Then came problems with insurance companies, so I had to go to them. Then came to problems there was no code that allowed it in that town so not a town in America that would allow it. I would have to, then, find a rather prominent client, an architect, and they would be able to get me somebody they knew in the town council, so they'd let me have a hearing in the town council. I'd have to appear there. And then they would say we will give you a special permit provided you have tests made at our particular University. So I'd have to make up a test wall and let that cure, and we'd test at the University, and sure enough it would have the strength we said it had, and so finally came to you're going to build.

And so they gave me an order for two or three truckloads of this. It wasn't really worth very much. By this time you had used up any possible profit you could make in an incredible overhead, so then I found that we got to the job and the carpenters said this was form work therefore it belongs to us. The masons said, obviously these are blocks, this is masonry. So if the masons put it up the carpenters went and pulled it down, and if the carpenters put it up the masons pulled it down. And the lathers said, "It's lathe." So they didn't like it. So there was nothing but jurisdictional disputes. This used up more money. Out of the 240 buildings that I was able to get up, I assure you that I just couldn't make money, and when it was all over, I had to have special insurance, and I had to have special the banks didn't like it for mortgages and things when it was all over I had to start all over again there was absolutely no momentum from the thing you'd done before. There was none.

I said, "This particular building world is just incredibly out of gear with the Universe, and everything man has learned to do technologically everything is backward, and everybody doubts it, and the only thing that is any good is "my grandfather built it that way, that's the way to build it." So that really tore me after the 240 buildings, just about the time that our second child was born. I had really made a mess of this, and the company sold out the operation to Celotex Company who liked the material and my method of manufacturing, because I was delivering by air and so forth, and you probably have seen in buildings.

Oh, incidentally, because it looked so inflammable, this white the oxychloride cement did not give the wood color it just looked kind of wood, it looked like it was just any bale of packing excelsior that was going to burn up like that. So I used a carbon black powder and it made it gray, made it look like concrete blocks. At any rate, the Celotex Company bought it, and there has never been anything that is quite so good as a sound absorbent. So there is a material called Soundex that you'll see many places, where you'll see those fibers matted that's the material I developed for that building. So I at least see my stuff around. And I sold out to Celotex, and I was really out and I was penniless, and my friends did not think well of me, the people at least who tried to make money a friend is a friend, so there were some friends left alright, but I was in anything but high repute as a businessman. And here was this new child.

So, I'll tell you and I had been doing all this drinking and everything like that and suddenly it was an entirely new kind of life. And, I really felt at that moment, that I had had really by good luck of getting out of Harvard, I had had an acceleration of experience. I really had much more experience than my contemporaries. I however felt that I had made such a mess of things that I didn't really like to try to make money anyway, I wanted to build a good wall. I liked to make a good material. I wasn't really interested in the money side. And I was having to play very much of a game there and I was not good at that.

So, I said, "I am just quite clearly a mess," and, I thought, then, that maybe my mother I say she was not well off she was well off for just a single woman, and I said my wife's family and my mother might be able to take better care of my wife and my daughter than I could. I just seemed to be a mess. I really felt tremendously "messy" I assure you. And, so I really contemplated very much suicide not contemplated, I started out to do so. And I got into the thoughts about "What is a human being, what are we?" If you're going to do away with this what are you doing away with? I said.

One of the things I would be doing away with would be a very great deal of experience. And I really learned an enormous amount with my experience, I assure you. And the fact that I didn't make money didn't mean that I hadn't learned my technology superbly. And I learned enormous pattern of how people get things done, and I had been through in getting those five factories going in five different cities and people putting up money, enormous amounts of legal work and patent work and so forth very familiar with those kinds of things, and I was very familiar with the business world's way of looking at things.

So, I said, "Well, each one of us is some kind of an inventory of experience, and I said "I do not really think that we own ourselves, that we are here by virtue of others, and I said "It could be that my experiences could be of value to man. So I said, "there is only one condition for you not getting rid of you, as far as you for you goes, you've got to get rid of you for you. You can only you are only entitled to stay alive if you really commit yourself and all your experiences to other human beings in a very really complete out and out way. I told you how much impressed I was with principles, so this idea of precessionally going off at 90 degrees did not seem to be illogical to me. In fact it seemed very logical. But it had never been tried, and so all my contemporaries were tied up with "have to earn a living" and I said I think this is just what we ought not to be doing. We ought to be saying "What do my experiences teach me needs to be done, which if not done will find world society in great trouble, and which if attended to will find them in advantage? And what will I need to know over and above what I now know that made me see that that is so, what more would I need to know to do something effective about it? I said, those are the kinds of question I think we ought to be doing. I then, also, then, came to asking myself a number of other questions. And I said, then, "The only condition of your staying is that you are committed to others, and that number one you have to do your own thinking. Everything that has happened to you really relates very much to your accepting other people's thinking, trying to play games that you didn't have your heart really in, so that this is going to be a very new kind of discipline. And you're going to have to be absolutely trustworthy that you really are committing yourself to other people. There's no cheating on this you're not just where you arrange not to kill yourself now, and then you're going to start cheating on this. You're going to have to have absolute conviction that you will be able to carry through for your full lifetime."

Well, I asked myself quite a number of things, and number one I said, "Alright you've experienced an enormous number of human beings who are deeply moved by their religions that they have been taught by their families, and they belong to very large great religions have great fervor." And I said, "Alright, I've got the number one question, you're going to have to ask yourself is, 'if you're going to do your own thinking, and this means giving up all belief.'" And I'd been taught to believe various things and I accepted them more or less whole-heartedly, I said "I'm going to have to give up all of those things. I'm going to have to start absolutely from experience. Experiential base." So I said "Do you have any personal experiences which give you reason to have to assume some greater intellect operating in Universe other then that of man?"

I said "I'm just overwhelmed by the evidence of that." These generalized principles themselves which can only be intellectually detected, and they are utterly intellectual. They are weightless, a generalized case is absolutely intellectual. And there is an integrity all these principles are all inter-accommodative so that I'm overwhelmed by an a priori greater intellect operative.

I'm going to talk more about this on Friday, but I just wanted that was one of the important questions right at the outset, so I said, "Then I'm going to assume, in doing my own thinking, I'm going to try to understand I am, really whether a Great Intellect thinks it is worthwhile for me to carry on. And what would be the requirements of a comprehensive integrity of our Universe. Whether it is looking out for all humanity, or looking out for Universe, why do we have these generalized principles? What is Universe itself trying to do? I said, I'm going to have to learn to ask myself some very big questions. I'm going to have to answer them myself from experience.

Now, certainly, one little human being going to see what absolutely penniless, dependent wife and child and trying to commit himself in such a big program as that, and everybody saying you've got to earn money I assure you that my family and my wife's family and all of our friends just thought I was being really very treacherous to do such a thing. And it was not easy to carry on there was nobody to tell you what to do, nobody to mark your paper. you had to really set out you've got a commitment of how to solve problems by artifacts and what are the first artifacts that have to be done. Luckily there had been that navy experience, there had been the "doing more with less" of the sea there had been the "doing even more with less" of the sky. And then getting into this building world where everybody was doing everything just absolutely opposite, the heavier and bigger, heavier and higher the more secure.