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My father was an extremely brilliant man. I consider him a genius, and so he probably could have joined Mensa. But why? I got in it with a 79 I.Q. and the first day I said, "I'm getting the hell out of here quick!" They're all losers. All they do is talk about their IQ.
For years [H.P] Lovecraft was defined as an atheist. Well, he wasn't saying anything about what he really was at all. He wasn't even an agnostic. That's exactly what the situation is, in other words, when you enter an eternal realm. You've got to know there is no religion.
I belong to the Lovecraft Society, which meets at the University. They do things like follow in Lovecraft's footsteps, just like he followed in Edgar Allan Poe's footsteps. I mean the actual footfalls, you know, like they're going out looking for sasquatch, this kind of stuff.
Stephen Hawking won [Babson Institute competition ] one year with his black hole stuff. It's keeping an open mind on whether gravity exists or not. I think my father believed this because ... when the wind blew on him, he'd get angry, because it was something he couldn't control.
As a kid, I was getting information in areas that no one else was getting. I think that was one of the reasons my mother didn't want me to go to school too soon. Because I would be beaten to a pulp, you know, if I walked down the street and said there was no such thing as gravity.
I was born rather late in [my father's] life, in his mid - 40s. And so what he did up until the time he was 15, I think probably from age 12 to 15, my grandfather made him demonstrate mediumistic powers at the Exeter Street Theater, the first Spiritualist church in the United States.
I think [Nikola Tesla] was always like that. And so it was inevitable that he would be an inventor. Because it was so easy for him to think fourth-dimensionally, dynamically. It wasn't just a static thing with him. In other words, it isn't the way an architect thinks, which is essentially static.
[My father] was a banker. He was the president of the Cambridge Trust Company, the head of the trust department, and he taught classes at the Harvard Business School. And he was a member of the Harvard Faculty Club, which I am, too, because what I did is... I have the same name as my father, only Jr.
[Nikola Tesla] would do it through lucid dreaming. He would, in a sense, dream up the engine, forget about it, come back, and then discover where it was wearing. You know, where the parts were wearing out. Now, that's inner visualization and a half! And that was the secret of why he did so many inventions.
When [my father] reached his majority, he was the head of the family. Everybody depended upon him. He went into a very uptight appearance; he would wear Chesterfield coats to work, Homburg hats, really getting into the whole thing. He knew people like Oscar Levant. He loved New York. He wanted to live there.
I actually challenged The Theosophical Society on their concept of planes of reality. I said, "What you're doing is, you're stacking two-dimensional surfaces in three-space. And you are not going into any other dimensions at all." And they were furious, because they thought I was attacking Madame [Elena] Blavatsky.
Both [Nikola] Tesla and [Leon] Theremin were preternaturally young. I mean, for a long time Tesla was a young man well into his 70s. And so was Theremin, even though, at the end, he looked pretty old. But he was still doing things that young guys do, beyond the time you'd normally think people should be doing that stuff.
[My father] was always upset that my mother didn't want to live in New York. Because he said he wanted to live in a hotel and not have to mow the lawn and all that. In other words, he never liked sports clothes, he always liked to be dressed up formally, 24/7. And he drove big cars and, you know, just loved to act the banker.
Now, we know this is what [H.P.] Lovecraft was into. Because he kept talking about how he wasn't interested in religion. In a heaven state there is no religion, meaning that you're seeing the whole thing ... I mean, to worship something means that it's something beyond you, right? In other words, it's not being revealed to you.
It was on Long John's show that I heard Orfeo Angelucci being interviewed. In other words, the whole thing about the green globes on the top of a car bumper and the voice coming out, you know, and then this beautiful lady.... So he went through the whole number, what you read in his book, that kind of stuff. A whole raft of things.
[Nikola Tesla] said he had no interest in the spiritual. He didn't believe in telepathy, didn't believe in any of that stuff, didn't believe in any religion, and he just thought all these people were being superstitious and wanted them to go away. And in that way he was very close to H.P. Lovecraft, who was almost a believing atheist.
I would say [to my father], "Why don't you actually take some courses in physics instead of saying [you are not believing in gravity]?" But he would never do it. Businessmen for some reason or other, think, because they're successful in a single direction, that they know everything. You know what I mean? You ever meet people like that?
We would go on retreats to Florence. The people in the planning team got to be good friends and so we did things like, we'd all go over to the Fort Belvedere in Florence and take that thing over. Because it's up for grabs, you can rent it. And then have New Age meetings and all that kind of stuff. [Buckminster] Fuller loved to go there.
At one time in the mid-'70s I became the president of the Boston-Cambridge chapter of the World Future Society. Because I'd been in my studio by myself since 1968 on up. And the thing is that my social life consisted of being involved in organizations like that. I would get people to come and speak, and speak myself and that kind of stuff.
To have that radical a mind in that bourgeois-looking body was really hard for a lot of people to take, because, when my mother would want to have people over she'd tell [my father], "Don't start with the gravity stuff." And then he would invariably do this and the guests would look at each other and say, "Well, I think it's time to go now."
[The Theosophical Society] are ideologues in terms of the way they present the material. That's one of the reasons why, when they teach their courses, you only get a smidgen of stuff and you have to keep coming back every week. They won't do an overview. Because they're trying to bypass your conscious critical faculties by leaking the information slowly.
H.P.Lovecraft could've been trying to do a Marx to Hegel, that kind of thing, in other words, turn the thing upside down and crawl around inside it. But, look, the guy was eating poorly, he had like a quart of ice cream a day. He was suffering constantly near the end. He wasn't concerned with his body at all, not the way we're concerned with our bodies nowadays.
[Buckminster Fuller ] never got past his freshman year [in Harvard], because the guy was an insane womanizer and he did parties every night, never studied anything, never took a note, didn't care about anything and just had a blast. So they said, "We gotta let you go. You get zeros all the time." Today it wouldn't even matter, because they don't care if you can read.
I think it was because [Nikola] Tesla and [Leon] Theremin were part of what made up the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Klaatu was actually a European among the Americans. And so the person who wrote the story said that Klaatu came from Europa, the fourth moon of Jupiter, which is now being investigated for life. There's water and ice on it and that kind of stuff.
The Babson Institute, which is now an actual university, was started by this guy [my father] who also had a problem with believing in gravity. And so he started the Babson Institute in New Boston, New Hampshire, which then moved to Gloucester. Each year they have a competition of one thousand dollars for one thousand words of an essay on gravity. That's the way they do it.
It's called "Pickman's Mephitic Models," based on the story [Pickman's Model by H. P. Lovecraft].Certain things about it many people don't realize. Pickman was a real painter who lived between 1888 and 1926. Now, there's a question mark [gesturing toward the writing in the margins of the painting], because Lovecraft claims that he turned into a ghoul. God knows how old he is now.
Long John would sometimes hold his interviews in the Carnegie Delicatessen, which is the most famous delicatessen in New York up by Carnegie. Let's see, 57th Street, you're down to like 50th Street and 7th Avenue... You'd go in there and everybody would be eating a heart attack on a plate, pastrami, malts, that kind of stuff. But it literally was the place where Woody Allen would go.
[H.P.Lovecraft] is thrust into some kind of outer space realm, like here [pointing toward the painting in progress]. In other words, he's recognized he's gone through R'lyeh, the Sunken City of R'lyeh, and then Cthulhu, the extraterrestrial, calls his band of worshippers home to recognize him as the anti-christ. This is all in The Necronomicon, something Lovecraft actually did make up.
At 15 [my father] revolted against his father like any teenager, and said, "I'm out of here! What are you doing to me?" He thought he wouldn't be involved in that kind of stuff for the rest of his life. He just wanted to make money. He was one of those people who took over the family responsibility. His own father was pretty irresponsible with money and borrowed from people all the time.
I began to analyze the movie [The Day the Earth Stood Still] and said it was really made out of these two characters [Nikola Tesla and Leon Teremin] who were brought together. That made it fascinating to me. And especially the language they made up, that Klaatu speaks. Because it has a Latin word order. It's like medieval Latin, but it had some Navajo phonemes in it and that kind of stuff.
I went to the Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont. And it was a place where you, like, learned to go to the store? And I was saying, Oh God, I want to learn something else. I wanted to learn to read and write better and do mathematics better. They were very much into Abstract Expressionism and that artsy stuff. And where most kids did what I call meaningless blobs, I could render perfectly.
Around the corner [ of the Carnegie Delicatessen] is the Russian Tea Room, which is now out of business. Which is awful. I remember going in there and seeing the ballerinas trotting in there like they were prize horses, with their hair, their sunglasses. Really amazing. They were all White Russians. This is where [Leon] Theremin met a lot of people, and where the KGB eventually picked him up.
Buckminster Fuller was down in Pennsylvania, then he'd come up and go to his island in Maine. He wanted to remain a New Englander. He taught from '48 to '49 and '50 at Black Mountain College. That's where he met Kenneth Snelson. Fuller kind of stayed a Yankee right in the New England area. So it was pretty easy to get him to come on over, and we would have lectures at the Harvard Science Center.
Look at all the stuff the Existentialists did. You can start with [Pablo] Picasso, you know, and then Francis Bacon and other guys like that. What they were doing is depicting suffering. And that's exactly what a demon is, he's pretending that he isn't. So he can get more people down there. You know, misery loves company, that's the whole thing. So that's basically the pitch that I'm working on.
The whole thing that Dante [Alighieri] did was summed up in the medieval world. It's like St. Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologica. He didn't invent it, he just put it all in one package. You get twelve fat books there sitting in any library. Whereas... I think if Joshi thinks [H.P.] Lovecraft was doing anything like that, just throwing together all this stuff to form a kind of anti-mythology, that's where I would disagree with him.
From the time of Dante [Alighieri], when you have the Ptolemaic universe, you had God on the outside like a hypersphere, and then in the center you have the Earth, all the seven heavens and layers, and then you have the Mount of Purgatory and Hell right in the center, and here's Satan flapping his wings and he keeps making the lake of Cocytus ice so you can't get out. So, again, where Heaven and Hell are, who the hell knows that now?
While often being called transdisciplinary, theonomous reasoning is actually a first step back to ancient wisdom in which methodological sensation [or what we now know as science] has completely merged with methodological revelation [or totally known mystical knowledge in which every aspect of the occult has been overcome]. A true tradition has no occult or hidden phases left in its process. The creators and the audience are in perfect harmony.
I said, "Well, why do you believe in the Klein Bottle?" He said, "Because I can imagine it." I said, "You don't have to imagine a Mobius strip. It's right there in front of you!" But [Buckminster Fuller] couldn't see how that could involve a cross cap, meaning something that couldn't be reduced to a two-dimensional surface. Which it does. It's because he was thinking that the matrix was the thing that a fly could walk over the edge of, like a torus.
Today the patent office is obsolete. You just take whatever you do, tool up, and start production for six months. At the end of the six months you put the data on all the computer inputs all over the world and you got your business. You can make all your money, and then people can steal it, but by then it doesn't matter because you've made the money up front and you avoid wasting money in lawsuits. [My father] had all these kinds of ideas years ahead of others.
I mean, these are really dedicated people [in Lovecraft Society] when it comes to [h.P.] Lovecraft. But in the top floor of the John Hay Library, you have all of Lovecraft's archives. And messing around in there, I noticed, I said, what are these paintings? And the librarian told me, "Well, those are Pickman's paintings." I said, "I thought this was like something he made up, like The Necronomicon, that kind of stuff." And he said no, that the guy actually existed.
[Buckminster Fuller] was quite willing to talk. He'd talk at the drop of a hat.I learned to talk in front of people by listening to the way he did things. Because he would give lessons in how to lecture. He would say, "Never take a note, just stand up and start babbling. And then eventually you're going to be able to make some coherent statements, and so it's like you're vamping. And then people will gradually start to listen to you when this spot of logic shows up in this torrent of verbiage.
Eventually, to get through school, I would make good meaningless blobs if I had to. And so they thought I was falling in with them and stuff like that. But on the playground, kids would come up to me and say, "I need three Supermans and a Captain Midnight by four o'clock because I'm going to sell them to somebody else." So I'd take all their lunch money and whip these things out, and they'd have to stick them in their underwear to get the pictures home, because if the teacher ever found out about that.
I would have private conversations with [Buckminster Fuller]. I once had an argument, for four hours, about the existence of the Mobius strip. Because he believed in the Klein Bottle, you see. And I said, "How in hell can you claim to believe in the Klein Bottle and think that the Mobius strip is dubious?" He said, "Well, it's a torus." I don't know what he had in his mind as a mathematical background, because I don't think he got topology. Because, in other words, the Mobius strip didn't have angles in it.
The main thesis of mind-physics holds that consciousness and matter are both manifestations of a more primary entity, and that the processes of manifestation exhibit equivalent invariances for both consciousness and matter. When the program for mind-physics is complete the subject-object dichotomy of modal logic, the polarity of concept-percept, and the antagonism between morality and technology will all come to an end. Then the non-repeatable experiment will be understood to be more primary than the traditional repeatable experiment.
I began to research the concept of dimensionality from the point of view of quality, and not just quantity, as a mathematician might do. Taking my clues from the theosophical use made of the Vedantic levels of reality, I identified the western notion of Energy (as someting which is effecatious by means of motion), with the idea of Time. The more comprehensive dimension 'eternity' I defined as a form of energy which is efficacious without motion. In this manner I began to establish the qualities of dimensions and open out the seemingly monolithic concept of energy.