12 The Path of Social Evolution
3 Buckminster Fuller revealed to us the potential of humanity for an everevolving, regenerative future. He made it clear that ‘‘our minds are designed to know the design,’’ and that we have the resources, technology and know-how to make of this world a 100 percent physical success. The design science revolution which he called for is still emerging among us in countless innovations in all fields. I believe that we are approaching the natural connectedness and synergy among positive innovations, which together can build a ‘‘win-win’’ world—a world that can work for everyone. This is the crucial choice point for humanity, as he pointed out. Our ‘‘final exam’’ is going on a bit longer than he predicted. But we haven’t failed yet, and his life and work give us the impetus to seek out the patterns of social and technological innovations that can carry us forward into the third millennium toward an immeasurable future as citizens of the local universe.
4 My personal experience with him gives insights into his remarkable gift of inspiring others to go beyond their normal path to reach for the highest.
5 The first time I met him was in the early 1970s, when the Committee for the Future was sponsoring a conference called ‘‘Mankind in the Universe’’ at Southern Illinois University, where Dr. Fuller was in residence. It was the time of student protests and terrified deans. I remember giving a speech one evening. An angry student stood up and violently criticized the Apollo Program for spreading the ‘‘disease of mankind’’ into the universe. He began a tirade against humanity. I rose up in defense of our species—for all our violence and tragedy, I said, ‘‘we are still a young species, evolving toward an unknown destiny that must not be aborted by those who criticize but do not contribute.’’
6 The next day, after this speech, Tom Turner, who was Bucky’s director of special projects, called a special meeting and said that he had an announcement to make. It was a message from Dr. Fuller. The whole conference group assembled. I was on the stage. Tom turned to me and said: ‘‘Dr. Fuller believes that a woman should run for president, and he asks you to be that woman, to run on the theme of Positive Options for the Future.’’ The whole conference sanctioned the suggestion. I would have run against Richard Nixon!
7 Of course, at that time, I did not do it, partially because of my family obligations.
8 The next time I saw him I was introducing him to a large audience. Before the event he came up to me, put his bald head upon my forehead, and held me silendy for a moment. Then he said, ‘‘Darlin’’ ’—he called many of us ‘‘dar- lin’ ’’—‘‘you’re free now, aren’t you. This is good.’’
9 I was astonished. There had been a shift in my personal life, and indeed, I was free to follow my own course.
10 At the same event, he was speaking far longer than planned. A member of the staff came out onto the stage and placed a large card on the floor in front of him. He glanced down at it and kept on talking, and then many minutes later, he picked up the placard, turned it toward the audience, and let us read it. It said: THE SESSION IS OVER.
11 ‘‘The session is never over,’’ he said, and calmly went on speaking for another hour, way past the lunch, which was by that time cold and ruined, but nobody cared.
12 My next encounter with him was the most extraordinary.
13 I had written a manuscript based on a vivid Christ experience in 1980.1 had intuited the presence of the living Christ as a field that was drawing humanity forward to do the works that he did, and even greater works. I saw that the belief that we would be radically transformed had in fact begun to give humanity the powers of precisely such transformation. As we understand more clearly the invisible technologies of nature—the atom, the gene, the brain—we are learning to affect matter direcdy. At the growing edge of evolutionary technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, quantum computing, and so forth, we see the possibility of the transformation of the material world as well as of our own bodies. After this experience, I (a Jewish agnostic futurist) was guided to the New Testament. It revealed itself to be coded evolution, coming true through us. If we can combine our spiritual wisdom with our advancing technological abilities we will indeed ‘‘all be changed,’’ and be able to do the work that he did, and far greater work. I wrote a sixteen-hundred-page manuscript based on the New Testament, called ‘‘The Book of Cocreation’’ (now published, in part, as The Revelation)—I sent him the manuscript.
14 Several weeks later, we were to speak together at the Annenberg Communication Center in Los Angeles. Word came down that Dr. Fuller wouldn’t be speaking that night. We were told that he was reading something. We all thought he must not be feeling well, and I spoke alone.
15 However, when I had finished, someone came up to me and said that Dr. Fuller wanted to see me alone in the garden. I was led there and the door was shut. There he was, carrying the manuscript.
16 He told me that he knew what I had written was true, because he had had a similar experience, part of which he has told many times, but there was another part that, as far as I know, he did not mention to others.
17 He described to me how he had been walking down the street in Chicago when a light surrounded him and seemed to lift him off the sidewalk. Then he heard the inner words. ‘‘Bucky, you are to be a first mini-Christ on Earth. What you attest to is true.’’
18 Then, he said, he had turned to the New Testament, and had written a similar interpretation to mine, almost word for word. He told me he hid it, never showing it to anyone, because, given his work in the world, he could not use the words ‘‘Christ’’ or ‘‘God.’’ (I had the same problem, and rarely speak of this experience, because it is either polarizing or seems unreal to so many.)
19 However, that evening, I had found my spiritual godfather. He put his arms around me, and touching that wonderful forehead against mine again he said gendy, ‘‘Darlin’, there is only God, there is nothing but God.’’
20 Subsequently Michael Toms, of New Dimensions Radio, and David Smith, television director of Xavier University (who made a beautiful video called The Video Book of Cocreation), brought us together in a dialogue with stur dents on television entided ‘‘Bucky and Barbara: Our Spiritual Experience.’’ But he never spoke the words in public.
21 I mention the story now because I feel it holds a profound truth. To be a ‘‘mini-Christ’’ was not a religious function. It meant that he deeply understood the nature of nature. He could see that the design of creation is that everyone can have life, and life more abundant. Everyone can be fed and healed. We are citizens of local universe, four and a half billion (at that time) billionaires, with wealth greater than any king of the past, if only we would understand the invisible design of nature and cooperate consciously with it.
22 Bucky inspired a whole generation with the thought that the world can work for everyone, because that is the way the world is designed. What is blocking it is ourselves, the ‘‘grunch of giants’’—the nation-states, the organized religions, the military, the giant corporations—all institutions and organizations that have a vested interest in separation and scarcity. In that sense he was a profound revolutionary, but he saw that it was not necessary to destroy one group to put another in power. Rather what we must do is comprehend the exquisite laws of nature and work with them for an ever-regenerating future for all humanity. ‘‘The world will be saved,’’ he told us, ‘‘by individuals of integrity freely joining.’’
23 His vision so deeply inspired me that in 1984 I finally decided to develop a new kind of political campaign. I formed a Campaign for a Positive Future to run to be selected as the vice-presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket. It was the Year of the Woman. As a futurist, I could get a hearing for my ideas.
24 The campaign was based on the ideas of three great founders of the positive future: Buckminster Fuller, Abraham H. Maslow, and Teilhard de Chardin. Bucky gave us the technological basis for hope. Maslow, founder of humanistic psychology, discovered the innate potential of every person for higher values and self-actualization. And Teilhard revealed spirit at work in evolution leading toward ‘‘Omega,’’ the awakening of the planetary consciousness, or love on a mass scale.
25 I proposed a Peace Room in the office of the vice president that would be as sophisticated as a war room. In our war rooms we track our enemies and strategize their defeat. In our Peace Room we scan for innovations that work. We map them according to function to see the design of what is working. We connect people and projects for greater cooperation, and we communicate live from the office of the vice president the stories of our successes, breakthroughs, and models that work. ‘‘That,’’ I said, ‘‘would help move us toward a world that works for everyone.’’ I called for the shift from ‘‘weaponry to liv- ingry,’’ and the building of ‘‘new worlds on Earth, new worlds in space through new worlds in the human mind.’’
26 As I was preparing my platform I called him up. ‘‘Bucky,’’ I said, ‘‘I want to know exactly the critical path you see that I should be for. I don’t want to bother you—is there anyone else who could tell me what you see?’’ ‘‘No, dar- lin’,’’ he said. ‘‘I want you to come and see me.’’
27 And then he died only a few days later.
28 I went on to have my name placed in nomination for the vice presidency of the United States, along with Geraldine Ferraro, at the 1984 Democratic convention. I proposed the Peace Room in the office of the vice president and in every capital of the world. In four years, I said at my acceptance speech, we will see the outlines of the world that is already working. This is a step toward the world that works for everyone.
29 Now, in Santa Barbara, California, we are committed to actually building a local Peace Room, both on the Internet and as a social process of cocreation. Allegra Fuller Snyder, Bucky’s daughter, was at one of our events. She said that Bucky had begun the design science revolution, and now she saw that what is needed is community to act upon it. The Foundation for Conscious Evolution, which I cofounded in 1990, has moved to Santa Barbara, and it is our privilege as a community to work with many Fuller students to bring his vision one step closer to fulfillment.
30 The Lord's Prayer from Intuition
3233 I feel intuitively that what is now identified as the Lord’s Prayer was digested through ages from many philosophies in many lands. Also I feel intuitively that in relaying the Lord’s Prayer from country to country, from language to language, from one historical period to another that many at first small, then later large alterations of meaning may well have occurred. It seems unlikely to me that the prayer’s original conceivers and formulators would have included a bargaining proposal such as asking forgiveness of our trespasses or debts because we agree to forgive others. It also seems illogical to remind God of anything or to ask special dispensation for self, or to suggest that God doesn’t understand various problems, or that God needs earthly salesmen for his cause. Before going to sleep, even for short naps, I always re-explore and rethink my way through the Lord’s Prayer. And as I thought it through tonight, August thirteenth, 1966,1 decided to inscribe it on paper.
36 our evolutionary integrity unfolder
38 who art in he-even who is in everyone hallowed (halo-ed) be thy name (be thine identity) halo-ed—
39 the circumferential radiance the omnidirectional aura of our awareness of being ever in the presence of that which is greater,
4344 haloed be thine identification which is to say the omnidirectional vision and total awareness is a manifest of your identity which name or identity is most economically stated as: truth is your identity—
45 by truth we mean the ever more inclusive and incisive comprehension which never reaches but always approaches closer to
46 perfection of understanding and our awareness is ever a challenge by truth—
47 truth is embraced by and permeates the omnidirectionally witnessible integrity of omni-intertransforming events which ever transpire—radiationally which means, entropically in the physical; and contractively—gravitationally—which means, syntropically in the metaphysical both of which—are characterized by either the physical expansions toward ever-increasing disorder, of the entropic physical;
48 or the metaphysical contractions toward ever-increasing order of the syntropic metaphysical;
49 and these pulsating contractions-expansions altogether propagate the wave and counterwave oscillations of the electromagnetic spectrum’s complex integration—of the omnienvironment’s
50 evolutionary reality and its concomitant thought regeneration which altogether constitute what we mean by the total being.
53 ‘‘be thy name,’’ which means your identification to us, Your kingdom come!—your mastery of both the physical and metaphysical Universe emerges as the total reality your will be done—your will of orderly consideration and mastery of the disorderly be done on our specialized case planet and in our specialized case beings and in our special-case consciousness and in our special-case intellectual integrities and in our special-case teleologic integrities as it is in your generalized case he-even (heaven).
54 We welcome each day our daily evolution and we forgive, post give, and give all those who seemingly trespass against us for we have learned retrospectively and repeatedly that the seeming trespasses are in fact the feedback of our own negatives, realistic recognition of which may eliminate those negatives.
55 For yours, dear god—oh truthful thought is our experience proven manifest of your complete knowledge, your complete understanding, your complete love and compassion, your complete forgiveness—subjective and objective,
56 your complete inspiration and vision giving, and your complete evolutionary volition, capability, will, power, initiative timing and realization—
58 because you are the integrity
62 The Lord's Prayer—Second Version from Intuition
6364 This is the way I thought through THE LORD’S PRAYER on June 30, 1971, at the American Academy in Rome. B.F
71 O’erwhelmingly manifestation
72 Of your complete knowledge,
73 Your complete comprehension,
77 Your complete effectiveness,
78 Your complete love and compassion,
79 Your complete forgiveness, giveness, and postgiveness,
80 Your complete inspiration giving,
81 Your complete evolutionary sagacity,
82 Your complete power, will, initiative,
83 Your absolute timing of all realization.
85 Is the only and the complete glory!
86 You are the universal integrity
87 The eternal integrity is you.
90 Bucky Fuller once starred as an actor at Black Mountain College with Merce Cunningham, Elaine de Kooning, and Arthur Penn in Erik Satie's The Ruse of Medusa. John Cage said Fuller's performance was outstanding. Fuller once told me that actors have "a presence to present information effectively, and they ought to think about using that talent for useful purposes."
91 Bucky's theater friends included director John Huston, Ellen Burstyn, and Marian Seldes. Other admirers were singer John Denver and actress Valerie Harper, perhaps best known as television's Rhoda. A recipient of four Emmies, a Golden Globe, and Harvard's Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year Award, Valerie Harper recently wrote and performed a one-person play, entitled All Under Heaven, based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck. Fuller's intersection with Madame Buck was China, for Fuller longed to visit that country. He learned from Buck that many of his earlier books had been translated into Chinese. Although Pearl Buck died of cancer in 1973, before she could return to China, in 1979 Fuller was invited to the People's Republic of China.
92 When I asked Valerie Harper to contribute to the book, I knew that she was the mother of a teenager and suggested she speak about Bucky in a way that might interest her daughter's generation. Fuller always talked to the young, urging them to reform the environment and not fall victim to their political or social state. We were standing in the lobby of the Century Theatre in New York City just after Valerie's performance as Pearl S. Buck, and it occurred to me that both women had a personal experience of Bucky. Oddly, we both had met Madame Buck through Bucky—there are no accidents.