FROM PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION TO GLOBAL IMPACT

Linda Groff: There’s getting to be more and more things written on this. I think it’s emerging as kind of a new field. I, you know, I’m trying to pull a lot of it together. I know whenever I go to conferences, there are consciousness conferences, there’s future’s conferences that they could contact the World Future Society where we just had a conference and there was a lot of interest in transformational perspectives as well as a lot of these new technologies. 

There’re all kinds of, you know, I suppose if you just opened your phone book, lots of cities now have directories of consciousness groups and alternative lifestyle groups. And there’s, you know, there’s publications coming out on, you know, those futures publications that the World Future Society puts out. There’s a book called Networking that talks about networks on all different types of issues in different cities. You could probably just open your phone directory and if you were interested in ecology, for example, you could look that up or spiritual things, you could look up our consciousness groups. You could look up in the Yellow Pages and probably get names of things. There’s also getting to be—conferences are a great way to begin possibly, because it’s a way to come together to hear people who are already into these things present some of the ideas and then also get in touch with them—find out what networks are already existing so that you can start to tap into them. 

Marilyn Ferguson talks about this in her book The Aquarian Conspiracy. But in the past, we went out and we tried to change society first, and then we hope that somehow all our behavior would change, and it hasn’t always done that. Whereas today what’s happening is that more and more people are finding that they have to work on themselves first in a spiritual sense, become whole in themselves, balanced, in harmony with themselves, then they can go back out to the society and link up with many, many people today who have been doing the same thing. And so there’s all kinds of powerful networks of people emerging today. 

But I’m—in my process of reviewing very various evolutionary transformational futurists I have found some something that just struck me very strongly that I would like to share with you and illustrate the examples of Buckminster Fuller and Robert Mueller (Former Assistant to the Secretary of the United Nations). And maybe for other people to show the relationship between the personal and the planetary. And let me start with Buckminster Fuller, because his whole life is an example of the whole principle of breakdown proceeds breakthrough or crisis proceeds transformation in many cases. And he was on the verge of committing suicide. I think he was 32 years old in 1927. And he, his daughter, one of his daughters had died five years earlier. He had been trying to make money. He wasn’t being successful. He felt that his whole life was collapsing around him. And so he was seriously contemplating suicide, apparently. And he had a choice at that moment to go with the breakdown, and that would be it, or to do something else. And instead, he chose to make a personal commitment to himself to always live truthfully, to always go according to his own direct experience, not to just take something that someone else told him was true, but to test it out for himself, and thirdly, he did something that was quite revolutionary at that point was to commit him his life to serve all of humanity and whatever he did, not just to serve himself. And that’s a real breakthrough if we all would start to do that. But what’s really fascinating is everybody knows what resulted with Bucky Fuller, who’s known as the planet’s friendly genius. He’s probably as well-known as anybody on the planet and he’s designed all kinds of amazing technological things, the geodesic dome and on. And when people know that he is trying to serve humanity, they sense that from him. So it’s an example, and what’s most interesting is he himself says, you know, that he’s just an ordinary person that anybody could do what he did. And I think that that’s, you know, important to think—we have all of us enormous power in us if we just take it.