Starting with Freud and others Freudians, really early (8th grade in Rome, and continuing on through high school in the Philippines) I got to Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death (which Woody Allen liked) followed by Norman O. Brown: Love’s Body and Closing Time.
To bring it full circle, I was just chatting with Perplexity about Closing Time a couple hours ago. I’ll copy over the prompt in a minute.
Then when I got to Princeton I found myself switching gears into Wittgenstein, mixed with international relations as I was either gonna be a psychoanalyst (med school ugh) or a diplomat (coming from an already-expat background). I wound up doing neither, directly, but fast forward and I reacquainted myself with fringe figures (from academia’s viewpoint): P.D. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.
But not so much directly as through the Jungian flavored writings of one Maurice Nicoll, a Scot, and admirer of both Jung and Ouspensky.
I found this pathway great for coming back to Synergetics since Fuller was quite familiar with the cult of Gurdjieff and even mentions him by name. Also, I believe P.D. Ouspensky was on the short list of people Fuller urgently should get a copy of 4D Timelock, his first manifesto of sorts. As documented by art-historian Henderson in her award-winning book on Non-Euclidean geometries influencing modern art, Ouspensky as active around the 4D meme, as was Fuller.
What I think binds Fuller’s philosophy closely to Gurdjieff’s is that whole East-meets-West Boho generation’s (Blavatsky…) emphasis on man’s robotic and/or machine-like nature, highly programmable, manipulable, by design, as we’re born as EPROMs, brains as yet far from fully formed, ready to embrace whatever culture said human is born into.
However we’re also able to jump through moments of open mindedness and feel ourselves divinely reprogrammed (it feels like it comes to us, more than we dig it out purely willfully — God’s grace is in response to passive “waiting full of expectation” (the Quaker jargon)). That mostly closed, reflexive, robotic being vs intermittently open model is what comes through in Omnidirectional Halo and brain vs mind.
Then when I got to Princeton I found myself switching gears into Wittgenstein, mixed with international relations as I was either gonna be a psychoanalyst (med school ugh) or a diplomat (coming from an already-expat background). I wound up doing neither, directly, but fast forward and I reacquainted myself with fringe figures (from academia’s viewpoint): P.D. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.
But not so much directly as through the Jungian flavored writings of one Maurice Nicoll, a Scot, and admirer of both Jung and Ouspensky.
I found this pathway great for coming back to Synergetics since Fuller was quite familiar with the cult of Gurdjieff and even mentions him by name. Also, I believe P.D. Ouspensky was on the short list of people Fuller urgently should get a copy of 4D Timelock, his first manifesto of sorts. As documented by art-historian Henderson in her award-winning book on Non-Euclidean geometries influencing modern art, Ouspensky as active around the 4D meme, as was Fuller.
What I think binds Fuller’s philosophy closely to Gurdjieff’s is that whole East-meets-West Boho generation’s (Blavatsky…) emphasis on man’s robotic and/or machine-like nature, highly programmable, manipulable, by design, as we’re born as EPROMs, brains as yet far from fully formed, ready to embrace whatever culture said human is born into.
However we’re also able to jump through moments of open mindedness and feel ourselves divinely reprogrammed (it feels like it comes to us, more than we dig it out purely willfully — God’s grace is in response to passive “waiting full of expectation” (the Quaker jargon)). That mostly closed, reflexive, robotic being vs intermittently open model is what comes through in Omnidirectional Halo and brain vs mind.
