A STORY OF THE RISE OF AN EVOLUTIONARY WOMAN
Barbara Marx Hubbard is an Evolutionary Woman. She has offered and developed the new worldview of Conscious Evolution as the fundamental context for the next stage of human evolution. She has written eight books and 195 volumes of Journal begun in 1948 to be communicated over Deepak Chopra’s ISHAR, a new communication system and archive for evolutionaries. She founded and led the Foundation for Conscious Evolution since 1993 and is the co-chair of the Center for Integral Wisdom, cofounder of the Association for Global New Thought and the World Future Society, a member of Evolutionary Leaders Group, the Club of Budapest and more.
Evolutionary Women fall in love attracted by shared purpose to fulfill their greater destiny.
In 1951, Barbara married artist Earl Hubbard. They met in a small café on the left bank in Paris in 1948 where she was on her Junior Year abroad from Bryn Mawr College.
Earl came in, a handsome American, and sat opposite her at the little wooden table. The chestnuts roasted in the fire. The November day was cold. She had been trying to be an existentialist, to believe there was no deeper meaning but what she gave it. She wore her beret, smoked Gaulois and had half a bottle of red wine for lunch. She was depressed. Soon she gained her courage, smiled, offered him some of her wine and asked him her fundamental life question: What do you think is the meaning of all our new scientific, technological, industrial power that is good?
He amazed her by saying, “I am an artist seeking a new image of man commensurate with our powers to shape the future. “
He told her that when a culture loses its story, it loses its greatness. We lost our grand narrative. We could no longer believe in the Renaissance story of progress after the two world wars, the holocaust, and the loss of millions of lives. At that time in Paris the worldviews were existentialism, nihilism, absurdism, materialism. No one at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques where she was in school had any hope, yet she was innately hopeful. But about what? That was her question.
Earl enthralled her. He told her it was up to the artist to help humanity find its new story. As he spoke it flashed through her mind, I’m going to marry you. And she did!
They married in 1951 in New York City and had five children. She wrote and edited several books with Earl, including The Search Is On, in deep morning breakfast dialogues as they sought to understand the next step in human evolution as a “cultural humanity” now being born into the Earth/space environment.
Gradually, she realized that something profound was missing in her life. She loved her husband, her children and was following all the requirements of the 1951 women: Get married, have as many children as possible and care for your husband and home. She did it all with love, yet she became deeply depressed, feeling she was literally turning into stone.
Inspired by the great American dream that we are seeking “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” she set out to discover who was happy in Lakeville, Connecticut. To her dismay, she found a sort of mildew of depression coating the comfortable lives of this exurban community. Something was missing. What was it?
During the 1960’s she found the answer through Abraham H. Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being. As a psychiatrist studying wellness rather than illness, he discovered that all Self Actualizing happy, beneficent people had one thing in common: Chosen work they found intrinsically self rewarding and of service.
He advised everyone to “Be bold. Do what attracts you.”
What attracted her was Dr. Maslow, so she was bold, called him up, asked him for lunch, and he came!
That was the beginning of her emergence as an Evolutionary Woman. It happens when the woman learns that her depression is a signal for something more to be expressed, and learns to say YES to the impulse of attraction within her. The “something more” begins to be revealed.
At the lunch, Dr. Maslow gave her a list of 300 people, his “Eupsychian Network of Good Souls,” that he had collected over a lifetime. Many of them became founders of the human potential movement. Her YES had brought her in touch with the newly emerging network of evolutionary transformation.
She returned from the New York luncheon determined to transform her life with this precious list. She wrote a letter to all three hundred people, asking them what they thought was “The Next Step for the Future Good”. She offered to publish their key responses in the “Center Letter,” which she created herself.
In the early 1960’s she read Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man. She was thrilled to discover evolution has a purpose. For billions of years it has been moving from single cell, to multi-cell, to animal, to human and now to us. The inner drive, the consciousness force, the divine in nature had a direction toward higher consciousness, purpose and more complex of synergistic order. The epiphany was the amazing realization that the direction of evolution and her own are one.
The Evolutionary Woman gains a new identity. She is “the universe in person.” Her passion to grow, to love more, be more, create more is the Eros of the Universe itself animating her.
Teilhard intuited the next stage of evolution. Before the Internet, he declared that the noosphere, the thinking layer of Earth would one day “get its collective eyes”. When enough love and creativity entered that field of the planetary nervous system, (now growing rapidly through internet, Facebook , Twitter, etc.), people would be changed, not one by one, but all at once. He called it the Christification of the Earth.
Barbara was deeply excited. In some intuitive way she realized that it was her mission to help the “noosphere” get its collective eyes and to help the nervous system of the planet to be filled with innovation and love. She realized it was like the nervous system of a new born baby, about to wake up a new planetary consciousness. A “vocation of destiny” was born. She yearned to become a communicator of evolutionary potential.
Evolutionary Women are animated by a unique expression of the Impulse of Evolution as their own calling to evolve.
Through the great Indian Sage Sri Aurobindo’s magnum opus The Life Divine, she learned that the impulse of evolution, the “supramental genius” of evolution was arising in evolving humans. At some point, he prophesied, we would become “Gnostic Humans,” a new species, beyond the animal/ human life cycle.
Evolutionary women often feel we are not getting older but getting newer. Something new is being born in us.
Then came Buckminster Fuller. He told us that Space Ship Earth came without an operating manual, so that we would have to learn how to guide the system. He informed us we have the technology, resources and know-how to make the world work for all…if we learned synergy and cooperation.
These four great pioneers, with others, laid the foundation for the Evolutionary movement. She had learned the evolutionary code. Evolution has direction, purpose and intent. The intent is more consciousness, creativity and love by means of ever-greater complexity or synergy.
She discovered that this was her intent. She and the Impulse were one.
She became a conscious Evolutionary Woman!
The next great breakthrough for her emergence was meeting Dr. Jonas Salk in the early sixties. She read something he had written on a Theater of Man, wrote a piece on it and sent it to Jerry Piel, editor of the Scientific American and on Jonas’s board. Jerry gave it to Jonas, who called Barbara one sunny day in the fall in New England. She had had her fifth child, and was sitting on the lawn with them all in the sun.
The phone rang, “Mrs. Hubbard? This is Jonas Salk.” The minute she heard his voice she realized something new had happened. Even though she didn’t’ know it then, he was an evolutionary man. It was coded in his voice – exciting, inviting, charged with vitality.
He said, “Mrs. Hubbard, You have written my vision better than I could have. We are two peas in the same genetic pod. Can I take you to lunch?”
She said yes!
He came the next week to drive her from Connecticut to New York. It was a magnificent fall day; the apple orchard sparkled with red and gold, the sun burned warm on the grass. The doorbell rang. Her heart skipped a beat; she opened the door to him. He smiled that incredible magnanimous, sexy smile and said: “Mrs. Hubbard, this is the Garden of Eden”.
“Dr. Salk,” she said, “You’re right. I’m Eve and I’m leaving!” He looked started. It started her too.
During the ride to New York she told him everything that was wrong with her: Her love of the future, the yearning to do more, the sense of deep vocation, a vital task that she was to perform.
He said, “Barbara, this is not what is wrong about you. This is what is right about you. You are a mutant! And I will introduce you to the few others I have been able to find in 25 years.” This was the next step in the emergence of an Evolutionary Woman.
She had met another evolutionary being. The Evolutionary Impulse became self aware in her.
He turned up the frequency of the inner code of evolution within her by resonating with it with his own being.
She wrote in her Journal in 1964:
This Christmas of 1964 is the best of my life, not because I have achieved my ideals, but because the problem of identity has disappeared. I can never again say, as I once did, “in my own eyes I’m nothing,” for, as all people are, I, too, am the inheritor of the evolution of the ages. In my genes are the generations. Every cell in my body identifies me with the great and terrible adventure of inanimate to animate to human and every desire of my being sets me passionately to work to further the rise of humanness out of humanity. I am what was and what will be. If I am nothing, life is nothing; that it cannot be – and be.
The rise of the Evolutionary Woman is awakened by the incarnation of the Impulse of Evolution as one’s own inner drive to become one’s unique self.
Your life purpose becomes the unique expression of the “irreducibly beautiful impulse of creation” as Marc Gafni writes in Becoming Your Unique Self.
With this often comes the disruption of past life pattern of the exclusive role of wife and mother, housekeeper and caretaker. The Evolutionary Woman is not seeking to be equal to men in a dysfunctional world, but to join with men and women to participate in the emerging world.
One day her husband Earl was speaking in a talk she had arranged for him. She stood behind a tree and wept. He came to her and said, “Darling, why are you crying?”
She dared to say, “Earl, I want to speak too!” Her heart sank. She knew it would hurt him.
He was crestfallen. “Then I can’t make you happy.” “That’s true,” she said, “No one can make another happy.”
She told him she had to go forth and tell the story her own way. He said, “Barbara, I’m the genius. You’re the editor.” She nodded, with tears of love, but there was no going back. They didn’t know how to grow the relationship as younger people often do now.
The Evolutionary Woman is not merely a co-equal. She is a co-creator, becoming a new archetype. “The Feminine Co-Creator.” She is incarnating the impulse of evolution as her own passion to create, motivated by the Creator within her to become a co-creator with the divine. She is moving toward the next stage of human evolution as a conscious co-evolutionary.
Barbara sadly had to ask for a divorce. After loving each other, having the five beautiful children, writing and editing his books, cherishing his paintings and securing a major show at the Gallery of Modern Art, she realized that she had to go forth and tell the story herself.
Lt. Col John J. Whiteside entered her life. He was Chief Officer of Information in New York for the Air Force. He loved the book she edited for Earl called The Search is On and spread it to the news media and the generals of the Air Force. In it he had declared: “We are being born as universal humans.”
John told her he had been totally committed to covering the Apollo program live, sensing it had great meaning, while others were reporting, as he told her, as if they were telling the story of the birth of the Christ child, as to how much the infant weighed and the labor conditions at the Inn.
John said, “Now I know why I wanted it to be covered live. It was a birth!”
The Evolutionary Woman becomes aware that we are entering a new stage of evolution, not only personal but collectively.
Barbara was alive with the aspiration of a universal impulse of creation, as though she was being born anew.
John told her that if she attempted to make her husband the spokesperson for her mission, she would fail. So she took the radical step as an Evolutionary Woman to break out totally from the role of wife of and mother.
In 1970, as an Evolutionary Woman, she became a new kind of mother.
She told her 9-year-old son that his mother was a pioneer and that she wanted him to come too. He wrapped his little arms around her and said, “We know Mom that you love us. You are doing what mothers are meant to do. You are creating a future for your children. I want to come with you.”
And so it was, She and Earl separated. John had told her that if she tried to make Earl the voice for her mission, she would surely fail. That was the key. She could not let that happen.
They were divorced in 1970. She moved her five children to Washington D.C. Her sister lent Barbara her home, the Greystone Mansion in Rock Creek Park, as she and her husband, Wayne Barnet had moved to Stanford University where he was teaching law.
Together John and Barbara founded the Committee for the Future in 1970 to bring positive options for the future into the public arena for decision and action.
One day he took her to meet the head of CBS news.
“Tell him the news,” he said to Barbara. She said, smiling, knowing how strange it would sound to him: “The news is humankind has been born into the universe.”
He looked at John as if he were crazy. But then he nodded, “It’s true,” he said, “but we can’t say it.”
“Why not,” Barbara asked. He shook his head.
Gradually they developed a powerful new global Earth/Space Human Development Goal: “New Worlds on Earth, New Worlds in Space, New Worlds in the Human Mind.” The idea was that after the lunar landing we should have a social lunar landing, guiding the military/industrial complex toward a new evolutionary goal to restore the Earth, free the people, and explore the infinite regions of spirit and the universe beyond our mother planet, as later written up in her book Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential.
They went to meet with Congressman Olin Teague of the Science and Technology Committee of the US Congress and told him about the new Earth/Space goal. He said ruefully, “Barbara, I completely agree with you. But we can’t do it in the Congress. There is no way for the various committees to come together to look at any long-range goal. YOU DO IT!”
Amazed, John and Barbara considered how to do it. They began to speak of the goal to business leaders, politicians, and space scientists. They all agreed it was good but said the others would not get it. She went to see Mr. Rockwell of Rockwell International in his giant office. “Mr. Rockwell,” she said, “Why don’t you call together a design team to design the first Earth/Space Human Development program.” He looked stricken. He nodded and said, “Barbara I totally agree with you, but I wont do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I would lose our defense contracts.”
So that was it.
Evolutionary women do not avoid technology, they attempt to guide it. High Love and High Tech merge for the New Culture of Humanity.
John’s son went to Southern Illinois University.
They were invited to a conference there called Mankind in the Universe. Earl was addressing the student body in the arena, which was like a prize fighting ring with thousands of seats surrounding it. Elegantly dressed he was totally out of phase with the ragged students in long hair and blue jeans. His speech did not go over well. He called for heroism in the age of the anti-hero.
Subsequently, Barbara had spent time in small meetings with students; however, it was a time for the radical rejection of society by students. One of the students raised his hand and asked: “Why do you want us to continue 25,000 years of failure?”
An older man, a professor, arose in towering wrath directed at this question. “You would have kept us in the caves! You wouldn’t even have dared step into the light.”
Barbara began to say in a gentle way, that man had not failed, that we are a young species at a point of transition. Now it is possible for the first time to overcome those terrible lacks such as poverty and disease. Our new tools might transform the ignorance that has forced us into destructive behavior so that we might become a new species
Each one of us is needed.
The longhaired, blue-jeaned, twenty five year old snickered at her. She stared at him and said, “Did I hear you snicker?”
He sank into his seat.
“How dare you snicker at humankind? How dare you condemn the effort of the past? Do you have any idea of the struggle that went into the development of the human species?” Barbara spoke like a mother defending her family.
The Evolutionary woman has faith in the evolution of humanity no matter what a mess we are.
The next morning Professor Tom Turner, director of special projects for Buckminster Fuller asked John and Barbara to sit with him on the stage. In the audience were several hundred people who had attended various sessions of the seminars. Earl was there too. Tom looked like a soft, comfortable dolphin. He said, “We would like to make a recommendation that Barbara Marx Hubbard run for the nomination for the presidency of the United States on the Democratic ticket. Her role would be to carry the options for the future into the public arena.”
She was stunned; yet amazingly, felt it was a good idea.
The Evolutionary Woman accepts the reality that she is needed for the evolution of the whole culture.
Earl was deeply distressed and said it would kill him if his wife ran for president.
So she did not do it for his sake but felt disappointed.
From the Southern Illinois experiences Barbara and John realized that some new process was needed. Whenever they discussed the idea of New Worlds on Earth, New Worlds in Space, or New Worlds in the Human Mind, a businessman, for example, would say, “Yes, I get it but the labor unions won’t”. Or a politician would get it and say that the public would never accept this new potential.
In a flash of insight John decided to put apparently opposing forces in a wheel to actually experience each other directly. He said you couldn’t make progress when one person is the speaker and everyone else is sitting in a row. “There needs to be a new social structure,” he declared.
He drew a new diagram and put functional areas of any social body in the inner circle of the wheel-like pieces of pie facing each other; sections for production, environment, and government, with a coordinating hub in the center where each sector could match needs and resources.
He added a satellite at the growing edge of the wheel to represent new capacities, as in the biological revolution, the physical sciences, psychologies of growth, and information sciences. Finally, there was a far-out satellite for unexplained phenomenon: the intuitive, mystical, and psychic experiences if the human race.
John decided to put a television in every section, with a central open “mission control” where everyone could see everything at once. People could begin to see themselves as one living organism. “Yes,” John told her, “We can broadcast the meetings live and call it the New News.”
Evolutionary Women are inspired by the male creative genius.
She realized he was giving the people their own nervous system. It was the noosphere getting its collective eyes! They called the conference process SYNCON for synergistic convergence. The purpose was to get the broadest possible cross section of people to form task forces in each sector. Each person or group was asked three questions:
What do you want to create?
What to you need to create it?
What do you want to freely give to others?
Then there is the chance for vocational networking. “Vocational arousal” occurs. People are excited to help each other. Instead of win/lose conflict, the process changes to how much and with whom can you co-create to get more of what you want. People merge with corollary but apparently conflicting functions, like environment and business, looking for common goals by matching needs with resources.
Finally each sector restates its goals, needs and resources in the light of the potential of the whole system. The students removed the walls between sectors of the wheel. Participants met in an Assembly of the Whole. A sense of social love infused the group. When astronaut Edgar Mitchell came in he said: “If there had been a spiritual Geiger counter it would have gone off the charts.” We called it “The All Walls Down Ceremony.”
Barbara realized some new form of self-governing process was being born here. This was the beginning of a more synergistic democracy.
John and Barbara begin to join genius to create this new social process to connect people to co-create.
The Evolutionary Woman became a co-creator. The new archetype the Feminine Co-Creator was born in her. Her creativity was an expression of the unique impulse of creation flowing through her. She could see the pattern of the new society emerging from her life and work. She told her children what was happening and they told her they were with her the whole way, as she included them in everything.
From 1972 to the early 80’s she and John did 25 SYNCON conferences throughout the world, from one with gang Leaders of Los Angeles to the nation of Jamaica to space scientists in Huntsville, Alabama. They had discovered a new social process to bring separate people and functions together to make a new whole system.
Later in 1985 she began trips to the Soviet Union with Rama Vernon’s Center for Soviet American dialogue, and did two major SYNCONS in the Soviet Union on the theme of joint projects, bringing Soviets and Americans together very successfully to co-create in every sector of the SYNCON Wheel.
But they had neither the resources nor the business skills to continue doing the SYNCONS. Barbara was paying for everything out the resources given to her by her father, the toy maker Louis Marx, creator of Marx Toys.
She had written a letter to ask to be taken up in the space shuttle. It was her intuition that an Earth/Space Mind Linkage, people in space connected to people on Earth realizing that humanity is being born as a universal species, would create a jump in collective consciousness and the noosphere would “get its collective eyes”. Fortunately she was not accepted. This was the shuttle that was destroyed in the terrible accident.
An Evolutionary Woman is inspired by the highest potential within her, and acts to discover the reality of her visions. She responds to her deepest vocation of destiny.
In 1980 while in Santa Barbara writing a book on the future of humanity, she had a Christ experience. She had asked the question: What kind of person can handle all this new power? What is the image of the future human equal to our new powers?
Jonas had taken her to a biology lab that had Stamp out physical death written on the doorway.
With these questions, as she walked in the glorious February day in Santa Barbara, she saw a group of hang gliders jumping off a mountain, floating above the Cross at Mt. Calvary Monastery in butterfly colored wings.
Suddenly the image of mass metamorphosis occurred to her. She remembered St. Paul’s words, “Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed…in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump and the trumpet shall sound…”
Oh my God! she thought, what if the whole story of Jesus is true. What if he is the future human!
She entered the monastery to spend a weekend. She picked up the Bible, and turned to St. Paul. As she read she realized it was coded evolution. It could only be understood by the generation who had gained the power to do much of the works that he did and more.
She began to write with out stopping for six months — an evolutionary interpretation of the New Testament. She saw in Jesus the embodiment of the future potential of humanity. He had said, “You will do the work that I did and even greater work will you do.”
She realized it’s true. We are doing the work that Jesus did without Christ love. When we combine Christ love and new scientific/technological capacities, we shall indeed all be changed!
The Evolutionary woman is a seminal thinker. She is original.
She sent the manuscript to Buckminster Fuller before it was published. He took her to be alone with him in the garden of the Annenberg Communication Center where they were both speaking. Putting his arms around her and touching her temple with his temple, he said, “Darling, I had the same experience that you did. I was walking down a street in Chicago when I was lifted up. I saw a light that said to me: “Bucky you are to be the first mini-Christ of Earth. What you attest to is true.” Then he told me he went to the New Testament and wrote almost an identical interpretation of the New Testament book that I had.
When I asked him for a comment on the book, he wrote: “Barbara is now the best informed human now alive on the subject of the future and the potentials it brings…”
This was because we both had a Christ experience and actually realized that he embodied the future potential of humanity that which we are to become. The ordinary futurists had no idea that this was so.
The Evolutionary Woman is inspired by the higher wisdom of the great avatars and beings to manifest them naturally and humbly as a new norm.
In 1981 John died of a brain tumor. He had inoperable cancer that was terminal. She nursed him until he died.
On his last night he said to her: “Sunshine, I know humankind is born into this universe. I know we will build new worlds. I know you will carry out the mission.” His eyes fluttered and he was gone.
“John, where did you go,” she asked out loud lovingly touching his forehead, which was rapidly turning cold. She was shocked never having seen a dead body. He said to her on the inner plane, “I’ve died to set you free. I have work to do to prepare for what is coming. We will rendezvous again. I will be ready when you need me to build the Great SYNCON in the sky.”
Devastated and alone, in 1984, Barbara decided to launch an idea campaign for the vice presidency of the United States at the suggestion of Buckminster Fuller. Her campaign was based on the idea of creating an Office for the Future to SCAN FOR, MAP, CONNECT AND COMMUNICATE WHAT IS WORKING IN THE WORLD.
She invited friends throughout the country to give a party for her to raise funds. She joined with Carolyn and Sanford Anderson and began to travel across the country. Her goal was have 200 delegates sign a petition to place her name in nomination for the Vice Presidency at the Democratic National Convention in 1984. She was told she would be lucky to get one delegate if he were her mother!
It was mission impossible.
Aiming at this goal nonetheless, everywhere she went Positive Future Centers formed. They wanted to create a center for “it”. She found that “it” was a center in each person sharing and reaching out to develop a greater community based on the principles of the Campaign.
Each center began to self organize in what she and Carolyn called The Rings of Empowerment, eventually becoming the Core Group process and “The Co-Creators Handbook”.
The ninety Positive Future Centers all focused on the one goal of the 200 delegates voting for Barbara.
When she went to the convention, she had no media and no passes to the floor. The wife of the governor of Colorado let her in with her little team. She made 30 second speeches, saying, “Vote for me for vice president so I can declare from the great platform of the Democratic Party that our purpose is to identify, connect and support what is working in the world. And I will then give my votes to Geraldine Ferraro.”
So over 200 delegates signed up to give her the power to make the speech, which she did at the Convention. When the guard took her to the great platform he whispered in her ear, “Now honey, they won’t pay any attention to you. They never do. You are saying this for the universe.”
And she did.
The Evolutionary Woman speaks far beyond her personal interest for the good of the whole. She is able to give birth to the unknown future just as she gives birth to the unknown child. No matter how painful.
The people and process had uplifted her during the Campaign. But after the Campaign came the sense of loss. Her sister requested that Greystone be returned to her. No one had the strength or ability to organize the ninety Positive Future Centers without the goal of the Campaign. People became critical of her, as though she were failing them. She wrote in her Journal, “I have a wound in my etheric body.” She realized she had entered into this huge effort with no protection, inner or outer. She was homeless, in debt, and exhausted. She arrived at the home of her friend Kathleen Gildred in Topanga Canyon, California, with all her clothes in a station wagon and no clear sense of next steps.
She said to Kathleen, “I don’t know where to go.” Kathleen said: “You stay here until you find out.” She put her in a little Bucky Fuller type house filled with his books, overlooking the hills. Every day she played “Chariots of Fire,” and asked, Where shall I live. What shall I do?
The answer came: You are to live in an alternative to Camp David where the leaders of the old world come to solve problems that cannot be solved in the consciousness that created them. You are to live where leaders of the new world come to tell their stories of what is working, to map it, to connect it, and to discover and communicate the design of the positive future already emerging in our midst. In this center there must a World Communication Hub, and a Great Library of books, tapes, works.
The problem was, of course, that no such place existed. Her daughters came to help her find an apartment. She said to them, “I don’t care where I live, you find it for me.”
So began a period of feeling lost and confused.
Rama Vernon, director of the Center for Soviet American dialogue, came to see her to persuade her to go to the Soviet Union with her. Rama opened remarkable doors with the Soviet Peace Committee and other leaders still during the Cold War. Together they took hundreds of Americans to the Soviet Union as citizen diplomats, as they were called then.
One of the most touching meetings was with Joseph Goldin, a Soviet citizen who had been imprisoned, but now was becoming famous in the citizen diplomacy movement for the development of spacebridges. On their very first trip to Russia Barbara was astonished when at the airport he pulled out a dog-eared copy of one of her old books, The Evolutionary Journey, published in 1982. He turned directly to the pages that described the “planetary smile” and told her that was what he was working on! The cosmic birth experience was his goal too!
Later she asked him: “Joseph, is it possible that what you call the ‘dialectic’, the inevitable pattern in history leading to a higher order, is what we call the process aspect of God, the implicate order, the blueprint or pattern of evolution?”
“Of course it is,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, and going on rapidly discussing his projects.
“But Joseph, if this is true, then those who believe in the quantum jump to Communism in the Soviet Union, and those of us in the U.S. who believe in a similar jump to a global/cooperative society are natural allies….We are co-creators…Particularly if it is true that you will renounce the use of force and if we will too.”
“Of course we are co-creators,” he said.
At the Soviet American conferences we were feeling love, empathy, and friendship.
As Henry Borovik, a major leader of the Soviet Peace Committee told the group: “Finally, Soviets and Americans are on the same side of the net, while the problems are on the other side. Instead of trying to destroy each other, we’re solving our common problems together. We were able to do here at the Summit in a few minutes that would have taken years to do officially.”
We finished the last of the Soviet/American Summits in Washington, D.C. in a blaze of creativity. Ted Turner gave a rousing speech. John Denver called in live. Alexander Gratski, the magnificent Russian composer, and David Pomeranz sang together: “It’s in every one of us,” as a duet. The audience, Soviets and Americans, sang, locked arms, and swayed to the music as the two singers repeated the refrain over and over again:
“It’s in every one of us, to be wise,
Find your heart, open up both your eyes;
We can all know everything without ever knowing why,
It’s in every one of us, by and by.”
She changed the words to “It’s in every one of us here and now.”
The Evolutionary Woman sees the pattern of the Emerging World and works toward it.
Barbara saw the 1980’s as the time when the nervous system of the body politic began to link us up in consciousness as one living system. Our new planetary nervous system was joining us in people-initiated, non-governmental, non-political acts of love, celebration and compassion for ourselves as one human family.
Barbara went to live with the global economist Hazel Henderson in Gainesville, Florida, working on how to tell the new good news. They conceived of a Global Intelligence System and a Global Collegium of innovators, thinkers and activists worldwide whose work and life successfully manifested the new value system. It would become an interactive global mind.
They couldn’t raise the money for it. She moved to different places, not knowing what to do. Often she could hear a flickering inner voice saying seductively, “Would you like to die?” She felt the temptation to sleep and not to have to struggle, but she quickly turned away. “No, I choose to live. I have not completed my mission,” she would say, quickly, knowing the power of choice.
She began to realize that in her and millions of others, a new woman was being born as Evolutionary Women practicing in-depth personal and social evolution.
She wrote in her Journal:
“As a woman, I have felt the passion in me being transformed into the drive for vocation, the desire to express unique creativity in service to the world. Within almost every woman I know there is a hunger to give ourselves more fully, not to maintain the world as it is, not only to be equal to men, but also rather to create with men a better world in which all life can fulfill itself.
“Everyone’s genius is needed for the evolution of the world, just as every cell’s function is needed for the growth of the biological organism. In the past we reproduced the species, lived short lives and died young. Now, the unique genius of each of us is being called forth, because that is exactly what is needed to solve this extraordinarily complex crisis and move us forward to the next stage of evolution. Nature does not need more bodies. She needs evolved beings! She needs our genius.”
Evolutionary Women are becoming co-creators as well as pro-creators. We are extending the love of the unknown child into the world as the love of the unknown future, toward love of humanity, and all Earth life.
“Instead of separating us from men, co-creation reunites us as partners in nurturing the larger human family, as well as our own social one.
“Each child becomes a chosen child. Every life is cherished. Every individual is needed to do and be his or her best. As we shift from maximum pro-creation to co-creation, the emphasis changes from caring for babies and dying young to evolving ourselves and healing the Earth.
“We have felt the fear of nuclear winter and environmental destruction. We have recognized the pain of social injustice, hunger, disease and violence. We have felt the stick, but we have not yet fully experienced the carrot. The carrot is the joy of suprasex! The carrot is joining genius to co-create, it is ourselves fully actualized, the world renewed and the environment restored. If we respond to this call we enter an “age of co-creation” that has only been envisioned by the saints and seers of the human race. The ecstatic quality of joining together to create goes beyond gender, beyond age, class or background. It is an endless arc of growth and adventure. It is the fulfillment of our lives.”
In August 1988 she was invited to give a keynote speech at John Denver’s famous Windstar Symposium in Aspen Colorado. John had proposed to go into outer space on a Soviet Rocket. (NASA had turned him down since the Challenger accident they were not accepting citizen astronauts).
She spoke to John backstage just as she was about to go on to speak. The music of the Olympics was playing as eighteen hundred people assembled in the big tent. The theme was “Ethics in Action.” It was the 25th Anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech “I have a dream.”
Stark King, an Aspen businessman, introduced her, “Barbara lives and works and plays right in that very, very small place where spirit becomes action.”
She was buoyant and said: “At this moment hundreds of thousands of people are gathering in Washington in the memory of Martin Luther King. Let’s send them a message from Windstar. “We are overcoming now…we have the awesome creative power of nature to transform to ever-higher systems with ever-greater consciousness, freedom and order. This is an implicate pattern in nature. Co-creation is our theme….Ultimately it is a new relationship between humans and God, or humans and evolution.
“The human mind is designed as Buckminster Fuller told us, to penetrate nature sufficiently to understand the impulses of evolution. What we have been doing in the last few hundred years since the Renaissance is learning nature’s invisible technologies of creation. Our understanding of the atom, the gene, the brain has put into our hands the power to be co-evolutionary. We can build new life forms. We can build new worlds. We are inheriting the powers of creation itself. We are at the beginning of a global renaissance.”
In 1982 Sidney Lanier, an elegant man of the theater and Episcopal priest, sought her out, having read her book on her Theater for the Future. He protected her, gave her a home, and together they explored what it meant to become a co-creative couple. How does it work?
From 1988 – 2016 Barbara has been seeking to fulfill her mission: A Planetary Emergence: Connecting What is Working World Wide in a Unique Self Symphony in which each person is free to contribute their best into the whole.
In 2012 she initiated with the Shift Network a major next step: On December 22, 2012 she became a global voice for “Birth 2012,” announcing The Next Era of Evolution. Thousands of people gathered in hubs world-wide.
She taught thousands of students on the Shift Network, inspiring them to become Agents of Conscious Evolution.
In 2013 Sidney died of dementia, a sad and tragic death. She cared for him as long as she could, but the fact was, he had lost his mind, leaving her alone again. Her Foundation had been launched by a large grant from Laurence Rockefeller in 1993 to publish the Bible writing. Laurence had taken her up to his little spiritual study on top of the Rockefeller Building in New York. He held her hands and said: “I am looking to you to help bring forth the Christ of the 21st Century.” And he gave her one million dollars to cover then next ten years.
This mission beyond all mental constructs was nonetheless the moving force toward her ever-greater attraction to a planetary birth experience for humanity.
As the understanding of the crises accelerated, we saw we are at the threshold of the collapse of our own life support system, but what to do?
John Steiner, an old friend said to her, “Barbara, why don’t you declare victory and retire?”
But she could not, because the flame of expectation was even brighter in her now.
She was lonely but she had faith in that Inner Impulse of Evolution to guide the way.
At just that time, two people appeared that dramatically revived this 85 year old evolutionary.
Nina Patrick, a former student and business woman came into her life with a passion to build community through her students , to reactivate the Foundation for Conscious Evolution – to connect those who are imbued with the evolutionary impulse, to continue the courses and widen the circle of evolutionary family.
She said YES to Nina who has moved to Berkeley California to help grow the Foundation.
The Vision of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution is Awakening Humanity’s Potential to evolve: spiritually, socially and scientifically/technologically.
The Mission is To Connect Co-Creators World-Wide in a Planetary Awakening in Love, in Time to shift from devolution toward evolution.
Our Goals are to offer evolutionary educational teachings to reveal the vast new potential of humanity, to offer a Global Communion and Community of Pioneering Souls, while working to establish the Office for the Future in the United Nations and communities world-wide.
Concurrently Barbara has become Co-chair of the Center for Integral Wisdom co-founded by Ken Wilber, John Mackay, Sally Kempton, John Gray, Walter Farrell and many others.
She is now working to found a Great Library to serve as a fundamental source code for humanity’s evolution.
She has also joined Global Purpose Movement, a new effort to join organizations and people to work together for a Global Awakening, connecting co-creators worldwide to shift consciousness from fear to love.
She is now at the threshold of a new human herself.
To fulfill the dream…
In 2016 she has been invited by Amb. Chawdhury of the United Nations to explore the formation of an Office for the Future at the United Nations to place the Wheel of Co-Creation and other synergistic processes in the 195 nations to assist them in supporting the UN 17 Sustainable Development goals. The Foundation is working with Avon Mattison’s Culture of Peace and other groups forming small citizens’ Offices for the Future, as proposed during her vice presidential campaign. From the US to the UN the process is being developed.
Now, in the next four years, 2016-2020 let us join together to realize our potential.
By 2020 on International Peace Day, let us have a planetary event to connect what is working worldwide – with a planetary nervous system, the Noosphere getting its collective eyes, just as Teilhard de Chardin foresaw, shifting consciousness on Earth from fear to love as we move from devolution toward our conscious evolution. This is the meaning of our new power that is good!
