“I think the most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’

This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.

“For if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process.

“If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially ‘playing dice with the universe’, then we are simply victims to the random toss of the dice and our lives have no real purpose or meaning.

“But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives.”

“God does not play dice with the universe,”

–Albert Einstein

“We’re at the point in our evolution that we all have to become conscious. This is a time of revolution. There’s no holding back. So I’m about tearing down the monastery walls and seeing the whole world as the monastery, as the practice, as the spiritual temple. What we’re all working on is this very being, this very life. This is the temple, it has no walls.” ~ Zen Master Dennis Genpo Merzel from Big Mind · Big Heart

Always one of my favorites, Bucky was an amazing writer, philosopher and inventor. To find out more about this true genius visit bfi.org.

Greater justice and economic improvement for the many is not always the result of social revolution. The Europeans’ guns overwhelming of the American Indian bow-and-arrow weapons was in most ways a retrogressive social revolution implemented by design-science revolution. It is always the design revolution that tips the social scales one way or the other. However, sum totally the combined design and social revolutions ultimately favor the many. Between 1900 and today, 60 percent of humans in the U.S.A. have attained a standard of living far in advance of those of the greatest potentates of 1900 while concurrently doubling the life-span of that fortunate 60 percent.

An excerpt from Grunch of Giants by R. Buckminster Fuller:

Never before in all history have the inequities and the momentums of unthinking money-power been more glaringly evident to so vastly large a number of now literate, competent, and constructively thinking all-around-the-world humans. There’s a soon-to-occur critical-mass moment when the intuition of the responsibly inspired majority of humanity, in contradistinction to the angered Luddites and avenging Robin Hoods, faced with comprehensive functional discontinuity of nationally contained techno-economic system, will call for and accomplish a world-around reorientation of our planetary affairs. At this critical moment will occur a realization by the responsibly inspired majority that the adequate capacity of the invisible technology to sustainingly support all humanity depends on all the resources, physical and metaphysical, being always and only employed for all of world-around humanity as a completely integrated techno-economic system operating entirely on its daily income principally of Sun-emanating energy.

“Financially, politically, climatically and technologically, the ground is moving beneath our feet. Our narratives of how the world works are not matching the facts. Yet humans are pattern-seeking, story-telling animals. Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation. We will always fill such a vacuum with meaning.”

– Joel Garreau, staff writer, The Washington Post and author, Radical Evolution

“The change now required must come from within ourselves, within our thinking–a shift in our attitude toward information itself. The information we choose is the information we serve. Like electricity, information is polarized; it is either creative or destructive. Destructive information is not evil; it is simply programmed to destroy …

“The human mind … is designed to operate on the creative, energy-rich currents of living information. Destructive informational currents distort and eventually block its perception. Those who attempt to ‘own’ truths soon find themselves orienting their lives around a storehouse of accumulated facts–arbitrarily maintained and increasingly difficult to access …

“We are embodiments of the universe’s truth, products of its creativity, interpretive mechanisms it has placed here to experience and enjoy dimensional life. Our human biocircuitry is designed to create, but until we clearly understand the vital distinction between forms of truth and truth’s living reality, our bodies’ higher creative functions cannot be activated.”

Ken Carey, “Where Do We Draw the Line?,” from Solstice Shift, edited by John Nelson (Hampton Roads, 1997)