Interview with Barbara Marx Hubbard
by Cate Montana
 |
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.
 |
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.
Interview with Barbara Marx Hubbard cont.
We've seen the demonic aspect, particularly in the warring nations, where people get caught and go further and further into what they know is not what they want to do really - which is kill everything around them. You can just see how people can get trapped when they are trying to “win” that way.
But this may also be the sign that we are ready for the dissipative structure [of society] to jump. Because in a dissipative structure, when the organism is using more energy to handle its own dysfunction and everything it does makes things worse - like more military intervention makes for more violence, and more economic growth makes for more global warming - you have to look for the nonlinear exponential interaction of what is working; And I think we're at the threshold. … It can't take hundreds of years, because we can't go on like this hundreds of years and survive.
TGI – There’s a lot of talk about the year 2012, where the Mayan Long Count calendar comes to an end, and a grand cycle in the Kali Yuga finishes. Some people fear it will be the end of the world. Can you address this in terms you’ve been talking about?
Barbara - There's a lot of prophecy about the year 2012. Ervin Laszlo has written a book called Chaos Point in which he says we have six years to do this in. And when I asked him about it, he said it's not that this prophecy is true. He said a lot of people believe it. Therefore use it. It's like the experiments with random number generators. Let's say that everybody thinks that 2012 is it. So it's going to affect reality by believing it. I'm very hopeful. I'm excited to be living through this next 10 years.
TGI- So basically we’re evoking a change.
Barbara - We are evoking it. I believe that conscious evolution is the context for the evolution of humanity, and that conscious evolution exists in every field of endeavor. People are realizing that the systems - their own lives - have to be evolved. The result of this is not more of the same, but an actual radical newness as great as from Neanderthal to Homo sapiens, if not greater. Because if we go from Homo sapiens sapiens to Homo universalis, with all the scientific and technological and spiritual capacities working along with social synergy, you've got a new species.
I think embedded in every human being is a transcendent “nerve,” you’ve got to pluck. We are, after all, the result of nature's capacity to transcend its own limits.
TGI - Or we wouldn't be here.
Barbara - We definitely would not be here. So now we are at a certain limit in consciousness and growth. Our capacity to transcend that is innate, and it's coming to the level of consciousness as what I'm calling evolutionary spirituality based on evolutionary consciousness which is threefold. The substrate goes within and accesses the non-dual pure awareness of the great mystics. It experiences cosmo-genesis and the whole story of creation in pure eternal awareness. Secondly, there is evolutionary consciousness over 14 billion years which is developmental. The third part of evolutionary consciousness is your own passionate desire to participate by becoming a co-creator with the process of creation.
If you add non-dual consciousness, evolutionary awareness of the whole story, with your own desire to be a co-creator within that story, you've got a new form of consciousness. And it's arriving. It's not the church, It's not an organization. It's a person that's coming into being as the crisis deepens and our collective awareness of this crisis grows.
TGI – So, in a way, there’s nothing you can do. It’s a birthing within that is, as you say, innate. It has its own time and we can align with it as best we can. And yet there's nothing you can quite grasp and manipulate into being.
Barbara - This is so true. Yet for me what has made a huge difference is having the right “meme,” [thought] the right memetic environment of ideas that supports your emergence and your process of emergence. When I was trying to go through this in my early years I tried to be an existentialist.
I was 18 years old in Paris during a year abroad. I had the beret and the Galois cigarettes and the red wine, and I was trying very hard to believe the universe was meaningless and that it was going down to its inevitable death. I alone had to make it meaningful. Well, you can imagine I was rather depressed.
TGI - And depressing!
Barbara – Yes, that too. But that was the whole culture in Paris at that time. And for good reason, because the world seemed to have totally failed. It’s a long story. I got married to an artist and had five children. But then I found the meme [thought] in Teilhard de Chardin, and Sri Aurobindo, and Buckminster Fuller, whose idea systems made me realize that, first of all, the universe is not going down to an inevitable death, it seems to be rising in greater consciousness and complexity. Secondly it seems to be going towards a quantum jump. Suddenly the passion in me was reinforced.
Suddenly I was the nature of the universe. Instead of being a neurotic housewife I became a universal process of creation in person. Do you see the enormity of that identity shift?
TGI – What triggered the shift
Barbara - Part of it was frustration and search. But the other part was certain ideas about the nature of the universe. Because if you add to Teilhard and Aurobindo the whole quantum physics end of it, which at that time wasn't clear to me - you begin to get so reinforced in your own propensity to evolve and to know that your intention affects reality … you get to be really different.
So it's not so much that we have to rush out and do things. But we do need the right idea environment that supports us discovering our own unique expression of the creative force. I think for me when I found that I had a life purpose and that it was related to the evolution of our species – that was 1966 – it was personal to me. I was 36 and I was the one that had to go do this. And when you get to feel that inner impulse of evolution that runs through all of existence, and if you can align with that, the vitality that you experience and the guidance changes everything from busy work to an expression of soul’s purpose.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy and that everything works. But it does mean that the vitality you get from the doing of it is self-rewarding. For me the discovery of life purpose - any ability to express life purpose as your own essence in the world - is the greatest gift of all.
Barbara Marx Hubbard has been a pioneer in positive options for the future of humanity for forty years. A public speaker, author, and social innovator, she is president and executive director of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. Her her new video, Humanity Ascending, is avilable now. For more information evolve.org [1] and barbaramarxhubbard.com [2]