Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties/Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties (1996)(Rockument)(Disc 1 of 2)[Mac-PC].iso/mac/MAIN/TUNEIN/TUNEIN01.DIR/00423_Field_Interview with Buckminster Fuller part 1.txt

Text File | 1995-06-01 | 24KB | 44 lines

Invisible Future
An Interview with Buckminster Fuller
Part 1

(Buckminster Fuller was alive, well, and eloquent in the Haight-Ashbury this month.)
Voice From Audience:  About universal rebirth how is technology affecting it, how is technology bringing it about?
Fuller:  There are now on the earth three or four hundred million babies in the wombs of mothers; they are alive.  And I think that we will learn within possibly a decade, what up till now man has spoken of as telepathy is the ultrahigh frequency electromagnetic wave propagation in which we use our eyes for beaming mechanisms (beaming and receiving).
   We've learned in our technical experiments that the bat is flying absolute radar at 186,000 miles per second.  It is bouncing signals off the walls getting information from the walls so that he doesn't hit the ceiling.  That a bat with the size brain could do that, makes it clear to me that the human size brain could do this.  When you say brain you are really talking about the complexity of technology, that the brain could do the same thing that the bat could do.

               THE WORLD WOMB

VFA:  Do you think the human brain is doing it all the time?
Fuller:  I think the brain is using electromagnetic waves all the time.  I've talked before, probably over 1000 times to audiences around the world and I am utterly aware of what everybody in that room was thinking.  And when I'm doing all the talking I'm really talking for everybody.  And I never prepare a lecture and I've learned it is possible of course, to think out loud and if I'm thinking and finding my way along everybody goes along with me.  I'm simply making the sounds for all of us.  And I've really learned to do this and I find that people can stay with me.  Otherwise it would be impossible for people to stay with me 8 or 10 hours which I've found that I've been able to have them do seeing as how it gets awful uncomfortable.  And it gets so concentrated that they can do that.  So it's the only really good explanation.  I'm receiving all the information from others, what their interests are usually steering his way.
   I'd like to come back to what my preamble was, that I had 300 to 400 million babies in wombs around the world.  They're alive and they have all their equipment.  I just, then, have a hypothetical electromagnetic wave communication between these human beings.  Any communication they have would be in terms of experience and their experience is entirely inside the womb.  They're not getting oxygen directly, they're getting oxygen in their blood from their mother's blood.  And they're not using their lungs.  They're using only one thing which is touch.  A child, a newborn baby, you put your finger in his hand and it closes on your finger adeptly, absolutely amazing.  You feel as though you are really communicating with that little thing lying there.  He's not using his eyes or ears.  When you want to remove your finger he immediately opens it up and accommodates and when you put it back he closes his hand again.  How can it be that this child is born with such beautiful communication?  When you think about it, this baby has been in the womb for 9 months and his whole communication has been tactile.  So the tactile is already extraordinarily mature.  So this is not just a first instinct he's been using it that way for awhile.  Later on when it's out of the womb it takes in air and oxygen, the olfactory goes before the other, he smells for milk and smells the flesh.  Then after many days he begins to hear; many days after that he begins to see, so this tactile is a beginning where we really start.  So it's very very prominent in all our thinking.
   But we know that now, atomically in physics, that nothing ever really does touch.  I'm touching but I'm really not touching.  The atoms get into critical proximity.  They get into critical proximity all kinds of things begin to happen.  Could we get to the atoms themselves we find that their components are as immobile as the milky way.  So we get to critical proximities, various things happen.  There's bounce off, there's reflections and refractions, smash up, all kinds.  What goes on in the end is also electromomagnetic even when we get into their proximities and gravitational and reverse radiation and gravity.  So a child in the tactile with his mother is electromagnetic, is also very very high frequency.  These of course, are words for a phenomenon of the extraordinary orderliness in the universe and it doesn't make prosaic, that you and I have invented the terms like electromagnetic to describe experience.  Because there has to be something before the experience, there has to be principles that are operative as we discover it and we just give it those names.  It doesn't make it prosaic, or any less marvelous!
   I was coming to the point then that we have a whole, 3 to 400 million is a very large population for this country with 200 million population in America, there is more than the population of all the Americans in the world womb.  So there is a whole way of living.
   We then, have these large populations of 2 and 3 and 400 million even billions human beings who are only in a tactile world of electromagnetic communication and talking to each other and so forth.  Well then, they emerge into going out of the womb coming into an entirely new world where they're breathing air.  This is a very sudden and extraordinary change of experience.  I discovered that certain things that happen to individuals happen to groups, this is a group of extraordinary number of cells, fantastic number of atoms.  Our individual brains have a quadrillion times a quadrillion atoms in fantastic coordination.  There is a coordination of all of us and I think we are all coming out of the womb of very fundamental ignorance, mental ignorance.  We talk in the ways that sound sometimes very faithful to our experience and many times very imaginary.  Which would indicate that we think that we know quite a lot and are responsible for a lot of what is going on.
   I do say to you whatever the last meal that you ate you haven't the slightest idea of what you're doing with it.  You're not consciously saying to yourself that I have designed and decided now I'm going to have a million hairs and they're going to be such and such a shape and color.  We don't do any of this; it is all automated.  Man is more than 99.9% automated and he is only a very small fraction conscious.  Whereas he tends to be so impressed with consciousness, he tends to suggest that he is really highly responsible for what goes on.  I find that he doesn't invent the oxygen, he is really very successful despite his ignorance and his vanity.
   I would suggest that all of humanity is about to be born in an entirely new relationship with the universe.  Where, having been given intellect, we are going to have to use intellect as we have never used it before.  We're going to have to have an integrity--a good faith with the truth (whatever the truth may be).  We're going to have to really pay attention.  We've been allowed up till now to be shortsighted and to compromise and to make quick hard decisions that make it possible for this one to survive versus the other, things like that.  We've learned that we can take care of everyone so it isn't the employment of the intellect just to make quick decisions of which one is to live and which one is to die.  That's the way it used to be.  My father was really carrying a gun at his side, that he would shoot at any minute.  And their fathers were carrying rapiers.  And if you couldn't afford a rapier you were carrying a bludgeon.
VFA:  Do you think that the population of the earth is an over population or an over concentration of population?
Fuller:  Over concentrations.  We're anything but over populated.  I've traveled all around the world a very great deal, I go by air.  I would like to point out that our atmosphere as we get into the wind foil, is just as thick as water.  Our atmosphere is an ocean, there is an atmospheric ocean.  We have been like snails congregating around one or two little places where survival was very probable.  On the bottom.  We've been barnacles or snails up till now rooting, just beginning to learn that we can take off the bottom and we will begin to be in that ocean.  The minute I go up into that air ocean, when I leave the airport, I travel thousands of miles and I don't see another human being.
   I find it fantastic how much woods and actual amount of wilderness is everywhere.  I have the statistics on it and it is very impressive.  At the present moment all of humanity could be brought indoors in greater New York City and you'd have as much room as you'd have in a cocktail party.  It wouldn't necessarily be very good living there.  We're very tiny and you can get all of us inside there.  New York City on that map, when I'm on that altitude, when I'm really at 40,000 altitude, is only three inches.
   There is beautiful research that has been done on five scientists that showed--so clearly great contributors scientifically, looking at their diaries and papers trying to find something common that they said and were thinking.  They all make it very very clear that by far the most important single factor in their turning of their discovery to the advantage of man, making it available to them, was their intuition.  So they said, intuition was number one.  Then number two was the second intuition or what they would do about their intuitive flash.  Do you light a cigarette or write something down.  What you do in the split second after your first intuition, if you really caught it or didn't catch it, the fish was on the hook were you able to reel it in, and your instincts are purely intuitive about what you did about it.  Everyone then documents intuition everyone of them make it very clear in their comments that what they discovered was an orderliness in the universe, the thing that astounds you is the sublimeness of the orderliness that you suddenly discovered as a contrast to the crudeness and awkwardness of what you have been thinking hypothetically by which you're reconnoitered in that position or you suddenly make the strike.
   So all the scientists originally, one is operating in one area of the universe and the other, which for the moment temporarily could strike one, as a different area of the universe so remote that we have man developing classifications of biology, mathematics, physics, and chemistry, so forth, where the magnitude of the frequencies are such that you saw no connections between the cell and the molecule and you saw no connections between the molecule and the atom.  I remember in 1917, saying, I don't think nature has a department of physics say, and a department of chemistry and a department of mathematics, and has to have a department to have meetings to know what to do when you drop a stone in the water, how to make that beautiful circular wave, I think she has only one department and this compartmentalization is an accident because man, these individuals that made the discoveries happened to be making discoveries so remotely from the others that they didn't see the connections and they took the prominent features.
   Suddenly with the more and more powerful instruments, we gradually found these things coming together.  Where the world by this time thinks that they have to become specialists to find something out and all of a sudden we find great scientists coming together having to become bio-chemists and had to become--they had to put in hyphens because they didn't do it purposely but they suddenly found themselves adjacent to each other because the instruments were suddenly powerful enough to show the inter-relationships.
   We're coming to an awareness of an omni-interrelated orderliness of the universe, an apriori set of principle which are utterly regular, purely metaphysical.  They are only discoverable by the metaphysical and cannot be found by the physical; physics is a medium of the discovery.  We're discovering apriori intellectual integrity of the universe, the universe is never at a loss as to what to do about this (drops a coin).  You and I don't know what happens when I do this, but the universe is never at a loss what to do.  That's all understood where we're at.  I didn't know about it but it's all understood.  So I would say that we're coming out of an era in the womb of man, of total society in a womb condition of being really taken care of.  The baby is inside of his mother.  Finding itself in the universe where he doesn't have to invent the oxygen or any of the 98 chemical elements; they're just waiting; he doesn't have to invent the mathematical elements by which hair actually grows, beautiful things.  But we're gradually beginning to come out of the vanity as we come out of this , out of the womb, sort of group womb, into the new relationship with the universe, our real guidance is going to be this metaphysical with fantastic respect for that truth itself which you find, and you've got to find.  Once you've found the true inter-relationships you've got to go with them.  You don't assume that man is so smart that he can short-cut and cheat.  Which is what we've been able to do up till now.
VFA:  You said recently that the earth is a space ship...
Fuller:  Well it is a space ship.  It's never been anything else.  So this shows how ignorant one way you can prove how quickly, how little man knows, is to call to anybody's attention when they say, "I wonder what it's like to be in a space ship," when in fact that's all they've ever been in.  Everybody's an astronaut.  We've been astronauts here with our knowledge for 2 million years without ever knowing we're aboard ship.  The ship is all equipped to take care of all those astronauts and we're allowed to be so ignorant that we don't even have to know that this is a ship.  We're moving just around the sun at 60,000 miles an hour.  One thousand miles each minute as I'm talking.  A fantastic speed.  As we launch a little space ship, we're launching it off the big space ship and that idea suddenly becomes realizable.  And lastly we have to accelerate taking off from our big space ship at 15,000 miles per hour only a quarter speed of our own space ship, you see.  This is a good way to really shock yourself into realizing how little we really are in tune with what we're finding out.
   All you see seems to go up or down.  There is no part in the universe that is up or down.  What we really mean is in toward the center of various masses and out from them.  The words up or down are invented to accommodate the concept of the world as going into the infinite play.  With some local mountains and you come outward to the sea, always around the mountains, so that went on into the plane.  This is what man saw.
   If you're dealing in a plane then all the perpendiculars to the plane are parallel to one another which means that all the ends of these perpendiculars when one set of ends point in one direction we call it up to heaven or down to hell.  We suddenly discover that in relation to all experience, all existence, none of the perpendiculars are parallel to one another.  So one moment what's up is going to be down.  So which star is over head when you say up is going to be in the direction of your feet in a few minutes.  You hear the scientists saying to the astronauts on the television program, "Well how are things up there this morning, boys," and the astronauts happen to be in the direction of their feet.  So I've found then that the scientists themselves are using the words up and down which will give you all the documentation you want that we are operating in complete ignorance.
VFA:  It's this ignorance that all of us are somehow oppressed by, that the spaceship isn't running right.
Fuller:  All I'm trying to discover is the condition of our awareness.  We are making discoveries and we do have this extraordinary intellectual faculty which is weightless in metaphysical capability.  In the last two years I took off 65 pounds.  So I say that wasn't me.  I got rid of it and here I am so there was a time that I weighed 7 pounds and there was a time that I weighed only 1 pound and a time when I weighed less than an ounce.  I was always me.  I don't think the weight counts, it's essentially a way of you and I communicating.  I've now processed over 1000 tons of air, water, and food which became temporarily mine and then was cut off so it wasn't ever me.  We've discovered that when men die no weight is lost.  Whatever we really are, if we are utterly weightless, is metaphysical and is what really counts, because all the sensing mechanisms go away when we die.
   We've discovered experimentally and Heisenberg's indeterminism makes it very clear that the act of measuring alters that  which is measured.  Just to single out this phenomena enough to begin to try and isolate it would be to alter it by doing that.  Just the light that comes to bear as you make a microscopic note just the light there changes the temperature and the behavior.  You discover then that the act measurement always alters the measured.  You find the poets saying earlier that the act of just consideration of history alters history.  It really does say, thought itself just simply alters that which you think about.
   We've gotten so that you cannot get to any absolute truths.  The word truth is simply a direction rather than an attainment.  It's not a static.  Truth is really then a yielding to the integrity of the intellect not trying to persist in sticking with something familiar just trying to rationalize what you thought was an explanation.  I say then that we're coming very swiftly into an era when we will think together, an enormous comprehensive spontaneity of society to act in unison.  As you see a beautiful flight of birds acting, simply because we will be adhering to the information which is closer to the truth and the truth will be guiding us all the time.  The nuances will be much more impressive, much more delicate, much more exciting!
VFA:  As we open up to these subtle perception impressions, how do you think it will effect our environment?
Fuller:  Well we have an environment as you call it, 99.9% of all of our environment is invisible.  We have this tune range in here red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.  We didn't know that was there until this century.  Really just yesterday.  I could bring in 100 thousand radio sets in this vicinity right here.  You could tune each one in on a different program which is being broadcast from some place around, not on earth, but on the Venus and the Moon right now, and we could bring equipment out here and do it.
   We have present everywhere around the earth, information coming in at a split second, at 700 million miles an hour, is the velocity of that speed, with the information and it's all there.  And we're tending to pay attention to only that which we can see and tune in on.  I find this very very important in relation to the environment.  The environment is trying to give this information all the time especially now since we've organized ourselves to be able to tune in on it.  It's been very meager up to now.  From now on we're going to be tuning much more in, it's going to be much more interesting, always, much more challenging.  But your future beautiful city is going to be an invisible city.
VFA:  What do you think about ancient Yogic methods of tuning the mind to receive a wider spectrum of information, a wider spectrum of experience for instance, Raja Yoga, or the ancient sciences of astrology, which seem to be picking up influences, for instance from Venus, Mars, Saturn.
Fuller:  I spoke to you about intuition and Follow-through.  A certain amount of extra-ordinary intuitive perception and speculative formulations are very very important.  Only a relatively small amount has been actually reduced to practice in what we would call the practical world and the people who deal in dollars and cents.  I think that quite obviously if you try to get near the sun you will burn up.  It's fantastic, the principles that are operative there.  Just the association of the chemical elements on which is not even mildly chaotic, fantastic order.
   We were given the design introducing an allowance for us making errors so we could learn.  Designed into it was our discovery of the importance of our intellect and the importance of integrity.  We had to make many mistakes in order to discover that was so, to discover the importance of mind, and of right over might.  That all had to be built in there so we could really discover it because unless you discover it, you're just told it, you don't get anywhere.  So I find some minds getting really constipated making some very long florid mental expirations because this is built into the equipment and we could use it.  They were getting so far out that you really couldn't do the practical connections about the red berries right now.  They were too far away for other people to pay much sense to, they were starving and they wanted to know which berries they were going to be able to eat.
   So I find that in the process of getting our higher faculties really brought into play we had to grow.  There is a gestation rate, maybe it just grows in certain rate.  I'm deeply impressed with gestation, extraordinary timings, the way things come together, there are the different magnitudes.  They have to have their synchronizations.  So that some people felt quite far out.  Obviously what astrology is dealing with, the power, the interrelations of different astronomical phenomena.  When you get to that power, of course, it is important.  We really haven't had time to get to paying enough attention to that yet.  We will find a great deal of importance.  All of the time here we have to make sure we're not kidding ourselves about something that we might call magic, something that doesn't have reason.  I find that every bit of it always has integrity, always really beautiful, and a really beautiful explanation once we really have time to get there.  I see when you really have time to come in there it's marvelous.  As the scientist and really great artist find, the truth is much more beautiful than the hypothetical formulation.
   So I think that the hypothetical astrological or numerological or anything else that you want to think about are getting into all this mystic range, where it's not being accredited by this practical man, the people who are holding onto it are holding onto it awfully hard because they feel they have got an important discovery.  Not properly so.  So the fact that one is calling impractical of just magic doesn't make it magic.  It's going to turn out to be extraordinarily rational.  It's going to be superb.  Certainly my life is one of asking questions and I find that for every question, every problem that is solved I have thousands more new ones; so that life always gets more interesting.  Just the opposite of getting old.  And when people think they're really getting to the end, again this is apathy.  Principles have no beginning and end.  So that we're in an infinite variety something gets always more interesting.
VFA:  You think the city of the future will be invisible?  You mean you wouldn't bother to design one?
Fuller:  You people keep talking about architecture.  The future I say will be really invisible.  The walls that you're familiar with were very terrible walls.  They're walls of bad faith and ignorance so you had to have something to stop the bow and arrows.  Somebody was trying to come in and kill you.  Walls for protection.  Walls represent great ignorance, fear and ignorance.