Feature Article - A Little Wisdom from R.Buckminster Fuller

If you missed the last issue, please send an email to janine@syzergy.biz with October 06 in the subject line and we will forward the issue to you.

In January 1994 I had the extreme good fortune to spend a week on the big island of Hawaii with a group of about 100 other people, studying for seven days, the last 21 hours of R. Buckminster Fuller’s work. That week has affected my life every day, ever since.

Recently I have been inspired to re-read Bucky’s ”Critical Path”. This book was published in 1981. Yet the points and principles are as important, if not more so, today than ever before. Bucky was always way ahead of his time.
In 1927, at age 32, he set out on an experiment, as Project Guinea Pig B (for Bucky), which lasted the rest of his life and was ”designed to discover what, if anything - a healthy young male human of average size, experience, and capability with an economically dependant wife and newborn child, starting without capital or any kind of wealth, cash savings, account monies, credit, or university degree, could effectively do that could not be done by great nations or private enterprise to lastingly improve the physical protection and support of all human lives, at the same time removing undesirable restraints and improving individual initiatives of any and all humans aboard our planet earth.” Page 124.

By the end of his life he had published 28 books, was awarded 25 US patents, 47 honorary degrees, circled the globe 57 times had met and befriended a who’s who of world leaders.

The following are some excerpts from “Critical Path”. Any comments I make are in brackets and separated by a paragraph.

It is the author’s working assumption that good and bad are meaningless….

“What I am trying to do is to discover why God included humans in the Universe.

My reasons for writing this book are…
(B) Because of my driving conviction that all of humanity is in peril of extinction if each and every one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only 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 organisations, which altogether heretofore have been assumed to represent the many.
(D) Because contrary to (C), 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 initiative.
(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 the course indicated by one’s own intellectual convictions.

Humanity’s present rate of total energy consumption amounts to only one four-millionth of one percent of the rate of its energy income.

(Bucky did extensive empirical research on this. He believed we do not need to spend another cent of money, energy or time on fossil fuels, atomic energy - that we have enough water, wind, wave, tidal, solar and vegetation produced alcohol power to provide more than enough energy for all.)

All books on economics have only one basic tenet-the fundamental scarcity of life support.

(This scarcity principle drives our behaviour at such a deep level we are not even conscious of it. Never enough. Never enough money, clean air, water, food…The truth is that if all the governments of the world really put their minds to it today, there is simply no need for anyone to go hungry. We have all the food for everyone to eat like kings, to have water, to have energy. Scarcity drives wars, weaponry, and domestic disputes.)

In the United States, throughout all twenty-four hours of every day of every year-year after year- we have an average of two million automobiles standing in front of red stoplights with their engines going, the energy for which amounts to that generated by the full efforts of 200 million horses being completely wasted as they jump up and down going nowhere.

(Remember this was written in 1980!)

…that the world’s power structures have always “divided to conquer” and have always “kept divided to keep conquered”. As a consequence the power structure has so divided humanity - not only into special function categories but into religious and language and colour categories-that individual humans are now helplessly inarticulate in the face of the present crisis.

(This is cause to reflect on in our current times, when the divisions seem to be growing deeper . How are we each participating in this by perpetuating and strengthening the divisions?)

The Denver geologist, Francois de Chardenedes in his “Scenario of Petroleum Production” makes it clear that, with all the cosmic energy processing (as rain, wind and gravitational pressure) and processing time (paid for at the rates you and I pay for household electrical energy), it costs nature well over a million dollars to produce each gallon of petroleum.

I sought to reform the environment, not the humans. I determined never to try to persuade humanity to alter its customs and view points.

In all reality I never “leave home”. My backyard has just grown progressively bigger and more globular….At present I am a passenger on “Spaceship Earth” and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category, a highbred specialisation. I am not a thing-a noun. I am not flesh. At eighty-five, I have taken in over a thousand tons of air, food and water, which temporarily became my flesh and which progressively disassociated from me. You and I seem to be verbs-evolutionary processes. Are we not integral functions of the Universe?

All the water for our advanced dwelling machine (Bucky designed environmentally efficient homes 60 years ago) will be brought to the dwellings in quantities equal to milk and fruit juice consumption.

(At this time when water is such an issue, particularly in countries like Australia, it is absolutely true that most of the technology already exists to forever change our water habits.)

Finally…

The Political and economic systems and the political and economic leaders of humanity are not in final examination; it is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity’s fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can’t deceive your mind-self-for minds deal only in the discovery of truth and interrelationships of all the truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible.

Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.”

In closing, my own comments:

Bucky was so far ahead of his time we still haven’t caught up. When I read his work I am prone to feeling very small and insignificant. I find myself asking” what can I do?”

Bucky said that what all of us can do is commit to truth; to our highest personal integrity, at all times. Do we have the courage to go with our own minds, to dare… or will we go with the crowd?

That is all.

Want to use this Article in your E-zine or Web site?
You can, as long as you include this complete statement with it: Syzergy dares to care about speaking the truth with compassion. We offer our complete flag ship program Dare to Care, into organisations world wide. We also provide Just in Time Coaching globally. If you would like to have your organisation be one where truth, compassion, respect and care work together, please visit www.syzergy.biz. Be sure to sign up for our free newsletter for more artilces like this one.

Resources, Tools and People We Would Love to Share

Following the great read of “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”, it was recommended that I read Jeremy Narby’s book, The Cosmic Serpent. Wow..what a fascinating look at the world of shamans and DNA. (Yes, both of those in the same sentence!) If you would like a really quick way of seeing just how blind we can be in our thinking, this book will do it for you.

I also recommend the GREAT movie with Robin Williams, “Man of the Year.” This is a movie about truth, and the choices we have each and every day about taking the highest road of truth there is.

Finally, as a passionate advocate of the work of Caroline Myss, I have been listening to her audio series on Archetypes. (www.soundstrue.com, or www.myss.com)
Caroline sees the world from the symbolic, global archetypical view. Her work is ground-breaking, gritty and extraordinary. We highly recommend reading/listening to her work.

Where in the World is Syzergy?

Syzergy is HOME!. According to Bucky that means we could be anywhere on earth, however, for the next few weeks, we are hanging out on the Gold Coast (Christine) and in Sydney (Audrey).

After a very busy year we are having some time off.

For Christine, this time is a time for me to retreat. In the morning you will find me running or swimming or both. In the days, you won’t find me. I will be immersed in the pages of the piles of books I can’t wait to read, and getting up to all sorts of creative mischief designing for 2007.

Audrey will be resting at our local Balmoral Beach, also ploughing through piles of books, body surfing in the ocean between chapters. The endless force of our individual and combined creative energy never ceases to amaze me. Apart from a nascent and fantastic journey with Christine as we launched our business partnership in 2006, there have been several other projects in the birthing, a few painful losses and many collaborative efforts with so many amazing, intelligent people. My heartfelt gratitude to all who have made the past 12 months a gentler, more graceful passage. It is so comforting to know that we are not alone in our quest for truth and integrity. Thank you and blessings for a peace-filled holiday and 2007.

©2006 Syzergy Pty Ltd    

Established in 1997, Syzergy is an international training and coaching company specialising in enabling people to speak the truth with compassion. Our flagship program, Dare to Care, has been delivered to audiences around the world, to great acclaim. Just in Time Coaching offers coaching solutions to organisations in ajust in time, innovative and efficient way.

Bring the power of truth with compassion into your organisation today!