“One of humanity's prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and co-ordinator of local universe affairs.”

—  Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

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Buckminster Fuller171
American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inv… 1895–1983

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Buckminster Fuller photo

“Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaenously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever-expanding inventory of experiences. … Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

“An organization is a group of living human beings. The formal or official design for living never completely accounts for what the participants do. It is always supplemented by what is called the “informal structure,” which arises as the individual brings into play his own personality, his special problems and interests. Formal relations co-ordinate roles or specialized activities, not persons.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, 1957, p. 8

Humberto Maturana photo

“We can also say that language is a domain of recursive linguistic co-ordinations of actions, or a domain of second-order linguistic co-ordinations of actions. We human beings also co-ordinate our actions with each other in first-order linguistic domains, and we do so frequently with non-human animals.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Reality; The Search for Objectivity or the Quest for a Compelling Argument (1988), p. 48 as cited in: Vincent Kenny (1989) " Life, the Multiverse and Everything; an Introduction to the Ideas of. Humberto Maturana http://www.oikos.org/vinclife.htm".

Marcus Aurelius photo

“All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been co-ordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

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B.K.S. Iyengar photo

“Yoga, as it was understood by its sages, is designed to satisfy all the human needs in a comprehensive, seamless whole. Its goal is nothing less than to attain the integrity of oneness –oneness with ourselves and as a consequence oneness with all that lies beyond ourselves. We become the harmonious microcosm in the universal microcosm. Oneness, what I call integration, is the foundation for wholeness, inner peace, and ultimate freedom.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xiii

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“If our universe is one of many, unlike others in containing observers like ourselves, there is no need to posit a designer. Most universes will be too chaotic to allow the emergence of life or mind. In that case, the fact that humans exist in this universe needs no special explanation”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Sweet Morality (p. 222)
Source: The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

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“The world is but an assembly of present, past, and possible sensations; the affair of science is to analyze and co-ordinate them by separating their accidental from their constant relations.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

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“Humans have evolved a leadership brain. Good leaders are people with a conscience who respect and reward all the four drives of other stakeholders [the drive to acquire, to defend, to bond, and to comprehend], even as they respect and reward their own drives.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Paul R. Lawrence, quoted in: " The Drive to Acquire’s Impact on Globalization http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-drive-to-acquires-impact-on-globalization," at hbswk.hbs.edu, 23 august 2010.

Luther H. Gulick photo

“The power of an idea to serve as the foundation of co-ordination is so great that one may observe many examples of co-ordination even in the absence of any single leader or of any framework of authority.”

Luther H. Gulick (1892–1993) American academic

Source: "Notes on the Theory of Organization," 1937, p. 38

Aleister Crowley photo

“ALL
may understand instantly that their souls, their lives, in every relation with every other human being and every circumstance, depend upon
MAGICK
and the right comprehension and right application thereof.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Introduction.
Magick Book IV : Liber ABA, Part III : Magick in Theory and Practice (1929)
Context: I must make
MAGICK
the essential factor in the life of
ALL.
In presenting this book to the world, I must then explain and justify my position by formulating a definition of
MAGICK
and setting forth its main principles in such a way that
ALL
may understand instantly that their souls, their lives, in every relation with every other human being and every circumstance, depend upon
MAGICK
and the right comprehension and right application thereof.

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