“How do we think in terms of wholes?” If it is true that the bigger the thinking becomes the more lastingly effective it is, we must ask, “How big can we think?”
from Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969)
Mr. Fuller and Maharishi came from different traditions of knowledge, but both talked about the universal basis of life, the individual, and the cosmos.
Critical Path is Fuller’s master work—the summing up of a lifetime’s thought and concern—as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. The book details how humanity found itself in its current situation—at the limits of the planet’s natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises. The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future.
Visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller explores humanity’s evolution and role in the cosmos in this far-reaching lecture. He celebrates the human mind’s ability to grasp universal principles, contrasting this with the brain’s focus on discrete data. Fuller champions a "synergetic" systems perspective focused on wholes rather than parts. He examines patterns in civilization, especially relating to travel and geography. Throughout, Fuller aims to inspire an eternal, all-encompassing understanding of our existence.
In this talk Richard Buckminster Fuller contemplates humanity’s cosmic purpose. Rejecting assumptions like the need to earn a living, he sees humans as empowered problem-solvers with the ability to employ principles and participate in the universe’s flow. Fuller advocates fully dedicating oneself to assisting humanity and nature’s overall aims. He shares his personal journey, trusting the universe’s integrity and coordinating with its intellect. Fuller encourages examining beliefs, focusing on lived experience. He envisions humanity awakening to its cosmic purpose, consciously evolving in harmony with nature’s symphony, our full potential realized through unity with the universe’s aim.
Like an omniscient sage, Fuller weaves an epic tapestry tracing technology’s ascent from ancient days when muscle reigned to modern times where mind ascends the throne. With synergy’s secret wisdom, he foretells an era free from want, where loving logicians lead, and politics and war recede into obscurity’s abyss. Yet this new day tarries, tangled in tradition’s tenacious tendrils. So with urgent eloquence, Fuller implores enlightened minds to sever these bonds and share synergy’s symphony, that all may know life lifted to its zenith through tool and thought’s triumphant tryst.
This session is all about technology’s promise to lift humanity. Like a captain navigating toward undiscovered lands, Fuller charts how innovations—from ships to refrigeration to medicine—brought new worlds into reach. Now technology beckons us to uncharted abundance. If employed for life, not war, it can free all people to pursue their highest aspirations. Fuller inspires us to reclaim technology’s power and unleash humanity’s potential.
Through cosmic timescales, humanity has voyaged in its vessel Earth, navigating by the star-charts of knowledge. Now we enter unmapped seas, led on by curiosity’s compass. Though frail, our minds pilot mighty technologies, taming invisible forces to reshape our world. If we attune to the celestial rhythms resonant in matter’s deepest reality, we may yet fulfill our odyssey’s purpose—to be worthy stewards of the living jewel suspended in the eternal darkness. Published as chapter one in the Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs publication.
In this essay on man, Mr. Fuller expresses what may well be his penultimate view of the human condition. Here, in a mood at once philosophical and involved, Mr. Fuller traces man’s intellectual evolution and weighs his capability for survival on this magnificent craft, this Spaceship Earth, this superbly designed sphere almost negligible in dimension compared to the great vastness of space. Mr. Fuller is optimistic that man will survive and, through research and development and increased industrialization, generate wealth so rapidly that he can do very great things. But, he notes, there must be an enormous educational task successfully accomplished right now to convert man’s tendency toward oblivion into a realization of his potential, to a universe-exploring advantage from this Spaceship Earth.
A talk on the impact of science and technology on man’s role in the natural world.
Acceleration of Knowledge
Throughout history we hairless primates have been jumping higher, living longer, and getting smarter every century. From Thai stir-fry to Roman roads, knowledge doubled faster as it drifted West—till now it jumps each year! Space migration? Check. Intelligence increase through yoga, drugs, or machines? You bet. Genetic tinkering? It's coming. And indefinite lifespans? We're on the yellow brick road to divinity, to roam the stars forever, to boldly go where no ape has gone before. The future's so bright I gotta wear shades. Keep hope alive and party on!
Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown
Over the course of nineteen essays, Alan Watts ruminates on the philosophy of nature, ecology, aesthetics, religion, and metaphysics. Assembled in the form of a mountain journal, written during a retreat in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais in California, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown is Watts’ meditation on the art of feeling out and following the watercourse way of nature, known in Chinese as the Tao. Embracing a form of contemplative meditation that allows us to stop analyzing our experiences and start living into them, the book explores themes such as the natural world, established religion, race relations, karma and reincarnation, astrology and tantric yoga, the nature of ecstasy, and much more.
Conscious Evolution
Presented at the 2015 International Forum on Consciousness, Barbara explored the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the possibilty of humanity gradually giving birth to a new planetary-scale consciousness, which she called Homo universalis.
Cosmic Network
Alan takes us from the very small to the very large, explaining the interrelatedness of all things in the universe as a vast network which weaves us into a united yet unnamable divinity.
Do You Do It Or Does It Do You?
Alan explores the meaning of personal free will in the context of core tenets in Eastern mythology: how is it possible to control anything when preexisting conditions outside of our influence determine our present situation? It is a realization of the hidden unity behind our apparent diversity and a relinquishing of obsessive control that enables us to unlock a pathway leading out of the conundrum and towards a celebration and reverence of life.
Ecological Awareness
When Alan Watts talked about the ‘mystical experience’ among scientific circles, he preferred to call it ‘ecological awareness’—referring to a state of mind in which a person ceases to feel separate from the environment in which he or she exists.
Evolving Times
This evening address is one of Terence’s funniest, in which much is said about monkeys, mushrooms, plants, and people. The question and answer session gets good and lively, with his unique analysis of UFOs, governments, and possible evolutionary pathways for us and the planet.
Metapatterns
In the interdisciplinary tradition of Buckminster Fuller’s work, Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature, and Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics, Metapatterns embraces both nature and culture, seeking out the grand-scale patterns that help explain the functioning of our universe. Metapatterns begins with the archetypal patterns of space, both form-building and relational. Tyler Volk then turns to the arrows, breaks, and cycles that infuse the workings of time. With artful dexterity, he brings together many layers of comprehension, drawing on an astounding range of material from art, architecture, philosophy, mythology, biology, geometry, and the atmospheric and oceanographic sciences. Richly illustrating his metapatterns with a series of sophisticated collages prepared for this book, Volk offers an exciting new look at science and the imagination. As playful and intuitive as it is logical and explanatory, Metapatterns offers an enlightening view of the functional, universal form in space, processes in time, and concepts in mind.
Reality, Art, and Illusion
Join Alan as he expresses the meaning of life through the Hindu-Buddhist idea of reality as a divine game of hide-and-seek. "Life is not ultimately serious," Watts argues. By embracing the fluidity of identity and recognizing our interconnectedness, we can creatively engage with existence as impermanent, unified, and filled with playful potential. Accessible yet philosophically rich, these decades-old lectures offer timeless insights on the nature of reality.
The Bridge Between Matter And Spirit is Matter Becoming Spirit
This volume brings together the essays of Paolo Soleri in which he sets forth his philosophy of arcology (architecture ecology) and pleads for a new stage in the evolution of human society—a move toward compactness, or miniaturization, of our cities. To do so we must build solids rather than veneers; we must flee from a “flat” cityscape that debilitates and suppresses the individual. Arcologies, three dimensional macrostructures, are for populations of thousands or of millions.
The Global Superorganism
The organismic view of society is updated by incorporating concepts from cybernetics, evolutionary theory, and complex adaptive systems. Global society can be seen as an autopoietic network of self-producing components, and therefore as a living system or “superorganism”. Published in the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems.
The Houseboat Summit
An extended conversation between Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder on the problem of whether to “drop out or take over,” conducted on Alan Watts’ houseboat in 1967.
The Myopic View of the World
Alan Watts argues that we spend most of our life in a sort of myopia; that is, only perceiving a microscopic subsection of the reality which we occupy. By mentally “zooming out,” humans can begin to see (and enjoy) the marvelous universal dance that has been unfolding since the Big Bang—and which now expresses itself in and through us at this very moment.
The Vision of a Better World
Two visionaries, Tom Munnecke and Barbara Marx Hubbard, engage in an uplifting dialogue exploring the emergence of human creativity and consciousness. They trace inspirations from mentors like Jonas Salk, who recognized futuristic possibilities in Hubbard, and Buckminster Fuller, who affirmed humanity's potential. Together they shine light on the crisis of our times as the birth pangs of a new civilization, calling us to connect with the creativity arising globally. Their exchange weaves threads of hope and positivity, envisioning a future where all people actualize their gifts in service of our world.
World as Play
Watts presents a core Eastern philosophy of the world as a dramatic illusion, and that it exists for no other reason except to be experienced in a playful manner.
