In April of 1981 I attended a conference at Georgetown University celebrating the life and vision of priest-scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I served as production manager for a PBS station in upstate Ohio, but prior to that I’d initiated a project to produce a one-hour documentary on Teilhard’s life and philosophy. I was working on a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to write the script, so the conference was an opportunity to meet people and invite them to participate. Someone had given me Barbara’s contact information, saying she was a “futurist” and had been profoundly influenced by Teilhard, so I called her. She said she’d be happy to be interviewed; I could come over any time.

It was dark and pouring rain when the cab driver stopped at her driveway. “No way am I going up there,” he said, pointing. The steep driveway looked like a muddy river. Water and pebbles rushed over the tops of my shoes as I climbed the hill. The house was large with pillars. My hair was wet, and my suit soaked. A woman came to the door. “Hello, Barbara?” I asked. It wasn’t her, but the woman let me in, took my wet jacket and briefcase and went for a towel. While drying my hair, several people were coming and going. Finally, Barbara came and introduced herself, explaining that she was having a dinner party, so I knew I didn’t have much time.

Barbara invited me to sit next to her on a couch. We talked about the conference and some of the notables on my executive committee that she knew. She said Teilhard’s vision of a positive future played a key role in her thinking and writing. Discussing one of Teilhard’s ideas, she excused herself to get something to read to me. Minutes later, she came back with a stack of papers. As she looked for a certain passage, she described her process—reading the predictive passages in the New Testament every morning, emptying her mind and writing whatever came to her without judgment or editing.

In less than a minute of hearing her read, I had an emotional meltdown. I couldn’t contain myself. I cried so hard I could barely breathe. She put her arm around my shoulder and tried to comfort me. “What’s going on with you?” she asked. “What’s happening?” I could barely get the words out. “I recognize the voice,” I muttered. She had been quoting the Risen Christ, describing the next stage of evolution. Here’s the passage as it appears in The Book of Co-Creation.

We will be godliness personified with the capacities of self-healing, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, levitation, materialization, and dematerialization, where empathetic love will be a constant state and where humanity will be a community of natural Christs attuning to the design of God, co-creating with that design, where each individual offers their unique contribution to the whole, and brings out the best in others. 

Those words touched the place of profound truth in me. I recognized it as an expression of Christ consciousness.

Barbara excused herself to tell her guests—about eight people—she would be unavailable until dinnertime. We spoke privately until then and she invited me to stay for dinner. Typical of Barbara, she had us go around the table, each telling our story and how we came to be there. I’d never experienced anything like it. It was exhilarating.

Back at the hotel, the phone woke me around one in the morning. “David,” Barbara said, “You can’t go home yet. We have a lot to talk about.” I had no idea how she knew where I was staying. The next morning I called my wife and cancelled my flight.

Barbara and I spent the next full day discussing what else was coming through her writing. That was the beginning of a long friendship and collaboration. All the videos in the Spiritual Visionaries collection came about because of that meeting. Her manuscript, then titled The Half-Hour of Silence, was published in 1993 under the title The Revelation: Our Crisis is a Birth, The Book of Co-Creation.