As long as I can remember I've thought about what could be done to make this world a better place. I've always been an avid reader and over the years I've found my heroes and a number of key concepts and ideas that have become the focus of my attention. Getting beyond the stage of thought and to the stage of action is always difficult. I know that I miss countless opportunities to do the little things that make for improvement in myself and the world. But, that aside, I remain optimistic that there is hope for me and for the world. It is with this optimism that I have constructed this site.

The idea of a critical mass connection first occurred to me about twenty years ago. The primary seeds for this idea were probably the culture accumulation curve and the thought that there were enough resources for everybody. The rapid accumulation of technology was obvious in my immediate experience. I went from living on a Kansas farm without electricity or indoor plumbing to working on radar, computers and a nuclear weapons delivery system in a span of less than five years. That there were many in the world without adequate food, clothing, shelter and medical care was equally obvious. These two thoughts together led to the conclusion that everybody's basic needs could be met. Pondering how this could be achieved led to the idea of a critical mass connection.

Two of my heroes, R. Buckminster Fuller and Abraham Maslow, provided an idea of how this could be achieved; a critical mass connection. This site is my idea of how a critical mass connection could work. Others with similar concerns can create similar or maybe not that similar connections.

So what is a critical mass connection? The basic idea is that there is a critical mass of awareness that when achieved will result in a cultural advance. The 100 monkeys fable is a good, if incomplete, representation of this concept. Awareness can be cultivated by creating appropriate connections at all levels. Connections can be within an individual's own thought, at a small group level, at a planetary level and I suppose even an interplanetary or universal level. The Internet is an ideal tool for making these connections and also demonstrates the exponential accumulation of mass involved.

Goals are most often established based on some concept of what is possible. Much of the negative behavior in this world is based on limited ideas of what is possible. One of Bucky Fuller's most important contributions was his expansion and documentation of our possibilities. Reading his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth was a confirmation of much of what I already believed, but also gave a huge boost to my ideas of what was possible. Bucky also made clear, in his book Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity, that the alternatives today are abundance for all or survival for none. Setting positive goals helps us make progress, but also helps us avoid disaster.

Abraham Maslow's theory of a heirarchy of needs provided me with a motivational framework. Briefly his theory is that individual motivation is focused on the lowest level of unfulfilled needs. Physiological needs must be met before the focus shifts to safety & security needs and similarly up the hierarchy to belongingness & love needs, esteem needs, the need to know & understand, the aesthetic needs, the self-actualization needs and ultimately the need for transcendence. This is a simplification, these are not rigid categories and an individual's motivation most often would be influenced by multiple levels at any point-in-time. It seems to me that this theory of needs applies at a group level as well as for individuals. Maslow's theories of motivation have seen wide application in management theory and to some extent in the field of education. Maslow's Toward a Psychology of Being covers his theories of motivation and self-actualization in great detail.

With goals in mind and a theory of motivation the next step is to put it all in motion. Here I look to Roberto Assagioli and his psychosynthesis. For this purpose I find his Act of Will to be fundamental. My reading notes of this book can give you a rough outline of what's in this great book. To simplify, Assagioli covers four aspects of the will, the strong will, the skillful will, the good will and the transpersonal will. Often when people speak of the will they are focused only on the strong will, this book covers a lot more than that.

In time I plan to create a trimmed down version of the category pages, containing only the most essential links. At that time there would be three levels for each of the category pages: the essential page, the expanded version and the overflow.