Barbara Marx Hubbard invites us to ask the question, What do I have a passion to create? then, What do I need to create it? and finally, What resources do I have to share with others who are willing to help me create it? She says, The design of evolution is made apparent through our own passion to create, connect and evolve.
Barbara has been a pioneer in positive options for the future of humanity for 40 years. A public speaker, author and social innovator, she is president and executive director of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. She has been instrumental in the founding of many future-oriented organizations including the World Future Society, New Dimensions Radio, Global Family, Women of Vision and Action, the Foundations for the Future and the Association for Global New Thought.
In the 1960s, she published one of the first newsletters on evolutionary transformation called The Center Letter with the support of Dr. Abraham H. Maslow, founder of Humanistic Psychology. She worked closely with Dr. Jonas Salk and was one of the original contributors to the Salk Institute. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, was nominated for Vice President of the United States, and is considered by many as the philosophical heir to Buckminster Fuller.
Fuller, himself, described Barbara as, The best-informed human now alive regarding futurism. She is the author of five books, including The Hunger of Eve, The Evolutionary Journey, The Revelation: Our Crisis Is a Birth, Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, and Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence, Ten Steps to the Universal Human. She is the mother of five and the grandmother of eight, and resides in Santa Barbara, California.
Cynthia Kersey, who is a bestselling author of Unstoppable and Unstoppable Women, interviewed Barbara for this article. Cynthia has helped thousands of people around the world connect with their own unstoppable nature. You can learn more about Cynthia’s practical programs for getting your life on an unstoppable track by going to www.Unstoppable.net. Cynthia, Barbara, and Chris Attwood are working together to design what’s called the Circles of Brilliance for the revolutionary organization, Humanity Unites Brilliance.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: It is my honor to be able to interview Barbara. Barbara, with all of the things that you’ve accomplished, what do you do in your spare time?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: It’s amazing because the longer you live the more creativity there seems to be.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: You take creativity to a whole new level. I’m really excited to learn more about this. Obviously, the first thing that comes forward to me is your passion. Anyone who’s around you really experiences your passion for life. At the top of this interview, how has your passion really played out in your life?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: That’s a very good question. I think it played out by starting off with a really deep question when the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on Japan. The question was, What is the meaning of all our new power that is good? What is the vision of our future equal to science, technologies, spirituality? I thought somebody knew. I began to read and look for images of the positive future. You couldn’t find them.
There was life after death, there was Armageddon, there was science fiction, and there were negative futures. I suddenly realized that without vision, people do perish. I became a seeker after a vision equal to our new powers. That quest ignited a passion in me that was really transcendent to any specific thing. It was like many scientists have, or artists or people like that. It seems to me that the deeper force of creation, the God-force, gets inside us and presses us towards certain larger purposes, larger than our own life could even accomplish.
When that happens to you and you say yes to it, you get turned on to the life-force. I got turned on to the life-force, and it led to me being, at almost 78-and-a-half, still at the emergent edge of my own creativity. The quest for the meaning of our power, the direction of evolution, is endless. It’s a big question. You could have smaller passions within the bigger one.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: Right, exactly. At 78-and-a-half years of age, what do you see as your greatest passion right now?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: My greatest passion right now is to find a way to connect people and their passions to create in such a way that we can have a quantum jump on planet Earth. We see the crises that are facing us on all fronts, but we also know there are innovations and solutions. There’s passion in millions of us, billions of us, that isn’t yet expressed.
I have felt all my life that if there’s a way for that passion in the people to be connected, expressed and fulfilled, that we’d have everything we need on this earth. I’m very interested in HUB for this reason and in building a wheel of co-creation where people could enter in their passions to create, their needs and their resources and be connected within a wheel of co-creation. I would say that’s become my greatest passion.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: I want to talk about that in more depth later in the interview, but what I’d like to do first is start back in the beginning. In your book, The Hunger of Eve, you talk about your own personal transformational story as a child who was born in an agnostic, materialistic family. Tell me about your own evolution from this little girl to who you are today.
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: It’s a really good story. I was born in 1929, so none of this was obvious to us. My father was a toymaker. One thing I found out early is I had too many toys. I had his toys and all his competitors’ toys, and I realized more toys wouldn’t do it. Once you had enough toys, the question was, What are you going to do?
My father was a very exciting man to me, but I knew I couldn’t just do what he did.
To make a long story short, I began this quest after I was 15, and then I actually got married to an artist, Earl Hubbard. I lost the question, lost the quest, of self-development because I became pregnant. When the milk came in, I remember clearly my desire for self-expression changed to my desire for the child. In the 50s when I got married, we didn’t really have much of an identity beyond wife and mother.
We didn’t have a sense of vocation, even for educated women in the United States. I found meaning to having my children. After the child was weaned and began to grow, that old longing for something more would come up in my life. Then I’d have another baby and another baby. I had five. Then I got depressed. The depression was not that I didn’t love my children, not that I didn’t love my husband.
It wasn’t until I read Abraham Maslow that I saw what it was. I hadn’t found my vocation. I loved my children, but my vocation, my passion to create, was not so much motherhood as it was something else. At that stage, it was unknown. The local psychiatrist was a Freudian, so he thought something was wrong with me. I was ‘neurotic’. How could I want something more?
Finally, through Maslow and Buckminster Fuller, Teilhard de Chardin, and other great thinkers and writers, I began to see that my desire for something more was actually the universal force of creation within me. Far from being neurotic, I was what I call ‘the universe in person’. Everyone has within them the force of creation. Instead of putting a negative sign on my quest, I realized I hadn’t found my life purpose.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: How did you find that?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: Once I knew that that was the problem, that the problem wasn’t that I was neurotic or just a discontent person, but that I hadn’t tapped in, what I began to do-and this is where I think I can be helpful to anyone-is I began to follow the compass of joy. I began to follow what attracted me. I would read, and I would reach out.
When I read Abraham Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being, I liked him so much I called him up. I said, I think you saved my life. Would you like to come to lunch? And he did!
CYNTHIA KERSEY: You’re kidding!
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: I got into the habit of reaching out toward what attracted me. That would then light up this small little flame of a person inside. This small little flame was a person who had something to express in the world, but I didn’t know what it was. The more people I met who attracted me, the more I was able to identify that particular passion.
Don’t forget, this was in the late 50s, early 60s. It was really before the women’s movement, the peace movement, the civil rights movement and the futurist movement. It was really early in the gestation of what we are now seeing as this passionate, creative human being.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: It’s interesting. It takes a lot of confidence and courage to reach out and call Abraham Maslow and actually get him on the phone. Where did that confidence come from, or that boldness?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: I think desperation.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: Really?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: In the sense that it was a combination of frustration and something else. Let’s see; that’s a good question. I actually began to feel that I knew something important. I had the confidence to reach out. That’s a good question. Sometimes in my life I have not had that confidence. I’ve lost my self-confidence. That time I think it was the early 60s. We began to get a sense of something new happening.
I felt I was part of something. I think I didn’t feel so alone. I read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystic. She said that thousands and thousands of women felt sad because there was something more they wanted to do. Instead of feeling like a neurotic person, between Maslow and Betty Friedan, I began to say, If I do this, I’m not just doing it for myself alone.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: I hear a purpose emerging even at that point in your life.
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: I began to feel by reaching out that I was on a discovery that would be valuable not only to me, but to others. What I could see around me where I lived there in exurbia, just beyond even suburbia, was that people were disappointed in life. They were trying to make everybody comfortable, and I could see that comfort alone does not activate your joy. I didn’t want to be like that. I was an early one in this generation. Now it’s very clear, but it wasn’t so clear then.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: How did your husband respond to this discomfort, or not just taking status-quo as is?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: That’s a very good question. He was an artist, so I saw my role as helping him get out in the world. I was his editor. I helped him get shows in New York. I was quite inventive. It was fine as long as I was helping him. One day, he was speaking and I suddenly started to cry. The tears were falling, and I didn’t even know what it was.
He said to me, What’s the matter? I said, I realize I have something to say, too. This was before the women’s movement. He said to me, Then I won’t be able to make you happy. I said, That’s true. This was like a shock to us.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: He said that to you, that he wouldn’t be able to make you happy?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: Yes. He said, I’m the genius. I’m the creator. I’m doing it for you, Barbara. It was really very touching. He loves me. What he didn’t know and I didn’t know is that you can’t be made happy by somebody else’s creativity. Then I was shocked. What happened was I began to speak because my vocation that I discovered was a communicator, just exactly what I’m doing now.
At that time it was to communicate the big story of creation, the fact that for billions of years, nature had been evolving, and now we were being born as a more universal humanity. I had a big, big story to tell there.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: To say the least.
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: Within the big story are all the little stories. Here’s the real truth of it: unless each of us feels we’re part of a bigger story, the smaller stories don’t have the same power.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: That’s really profound. Was he supportive? How did your career evolve?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: At first he was supportive, but then I began to reach out and traveled without him. I had five children. I finally got somebody to help me with the children. I had done it 90% myself. In my early 30s, Cynthia, I just burst out. I met people. I met, for example, Dr. Jonas Salk. He called me up one day because I had written a letter about something he was doing. He said, Mrs. Hubbard, this is Dr. Salk. We are two peas in the same genetic pod.
He said, Could I take you to lunch? He came to call on me. It was in September of 1964, just at the beginning of all of this. He looked at me when he opened the door and said, This is like the Garden of Eden. It was in Lakeville. It was very beautiful. I said, Yes, I’m Eve, and I’m leaving. I was leaving the whole cultural role. As the cultural imprint, I had only the identity of a support to others.
In those days, stepping out was really potent. I didn’t step out so much into the feminist movement. I stepped out into the evolutionary movement, which is slightly different. The evolutionary movement is the movement of trying to see what’s emergent for the future. It depends on all these other movements. The liberation of women is essential to it. I jumped into being an evolutionary futurist. It’s my nature.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: Interesting. It’s funny. What kind of preparation was there? How did you prepare yourself for that role?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: I did a lot of reading. When I realized that my vocation was to be a storyteller of stories of evolutionary potential, the way I started was really funny. I’d be invited to cocktail parties and somebody would say, How are you, Barbara? and I would try to tell them. Fourteen billion years ago… I would go into this enormous, long-winded speech; they called it ‘hosing’. After a while people said, Barbara, we don’t want to know how you are. It was too much for them.
I began to calibrate my passion. I found that if you’re too passionate with somebody else about what you think you’re doing and they don’t feel part of it, instead of being inspired by you, they’re put off by you. I learned to actually be a better communicator through listening to other people, to finding out where their passion to create was, and how I could participate with them and not just have them listen to me.
I think this is very important for anyone with their passion, to realize that the better able you are to communicate it in relationship to other people’s passions, the more effective it is.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: Exactly. Fast-forward 50-some years, or whatever. Very quickly, when did you start the Foundation for Conscious Evolution?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: Even before the foundation, I got a divorce in 1970 when I was 40 years old. I moved to Washington D.C., and I founded the Committee for the Future. That was before the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. I brought my children to Washington. In those days, the communication skills between the woman and man, if the woman started to grow, I didn’t have the skills.
If this had happened to me now, I think I would have been able to communicate to my husband earlier that this wasn’t working for me. I didn’t know how to do it. When I found that I had a way of expressing my life purpose and that it had to be in Washington where I could meet people, I did it. I took my children with me. I founded the Committee for the Future, and I began to do SYNCON conferences for Synergistic Convergence.
We built big wheels in auditoriums and brought people together-very diverse, very opposing people-to look for common goals that match needs and resources. I was completely attracted to the process of being creative in the world.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that, the Synergistic Convergence? Explain exactly what that is.
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: This came first of all from my discovery that we were a species that had problems on earth, and that we could solve these problems, we could evolve ourselves spiritually and socially, and we could move ourselves, restoring the earth, freeing ourselves into exploring and developing the solar system. We were at the threshold of radical abundance just at the time when we thought we were limited here.
We are somewhat limited here, but not ultimately limited at all. My new partner, John Whiteside, and I realized that there was no place in our society to look at long-range positive goals. We created in auditoriums large wheels, and we did the first one at Southern Illinois University. We had movable walls, so here was the environmental sector, the health sector, the economic sector, the government sector and so on.
We had innovators and creators at the growing edge in task forces. The idea was people would go in and state the goals of that sector, what needs they had to realize those goals, and what resources they would like to share with others. We took down walls between sectors. We literally took down removable walls, and different sectors like technology and environment would meet; or business and the arts would meet.
They would look for common goals. Eventually, we took down all the walls, and the people met in an assembly of the whole. The great scientists and innovators gave their sense of what our human potential actually is. We met beyond the barriers of the separations that structure creates. Like the US Congress, it’s all separated in academic disciplines. There are separate disciplines.
We discovered the power of the whole. I think we tapped into the beginning of a more synergistic or cooperative democracy. We had 25 of these events for Synergistic Convergence and every single time, whether it was gangs in Los Angeles or scientists in Huntsville, Alabama, we found that there is a natural tendency in human nature and society to form wholes out of separate parts. It was a very powerful experience for everyone.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: After you had 25 of those conferences, what were your key learnings from that experience?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: My key learnings were that at every sector of the wheel, the goals are quite the same no matter what type of group it was; and that when you took down the walls between people’s goals, needs, and resources and matched needs with resources, there was more than enough to accomplish everybody’s goals. At that time there was a lot of opposition; for example, black power leaders or environmentalists who literally hated technologists.
They would be opposing each other to begin with, but as the process continued, the quest for common goals and matching needs with resources led to this idea that everybody got more of what they wanted through cooperating than they did through opposing.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: What is your vision when you look at that model? What is your vision for society? What would be available to a society that operated like that?
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: I think we would have a social function-like now we can have the vote-which would be that everyone who is excited would have a chance to say, My passion to create is…, and this is where it relates to this whole theme. My passion to create is…, My needs are…, My resources are…, and they would put that into an Internet wheel.
The technology would help them find out who in their area shares their passions. They would form Circles of Brilliance. The Circles of Brilliance would connect not only within the particular sector, like environment or health, but would connect the cross-sectors and you would actually not only have Internet, but you’d have town meetings in-the-round. We would begin to see social cooperation as a process.
I think that wouldn’t have been possible really until the Internet came along. Now, with Internet and its ability, one of the exciting things to me in working with the HUB team is the Circles of Brilliance are already forming around people’s passion to create.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: It’s interesting, Barbara, because when you think about society at large, people aren’t thinking about what they are passionate to create. Most people are in survival mode: What kind of job do I need to get, and how much money can I make? It isn’t really about creating something they’re passionate about. What to me is exciting is really shifting people’s consciousness. What can I bring into the world? What is it that excites me? Then literally, instead of operating from scarcity, you’re saying, Here are the resources I can support you with.
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: Exactly. I think part of the problem is the way we’re seeing the news and the state of the world. If you watch the news, you will not see any examples of people whose passions to create are joining. You don’t even get emotionally involved. I think that when we have more of the news of what it feels like to be passionate around creating, that the person who is passionate to create becomes attractive and attracts more energy to their lives.
Then if you see the story of that person, if that’s the news, what we’re creating, then it’s very contagious. It’s always interesting to me how much pornography there is on television. It seems to me like a problem of not knowing where the creative drive really wants to go. There’s substance abuse, there’s violence, there’s pornography, and there’s depression. A lot of that is suppressed creativity.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: You know, Barbara, what I find interesting is there are a lot of great stories, and people are creating and pursuing their passions, and yet it doesn’t seem to hit the media.
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: The media has a filter. I think of it as an infantile planetary nervous system. It picks up pain and dissension, and it puts us to sleep. It’s immature. If you get into smaller publications, radio shows, or Internet, there’s a lot of this. Until the newer technologies of communication came out, it seems like the mass media and the corporate control of that mass media have a vested interest in supporting the existing problems and the existing world view. We don’t get out there. We’re not known as the news. I think we are the news wherever something is passionate to create. That’s where I think the news really is.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: As a society when we really step more powerfully into that consciousness, I think that media will have to follow eventually.
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: I think it will. I do believe what Bill Moyers said, We have to gain hold of the story ourselves. There are many sites on the Internet now where they’re trying to do the new news, the good news. I think that what we need to make it really exciting is the genuine context, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, with all these characters in it.
Ours is evolution or extinction; evolution or ‘de-volution’ and self-destruction. If you put good news in the context of shifting the tide of human history rather than small things against the tide of history, I think the drama is evolution or extinction. That’s really a major drama of our time. Because the media doesn’t have the context, it doesn’t get the content right either.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: Right. You talk about moving into universal human consciousness, and today we are plagued with really unprecedented challenges from the depletion of our environmental resources, global warming and the lack of social justice. We could make a big, long list. Yet, at the same time, there is this movement. It’s the largest ever social movement in history that’s rising up to work toward a different type of outcome. Tell us what that means in terms of your universal human consciousness.
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: I once tried to do a list of categories of what’s really emerging and creative. It’s huge. I’ll just list them for you very briefly. The first one is what Paul Hawken writes about in Blessed Unrest. It’s all the responses to crises: the environmental movement, the civil rights movement and the movements of people dealing with immediate emergencies like poverty, disease, and those movements.
That, according to Paul Hawken, is the biggest mass movement in the history of humanity. It’s all under the radar of the media, because nobody’s famous and nobody has much money. The second one is the whole learning of nature’s wisdom; not just pure environmentalism, but understanding that we’re part of a vast intelligence of nature. How can we grow like nature does, not only just recycling but actually building so there’s no waste? It’s a huge movement.
Then the third one is human potential and spiritual growth. If you map the number of spiritual- and personal-growth movements, teachers, books, networks and trainings, you’d find hundreds of millions of people evolving. Then add social innovations like microcredit loans, which is huge. Then, finally, high technologies; nanotech, biotech, computing, and there you see we’re transcending the creature/human condition.
I put all that together and see it as a response to the crisis. If connected and if seen, it’s enough already. It’s enough. The number of people who are turned on, if they are connected, if we know what’s emergent, it’s enough. I think the reason this could happen quickly is so much of it’s already happening. That’s where I go back to the wheel of co-creation. It needs to be connected.
People’s passions from the simplest act all the way on up to very sophisticated projects, need to be connected not only with people who share that particular interest, but in health, education and economics. It’s part of a whole system. We’re very close. I think the next four or five years we’ll see the connectivity of that which is emergent.
CYNTHIA KERSEY: When you said it’s enough just to see it, expand on that a little bit.
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