuller beleived, as stated above, that the human race needs the benefit of the one-of-a-kind differentness of each of us, nothing held back. He also believed that feeling is more important than thinking. And I agree with him. When you feel, you are in touch with your Soul.
At the age of 32 Fuller threw over everything he knew and had, and started a course of study, using himself as a guinea pig, to see how much one individual could do to change the world if he or she set his/her heart and mind to it. He referred to himself as "Guinea Pig B." And amazingly, through thick and thin, his wife stayed beside him. If you do not know who Buckminster Fuller is, please google him.
He credits this decision to set upon this course of action, partly to a piece written by his friend, the poet e.e. cummings, and reprinted below. Cummings writes below about poetry, but you could just as easily subsititue the word painting for poet, and I suspect this piece also applies to musical composers, or anyone creative. And we can all be the poets, painters, composers of our own lives. Why not live your life as though it were a work of art!?
A Poet's Advice
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel - but that's thinking or believing or knowing: not feeling. And poetry is feeling - not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time - and whenever we do it, we are not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world - unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
-e. e. cummings
