The Red Pill & Buckminster Fuller

"The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it's really a different kind of life." -- Buckminster Fuller

"In 1927, at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller stood on the shores of Lake Michigan, prepared to throw himself into the freezing waters. His first child had died. He was bankrupt, discredited and jobless, and he had a wife and new-born daughter. On the verge of suicide, it suddenly struck him that his life belonged, not to himself, but to the universe. He chose at that moment to embark on what he called “an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity.” - Buckminster Fuller Institute

"...he reflected on how lanugage pulls one in the direction of conformity. He wanted a mind liberated from such a limitation. Bucky Fuller wanted to transcend the cognitive limits of language to discover new meanings about life. So it was that he returned from the edge of Lake Michigan that wintry night with a pledge to speak to no one, including his wife, during the first year of his new, born-again consciousness. He wanted to be as fully purged of preconceptions imposed by his culture as possible." - Ageless Marketing

Comments

[Curt]

Very intriguing points made here, about the way in which our mental constructs of the world can tend to 'be' our world, and in fact can limit what we believe we can see and learn about the world.

Language is one of these constructs, perhaps the most important. Think of how hard it is to articulate a complex thought even when you have very good language skills. Then think about how to articulate a new perception of something which you've never seen before.

I recently read a book on Isaac Newton, and what struck me most was the idea that he was able to essentially throw away all the inherited knowledge of the time, move his frame of reference out of his head and in a sense outside of the solar system, to try to understand what was going on with the moon and the planets using simply the traces he could gather here on earth. Simply breathtaking!

[q]

anyone have the entire text of Bucky's pledge to himself and humanity