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Emanuel is the founder of various large-scale movements. He is also an entrepreneur, writer, journalist, philosopher, philanthropist, quantum physicist, and activist for social transformation who has had many lived encounters with spiritual masters. Emanuel founded Greenheart International in 1985, and is the co-founder of Fundación por el Futuro in Madrid, Spain, serving as President since 1995. He is the founding co-creator of the Global Purpose Movement and Purpose Earth, and a member of the Evolutionary Leaders Circle. His most current project is developing the theory of the Holomovement as a movement to unite humanity through our collective purpose.
Emanuel Kuntzelman: That very first class, very first day at college, 1970, it was Professor Dr. Jeffrey Haddon. I was the head of the sociology department at Tulane at that time, and we had a very small, select group. And on the blackboard there, he drew what are very familiar now, graphs of exponential change over time.
He put quantities on the vertical axis, time on the horizontal axis, and graphed the growth of various quantities going back to the year 0, and then approaching year 2000. Population being amongst them. Overkill was another one, or the growth of armaments. Environmental deterioration and the growth of technology.
He used those terms so he could get an acronym, P-O-E-T, POET, and he called it Poetgraph. And he showed these lines going across, growing very slowly, population armaments, and then around the 17th century, starting to turn upward, and as we approach the 20th century, a straight line going directly up. With the exponential growth. Of course, in this day and age, all of that's very common.
We've seen it with Al Gore and Inconvenient Truth, and many years before, but at that time, this was really very revolutionary stuff. This was two years before even The Limits to Growth was published by the Club of Rome, so certainly I, and I don't think hardly anyone had really seen those types of exponential growth graphs and the way Dr. Haddon explained it, he could plot in anything on the environment. He was always already talking about the reduction in the size of glaciers and the growing salinity in the Baltic Sea and the lack of topsoil and the disappearing rainforests 56 years ago.
Paulette Pipe: Yeah.
Emanuel Kuntzelman: And he said, so what this graph shows is basically one thing to you, this generation. And it is quite literally, we are running out of time. The graph's going along, it's going up, it's curving, and it's going straight up, and time's out there. And it shows us that we are at the end times.
Unless this situation is resolved. And so my challenge to you, young people, is what would you, as sociologists, or whatever you are, do to create solutions for this pending crisis that's right around the corner? How will you, in effect, contribute to saving the world from this? He said, now I'll give you one hint.
He said, one, you're gonna have to write a paper on this in the class, so you do have to think about it, and two, it does not have a standard, logical, linear solution. So, don't think about it in your normal thinking terms. That's why I've called it the Poet Graph. It's a kind of pure poetry.
You're gonna have to find a new way, you're gonna have to read your intuition, you're going to have to be very creative, because this doesn't have an easy solution. I was so moved by his words and that message. I remember going out after the class. I sat down under one of those big live oak trees on the quad of the Tulane campus with the Spanish moss hanging down.
Paulette Pipe: Another tree.
Emanuel Kuntzelman: I know, I keep running into these tree moments, but always, always have been a tree hugger at heart, I guess.
Paulette Pipe: I guess.
Emanuel Kuntzelman: I was sitting there under that tree, and really just getting a powerful, powerful download. The equivalent to the apple tree, but multiplied. And I said, okay, I dedicate my life to service to humanity, to solving the conundrum of the poet graph. I'm not sure what that means.
I don't know how to go about it. That is the rest of my life. I am in service to this mission. I then, when I finally got up from under the tree, the first thing I did was go to the dean's office, walked in, and said, I need to change everything, I need to see the world, understand other cultures, other people, the way they work, otherwise I can't do anything, so I need to study abroad.
And started to change my orientation so that I could eventually do that, which I did.