OUR SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

Announcer (Bill Myers): From the campus of Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, welcome to Our Spiritual Experience: A conversation with Buckminster Fuller and Barbara Marx Hubbard. In this conversation, Bucky and Barbara talk about the spirit that has moved them and which moves us all, to help create a positive future. Moderator for this occasion is Michael Toms, co-founder of New Dimensions Radio, founder of the Potentials Radio Network, currently Executive Director of Audio Independence, the nationwide network of independent radio producers.

Moderator (Michael Toms): Hello and welcome. I’m Michael Toms. It’s my special privilege to be here with two very special people, for what promises to be a very special conversation. To my right is Barbara Marks Hubbard. Barbara is probably best known as a futurist. She’s the founder of the Committee for the Future and to her right is Buckminster Fuller, who said about Barbara that she was the best-informed person about the future on the planet. It would take far too long for me to introduce you to Buckminster Fuller, who has the longest biography of anyone in Who’s Who, so I won’t belabor that, but he is known to most of you, I’m sure, as the inventor of the geodesic dome, someone who travels the globe twice a year, and someone who has really dedicated his life to the service of humanity very much in the same order as Barbara has done in her work in exploring positive options for the future. And. we’re here to talk about Barbara and Bucky’s experience with life, but their experience in a very special way, they’re deeper, inner experience of life—their spiritual experience. And I’d like to begin by asking Barbara—Barbara in your own search for meaning. how did that begin for you?

Barbara: It began when I was a little girl. I had a deep expectancy for something great coming, an intuition that the human race was moving forward towards a great future. But I didn’t know what it was. I came from a secular Jewish agnostic background. When I was fifteen, the atom bomb was dropped, and it was just when I was beginning to ask what’s the purpose of my life? Where is it going when I saw the possibility that the whole planet would be destroyed? And I realized that a person could not have a meaningful future if the planet didn’t also. So, I asked the question where is civilization going? And especially, what is the purpose of our power? What is the purpose of science, technology, industry? Where is it leading? I had the feeling it was good, but I couldn’t find it.

And I started to read through the world philosophies, looking for an image of the future commensurate with our power. And I didn’t find one in the existing philosophies. And then I looked in the world religions, something commensurate with our power. And when I got to the Judeo-Christian idea that said, behold, I show you a mystery, we shall not all sleep, we shall all be changed, and we shall eventually become heirs of God. I said, Ah, that’s it. That feels right. So, I joined the church. And I went to the Church in Scarsdale to ask how do we evolve from where we are to the New Jerusalem? In Scarsdale, you couldn’t ask that question very easily. I wanted to know what they meant by the resurrection and the ascension. And I really felt that there was some truth to that. In church, I prayed so hard I fell off the pew one day. And I couldn’t hear anything. So, then I went to Bryn Mawr. And I thought maybe if I study hard, I will find this understanding of where we’re going. But in college everything was in a box—geometry, mathematics, history. No course on purpose.

And eventually my family was getting worried about me. They said wait till she gets married and has babies, because the purpose, after all, she’s a woman and when she has children she’ll find the meaning of life. I had five children. And with every child, it got worse. The question deepened, and each child brought me to the sense that I didn’t know the meaning. I got very depressed in my early 30s. I felt my life was a failure. When I discovered three people who changed my life and set me on this path, the first was Abraham Maslow, his book, Toward a Psychology of Being. He said every human has untapped potential, and if you don’t use that potential, you get sick. And I realized I had untapped potential. The second, was Teilhard de Chardin. And he saw God at work in history, moving to ever higher order. And that felt right. And then I read Buckminster Fuller. I read the little book Utopia or Oblivion. And I saw that the world technologically could work for the entire human race to be freed from its creature-human condition and become a citizen of the universe.

And I pieced together the evolutionary perspective. And I set out to tell the world about the potential for the future. But something was still missing. And when about 1976, I heard a deep inner voice that said know God. You can’t help the world without knowing that deeper sense of God. I began to meditate, to listen to an inner voice. Until I finally got to what is a very deep mystical experience, which I’ll talk about in just a moment.

Michael: Buckminster Fuller is known far and wide by those people who know him as Bucky. Bucky, it’s really nice to be with you again. I know that your life took a very distinct turn in 1927. Perhaps you’d like to talk about that?

Bucky: It took an enormous turn, because of the fact that, like Barbara, I had, like every child has, really something very, very important about it. Every advantage, just the rain or the snow, flowers coming out—all those things seem to be telling you something very strong that you’re in the presence of. But I, my father died when I was very young. And my mother, I knew, love me that much. And she would say, darling, never mind what you think. Listen, we’re trying to teach you. And the school that I was sent to, they said never mind what you think, listen, we’re trying to teach you. The working assumption of all the older people that are. The cerebral processes of the young were very unreliable. I knew my mother did love me. I did my best to try to pay no attention to what I was thinking, trying to learn the game. So, I did learn the game and the way life was being carried on.

And I came into life in an interesting moment. I was born 1895. And the time I was born, all reality was always everything you could see, smell, touch and hear. That’s reality, that was it. The year I was born, X-rays were discovered. You couldn’t see them, but the X-rays could see bones and photograph them. The same year I was born, Marconi, he developed theoretical wireless. You could see a wire-less. We didn’t have an actual, practical SOS until I was eleven. When I was really electrons were discovered. I didn’t make any newspapers; nobody thought that would be anything. Entering Harvard in 1913 I did very well in physics of my mathematics was over. My favorite book, preparatory to going to Harvard, in the back of it some yellow pages has been glued in called “electricity.” Electronic energy was beginning to be something. But the point is that we’re entering an era of reality you couldn’t see, smell, touch or hear. And society didn’t realize that eventually everybody’s looking at things they had always before. That’s the point that I really brought under, the moment when humanity crossed a new threshold. Are we adding anything to the invisible world?

1930, the year after the great crash, we had the first chart of the electromagnetic spectrum published by Westinghouse Company. Add all the electromagnetic waves and the mile-long waves of radio in World War One, getting shorter and more frequent, getting finally to infrared and then red, orange, green, blue, violet where you and I can tune in and ultraviolet out. If anybody really studies that chart and looked at the significance it was, where you and I can tune in and our whole reality amounted to less than one minute on the electromagnetic spectrum. Reality is actually multiplied a million-fold, since that time, since the year when I was born.

Michael: Bucky, I’d like to come back to you.

Bucky: That’s where, that’s the mysterious point you’re talking about.

Michael Toms: Yeah, I’d like to come back to your experience in a few minutes. Barbara, you mentioned that your own search for meaning led you to literally what you called a mystical experience, and I’m wondering if you can share what that experience was for you. And why you termed it mystical?

Barbara Marx Hubbard: Well, I’d like to back up and tell you about my first experience, which I call an expanded reality experience, not a mystical experience. In 1966, Bucky, I had read your writings, I had understood evolution, and I had the feeling that there was something going on on Earth that was one story. I’d been reading Reinhold Niebuhr and he’d been quoting from Saint Paul—all people are members of one body.

I took a walk on February cold day in Lakeville, Connecticut and I was asking the question. What in our age is comparable to the birth of Christ? What is our story? What’s going on here? And with that, I had what I call an out-of-earth experience. My mind’s eye got off the planet. Like the blue cocoon opened up and I got into the blackness of space. And I experienced the planet as one living organism, and it was struggling to coordinate. It was gasping for breath. The communication system was our mass media. It was sending pain around the whole system, and each of us was a cell in a living body.

Then I felt the whole human race reach up into outer space, and with that reach I experienced a ripple of empathy go around the planet. And we were connecting, we were linking, we were feeling love for each other, and in one instant in time it was like rubbing the fur the right way on the whole planet. And we experience what I call a planetary smile. The whole human race went like this, we opened our collective eyes, and we experienced a loving presence surrounding the whole earth. And I felt that we were about to be able to communicate to a loving presence beyond us. And I got this deep desire to communicate, not just me personally, but all of us. And I heard the words, Barbara, our story is a birth. It’s the birth of humanity. We are one body, and we are being born. And I felt a shift from our terrestrial self-centered phase to our universal, God-centered phase.

Barbara Marx Hubbard: Now this is the mystical experience. In 1980. I rented a little house in Santa Barbara to write a book on evolution. And I had been saying that the human race is evolving, and I’ve begun to experience it, but I didn’t know what to do with all that excitement. And I was, I had a writer’s block. And one day I gave up, I said I can’t do it. And I called up my sister and I said let’s go have some fun. So, we headed out to the Botanical Gardens in Santa Barbara on a beautiful day.

We were driving along until I saw a little sign that said Mount Calvary Monastery. And suddenly I felt an electric presence surround me, a field of force. I felt a very strong light. Now this was mystical. I had never experienced this before. Suddenly the tears were streaming down my face, and I said, Jacqueline, we’re going to Mount Calvary. And we started to climb up the hill, and my sister is a good Jewish agnostic. She said, Why are we going to Mount Calvary? I thought we were going to the botanical gardens. And I said, I don’t know Jacqueline, but I feel I’ve been here before. And I had this immense sense of expectation. And as I got to the top of the hill, I got out, and there was a little Episcopal monastery. I looked up and off a higher mountain, a group of people are jumping off and a hang glider club—in butterfly wings. And they were floating in these butterfly wings above Mount Calvary. Hundreds and hundreds of people.

And suddenly this electric field surrounded me. And I heard an inner voice that startled me with the words “My resurrection was real. I did it. And it is a forecast of what the human race will be able to do when they combine love of God with knowledge of how the universe works. And for the past 2000 years you have been learning how the world works, and when you finally fuse love and knowledge you will be able to do the works that I did and even greater works than these. Will you acknowledge this, Barbara? Will you acknowledge that every person on earth is to be a natural Christ?” And I was totally startled. And I stood there in absolute silence. And I realized it was true. We are designed to become. joint heirs with Christ. And I said, Yes, I will, but I don’t know how.” And the inner voice said, “Did you know how to do puberty? Did you know how to be born? Do you know how to build a universe? You didn’t know any of that. I know how to do it. You have to intend with all your heart and soul, to act at your highest. And you are the generation, all of you, that is going to experience a change.”

So, I went— I was thrilled. And I went into the monastery. I knocked on the door and I said, “I’m Barbara Hubbard, I’m a futurist, a seeker after God. Can I come in?” And a priest in white robe answered. He said, “I’m Adam and I’m having lunch. Could you come back in ten minutes?” So, I said, “Yes, I’ll be back.” All existing institutions fall behind the seeker. So, the next weekend I checked in for a silent retreat. And the next morning I was taking communion, and there was this magnificent ceremony—”Take, eat this in remembrance of me. This is my body. This is my blood.” And I thought, oh my God, it’s true—we have been expecting to transform into a new being. And I suddenly saw that the biological revolution, the astronautic, the genetic revolution, the cybernetic revolution, all of evolutionary science combined with the rise of consciousness would in fact make us eventually have bodies that could live longer and could be self-healing. And I thought, maybe the whole story is true.

And then I got the idea, go look at the predictive passages in the New Testament. So, I went into the garden and got a New Testament which I had not read. And I turned to Corinthians that says, “Behold, I show you in history, we shall not sleep, we shall all be changed in the twinkling of an eye. This corruptible flesh will become incorruptible. Death shall have no dominion.” And I began to write. Everything I ever learned started to pour out of me with those scriptural phrases. And I got the idea that the New and Old Testament was coded evolution, and that Jesus and those other great prophets had understood what we are going to become. I saw Jesus as our potential self. And the idea came through to me that Armageddon is what will happen if self-centeredness holds on, but that there is a new possibility on Earth because of the rapid rise of enlightenment on the planet and I called it the Planetary Pentecost—that we could now, there are not people right now, that if we all connected, all of us who know we are one, who love the world, if we all connected in consciousness we could shift the consciousness of Earth, heal the wounds of separation and carry out the design-science revolution. And it said, Barbara, work with everybody else on earth who believes we are one, for a time when we connect, and we all hear in our own inner voice the words we are one. And at that time, we will be surrounded by that loving presence that I had felt way back in 1966.

So, the mystical experience was an experience of a being that said to us, we can do the works that Jesus did. And I became deeply convinced that the Old and New Testament is a template of the future. And we can become heirs of God. Did you ever feel anything like that? Did you ever have an experience—did you? What was it like for you?

Buckminster Fuller: I don’t think the mystical experience would come if I didn’t say something first. Number one, if I were to use my total experience only for everybody, all human beings, would I be really justified in not throwing it away? I was pretty much of a mess. But if I used it for everybody, then I could see that it might be valid. I had to go through some very important quick decisions in my thinking. I said I would not only use my experience for everybody, but I would develop artifacts and technology that would improve the environment for everybody, so that everybody could afford to really dare, dare to be open with one another. It might be really the greatest thing could be done. And ultimately if I’m committing myself to developing technology, I would need enormous amounts of material, technology itself. Which means also it would bring in money. And nobody right now accredited me with anything.

So, I committed myself to that kind of thing. I obviously going to have to have a very important kind of faith and human exposed, all of us are the fact that almost all human beings have some kind of an intuitive sense about God. And there’s great many organized religions. I said, from now on, if I’m going to do what I do, I’m going to do my own thinking and it must always be predicated on experience and not what I call believing. I said, by the word believe I mean accepting explanations of physical phenomena without experimental evidence.

And very much in my religious education, which was in the Episcopal Church, was on the basis you believe this, you believe that, and my grandmother who knows much, but when I was really small, she said, darling how much I love you and I’ll tell you what when on 2000 years ago—which I’m convinced is true. Because you ought to be able to trust me, you ought to believe so that was the great chain of believing. And I said I’m going to have to dare, to stop and have to give up all the things I was to ask to believe and go on my own experimental evidence, going to really do some technical thinking about humanity. So, I said it is part of your experience that people are intuitively moved to assume some kind of God, I said, in your own personal experience, do you have any reason to have to assume a greater intellectual integrity to be operating in universe besides that of humans? And I said, (garbled)… I’m just an old grandma… principles of gravity, all which is only mathematically expressed… And none of these great principles governing the physical universe have ever contradicted any others… augmentative. So, there’s something as an intellectual only mathematics successful set of design laws that convince me of an a-priory intellectual integrity.

Take the fact that the brain is always dealing in things coordinating our senses. And chances always deal in things that stopped and we also go to sleep. News in the temporal special cases. The human mind doesn’t destroy that capability. From time to time discover relationships existing between special cases that could no way be smelt, touched, seen, heard… discovering the extraordinary mathematical attraction going on between celestial bodies. Millions and millions of miles apart. Yeah, they were, they have their behavior came out with all the same number in terms of area they swept out and give amount of time. They said yeah, they’re obviously coordinating and how can they coordinate when they don’t touch and they’re millions of miles apart… going on in there. Through series of events like Kepler’s work and then Galileo and finally Isaac Newton, discovering these celestial bodies were attracting one another… it was the inverse of the mathematical, the second power of distances intervening….

The fact that there was something you couldn’t see had nothing to do with the brain at all. But the human minds have been submitted to this these laws, but Newton then hypothesize as being what’s going on, with trying out by all the different astronomers, sure enough they noticed different types of behaviors. The fact is, there were laws actually governing here which had no exception, and no exception meant they were eternal. So, we find the human mind being submitted to eternal laws, as the brain is entirely in the temporal. Things begin and end. This is overwhelming, this is I really revealed.

I’m just overwhelmed by the experimental evidence of a greater intellect operating in the universe, and that I don’t need anybody ever to give me any advice about it from now on. I’m going to assume that humans were introduced in the universe with some very important reason, in support of the great design, and we’re given that beautiful mind to access it for some as yet unknown reason. And I would use it to try and make humans a success physically. It could be that I don’t have to, and then living… I see the grass doesn’t have to pay the clouds for the rain. And I see that I’m going to have to have absolute faith in from now on, I’m doing what God wants done. But I’ll get on and that is now 55 years ago, and I have gotten on.

Barbara: It works.

Bucky: It was not long after that that written initial thinking. Basically, that required an enormous amount of self-discipline to get over all the things that people I love had told me to believe. And to really question and look at it very, very much. One day I was walking down Michigan Avenue in 1927. And suddenly I really—you spoke about it a sense of being in almost all electrical cloud—my feet didn’t seem to be touching the avenue at all. And I heard this extraordinary voice—to me, because I speak something called English, and why this voice would, at any rate, there’s no question about the word—clarion and clear and very strongly voice and everything like it before, which said. “From now on, you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth.” It was extraordinary to feel that way. I had Barbara, from there on, a great deal of thought about the coming of another Christ, and then I came much to the conclusion you did, that everybody would become a Christ. And that was, it wouldn’t be any one person, it will be an extraordinary transition for humanity. As to who will die first and then who will be reborn, I don’t know. But it seems if we’re on the threshold of the Omni Christ.

Barbara: That’s exactly the feeling I got. And the idea of a Planetary Pentecost was interesting to me. If you remember the first Pentecost, the disciples were in an upper room several weeks after Jesus had reappeared and then ascended. And suddenly an energy came into that room. They felt flames coming out of their heads. And the miracle was that everybody heard these simple men speak in their own language. It was as though the inner voice which is in each of us started to speak in the language of each person. And then the disciples left that room, empowered by that energy to be healers, to be clairvoyant, to be telepathic and in fact to have the powers of the natural Christ, because they got it together and they were energized to do what each could do but didn’t do alone.

And it has occurred to me that every one of us has the power, but we don’t fully use it. Because around us, other people aren’t using it. And in a Planetary Pentecost, it would be an experience in which each person who already had the feeling of oneness and some feeling of God would connect back, like in that upper room of consciousness. And maybe the energy of the Holy Spirit would be evoked together, and it would trigger in each of us—in Chinese and Russian and Japanese and English—the same words. And with that, we would be empowered to realize we’re natural Christs. And when I thought about the whole futurist scenario, it seems to me that a special set of events need to happen to trigger the human potential. And maybe there is a state of grace.

I have begun to believe we should consciously work for world experiences of communion, of linkage, of all people on earth. So that we can experience that it’s true, that we have these powers and start to manifest them.

Joe (Audience member): My name is Joe. I’m an educator, and I’m wondering if you have any idea how to persuade ourselves, to convince ourselves, that in a sense we are the great minds of the present, and that we have that inner potential to change the course of the world’s future, just as people such as Buddha and Christ and Newton and Einstein did in the past. 

Barbara: If you study evolution, you see it is a consciousness raising experience or an intelligence raising experience—from molecule to cell to animal to humans and now to us becoming a planetary civilization. I think what is happening is that each of us is being stimulated to act at our best, which is what those earlier people did. And more and more and more of us are going to act at our best. And we’re approaching what I call a new norm, where we will all be able to be in a state of Krishna or Christ consciousness, and we will activate our mental and spiritual capabilities, so it will become normal. And I think it’s very important that we don’t think it’s just something that happened in the past. It is us and we can do it. And that’s the direction of evolution is that we should do it. It is coming naturally, in other words. 

Bucky: I’m not really convinced of the technical validity of scripture. For instance, when we discover there’s no up or down in the universe, you can’t have an ascension. I don’t require an ascension, many of the things discussed. All right. I’m deeply impressed, is that a little child will lead them.

Barbara:  Yes, yes.

Bucky: Those things I really feel better. They go back in the earliest of the scriptures we can find, of the earliest, the thinking of humanity around the world. So, I look at all the different religions—enormous insights, and people driven to write something out must be enormous task to do so in the early days. And so, I don’t, I don’t take up any—I’m very remote from any organized religions anymore. It’s going to be where you don’t need any intercession between yourself and God. I’m using right modern term, but I say everybody has a hotline to God. 

Barbara: Yes, I really believe that. And something you said in your book, The Critical Path, I have found to be very important. You said you thought we had five to ten years to make a shift from weaponry to livingry, and if we make that shift, we can be abundant. We can be 4 billion billionaires on this planet, because the universal resources are available to us. And you said one of the keys is that the people know what the potentials are, and we need a swift telecommunications revolution in order to communicate to the people directly, over and beyond the institutions like the nation-state and the large corporations. You know, I’ve thought of the mass media as having a disease, which I called dis-empathitis. It’s a communicable disease. It really has gotten sick in that it doesn’t, it isn’t sensitive to creativity, innovation and growth, and it picks up pain. And as we start putting information of creativity and innovation through, eventually I think it will get it and then we’ll have a system wherein everybody can know. And I think that what we’re doing tonight and the many other types of programs which tell people their potential to have humanity 100% successful is an essential part of ourselves surviving. 

And I just want to tell you that, one of the things that I’m doing due to all this experience is initiating a world good news network, that will aim at having a 24 hour a day channel on television and radio to tell people what the options are, what the potentials are and how we can act together for a world that works for everyone. And I, I’d like to dedicate it to you—The World Good News Network—So that we can bring together the people who have ideas on what, how the world will work, because once you know that you cannot never again accept that we need to move to destruction and to scarcity and to violence. 

Audience Member: Here in Cincinnati and in Columbus, we have interactive television. I’m wondering if that form of the mass media might be useful to you in your network and how you might see it being used?

Barbara: I think interactive television is extremely important because it make it possible to have a direct dialogue between these kinds of ideas and individuals. And since it’s the individuals who have the integrity and can make the new decisions, when it becomes clear that individuals are responding in certain ways, the whole system will respond to those individuals. And I think the political system can be transformed. I really don’t agree that politics need necessarily disappear. I think it will be transformed into the coordination of the resources and elements in such a way that the world works for everyone. 

I think we need a new set of leaders, that come up and understand what I call synocracy, synergistic democracy, wherein we’re attempting to play the win-win games—and how to activate people at the local level and empower people to do it for themselves. And interactive television will probably lead to synergistic democracy. 

Bucky: To me, humanity really has men, and developed all the way from naked and ignorant learning all kinds of… World War One was the beginning of awareness that there might be some other people in the world. World War Two brought us very much closer. Today, everybody around the world knows all about everybody else around the world. So, it really is a humanity is going through an evolutionary change. Nations are obsolete. They are barriers to getting together so nations are going to have to go. And I feel that that’s going on right now, human beings are going through final examinations. Is the invention human, a really good invention? Does it have the courage to really go along with this mystical insight that God tells you this—not because somebody else is saying it. You have the courage to say this is out. As Christ did. I think we’re at the point where economic systems and political systems are not being tested at all. It’s question, does a human being have the integrity which means they both the faith and the courage and the competence to actually work it out to get together one with the other. 

Michael: Bucky, when you say political systems and economic systems are not being tested, what do you mean they’re not being tested?

Bucky: I feel that humanity is going through a final examination, as to whether it’s a good invention. We’re being allowed access to the great laws of the universe. And we’ve been using them to destroy other human beings. How do you disregard the other side and not look out for everybody? They’re doing many, many errors. Question: Does the individual have the courage to go along with this knowledge, that there really is enough. And not to go along with the crowd, but to speak as individuals, each with access to God because God makes it clear we should get together. 

John Howland (Audience Member): Wondering if either of the guests have considered serving in an official advisory capacity to, say, the president of the United States, which would really afford the greatest opportunity to affect change, which is really what it’s what it’s all about anyway. 

Bucky: I think the error of humanity is things can be solved with politics. It cannot be policy how you spend some money and this and that. Right now, it is question of really the integrity of humanity and not something that’s going to be solved by politics. So, politics are about to become obsolete. We had the umbilical cord, absolutely logical, beautifully designed to produce life, but once you’re out of the room you cut and get rid of the umbilical cord. It doesn’t mean the umbilical cord wasn’t a good invention. Nations and politics have all been very good inventions in their day. And we have nations because human, not knowing about other humans, find a place where nature, through photosynthesis is producing food. And you’re trying to survive there. And so, you find yourself being invaded by other people, not being so lucky. And then they should matter. 

You have a National Defense, because when the other side is going to die. And so that’s why nations developed—as human beings have been isolated geographically for thousands of years, and those who do survive on those particular geographical conditions have only others who survived on the same geographical conditions, this concentrates a type of genes that survive there.  Russia had when she invaded the USSR, there were 148 nations of people look very differently in literally I say for thousands of years. So, nation means just that. People have been isolated, don’t know about any other human beings looking out themselves in the wilderness until somebody coming along trying to displace them. Then they defend themselves. Evolution is now integrating all of us. 

Barbara: Now we are just getting the technology through our mass media, especially television, to reach directly to people everywhere on Earth. And I’ve been fascinated to hear that you have, for example, technologies where you can record 100 to 600,000 telephone calls in one hour. The people can respond on television, and they can be recorded by computer. So, it seems to me that we have a method now of people speaking in response to what they see on television and directly asserting their integrity—and that this might be the swift telecommunications revolution to get information out and give people a chance to connect, to respond and to express their opinion through the television system.

Bucky:  Oh, we will use the technology alright. 

Barbara: Participatory Democracy.

Bucky: The big thing is really there. They’re the courage to go along with their own deepest conception.

Michael: Will that kind of communication be in the best interest of those who essentially control, say, commercial television, perhaps some of the larger institutions that advertise. Of themselves on something that commercial television. How do you see that changing? 

Barbara: Well, I think that we need to have a subtle evolution. I’m not a revolutionary. I don’t believe that attack will work. I think if we can clearly put forward the attractive creative options and people start acting on them, it will not necessarily be acceptable immediately to the existing system, but eventually it might attract the existing system, so that rather than going through a revolutionary mode we’re going through an evolutionary mode of attracting ourselves forward to the next phase. 

Michael: And so, they also attract some major corporations that might have that as part of their future plan. 

Barbara: I think eventually we need to convert the military industrial complex. It’s an interesting thought that if the military industrial complex were converted to livingry, to building new worlds on Earth, new worlds in space, they have the skills, the technologies, the logistical capacities to do it. And what is required to for that conversion? That’s really the point. And I think it’s several things, many things. One is the people demanding it, everywhere in the world.

Michael: We have to have the courage to recognize that perhaps we have enough nuclear weapons. 

Barbara: The people have to act. And secondly, I believe we need a state of grace. I think we need to pray. I think we need to have a planetary connection. I think we need to call upon something beyond humans to work with us. If you want to call it the God force, the evolutionary pattern, whatever, we need to call upon the designing intelligence to co-create with us.

Bucky: The criteria we have on our planet right now, is that to be a realist you have to make money. And we have to realize that making money and making sense are diametrically opposed. We’re going to have to have a humanity that going to dare to realize that there’s transcendental truth to making money. We’re going through a great economic crisis of our money and they’re gonna be a lot of people who might want to push some buttons for some bombs because they say they’re not gonna lose their money. And those are the kind of test we’re really up against your fellow very, very big, right? Whether you really, whether the truth is what counts or is it a man-made crisis like money, that’s enormous test we’re coming into. 

Audience Member: I would like to ask Mr. Fuller if his view toward making money would be changed if the concept of businessmen changed to consider money as a by-product for doing a job well, for a job well done, instead of a primary objective, watching the bottom line each quarter to see that it’s better than last year’s?

Bucky: I wrote a book called Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. You might like to look at that. And there I differentiated between money and wealth. Wealth is the extent to which humanity is actually already taking advantage of their experience and their knowledge of principles, to take care of how many lives for how many people, how many days. That really is real wealth. How many days can we organizers have to carry on? And I found that wealth itself consists of two phenomenal energies, the physical and the metaphysical. And the physical is all energy. We now know, quite commonly the energy of universe is inexhaustible. It is a regenerative affair, so the physical side could not decrease. The metaphysical side, which is know-how. Every time we use our know-how, we always learn more. You can’t learn less. You may learn what you thought was true doesn’t work. I find because the physical could not decrease and the mental can only increase, wealth can only increase. 

Barbara: Yes, I’d like to just add to that. If you assume the best possible world in which the technology is appropriately used in an earth-space environment, you can see abundance and material security given as a natural given, like we have inherited the biosphere—meaning that each individual will have the opportunity for creative function. And I think the meaning of work will shift from that which we have to do in order to survive, into that which is our opportunity for creativity. And people will want more and more of it because creativity feels good. And that is a shift which is now technologically possible. So, in that sense, you don’t need money. The reward is creativity. 

Michael: What would the world look like if it was working for everyone? From your vantage point?

Bucky: It would look very beautiful; dew on the garden. When you saw your own child and saw your first sunlight. 

Barbara: I think Bucky is right. It would be very beautiful. And he way I try to imagine it is, it’s taking all our potentials and imagine them working fully—the personal as well as the technological. And what I’ve seen, is that we would be in a state of whole-centered Christ consciousness as a new norm. Everyone would be experiencing the love of each other as themselves. We would be in an Earth-space or universal environment. We would be restoring this Earth. We would be extending our environment into space. We would be building new worlds in space. We would be traveling to far distant galaxies. We would be, probably in a universe full of life and find we are just being born to a universal community. I think through our biological revolution and our healing powers, we find that we do not need to get disease, that we can heal ourselves and eventually we can regenerate our bodies and have extended lives so that we will choose to die, and we will choose to live on, and we will not die like animals—choicelessly. 

I believe that when our information revolution is complete with mass communications, cybernetics, robotics, that it will be just like Jesus said, “Look at the lilies in the field, how they grow, and they toil not.” That work as we know it will pass away. The whole planet will have a nervous system that makes it possible for the crops to be monitored and the food to be distributed, and the physical work will be done by exquisite intelligence of human and machine, and we will be free to discover what it means to be fully human. And a child born when all of that is working would be a citizen of the cosmos. You know, it’s said we’ve only used 5 to 10% of our potential. We are going through the final exam. If we get through it without destruction, even in one or two generations, a child born in a cosmic civilization with all that capacity, each will be the genius that we are. I see a world of genius. And I think the most thrilling thing, Michael, is that we’re the generation of the shift. That means we’re a very special generation of all the generations on Earth. And in some sense, every man, woman, and child alive now needs to know, that if they can act out of their integrity the world can be, have an ever-evolving future, greater than anything that has been conceived except the great Mystics who did see it all. 
So, it’s the most thrilling time on Earth to be alive. Each of us needs to know it, and we need to communicate it out, and the people need to invent how to do it. That’s about where we are. 

Bucky: I think it’s very important to realize you can’t do any good thinking if you have good and bad people. Imagine, we clearly were designed to learn by trial and error. A great many people are out there making mistakes, very big mistakes for us all. And I don’t look on bad people at all. I’m absolutely convinced, you’re not in the crowd if you’re thinking you have good and bad. You have to understand the scheme of things… That’s where we are right now. The challenge has been enormous. And I feel sad about people having to make a mistake and often be blamed. And the sad thing about the media has been up to now, learned that if you have a newspaper or whatever, that you have to make some money. And then learned that advertising is only way you make it. You couldn’t make any money out of newspaper per se. And as advertising goes so does readership. So, the owners of newspapers have time and again to get that kind of news that sells best, and they found that bad news sells better than new good news. So, you talk about how your good news world, it’s not something to make money. Advertisers won’t back you if they want to make money.

Barbara: No. That’s right. We’re just going to make life. We’re going to, it’s going to be the next, it’s going to be out of love. And two things are very attractive to people on television now, is violence and negation and love. But this is the way. It’s the next step of love. So, I think I think it will work. 

Audience Member: Number one, could you give us concrete suggestions how we here, can verbalize and vitalize the philosophy we’ve been hearing tonight? And point B, have you ever considered serving on an advisory capacity at a university? 

Barbara: I have thought very much about a meta curriculum for the future. And I believe we need a new education altogether, in which the student from grade one all the way up would be introduced to the idea that each student is coming in to learn how to participate in the co-creation of the future. And they would study the whole of cosmic evolution as the spine of the university. And they would study personal evolution, how each of us can grow to optimize their potential. And then they look for their creative vocation, to not simply maintain themselves or get a job, but to do that which most needs to be done that they can best do. And all of education would be a process of learning how to be co-creative with God and evolution. I would love to work with any university on that idea. 

And as far as concrete suggestions, that is always the most difficult problem, just for the reason that Bucky says, it’s a matter of individual integrity. Way beyond the stage of one person being able to set up an organization in which other people are told what to do. So each of us has to look to our own highest, meditate, ask, seek the kind of experiences that many of us have had, and then take your own steps. It’s a matter of personal initiative, personal integrity, and I would make one suggestion. It’s the word networking. It’s a real important way of developing is if you have an intuition of a new kind of education or a new community or whatever. See who else feels the same and join together in small groups, and together you will find the way to do something new, outside existing bureaucracies and existing limitations. 

Michael: Barbara, when you say we all have the capacity, we all can do it. You do mean everyone don’t you?

Barbara: Everyone. That’s why I love that, “Behold, I show you a mystery, we shall not all sleep, we shall all be changed.” Every person on earth has it. 

Michael: So it’s really up to us.

Barbara: It’s up to us. And I think it’s really a privilege to be alive when we know that our acts are going to affect the destiny of the future forever and ever. And I think if everyone really understood the critical path (reference to Bucky’s book entitled The Critical Path), that we have the chance to do it in the next five to ten years. 

Bucky: I’ll rather quickly give to you. We have the universe that physically has gravity, holds the whole thing together. Radiation is trying to come apart, gravity holds it together. I find that phenomenon we call love, which is the most mysterious thing everybody experiences, is then, I would call it metaphysical gravity. Love is metaphysical gravity; it holds the whole thing together. 

Barbara: Love is metaphysical gravity and its love, expressed at the next level that we’ll do it.

Michael: On that note, we’re almost out of time, and I just wanna thank both of you, Bucky Fuller, Barbara Hubbard for sharing yourselves. Certainly, you’re both examples of the courage that you were talking about, that all of us need to express as we enter the challenging future. Thank you both. 

Barbara: Thank you, Michael. 
Credit Roll

Barbara: The crux of each experience is that we each felt an electric presence and a field of light that was stronger than ourselves and we felt almost being lifted up. And then we heard.  / If the positive could be reinforced in an exponential way, and you happen to be feeling alienated and you got near that field, you go woop! / That’s been the tradition of the billions of years of history.

Audience Member: But it’s just so, so subtle a change when you’re going into outer space, compared to your own inner path.

Barbara: Oh yeah. But we are doing both of them. 

Audience Member: … relationship between peoples and ah /.