Conscious Choice: Evolve!

January 1999

Evolve!

An interview with Barbara Marx Hubbard

by Aliess Margaret Brady

Barbara Marx Hubbard’s face is alive with light; her deep brown eyes twinkle with expectation. A noted futurist, author, and social architect, she is dedicated to understanding and communicating humanity’s potential for creating a positive future. Her new book, Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, charts the emergence of a new global renaissance, what she calls the "social potential movement." I recently spoke with Hubbard about her new book, the future, and creativity.

AMB: In many quarters, the future looks bleak: we’re using up natural resources at an alarming rate, population growth portends massive problems for food production and water supply. Yet you present a positive future for humanity, a new story of evolution. Can you explain your hopeful viewpoint and what you mean by conscious evolution?

BMH: If you look at the facts, figures, and projections, it’s very hard not to be pessimistic. So you have to assume something new is possible. I am not an optimist or a pessimist. I am a potentialist.

Looking back at 15 billion years of evolution, I am completely amazed, awed, and struck, by the power of evolution to create newness when it hits a limit — the power of evolution to bring forth emergent properties.

I see limits and problems as evolutionary drivers towards innovation and transformation. When single cells were the only life form in the early seas of earth, dividing and over-populating and polluting and stagnating, a very bright single cell could have said: "Cells, we’ve hit the limit, we’ve made a mistake, we’re guilty, we’re eating too much, we’re reproducing too much." And in fact, life was threatened. But what came out of that was a very complex process of multi-cellular life, photosynthesis, the building of the biosphere, and the formation of a whole planetary ecology. We are on the threshold of a similar shift now.

As Sri Aurobindo, the Indian mystic pointed out, "If you had been able to see the rocks on the early earth before life, and someone had whispered in the fictitious ear of the rock, you’re going to get up and walk. You’re going to get up, talk. You’re going to get up and move and you’re going to fly to the moon," the rock probably wouldn’t have believed it. Yet evolution is a consciousness-raising experience. Life has gone from from single-celled, to multi-celled, to animal, to human, to the great avatars, the Buddha, the Christ, and many other people now, moving from self-centered to more cosmic, unitive consciousness.

AMB: It’s both amazing and magnificent to think about the evolution of life in such quantum leaps of grace.

BMH: Yes, well, here we are. If we do not take a quantum leap we could self-destruct. Yet, it is my sense that the very crisis we are facing is a birth, that in fact it is stimulating the shift in consciousness of millions and millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people all over the world. It is awakening us to what, in the past, was considered a more mystical consciousness — that we are all connected, we are all members of one whole. Evolutionary and environmental consciousness say the same thing: we are all connected, we are all members of one whole. The importance of the new story is that people know that the possibilities are glorious. We have an immeasurable future physically in the universe. We have an immeasurable future in the expansion of human consciousness. We have an immeasurable future in the expansion of human creativity. We have an immeasurable future in the possibilities of not only restoring this earth, but building any number of new little worlds in space.

AMB: How do you propose we facilitate this leap in consciousness?

BMH: In 1984 I had my name placed in nomination for the Vice-Presidency. What I actually advocated was a social function as great as our war machine, yet engineered to scan for, map, connect, and communicate emergent innovations, creative solutions, and models that work in every field of human endeavor — mapping them to see the pattern of emergent possibilities. I called it the Peace Room. If right now we undertook what I call a campaign for what works, at every level possible, we would go a long way toward a sustainable, renewable, compassionate, regenerative, and humane world. We are repatterning, but it’s slow and it’s disconnected, and the mass media doesn’t communicate it. The knowledge is there, but it needs to be connected as we shift from a separated state of consciousness to a more unitive state.

AMB: What Joanna Macy might describe as eco-consciousness or the eco-self, equating one’s self with a larger sphere, from the community, to the nation, to the world itself.

BMH: Right. Eco-consciousness, unitive consciousness, cosmic consciousness, whole-centered consciousness, Buddha mind, Christ consciousness — I make a long string. But the beauty of this is, Aliess, it’s not one single religion. It’s personal. That the individual human being feels within him or herself something connecting. And it’s connecting in a very deep way for some of us. I mean just take you and me sitting right here. You’re motivated in a very deep way. You do this work. And who told you to do all that?

AMB: Nobody! From the time I was a teenager, I had a desire to travel and learn the stories of people all over the world, looking for what connects us.

BMH: Yes. So, you see, you were motivated by something deep within yourself. And as you share with others, you strike a chord in them that plays and resounds. In this way, I think that consciousness is reinforcing itself. It resounds and echoes back, and as it does so, it gains solidity. That has to affect the consciousness field of earth in tremendous ways, and we don’t even know the physics of consciousness fully.

AMB: Speaking of physics, you mention Rupert Sheldrake and his theories of morphic resonant fields, the most popular example of which is the young monkey on Bimini who started to wash her fruit in the sea before she ate. When the 100th monkey began washing its fruit, the behavior spread simultaneously to all the other islands — through the field. Can you explain the role this theory plays in conscious evolution, for humans, for earth?

BMH: Well, it plays a very big role. If we must solve all of our problems in a linear manner within the construct of limited self-centered consciousness, I don’t think we can do it. But, if the morphic field, or what Carl Jung would describe as the collective unconscious, is actually stimulated by each person’s consciousness shift, then it will become easier and easier to change our consciousness and our behavior. And this is a mystical thought. Several people I know have a similar thought. Ken Carey says earth has a due date. Peter Russell says it’s a white hole in time. Teilhard de Chardin caled it omega. I call it a planetary birth experience, the collective leap from self-centered consciousness to unitive or cosmic consciousness.

These are all metaphors for the possibility that there could be a sufficient number of people on earth resonating at an octave that’s consistent with one another and with the whole, a frequency that would give us a collective shift that would stabilize a more unitive consciousness on a global scale. Cosmic or unitive consciousness is still unstable in a self-centered world. Resonant fields of consciousness are very key to this process.

Number two is linking up that which is already emergent, so that the system can cooperate in its own re-patterning. Number three is the emergence of cosmic consciousness in the individual. Not just flickers of understanding, but the total emergence of the universal human, the co creative human.

AMB: You’ve said that the human potential movement of the‘60s and‘70s was the birthplace of what is happening now, what you’ve dubbed the social potential movement.

BMH: Yes. I think that the human potential which has been building up in personal values and so forth is now coming not only into the idea of social action, but it’s a little bigger than that — that each of us who is working from within on our own growth gets in touch with a unique creativity. I call it the genius code.

The genius code, like the genetic code, is the unique creativity of each person. And when its purpose is aligned with some part of the larger pattern of social evolution, it gets turned on! And then it is as powerful instinctually as the desire for self-preservation and self-reproduction, because you get passionate about expressing your purpose in the world!

Passionate creation is the big difference between purely mystical consciousness and purely altruistic consciousness where you’re always in service. It’s a consciousness that is attracted to expressing its unique creativity in such a way that the person evolves and the world is changed.

AMB: One thing that sets your work apart is that your views on evolution are so all-inclusive. Nothing is bad. We haven’t made any mistakes. You have a very loving view of humanity and our growth as a species. You view even the environmental degradation that we’ve wrought as a natural step to our growth. That’s a problematic stance.

There are a lot of environmentalists who are fighting against the new uses of our understanding of the genetic code, and specifically biotechnologically engineered food, cloning, and so forth. While I was reading your book, your theories, I felt a kind of relief to think of evolution with such a warm embrace, and also a great deal of concern, because at this stage we don’t have the responsibility to handle our power ethically.

BMH: Yes, that’s right.

AMB: Can you explain some of the dangers and the potentials of these powers?

BMH: The reason that I’m a potentialist and basically filled with hope is that we are only at midlife in the life cycle of this planet. I know that five billion years from now, in the long distant future, our sun will expand and destroy its planets.

These powers are too great for a self-centered species within a single biosphere. However, if our crisis is a birth, and we are to eventually become a universal species, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and nuclear power are normal beyond the biosphere.

What if all of these powers are the powers of a universal species with which we can restore this planet and limit growth here? I don’t think we should be using biotechnology on food or any of that here. What I do think is this: when we build worlds in space, these technologies can provide new biodiversity. In How To Colonize the Galaxies in Eight Easy Steps, Marshall Savage puts forward the idea that whether or not there’s other life in the universe, we ourselves are becoming other life.

AMB: Early on in Conscious Evolution, you described five very beautiful blessings of evolution, among which is that what we know and what we perceive actually is us.

BMH: Yes! We are nature become self-aware. Human nature is nature. And I think that not only Gaia, not only Mother Earth, but the entire process of creation is designed to create systems ever more conscious and ever more free.

This does not underestimate the danger. It just says that potential is a quantum transformation — forward into something that has been poetically intuited by the great mystics — and the science fiction writers — of the human race.

AMB: Speaking of science fiction writers, I was really excited when I read about your potentialist video series and your interview with Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek series. I think many people are afraid of what has been termed globalization and the new emerging global economy because they fear it as an assimilation of their culture, of their individuality, almost along the lines of the Borg mentality in Star Trek’s Next Generation.

BMH: Gene had such a faith in humans’ ability to transcend problems and to grow and expand that he laughed at this problem. While our global nervous system is linking up, we are seeing a blend of cultures. But people are hanging onto their ethnic roots for identity, and it’s the wrong place to look. I think the place to look for your identity is in your creativity. We’re not in a closed system. We’re in an open system. The earth is no more closed than it is flat.

What would happen if we chose to develop an integrated earth-space environment for humanity which would have as its goal the restoration of the earth, meeting the basic needs of people, the control of our population, and the shifting of our military from defense to building new worlds?

Usually when people talk about the peace dividend, (not that it’s been used that way) they think of the immediate needs of people. Now, I’m only suggesting, and this is very delicate, that if we only think of how to feed, house, and clothe ourselves without continuing to press at our own frontier, we will get closed in. And we need that openness.

AMB: You’ve said that if we don’t have positive images of where we’re headed, we’ll get lost, we’ll misuse our great powers, possibly destroy all chances for our future. Can you give us a preview of the coming attractions for the next millennium as you see them?

BMH: Looking at the high peaks of human capability, I see a more stabilized unitive consciousness as the new norm for humanity within the next 1000 years.

Secondly, I think we’ll find that we can be self-healing and regenerative. I believe that we will have extended life spans, and eventually I think we’re going to live as long as we are creative. I’m 68 years old and I feel newer every day — not younger — but newer, because my creativity is constantly growing. And it has no age! My feeling intuitively is that as my creativity increases, the health-giving qualities of creativity could eventually lead not only to the keeping of optimum health, but a certain degree of regeneration.

Eventually I think we will live as long as that creativity is in us, and that we will die consciously. I believe the combination of advanced medical technology and the advanced mind, body, spirit connection is going to lead to the regenerating human.

I think that we will be physically universal, that we will live in space as well as on earth. And that that will change everything when we realize that this is not just a technological achievement for a couple of astronauts. It’s even greater than when the fish came out of the oceans onto the dry land.

AMB: What do we do to help ensure that powerful technologies are not misused? Do we just keep focusing on what is working rather than fighting against what isn’t?

BMH: No, I think it’s both. One thing that would give more energy to the positive, however, would be to start envisioning the next 500 years as a quantum transformation, and see that the powers that are so dangerous now have a use in that future, not just for the commercial patenting of genes, but for the possibility of a species who perhaps needs a new body if it’s going to travel in space — needs it. I mean, the body is much too fragile!

I would like us to flesh out a vision that would let us see the meaning of that power for the longer-range future. That doesn’t mean we should use it right now, here. Nor does it mean, stop it. Not having the further distant view, people are tending to want to stop growth altogether, because these technologies are harmful here.

I’m in no way suggesting that we just let anything happen. But what I’m noticing is that almost nobody sees the long-range purpose for the newer technologies. I’d hate for us to cut off all our capacities now because they’re dangerous in a limited biosphere with self-centered consciousness, when their ultimate purpose is to give us life and to save the whole solar system for earth life.

AMB: You co-founded The Foundation for Conscious Evolution and have since started a web site to encourage different groups to share their creative process. Would you talk a little about that and what you’re working on now?

BMH: The Foundation for Conscious Evolution was formed to bring the ideas of conscious evolution forward into the world. Nancy Carroll, my partner in this, decided a couple of years ago to do an interim version of the Peace Room, hence the Co-Creation web site. The web site enables people to share their projects, their sustainable success, with the world, networking what’s working for them in the fields of health, education, governance, and so on. We are now identifying a design team of people who are knowledgeable in every field of human endeavor who will help us identify golden innovations that are widely applicable to society, reigniting the spirit of innovation and creation with unlimited possibilities.

The way you reignite the spirit is by awakening your own spirit. It’s about people awakening to what it is that turns them on to create, to do, to cooperate. We’d like to stimulate that.

Barbara Marx Hubbard can be contacted at the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, PO Box 6397, San Rafael, CA, 94903; e-mail: fce@peaceroom.org; web: www.cocreation.org.

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