Interview with Barbara Marx Hubbard
by Cate Montana
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TGI - You are in a unique position after dedicating 40 years of intense work and focus to understanding and assisting human evolution. From your perspective, how are we doing?
Barbara - My basic metaphor of our crisis is birth. I saw that 40 years ago. What's happened in this metaphor is that the crisis has matured; the crisis has advanced in the sense that now it's more obvious what isn't working. With global warming, with the failure of war to win anything, with the failure of many forms of our civilization, it's more obvious what’s breaking down.
From the point of view of the crisis as a birth, we’re getting closer and closer to what that birth might be. The crisis is accelerating. The breakdowns are accelerating, and the emergent capacities and the emergent consciousness is accelerating very fast as well. Will there be sufficient global awakening before the collapse becomes totally chaotic? I believe that it is out of this chaos that something new can emerge. The new is emerging, and I think it needs only one more degree of connectivity and self-awareness as a whole for us to be able to experience a jump in consciousness collectively. So I actually think things are going very well and the timing is very close and very precise for the collective awakening.
TGI – If I hear you correctly, you’re saying that the worse it looks, the closer we are. That in some respects the same breakdowns and indicators that fundamentalist Christians might see as hallmarks of the literal Second Coming of Christ are the same hallmarks of global transformation – a different kind of second coming if you will.
Barbara – That’s avery interesting way to put it. It is the end of a world as we've known it because our society is not sustainable - a very different reason than fundamental Christians might use. But it's really true we cannot keep on populating, polluting and growing economically in this closed system. If you take the birth metaphor, it's deadly after a certain point for that baby to stay in the womb - it will kill the baby and the mother. Just so it will destroy us to stay in the womb of self-consciousness.
Awakening is on many, many levels. But for conscious evolution there are three specific levels. The first is spiritual and I think of that level as the awakening from within millions of us of a more direct experience with spirit; a more direct experience of life purpose; a more direct experience of expanded consciousness.
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And then you go to the next level of science and technology. It's being transformed before our very eyes by the understandings of quantum physics and entanglement, non-locality and a participatory universe with the whole universe being alive and connected. If you look at the technological breakthroughs possible with life extension, the human settlement of space, the expansion of intelligence into quantum computers, you begin to see that it's not only the scientific understanding of the physical universe that’s evolving, but also our physical capacity to transform the universe.
If you put together spiritual, social, scientific, and technological capacities, not just as separate individualistic activities, but as a new gestalt, you will begin to see the outlines of a new species. I call it a universal species, because it is universal in consciousness, universal in action and literally universal on the physical plane.
Now, that doesn't mean that everything is going to happen automatically right. Just like every birth it's always dangerous. And, on a planetary scale we don't have anyone to compare ourselves with who has direct experience making it through a high-tech overpopulated, polluting species to a birth universal species orchestrating its capacities harmoniously with ecological sustainability.
TGI – True, we don’t have an advanced species hanging around that has made it through the gate so to speak.
Barbara – However, if you really read the literature you'll see that there are solutions to all of this scattered throughout the system. There is no one answer. And it helps if you think of it as a new gestalt of the planetary emergence of a universal species whose birth is being forced by the breakdowns. That way you can reinterpret the breakdown.
I've had five children and the metaphor means a lot to me. Really, until the labor pains become intense, you're not going to be able to give birth. It's a most painful period. As a mother, you know the pain has meaning. As a planetary culture, we don’t know yet that this pain has meaning, because it looks like failure everywhere. But when you really look at the civilization that is breaking down, you have to ask yourself, do you want it to continue the way it is? With all the inequalities? With 25,000 children starving everyday?
Do you want the dominator, militaristic structure that has gained so much power? Do we want that? What if the very breakdown is the opportunity that the emerging civilization and the emerging species absolutely requires?
TGI - When you said basically that the child being born is still in the womb of self-consciousness, do you mean that when we come out of the womb that we will transcend the limited human concept of self into a transformative evolved sense of self that's universal?
Barbara - I do. I think that we've had great beings for the last 5000 years who have done this. It's not like it's totally new. All the great avatars have led the way with this. Religions have been founded by people who broke through. But they did it as extra ordinary people bound by their culture. What's happening now, I'm thinking of it as an incarnation of the essential divine self coming in as our own identity. When you shift your identity from your local personality to your central, higher God-self - whatever you want to call it - when you shift that identity you begin the process of giving birth inside yourself to this universal human that has been called Homo Noeticus, Homo universalis…
TGI – But we’re still stuck with Homo neuroticus…
Barbara – Yes, that's definitely here! Homo neuroticus happens when people who don't see their own emergence as part of what's happening become not only neurotic, but depressed, and alienated and frantic. Here we have this new perspective supported by science and popularized by such mainstream movies as What the BLEEP Do We Know!? on the nature of reality, and the nature of the subatomic level being fully connected and alive, reinforcing our spiritual intuitions and telling us that this form of consciousness is not something weird or even extraordinary. We’re learning it's the universe in person as us.
I've realized that everyone is the universe in person. So whatever is true of the universe is also true of you and me. If the universe is entangled and participatory at the subatomic level, so are we. So the consciousness I'm speaking of is not some foreign breakthrough that we've never heard of. It’s actually a gentle emergence of what's been happening for thousands of years.
TGI – And being impatient, short-lived human beings, we have a tendency to not recognize process, or we tend to define process in terms of our own time period on this earth where 10 or 20 years is a long time. We don’t usually think in terms of thousands of years of evolution.
Barbara – Correct. And I would like to add the question of timing to this, because ordinarily evolution works very slowly. But we also now know about punctuated equilibrium. If we really are at what people like Erwin Laszlo and many others have termed the bifurcation point - a macro shift where the system is so far out of balance that small fluctuations can shift the whole system very quickly because it's all unstable – the theory says small fluctuations of small numbers of people who are aligned in their consciousness and creativity can jump this system fast.
Equally, as Joseph Chilton Pearce points out, if the “strange attractor” is demonic, the system can go downwards very fast.
