NAVIGATING EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE
CHAPTER 1: THE MOST IMPORTANT TALK I EVER GAVE
Futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard presents her vision of a positive future by describing consistent patterns in the evolutionary process. The talk was given before 240+ international delegates, dignitaries and others at the Congress of the Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose in Toronto, Canada in 1983.)
Barbara: Thank you, Donald. (Donald Keys, Executive Director of the Planetary Initiative…, introduced Barbara). As I finished dinner, I went and took a walk by myself. I’ve made lots of talks, as we all have. But I had the sense that this was the most important talk that I’ve ever made in my whole life. And I wanted to quiet myself down and turn within to just seek guidance, because I have the feeling that what’s happening here today, in this period of time, at the Planetary Initiative, will represent, when we look back on it after the world has made it, will be seen to be an absolutely pivotal event.
It’s small, so it doesn’t look pivotal given the enormity of the world’s problems. But the fascinating thing that I’ve come to understand in observing and studying how evolution works, is that at a point when a system is about to breakdown or breakthrough, small areas of convergence and coherence can shift the whole system. And what Donald has created here with so many other people, is an absolutely appropriate convergence zone, with the appropriate feeling of being open, into which can move, by attraction, the elements whose connection will be able eventually to help the system cooperate to self-transcend. And I see this as a first step in a process that eventually—my vision of it eventually will continue until it either converges with the United Nations or becomes The United Peoples of Earth.
We don’t really know how responsive the system will be, to being absorbed into this. Hopefully it just blends in and becomes the system. If that doesn’t happen, I see that what we’re starting here is the beginning of the convergence zone of individuals—and it is individuals. It’s not nation states. It’s people. It has to be the peoples of Earth. The sovereign individuals of planet Earth need a place to express themselves and attract their brother and sister humans. And my vision of what’s happening here, is that this is the first open space convocation for the United Peoples of Earth to express their magnetic attraction to the rest of the world. And I would like to see us acknowledge this, and what are the specific steps that follow from this event—that we hold the vision together, that what we’re starting here is an open enough convergence zone. to attract enough people so the system can shift gracefully from its present course of destruction, toward its course to transformation.
So, the reason I’m so thrilled to be here is, I feel it’s like a pivotal point of history. If you circle the globe today, just go around it in your mind’s eye and ask what’s happening, that’s equally pivotal to history as this, I don’t think we would find another thing. So let us acknowledge Donald and all of those who worked, and all of us here for the significance of where we are for just a minute. I’d like to make the point that what we’re entering into is not a historic change, but an evolutionary change. And that a change of this importance has not happened since the dawn of human consciousness. That’s a very big statement to make, and I’d like to set it in a context for you, to try to show you what I mean by it.
Just taking the present for a moment, one reason why I believe it’s evolutionary, not historical. Historical changes are incremental. Evolutionary changes lead to a quantum changes and radical newness. That’s the difference. An evolutionary change is made-up of incremental changes, but finally it produces newness. We can see when we look at the mega crisis—and the reason it is a mega crisis—is that it is impossible for it to continue two or three more generations and have civilization survive as we know it. It is impossible to have two or three more nuclear wars and survive. It is impossible to have two or three more doublings of the population and survive. It is impossible to pollute the environment, as we have been doing for two or three more generations and survive. This is what makes it a mega crisis. They’re all interactive, mutually reinforcing, and lead not to a gradual decline but at some point, to a radical catastrophe. And we have foreseen that. And from this perspective, that is an evolutionary driver which is going to catalyze the next stage of evolution.
Now here is an element that is less widely thought about. The mega crisis is the ground of the mega opportunities. And emerging out of the mega crisis right now, far less perceptible but nonetheless very real, are a set of potentialities in the collective body politic of the human race which, if activated in the space of ten to twenty years will lead not to incremental improvement, not to middle income housing for the human race, not to utopia, but to the unknown.
If you just think for a moment of the capacities right now in our system, and imagine that we don’t destroy ourselves, and that we activate these capacities, what you see—. For example, if you look at the whole field of the biological revolution, you see that we’re gaining access to the understanding of how the mind-body system works. We’re talking about eventually becoming self-healing, self-regenerating beings. That does not lead to an incremental change, it’s leading to a quantum change. And then you look at the information revolution—cybernetics, automation, robotics—and you see an extension of intelligence so enormous that if we actualized it in the next 10 to 20 to 50 years our intelligence would take a quantum leap comparable to the dawn of human consciousness itself.
I’d like you to hold that balance in your head for a moment, and let’s back up and off in time and space and place us in a cosmic evolutionary context. First, to get a perspective on quantum transformation, you must take an evolutionary perspective.
(This begins a guided meditation). The elements of this perspective are—first of all, I’d like you to visualize ourselves right here in Toronto, and just lift slightly off the planet in your mind’s eye. See your little planet getting smaller and smaller as you lift towards the sun. Now allow yourself to get lighter, and go beyond your sun, out to the edge of your solar system. And you see that the Earth has disappeared. Now allow yourself to go beyond your solar system. And you’re in your galaxy, the Milky Way. Your solar system has disappeared. You are at the far reaches of a vast galaxy with billions and billions of solar systems, some of which may have life comparable to our own. Now let yourself get even lighter and you’ve gone beyond your galaxy. The Milky Way has disappeared. And you are in a universe of billions and billions of galaxies. And just hold that for a moment in your mind’s eye. And allow yourself, to come like the speed of light, through those galaxies, back into the Milky Way, back into our solar system, and land right here on planet Earth, in Toronto, in this auditorium. (Meditation ends). And realize that that’s Nature. That’s our universe. And we know a s much about that universe as a newborn baby knows about its world. We are just gestating in a cocoon; just beginning to feel ourselves becoming whole; just at the point of coordinating as a whole system; just awakening to our responsibilities; just peeking out of the blue cocoon into the universe.
And many of us say, well, it’s all over. We know it all. Nothing more will happen. We’re at the end. But as a matter of fact, from this perspective, you can see that we are just barely born.
CHAPTER 2: THE EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
Barbara: The human race is exceedingly young. 50,000 years, homo sapiens sapiens appeared on planet Earth. So, we are the generation that’s coming of age when the planetary system has got enough awareness to see itself whole and begin to probe how we can be responsible for a whole system.
So, the first thing about the evolutionary perspective is that we must not be the slightest bit humiliated that we don’t know how to do it. There’s never been on planet Earth a generation that was required to do this. A Planetary Initiative for the World we Choose—it’s totally unprecedented. There’s no school to go to, to find out how to do it. There is no discipline on it. We are inventing it. And we must have in this evolutionary perspective, a great deal of compassion and humility, that we’re just barely learning. And it’s natural that we don’t know how to do it. Because the system didn’t know it had to be done until maybe the last twenty years. So, it’s truly a new situation. And from an evolutionary perspective, it’s not unnatural. It’s perfectly natural that we’ve arrived at this point.
All right, keeping in your mind’s eye for a moment, the universal environment that is nature. Let us go back in time and take a very quick 15-billion-year trip through our history. And from this perspective we have to broaden the concept of history, from just a few thousand years of human history, all the way to see how nature has brought us from an original act of creation to us sitting here in this auditorium, initiating the world we choose. The most recent thought is that about 15 to 20 billion years ago, the material universe began with an actual original act of creation, the first radical transformation on the spiral. Go along about four and a half billion years ago, our solar system and Earth condensed, another loop on the spiral. 3 1/2 billion years ago, the first single cell in the seas of Earth—sentient consciousness on the scene; another turn on the spiral. About 800 million years ago, multicellular organisms, plants, animals, the biosphere began; another turn on the spiral. And then only two to three million years ago the dawn of human consciousness comes into the scene; the next turn on the spiral. As you go up that sweep of human history, from the evolutionary perspective, it is easy to see it as a continual pulse and thrust to transcend the limited consciousness of the creature, animal, human, towards something more.
The entire thrust of human history can be seen as pulsing toward the next stage of evolution. About 6000 years ago—on this spiral, realize how recent that is—in Egypt, India, Greece, there began to be individuals in a state of expanded consciousness—cosmic consciousness, something beyond the waking state. From this perspective, it looks like they were precursors of a coming new norm. Because what you see, let’s take a few lessons, till we get to our present on this spiral. Molecules connect and become cells. Cells connect and become multicellular organisms. Humans appear with the most complex brain that the Earth has ever seen. And now what you see happening is on planet Earth, it’s a single body. And you see this same irresistible tendency, integration on our planetary system. And it gives you the clue that when that synthesis has completed itself, there will be—as there has been in those other spirals— a quantum leap in capacity.
Another thing you see when you look at this spiral, is you see what I think is the foundation of hope. You see that holism is inherent in the nature of reality. Nature has an irresistible tendency to form whole systems. There is no reason to assume it will stop with us. There is no reason to assume that the force that has been operating to transform for 15 billion years would stop here on planet Earth and say, ‘Okay, it’s all over now and it’s up to you alone.’ There is no reason to assume that we are not operating with the same organizing intelligence—call it God if you’re spiritual. Call it the patterns of evolution if you’re evolutionary. Call it nothing if you don’t believe in anything. The witness that we have been given through this miracle of the discovery of our past, is that nature has this incredible capability to transform through forming more complex whole systems with the characteristic of higher consciousness, greater freedom, and greater order.
Alright, remember in our spiral, we’re now realizing that five to six thousand years ago there began to be the awareness on planet Earth that something new is coming. This awareness in individuals who might be considered evolutionary mutations or quantum leap individuals, harbingers of the new species that we are becoming, came into Earth and experienced ourselves as connected to each other, to nature, and to the creator. And they basically founded the religions of the world, which are at the root of the civilizations of the world. And imprinted in every civilization, and in every religion of the world is a vision of the future which looks to me like the next stage of evolution. You can call it Nirvana, Paradise, the New Jerusalem, the promised land, the New Heaven and the New Earth. I think we’ll find that the religions were the ancient futurists. They first perceived, through experience, that something new was coming. However, most of us were not yet in the state of consciousness that could experience that. So, the institutions formed around this awareness, and divided into the various religions and civilizations as we now know it.
Because the human race was suffering from a fatal flaw, it seems to me, it could be fatal. The flaw is the illusion of separation. It seems to me that something went wrong early on. As we gained this enormous intellect and this powerful genius with a slight defect (gesturing to her brain), which is we forgot we were connected. And in every myth of the world, there is some story about something that happened that disconnected us. Whether it’s the serpent or something that came in and intruded. Okay, so we’ve been developing this powerful capability with the illusion of separation. Our religions came in and told us we were one, ‘Experience the Oneness,’ but the average human being has not and still has not been able to hold the consciousness that we are whole. We know it, but we can’t hold it. We are almost schizophrenic, because when we know it, it’s obvious. And when we’re out of it, it’s disaster.
Now, what happened through this tremendous perception of those early humans that experienced broader consciousness than the creature-human consciousness, is that civilization was seeded with the dream of a new age. And particularly in the Judeo-Christian culture, it was seeded with a historical vision, that a time would come in history when collectively we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. Now it’s fascinating to me from an evolutionary point of view, that that seems to be one of the most precise intuitions of a quantum leap that has ever been written—that there will be a series of dislocations, tribulations, a radical selection process. And when it’s all over, there will be only those connected to God. And those who are connected to God, will be in a new state of being. They will have no more physical death, they will be in a community of evolved beings, the former things shall be passed away. Now when I first read about that in the Bible, I thought that was like a fairy tale. But when I related it to what I know about evolution I realized if you look back, there’s no more dinosaurs. There are no more mastodons. There’s no more early Earth with a planet that has no biosphere. Evolution actually does cause radical newness and radical extinctions.
All right, the story gets very interesting given these templates. Of all the religions included, but especially the Judeo-Christian—the Judeo-Christian is fascinating to me because it says that through obedience to God, we shall transform the material world. It does not go into the impersonal, it goes into a transformation of the personal until you end up with an actual new world and a new person. It’s an absolutely fascinating expectation. What happened, based I believe, on these religious perceptions of transformation, is that the human race set about actually doing it. And in modern times, let’s say the last 300 years with the development of science, technology, and democracy we are at the threshold of acting out the dreams of the ages. Because when you look at science and technology, what it amounts to, is the human brains capacity to understand the processes and laws of nature sufficiently well to become co-creative with them.
Into the hands of the self-centered species, are coming the powers of co-creation. It’s inevitable, because they’re there and the mind is designed to know them. But we’re approaching it in the self-centered state. There’s the terrible danger. The second great tool of transformation, of actually acting it out, I believe, is democracy. Imperfect as it is, what it has said to us is that all people are created equal, endowed by their Creator within alienable rights. That idea has unlocked the human individual potential on planet Earth to the degree that, combined with science, the emancipated individual potential, combined with the tools of science and technology, have hit an evolutionary jump point which is going to have the characteristics either of a disgraceful jump, as in some of the negative prophecies, or—and here I think is the really new possibility—a graceful leap. What about a graceful shift?
It started; I think we can mark our own turn on the spiral in 1945. When the atom bomb fell, we were signaled with the fact that a self-centered species had gained the power of co- creation. And it was now, through freedom—and there seems to me to be genuine freedom inherent in the evolutionary system—we had gained the freedom either to be processed by some terribly negative events, which would eventually lead to a new stage of evolution or go willingly into the light. Now the feeling that I have had in the last years—and I think it would be what most of us feel here—is that there has been a rise of consciousness on earth in the last generation, so that we now have a critical mass of human individuals who know we are one peoples of earth. And we are spread through every nation, through every culture and through every religion. And we’re just barely becoming self-aware as a state of consciousness on planet Earth. What has been in the past—the great mystics and the unique seers and saints of the human race—is gradually being normalized, and millions and millions of us at an increasingly rapid rate. So, the way the world hangs in a balance, for me, the cosmic drama, is: Will the critical mass connect soon enough, and shift the consciousness field of earth so we go gently into the next stage of evolution? Or will we not, and go disgracefully through some kind of breakdown scenario? That’s right where we hang now.
CHAPTER 3: REACHING CRITICAL MASS
Barbara: What would be the factors that would speed up the connections among the critical mass? I’d like to just put forward some ideas. First, I think it is essential for us to be attracted at a sufficiently global scale, that we have a vision of a preferred world to be attracted toward. That’s where I think that this has such a genius to it—Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose! I’d like to very briefly, give you an image that has been coming to me over the last 15 or 20 years of that world. Now it’s a world not just moving to historical change, it’s moving to an evolutionary change. That’s my belief. And let’s look at that for a minute, because if I’m right, and if I’m right that it is imprinted in the human consciousness to know this already, and that the religions of the world who have reached the masses of humanity have already imprinted it with templates to know it, it means that one of the keys to collecting a critical mass is a vision as dynamic as that, which is inherent in the religions of the world.
It’s almost like a revival of the spiritual, at the level of evolution—by saying it’s real. Because when you say it’s real, that we’re going to be transformed, it touches the transcendent nerve. And the transcendent nerve in each of us is so powerful that it’s irresistible when it’s touched. And I believe the tremendous popularity of the science fiction movies tells us something. There’s a craving for the transcendent. But we’re getting it in very narrow ways. We’re basically getting it from science fiction movies and fundamentalism. That cannot be the broadest way to reach the most people with a vision of transcendence.
It’s very unfortunate that liberals and nice people don’t allow themselves to believe in the reality of the quantum leap, leaving it to people who have narrow orthodoxies who do believe in it. Whether it be Islam fundamentalism or Christian fundamentalism or any of those narrow orthodoxies, the reason they’re popular is they’ve got a glimmer of truth in them—that is more truthful, I believe, than secular humanism, which is very disappointing. When you really say what will it be like when everything works in secular humanism, you end up bored to death! And enough of us have been bored to death to know that there’s got to be something more to excite. And you know, a bored species will never make it. There’s got to be the nerve that excites now.
What has excited me, having come from an agnostic background, and never having gotten an ordinary religious training, which is probably all to the good, because I came at it with sort of a spiritual tabula rasa (blank slate), I never got imprinted with the traditional religious pattern. I discovered, by spending 15 years studying evolution, that what religions we’re talking about is the next stage of evolution. But they talk about it in prescientific and somewhat mythical terms. And we can begin to talk about it in evolutionary systems transformation terms. But it’s the same thing. And the glory of it, is that instead of feeling like a small band of isolated new age far out fringe people, I think we’re sitting on the great mountain of human spirituality—which is the great mass of humanity knows this already. It’s the intellectuals who forgot it. Particularly in recent times, the intellectuals completely negated almost with a viciousness sometimes, the aspiration for total transformation that’s in every human heart.
All right, let’s just take a look at what that vision might be in evolutionary terms, equating it and translating it into the various spiritual terms of the various cultures of the world. I’m going to do it in evolutionary language, but hold it and translate it, and we need to find out how to translate it into all the cultures of the world. What are the characteristics that we now know the human race has, which if activated would lead to a quantum shift? The first that we know we have, because we’ve seen examples of it, is a higher state of consciousness itself. We have seen individuals who are in God-centered consciousness.
We have seen that evolution is a consciousness raising experience. We have seen that, within each of us there seems to be activation at the inner plane. I’m assuming that whole centered consciousness will rapidly become a new norm. And just as self-consciousness was new two to three million years ago, cosmic consciousness was new 5 or 6000 years ago and will be established as a new norm. And we will find that self-centered consciousness has become nonviable and will become extinct. It’s as extinct as the mastodon, because when you really look at it, there is no way—if we are to evolve at all—that we could evolve as self-centered beings with all this power. Because it’s not just nuclear power. You know, they’ll tell you if you talk to people in the Army that nuclear power is no longer the threat. Co-creative consciousness would be a consciousness in which the individual is attuning from within to the patterns in the process of evolution. And through science to aim it toward science, is observing the processes of creation from without, and through technology co-creating consciously within. That’s really touching the tree of life. If you can imagine us doing that, intuiting the patterns which are leading to ever more complex wholes, with the power that we’re at the very threshold of to understanding nature, you see that people like Jesus were right—we shall do the work that he did and even greater works. That’s the design. It’s right there.
Now let’s look at our capacity in the space program. And whenever I mention the space program to new age groups, I lose at least 3/4 of the group. Why are you bringing that up, Barbara? Well, I’d like you to bear with me. What I think has happened in the space program is as important as the fish coming out of the sea onto the dry land. Now I know there were some fish who didn’t think it was important. I’m sure there were a few. When I start, this is funny, thinking what I’m going to do. But when I saw John Glenn go off in space in 1962 on television, I had a cosmic birth experience, and I called it a cosmic ejaculation. Now wait till I tell John Glenn. Now that he’s… It’s really funny. I saw that, what was happening—and we happened to be witnessing a shift in physical evolution, which meant that the human race was being given, through its high technologies— of which space is only one; astronautics is only one component—the capacity to have technologies equal to our consciousness.
And when you combine high consciousness with high technology, and I’m not speaking now of belching steel factories and Cadillacs, I’m speaking of ephemeralized microchips and exquisite solar sails and magnificent communication systems, of which we’re also just at the beginning. If you fuse in your mind cosmic consciousness and ephemeralized evolutionary technologies, what you see is that we are going to be, and in fact in the process of becoming, a physical, universal species, which complements our cosmic consciousness. And that if we get through this period, we shall be genuinely a universal species.
I see a vision of the Earth being restored, as the center of nature and culture for the human race. And I see, not crude technologies in space, but ephemeralized technologies. We are becoming extraterrestrial. I’m not going to pursue that vision, but you can see it leads to the unknown. It doesn’t lead to more of the same. Now add the biological revolution to this equation. We’re also—it’s fascinating that genetics, astronautics, cybernetics all came in in the same generation. People like John Platt and others have said, this is a complex of organic capabilities that would be lethal in a biosphere but natural in the universe. The handwriting on the wall, and the biological revolution is that we understand our own DNA. And our own mind-body systems are going to be able to change it. You know people shy away from this truth because it seems as though it’s against the will of God. And there’s a whole big controversy now, clergy against biotechnology. I once wrote to the Pope and said, Dear Father, have you ever thought that the founder of the Christian religion manifested the most radical body transformation in the history of the world? Literally, I’m assuming that we’re getting biotechnology at the same time that we’re getting astronautics and at the same time that we’re getting cybernetics, and at the same time we’re normalizing cosmic consciousness because we are truly destined to become co- creative with God.
Whoever thought that this particular model of a body is forever? A little mammalian furry body—it forever? You know, sometimes I notice my body has a little fur, and little fangs. You know? And ears still slightly pointed. We are spiritual beings still in animal bodies, and it always struck me as weird. Strange that—you know I used to look at it and think well, it won’t be this way forever. Because the physical world changes too. This is another thing that the New Age has tended to ignore. It sees us returning to something, and it sees us in cosmic consciousness, but it doesn’t realize that we’re going to really build new bodies. Because that’s what we always do. That’s what nature always does when it hits a limit. It builds new bodies.
So, through the biological revolution it looks to me like we’re going to gain access to our own body design. We’re going to have the choice to extend our lives, to become self-healing, self-regenerating, eventually self-transforming beings. And we’re also going to be able to choose to die. You can see we’re beginning to do that. People are saying I don’t want to go on medical technology that might extend my life, but I choose to die gracefully. Other people are going to choose to extend. We’re just at the beginning of it. Projected 20 to 50 years, in a cosmic environment, in cosmic consciousness, you begin to see that we are no longer going to be creature-mammalian humans. Now this is written up in Time magazine. It’s on the front page of World News. Our World News and World News Report, I can’t remember. They did a big issue on its 50th anniversary. And it’s all in there, but it’s not related up to anything. It’s just like a group of oddities that we can do. And I’m putting an evolutionary perspective on it.
So, I assume we will be in co-creative consciousness, in a universal environment, gaining access to our own mind-body system. Then let’s add into the mix the whole communications revolution. And at the growing edge of that, what we see is an extended nervous system for the body politic. We see all unchosen work no longer has to be done by humans. We see we have extended capacities in the universe that we can send out as our eyes and ears and hands beyond us. John Clapp says that this combination, if you combine it with our capacity to do systems design like the Apollo program, our capacity for collective evolutionary thought is as great as the origin of thought itself when you piece it all together. And the amazing thing to me is, all of this we’re already doing. I haven’t mentioned a thing that isn’t happening. Now add to this what we’ve learned about the unique individual human potential. Margaret Meade’s, famous quote. I don’t know where she thought it up, but she said we’ve only used 5 to 10% of our potential. It has been said by her, it’s been said by many others. That means 90% of our potential is untapped. Well, when you look at it, what would that mean?
It looks to me like the creature-human phase was basically the phase of reproduction, maintenance, and survival. And most of us did not have to activate much over and beyond the effort to survive. We didn’t have the time, the energy, or the capabilities. Now, in those countries where people don’t have to work 18 hours a day to survive and have 10 babies, what’s happening is this enormous human potential is being liberated. What’s happening with women, is that their whole species role is changing from maximum reproduction, and there is this feminine energy being let loose upon the world. And there’s no model for it. I mean, a woman of my age with this amount of energy is socially unacceptable—as my partner over there, Ram Dass, frequently points out to me. And I think that will aid us, one evening and the next, for good reason because he keeps me down long enough to really catch hold of some of these things.
CHAPTER 4: TRANSCENDENCE
Barbara: Okay, my vision is that when the individual human is born into a society that is manifesting these collective capabilities, that we are going to become natural Buddha’s natural Christs. And that it is true that we are created in the image of God. And when we make this turn on the spiral, you and I, even you and I, will live to see ourselves activated, to feel what it will be like. And our children and our children’s children will be emerging as full humanity. And probably we’ll find we are in a universe full of life. That’s the one part of this that has not been verified, although there’s been many intuitions of it and many perceptions of it. Even from a scientific point of view, it seems unlikely—you remember the billions and billions of galaxies— that we should be the only life. So probably the next immense quantum leap, will be as we get through this cycle and collectively unite on this earth, turn on our consciousness, become coherent and move on out into space, we’ll find we’re in a community full of life. And we’re probably a newborn cosmic species. And we’re going through the birth canal right now.
That vision has attracted me so much, that I never can stop until somehow, we live to see it. It is not in any way the only possible vision, but the thing that I said about how we get the critical mass together—number one, is to envision together what it would be like if everything we are worked? Because that touches the transcendent nerve—in all people.
And the curious thing, it’s also the goal of the ideologies of the world. The communist ideology—from each according to his ability to each according to his need, the state shall wither away. It’s the goal of the democratic societies. It’s a goal of the Christian societies. It’s the goal of the Jewish societies. It’s the goal of the Muslim societies. It’s the goal! The goal is to go to the next stage of human history. The goal is the quantum leap into the unknown.
Now, if we realize that the way nature has worked over those billions of years is to hit a crisis to the existing system, to activate new potentials and through synergy create radical newness. Let’s model that and say that we do that now consciously. And that’s why I’m so excited to be here. We are doing it. The Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose is fitting precisely into an evolutionary pattern, because it’s creating an open place for people attracted to potentials to come in and examine how those potentials might create a world we choose.
If people like Ilya Prigogine and others are right, what they say is—I’ll just give you this model. He won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1977. He said, he noticed, How do systems evolve to greater complexity when materiality goes to entropy and disorder? He said any system at a certain stage begins to build up perturbations and dysfunctionality. And the system has to spend more and more energy dealing with dysfunctionality. And that’s what’s happening in our system—masses amount of our energy is dealing with dysfunctionality, the trillion dollars arms race and so forth. Okay, while that happens, the attention of the system is off and the innovating elements begin to crop up everywhere, doing something better everywhere. And what we’re seeing in our system is everywhere we’re doing something better than the big system is able to do—in health, in energy, in community, in space development, in consciousness, in education— all across the system, in every function, are innovations. It looks to me like, with one more degree of articulation and interaction of the innovating elements in each functional area, we would see emerge a new pattern. And what Prigogine says, is that at a certain point in the dysfunctional system, the innovating elements interact in an exponential link up and the system flips into a new pattern.
I feel, we’re close to that flip. It’s called like a sudden shift. Now let’s add to that what we’re learning from people like the Maharishi and people like Rupert Sheldrake. Maharishi says that, if 1% of any population is in a state of coherent consciousness, it can create a harmonic for the whole population. And he’s experimenting with this and sets states with various small clusters of people. Imagine if we create coherent consciousness and bring innovations together, the system could flip in our time. That’s my sense of it.
Okay, now what Donald and you and we are doing here is creating this on a planetary scale. I’d like to conclude with what I think needs to be done. I think in every field we need to collect the innovations and connect them. In this kind of context, this is planetary. Now, I think it has to be done on the national level as well. (END OF THIS SEGMENT IN THE VIDEO)
Barbara’s talk continues, indicating that she will become involved at the national level by announcing her intention to become selected for the office of Vice-President of the United States in 1984. Picking up where this video ends, the rest of her talk can be viewed in the video entitled “Campaign for a Positive Future.”