Turn on the Bunsen Burner

So, I digressed a little in the last two posts and now need to get back to the experiment. I read something interesting in +Pam Grout's book E-Squared about +Buckminster Fuller . If there's one thing I took from the whole book it was a little snippet of information in there about him. Buckminster Fuller was a fascinating man, a polymath of sorts, well-celebrated in life and death. However, it wasn't always that way. Even though he was an intelligent man who attended Harvard (but was kicked out), at the age of 32 he found himself thinking of committing suicide due to the death of his 4-year old daughter and the state of poverty he suddenly found himself in. Then he had an epiphany whilst on one of his long walks around Lake Michigan. He recounted this epiphany and vision as being suspended above the ground in a sphere of light when a voice spoke to him, saying:

"From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others."

From then on he chose to embark on "an experiment, to find out what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."

I never knew this about Buckminster Fuller, so was intrigued as I had encountered him several times through my life, as I wandered through various books - his is the sort of name that crops up every now and again.

So, what I want to know is, are we all capable of starting our own experiment similar to Bucky? Are we all able to turn on the bunsen burner and change the world for the better? More thoughts on this soon...