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The Spirit of Ma'at, Volume 1 No. 5 "The Futurists Creating Peace"
by Barbara Marx Hubbard with Diane Cooper
The Foundation for Conscious Evolution Diane M. Cooper: I'm really interested in your view of the current planetary situation and humanity as it relates to the possibility of a new human. You mentioned this when I interviewed you before, about eight or ten years ago. You talked about the idea of co-creation and procreation, and the different signals. What's happened since then?Barbara Marx Hubbard: I have a new foundation for conscious evolution, and am living in Santa Barbara, California. About a year and a half ago, I came here to speak, and I asked the question, "What would happen if this community" - that is to say, Santa Barbara - "were to realize its own potential for conscious evolution." And spontaneously, that night, one hundred eighty-five people signed up to form an experimental seed group. And because of the seed group, I returned to Santa Barbara. I hadn't expected to do this. Right now, we have two hundred or more people involved in this experiment. It started with members going into resident core groups according to their vocational affinities - health, education, business, technology, and so forth. And they began to experience their own deeper resonance with one another. That phase went on for a year. Now we're coming together as a whole to develop purpose, principles, and organization that the community wants for itself, from the point of view of being involved in self and social evolution. We're using some of Dee Hock's chaordic design materials. Birth of the Chaordic Age Diane: Could you explain those terms, please?Barbara: Dee Hock - the founder of the Visa credit card - wrote a book called Birth of the Chaordic Age. Chaordic is Hock's word. It means a combination of the chaotic and the orderly. He believes that one of the great problems on Earth is the way we are organized in tyrannical forms of command and control, where people are coerced to do what they do. Hock speculates that there is a way of creating a self-organizing organization - of which Visa is one example - where there isn't the bureaucracy and the command-and-control centralized power, but where the power is freely distributed. So in our group we are practicing with Hock's design to create a community that is self-organizing and has a shared purpose. The basic shared purpose is for each human being who is involved to be able to emerge - for people to be give their gifts, both personally and socially. It's a fabulous experiment. The Peace Room From that, I'm developing Wisdom Radio Outreach. This takes place every Wednesday at 5 p.m. on wisdommedia.com. What we're doing there is called ''Live from the Peace Room.'' Do you remember my concept of the Peace Room?Diane: I've read about it on your Internet site. Barbara: It started many years ago, when I ran for vice president. My platform proposed that in the office of the vice president there be a Peace Room that would be as sophisticated as the Pentagon's War Room. Here, they could scan for, map, connect, and communicate social innovations - that which is emerging, that which is creative, sustainable, compassionate, that which opens a greater possibility for humanity in every field. The scanning would create a new vision instantaneously, because everything we are talking about is already happening, but we don't see it. We don't connect it. And so we don't know how to participate. Diane: Because it's not talked about. Barbara: Only in small groups. It hasn't penetrated the mass public mind. so it is as though it's not happening. Anyway, the Peace Room was my vision. So now what is exciting to me is that I'm acting out this vision. Of course it's not on the huge scale of a vice presidential campaign. But that was like a demonstration, and I didn't know how to organize it. Two hundred delegates at the democratic national convention signed up for me to be nominated for vice president on this Peace Room idea, but I didn't know how to go beyond that. "Not What I Could Do, But What You Could Do" Diane: I understand that you had an experience that brought you to this vision. Could you tell us about that.Barbara: Yes. It happened in 1980. I had a very profound Christ experience where the basic message was, "Be me. All of you. You are the natural Christ. This is what I came to reveal. Not what I could do, but what you could do." And from that experience, I got this impulse that there is, now, on Earth, a new order of the future. This new order is in the form of pioneering souls who know they are here to participate in the transformation of humanity from homo sapiens to homo universalis. From the creature human to the co-creative human. Christ's resurrection showed this process of transformation, so that we could then carry it out in ''slow motion.'' Because if you combine spirituality and the very new high technology with social synergy, cooperation, and psychic experience, you will find that we will be shifting as humans from our separated, animal-human state to our co-creative, ''universal'' state. So when that Christ experience happened to me, I became totally inspired. I realized that the New Testament is coded evolution, and that the story of Jesus is now coming true. We don't know what really happened two thousand years ago, but I believe that the story of the death and resurrection of a human into a new form symbolized the evolutionary destiny of humanity. I have written a book about this called Revelation: Our Crisis Is a Birth (The Book of Co-Creation). The book sets out an evolutionary interpretation of the New Testament, but it's more than a Christian tradition. There are many myths - Osiris, Dionysus - of the god-man coming in, having miracles, dying, and then being reborn and resurrected. That's the tradition of all the great mystery schools. It's the universal mystery story, in a way. And this resurrection is what is happening to us now. We are dying to one stage of evolution, which is the self-centered, separated stage, and we are being born to the unified, connected stage. And when this new stage fulfills itself, we will find that we are no longer self-centered homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is a transitional species giving birth right now to millions of new people. Not ''ascended masters,'' but people who are shifting internally. People like you and me. Transformation of the American Presidency Diane: So you feel that this inspired your bid for the vice-presidency?Barbara: Yes. When I did the vice-presidential campaign, I was deeply motivated, inspired, to work for the transformation of the American presidency. Because I felt that until the American presidency could reflect these new values, there would not be the public shift we need. So in 1984 I was like an evolutionary throw-forward. I threw myself out there as an inspired person. And I was able to go an amazing distance, but I couldn't go the distance of manifestation; I could only go ''demonstration.'' I was skilled at inspiring people, but I did not have the organizational skills. Networking the Networkers Diane: What did you do after that?Barbara: I would say that from 1984 to 1990 I wandered around. I met a wonderful man, Sydney Lannier, and I went to live with him in San Francisco, and sort of stabilized myself. And by way of that stabilization, by a whole set of circumstances, I am now in Santa Barbara, where the ''Live from the Peace Room'' radio show on Internet is the next stage of the very gentle beginnings for me of carrying out that original vision. I am connecting up with key people throughout the world whose life and work are already demonstrating conscious evolution. Diane: How is your present focus different than it was before? Barbara: People who are highly developed now are already networked in their field to so many others. So my thesis now is that by bringing together only a small group, you begin to get the whole field connected. I'm doing that through radio and other means of connecting these people. Then this goes into the personal. My new book, which is going to be published by Neill Donald Walsch (Hampton Roads Publishing Company), is called Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence. Again, this goes back to my original Christ experience, that we are all to be changed - that we are all being changed. The basic change is from our identity as separated humans to our identity as the Divine Self in each of us. I call it the Essential Self. And so, on a personal level, I am now working on my own emergence as a universal human. I am shifting my identity from the driven, local self-trying-to-get-the-job-done to the Guide, the Source, the Inner Voice - the Presence that is me. And I realized that I'm not channeling. I'm presencing myself. The Self that I'm presencing is beginning to incarnate all the way in, because I've placed the intention of my egoic self on the Higher Self and I'm bringing it in the whole way. And I'm offering some intensive ways for members of the community here and elsewhere to work together on their own emergence, so that as we work on the social aspect of evolution, we are truly coming through ourselves. Because that is the source of it all: Self. I'm developing an entry course, Gateway to Conscious Evolution, which will be on the Internet starting January 2001. So you can see, it's all happening. Diane: Yes. One of the things that Drunvalo has talked about is the global brain being manifest as the Internet. Barbara: Exactly. This interview is an example of that. When I am talking to you, I'm not talking to one person. I'm talking to your network. If you think of how many people now have networks and if you network the networkers, you have a huge amount of connections and coherence there. Conscious Evolution Diane: I've asked you about the Indigo kids before, and actually, in my research, I am finding out a lot more about that from both sides: traditional medicine, psychology, and then the spiritual, New Age thought. What you are saying to me sounds as if, when you say evolution, that evolutionary pattern would be manifest in a physical way, as in a new human, a newly structured human in the genetic sense. Would you say that?Barbara: Here's what I think. If you just look back for a couple of million years, we had australopithicus Africanus, the pre-human humanoid. And then we had homo habilis, homo erectus, homo Neanderthal, Cro-magnon - archaic homo sapiens - and, most recently, say between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago, modern homo sapiens. Now you can think of all these hominids as a series of species emerging in sudden shifts. Nobody knows exactly how these shifts occur. Nobody. Some may think it's a cosmic ray, or it's a gene that suddenly mutates. But however it happens, I feel that, out of the existing model of homo sapiens, another type has been gestating for thousands of years. The great ones like Buddha and Jesus have fully demonstrated this type, and have founded religions and mystery schools. But very few people have been able to do what the great ones did. So instead they have dogmas and teachings. But now, due to the planetary population crisis, a shift is occurring from procreation, reproduction, and dying young toward life extension, freedom, connection, and education - toward bringing forth one's own unique creativity. And all of this is going on in a crisis that could lead either to extinction or transformation. This type of human is popping into higher level experience, unitive experience, Inner Voice guidance. And people are really coming out of their traditional patterns. I've talked to so many people who are almost totally different from their backgrounds, from their parents, from where they went to school. You are probably that way yourself. Diane: Extremely. I'm a rogue. Barbara: What happened to you? Diane: It's hard to say; I think I was that way from a little kid. Barbara: You were that way, but you had to somehow get to know you were that way. I was always a seeker. I had come from a Jewish agnostic, materialistic, competitive, New York business family. What happened to me? Okay, my thesis is that this emerging human is in every field and every religion. But it's not a new religion. It's an emerging person. I think there may be a genetic predisposition in this species combined with a memetic attraction. Memetics: The Reproduction of Ideas Diane: What does that mean, ''memetic attraction''?Barbara: This is a very important concept. It comes from Richard Dawkins, in a book called The Selfish Gene. A gene is a biological ''meme'' - it is an information system that takes in nourishment, then breaks down that nourishment into the components that become specifically you. So a meme is a self-replicating idea. When it takes hold of a population, it changes their behavior and builds their culture (for an on-line book about the new science of memetics, see Institute for Memetic Research). For example, we've had some terrible memes recently, like Nazism. It's amazing to think that the idea of Nazism, anti-Semitism, made it possible for the German people to murder six million people. We don't have that meme anymore. It's gone. It's regressive, not dominant, and so they don't do that anymore. Communism was a meme from that memetic system. Fundamentalist Christianity is a meme. Memetic systems are idea systems that create beliefs, behavior, and culture. So people are attracted to a certain memetic pattern, just as you and I are attracted to certain ideas. These ideas are memes. They are not genes. They are memes that are beginning to self-replicate. Now why is it that you and I are attracted to certain memes, and some other people are not. That could be genetic. But the memes combined with the genes start to transform you into a different person than you were when you were part of, let's say, a materialistic-competitive memetic pattern. Eventually, if you think of it, we are being born into a very enriched cultural and technological environment. So imagine what happens if you project that cultural, technological environment a couple thousand years forward - which is nothing in evolutionary time. Can you imagine, if we don't manage to destroy ourselves first, what the culture will be in the year 4000, and how it will enhance our capabilities? Ecology of Metaphysical Temperaments So I think we are an early mutation. And I also think it's possible that homo sapiens is actually going to mutate into several different species. For instance, the ones who will want to go travel into outer space will become a different species from the ones who stay on Earth. The ones who want to expand consciousness and resonate may be different from the ones who want to physically change their bodies, extend their lives, and clone themselves.In other words, I think our metaphysical preferences are going to become evolutionary choices. And as people have evolutionary choices, they are going to choose based on very deep, metaphysical preferences. Here's an example. In the early '70s, when the space program was alive, some people really loved space colonization, and other people hated it. I had this wonderful dialogue with my friend Hazel Henderson. She and her environmentalist friends were all talking about techno-twerps and how they hated the technologists. Yet there were others who wanted to go live in outer space. And Hazel and I had this deep dialogue, and we were asking each other why it was that I, Barbara, wanted to live in outer space and if asked, would go, whereas Hazel thought that was ridiculous. I said that I wanted to go because I expected something new. She said, "I don't. I am here as part of a big mind on a local assignment, and I want to go back to the All." That was her preference. I wanted to self-evolve and go on forever in an ever expanding series of consciousness and bodies. We laughed and said that this was a metaphysical preference. It's not better or worse. One was more Buddhist and the other, you might say, was more evolutionary/technological. So this concept of metaphysical preferences applies to how we live our lives. Hazel wants to live in an organic way, while I'm an evolutionary, cosmic-Christ-oriented person. So I began to believe that there is an ecology of metaphysical temperaments. There's the Native Peoples temperament, close to the Earth. There's the Buddhist. Then, of course, there is the Hindu, which is different even from the Buddhist. There's the Taoist. There's the Islamic temperament. There's the Jewish, the Christian, the New Age, and so on. And if you really go into it, I think you will see that these are all slightly different frequencies. I believe that at a profound, psycho-genetic level, we are attuned to different frequencies. These frequencies have ''orchestrated'' themselves into religions, but now we're bursting out of religion and becoming whole beings who are somewhat different in our frequencies. And the difference can be seen by what attracts us. For instance, I am very attracted to Christ - not so much to being a ''Christian,'' but to the idea of the resurrection. I believe in that. And Jesus is my teacher because he demonstrated that in the story. But I talk to my Buddhist friends about that, and they have no interest in it. And it's not about dogma, it's about their not wanting to do it. So we've got genetic differences. Everyone is unique, but we are still homo sapiens. But I think that there are untapped potentials in the genes that are going to be drawn forth, simply because the enriched culture is offering options that never existed before. Those options will attract us, and our metaphysical preferences will guide us. Eventually, those who choose one path will be quite different from those who choose another. I think that by the year 4000 we will probably be a Solar-System species. We'll probably have the beginnings of many new worlds in Space. I think we will indeed be in contact collectively with other non-human forms of life. We don't even know what all is out there with the billions and billions of galaxies. How would you imagine that homo sapiens could possibly stay the same with all that happening? There's no way. The Crossover Generation Diane: We have to change.Barbara: We have to change, and we are changing. I call us the crossover generation. It started in 1945 when we dropped the bomb and when we understood e=mc�, and includes now, when we understand the gene. In my book Emergence I am saying that the crossover generation sees that self-centered, self-conscious homo sapiens will not long be viable because we have too much power. We will either evolve in consciousness or we will become extinct. This crossover human being is connected to the whole, but people have their own metaphysical preferences. So the crossover potentials are very capacious and diverse. I think we need all of it, the whole ecology of souls. If everyone were like me, it would be a disaster. But if everyone were a Buddhist, I think that would be equally disastrous. Diane: The spice of life. Barbara: The spice of life and the spice of evolution. We need the diversity. Yet the fact is that we are all still members of this one living body right now. So we need unity and diversity. The reason I love the Peace Room idea is that in doing this we could identify the most life-enhancing means or idea systems that provide us the possibility of sustainability, compassion, creativity, and life-ever-evolving. And once we identify that memetic pattern, the selection of that pattern is absolutely critical. Because the memes cause the behavior. So I'm a conscious meme maker and a conscious meme seeker. I am always seeking memes and piecing them together in a gestalt that leads to a greater whole for everyone. Postmenopausal Motherhood Diane: Can you say something about the phenomenon of the New Children? Barbara: Some of my grandchildren are extremely bright, but I don't have enough expertise or information to comment more than that. I am very interested in this, but my work doesn't take me into contact with children, and I don't have enough information to comment on it directly. But I would like to comment about experiences with my own children. When they were born, I was in my twenties. I was a seeker. My five children were born in the fifties, so I couldn't give them any of what I have learned since. When I began to have this consciousness, they were in their teens, and they took it to some degree as a separation, because I then became galvanized to go out into the world. But my children and I now are extremely close. I've entered a second motherhood. The second motherhood for a woman is when she realizes who she is and is moving from the self-reproduction mode to the self-evolution mode. As a self-evolver, she is able to give her children the model of self-evolution. I made this shift, and I am now giving my children this example of self-evolution. I am an Elder from the Future, because I've gone far enough in my own evolution to be conscious of myself. I am an evolving being. Most younger people in my children's generation went through the sixties and went through mind expansion, but they didn't get to this evolutionary step. As a mother, I am able to give them something that I didn't have and they didn't have as children. Now their children are receiving from them something that is new. Diane: I find this extremely inspiring, the idea of a woman who is a role model as a second mother. Barbara: Well, I think it is interesting that the people who are over sixty-five who are "turned on" as I am - "vocationally aroused," you might say - are really offering something new, particularly the women. When a woman goes through menopause, as far as nature is concerned, she is basically finished with being a woman. She has reproduced. The eggs are not coming down any more, and the body begins to age more rapidly. Do You Want to Die? Now, what happened to me at menopause is that I had a very deep Inner Voice experience. That Inner Voice said, "Would you like to die?" I thought that that wouldn't be bad. Actually, I wouldn't have minded dying, because keeping on living takes a lot of energy. But I checked in, and realized that I had barely begun. So I said, "No, I don't want to die." Then the question was, "Would you like to get cancer, or would you like to rejuvenate?" I said that I had no idea I had the choice.What I got then is that cancer is the body's panicked effort to grow without a plan. And that rejuvenation occurs when men and women access the deeper design of their own vocation, their own creativity, their own statement of self. When that gets accessed in the feminine, and the woman surrenders to give birth to herself rather than to a child, that activates us at the cellular level, and we begin not simply to get younger but to get newer. It's about getting newer, deeper, fuller of ourselves. If a woman who has accessed this design of her own vocation keeps going deeper into the pattern of her own Self, to express it and give it into the world as a procreator, she is beginning the process of mutation right there. I feel that I am mutating. I am so amazed at myself that at 70 I should be completely, passionately turned on - by what? What's doing this? I think it's a drive as great as the sexual drive that happens to a teenager. Suddenly, suddenly, teenagers want to have sex. Who's doing that? Nature wants to reproduce the species through us. This certainly is true of men, too, but I speak as a woman now, because a woman's body is able to reproduce the species, is able to have a child, which is totally miraculous. I think that when women become really sensitive to what is happening in their body when they are turned on post-menopause, we will find almost at the DNA level that we are being repatterned. This repatterning has many effects. It also releases stress. It releases fear. It releases separation. If I had known all of this sooner, I could be moving into self-regeneration. I don't say that is fully happening, because I have lived the old life for so long. So even when my shift occurred, at seventy, I didn't have a feel for what I was doing. Self-Repatterning in a Dissonant World But now I'm living in a resonance field. That is to say, everyone I am working with is on the same path that I am on. Everyone is emergent. Everyone is treating the other as a Higher Self. There is a love field here. I don't want to exaggerate and say that everyone is perfect and that there is nothing but love. That is not true. But there is such a harmonic and such a shared intention in this particular little community. To live in resonance with others whose lives have been moving in the same direction is like a growth culture for this emerging human.It is extremely hard to do this kind of repatterning in a dissonant world with dissonant relationships and jobs you don't like. The person who wants to emerge needs to find the community in which this is facilitated by the field. It's a field phenomenon. When we get in it together, when we meditate together, even when we work together, we all suddenly feel boundless. We feel as though we don't need to figure things out. We feel that we know. We stop thinking in the old way and start being what I call ''thought through.'' And sensitivity increases rapidly. Many of us are taking lightbody classes and doing yoga, and breathing, and on and on and on. I ask myself what I really want. I don't want to get younger, because I wasn't anywhere like this when I was young. I would like to have a lightbody. I don't really feel at the deepest level of my being that degeneration is natural for the Eternal Spirit. Diane: I don't either. That was a belief I had as a child when I had really no basis. Barbara: This is what attracted me to the idea of the resurrection. I believe that the resurrection was a lightbody. It was not a resuscitated corpse; it was a lightbody. People thought it happened, and that thought, that meme, has been translated for two thousand years. People have been doing the communion: Take, eat, this is my body. They've been trying to eat Christ! Eat the living body of what? After doing this writing and thinking about it and doing communion myself, I have begun to feel that that story is totally predictive. I am now affirming within my own heart that I am already a lightbody. I am Light. You are Light. We are Light. The intention to manifest lightbodies is itself a trigger to the internal nervous system that the person is ready for the true crossover from the degenerating, animal, self-reproducing body to the lightbody, which is self-evolving rather than self-reproducing. With self-reproduction, scheduled death is essential. You have to die if you are going to self-reproduce. But if you are going to self-evolve, you don't have to die. That doesn't mean you keep an animal body, it means your consciousness creates a body. That's what I believe. Diane: And it remains conscious in the process of moving from one to the other. Barbara: That's exactly my metaphysical belief and choice. Not everybody wants to do that. Like I told you with Hazel. She doesn't want to do that. She wants to have her essence go into the All and not have self. It is really an interesting preference. I have the preference to have an ever-evolving self until I can become a true universal being. I want to know about the billions and billions of galaxies. I want to meet my brothers and sisters and do all that. I cannot possibly do that as a homo sapiens living eighty years. It is out of the question. I have also come to believe from my own personal experience that anything that is your true heart's desire - and I mean deep-down, in-heart desire - is an evolutionary possibility. If you acknowledge the heart's desire and completely surrender into its truth, it begins to manifest. This is even deeper than a belief or an intention. It's an intrinsic evolutionary impulse. I feel that I am an evolutionary intuitive who is imbued with evolutionary impulses, as are millions of us, and that by enough self-awareness, I am aware of my impulses and have surrendered to them. Through this surrender, I as a universal consciousness am incarnating in this being. This being, this Barbara Hubbard, has invited me to completely take dominion within herself. I feel that I am here now and that the being who has been guiding this particular local self has incarnated, and that there is an integrated being occurring right here in this person that I am. The new model is the integrated Higher Self and local self as one Self, co-creating as the statement of the Divine in the world. Diane: Well, it's always such a pleasure talking to you. We should do it again every ten years, you know. Barbara: I'll be eighty next time, if you want to call back. The address for Barbara Marx Hubbard is: Foundation for Conscious Evolution, P.O. Box 4698, Santa Barbara, CA, 93140. Her group has a newsletter, and they invite you to listen to the Wisdom Radio show. The foundation's e-mail address is . |