Something
hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do.
Think of the Queen Mary the whole ship goes by and then comes the
rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a
trim tab.
It's
a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low
pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all.
So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society
thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if
you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just
put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going
to go.
So
I said, call me Trim Tab.
-Designer and Inventor Buckminster
Fuller, Playboy, February 1972
The Grave of Buckminster Fuller (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
...we
can make all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing
industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to
continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the
orderly energy savings of billions of years' energy conservation
aboard our Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into
our Spaceship's life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use
only in self-starter functions.
Fifty
years later and our “bank account” is in overdraft and we are morally and spiritually bankrupt.
1927 (he was 32) was a crucial, crossroads, year in Fuller's life. He had hit rock bottom and was deeply depressed. He felt
responsible for the death of his little daughter some ten years
previous. He had lost his job and was financially ruined. He was at the end of his tether. He
contemplated taking his life so that his family could benefit from a
life insurance policy. He found himself a disappointed, broken man on the shores of Lake Michigan when out of the blue he had an extraordinary life
changing experience.
After several hours of internal debate over the question "Buckminster Fuller - life or death," Bucky was suddenly seized by an experience which would transform his life and his overall perception forever. As he would later recall, he experienced what he thought was the most significant of many seemingly mystical events which occurred throughout his life. During almost all of the lectures which followed that experience, he would recount that he had unexpectedly found himself suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a "sparkling white sphere of light." During the incident, time appeared to stop while he listened to a voice speaking directly to him. Although the experience was difficult for the pragmatic Fuller to accept as reality, he remembered not resisting and allow himself to savor it fully. Because of that, he was able to remember the exact words he heard. The voice declared, "From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth." It continued, "You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others." Although we will never know if that "voice" was simply Fuller's inner thoughts or some higher guidance, it did result in a vastly transformed individual.
It
was an epiphany that changed the course of his life. Henceforth he
sought to live such that others would benefit.
I have advocated journaling as a spiritual discipline but Fuller deliberately took the practice to extremes. He wrote what he called his "Dymaxion Chronofile" in which he sought to record every fifteen minutes of his life from 1920 to 1983! It is the ultimate personal scrapbook! He said, "I decided to make myself a good case history of such a human being and it meant that I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record" (Oregon Lecture #9, p.324, 12 July 1962). His diary rivals everything envisaged by Pepys and John Wesley!
An idiosyncrasy was the manner in which Fuller wrote and spoke sometimes "levitating" us out of our own traditional comfort zones. He invented words and used neologisms with dramatic koan like effect. “Dymaxion” was a word that came to be associated with Fuller and his designs. He readily adopted it as a personal trademark. It was a portmanteau of "dynamic maximum tension" and was so descriptive of his life and work. Wikipedia explains his mind-shifting language further...
Buckminster
Fuller spoke and wrote in a unique style and said it was important to
describe the world as accurately as possible....
Fuller
used the word Universe without the definite or indefinite articles
(the or a) and always capitalized the word. Fuller wrote that "by
Universe I mean: the aggregate of all humanity's consciously
apprehended and communicated (to self or others) Experiences."
The
words "down" and "up", according to Fuller, are
awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction
inconsistent with human experience. The words "in" and
"out" should be used instead, he argued, because they
better describe an object's relation to a gravitational center, the
Earth. "I suggest to audiences that they say, 'I'm going
"outstairs" and "instairs."' At first that sounds
strange to them; They all laugh about it. But if they try saying in
and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to
realize that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to
the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. And for the first
time they begin to feel real 'reality.'"
"World-around"
is a term coined by Fuller to replace "worldwide". The
general belief in a flat Earth died out in Classical antiquity, so
using "wide" is an anachronism when referring to the
surface of the Earth —a spheroidal surface has area and encloses a
volume but has no width. Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete
scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition. Other
neologisms collectively invented by the Fuller family, according to
Allegra Fuller Snyder, are the terms "sunsight" and
"sunclipse", replacing "sunrise" and "sunset"
to overturn the geocentric bias of most pre-Copernican celestial
mechanics.
Fuller was not simply a stickler for precision. He was wanting us to rise above old, dated, confining paradigms and be caught up in life transforming orbs of light ourselves. Such
are the minds, thoughts, and experiences of others that have not only
amused me in the course of my own life but also inspired me to
realise that there is much more to being human than simply a constricted Space-Time-Energy-Mass (STEM) Box prisoner of circumstance and misfortune. Huge is the impact of a singular life upon
another that in time reverberates down the generations with awesome tidal consequences and outcomes.
A Geodesic Sphere (Wikimedia Commons)
oOo
Acknowledgement:
Wikipedia
Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za
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