Barbara Mark Hubbard Interview
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. For more information or to support our efforts please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. At the end of the interview we’ll be explaining more about what’s there. But my guest today is Barbara Marks Hubbard. Welcome Barbara.
Barbara: Thank you.
Rick: And I’ve known about Barbara for a long time. Most of people watching this show probably know about Barbara. I’m going to read a little bit of biographical information about her and then we’ll get into it. Barbara has been called the voice for conscious evolution of our time by Deepak Chopra and is the subject of Neil Donald Walsh’s book, The Mother of Invention. A prolific author of seven books, visionary, social innovator, and educator, she’s the founder of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. Its purpose is to accelerate our conscious evolution. She’s the producer and narrator of the award winning documentary series entitled “Humanity Ascending, A New Way Through Together.” As a global ambassador for the conscious evolution movement, she partnered with the Shift Network and formed a team to co-produce the worldwide multimedia event entitled “Birth 2012, Co-creating a Planetary Shift in Time on December 22nd, 2012.” That’s your birthday, isn’t it?
Barbara: Yes, it is.
Rick: Yeah, great. And speaking of birthdays, you’ll be 85 in December, right?
Barbara: Yes, I will.
Rick: Okay, you’re an inspiration to all of us. I hope I’m half as sharp when I’m 85 as you are now. So currently she’s developing online courses with the Shift Network and I think there’s one starting this Tuesday, isn’t there?
Barbara: Yes, it’s called “Co-Creators Rising” and it’s a wonderful course of how do we become co-creators with people like Rian Eisler and Neil Donald Walsh and Charles Eisenstein and many brilliant people, Stephen Dynan.
Rick: Great. Yeah, well during this interview we’ll talk about some of the stuff that will be in that course and this interview will probably be put online like Monday or Tuesday morning and so it’s a little bit last-minute for people, but if they let’s say don’t watch it till Thursday, can they hop into the course a little late and then catch up with the one they missed?
Barbara: Sure, they can. Yes, indeed.
Rick: Okay, great. A little bit more about you. In nomination for the Vice Presidency of the United States on the Democratic ticket, calling for a peace room to scan, format, connect and communicate what is working in America and the world. I listened to your address at the convention there. You also co-chaired a number of Soviet American citizen summits, introducing a new concept called “Syncon” to foster synergistic convergence with opposing groups and Barbara is the co-founder of the Association for “Global New Thought and the World Future Society.” In other words, you are a very prolific person and have been for many, many decades. And you know as I was listening to all these recordings in the last week, hours and hours of them, which I always do before interviews, a verse from the Rig Veda came to mind which goes something like “Yo jagara tam rica kamiante” which means “He who is awake, the riches seek him out.” And what that means, what “riches” means is like the impulses of intelligence that are responsible for the emergence and governance of the universe. And it’s sort of like if a person begins to wake up, those impulses of intelligence kind of say to each other, “Hey boys, we got a hot one here, let’s give her some juice.”
Barbara: That’s really true.
Rick: And your life has sort of been that story, that having kind of awoken and chosen to play an evolutionary role, you stepped into a swift moving current and have received all sorts of wonderful support and beneficial influences from having made that choice, wouldn’t you say?
Barbara: It’s really very well put. It is a swift moving current that I think of as the consciousness force of evolution itself. When anyone says “Yes” to a deep inner purpose, you activate that consciousness force within you and then it turns you on and does give you so much guidance and so many insights. It’s true.
Rick: Yeah, it’s almost like it’s just a matter of raising your hand and saying, “Okay, I’m willing, I’m taking the first step that’s obvious to me, keep guiding me.”
Barbara: It’s the ultimate volunteering.
Rick: Yeah, so let’s talk about what that conscious force really is because I’m sure we’ll be alluding to it a lot during this interview. How would you, I mean some people wouldn’t even acknowledge that there is some kind of conscious force in the universe. I mean there’s a lot of people who think that the universe is a random occurrence and a mechanistic thing and the idea that there’s some kind of deep intelligence governing it doesn’t sit with them. So let’s kind of play around that concept for a bit to lay a foundation for this talk.
Barbara: Well, in my understanding there are two aspects of God, the Creator, the Source. One is eternal, one infinite. Then out of that force, obviously starting in the first second, first instant of the Big Bang, came brilliant creativity. Those first three minutes were designed such if the energy had been a bit faster or a bit slower, life could not ever have formed. In other words, it was perfectly attuned. And if you study the formation of matter and you then go into the formation of life and the discovery of the DNA and the complexity of every one of those stages of evolution, coming right up to you and me, what you see is we are an expression of the genius of evolution. We are an expression of the impulse of creation internalized and personified and, for the first time possibly, activated by choice, not chance, as we become aware that we are participants in the process. I don’t think there’s a good word for “God” in evolutionary thinking or even “spirit,” because they tend to connote an earlier phase of cosmology. They do not indicate that the process of creation for intelligence. And for me, it’s not an external God manipulating, nor is it even conceivable that all of this extremely brilliant higher order comes by accident, but that the universe itself is intelligent. Everything in it is intelligence, and the universe has direction and purpose toward higher consciousness, greater freedom, more complex order. And that’s a 13.8 billion year trend. So you don’t need to be a believer in something to notice that the universe has been creating, and not only our earth but billions of other planets and possibly other universes. So you fall down in awe and wonder of what we’re a part of. But the beauty is, just as you say, it’s internalized in every one of us as our impulse to create, to evolve, to love and to be.
Rick: And some of the greatest scientists, like Einstein, definitely used words like “awe” and “wonder” a lot, but it always surprises me that pretty much all scientists and doctors and people who look very closely at the phenomenon of creation aren’t deeply spiritual people, because it’s staring them in the face and they should be able to see it so much clearly, more clearly than the rest of us. You know, they’re looking at these incredible phenomenon that so obviously aren’t like just little billiard balls happening to randomly collide with one another. You’d think they’d all just be walking around in a state of jaw-drop all the time.
Barbara: Well, I think you know what happened there because particularly of the Catholic Church is when the early scientists were criticized and almost destroyed by the Church. There was a tendency, starting way back in the early scientists, even though they were very spiritual, to avoid religion and put religion over here and science over here so that the religious dogma did not interrupt them, because that dogma was lethal. And when science began to actually notice how do things really grow, how do things really work, they didn’t get it out of Revelation or the Bible, they got it out of nature. And I think what happened, they went extreme in not wanting the invasion of various views of God. Whereas, I would say some of the most brilliant scientists are seeing the entire universe. I think it was John Wheeler who said “it looks more like a thought than a thing.” So there are scientists at the edge of their own discipline, particularly as we go into quantum physics, that realize there’s hardly any matter at all and that we are affecting what we observe. So it gets weirder and weirder and we get deeper and deeper into the process.
Rick: Yeah, well it’s interesting because religion as you refer to it is probably a fairly distorted and degraded form of what had originally been introduced by the founder of any particular religion after a thousand or even a few hundred years, there’s been a lot of garbling of the message. And so then you have people clinging to belief in things which they don’t or can’t actually experience, and then they become all rigid and adamant and fundamentalist about those beliefs. Whereas, you find that people who are really deep in their experience are pretty easygoing about what people believe or don’t believe.
Barbara: This is very true and I also think that if you are embodying the process of creation and you are impelled to participate in it, you become a true participation person within the story itself. So you don’t look at over here is the material universe and over here is science. You experience yourself as a participant in the creative universe. And then that gives you a different vantage point than either being religious or science in its old forms. You are becoming a co- creator with the process of creation and you get to know more about it by knowing more about who you are.
Rick: Yeah, so the word “co-creator,” you use that a lot and Leilu Mace always uses it when she introduces her interviews, you know, “Oh, my juicy beautiful co-creators,” and it seems to be a happening term these days. So from what you just explained, I understand you to be saying that “co-creator” means that you’re a conscious participant in the creative impulse that is governing the universe and helping to foster and enliven evolutionary tendencies rather than being an unconscious thing that’s just kind of being knocked along without … Is that what you mean by co-creator?
Barbara: It is. I mean, I think in the deepest sense the creative impulse of the universe is within every one of us, and “co-creator” feels to me like I am creating with an impulse greater than myself, with a universal impulse that localizes in every person uniquely. But I don’t consider my impulse to be just personal. When I studied over the 13.8 billion years of evolution and see there’s a direction in them to higher order, more complex systems, more greater awareness and then I realized that’s the same tendency in me. I yearn for greater awareness, greater complexity, greater connectivity, and basically I saw that the direction of the universe and my own internal direction are one.
Rick: Yeah.
Barbara: It’s a very wonderful insight. And that… Yes, there have been billions of species are extinct, there have been five mass extinctions, and Teilhard de Chardin called the process “directed chance.” So it’s not like it’s a robotic universe controlled entirely by an intelligent force, but it seems to be a free system directional, where there’s a lot of experimentation, a lot of things that work and don’t work, including us. Therefore I would say, you might say simply, “God put freedom in the system.” As we gain ever greater power of God’s – we can blow up worlds – we can create worlds, we therefore have more freedom to be able to be good at this divine gift we’ve been given or really disastrous in which we could destroy our life support system.
Rick: I often think of the metaphor of a child growing up and it’s pretty much no freedom, totally dependent on his parents, and then at a certain point, he becomes a teenager and things start to get really wild. He might go off and start doing drugs or doing crazy things or whatever, but there’s this transition from total dependency to total independence as an adult, and in that transitionary period, it’s very much a period of experimentation and trial and error and breaking boundaries and so on.
Barbara: Yes, exactly, and so, in that sense, we might be in late adolescence, because we’ve gained huge power and we can literally destroy our environment and our life support system, and that means we’ve entered the phase of conscious choice. The species before us never realized, if they were becoming extinct that they were doing it by their own behavior. We’re the first species to know that there’s certain things we could do that could cause the extinction of our own life on this planet. So that is a wake-up call, “Oh I’m responsible here.” And we have no experience at being responsible at this level. It’s new.
Rick: Yeah. I’ve heard you say many times in various recordings, that your first wake-up call was when you were Japan and it awoke this question in you, tell us what that question was.
Barbara: Well the question was, “What is the meaning of all this new power, science, technology, industry, the military that’s good? How come we have all this capacity? We can use it to destroy our world which we saw with the atomic bomb but can we use it and what are we given it really to evolve our world?” And I thought I could find out that somebody knew, maybe the church knows or the universities know. But nobody knew the meaning and direction of civilization.
Rick: Right.
Barbara: And this was in the mid 40s, right after the Second World War and the atomic bomb, and then heading into the environmental set of problems in the 60s and 70s. We suddenly became aware that we are overgrowing the womb of Earth. We can’t have so many babies. We can’t pollute, we can’t destroy. All the things we thought were good to do we now see are destructive. So I really don’t hold this human species guilty, but rather we’re growing up. And now we know we have to have all new systems, because the top-down models of government and global corporations and organized religions are not designed for global cooperation.
Rick: So to what extent do you feel that you have arrived at an answer to that question that dawned in you when you were 15?
Barbara: I think I have a response anyway, that the meaning of our new power is really inherent in connecting those of us who want to express love, creativity and oneness in the noosphere or global brain of humanity such that we can shift the consciousness field of Earth from fear to love, towards co-creativity, and eventually toward the birth of a universal humanity and a universal species until we become a galactic species. I think we’re being born as a universal humanity and it’s a crisis of birth.
Rick: Yeah. It seems to me that most of the great spiritual revivals that have taken place throughout history, Buddha, Jesus and so on, those fellows were limited to the distance they could walk around in their sandals in a lifetime and then they passed away and then, in some cases, nothing was even written down until a couple hundred years after they died and then the things got handed on and generally distorted pretty quickly, at least in this one interpretation. But what we’ve got now is, you and I are talking to each other, I’m in Iowa, you’re in California, you’ll be doing this TELUS seminar with people all over the world. So, seems to me the communications technology that we’ve got is … well you continue the thought, you know where I’m going with this.
Barbara: Well the communication technology is the planet has grown a new nervous system, particularly in the last largest nation in the world is in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, 5 billion cell phones, Internet, all of these TELUS seminar courses. We suddenly have a global linkage for humanity. And the thought here is that, when it gets infused enough with a certain degree of consciousness, that the whole field changes. I use the analogy of a baby’s nervous system. It’s firstborn, it panics, it doesn’t know it can breathe. It doesn’t know it can nurse, it’s hungry, all of that. And if its nervous system coordinates and it’s able to breathe and nurse and move a bit, then it can relax, because it has the capacity to survive. I think the same is true for us. We don’t know if we have the capacity to survive because suddenly, we’ve hit a limit to our growth potential the way we’ve been going. And we have to see that there is enough, that we can make it through together, that we have the resources, technology and know-how as Buck Minster Fuller said, to make the world work, if we connect and cooperate. And we do not have enough if we are separate and warring, that’s really simple.
Rick: You’ve probably heard your friend Nassim Haramein say that in a cubic centimeter of empty space, at the level of the vacuum, there’s more potential energy than there is in the entire expressed manifest universe. So, there’s tremendous energy, if you get right down to the essence of things, tremendous potential, tremendous resources.
Barbara: Well, that’s right, I mean the zero-point energy, which is what Nassim is speaking of is infinite. There are devices that can tap into zero-point energy. They haven’t gone to the marketplace yet, but as I understand it, they can and they will. So, that’s going to be a complete and radical change of our social structures and our economic system based on scarcity. So, I think we’re preparing for either a devolution and destruction or evolution and quantum shift. The question I’m asking is, “What can we do now, let’s say the next 5-10 years, when humanity is at this choice point? What can you and I do to help us move toward a positive shift in time, to save us from catastrophe?” That’s the drama that’s going on right now.
Rick: I read a quote recently from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whom I’ve heard you quote a few times, where he was saying that the spiritual revival takes place when both positivity and negativity have risen to a very high degree. There’s this sort of contrast that takes place. He said, “The positivity wants to emerge and the negativity actually wants to be relieved.” You know there are all these stories in the Vedic literature and all where some demon comes and he’s terrorizing the earth and then some avatar comes and eventually kills the demon. The moral of the story is the avatar is doing the demon a favor, because he wanted to be relieved of that negative embodiment. And generally, in these stories, the demon actually gets enlightened when he’s killed by Krishna or Rama or whatever.
Barbara: Yes, yes, yes. Well I think that the amazing thing is we are the first species on earth to be aware of our responsibility for our own evolution. And what gives me so much hope and courage is that the direction of evolution for billions of years is towards higher consciousness, greater freedom, and greater love. So if that really is true and we say “Yes” to the impulse within us and join to co-create… I feel personally called to a great mission. I’ll say what I think it is. The mission is to say there’s a purpose in evolution towards ever greater consciousness, freedom, and order. At every crisis point, there is the possibility of the destruction of the species or the evolution of the species. My purpose is to offer an awareness that we’re at the jump point, and by joining together to create that which we yearn to express, we can make the shift in time. And, in my Foundation For Conscious Evolution, we’re developing educational processes for people to learn social synergy, co-creation, self-evolution toward a universal human. And we would like to develop a community of pioneering souls who are deeply attracted to what’s emerging. So this is not about trying to persuade people who are not attracted or who don’t believe it. But there are millions of us who are attracted, and I think the most important community on this earth are pioneering souls who have a sense of what’s emerging, what’s creative, what’s good, and want to do it and share it and connect. So the purpose is to bring forth a community of pioneering souls to participate in the quantum shift.
Rick: I think there is a pretty huge community, actually, and it’s growing exponentially. A lot of it is loosely affiliated. In other words, this group over here may not have any official correlation with this group over here. Some of them are more officially affiliated, but nonetheless, there are all these expressions, like a big fertile field, where all these plants are starting to spring up. I don’t know if it’s important or not for them all to be officially connected in some kind of manifest way, as long as everyone is doing their thing in their own way.
Barbara: Well, I think there’s such a thing as “social synergy,” which is different than saying we all have to be connected in one entity. I’m not saying that at all. Here’s what I learned from studying how nature has gotten from greater disorder to higher order for billions of years. How did it get from entropy to more complex syntropy? Instead of going down to disorder, it keeps going to higher order. The great student of this was Ilya Prigojine, in his study of dissipative structures, and here is one observation.
Rick: I saw him speak once…
Barbara: Did you?
Rick: …but continue.
Barbara: When a system is dysfunctional, it uses more of its energy in handling its own dysfunctionalities. You can see it now. Military, we need more military. Prisons, we need more prisons. We’re doing things that, in order to solve a problem, we’re in a way making it worse. Meanwhile, in that same system, innovations or mutations are cropping up everywhere. In health, education, economics, science, and technology. If you saw all those innovations, and began to see them as a coherent expression of the next stage of evolution… In syntropy, at some point, there’s a nonlinear exponential interaction of innovating elements – Nonlinear, very fast, exponential, not additive, but one goes very fast – exponential interaction of breakthroughs in health, education, economics, science, and technology, the arts, the media, health, just imagine that, by the nature of evolution connecting. Because there’s a tendency for that which is rising to connect with other things that are arising. Not in one organization, but the fact is, we’re part of one organism. Planet Earth is a living organism. The same factor that was able to coordinate you and me with 50 trillion cells each is at work coordinating us. This is my faith statement. The breakthroughs and innovations and mutations and all these different fields are part of an overall pattern or design, not controlled, but emergent. I think that one of the greatest things that I want to contribute is a structure in which to connect, in which we people, can connect what’s already created. And I call it “a wheel of co-creation.” It literally is our turn on the spiral seen as a wheel, with every sector being filled with emergent creative projects and solutions until we see a pattern of the whole. When we see that, you’ll get something very different than the President of the United States or the President of any country, because liberal democracy does not see the pattern of the whole.
Rick: Interesting. Continue, if you have more to say. Go ahead.
Barbara: Well, I just want to say that in a lot of work I did in synergistic process, building large-scale wheels in auditoriums and bringing people in to different sectors to say what they want to create, what they need to create it, what they want to give, you shift the dynamics from win-lose voting to co-creation, because nobody can succeed alone. No project can succeed without help from other parts of the social body. You know, if you’re in education, well, you need communication, you need economics, you need environmental understanding. So actually, we’re all part of a living system. This is already true, but we’re put in silos by our universities and by our top-down structures. But we’re not top- down, really. We’re all connected. So, I think there’s one more degree of awareness of this connectivity through internet and through some of the advanced means of internet. There’s a new project called NewMap, N-O-O-Map, which says that we’re all a whole-on, we’re all little whole systems, and every whole system is connected to every other whole system. Not by some external force organizing us, but by the nature of evolution connecting us. When I say that, I feel a sense of lightness and joy, because I know every one of us is part of an incredibly intelligent process.
Rick: Yeah. God, every single sentence you speak is like, we could unpack that into a whole discussion.
Barbara: We could, we could.
Rick: Every single thing is so rich with meaning and significance. Just a couple quick thoughts, and then I’ll bounce it back to you. You probably heard the notion of phase transition, where water can be brought to 211 degrees Fahrenheit or 99 degrees Centigrade, and it looks like nothing much is happening, and all of a sudden, one more degree and it’s boiling.
Barbara: That’s such a good image, yes. Exactly.
Rick: So that pertains to what you were saying about, this kind of critical mass of development taking place, and then all of a sudden, things change so much more quickly than we had imagined possible.
Barbara: Right, that’s exactly what’s possible. and it can change either to greater chaos and destruction of our life support system, or it can change to greater connectivity of what’s emergent and creative in the same time frame.
Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting.
Barbara: Yeah, right now.
Rick: I mean, yeah, I can think of an example. I mean, Archduke Ferdinand is shot, and next thing you know we have World War I, you know, and 30 or 40 million people are killed.
Barbara: Very fast.
Rick: Yeah, and no one saw it coming, and I’m sure we can think of positive examples, the fall of the Berlin Wall or whatever, where no one saw it coming, and all of a sudden everything changes overnight.
Barbara: You know, I’m writing, re-editing a book I wrote in 1998. It’s called “Conscious Evolution, Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential,” and it will be out in 2015, and I’m really pointing exactly that out, that we live at this exact crossover point between one phase of evolution and the next, and I’m calling for consciously connecting that which is creative in social synergy, in small groups and large and on internet, until we can go into a mass process of finding each other to connect, to create. Now, I call this “social love.” If I want to create something and I find you who need what I want to give, and we start to join to create, like we’re doing right now, as a matter of fact, then we begin to enter the process of joining genius. That’s my favorite concept of supra-sex. You know, sex is joining genes to have the baby. Supra-sex is joining genius. And what does joining genius do? It gives birth to the greater self in all the participants. There’s a joy in supra-sex, like there’s a joy in sex, but since we have to have fewer children and we’re living longer lives, supra-sex co-creativity is on the rise. It’s particularly showing up in the life of women, because if we live beyond 50, 60, 70, 80, like me, we enter “re-genopause.” We begin to have a pause in our own life cycle, from going down into aging and impotence to rising to creativity and expression. So, when a woman falls in love with a deeper life purpose after 50, her body’s no longer producing eggs. In fact, she is the egg, and who knows what her… I don’t know what her limits are. I don’t know what my limits are. As I approach 85 for December 22nd, 2012, I realize I feel like I’m getting newer, not older or younger. I’m beginning to say “aging is emerging,” because we’re living in a world of radical change. When you’re aging and you’re aware of your participation in the process of creation, you begin to get to be new. When people ask me how I feel, I say, “Well, I feel new. How about you?” And interestingly enough, a lot of people feel they’re at a threshold, whatever age they’re at. Maybe you do.
Rick: I’m always at a threshold. I mean, I was thinking about, as I was listening to your recordings, I was thinking, “Well, you know, Barbara says a lot of the same things over and over again, obviously, because she’s not going to make up a totally new thing every time somebody interviews her or she gives a talk, but there’s always a sense as you’re saying these things that it’s new in that moment for you. In other words, you’re not getting bored with it. It’s ever-fresh, ever-exciting, and it’s unfolding and evolving and refining and becoming more subtle and nuanced as you go along.
Barbara: Well, you see, what’s really true is we’re all emerging. So you’re never the same, even from one moment to the next. Whomever I’m talking with, whatever situation I’m in, obviously there are very similar concepts. But I never feel… It’s odd that I would be simply repeating myself, even though I am. It’s because of you being there and me considering who is going to be listening to this, and having some intuitive feeling that I’m saying this for people I don’t know, and who knows what effect it may have on them or on me or on you? I feel that newness every moment in that sense.
Rick: Yeah. Don’t you also find that, as you continue to grow, a certain concept which you might have been speaking about for 20 years, you appreciate it so much more deeply than you did 20 years ago. It continues to go deeper and deeper into the understanding of that thing and the intuitive experiential living of it.
Barbara: Well, it’s getting more truthful as it goes deeper into reality. And I feel, when I really got started in all of this was the 1960s with Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Buckminster Fuller and few others. It was tremendous epiphany. I had never met anybody like me in Lakeville, Connecticut. None. Now, everywhere I go there are people like me. Whatever we want to call ourselves, pioneering souls, people sensitive to what’s emergent within themselves in the world, people attracted to participate, people called from within. Now, this community is radically accelerating while the breakdowns are accelerating. So, I’m also feeling the live drama of the moment. This is not like I have an opinion about God, you know. This is like I’m a participant in the greatest drama on earth and so is everybody else. Every statement anybody makes is affecting, we’re part of the play. I’m part of the play right this second.
Rick: Yeah. Just to play off something you said a minute ago, I mean, a lot of people feel that I am my body, and once the body starts to go downhill they feel like, “Oh, my life is over. It’s meaningless. There’s nothing really to look forward to anymore,” and so on. But I think that, many, many people listening to this, and you’re a beautiful example of it also, have gone beyond that stage of development and they realize that progress and growth and exploration never cease. The body is just a vehicle for that growth. If it’s getting older or even if it dies, that is not the end of the game.
Barbara: Right. I think what I’m noticing, while I’m still alive here, is the concept of regeneration. Regeneration seems to me to happen when you are activated to express more, to give more, to love more, to be more. You get turned on by the joy of co-creation. You get supra-sexually aroused or vocationally aroused because you’re attracted to something and someone. That gives you a sense of vitality. I can feel it in myself. The minute I lose what I would call my direction or my impulse of expression, I will feel exhausted and I don’t care how long I live. I’m not even concerned about it. However, when I get turned on by the impulse when co-creating with others, I seem to have no fatigue. So I’m saying to my body, “Okay body, I’m affecting you by everything I feel and intend, so I am going to ask you to regenerate as long as it’s necessary for me to co-create.” And when it isn’t, I’m very happy to go, but not until. That’s what I tell my body.
Rick: That’s great. What are you looking at there?
Barbara: Well, I got a very interesting little note on my computer that somebody’s trying to reach me.
Rick: Okay, so yeah. I heard you say on one recording that you don’t really want to be reincarnated but you want to continue as a conscious being. Exactly what did you mean by that? In a way, it sounded to me like you were saying to an apple tree, “Well, I want peaches,” because, if reincarnation is the way the universe works, then maybe you don’t have any choice in that. What do you mean by that?
Barbara: Well, the model that really inspired me is the life of Jesus, as contrasted, let’s say, to the Dalai Lama or Buddhism. Jesus, after the crucifixion, appeared as a new person in a body.
Rick: Right.
Barbara: He said, “You will do the works that I do in greater works.” Now, when I read that, I feel that my choice, if you can have a metaphysical choice about life beyond this life, my metaphysical choice is to have continuity of consciousness in new bodies, to participate in the evolution of the universe. I do not want to return to life on this earth. That’s why I don’t want to be reincarnated. I want to become ever more universal, and I’m a star child. I come from the universe, and I am here to help the planet give birth to itself as a universal humanity. Whether I have continuity of consciousness through extended life until eventually we make new bodies. If you really study transhumanism, there’s a huge effort going on to be able to go beyond the carbon-based body. This is not the final version of bodies. All of Western culture was inspired by Jesus who came forth. He said, “I’m going to die and rebuild this temple,” his body. Whatever happened there, they thought he did it, particularly Mary Magdalene. I believe that we are going to be new beings in new bodies that will eventually be cosmic, and reincarnation is no way to go for that.
Rick: Well, you may be right. I was sitting in a hall in New Delhi in 1980 with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and they were talking about physical immortality, and he kind of stopped and scrunched up his eyes a little bit. He said, “You know, if we want to be immortal, there must be much better bodies than these in which to do it.”
Barbara: I think he’s right. You can’t be immortal in this body. Trying to extend your lifespan up to a point is good, and the reason I think it’s good is because there’s so many advances in life extension scientifically, as well as the ways with nanotech and biotech and quantum computing and zero-point energy. I wouldn’t be surprised for the younger ones who live, let’s say, 50 to 100 years beyond where we are now, that life extension will be a new norm. Right now, we give birth by choice, which wasn’t possible before. Conscious conception, conscious birth. I think we’re going to move into conscious dying and conscious life extension.
Rick: Could be. I was reading in one of Sam Harris’s books, he was saying that there may come a time when, if you can’t run a marathon at the age of 500, you’d be considered severely handicapped.
Barbara: See, I think that’s a limited view of what we’re trying to do.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Barbara: It’s not about trying to be a good athlete for long and long. I mean, I would like to extend our horizons here and say I would like to be a cosmic being, not be good at something that people here do well. I would like to be able… I volunteered to go up in the space shuttle years and years ago. Right now, I’m volunteering to go up in the citizens spacecraft that are beginning, like Virgin Galactic and others. I would like to go up and here’s what I’d like to do. Invite people on Earth to join with people in space to create an Earth-space mind linkage that would create a field of consciousness that would empower millions of us on Earth. So, I’m volunteering to do that. Cool. Have they taken you up on it yet?
Barbara: Well, there’s some interest.
Rick: That would be great. I know John Glenn went up again in the space shuttle not too long ago, five years ago maybe, and got to experience that again.
Barbara: What I’m really speaking of here now is not the major shuttles or astronauts. It’s like these little brief flights.
Rick: Right, those things they can let you…
Barbara: Right. You go up, like in Virgin Galactic, they’re planning you, you’ll go up and you’ll have six minutes of weightlessness and then you come down.
Rick: Yeah.
Barbara: They’re selling tickets on this – this is Richard Branson’s business – very expensive tickets and they’re all sold out many times over. Why? People want to go up and experience this. They’re going to be trained also to be a team so that they can speak of the purpose of it and what it means to humanity to become a universal species. See, this is a new … you have to think about what’s new here.
Rick: But you know you were saying, “Well, I want to be a cosmic being. I want to … ” I have the sense when you say that, that you don’t want to be constrained by smallness. You want to have a significant impact and be an even more potent catalyst for evolutionary change than you already have been. If we look at it in one way, you already are a cosmic being. We all are a cosmic being already. We are that cosmic being which inhabits all bodies, the universal Purusha it’s called, and yet we also have our individual expressions. I think I also hear you saying that you would like your individual expression to have greater territory of influence, to be more cosmic in its range of capabilities.
Barbara: Right here on earth, but beyond that. If you just look at the sequence, from the first Australopithecus Africanus as the earliest shift from the animal to the pre-human, and you imagine yourself as that, you would have no idea. Then you get to be Homo erectus and Homo habilis and Homo neanderthal and Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens. We may be coming to the end of the phase of Homo sapiens sapiens. I think we are. I think the great beings like Buddha and Jesus and others were precursors of a new species. This new species I’m calling currently “Homo co-creator.” It’s the type of human that feels this impulse emerging within them. So let’s play Homo co- creator or Homo universalis out for the next 500 years. You’re not going to just see a better athlete. You see, you have to have imagination to expect the radical new.
Rick: Yeah, so what would you say, let’s say, 500 years, you’re a futurist, 500 years from now, if Homo co-creator is the norm and Homo sapiens sapiens is some kind of remnant minority that you find pockets of here and there, what would our world look like?
Barbara: Well, I think we will have, first of all, gone way beyond the environmental crisis and learned to be cooperative and synergistic. We’ll preserve our environment. We will get over the major hurdles of poverty and disease in many, many cases. I believe we will have seen the transition from war to actually using our high technologies to serve the earth and explore the universe. When those high technologies go toward making up with zero-point energy and anti-gravity and exploration, I think they will assist us in moving beyond the carbon-based life cycle into what might be called the universal human life cycle. That is new and I don’t know exactly what that’s going to be. If we look past from Australopithecus africanus to you and me, can you doubt that we will have ever more refined bodies?
Rick: I can’t. And given the time scale of things… you probably saw Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos series. He had that calendar laid out that he was walking on, showing the history of the universe. Pretty much all of recorded human history is in the last few minutes of December 31st.
Barbara: So we’re really, when you look at that, it looks like as far as planet earth goes, we are at the very, very end of one phase and the minute beginning of the next phase, which intelligence and co- creation and spiritual embodiment of the process that’s creating us, that would be a co-creator, is going to provide such enormous potential of ourselves as a universal humanity.
Rick: Yeah, if you don’t mind, tell us the story of the caterpillar and the butterfly.
Barbara: Well, it’s a wonderful story. a caterpillar, at a certain stage, begins to manifest these little imaginal disks and they have a different genetic code. the first thing the caterpillar does is try to destroy them because it looks foreign to them. It’s very much like some of our leaders, like Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and John Lennon or Gandhi, were destroyed because they were different than the caterpillar social bodies they were in. What happens is, the imaginal disks proliferate and become imaginal cells in the body of the caterpillar. Every single imaginal cell is coded with the part of the butterfly it is to build. It’s never seen a butterfly, but it’s coded with the antenna or the feet or the eyes or the legs. This is a scientific understanding of the way the imaginal cells, toward the end, begin to assemble and participate in building a new entity called the butterfly. At some very critical point, before it turns into mush, the metamorphosis occurs and the pupa opens and the wet winged butterfly appears very suddenly. It has a little silver thread and it hangs itself from something to dry out. It’s a very, very dangerous time for the wet winged butterfly because it can’t fly. I think we are in metamorphosis toward the wet winged butterfly which would be the co-creative society with all our new capacities functioning as one living system. That’s what I think.
Rick: But I think we’re still pretty much in the mush stage.
Barbara: Some of us are, some of us aren’t. So the point is, here’s the point, there’s a time factor. it may be that our species won’t make it and will just turn to mush. If only a few of us are making it and we live at a time of the life support system being destroyed, then we will really all lose our chance. If enough of us wake up to the fact that we are part of what’s new and join together then we’ll be able to invite all the rest of them to come along or not. It depends on how many of us want to say yes to this. That’s what it depends on.
Rick: Well fortunately it seems like more and more are saying yes, hopefully it’s a sufficient number.
Barbara: I think so. We don’t know because you know what? We’re members of generation one. Nobody on earth has been through a high-tech, overpopulating, polluting species towards the new. We don’t have an elder in this.
Rick: Yeah. You were saying earlier that there have been all these apparent experiments throughout history where species have come and gone. If you think about how populated the universe must be with probably trillions of inhabited planets, I don’t think it’s a done deal that they all go through the mush stage and become butterflies. I think probably some fail and some planets get hit by asteroids and blown to smithereens or the Death Star comes and gets them or whatever. I think we can’t rest on our laurels and feel like, “Oh I’m meditating and this is just all going to work out for the best.” I think there needs to be, as you exhibit, a sense of motivation and urgency and determination to make it happen.
Barbara: I also feel we’re not alone in the universe.
Rick: Oh not at all.
Barbara: Probably the next stage would be shared contact. Not through the government or the media or the Defense Department but just through the people having shared experiences. I think we have them already on the inner plane. Millions of us are getting all kinds of guidance. I can imagine joining in small groups and large, and simply asking for direct contact. I think by being positive ourselves, we will attract that which is positive. So I’m all for that.
Rick: I think some are getting it like Stephen Greer and so on.
Barbara: He is, he is, yes and I’d like to see how that could become a shared experience for enough.
Rick: Yeah and this thing about not being alone in the universe. There’s the one thing, of extraterrestrials who might come here in ships or something, or with whom we might communicate telepathically. There’s also the thing of all the subtle realms of creation which are teeming with life and which many people are awakening to the capacity to perceive. I have friends who see angels and subtle beings and so on around us all the time, as commonly as you and I might see people at the mall. You mentioned wanting to become a cosmic being. Well, there are cosmic beings among us helping to guide our destiny. I know that may sound esoteric for some listeners, but I really feel like that’s the way creation is structured.
Barbara: I know I was a student of John Mack, who was the head of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard, and he began to study abductees, and said it seemed like it was real but a different level of reality. He pointed out that there are different levels of physicality like nature spirits, like they have at Findhorn, that people actually could get guidance and then they took care of the vegetables and they grew bigger than any other vegetables. So I believe all of these dimensions of reality are coming into openness and we probably have different attunement to different levels. So, I think this is a very encouraging element and we don’t need to relegate this to weirdness or craziness, but we need to be attuned to what feels authentic.
Rick: Yeah.
Barbara: Because there’s a lot of extraneous and extreme views out there. I always am a little bit cautious when somebody’s channeling from Venus or talking with absolute authority what the channel has said.
Rick: Yeah.
Barbara: So I’m not saying it’s not true but I really feel we all need to attune to what feels accurate to us and not be under the power of any channel.
Rick: I agree with you because I think a lot of that stuff… I was just chatting with a friend recently who was married to somebody who was doing channeling, He’s not married to her anymore, but he felt like some of it was right on but a lot of it obviously was a matter of some subtle level of creativity in her own mind just fabricating stuff.
Barbara: Exactly. So I think I’m going to have to leave now.
Rick: Okay. So I’ve enjoyed this so much.
Rick: Yeah, let me make a few concluding remarks, okay?
Barbara: Okay.
Rick: First of all, you have this course starting imminently. If people are interested in plugging into that, how can they do so?
Barbara: They go to evolve.org.
Rick: Okay that’s easy enough.
Barbara: That’s my website and we’ll have it up there for the next few weeks because you can come in late, it’s fine. It starts September 16th but people come in for the next few weeks.
Rick: Sure, and if someone’s watching this next year or whatever you’ll be doing other courses so they can always plug into one of those.
Barbara: Yes, yes, I hope so.
Rick: Okay, and so some quick concluding remarks, I’ve been talking with Barbara Marks Hubbard and you can find… Is evolve.org the best place to find out more about you and springboard into other things?
Barbara: Yes.
Rick: And this interview is one of an ongoing series about, you’re number 250 by the way.
Barbara: Oh, congratulations. Good for you.
Rick: And so if you go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, you’ll find them all categorized and indexed in various ways, and you’ll see other things that you can explore, chat group and link to an audio podcast, a place to sign up to be notified by email, a donate button and all sorts and we continue to grow and build and diversify what we have to offer there. So thanks for listening or watching. Thank you very much Barbara, I really enjoyed this and we’ll see everybody next time.
Barbara: Thank you so much. Bye-bye.
Rick: Bye-bye.