Awakening

An Exploration

Bucky Fuller was a pragmatist who always sought exact proof to answer questions and solve problems. Still, after decades of examination and consideration, he came to the same conclusions as the most spiritual teachers - that our entire existence may well be an enormous dream. When we really stop to think about this possibility, we find Bucky to be correct, upon awakening we can't prove that we are the same person who fell asleep just a few short hours ago.

This is an extreme statement for a man who most people believe to have been a rational engineer and architect. Those same people are also the ones who speak of Fuller in the past tense. Along with believing that he was primarily a great thinker, they also believe that he is gone.Bucky is as departed as is Jesus, Buddha and Mother Mary. He, like all humans, is and was not the sum of the material elements that made up his physical body. He is also not the aggregate of his inventions, books or recorded interviews.

Bucky is and was much more than that. He had awakened to a much larger perspective and reality. He continues to exist and make his presence felt among many people like us who still operate within the confines of physical bodies and long for deeper awakening. When he was operating within the confines of the body people called Bucky, he often worked on the same project for years, but he also realized that there was much more to his life than what he could learn from daily living. He recognized the value of "the dream" and consciously used the time we label sleep to grow and further his awakening.

Our lives are much more than we are willing to imagine, and Bucky was more aware than most of possibilities. He knew that what most people consider wasteful dreaming was, in truth, a valuable human activity. He also understood that the activities of the night when our physical bodies are resting can be fruitful and can do a great deal to establish the foundation upon which our physical reality is based as well as move us toward true awakening.

Bucky was a dreamer. He was also a night person, spending just a few hours each night sleeping and the balance of that quiet time consciously experimenting and searching in a manner similar to shamans. During the quiet of the night, many ideas came to him, and he was able to find answers to challenges at night when he was awake or asleep.

He understood that personal experience is the most viable and valid research and development. Hence, he only trusted his personal experience or the word of the few people he knew to follow a similar discipline of putting more faith in their personal experience than in the statements of "experts" or the media. That personal experience includes our dream adventures.

We do live within the confines of a dream. The question is whether we buy into the cultural dream that is being continually sold to us through media and experts or we follow our personal dream, the heartfelt one that moves us to passion and compassion. When we take the time to examine that heart's desire, we find it to be the dream of peace, love and harmony that Fuller and all true global leaders champion.

The issue is not really if we are the same person upon awakening that we were when we went to sleep hours earlier. We are all continually changing. The question is who each of us will choose to be for that day - the person others tell us we should be or the person our intuition, heart and experience is moving us toward. Are we who someone else tells us we should be or have we awakened to be who we dream ourselves to be.

For most of his life, Bucky based his actions on his inner knowledge as well as the guidance of his heart and intuition. He was often chastised for not "following the rules," but, at the end of the day, he knew that he had been true to himself and that he was living the life he had chosen to dream after truly awakening.