[Background conversation]
So Bucky died 30 years ago. And when he died everybody went Buckminster Fuller is dead and I went, “Wait a minute!” because I was working with the institute at the time, I went, “This is the guy who said, ‘death is yet ---
[Background conversation]
So Bucky Fuller 30 years ---
[Background conversation]
[0:01:47]
So Bucky Fuller died 30 years ago and everybody went, “Bucky Fuller’s dead, we should wrap up all the stuff, put it in an archive.” And I went, “Wait a minute! This is the guy who said, ‘this is not me, this is yesterday’s breakfast. And when this is gone doesn’t mean I am gone, it means that you need to find other ways to communicate with me.’” And I actually just got an email yesterday from a woman who said, “Oh! I’ve been dreaming about Bucky Fuller and I actually saw him in the mall the other day.” And I am like, “Whoa! This is pretty interesting she’s in Australia.” And I think that his influence is like everywhere.
[0:02:27]
What I decided was that I was going to do -- that he had conducted a 56 year experiment to determine and document what one individual could achieve that could not be accomplished by any religion, government, organization of any kind. So it’s basically what one man can do and he documented it and I said, “Well, when somebody does an experiment, you don’t just archive it away. You actually examine it.” So that’s what I’d spent the last 30 years doing literally. And doing what he told us to do, which is what all the great teachers say, they all say, don’t believe a word I say, don’t believe a word I wrote, right? Checked it out against your own personal experience, take what works and use it, what doesn’t -- I say actually like put it aside because when your perspective changes, as I have had happen for myself many times, then you might say, “Oh! That does actually work now for me.”
[0:03:30]
During that 30 years, I didn’t just doing that, I was Mr. Mom at home, dad for 15 years, raised kids, did a bunch of things, but I was always looking at his life and all the pieces of his experiment that I could apply to my life and I found that in the last 30 years of his life everything he said was spot on, and it works. And so that’s the cool thing about Bucky Fuller is that, this is the time when everybody’s going, “I want to make” --a lot of people anyhow, are going-- “I want to make a difference in the world, I want to do something with my life, I want this.” And we don’t have to reinvent the wheel because here is the man who created a template for us 56 years living consciously. As an experiment to determine and document what one individual could achieve, that could not be achieved by any religion, government, no matter how large or powerful. And he documented it so there’s -- it’s not like we have to kind of figure it out. It’s all there to see. And I found there are certain things that work. Trim tabs, synergy, precessional effect. All these things that he talked about, these generalized principles, you can apply them and it’s really kind of simple.
[0:04:44]
And that’s the other thing everything that he said was actually simple although it seemed convoluted and complicated it was actually simple. Because what it all boils down to is; how does nature do it? Let’s do that. Does nature do that? If nature does that, we’ll do that. That’s design science in a nutshell, really. If nature does it, that’s how we do it. Design science in a nutshell is following nature’s patterns. It’s like not trying to do things that nature is not doing. Nature wants certain --nature, God universe creator, whatever word you want to use. Bucky talked a lot about nature, he also talked a lot about God and he used these kinds of words interchangeably. He also used the word universe, which I like to use a lot. Universe has a certain design that it’s doing. Human beings need to be more in line with what nature’s doing. Because when we don’t it doesn’t work. It’s like earthquakes and buildings, you know. Geodesic domes and earthquakes do not fall down, they might roll off their foundation and roll down the hill, but they won’t fall apart because they mirror nature’s principles; whereas most of the buildings that we’ve built as human beings will fall down because of an earthquake.
[00:06:16]
Bucky talked about tension and compression always and only coexist --and this was one of his favorite expressions ‘always and only coexist’ and they have to be balanced; because if they’re not balanced, everything disappears. So it’s all tensegrity, tension and compression. What else do you want?
[Background Conversation]
[00:07:59]
I’m going to tell you about generalized principles actually. So over the last 20 years or so, I can’t tell you how many (usually younger) people come to me and say, “We need a list of all the generalized principles. Did Bucky write one?” The answer is no, and then they go “Well, could you, could you? Let’s do a book and let’s get all the generalized principles and then we’ll know everything. We’ll have it all down on paper.” And I’m like “No.” Once in a while I bite and actually try to do this, and I start off you know --synergy, precessional effect. It doesn’t work. Because there’s too many of them and there are certain ones that are really important that he used. Trim tab, which is --well let’s not go into trim tab now but trim tab and precessional effect and synergy and the things that he talked about a lot that we need to know about that are generalized principles, but basically generalised principles are once again just mirroring nature.
[00:09:10]
So it’s like you’re not going to get, we can’t give you the whole, I mean go try reading Synergetics One and Two and then you know, see if you can get all the generalized principles out of there. Because they’re all in there, you know if you want to do all the technical work. But for me, what you wind up doing is in Buddhism --which I’m a practicing Buddhist –there’s the path of study, there’s the path of practice and there’s the path of action. And when you start writing down everything, you go down the path of study which is good for some --Bucky did a lot of that. But we need action now. We don’t have time to write everything down. It’s like “Here, trim tab, you know what trim tab is, now, go use it.” Trim tab is basically doing more with less. Trim tab is on the back of the great ‘Ship of State’ or any great ship there is, or people think that any way you turn the ship, is with a rudder. The big heavy rudder that weighs tons and tons, it’s not how the ship is turned. The way the ship is turned is that on the back of the rudder there is a little ‘teeny’ rudder that you can actually turn and basically you can move it with your finger. It’s very easy to move and when they want to turn the ship, they turn the wheel which moves the trim tab which causes the pressure on the rudder to change, which causes the rudder to move, which causes the ship to turn. So with a very little effort the Buddhists and other people call it simple. What do they call it? I forgot. Anyhow.
[Background Conversation]
[00:11:01]
So on the back of the ship is this little rudder that takes almost no effort to turn, so if you want to make a difference in the world, what you do is you look for the trim tab. Yes, I could talk to one person and one person and I’ve done that. I could talk to an audience of ten, and I could be recorded on film or I could write a book. Those are trim tabs. You get more with less. You do the same amount of work pretty much, like talking on film and getting recorded and put out as it does to talk to one person. So it’s a trim tab. And I have learned in my life to look for the trim tab all the time, so it’s like okay so I really wanted to do this and that, now with the access we have to the internet I always think “God what would Bucky do if he had a smart phone, if he had the internet.” He would have just been --I can’t even imagine, you know it’s like wow!. So we can do a lot. I mean I put a Bucky fuller quote on facebook and two hours later 10,000 people have seen it. And it happens, I do it almost every day. And so a lot more people are being exposed to this kind of stuff. That’s trim tab and it takes me about ten minutes, fifteen minutes to do this. And it’ll be there for a long time and people will be seeing it for a long time. And people will be influenced. That’s trim tab. And when you really are into making a difference, this is what you do. That’s trim tab it’s just one of the generalized principles. But it’s a big one if you’re into the path of action. So yeah that’s what I know about trim tab.
[Background Conversation]
[00:13:07]
Well, study is basically study. You study the Dharma, you study the principles. Oh by the way, Buckminster fuller was a bodhisattva. I don’t know if it’ll ever get in your movie, but Bucky Fuller was a bodhisattva. Many of us, I’m not the only one who’s said it, I’ve heard other people say it. A bodhisattva being a person on the road to Buddhahood --which we all are --but someone who’s doing it very consciously and specifically; you can tell by the fact that they work for all beings and that was his thing. He was always looking out not just for him or his family. In 1927 when he was going to commit suicide that was one of the disciplines that he committed himself to. To work for everybody. And he soon thought it out. This is like a sort of generalized principle. It is a generalized principle actually, that very few people talk about. That the bigger the project you work on, the easier it is and the more that comes to you. Specifically, if you’re working to solve world hunger, you probably don’t have problems with your relationships or your money because you’re too busy ending world hunger and things happen.
[00:14:39]
That’s the other thing, that’s called precessional effect because things happen. I’ve had this happen many times where I’m working on you know, the second Bucky book and I don’t know how it’s going to come about --and this and that and the other thing --and all of a sudden it just shows up. A publisher shows up on facebook --a guy I haven’t seen in 25 years --you know. How did that happen? Or somebody actually gives me money. In the past I would go “Woah, that’s strange, that’s a miracle!” Now I go “No that’s just precessional effect.” Which is actually related directly to the Buddhist thing of karma; karma being cause and effect. That’s all karma is: cause and effect. You drop in the Bucky Fuller one-man play, he comes and at the beginning he drops a quarter and goes “Gravity! Works every time.” That’s karma actually too. Works every time. You do something, there will be an effect. Unfortunately, we don’t have a broad enough perspective to know that “Oh when this guy came to town and I met him it was because of karma, some action I did four lives back.” Bucky Fuller actually had that kind of perspective; he was pretty clear about a lot of things you know, he responded like “Oh yeah, okay of course.”
[00:16:12]
He didn’t get riled by things because he had the bigger perspective and he talked about that whole idea of perspective. Which was one of the greatest gifts he had --was his perspective --which was very broad, which when you have a broad perspective, you see that everything is related. There are patterns to everything including earthquakes and everything. Bucky used to say we just stand far enough back in order to see the pattern, we only see these little short term patterns which is kind of an issue we humans have. We only see short patterns where as he was looking on big patterns which is why he was a comprehensive anticipatory design scientist. Anticipatory meaning he was looking into the future. So he was always looking to solve problems 50 to 100 years into the future. Geodesic dome, people still haven’t applied it properly to where it really needs to be applied which is to cover a large amount of space. It’s the only structure we know of that the larger it gets the stronger it gets. So they’re working to build a geodesic dome to cover the city of Houston. Because it would save energy, it would protect the city and it would always be ‘72 and sunny’ and you’d never see the difference. So it’d be a very cool thing and Bucky proposed this as a kind of ‘pie in the sky’ thing when he was alive. This is what he did, he was not the guy who would actually --although he did build things --he didn’t build things to say like “Okay this is a house.” He’d build them to plant seeds. So that others could carry on and that’s what we’re doing. A lot of people are doing it. More and more than you could possibly imagine. And they keep kind of floating on the surface like “Oh look at this,” and “Look at that.” You know this thing is happening, that thing is happening so it’s pretty cool.
[Background Conversation]
[00:18:33]
Synergy is behavior. Synergy is not what people think it is and that’s what’s amazing to me. It’s like “Oh yeah, let’s create synergy in the room.” Synergy, a lot of people believe especially in business, that synergy is we get a bunch of people in the room and we all start talking and something magical happens, like fairy dust comes down and we all make a million dollars or millions of dollars or we do this great thing and great things happen. Synergy is not that. Synergy can be that, but it’s not that. Synergy is behavior of whole systems that can’t be predicted by the behavior of the individual parts when looked at separately. For instance; fire, black powder. If I don’t know I go “Oh! Fire, black powder. Interesting this is powder and its very interesting and this is fire and its very hot.” But you put them together and it’s an explosion. Gun powder and fire, it’s an explosion. Well, after I’ve seen it once it’s not synergy anymore because I actually know that when I put these things together, that’s what’s going to happen. So the more knowledge we have, the more synergy we have, because we can see --we have a broader perspective. The synergy of synergy as Bucky said once in a while is basically God. When you get to the point where you can see everything and know all the behaviours of all the parts as they’re interacting then you’ve reached enlightenment or something I that have not yet. Not in my purview at the moment.
[00:20:14]
Then there’s people who always say, “Oh yes, we’re going to create synergy isn’t that great. I’m like, synergy is not positive or negative. Synergy is a thing, it’s just synergy so if you want to say there’s positive synergy, then there’s negative synergy. For instance you could take a bunch of really smart well intentioned people with really good intentions and the highest of credentials and you send them to Washington DC. You put them together and they create something that couldn’t be predicted by what they’d do separately. And its usually less than what they would produce individually, if those people were working individually. You know, it’s called government. Which Bucky said politicians and government is all obsolete, and it is. We don’t need it anymore. I don’t have a television but if I did --in a day when I could vote on who’s going to win American Idol or whatever the show is at the moment. Why can’t I vote if we’re going to build another bomber or were going to have better schools? We’re going to put the money into schools. There’s actually no reason. People go “Well it’s state money,” or “Its federal money,” no its all our money. It all goes into one. And why do we need to pay all these people to go to this place and make these decisions for us, when we the people could make the decision?
[00:22:02]
Bucky talked about that a lot. He actually talked about another level which was you could put some sort of satellite. That would detect what people were feeling at any given moment. Which I’m sure we could but, I think that’s beyond what were up to right now, and know that this is what the people want and what the people want by the way is kind of simple we all want to be happy and have a good life. The Dalai Lama says people just want to be happy. The memo that most of us have not yet gotten was what Bucky discovered when he started looking in well 1927 he started looking but in the 30s he really looked. And he inventoried all the resources on the planet which people go oh that’s nice. you have to understand the man didn’t even have a computer, he didn’t have a calculator, this was in the 30’s!. so he had nothing except all this data that he got because he was involved with Fortune Magazine and Phelps Dodge so he had all this data and he put it together and figured out, he noticed what was happening is that every so many years, when something would be recycled, which that word wasn’t really in the vocabulary at the time. When that happened we added something to that resource that copper that zinc whatever it was and the something we added was knowledge and because we added knowledge to it, what happened was we could do more with less.
[00:23:41]
So the analogy that Bucky used to use which is still valid, is that it’s the same copper that’s in the cables these tons and tons of copper cables that go under the ocean was in the satellite, but the satellite you only need like hundreds of pounds to convey thousands of phone calls whereas the cables you need tons of copper to do this. And the thing is that I always, take this guy. There is nothing new in this guy. This cellphone –smartphone --there’s no new fairy dust that came from the sky. It’s the same materials but what we’ve added to those materials is knowledge and we keep adding knowledge to material and we keep being able to do more with less. And Bucky said well, in the thirties and the forties he went “You know we’re doing so much more with less I think we’re probably going to get to a place and time where there’ll be enough for everybody.” Which was a strange idea back then that there’s enough for everybody but he started doing the math because he was a math guy and what he came up with was that in approximately 1976 (give or take) there would be enough to go around and we now know that.
[00:25:02]
Approximately 1976 there became enough food on the planet to feed everybody. There’s enough. There are very few people left who will argue that point any more. However 50,000 people will die of starvation today. And I know it’s not exactly 50,000 but it’s somewhere in there and that’ll happen tomorrow and the next day and it happened yesterday and it keeps happening. But there’s enough food to go around. Bucky said there’s not just enough food to go around, there’s enough everything to go around. However, when that happened we became enough to go around what we reached was a place where politicians are obsolete, war is obsolete, it’s all obsolete, and we don’t need it any more. We don’t need to try to kill each other. What we need to do is feed each other and house each other and clothe each other then we get to live in the utopia heaven on earth that people have been talking about for quite a long time. And it’s available and that’s my little tagline, people go “What was Bucky Fuller about?” Weaponry to livingry ’ baby, that’s it.

‘Weaponry to livingry.’ We have to shift our focus and resources from weaponry to ‘livingry’. Livingry being education, housing, food and making sure everybody’s taken care of. And then our physical problems become solved basically. People go “Woah, what about those terrorists?”
[00:26:42]
Do you really think that a guy who has a house and kids in school and a job that he likes doing and a wife and relatives and friends and all that stuff no matter where he lives --in the Middle East or wherever --is going to strap a bomb onto himself and get on a plane or stuff like that. No, because he’s happy. Yeah there will be a few crazy people. There are crazy people on the planet. But if we shift our focus from weaponry to livingry, we’ll have enough resources to give those people the care that they need. We’ll be able to find them and take care of them --if we have to lock them up in an institution or something. But it’s doable. But as long as we’re trying to kill each other, it’s not going to work and we’re not going to make it. And that’s one of the things Bucky used to get asked all the time, “Do you think humanity’s going to survive, are we going to make it?” And he would always say until the last year of his life, “Well its touch and go.” And there’s a video I would sometimes watch and show in ’82 where he says to the interviewer --this was 1982, the year before he died –“Eight years and it’s not looking like we’ve done such a hot job of turning it around right now.” And he also said in the last year of his life that he thought we were going to make it and the reason being, most people don’t remember when they had the Falkland Island situation. Where the British and the Argentinians I think, --well some South American country –they were arguing over these rocks in the middle of the ocean called the Falkland islands and the British could easily have used an atomic bomb and just annihilated them because there would have been some fallout. But it wouldn’t have been that big a global crisis. And they didn’t. Bucky said that proved that we humans could actually you know, handle things without going to those extremes.
[00:29:03]
He cited that as the thing that was like a turning point for us. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what he said.
[Background Conversation]
I live two blocks down from The Bullet Foundation. Do you know what the bullet foundation is? The Bullet Foundation is a Bucky Fuller dream actually. The Bullet Center, it was built by the Bullet Foundation, it opened about three months ago. And it’s basically a Buckminster Fuller dream. The ‘living building challenge’, they won the living building challenge. It’s a living building. So all the water comes from the sky, its collected in a cistern and they drink it. It’s a six story office building and it’s totally off the grid. All the electricity comes from the panels. It has geothermal heating. All the materials are within a certain range of local. In order to build this building they had to get laws changed in both the state and the city. To build a sustainable building in Seattle, and pretty much anywhere else is illegal. And the Mayor and the City Council went along with him because they were doing this to prove that it could be done. And interestingly the ‘living building challenge’ which won the ‘Buckminster Fuller challenge’ last year, their offices are in this building and this building won the ‘living building challenge’. And it’s so Bucky you know. When he built a Dimaxion house or proposed a Dimaxion house. There wasn’t the possibility, there wasn’t the technology. But he proposed that it would be a structure that was off the grid so your Dimaxion house was your house for life, so if you wanted to take it from Seattle to New Mexico, you called up the moving the service and said “On this and such day, you pick up my house” and a big helicopter thing came and picked up your house and flew it to wherever. And that’s how people lived and it generated its own electricity with a big wind turbine. It didn’t do that at the time, but he was proposing things 50 to 100 years into the future. And he said this technology will exist and this technology now exists. And the Bullet Foundation Center up here, they’ve actually implemented it. Dennis Hayes who was the coordinator of the first Earth Day among other things, is the head guy of the Bullet Foundation and he proposed this building and they actually built it and its pretty amazing.
[Background Conversation]
[00:34:52]
Do you want to know what I think? I think recycling and all this stuff people are doing now is worthless. It’s spit in the ocean. As long as we’re still doing weaponry instead of livingry. We can do all the design science and recycling things we want, but it’s going to kill people. It’s going to war. If we’re doing a better job at weaponry, is that really such a good thing --like yes it’s nice, people feel good about putting their cardboard in the bin and this or that. It makes them feel good and then they don’t do anything else. They don’t get really active. The people, especially in this country need to stop allowing the people we’ve elected to keep putting our money into weaponry when we don’t have schools, we don’t have roads and people are starving on the streets of Seattle. I walk down here I walk by several people who are sleeping in the streets you know, that’s crazy when we have money to go over to places and kill people. Yes design science works. Mirroring nature works, nature doesn’t actually kill. You know, no species in nature tries to kill other members of its species except human beings. That’s design science. We’re the only species that tries to kill each other. It doesn’t make sense any more especially now that there’s enough to go around. The enough to go around part gets even better when you go, “So if there’s enough to go around then how exactly does this work?” How does this job thing, and this working for a living thing --cause u know Bucky said working for a living is like working to earn your right to live --that’s obsolete also. “Wait a minute, I don’t have to do something I don’t want to do in order to be alive on the planet? That’s what they told me when I was a kid.” They told Bucky that too. In 1927 he decided he was going to try something else, which was doing what needed to be done. What a concept. People say to me, “Well, what would Bucky do?” Well it’s really really really simple. Here’s what Bucky would do: Bucky would always do what was needed to be done that was not being attended to. You want to know what to do, to make a difference in your life, in people’s lives and all that good stuff and to be satisfied and fulfilled. You look around wherever you are, in your kitchen, in your office, wherever you are and look and see what needs to be done that’s not being attended to and do that. Might be washing the dishes, it might be ending world hunger.
[00:37:42]
When you do that, everything starts to change, life starts to change and your life starts to change and you get happier because you’re doing things that you want to do and you’re making contributions to people and that’s the ideal. The ideal happens when we all realize that there’s enough to go around so we don’t have to do things that we don’t want to do to earn a living and then we can do what we want to do and people are all “Oh, yeah I’ll win the lottery and I’m going to go on trips and I’m going to buy cars.” Yeah, people do that for a while and after people have won the lottery and then they go “Well now what?” If they’re smart --which most of us aren’t because they go “Oh I’m going to buy all these cars,” and next thing you know you’re broke and you’re wondering what happened to that ten million dollars. We see it all the time with these people who come into this fortune and don’t know what to do. People who actually do well are the people who just keep doing what they’re doing and maybe buy a house for their mother or they do a few things and they go “Well you know I didn’t really want to be an accountant I wanted to be an artist and they go be an artist. And they make their contribution. It’s all about contribution. So everybody, when they don’t have to earn a living goes “Okay well, you kind of got to look around as we all do when we’re younger and find the place we want to make our contribution and do that.” And that’s what Bucky did. That’s all he did. He saw where he could make his contribution and he did that. It happened to be on a huge scale and he happened to be --his main thing was to sow seeds that would blossom in the future like now. And solve problems that maybe he knew were going to come up 50 to 100 years into the future.
[0:39:37]
That’s what he did and he created this thing called comprehensive anticipatory design science and you know, said “You people should recycle. Everything that goes around comes around and it keeps coming again,” you know. Now there are some car makers, (very few) who build that into their cars, it should be built into every car. Part of the cost of the car is dismantling it all and putting all the pieces somewhere they can be reused again, not necessarily in a car but where they can be reused again. And not like plastic where they grind everything up and make some carpet, but most of the plastic doesn’t get ground up it gets put in the landfill. Someday, in the not too distant future, if we make it, were going to get to a point where we’re going to go “Oh my God! We’re out of plastic!” Where are we going to get our plastic? And so we go to the landfills which will become the great resource mines and we’re going to re-mine that stuff. Because there’s no such thing as artificial, there’s no pollution. Pollution is a myth, there’s no pollution. There’s nothing artificial. Pollution is just resources in the wrong place. So if we put resources in the right place in the first place, so when you use the plastic bottle, not that I think anyone should use plastic bottles, because they’re carcinogens and there’s a lot of reasons we shouldn’t. And I don’t. But if you do, rather than putting it in the landfill, it’s got to go back and become plastic again. And plastic is a good thing –in certain places. I mean my juicer that I bought has this plastic, it’s like really hard and the juicer will last for 20 years. It’ll last for a long time and it’s a good place to use plastic. There are places where plastic is a good thing. But in things that are going to be tossed away and wind up in a landfill, this is not such a good thing because we don’t have the place, and we’re here for a reason. You know, this is another thing that I learned from Buckminster Fuller.
[00:41:44]
Why are we here? Human Beings are here on spaceship earth as local information gatherers and problem solvers in support of a continually sustainable universe. So were here to gather information and solve problems in support of sustainable universe so if it’s not sustainable it’s not right. We haven’t done it right. So if we’re thrown into the landfill, we haven’t done it right. If the car, if the pieces of whatever we’ve done can’t keep being recycled and reused we’re not doing it right because that’s the way nature does it. Nature wastes nothing. Nature doesn’t use too much water or too little water to grow a tree and it all comes back around. And that’s the way the bullet foundation building is built. To do that, to do exactly that.
[Background Conversation]
[0:42:39]

Yeah there’s a huge pay off in what Bucky did. I mean, in my life and that’s not to say it’s always easy believe me, I mean Bucky said you do what needs to be done. Bucky said we’re part of nature, we are you know. It’s not like “Hey! We are separate things,” we are part of nature, the universe, the whole ecological system. We are part of it. And nature does not have anything in it that’s not supposed to be there. There’s nothing artificial. If you’re doing what needs to be done. You will be supported. Because that’s the way it works, that’s the game. That’s the way nature designs things. If you’re doing something that needs to be done, it will be supported. The caveat that he mentioned that most people don’t remember is that anything can happen. Like tomorrow you go, “Yes, I’m going to write a book about something,” and then a publisher calls. That’s not how it works. You take a step forward you take another step and you take another step and you show faith that you’re doing it and at the last –Bucky always said at the last minute it’s like your down to your last macaroni and cheese box in the cupboard. You have no idea where you’re going to eat tomorrow and you don’t know how you’re going to pay your rent, something will happen. If you’re doing something that nature wants to have happen. Now in being a Buddhist, I will also learn that it’s really good not to be attached, which is a hard thing to do. When your life is on the line or your living is on the line or whatever is on the line it’s hard to be “Oh well, how can I not be attached to this project; this book that I’ve now put two to three years into.” Whatever the project is, this building I’m building, this house. It’s not easy. I mean one of the things that Bucky did that I think was cool is he didn’t own a lot of stuff. He only owned one house in his entire life. And that was the dome in Carbondale and you know that was kind of a show piece than anything else. So he didn’t own a lot of stuff, so he wasn’t attached to a lot of stuff.
[Background Conversation]
[0:47:30]
It’s interesting because my supporter friend John said to me “I’m doing a talk Friday night on Bucky’s birthday,” and he said “Oh you should bring some artifacts.” I was like “Oh, well what should I bring?” And he said “Well can you make one of those rope things, with the three kinds of rope?” And I go “You know in all the years that Bucky ever did that he never made one.” And I go “You don’t want to make one because it’s a generalization, you want to show people at the end, you would say this is a generalization.” So pattern integrity yeah that’s all I know. Pattern integrity is hugely related, it’s interesting because I became a practicing Buddhist about 12 years ago and I would hear that The Buddha said this and The Buddha said that and I would be like “Well Bucky said that too, he just used different words.” Pattern integrity is basically mind but if you translated pattern integrity into Buddhist terms its mind. Because it’s continuous and it goes on forever so Bucky talked about how everything is pattern integrity. Everything is a pattern, which is a pattern and it has integrity and you have to define integrity. And I love the definition of integrity that anything that has integrity holds its shape. I have done classes with kindergarteners and first graders and second graders where we start off and talk about pattern and integrity and what’s integrity and honesty.
[00:49:11]
I tell them it’s anything that holds its shape and then we do what structure --as in inside and outside and then it’s like how many structures are there in the universe that are symmetrical and have integrity and they guess a whole lot and we get down into the three. Tetrahedron, icosahedron and octahedron, and then we build them. Out of coffee stirrers and pipe cleaners and years later kids would still know tetrahedron, icosahedron and octahedron and the parents would tell me “Oh yeah they still have them hanging in their room.” Which is cool that they know these things. So everything is energy and science is now starting to prove that everything is energy. Basically there’s not a lot of mass, there’s a lot of space, and Bucky talked about this a long time for most of his life. Where we and all things (especially living things) are energy that knots itself up and eventually looks like matter. Like a human being. And then we start un-knotting and we see as we get older things start to deteriorate and fall off and teeth fall off and what not and the next thing you know, eventually we die and the body just disappears but the pattern goes on. And he used to talk about this whole thing about a rope and I would have a rope and piece of it was nylon and it was to spliced to rayon and it was spliced to hemp or whatever and I would tie the slipknot in and I start sliding it along and slide from one to the other to the other. And then I slide off and where’s the knot? Is the knot the rope? The knot’s not the rope. This is not me, this is yesterday’s breakfast. This is the material, this is the rope. So but the essential me is not this. And when we realize that.
[Background Conversation]
[00:51:27]
Where did the knot go? The knot has disappeared. The knot, it’s an idea. The knot is an idea. The knot still exists. The ‘idea knot’ still exists. We could do it again. It’s a pattern, its information its energy that’s floating in the universe around us so it’s the same with our bodies. Our bodies are not us. Our bodies are the material that the pattern-integrity-me or the pattern-integrity-Bucky Fuller or the pattern-integrity-Sally has coalesced around. And that pattern comes back again. It keeps coming around on being many people believe the pattern-integrity-Buckminster Fuller is the pattern-integrity-Benjamin Franklin is the same pattern-integrity-Leonardo Da Vinci. And if you take a hundred dollar bill out of your wallet, and look at it and look at the picture of Ben Franklin without the long hair, he kind of looks like Bucky. And back in the 70s I had a big poster of a hundred dollar bill with Bucky in the center so it keeps happening again in all things. Bucky used to talk about ideas how ideas, all knowledge in the universe is out there. It’s there, its streaming and we just have to let it in we have to tune into the channel of the information that we want. I think most people have had the experience of having some great idea for this like invention and then just have just gone “But it’s too weird.” And you don’t do anything and then two or three years later, maybe five years later somebody makes like ten million dollars, brings it to market and you go “I had that idea!” And yeah a lot of people have. And in science its often the same idea that shows up at different places of the planet at different times and people are working and they’re not connected at all. Because they’re tuned into that energy of the past.