https://hightimes.com/culture/high-times-greats-buckminster-fuller/

 

 Here are some selected quotes:

"We simply cannot continue navigating Spaceship Earth with a hundred and fifty separate and supreme admirals all steering in different directions. That could work only when peoples were relatively isolated from each other. Now with the planetary system omniinterconnected, a hundred and fifty separate admirals steering in a hundred and fifty directions merely causes us to go around in circles and get nowhere."

 

"Everything is a verb, a wave function. I am a wave. You only see me because of interference, because light is bouncing off me. We don’t understand Universe or Mind because we keep thinking of them as nouns, static things, and they are not static at all, not nouns."

 

"High Times: What is Mind?

Fuller: Patterned integrity. I am not the tons of food, water and air that have gone into supporting this patterned integrity for eighty-five years; I am the patterned integrity itself. You breathe out everything you breathe in. A little bit of flesh gets rubbed off by friction against other things or air molecules every second. The patterned integrity organizes the food, water and air into this wave function in time that you recognize as Bucky Fuller.

Suppose you had a different-colored telephone for each friend. Then when the pink phone rings, you would say, “That’s Mary.” If you never left your room, all you would know of Mary is the pink telephone. The pink telephone would be Mary for you. If the pink telephone was destroyed, you’d think Mary had ceased to exist.

High Times: Sounds like Plato’s parable of the prisoners in the cave, who think only shadows are real.

Fuller: I am simply saying that patterned integrities are more real than the matter on which they are imposed. I can make the same knot in cotton or nylon string, but the knot is not cotton or nylon. It is a patterned integrity.

High Times: Sometimes you sound like a Buddhist.

Fuller: I see absolutely no difference between Buddhism and Christianity. Let me put it this way: When I was a student at Harvard, they told me there was a difference between the animate and the inanimate. Then along came biochemistry, genetics and virology. The line began to blur, especially around the viruses. Now we have biophysics and the line has disappeared completely. We are made up entirely of atoms and atoms are inanimate. Then must we be inanimate? I find that impossible to believe. We are the patterned, structural integrities that hold the system together. Instead of thinking of animate and inanimate, we should think electromagnetically, in terms of the tuned in and the not tuned in. When the pink telephone goes, we would simply say that Mary is not tuned in. The not tuned in is not nonexistent."