August T. Jaccaci has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University. He has worked with leaders throughout the world to help them envision and architect an ideal future for themselves and their enterprises. He is the author of Chief Evolutionary Officer - Leaders Mapping the Future; and General Periodicity: Nature's Creative Dynamics. He has spoken to audiences across the globe about nature's patterns of growth and transformation, and how those patterns can be applied to the successful evolution of any business or venture. As a professional futurist, Jaccaci leads a not-for-profit organization, Unity Scholars, which creates social design projects in the United States and in Africa. He has recently launched an international Nature Planning Network to facilitate communication and learning among those wishing to apply nature's wisdom to their lives and work.

General Systems
December 2005
August T. Jaccaci Jr.

In addition to John's introductory description, this book is also collection of stories about discoveries, intuitive and rational insights, gifts of revealed wisdom and creations of visual thinking for ordering and communicating some of the deep structure in nature. It is a story of two men the same age, each awakened in his fortieth year to embark alone on work of cosmic proportions. These two pioneers subsequently found each other and began a creative collaboration which has continued for nearly thirty years.

John's search for truth culminates in his successful formulation and understanding of Einstein's dream, the Unified Field Theory, and in his cosmological mapping and ultimate repositioning of Earth in the history of the universe. For me, John's work is the validation of and foundation for another form of Grand Unification prophesied by the great Jesuit paleontologist, the spiritual scientific visionary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, when he wrote:

"Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, Man will have discovered fire."
At St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, where mathematics and physics challenged my ability, it never occurred to me when I prayed fervently in chapel for guidance on what to do with my life that I would be guided to discover and tell the story of cosmological grand unification as a love story. Nor did it occur to me that my development as a visual artist inspired by my father early on would lead after Harvard to the Rhode Island School of Design where my paintings almost instinctively began to form images synthesizing the objective and subjective, the rational and intuitive and the spiritual and scientific. This visual thinking in paint became a form of map-making. One of my paintings titled "Map of the Twentieth Century" was purchased for the collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It was there that I began my lifetime journey as a teacher of art.

Leaving Andover, I went to help the Reverend Seavey Joyce, SJ, the new president of Boston College, develop the arts at BC. My work included starting a film study program and hosting special events for the students such as the second playing of Buckminster Fuller's World Game. Under Bucky's tutelage, I came to realize that the unification of all life on earth was both possible and necessary. During those years, I also joined the Boston-Cambridge chapter of the World Future Society (WFS) where I met Rendle Leathem who introduced me to the study of General Systems Theory and to the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) in Buffalo, New York where he was forming a systems theory study group. These two experiences laid the foundation for my eventual discovery of general periodicity, nature's creative dynamics of growth and change.

As President of the WFS chapter and as the culmination of my work in art at Boston College, I worked with a class of students to design and host the "Town Meeting on the Year 2000", the official future-oriented part of the Patriot's Weekend opening of the United States Bicentennial in April of 1975. Co-produced with Barbara Hubbard's television production team using their broadcast studio in a bus, we held a New England town meeting with several hundred people in the Harvard Cage. We beamed the signal to WGBH, the Boston Public Television station, who broadcast the event for two afternoons throughout the region. We also used a bank of telephones to enable viewers from far and wide to phone in their comments and suggestions and later to join in the voting on the articles for consideration of their lives in 2000 - twenty-five years into the future.

During these years at Boston College, I stopped painting and, after a brief exploration into the realm of conceptual art, I focused my personal artistry on the creation of public participatory events which I began to call the work of social architecture. I left Boston College and became director of an alternative high school within Lawrence Academy in Groton, Massachusetts. After a year, as I turned forty, I discovered that I needed still more freedom to create so I struck out on my own to become a social architect. I was still unaware that I was drawing toward a discovery process which would reveal the universe in its source, its substance, and its future to be a love story.

During those same years in the 1970s at CPSI, I helped Rendle support and enhance the work of the systems modelers and theoreticians he invited onto the faculty. He invited only the people he called generic parameter modelers as opposed to existent parameter modelers. That meant that his chosen faculty members were not asking questions about local particular systems but were asking the biggest, most general questions possible: how and why the universe works. Their perspectives were widely different and it was our hope that somehow they would synthesize their wisdom into a unified composition of general principles. But that did not happen. It would take the arrival of John A. Gowan to CPSI in 1980 to really begin the long process toward unification. Rendle's general systemic thinkers were an awesome lot. There was Stuart C. Dodd, one of the founders of sociology, and Itzhak "Ben" Bentov, a biomedical inventor, cosmological theorist and experimenter in the mechanics of human consciousness who was a neighbor of mine in Wayland, Massachusetts. There was George Land, an explorer and theoretician of the transformative dynamics of growth; Derald G. Langham, a double PhD in plant genetics and in human scale geometric modeling of natural order he called Genesa; and Barbara Marx Hubbard, a futurist and modeler of human evolution. And, thankfully for this story of grand unification, there was John A. Gowan's father, John C. Gowan, an educational psychologist, mapper of human consciousness and champion of creativity.

The year that I set out to become a social architect opened another door on the search for unification in human social experience. That year, 1977, remembering the future town meeting, Rendle recruited me to help his friend Carl Shapley organize a New Age conference in Florence, Italy where Carl had a small school. As it turned out, after Carl's valiant beginnings, he was exhausted and I ended up as the fundraiser, designer and host of the meeting which through my good fortune was held in the Medici's Fort Belvedere overlooking all of Florence in February, 1978. The event, fraught with the internal struggle of egos, grandiloquently called itself the First World Congress of the New Age. Several hundred luminaries attended for ten days. Bucky Fuller taught a morning series on his synergetic geometry. Sir George Trevelyan conducted a walking- teaching tour of cathedrals in Florence. The Baron and Baroness Killi and Edmee Di Pauli opened the proceedings with a blessing in five languages. Ben Bentov taught on consciousness and cosmology. Twyla Nitsch, granddaughter of a Seneca Indian chief, taught Native American lore. Roger Brown, Emmy Award Winning filmmaker, documented the proceedings. Anthony Judge from the Union of International Associations wrote an article for the UIA journal. Workers from the Findhorn Community in Scotland helped cook and serve the midday meal. Derald Langham exhibited his huge geometric models and taught his Genesa method of spatial energizing and thinking. These are just a few examples of the people and events.

The conference had no preplanned daily schedule since part of the intentional struggle was to allow the emergence of continuous co-equal self-determination and self-governance of any making of meaning among the participants. The strain on expectant egos and eager consumers was often intense but in the end yielded a spontaneous wordless closing celebration of group singing and ritual moving, more worshipful and holy than anyone could have imagined or hoped possible. The question of whether a long period of spontaneous creativity would follow the natural stages of general systemic growth and end in total transformation was answered in the affirmative.

Flying into England on the first of several times working to prepare for the Congress, I wrote "Social Architect" on my landing card for "profession". I subsequently announced myself to the Congress as such. At this time, I also began to think about the subject of love and its place in the universe. As a synthesizer of theories, I was cooking a serious inner stew of the principles and visual models of general systems science, the profession of social architecture and the subject and cosmic dynamics of love.

During those years, I had been particularly impressed with the geometric Genesa models Derald Langham introduced and I could appreciate the potential for synthesis of multiple subjects which he presented nested within his stand-inside models. I later hosted a meeting which Derald attended on the future of television at the WGBH experimental studio where I was a guest artist. I designed and built a three story and thirteen axial setting based on a Genesa cube for intensive interactive communication. Unfortunately, Derald's work found few other applications despite its potential for creative thinking and modeling.

However, I found George Land's work on the theory of transformative growth immediately applicable to business consulting based on the stages of individual project and whole corporate growth. At one point, George and I worked together for my client Polaroid using his theories. Still, George's theory and the models of all of Rendle's group of generic parameter General Systems thinkers was at such a high level of abstraction that working applications seemed to be few and far between.

It came as a great relief and a breakthrough for me when John C. Gowan brought his son John A. Gowan to CPSI. The sweep of the younger John's thinking was so broad and so deep as to guarantee an important synthesis of the general principles embedded in general systemic thinking. Bucky Fuller had always said that such principles were "inter-accommodative," they had to be synergetic and ultimately unitive, and he was right. So was John C. Gowan right when one day I complimented him on his wide mapping of the scope of human consciousness and he said, "Thank you, but just wait until you see what my son has to offer." That year, 1980, when John A. Gowan and I met at CPSI, a new stage in the discoveries leading toward grand unification began.