Thank you so very much. I didn’t know what a remarkable place I was coming into. I’m really thrilled to be here, and I thought—as I was hearing this brilliant talk that microbes affect our state of mind—that I could frame my talk by saying the worldview you hold affects your state of mind. It goes to the very, very large scale. If you’re in a worldview in which God is in control of everything, that’s a worldview where your behavior changes. If you enter the Renaissance, and the worldview of the individual, of democracy, and eventually science and technology and power, you have a progressive worldview. And when I graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1951, we had lost our progressive worldview because we’d had two world wars, the atomic bomb, and the beginning of the environmental dangers. So it was no longer possible to be hopeful from the existing worldview we had. And my husband was an artist who went to New York. It was absurdism, existentialism, nihilism, scientific materialism, and I had this innate sense of hope. So I decided I had to find out what I was going to be hopeful about. Because the hope was innate, but it was not being reinforced by the cultural worldview I was in—or we were in together.
So I want to tell you about the discovery of a new worldview, which I call conscious evolution, that even from my own personal point of view has radically changed my life from depression and a feeling of being trapped to a sense of life ever-evolving. And the people who are influenced by this worldview tend to feel the same way. And I’ll just say very briefly that it did start after I had five children in the 1950s, and I was one of the women that Betty Friedan spoke about—that we had last our sense of identity, our sense of purpose, and this depression was very rampant in educated women in the late 50s. And so I decided to see if I could possibly discover what to do about my depression. I had a Freudian analysis, and that was not accurate, so… I’ll tell you my path upward.
It really started with a telephone call from Dr. Jonas Salk. And it was a completely surprising call, but I had written a little article on an idea he had had, which was called the “theater of man.” And he wanted to dramatize how biology had led into the human life, and how we could learn from biology how to become more sane and fruitful as humans. And so I wrote this little paper, sent it to Gerry O’Neill of Scientific American. Gerry O’Neill sent it to Jonas Salk, Jonas Salk called me up. And I just had my fifth child and I was depressed. And he said, “Mrs. Hubbard, this is Dr. Salk.” I said, “Yes?” He said, “You have written my vision better than I could have. We are two peas in the same genetic pod. Can I take you to lunch?” And the sound of his voice did something to me. And when he took me to lunch—and it was a beautiful day in the Berkshires in September, and the apple orchards were glowing—and he said, “This is like the garden of Eden.” I said, “Yes. I’m Eve, and I’m leaving.” And on the way down to New York from Connecticut I told him everything that was wrong with me.
Well, what was wrong with me is: I had a sense something great was about to happen. I sensed I had a part in a greater purpose of life. I was thrilled about something that I didn’t know what it was, but I told him all these difficulties I was having. And he said, “Barbara, this is not what’s wrong about you. This is what’s right about you! You are a mutant.” Coming from Jonas Salk you could take it as a compliment, I guess. But he said, “I’m going to introduce you to a few others.” And at that time he introduced me to Dr. Joel Elkes of Johns Hopkins, he introduced me to Al Rosenfeld, the science editor of Life magazine, and Louis Kahn the architect—they were all evolutionaries. And something happened to me by finding a few other human beings that had an innate sense that life was progressive, that it was going somewhere. And I truly transformed my attention. Then I began to research into the field of conscious evolution, which at that time didn’t have a name.
And by far the person that was most meaningful to me was Teilhard de Chardin, and the book The Phenomenon of Man. And when I found that book—see, I knew I was a mutant, but that didn’t really sound good. I had to find some better way of describing myself to myself, and it didn’t give me any sense of what to do about it. As I read Teilhard—as you probably are all familiar with this well-known book, The Phenomenon of Man—basically, he discovered purpose, direction, and meaning in evolution, leading to ever-progressive order to the point where the noösphere—the thinking layer of Earth, which Peter Russell has called and made famous as the global brain—was going to turn on.
And if and when—the discovery was the Law of Complexity-Consciousness: as systems become more complex, they jump in consciousness, freedom, and order. And he saw this impulse of evolution within the entire billions of years of evolution as (in his language as a Jesuit priest) basically God in evolution and divine purpose. But it could be considered implicate order, it could be considered a mysterious process of universal intelligence. But every single turn on the spiral was going to higher consciousness, greater freedom, and more synergistic, or interactive or—in some sense—loving order. Because more parts were connected together to make a whole. And when he saw that the coming-together of the noösphere—the thinking layer of Earth; this was before the Internet—but he saw that. I intuitively know that was right. And I’m probably one of the very few people to fall in love with the noösphere in the 60s: I got a feeling of purpose. Not only did evolution for billions of years rise to higher complexity, higher order, and greater freedom of choice to destroy or create, but it was going somewhere that—if we got there he saw that if that thinking layer of Earth were to be filled with love, innovation, and creativity—it would be like the nervous system of a newborn baby. It would connect the whole planetary organism, which is a living planetary organism, into a state—in his language—of the Christ-ification of Earth. And I’ve come to call it a planetary awakening, a planetary birth, a global brain turning on. There are many versions of it.
But when I saw that evolution had a direction and a purpose—it was going somewhere—and the place it was going was the same place in me that was yearning to be more, do more, love more, and create more, which had turned me into (from the Freudian analysis) a neurotic. And Jonas had said that I was a mutant, and what Teilhard de Chardin said—that there were two types of people on this Earth, he thought. One was called Homo progressivus. Homo progressivus is the type that, by some mysterious reason, thinks that something is emerging, that knew that they don’t know what it is. They’re attracted toward the future as a process emerging toward the unknown. That was totally me! Attracted to the future progressing toward the unknown. The other type was called the bourgeois, who didn’t like the unknown and wanted to hold it exactly as it was. And he felt that the ones attracted to the future would eventually be animated by the ability to participate in that, whereas the ones trying to hold on—which we can see now in reactionary politics, in reactionary religions, in reactionary efforts of all kinds to hold on in this period of radical change—we can see that the Homo progressivus is proliferating. The mutants are arising! And I have this feeling of mutants popping up. You know, seeing all those microorganisms? Maybe they’ve got more heat inside, or that the microorganisms got in somehow, or we are the microorganisms of humans.
Because there’s absolutely no reason to assume that evolution stops here, with a self-centered, self-conscious genius of a species, great at overpopulating, polluting, and killing, and creating and inventing the powers of gods. Well, if I were God, I would say, “We’re just getting started, folks!” We’re just getting started, and I think the evolutionary mutants, the Homo progressivus, have a clue here of enormous significance. And I began to discover—through a lot of revelations and different types of reading—a worldview that I’m calling conscious evolution. I believe that it will be the next step after self-conscious humanity. And if you think of about 50,000 years ago, when self-reflective consciousness came into the world, there was no understanding of how new that was to the people who were experiencing it in a Neanderthal and early human world. Self-consciousness was a new species that emerged.
What I began to understand is that in our generation—particularly with the two world wars and the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the powers to destroy all of life—that nature was creating a mutation in the species. And that the consciousness of the type of human who innately loved the Earth, innately cared for each other, innately was yearning for greater meaning and conscious evolution—that I was one of those, and that conscious evolution arose right along with the possibility of destruction of our whole life support system. And it arose with, first of all, the awareness of cosmogenesis. Cosmogenesis was discovered in the 1960s. That’s why it’s not in politics, it’s not in universities in general, it’s certainly not in global corporations, it’s not in the Vatican. Where… it isn’t there yet. It’s just emerging.
But what I realized is: we are the first species on the face of this Earth to be aware of evolution, to be aware that we are affecting our own evolution by everything that we do—the babies we eat [Curator's note: hopefully a mere slip of the tongue!], the food we eat, the wars we fight. We are the first species to begin to understand: not only are we aware of evolution, but we are evolution! We are evolution in person. And when you really think about it, our beings are a résumé of the entire story of creation—from the original “flaring-forth,” as Brian Swimme called it. Every atom, molecule, cell, reptilian brain, mammalian brain, human brain, and perhaps evolutionary brain—which I think is a form of brain—that is actually picking up the entire pattern of creation as incarnate in you!
And the next thing about conscious evolution is: since we are aware of this, evolution itself has evolved from unconscious evolution—where most of the species that were extinct before us (that’s billions of them) didn’t know that they were rendering themselves extinct by any means—we know! And the crisis that we’re facing—that we are now aware that we are certainly, in part, causing—is the greatest wake-up call that the human species has ever had. We’ve been told to love one another by every great tradition in the world, but it isn’t quite enough as long as we were able to grow this way. But now that we’ve hit a limit to growth of this form of consciousness, this form of behavior, the people who are alerted to something new emerging within themselves, within the world, and possibly within the species itself, are proliferating an—when I first met Jonas Salk in the 1960s, he was the first human being I had ever met who was an evolutionary. Now look at us! We’re all over the place. I can’t even go to the marketplace without meeting an evolutionary. Because we’re interested; people are fascinated with personal growth, with psychological growth, and with the societal challenges we’re facing.
So Teilhard de Chardin was my first. And I was able to recognize a new self-identity: I/we are the universe in person. This is how cosmogenesis shows up as people! We’re the résumé of the entire story, and whatever impulse we have within us is the same impulse from that big bang and the flaring-forth, and what Andrew Cohen calls the continuous inner big bang. It hasn’t stopped, it’s right in every one of us. Then, when I read Sri Aurobindo, the great Indian sage—particularly the book Life Divine—magnificent! At 27 years in silence while the mother built [???]. Basically, he saw the same thing. What Teilhard did for Catholicism was saying: if you don’t understand evolution, religion will fade out and die. Basically, he looked at Buddhism and the Vedas, saw the greatness in them—as Teilhard certainly did with Jesus and the Catholics—but he said the end of the world is not about getting off the wheel of life, it’s about getting on with the wheel of life to the next stage of evolution. And as Teilhard called us “ultra-humanity”—when the noösphere would get its collective eyes—we would be connected through our extended nervous system with the intelligence of the entire world and beyond, which is what’s happening with our little cell phones, Aurobindo actually foresaw a new species. He called it the gnostic human. And the mother, even into her 90s, was attempting to affect the life of her cells. I have ten volumes in my library called The Mutation of the Cells. And she felt we would no longer be animal humans, and that through the very power of her innate evolutionary intelligence that she was going to be able to bring in the supermental intelligence. And the supermental intelligence is the intelligence of the evolutionary process itself. And if the evolutionary process itself could take us from nothing to this, and if you are incarnating the evolutionary process, and you have the intention to be more, do more, love more, create more, and be a new species—why not? Maybe it’s evolution by choice, not by chance. Is basically what she was saying.
And Jonas took me around, and I went to the labs of the biologists, and they had stamped out physical death. That was in those years, in the 1960s, 1965. And he was very concerned about it because, as you all well know more than most here, is that the effect of the biological revolution on human enhancement, human transformation—and then, if you add the high-tech movement of nanotech, biotech, quantum computing, robotics, what really is happening here? If we would be able to take Teilhard’s noösphere being infused with love and creativity and combine it with high-technology impelled by love, what do we see? We can restore the Earth, we can free the people from wanton destruction, we can transform the military-industrial complex to build new worlds on Earth and new worlds, eventually, in the universe. Because, folks, we’re one teeny-weeny little planet in a universe of billions of planets. And I just heard—I don’t know if you read recently—that the latest galaxy they discovered is only 50 billion years away. The scope, the scale in which little planet Earth is born in a universe like this! It is my intuition that, when we gain a certain degree of resonance, and the noösphere (the global brain) were to be infused with a state of consciousness of love, creativity, oneness and interiority, that we will find we’re not alone as a shared experience for humanity.
So when I use the phrase “our story is the birth of a co-evolving, co-creative humanity,” I really think that’s true. But the first step we have to do right here on earth. And so Aurobindo gave me the realization that this impulse in me towards higher life and really the evolution of humanity itself was going in the right direction. And then I encountered Buckminster Fuller. These were my three. Jonas Salk, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo. Now, Buckminster Fuller really had the design science revolution. He really understood we have the resources, technology, and know-how to make the world work for all. And he saw that social synergy and synergetics was the way it had to happen. So if you think of Teilhard de Chardin, the Law of Complexity-Consciousness: as systems become more complex, they obviously become more interactive, with separate parts coming together to form radically new whole systems greater than the sum of the parts. So, in a way, the way nature does it is not only by individual organisms, but the coming-together of separate organisms—like our bodies with 50 trillion cells (not even counting the microbes)—organized as a body. It’s so phenomenal that, if it is possible that the Earth is a living system, and the very same capacity that could get amoebas to create multi-cells and multi-cellular animals and all the way up the sequence of complexity, we’re right at a threshold of complexity here. That if the resonance within us could possibly create a field of consciousness of sufficient wholeness, that the very same organizing tendency of Universe that has created from single cells to multi-cells all the way on up to this planet Earth at a phrase of either over-complexity and disintegration and entropy, or higher order, syntropy, connectivity of separate parts to make a new whole greater than and different than the sum of the parts, and that we’re the generation right at the crossover point of devolution and destruction or evolution and radical transformation.
And I began to then ask what would be the vision of radical transformation? We have no vision in our culture about where we might possibly be going equal to our new power. And I began to take the new capacities personally. And I had a couple of meditations where I would think and I’d think, “I have the global intelligence of the noösphere.” The global brain—I’m in it. I can travel with the speed of light. And I began to expand myself by taking personally the extended capabilities of humanity until I could feel myself, you might say, to become a universal human. But not as an eccentric, sub-normal or super-normal, but as a new norm! Wow! Then I began to teach on the Shift Network on the Internet. And my first course was called “Agents of Conscious Evolution.” And that we are an agency. And that the impulse within us for life purpose—for unique expression of what we’re meant to do in this world—this personal impulse toward vocation and calling is the impulses of the core of the evolutionary spiral going through every one of us. And when we say yes to it, when we discover unique life purpose, I really believe we incarnate the impulse of evolution. That’s what must have happened to you! You must have incarnated the impulse uniquely as you. And when you think of incarnating the impulse as your vocation, and you say yes to it, there’s a new kind of nondualism that I’d like to talk over with you, brother David.
Could it be nondualism with the impulse of evolution rather than with the oneness and the infinite, it is oneness with that which is impelling life, universally, forward toward higher order. And in my class—and I’ve got thousands of students that I got on Shift Network and other ways—they are all agencies of evolution, and I have to tell you: most of them are women over 50. So I wouldn’t be at all surprised that they are early birds of the new species. And then, to give you just a few thoughts—any women over 50 in this group. Yes! They’re the best, I tell you! And when they give you a few personal stories, then I discovered for myself about women over 50. See, I found all of this out around about 50. I was building up to it with Teilhard and Aurobindo and all of that.
I have to just tell you very briefly: I became aware that the United States of America had a destiny that we were not fulfilling because we didn’t have any vision of where we were going. And so at the request of Buckminster Fuller, he said to me, “I think you should run for President of the United States and bring women into politics to discuss the new options for the future of humanity.” My husband said, “If you do that, I’ll die.” I didn’t do it right off. But what I did do—in 1984, I was guided by lots of friends. It was the year of the woman, and I should run to be selected as the Vice President of the United States on the Democratic ticket. Now, I’ll just tell you this story briefly, but it is totally amazing: the chance of me getting nominated for Vice President of the United States is zero minus a million. And I was told I’d be lucky to get one delegate if she were my mother. What you have to do to be nominated for Vice President of the United States is: you have to get over 200 delegates. And if you do get over 200 delegates, they have to put you up there to make a speech before the world. So anyway, what I did was I went around talking just like I’m talking now, and I had a great, simple idea that the Vice President should have a new function. I called it a peace room as sophisticated as a war room. Take all the technologies of how to get every enemy and how to defeat them, use the same technology to discover innovation, creativity, solutions, and breakthroughs in every field of endeavor, connect them, and the Vice President should communicate them every week to the world—what works in America, what works in the world, and how would you like to participate? Wow! I mean, it’s so… it is totally a good idea! It’s so simple that you can hardly believe it. But I went around to all these little communities. I said I’m running for Vice President of the United States to my friends, I have a fundraising party, would you give a party for me for Vice President? It was so weird. But everybody said yes. I had party after party.
And everywhere I went with my friend I would say these things, but I would talk as the impulse of evolution; that we have this coming and everyone has a greater purpose. And the people I gathered—Hazel Henderson said, “You make a certain bird call, you get a certain kind of bird.” I got a certain kind of bird! Like me. I mean, I didn’t know how to call them all mutants at the time, but I got the mutants! I put out the signal, got the mutants. And they all started to cluster in small groups and resonate. They began to want to discover higher purpose, they wanted to have their own insights expressed in their communities. There’s somebody from Santa Fe here, I think, who knew the person who was one of the very best—we call them “Positive Future Centers:” everybody wanted to form a center for it. And I said, “What is it?” The it was the center in themselves, shared for spiritual and social purpose. So everywhere I went, a Positive Future Center formed—that’s what we called them. And they had two goals: to work with themselves, to love one another, to work in their community, and to do everything they could to intend for me to be nominated for the Vice President of the United States.
So when I got to the time of the Convention, I had no money, no media, and no passes to the floor, because the Democratic party would not recognize me because I was a “human potentialist.” Meaning—that was the days of the touchy-feely, I loved people—the news media couldn’t cover me because I had nothing but looking for the positive. I couldn’t possibly be the news. So I finally was allowed in by the wife of the Governor of Colorado who knew me. And I brought my ten friends with me. And our goal, in two days, was 200 delegates to sign a petition to nominate me for Vice President, and I had none! None. And so my first talk was 5:30 a.m., South Dakota, 30 seconds. And I said it: “I’m Barbara Marx Hubbard, I’m running for Vice President. I want to put a Peace Room in the White House to map, track, and connect what’s working in the world. And if you give me your vote for Vice President, I’m going to make a speech from the Democratic party to say: this is your purpose. And then you can nominate Geraldine Ferraro if you want.” In other words, I didn’t tell them that I wanted them to expect me to be Vice President. I told them: “Would you give me the chance to say this from the greatest platform of the Democratic party? And if you do, I’ll speak on your behalf.” I got over 200 delegates. It’s really amazing.
And I think it was two things. One, I had a very good idea. The other was: the ninety Positive Future Centers resonating. I think they bewitched the Democratic delegates. You know? We have healing at a distance? You have politics at a distance! They were zapping it, and we were… it was amazing! And so when the guard led me up the stairs to the big platform that we’d visualized in all these little churches and small groups around the country, he whispered in my ear, “Now honey, they won’t pay any attention to you. They never do. You’re saying this for the universe.” I said it as for the universe, and you can see it on YouTube.
What that did for me when I went down from that—I was very confused, because there was no way for me to follow up on this. I had no way that I was going to be able to create a political movement out of this, because I wasn’t even a politician. I’m a story-teller. I have a story to tell that there is an emerging new worldview and we’re all part of it. So I want to, then, tell you that, as I became a teacher in this, I realized from the fact of what I was able to do in the Democratic National Convention—and I had just read about Ilya Prigogine and the study of dissipative structures. And the amazing reality of how nature has gone from entropy to syntropy—from disorder to higher order—for billions and billions of years. And Peter Russell was trying to describe to me why the scientists believe that entropy inevitably increases—inevitably in a closed system, because the universe is a closed system. Meaning the whole universe is going down to a heat death. Whereas—I didn’t have time to finish this conversation with Peter—but nature, for billions of years, has been eating entropy. It eats disorder to higher order.
That was my clue. We have disorder on this Earth. What if we create social syntropy, connecting the separate parts to make a greater whole? Could we take that jump by consciously evolving a more synergystic democracy? And I developed with my partner John Whiteside, who was chief officer of information for the Air Force in New York—I had a tremendous love of the space program. I loved the high technologists. Not only the biologists, but the space scientists. And I got to know them very well. And it became obvious to me that if we were to change our goal from just the lunar landing to having an Earth-Space human development program for the next 30 years, we could restore the Earth, free the people, and have a foothold in the solar system. We’d be a new species. We would become a universal species. So I got many people—we went to Mr. Rockwell, we went to Congress, we went to different businesses. Everybody said it’s a good idea, but the other guy won’t get it. So my friend John Whiteside said, “Let’s put them all in a wheel.” And we did, at Southern Illinois University—which was Buckminster Fuller’s university—we did the first SYNCON (for “Synergistic Convergence”). And what we did is: we built, on an auditorium like this, a huge wheel. And the students designed it. So there were removable walls between every sector. Here was health, here was education, here’s economics, here’s science and technology, and so forth. We had all the functions with removable walls that were designed by the students to represent the different functions. And at the hub of the wheel they had a staircase, and you could go up and stand there and watch all the different parts working. And since John had done live coverage of the space launches for NASA—we developed a Synconsole. Instead of Houston’s Mission Control we had a Synconsole. And we actually could see what every sector of the wheel was doing, simultaneously. And we asked them all to look at this new national—really, global—long-range goal: how would it affect education? How would it affect security? How would it affect the economic system? Because you couldn’t get that done in Congress. I tried to get the head of the science and technology committee, Olin Teague, to call the members of Congress by committee together to look at a long-range goal. It could change everything. And we had the skill, we had the power, we had the whole thing. He said, “Barbara, we cannot do that. The Congress cannot look at the situation as a whole. You do it.” I was appalled. But that’s why we did it. We actually designed a system, and we invited very distinguished people as well as welfare mothers, and people from Bangladesh, and people who were really down and out. We had white southerners, we had Black Power leaders. We tried to get as much diversity as we can. But we asked them: “What would happen to you if you could participate in creating this goal? Would you want it? Would you like it? And if so, what would you need to do it better?” And to make a very long story short, this was the first SYNCON we did. And by the time every group had examined how it would affect their own interests, and what they would like to do to participate in this long-range goal, we took down all the walls. And we called it the “all-walls-down” ceremony. And we had Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura in Star Trek, and Gene Roddenberry was a friend of ours. And when we took down the social walls and we had examined every possible difference that people had, looking for: is there anything in common where you could get more of what you need if somebody else can help you and you can help that person. In other words, we began to synergize! All these diverse people. And when we took down the walls, people started to sing and dance. They were like those little molecules. The would not stop rejoicing!
And Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut, came to visit one of these SYNCONs. And when he walked in when the walls came down, he said, “Barbara, if I had a spiritual geiger counter, it would have gone off the charts.” And we didn’t even mention the word “spiritual” at that time. Because when you took down the walls and the people started to interact to get more of what they wanted to create by joining and by separating and voting, the hallelujah chorus could have been singing. And it was so successful. But we couldn’t, of course, change the United States Congress. We couldn’t change the existing systems. But we were a new system in tiny embryo form. Just like we’re the new humans, with all these new capacities. When we love one another, and care for the Earth, and become innovative and creative. When you cluster together, people who have that quality of being—and even people who don’t know they have that quality of being—and you ask them what they want to create, what the effect on them is, what needs they have, what they want to give. We created social synergy exactly as Buckminster Fuller had laid it out in Synergetics.
And my partner John and I felt that we had discovered something. And we did 25 of these in the 1980s—before I ran for Vice President. So by the time I had run for Vice President, I actually knew that we could have a new governance system. And I knew that one of the things was mapping, tracking, and connecting what’s working. The Vice Presidency didn’t demonstrate all of this, but I know it’s true. But once again, I didn’t have the money, the creativity, or the organizational power to take these seed experiences and make them truly work for the world at the scale that they needed to work. And so I became a teacher instead, because I didn’t know how to do it.
But I just—what’s my timing now? I have 17 more minutes? Oh, great! Yes, alright!
I began to divine the design of not only humans’ self-evolution in a new species, and what we might be like on the interior by knowing that we can incarnate the impulse of evolution as our own. And that the very important key to that is vocation, calling, life purpose. And that when you say yes to life purpose you begin to activate inside yourself the genius that’s incarnate in you as emerging property of your own nature. This is innate to us. And that when this starts to happen to you, if you develop synergystic relationships—as you must have done in this whole enterprise that you have here, you see?—more and more is created by connecting. And the vision that we might have here: how many people on planet Earth does it take to connect through the Internet to co-create? We don’t know. But I think we have enough people already. I believe there are enough innovations and creative solutions—at least in part—to start solving every single problem we have on Earth. I think Buckminster Fuller was right. I believe that if we were to make a shared intention, then in the next five to ten years we would have a shared goal of identifying, connecting, and communicating what’s emergent and creative in the world as a participation for everyone to enter in, aiming at a time of a planetary experience of wholeness. That that might be able, in the short time that we seem to have to make radical changes, it might be that we’ve been given the nervous system to do it. We’ve been given the technologies to do it. And that no existing structure in the top-down dominator model can do it. The government cannot do this. It cannot coordinate a planetary experience. Global corporations cannot do it. The Vatican cannot do it. It’s not even that people in there wouldn’t like to. Their structured so they could not possibly do it. Universities—if I were head of the university, I would completely reverse the situation and say—I was telling this to Joy last light, shouting at the table across her; she’s at Yale—I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could have an overview perspective of the whole story of Creation? From the origin of the universe all the way through, and then see current problems as evolutionary drivers, as crises requiring us to innovate and transform in every field—which is already happening. And that the university would then be an opportunity for vocation, for callings, as much as possible dealing not only with healing and fixing problems, but creating innovations and a better design than we now have in all these existing structures?” And I really believe that’s true, too.
But the problem with me is, I’m 85. And the young people know this already. So we’re right at the threshold, I believe, of devolution and self-destruction or evolution and self-transformation, and that the worldview of conscious evolution is the first time any species on this Earth is able to to be aware of its own evolution and to guide it. And that the yearning in the heart of humanity—for freedom, for cooperation, for all these things that we’ve learned on a small scale is possible—has to now be spread to this larger scale, and that we’re right at the stage in order to do it.
And I’ll give you one example that’s happening right now in Monterrey, Mexico. I was down there two years ago doing a big conference. I was a speaker. And some young people from Monterrey—you know, they have terrible problems with drugs as well as poverty, and government and drug dealers working together; the citizens feel hopeless in many ways. And I was taken to a little meeting of young people of Monterrey before I went to the big talk that I was to do. And I did my favorite story, and I didn’t bring this slide with me, but if you can visualize it, my basic slide is a spiral and a wheel. It starts with an evolutionary spiral. From the origin of creation it goes like this: Universe, Earth, life, animal life, human life, and then this is a big wheel, it’s our turn on the spiral. Here’s all: health, education, economics, all the different systems. I asked them, “If you had to fill out that wheel”—I call it the wheel of co-creation—“by finding out what works in Monterrey, would you want to do that?” And they all said yes. Every single one of them. They were getting out their cell phones, they were making dates. We all had lunch together. And I had caused a positive uprising, momentarily, in the midst of terrible political conflict.
So I went back to this beautiful woman who organized these big conferences called Global Human Value Systems, and this was her seventh conference. And she’s the sister of one of the governors of Monterrey; very powerful woman. And I said, “Cristina, we need to have a wheel in Monterrey.” She said, “A wheel in Monterey? What’s that?” And so I told her the whole thing. And we had a wheel last year in which we had leaders of every one of the sectors of the local government in Monterrey commanded by Cristina Gonzalez to do this. They had no idea what they were getting in for. But they had to come to a modified SYNCON. And then they had to sit up on the stage and say what were their golden innovations—that we call innovations that work. And they had to state them, and as they stated them they were able to say, “I’m government, I can’t do this without art, I can’t do this without education.” We saw social synergy at the government level on the stage of Monterrey.
It was so powerful that this year, in October, we’re going to do an effort to create the vision of a compassionate global culture of social synergy. And Ervin László will host a meeting of well-known people, famous people like Mary Robinson, the Nobel Prize winner, Claudio Naranjo for education. We have one for every sector of the wheel. And our job—Ervin and myself—will be to see if we can get them not to make speeches, but to synergize. To see what would be the picture of a global culture? Because these people know it. They know not only what needs to be done, they know what is being done. But still, the structure of the speaker and the rows—they would just get up and make a speech. So I’m going to get—standing over here, at least… (Does this work? Can I talk from here? No? Okay. So I won’t talk from here.)
I would like to just conclude—so we can have some time for questions and discussion—that I truly believe that conscious evolution, the great awakening, that’s what got me here. The title of this talk—I didn’t know anything about where I was going, and look how fortunate I am. It’s amazing! I think maybe, given synchronicity and simultaneity and the self-organizing nature of the universe, that I landed in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment to make exactly this expectation for humanity that I think we’re really close to doing this. What we need is an enlarged team of people who want to put their genius together. Join genius is a phrase I like very much. To have the babies rejoin genes, and it produces an absolute miracle of newness in every newborn fetus. It’s totally miraculous. It is my experience that when you join genius for shared purpose of the highest order, first of all, it’s extremely enjoyable. And secondly, you start to get more—I have to backtrack one moment, because I forgot to talk about the women over 50. I [???] to my Vice Presidential campaign—I do think I notice a new phase of life beginning for women over 50, and I have a name for it. And the name is regenopause. You have no more eggs, but you become the egg. Which is to say, the authentic feminine human being, born now into a culture like we have of this enormous power to destroy and create, is a new archetype on earth. An agency of evolution in the sense that she wants to give birth to the authentic feminine self. And she does it out of love. Very much like she can give birth to the baby. She doesn’t know it’s going to turn out well. She’s an innate Homo progressivus. She doesn’t know if the baby’s going to turn well. She’s knows it’s going to be painful. And when she first sees it, if she didn’t know it had potential, she would be horrified. The world is sort of like that. It is a mess. We don’t know how it’s going to turn out. But there’s an innate quality of the feminine co-creator, and I’m sure there are many of us in this room who, when she falls in love with the creativity and the creator within herself, she acknowledges that creator, and if she says yes to a vocation, to a life purpose, that yes turns on the system of evolution within her. I’m pretty well sure of it. That that regenopause is then starting to move to regeneration here. And then, at 85, what I’ve noticed myself, I talked to the head of AARP the other day and—American Association of Retired People—they’re not retiring! The whole thing is shifting! And so the feminine co-creator is an archetype of very great potency, and she’s everywhere. And the more we can identify ourself, we long for and love masculine co-creators. They’re harder to find because the masculine structure of the world requires so much more of them in order to be looking successful. But nobody cares about a woman, 65 or 70, what she’s doing. There’s no social protocol worrying us at all! But we are very much in love with men who want to come along and co-create with us. And we can be very, very helpful to them. And they to us. I don’t want to be demeaning at all, because there’s so many great men in this room and elsewhere.
And the rise of the masculine co-creator, the feminine co-creator, I believe is an archetype that is emerging. It is a Homo progressivus, in other words, it is an ultra-human. Because the powers are ultra-humanity. And that, given all that, that the call needs to be made—and this I would say is my current deepest purpose—is to be a part of a team to make a call to humanity to connect, to co-create in time, to shift the system from fear to love. I think so.
So I think I have a little time for comments or questions or thoughts. Three minutes and twenty-four seconds. Did get a lot done. Who would like to make a comment or a question?