Place Based Education (PDX and EWR) -- School of Tomorrow

Thinking with the Ancestors

I rarely talk (or write) about my Uncle Earl.  As is the case with Uncle Bill, I'm using ancestry shoptalk in a shorthand, as both uncles are actually siblings of grandparents, not parents.  

Earl was the in-law of my grandma Margie's sis Betty. I recall the last name was Poole or Poolton, I'll ask Bill if he remembers, probably not.  Carol might.  

My dad's side did not get to meet all of my mom's side, but isn't that usually the case?  We meet the most of our respective clans at weddings and funerals, oft times.

Anyway, I recall this conversation with Earl, who seemed enigmatic, yet good humored, happy to have time with me, asking why we say "the campus" instead of "Campus" or something like that.  Why wasn't Campus a proper name?  But for what?

I have only this dreamy recollection, which includes the room.  Then along comes this "the universe" versus "Universe" talk with respect to the Bucky stuff (R. Buckminster Fuller).  These seem to be grammatical investigations.

Where I come out, almost as a sum of these data points, is with Global University in place of and/or as a synonym for Spaceship Earth.  We say Earth as often as "the earth" it seems to me.  So we might say Campus and mean Earth, as in "the planet" (the one we're on).

Campus in Universe.  Works for me, why not?

I'm fine imputing a subjectivity to these terms, thinking of a passage in Synergetics wherein a Universe is like a complete game of how it might have turned out, something subjunctive flavored like that.  There's a wistful "could have been" to one's own world (shades of Wittgenstein again).

On a rather different subject I'll chronicle here that I got up early and started taking in high volumes.  The complete Silva Ultramind commercial, and then free episodes of the new Showtime documentary on Bill Cosby.

And William James Sidis, the smart kid who just wanted to be left alone to think, therefore to be, not unlike Descartes, always pestered by his "friends".  Later they found a manuscript he'd been thinking on (i.e. writing) and it seemed to be about thermodynamics in some way.  They ran it by Bucky Fuller for his assessment.  Small world.

Social Engineering

Middle Americas

In case you're curious what social engineering might look like, let me share some science fiction.  For one thing, I come from the viewpoint of the Americas all being delighted with one another.  

That North Americans have a Mexico to enjoy, and vice versa, is a double blessing.  So many North Americans I know, and not just the so-called Hispanic ones, are in love with Mexican culture, whereas others have retired in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Belize, Panama and so on.

I used to tell EJA I was bound for Costa Rica, just to get away from the oppressive MIC, which is AFSC jargon for "military-industrial complex" (to which I give a Jungian spin, i.e. "complex" is a psyche thing). My sister lived there for some years.

Speaking of teaching, I want to introduce high schoolers to Regexes, and not just inside the domain of "computer science".  We're always reminded that Regular Expressions were invented by a mathematician. Lets expand high school math to include them.  What's on my plate for the next couple days.

So the social engineering centers around weather reports, as broadcast over TV stations.  Some of the GPS / GIS maps in the background are fairly TexMex in their makeup, i.e. we're in some Middle America between Mexico City and Las Vegas.  

There's a road net, a set of mountain ranges, some valleys with rivers.  The Colorado, for example, no longer has much of a delta to speak of.  Humans have diverted 100% of that particular river.  I'm getting off topic w/r to TV weather, but not w/r to global climate.

When TV viewer-voyeurs are as familiar with Middle Americas as with so-called New England, they'll be less prone to fuel the polarizing language factions.  

Again, the Americas are in love with themselves.  We have so much to treasure.  We are the real West after all (plenty wild), not the pseudo-west of the Atlantic-bounded EU East.

Weather maps, as you've noticed, are used to promote a sense of cohesion, of us versus them. That's why you still see these ludicrous masking algorithms, wherein the "weather of interest" is miraculously masked out.  

As if political boundaries trumped nature.  Hilarious right?  

We get more serious around airports, acknowledging there's an ecosphere (aka a biosphere).  

For the most part, though, we're living (mentally) in a house divided, some us versus them.  

That's your model?  Question authority.

Picture a weather map that strays from Oregon to Washington to Vancouver without a pause.  Bellingham is the belly button of this Cascadia place.  Do we need permission from the District to frame our weather reports as such?  Of course not.  

We might obey conventions out of reflex of course.  "Lets do what we've always done!" is the slogan of Darwin Award champions.

Supergrids

 I've noticed for awhile now that the idea of a "global grid" is nowadays said to be an Asian and, more specifically, a Chinese idea.

Not mentioned here in this Bloomberg vid, is Bucky's World Game making the global grid a top priority.

I guess Bucky is just too scary and troubling a figure to bring up casually in corporate business circles.

The vid also fails to mention one of the oldest HVDC lines, from Oregon to California.

Mind vs Brain

What I'm not expecting the new biography of Bucky Fuller to dive into, given time and space constraints, is Fuller's relationship with P. D. Ouspensky and/or his philosophy. 

We know there was some kind of connection from Linda Darlrymple Henderson's book, on non-Euclidean geometry's influence on modern art.  Apparently Fuller sent a copy of his limited edition 4D Timelock to Claude Bragdon as soon as he self published it, with a note mentioning the importance of Tertium Organum. 

We may conclude Fuller read Tertium Organum, which gets into the "dimension talk" so pervasive at the turn of the millennium (1800s - 1900s). 

Fuller’s appreciation of trailblazers who rose above their peers with pioneering ideas was also influenced by mystically oriented teachers whom he met in New York City at the beginning of the Great Depression. He gravitated to esoteric teachings in spiritual development by the Russian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (whom Fuller met in Greenwich Village in the late 1920s) and his pupils P. D. Ouspensky and Claude Bragdon, and, in the 1930s, the controversial French American scientist Alexis Carrel. Drawing on these various sources, Fuller merged the design conceptions of his single-family house with mystical iterations on self-propelled evolution. [source]

The connection I'm seeing is between Gurdjieff's picture of "man, a machine", striving to awaken, and Fuller's own emphasis on automaticity, i.e. on processes not carried out consciously, such as digesting and growing hair... including consciousness itself?  

We don't know how we do it.  Look ma, no hands.

Our automaticity is not something we need to moralize about or feel guilty about, so much as wake up to. Like they said in est:  guilt is that thing you hold on to so you can keep doing that thing you feel guilty about.  

Per Bucky, and just ordinary language, waking up to inappropriate reflexes is more a matter of correcting for awkwardness, once a habit gets way out of whack vs-a-vs the actual challenges.  But doesn't this beg the question as to what's inappropriate?  Who's to judge?

Taking a page from Krishnamurti, is it a matter of seeing the cost?  Or call it sticker shock.  We snap out of it to the extent we catch ourselves falling into it, whatever that is.  The shock of realizing you about to doze off in the driver's seat is what might finally persuade you to pull off, the better practice in these conditions.

Assuming "the Self" in the Jungian sense is an anchoring equilibrium, then a disequilibrium might be a daydream or system, a set of beliefs, a faith and practice.  We accept an aberrational system, always needing Self correction in principle.  But what shocks us into actually shaking off the old habits to make room for new grooming?

I bring est into it because in retrospect it doesn't surprise me that these two philosophers would precessionally orbit one another, but not necessarily converge.  Fuller never did the est Training.  Yet his and Erhard's karma most definitely intertwined.  

I'm pointing to a common lineage:  "esoteric" teachings that begin with the unconscious and/or sleeping and/or habitual nature of the human psyche (including thought), with respect to a possibly unrealized self awareness potential.  

I put "esoteric" in scare quotes because none of the actors mentioned was actively working to make their teachings private and/or secret.  What makes the teachings "hidden" is the need to work on oneself, which can be difficult and may imply a workshop setting, with exercises and self-disciplines.

As Applewhite mentions in Cosmic Fishing somewhere, Fuller was not prone to demonize.  He was not into pointing the finger of blame or indulging in resentment, the paradigm negative emotion.  

He could see what he was up against, in terms of pattern integrities.  Yet he is adamant about having no goodies or baddies at the heart of his mechanics.  He's taking after Nietzsche in that way, in revaluing all values. "Accentuate the positive" was his motto, from that song.

"Man cannot do, because man is a bureaucracy" might be one way to provide a synopsis of the Fourth Way teachings.  

To will the good is to will one thing, according to Kierkegaard.  But how often are we free of ambivalence?  Don't we fragment into numerous "I" types, each with a point of view?  We fight with ourselves, in a battle of self overcoming.

Fuller wanted to accommodate the namespaces he trusted, even where the shop talks diverged.  He'd have his own way to keep Love and Gravity connected, including through ample discussion of Newton's Law.  

There's that one-on-one love, of two black holes, swirling around one another, one day to converge.  Then there's that peeling off from a 90 degree orbit and making one's own way, neither tugging nor resisting, what Fuller labeled "precession".

In Fuller's shoptalk, the "brain bureaucracy" may be semi-paralyzed in an awkward state, looking to pull out of a tailspin.  The mind is able to reshape the aberrational, provided one stays open to it.  Whether it's able to do so in time is touch and go in some cases.