Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.
—Buckminster Fuller
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
—Buckminster Fuller
This great systems theorist, architect, engineer, author, and designer was one of the towering geniuses of the twentieth century. The two sentences above reveal the visionary Fuller, who was never content with simply confronting reality but always held in his mind and heart a vision of what was possible.
As I read these two statements, I am reminded of the times in which we live and the planetary ordeal we have entered and to which I have given various names in this book: collapse, unraveling, chaos, initiation, and paradigm shift. Repeatedly I implore those who follow my work to hold in their consciousness, no matter how daunting external circumstances become, a vision of what is possible for humanity as a result of moving through our species’ rite of passage.
Fuller was a visionary, which is evident in the first statement: most of who we are is invisible and untouchable. For that very reason, vision is not only possible but necessary. Fuller probably would not have used “deeper Self” to describe the “most of who we are,” but he was obviously aware of something within our nature that is more momentous than the rational mind. That “something” is the territory of vision—our ability to imagine and live out what is possible, even when all external evidence appears to contradict that vision.
Just as nothing in the caterpillar tells us that from its body and tireless work in the cocoon, a gorgeous butterfly will emerge, very little in the exterior landscape of today’s world suggests that even one transformed human being—let alone clusters of them—may evolve from the misery and rubble of a collapsing civilization. In the cocoon, the caterpillar becomes a butterfly as a result of being liquefied—a process that essentially remains a mystery to this day. A stunning mystery of the invisible and the untouchable.