Library

BOOK OF CHAPTERS from the FS4SWebsite Library of Lost Knowledge:  Highlights

These books have been chosen from the Library as influences and  “keys” to some of the main concepts of FS4D. The highlights have been included as an attempt to informally “capture and release” these ideas.

1) The Gift of Story, Pincola-Estes
2) The Critical Path, Buckminster Fuller
3) Utopia or Oblivion, Buckminster Fuller
4) The Wisdom of Teams, Katzenback and Smith
5) Hundredth Monkey, Keyes
6) The Family of Man (MOMA)
7) Yoga of Time Travel, Fred Alan Wolf
8) The Discoverers, Daniel Boorstin


1) Pinkola Estes, Clarissa. The Gift of Story: A Wise Tale About What is Enough. New York: Ballantine, 1993. 

“Like night dreams, stories often use symbolic language, therefore bypassing the ego and persona, and traveling straight to the spirit and soul who listen for the ancient and universal instructions imbedded there. Because of this process, stories can teach, correct errors, lighten the heart and the darkness, provide psychic shelter, assist transformation and heal wounds” (28).

“…The tales people tell one another weave  a strong fabric that can warm the coldest emotional or spiritual nights. So the stories that rise up out of the group, become, over time, both extremely personal and quite eternal, for they take on a life of their own when told over and over again” (29).

“Though none of us will live forever, the stories can. As long as one soul remains who can tell the story, and that by the recounting of the tale, the greater forces of love, mercy, generosity, and strength are continuously called into being in the world, I promise you…
it will be enough” (30).

2) Fuller, R. Buckminster. The Critical Path. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981.

An extensive three part work that includes a wide range of Fuller’s scientific and philosophical theories as well as time lines or Appendices I. Chronology of “Scientific Discoveries and Artifacts” and II. Chronological Inventory of Prominent Scientific, Technological, Economic and Political World Events: 1895 to Date.” Chapter 4: Self-Disciplines of Buckminster Fuller is a personal “Time Line,” written in numbered list format from 1 to 21:

a. “MY FATHR DIED when I was fifteen.
My mother said it. My school teachers said it. All grown-up authorities of any kind—the policeman, the druggist said it. “Thinking” was considered to be a process that is only teachable by the elders of the system. “That is why we have schools dear.” “Thinking” was considered to be an utterly unreliable process when spontaneously attempted by youth.

b. Grandmother taught us the Golden Rule: “Love thy neighbor as they self—do unto others as you would they should do unto you.”
(123)

“Conventional critical-path conceptioning is linear and self-under-informative. Only spherically expanding and contracting, spinning, polarly involuting an evoluting orbital-system feedbacks are both comprehensively and incisively informative…” (quoted from Synergetics 2) (an example of Fuller-speak from the opening statement  paragraph)

“The total overall evolutionary events of 400 to 200 B.C. in the eastern Mediterranean world saw all the extraordinary Greek intellectual activity transpiring almost exclusively in the city of Alexandria—founded by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. on the delta at the western most mouth of Egypt’s River Nile. In 100B.C. the Alexandrian library was said to have contained some 700,000 volumes, or manuscript scrolls. Fortunately some of those volumes in Alexandria were meticulously copied and distributed to libraries around the world of that time,  for over 40,000 volumes of the Alexandrian library were burned in 47 B.C. during a siege in the war between Caesar and Pompey” (43).

“In 272 A.D. a Roman emperor burned the Alexandrian library for the second time. The third burning…was accomplished by a later Roman emperor in 391 A.D. In 529 A.D. all the Mediterranean Universities were closed. In 642 A.D. occurred the final complete burning of the library of Alexandria by Muslims”(44).

“All the great pre-sixteenth century empires—such as those of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Rome—employed that flat concept, with civilization centered around the Mediterranean, which means “sea in the middle of the land.” The people, in the times of Alexander the Great or of Caesar or of Saladin, all thought in that flat way “(44).

3) Fuller, R. Buckminster. Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity. New York: Bantam, 1969. 

Robert Marks begins his introduction with:  “It should be apparent that this is one of the most important books to come out of America.” He quotes Matthew Arnold: “What if our urgent work now is, not to act at any price, but rather to lay in a stock of light for our difficulties’(ix).  He claims that Utopia or Oblivion provides “much of the light for the difficulties of our time…”(ix). He claims that “Fuller is one of the few men in history who have systematically put in order the data of their experience, who have set out to see the world whole and see it constantly; and of those few he is singular in having available the technology of quanta, nucleonic, and computers. He work thus reflects an extraordinary gaining techno-economic leverage”(ix).

Epilogue: “All humans are born inventors. As children we invent games until grownups persuade us that our inventing is futile and that we should conform with yesterday’s seemingly proven but usually outworn inventions. But the inventiveness remains latent in us all” (343).

4) Katzenback, Jon R. and Douglas K. Smith. The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. New York: Harper Business, 1993.

“A successful team is the definition of alchemy…how the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts” George Mercurious.

“…real teams do not emerge unless the individuals on them take risks involving conflict, trust, interdependence, and hard work. / Of the risks required, the most formidable involve building the trust and interdependence necessary to move from individual accountability to mutual accountability. People on real teams must trust and depend on one another—not totally or forever—but certainly with respect to the team’s purpose, performance goals, and approach. For most of us such trust and interdependence do not come easily; it [sic] must be earned and demonstrated repeatedly if it is to change behavior. Our natural instincts, family upbringing, formal education, and employment experience all stress the primary importance of individual responsibility as measured by our own standards and those to whom we report. We are more comfortable doing our own jobs and having our performance measured by our boss than we are working and being assessed jointly as peers” (109).

Conflict, like trust and interdependence, is also a necessary part of becoming a real team. Seldom do we see a group of individuals forge their unique experiences, perspectives, values, and expectations into a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach without encountering significant conflict. And the most challenging risks associated with conflict relate to making it constructive for the team instead of simply enduring it” (110).

5) Keyes Jr., Ken. The Hundredth Monkey. Oregon: Vision Books, 1982.

“This book is dedicated to the Dinosaurs, who mutely warn us that a species which cannot adapt to changing conditions will become extinct” (3).

“We will replace the myths
 with knowledge. Our persistence
 will relentlessly channel
 our positive thoughts
 towards peace
and a harmonizing world.

And that starts right here—
In my heart and yours—
Right now!”
(162)

6) Steichen, Edward. The Family of Man, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, 1955.

“In the times to come as in the past there will be generations taking hold as though loneliness and the genius of struggle has always dealt in the hearts of pioneers. To the question, “What will the story be of the Family of Man across the near or far future? Some would reply, “For the answers read if you can the strange and baffling eyes of youth.”

There is only one man in the world
and his name is All Men.
There is only one woman in the world
and her name is All Women.
There is only one child in the world
And the child’s name is All Children.

A camera testament, a drama of the grand canyon of humanity, an epic woven of fun, mystery and holiness—here is the Family of Man!

Prologue, Carl Sandburg


7) Wolf, Fred Alan. The Yoga of Time Travel: How the Mind Can Defeat Time.  Illinois: Quest Books, 2004

“There are two basic notions about the movement of time. One of them—a view mostly found among ancient peoples—acknowledges that cycles of time faithfully repeat themselves (indeed, a cycle means a repetition) and hence are replays of an original succession of events. The other, which most likely came about through the invention of mechanical devices such as the steam engine, recognizes that even though cycles appear to repeat, they are not identical; some about them fails to exactly replicate what preceded” (68).

“…an entire human life, which exists over time, can be conceptualized as a four-dimensional tube set in a four-dimensional block of timespace. The time traveler explains that each of us exists as a solid entity in four dimensions. Every person has a fuzzy thickness extending in all dimensions and consciousness precipitating out, instant by instant, like a dewdrop from a fog, with each drop a fuzzy cross section of the person’s whole life. Although we exist as four-dimensional beings frozen in space-time, we only experience the precipitation process, moment by moment. Consciousness moves along only one of those dimensions—the time dimension—and only “sees” a cross section of the whole, which it takes to be the whole being at a certain time” (78-79). Add more here on PHOTOGRAPHY CONNECTIONS

8) Boorstin, Daniel. The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself. New York: Random House, 1983.

A fascinating 716-page work that deeply explores the history of time is basically an extensive history of knowledge and discovery.  Boorstin’s inclusion of stunning reference notes to “help the reader walk some of the paths of discovery that I have found most rewarding” (685) make this a significant resource.

The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sun-dial,
The cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions.

Plautus (c.200 B.C) (25)

Time was, in Plato’s phrase, “a moving image of eternity” (29)

“So long as mankind lived by raising crops and herding animals there was not much need for measuring small units of time. The seasons were all important—to know when to expect the rain, the snow, the sun, the cold. Why bother with hours and minutes? Daylight time was the only important time, the only time when men could work. To measure useful time, then, was to measure the hours of the sun. /No change in daily experience is more emptying than the loss of the sense of contrast between day and night, light and dark “(26).

The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans used water clocks.

The Egyptian god of night, “Thoth, who was also god of learning, of writing, and of measurement, presided over both outflow and inflow models of water clocks”(29).

Our precise uniform hour is a modern invention, while the minute and the second are still more recent…when the working day was the sunlit day, the first efforts to divide time measured the passing of the sun across the heavens. For this purpose sundials, or shadow clocks were the first measuring devices” (26).
For centuries the sun’s shadow remained the universal measure of time…A shadow clock [however] was useful only in those parts of the world where there was lots of sunlight, and then it served only when the sun was actually shining”(27).

Not the flowing waters of time but the falling sands of time have given modern poets their favorite metaphor for the passing hours [sandglasses]”(33).

“The first steps toward the mechanical measurement of time came …from religious persons…Monks [who] needed to know the times for their appointed prayers. In Europe the first mechanical clocks were designed not to show the time but to sound it” (36).

9) Winchester, Simon. The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. 

“William Smith created “the first true geological map of anywhere in the world. It is a map that heralded the beginnings of a whole new science…a document that laid the groundwork for the making of great fortunes –in oil, in iron, in coal, and in other countries in diamonds, tin, platinum, and silver—that were won by explorers who used such maps. It is a map that laid the foundations of a field of study that culminated in the work of Charles Darwin. It is a map whose making signified the beginnings of an era not yet over, that has been marked ever since by the excitement and astonishment of scientific discoveries that allowed human beings to start at last to stagger out from the fogs of religious dogma, and to come to understand something certain about their own origins—and those of the planet they inhabit. It is as map that has an importance, symbolic and real, for the development of one of the great fundamental fields of study—geology—which, arguably like physics and mathematics, is as field of learning and endeavor that underpins all knowledge, all understanding”(xvi.).