New Dimensions; World Future Society; Part 1

<v Michael Toms>It is only through a change of consciousness that the world will be transformed. <v Michael Toms>As we bring mind, body, psyche and spirit into <v Michael Toms>harmony and unity, so also will the world be changed. <v Michael Toms>This is our responsibility,as we create <v Michael Toms>and explore new dimensions of being. <v Michael Toms>[Music] <v Michael Toms>Welcome to New Dimensions. My name is Michael Toms,.

<v Larry Guice>And I'm Larry ?Guice,? <v Michael Toms>And we're gonna be talking with Barbara Marx Hubbard. <v Michael Toms>Barbara founded the Committee for the Future. <v Michael Toms>She was one of the founding members of the World Future Society. <v Michael Toms>She wrote a book entitled The Hunger of Eve: A Woman's Odyssey Towards the Future. <v Michael Toms>Barbara is a woman futurist, and we're gonna be talking about the future <v Michael Toms>of the future in a different kind of way where we look at the present and then explore <v Michael Toms>the future from a universal perspective. <v Michael Toms>Stay with us. We're going to be here for the next two hours. <v Michael Toms>[Music] I <v Michael Toms>also want to say that Barbara is one of the contributors to New Dimensions' first book,

<v Michael Toms>Worlds Beyond. In fact, Barbara's contribution is the final segment of that book, and <v Michael Toms>we made it the final segment because her vision is so positive and so all encompassing <v Michael Toms>and so expansive that we wanted people to go out with a super high. <v Michael Toms>[laughter] <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I was very excited to myself at the end of that tremendous list of of <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>people who are thinking beyond the present. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I was, uh, amazed that- that was so because <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I never imagined in my earlier life that I would be in a position of thinking <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>so far ahead into the future. <v Michael Toms>Barbara, you had - you had a family - You have a family of five children. <v Michael Toms>You were a housewife. <v Michael Toms>And then suddenly one day you turned your life around and started doing something <v Michael Toms>differently. And I just like to spend a couple minutes just exploring that. <v Michael Toms>What happened to you and how you started looking at the future in a different way? <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Well, it really started when I was younger as a teenager. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I was 15 when the atom bomb exploded.

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I was asking myself at that time, inarticulately, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>two basic questions. One was, what is the purpose of my own life? <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Because I felt a lot of energy and a lot of attraction to <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>a future that was unknown. And it was like a magnet pulling at my solar plexus. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>But at the same time, I saw all the power that Western civilization had <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>developed, leading to possible total destruction. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I realized I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do on the planet if I didn't <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>have some sense of where we were going as a civilization. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So I began to ask the second question is, what is the purpose of civilization? <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Not just individuals, but all the mass of knowledge in- <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>in philosophy, science, industry, technology. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>You can't ask a personal question of where you're going if you can't have any <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>sense of where your civilization is going. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And then I came up with the recognition that Western civilization particularly had lost <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>an image of the future.

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And we had negative images of disaster and none of the positive. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I got this strange feeling that I couldn't live my life unless I had some sense of <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>where we all were going. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I connected up very early on a connection between the personal growth <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>potential and the social or planetary growth. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So I started out with that question. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And the reason my book is called A Woman's Odyssey Towards the Future is I stopped in <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>at every port of call of modern society, hoping it would be it <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>and that I could stay there because it's really easier not to have to grow like this. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And one would hope that you could find an existing spot and go in there, and that would <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>be OK. So I- I did all the usual things. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I went to Bryn Mawr College, and I explored academic knowledge <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>and excellence. And I love ideas. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>But I recognized right off that all the ideas were in boxes of separate parts <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>and there was no place to ask the direction of human life or civilization. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>In other words, it wasn't written in a book.

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>The world philosophies had no image of the future commensurate with our power. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And then being a woman, people would say to me, 'well, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>you haven't got married yet. You haven't had your children, and you'll find your purpose <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>because your purpose is to reproduce the species.' And I said, 'probably that's true.' <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I didn't know any better. So I got married, and I had five children. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And with every act of reproduction, the question of meaning intensified. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Because if you don't know the purpose of your own life and you're reproducing other lives <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>that you love. For me, it became almost an agony because I loved my <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>children and it intensified this need. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So finally, through a long and wonderful search I came across, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Abraham Maslow's Toward a Psychology of Being, recognizing personal growth potential. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I realized my desire was was for a new norm. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>It wasn't sick. It was normal. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And then through Teilhard de Chardin, I realized the world itself had an inherent pattern <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>towards greater holism, consciousness, freedom.

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So as we were evolving, so was our world. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And then through our space program, I saw us penetrate physically into <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>the infinite. And I recognized that we were <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>living at a moment of quantum transformation. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And then I started to study evolution and saw how it produced absolute newness <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>out of higher integration of patterns. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And then I got so excited by then it was about 34 and had five children <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>and was really embedded in a life of being a housewife in Lakeville, Connecticut, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>when I had what I call a cosmic birth experience. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I sense myself. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I asked a great question. The great question was what in our life is comparable to the <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>birth of Christ? <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I had the feeling that there was a single story going on on this planet. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And the answer came back to me in the form of an experience. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I got out into outer space <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>and I looked back at our planet and I sensed every one of us as a cell in that <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>planet. The planet was struggling to coordinate.

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>It was gasping for breath. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Literally. The oxygen music reminds me of that [gasp] gasp of the <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>planet. The nervous system was coursing the pain throughout the whole body. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>We began to reach out in universal consciousness and action physically <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>and spiritually to know and to be able to participate <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>in the universe. And as we reached out ourselves, all the people began to link up in <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>empathy. And I had what I think of as a planetary precognition <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>experience, which I call affectionately the planetary smile. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>A moment is coming and we're all working toward it. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>When enough of us are going to know at the same time, at the same moment that we <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>are connected, we're one, we're whole and we're universal. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And in this particular experience at the moment of the planetary recognition <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>of oneness and a kind of joy that courses through the planetary body <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>with overwhelming joy, I sense that we were

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>in the presence of much life in the universe intelligence and that it was our <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>maturing that- it was going to make it possible for us to communicate. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I had the feeling like it was on the tip of my tongue to say <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>something. But the deepest feeling was that this presence was loving and benign and <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>waiting for us to grow up just like a newborn baby no matter how much its mother loves <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>it. So then I got an inner commandment with this terrific joy, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>and the commandment was go tell the story of the birth of mankind. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>That's our story. We're being born literally. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I began to see if you want to say the political <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>economic implications of birth. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>[laughter]] Which is it- this is not a metaphor. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>If we are, in fact, shifting [cough] from an earth only <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>terrestrial environment to an earth space universal <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>environment, then our economic policies mean that we <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>we can contain and preserve and harmonize here as we develop a new environmental niche

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>in economics. It means that as we're shopping, hitting up against limited <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>resources and inflation here, we can get new resources and <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>total abundance as we move into the universe. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>In politics, it means we can turn our attention from national strife <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>to cooperation for the creation of something new, etc. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So I not only got a metaphor, I got a political program. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Because I think it is the most accurate model of what's going <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>on on planet Earth is we are in a transformation, not just in consciousness, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>but in consciousness and physically from an earthbound terrestrial species <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>to a universal species. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And our generation is at the critical point of that transition. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And like birth, it's the most dangerous point because we've got to coordinate all systems <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>at once and we both have to heal that which is wounded. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>But we also have to create and work with our new capacities and not

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>be afraid of them. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So I had a deep life vocation when I got to be about <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>35, which was not simply to tell to communicate <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>that we are universal, but to try to meet the people in <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>all the different fields and environment and business and science, space and genetics. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Find out really what's going on and try to share with them the fact that they're <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>participating in a planetary birth. [laugh] And how did they take that mostly? [Laughter] <v Speaker>Well, I learned to say it so that they could take it quite well, <v Speaker>actually. They got to like it because I found, particularly with specialists <v Speaker>and experts, that in order to become expert, they had had to become narrow. <v Speaker>And yet in their intuitive side of their being, which quite often they had suppressed. <v Speaker>They knew they were doing something of extreme importance. <v Speaker>But society as we entered the 60s, was beginning to turn against <v Speaker>its rational scientific capacities because of their destructive component.

<v Speaker>So a lot of these geniuses I were meeting actually were as left out as the youngsters in <v Speaker>the ghettos, the ghettos of the genius. <v Speaker>I explored, particularly in the field of space and the biological <v Speaker>revolution. I met Jonas Salk and began to question him about <v Speaker>what we're learning about the DNA. <v Speaker>And I began to think it was natural for us to understand our building plan because we're <v Speaker>going to be building in a new environment. <v Speaker>And so I would discuss that with Jonas. <v Speaker>And then I started to meet space scientists. I went to see Wernher von Braun and I <v Speaker>said, I feel that this is a birth and you people here at NASA are <v Speaker>actually building the muscles of a planetary child that's going to have the capacity <v Speaker>to move way beyond its mother planet and you're needed. <v Speaker>And the thing that made me popular was when I said you're needed. <v Speaker>And I really felt that. But you're not needed as an isolated new capacity. <v Speaker>You're needed as part of a new gestalt.

<v Speaker>And then gradually, I began to realize that that gestalt pattern didn't exist except in <v Speaker>my head. Although a lot of people had other ways of saying it. <v Speaker>So then I got into a long thing of how to communicate, interact and help <v Speaker>participate in the world's evolution. [music] <v Michael Toms>We're talking with Barbara Marx Hubbard.

<v Larry Guice>Yes, I'd like to go back, Barbara, to some of the things that you mentioned in your <v Larry Guice>odyssey there and two of the thinkers that had a strong influence on <v Larry Guice>you. And perhaps let's delve a little bit into their thought and their ideas. <v Larry Guice>And that was Abraham Maslow and Teilhard de Chardin, right? <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Yes. When I got to be about 31 or 2, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I had had five children and I had done everything <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>that my culture told me and that I could think of to do to make myself happy <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>and my children happy and my community happy. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I was miserable and I didn't know why. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I didn't - there was a Freudian analyst friend. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I didn't actually go into analysis, but I would talk with him and he would try to tell me <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>that this desire I had, which was inarticulate for some more being something more, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I couldn't say what it was, was neurotic. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And it had to do with something wrong with my sex life or something wrong with the way I <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>was brought up. And I knew intuitively it had nothing to do with that, but I <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>had no words to express it. So I was beginning to think I was sick.

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>It was as though my culture was just about to do me in. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I picked up this little book Toward a Psychology of Being. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And as you know, Maslow had studied well people. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>It was an act of genius to think of studying people at their optimum wellness. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And he said that everyone who's deficiency needs are basically well met, then <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>has released growth needs which attract from out front. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>They don't push you from behind and they are a search for unique chosen <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>function in relationship to some transcendent order. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And everybody who had become what he calls self actualizing had their deficiency <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>needs relatively well met, had discovered chosen function, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>chosen work, and felt that work was related to a transcendent order. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So I identified my need, which was for more being and more function <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>as healthy even though I hadn't achieved it. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And the difference of knowing that a need is healthy rather than sick is a tremendous

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>difference because I decided to really try to become healthy. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I rejected the analysis that I was neurotic by wanting to grow. <v Larry Guice>I believe, excuse me, but I believe that in Maslow's thought and <v Larry Guice>the people who follow him, they postulate that maybe only two or three percent of the <v Larry Guice>people are healthy by that definition. <v Larry Guice>And this is kind of like it's what's healthy isn't nor is not normal with <v Larry Guice>what's normal is what everybody has been. Maybe everybody's sick. <v Larry Guice>That's what the Freudians all say. [laughter] <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>But what I have learned subsequently or I've come to believe that <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>there is an evolution going on in human consciousness and therefore <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>in human well-being. And what in the past and even now is a very rare <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>high norm is and will be when this transformation has completed <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>itself the new norm. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And I've been influenced by a man called Buck in his book Cosmic Consciousness. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And he points out, for example, that when self-consciousness first emerged in the animal <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>world, it was obviously unstable and very unique.

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And anyone who was aware of self in the midst of the animals must have had a very <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>odd sense. Then he said about 6,000 years ago on planet Earth, these <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>great avatars started coming in in a state of holistic cosmic consciousness. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>They were the first self-actualizerzis in India, in Egypt, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>in Greece. And the early Christians. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>But nobody else could share it. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Gradually, more and more of us are attempting to normalize <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>what has been an extremely unique norm. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>But if you really- I think it's a religious state, actually, if you read <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>what Christ said, he said, you shall do what I do and even more. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And the whole message is you can be like me. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>The message of Buddha is you're all Buddha. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Well, I think it's true. And so the fact that most of <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>us haven't achieved it yet doesn't mean we won't. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Because if you think that only 50,000 years ago, Homosapiens had just begun. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Once you take the evolutionary perspective, you expect that

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>you will have a raise- a rise in consciousness and freedom. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So the fact that only 2.3 percent do now does not mean that maybe <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>50 years from now, 50 percent. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And eventually, I believe only those who get into a state of self-actualizing <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>connectedness will be able to survive psychologically because the stress <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>and tension of life in which you feel selfish in an interdependent world, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>will- it will kill you. We can see it happening already. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>The stress is too much. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So- Yeah- does it matter that there are only two to three percent. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>There'll be more. <v Larry Guice>I'd like to- to just get a little bit deeper into it also. <v Larry Guice>I believe Maslow also pointed out that once you're like you say, these deficiency <v Larry Guice>needs are met. Like you have your food and clothing. <v Larry Guice>Shelter in your stable family life and these kind of things that now at least <v Larry Guice>the majority of Westerner's, Western Europeans and Americans and some of the, <v Larry Guice>you know, maybe the third world is not in this level yet, but that if

<v Larry Guice>you continue to feel selfish after these needs are met, that this is what creates <v Larry Guice>this this feeling of separateness or this feeling of, oh I just don't <v Larry Guice>have it, I'm not happy. Why am I not happy? <v Larry Guice>I've got everything I want. You get sick. <v Larry Guice>You have to move into this transformative state or this new state where you transform <v Larry Guice>your purpose of being or you won't feel that feeling, right. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Exactly. That what was- is perfectly natural for you to do when you're in the deficiency <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>need motivation. You must be to some degree self oriented to survive. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>However, when that is more easily met, if you stay selfish <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>and try to get more and more things or more and more power or more and more fame, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>your psychological state will not be one of well-being. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>You will be mentally ill. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So that self-actualization really requires self-transcendence <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>and involvement in the evolution of the world. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And that's what brought me from Maslow to Teilhard, because Maslow does not really talk <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>about the evolution of the world.

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>He is not- doesn't take the social evolutionary perspective. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>It didn't interest him. It's the individual. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>He was looking at individuals. Yes. And that was a tremendous step. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>But if an individual is evolving in a world that is devolving, it's <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>not going to work. Eventually, obviously. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So what Teilhard de Chardin complimented for me with- with Maslow <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>is he identified a pattern in the process of evolution from the <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>creation of the universe onto the formation of earth life, multicellular <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>life and human life. Of what he calls complexity consciousness. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And that law is that as a whole system becomes more complex. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Its consciousness increases as a cell's consciousness is greater than a molecule. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>A multicellular animal has more consciousness than a single cell. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And the planet Earth in becoming more complex, more interrelated and <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>building what he called the noosphere, the thinking layer, was inevitably <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>increasing the consciousness of its parts and leading toward a

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>next step. So I sensed that as the individuals were <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>moving towards self-actualization, the world was moving towards its <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>next level of integration into which the self actualized people would be plugging. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And there are other thinkers who have pointed this fact out that nature forms <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>whole systems. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Otherwise, none of us would be sitting here in beautifully organized bodies on a planet <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>going around the sun, going around the galaxy, going around the universe. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>The tendency is so integral to nature that <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>my faith in our planetary civilization making it is that the force that got <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>atoms together, together in molecules and cells could not suddenly stop now. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>And as we're struggling to coordinate- this goes back to the birth experience- the <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>force is with us. [laughter] And I know Star Wars was right! <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>That's why it's so popular. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>How could we think that 15 billion years of organizational genius would turn off

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>with us? So any one of us who has a slight [laughter] <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Yeah, we cannot hide the planetary conceit [laughter] Yeah, we can't be that bad - I think its <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>arrogant to think we could be that bad. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>[laughter] In fact, I call it the arrogance of pessimism. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>I mean, there is this arrogant person standing up there and saying we'll never make it. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>Not recognizing that he or she has been created by 15 billion years of organizing <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>genius and any little impulse we have towards holistic activity, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>making ourselves whole, making our families, making our communities wholes has got that <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>whole process with it. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>On the other hand, any act we make toward isolation, selfishness, <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>destruction of the whole has the opposite with <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>it that it can't in the long run succeed. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>That means individuals who go in that directions or even whole societies who go in the <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>direction of self orientation eventually will fail. <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>So I sense as going through a deep evolutionary selection process with

<v Barbara Marx Hubbard>no guarantee that any individual or any culture will make it only the ones who get <v Barbara Marx Hubbard>holistic will.