Barbara Marx Hubbard

                                                                                                                        An excerpt from the book 'Conscious Evolution' by Barbara Marx Hubbard:

 

The world is ready for the advent of a new stage of human consciousness and action. It is time for a “planetary birth experience,” a collective awakening, an experience of shared empathy, love, and creativity. Just as we once evolved from Neanderthal to Homo sapiens through a mysterious set of circumstances, not fully understood, so now we are emerging as Homo universalis, a species capable of conscious evolution on Earth and beyond.

What are signs of the emergence of a new era of evolution? Ken Carey wrote in The Third Millennium:

A mother never knows exactly what hour she will give birth to her child, but she has a “due date,” an approximate time when the baby is expected and will most likely be born. For millennia now there have been those in various traditions of both East and West who have known that the earth has a due date sometime during the second decade of the 21st century. Though there will be much awakening of individuals prior to the first unified movement of the awakened planetary organism, this movement, like a first breath, will occur in but a single moment.

Let’s compare ourselves as a planetary organism to a biological organism just after birth. We are facing a trauma that could be compared to the trauma a baby faces after birth. We are Generation One, the first generation on this Earth to consciously be aware that we can destroy ourselves by our own actions or evolve ourselves by our own choices. We are struggling to coordinate ourselves as one global system, feeling the panic of running out of Mother Earth’s resources. We are learning to change our energy consumption, to grow our food in healthier ways, to handle our own waste, to stop overpopulating and polluting, and far more. As we do so, we are beginning to recognize we are all members of one planetary body.

The process is unfolding. Yet, as Teilhard de Chardin writes in The Future of Man, “The whole future of the Earth, as of religion, seems to me to depend on the awakening of our faith in the future.” At times, we live with an ominous sense of impending doom, which is realistic. We have never seen another planet go through a transition period wherein its inhabitants were able to create so many offspring, so much technology, and such high levels of pollution and waste. If we do not quickly adjust to our new condition, we may die. Our birth could be a death. The dangers we face are life threatening, just as the newborn infant faces critical problems that must be quickly handled or it will die.

Something more is needed to awaken us as a whole — an infusion of life, love, appreciation, and security to comfort us in our time of trial. Remember, everything that rises converges. The planetary dissipative structure is reaching maximum instability. Everything we do counts, especially in this critical time. Will the impulses of health and creativity prevail soon enough to counter the acceleration toward environmental and social breakdown?

Futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard is a prolific educator and author of seven books, including a revised and updated edition of her seminal work Conscious Evolution. She is an evolutionary thinker who believes that global change happens when we work collectively and selflessly for the greater good. Visit her online at http://www.evolve.org.   

Excerpted from the book, Conscious Evolution. Copyright © 2015 by Barbara Marx Hubbard. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.NewWorldLibrary.com.