00:24

Hubbard

Yes. Well, of course, my first meeting—I will tell you about it. It was in 1964, and at that time Jonas was attempting to create the “theater of man,” which was his idea of how to apply biological wisdom to social evolution. And he had this man, Jacob Bronowski, was going to go out to the Salk Institute. It was really interesting because Bronowski—I had asked him to do some kind of script on the possiblists and the impossiblists. And (Bruno, he was called) came to visit me. And he said, “I’m going to the Salk Institute. And Jonas is going to create the theater of man.” And it’s one of those triggers. It triggered my evolutionary consciouness. I was 34 years old, I was—you know, I didn’t have any of these experiences. And I wrote a letter about the theater of man and sent it to Gerry Piel, who was head of the Scientific American. And I was inspired as to what it could be. He sent it to Jonas. Jonas called me up one day and he said, “Mrs. Hubbard, we are two peas in the same genetic pod!” It’s his opening line. “Could I take you to lunch?”

So about a week later he arrived at my home in Lakeville, Connecticut with Warren Weaver, who was president of the Salk Institute, I think—or he was in the Rockefeller Foundation. Very distinguished man. And Jonas opened the door in my home. It was September 1964. And I looked at him, and he looked at me, and he said, “This is like the garden of Eden.” Because it was a beautiful fall day and [???]. And I said, “Yes, and I’m Eve. And I’m leaving.” What I meant was: I was leaving the cultural environment in which I lived. That is to say, in the fifties, early sixties, you were a wife and mother. I loved my children, I loved my husband, but there was this “more.”

So, on the way to New York, Jonas is driving, there’s Warren Weaver in the back seat, and I’m crying. Why am I crying? Because I sensed something in him. And I said, “Jonas, there’s so many things wrong with me.” He said, “What’s wrong with…” “My attraction to the future.” Wrong! My sense that something more is coming. My sense that I have something more to do about it. And the local psychiatrist had claimed this to be neurotic. It’s Freudian. And Jonas said, “Barbara, that’s not what’s wrong about you, that’s what’s right about you! You are a psychological, evolutionary being, and I’m going to introduce you to a few others.” I met Al Rosenfeld, a science editor at Life magazine, Dr. Joel Elkes, I think he was head of the Department of Neuropharmacology at Johns Hopkins, Louis Kahn, building the Salk Institute at the time. And what Jonas did—and then we got to be friends, and I saw him quite often—was: he recognized the evolutionary quality of being. But I had no idea what was wrong with me.

Well, of course it’s not what’s wrong with you. But at that time in the early sixties… it was even before the feminists had taken hold, before the peace movement, the civil rights—any of the movements. This man was an evolutionary. Through him I learned the relationship between science, biology, and social evolution. And I would say he was one of the great mentors and friends of my life.

Hubbard

I loved them all!

Hubbard

Well, no. No, no, no. Not the people in Lakeville, Connecticut!

04:56

Hubbard

I’ll just tell you the little difference. Because in Lakeville, when I began to realize that there was an evolving universe, even before I met—I didn’t know I was evolving, and that the universe was evolving. I would meet people at local parties in Lakeville and they finally said, “Barbara, we don’t want to know how you are.” Because how was I—I was excited about these ideas. But there was no response, no positive reinforcement.

So when Jonas introduced me he said it took me a quarter of a century to find these people. It wasn’t like he knew that many, either. So what happened was—it’s a phrase from Teilhard de Chardin—people with the flame of expectation in their hearts. With a sense, Teilhard said, of a mysterious sense of a the future. As an organism progressing toward the unknown. Teilhard de Chardin called this type Homo progressivus. When I read it, I had never met any one of them. And I didn’t know I was one of them. I thought I [had] something wrong with me. When I met Jonas and his friends—maybe only three or four of them—it wasn’t that I loved everybody. That’s not true. I was so happy to meet people with an attunement to what’s emergent.

Now, an attunement to what’s emergent is a gift, like a musical ear (I think), a mathematical genius, an athletic ability. Most of the people in Lakeville, Connecticut, in the environment I was in—the PTA, the general federation women’s clubs—there wasn’t the sense of emergent. Jonas’s friends all had it. And by being with them, I got more of it.

07:01

Hubbard

Well, in those days I had read Teilhard de Chardin and discovered that the universe is evolving towards greater complexity, greater consciousness—from atom, to molecule, to cell, to human—and then Teilhard foresaw “Omega,” which was when the world itself would link up into a whole and we’d be connected heart to heart, center with center, and the noösphere, the thinking layer, would get its collective “I”s. When I read that—this is interesting—I actually got totally excited. How is that? Because I knew, internally, that that was true. But I had never read it, it’s not a religion, it’s not in the Bible, exactly, or any of that. And what began to happen to me about emergence is: I realized that that which was emerging in me was a universal process in a person. That every person is a member of the universe, or the universe in person. Like we are right now. With a universe in person discussing this. I got the internalization of cosmogenesis. I got the internalization of the story of creation as my own impulse to create.

08:41

Hubbard

The difference between a neurotic housewife and the universe in person is huge! And it prepared the way for me to realize that maybe I did have something to do about the future, and then to seek it out. And then I met Abraham Maslow, who reinforced Jonas Salk, because Maslow discovered that every joyful person has chosen vocation—meaningful work. And I realized that I loved my children, but my vocation was not motherhood.

09:22

Hubbard

Maslow, talked about—when I met Maslow, it was before the Human Potential Movement. And he and I had the same type of wonderful exchange that I had with Jonas. And he said to me, “I am going to give you my eupsychian network.” And he had a list of 300 names. And he called that “eupsychian”—good souls. And good souls is exactly what we’re trying to talk about: people attracted to what’s emergent, what’s good, what’s not yet fully known. It can’t be proved. So there’s a lot of scientific thought that will not be attracted at that time to what’s emergent—whether in the field of psychology or in Jonas’s field. There were a lot of molecular biologists that did not go along with Jonas.

10:27

Hubbard

He got the best of them there at the Salk Institute, but he was of a different order of magnitude, which is what I’m talking about with this sense of emergence.

11:22

Hubbard

You know, what I realized with Jonas, and Abraham Maslow, and the third one was Buckminster Fuller—I used the word being seen, or recognition. See, now I’m more or less used to it because I’m fortunate to meet people like yourself who already have a sense of emergence. And I recognize it in you. And then I can be more of it, because you’re more of it. And then every one of us builds on everybody else. But at that time, I never had it happen before. And I think one great thing that Jonas did for a lot of us—when I went to the Salk Foundation, everybody has a story which was “and then Jonas called me up.”

12:23

Hubbard

And he had an ability to recognize qualities in people that they didn’t fully recognize themselves. And because he was so attractive and distinguished—like when he says, “Mrs. Hubbard, we’re two peas in the same genetic pod,” and I never met anybody… you know what that does for a person?

12:55

Hubbard

I had huge revelations with Bucky. I’ll tell you an amazing story about Bucky that he often didn’t tell. I met him over the years, and I read his book, Utopia or Oblivion, and I remember that phrase “humanity has the resources, technology, and know-how to make of this world a 100 percent physical success without taking it away from one another or the environment” because he understood the nature of nature itself: that it was regenerative and abundant. And at that time, in the 1960s, he called it 4.5 billion billionaires. Now it’s 6.5. I don’t think any of us foresaw quite the set of crises, but he did say it’s a viability test on Homo sapiens.

Anyway, we became friends, and I had a very unusual experience—in which I experienced not as a religion at all, and I want to be sure you know this—but I experienced an image of the resurrected Christ as our potential in the vast future. It was just a flash, as a futurist. And I was guided to the New Testament. And I started to open it up, because I hadn’t really read it. I’m from a Jewish agnostic background. And, “Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, we shall all be changed.” That’s Saint Paul. And I started to write. And I decoded the New Testament from a futuristic point of view. So I did a huge manuscript and I sent it to Buckminster Fuller.

So, one night, we were at the Annenberg Communication Center to speak. He sent word: he’s not coming. He’s reading something. And then he invited me into the garden. And he put his arms around me—he was carrying my manuscript. And he put his forehead on mine (and he called everybody “darlin’”), and he said, “Darlin’, there’s only God. There’s nothing but God.” And he never used that word publicly. Then—here’s my manuscript of decoding the New Testament from the point of view of futuristic possibilities. He said, “I had the same experience. I was walking down the street in Chicago, and not only did I have this light, and the light surrounded me,”—here’s the part he doesn’t usually tell—“I heard the words, ‘Bucky, you are to be a first mini-Christ on Earth. What you attest to is true.’” And he said he went to the New Testament and wrote a similar thing to what I wrote, and hid it. Because, as an engineer, he could not use the word “Christ” or “God.” The language cuts you off. Because it’s relates overly specific into a dogma. So I asked him for a comment on my book when Lawrence Rockefeller wanted to fund it, and Bucky said, “Barbara Hubbard, who helped founded futurism, is the best-informed human now alive on the subject of the future.” You know why he said that? Because we both had an advanced spiritual experience—not of the Christ in terms of a religion, but in terms of the fact that we are going to be changed. We will be continuous humans, is the way he put it. And he—if you go into the futurist movement, as you well know: the transhumanist society, all of that, is: Bucky and I both saw this. And so he affirmed in me my most far-out thinking. He wouldn’t say all that publicly. And I tried to get him to say it, and I finally told him I’m going to tell people. And he got me to run for vice president. And he said, “I think women need to go into the political arena,” and that’s when I thought of a peace room as sophisticated as a war room to map what’s working.

17:25

Hubbard

84. I ran for vice president in 84. I met Bucky in the mid-60s. I did some conferences at Southern Illinois University, where he was—they call it “professor in residence,” or something like that.

18:24

Hubbard

Well, I have a simple sentence: our crisis is a birth of a universal, cocreative humanity. Birth is dangerous. This crisis is dangerous. I believe it’s natural that an intelligent species would hit a limit to growth on a finite planet. It’s natural that we would start overpopulating and polluting and destroying our environment. We didn’t even know we had one. Like a baby in a womb starts to grow. And it hits a point that, if it would continue to grow that way, it would destroy itself and its mother. I think we are in a crisis of one form of growth. It’s a crisis of self-conscious humanity on a finite system. With the degree of power that science has given us—starting with Einstein’s E = mc²: you look in, you understand the atom, you build a bomb. Now we’re understanding the gene, and we’re understanding intelligence. The power of this species, now, with this degree of power, and still self-conscious humans, is not viable. So what’s been happening is a large population of unidentified people—out of category, like myself—all over the place. Paul Ray calls it “cultural creatives.” Currently he estimates, as a social analyst, that about 30% of people in the industrial world have shifted their values from separated, tribal, nation-state, my-tribe-above-yours mentality to a planetary, co-equal tendency. And I think what’s happened is the crisis of dangers—including global warming, financial collapse—is pushing up the carrier population who has a more evolutionary, emergent sense of potential. Both in response to the crisis, but more than that, in a feeling of creativity: of something more wanting to come. And that Obama was a signal for that population that’s never been named. It’s not Republican or Democrat, left, right, or center, it’s evolutionary. But it doesn’t have to call itself anything. And that was the greatness that he did. But the symbols that he had—yes we can, change, you’re going to do it, not me—these are all the symbols that wake up cultural creativity. And I think that the networking and interaction of those people, worldwide, is where hope lies. And how fast that gets connected and how fast that gets networked is between a very terrible birth process of extreme collapse—which has been foreseen, and Jonas kept talking about epic A and epic B. Epic A is the way it is now, the collapse of overpopulation and so fort. How do you get to epic B? I feel that this [is a] crisis of birth toward a universal potential. We need a vision of where we’re going. And this is my thing with the Foundation for Conscious Evolution and everyone else working on it: is the greater connectivity of that which is creative and positive. It’s not about solving every single problem on Earth, because you’ll wear out long before you have a chance to do it. But if you start noticing from the simplest acts to the most complex and see them as part of a whole system—now, that’s not an organization, it’s a living organism. And we use a metaphor of a wheel with all the different sectors representing functions, and imagining assisting one another in placing ourselves, and finding how better to create.

24:17

Hubbard

I think so. And one of the things, of course, we learn is that problems are evolutionary drivers. And crises proceed transformation. Now, you could have mass extinction, and we’re causing some of it ourselves, but the fact that we’re awakening that we’re causing the possibility of our own extinction and the extinction of so many other species is the awakening of conscious evolution.

25:13

Hubbard

Well, that goes back to my experience with Bucky Fuller and this image of the evolving human. I think—I don’t know, neurologically, whether the brain is evolving—but I know that through the increased stimulus of all these energetic connections, particularly when they’re positive, you start getting more intelligent. I’m sure that I’m more intelligent now than I was when I was the housewife in Lakeville, because I’m far more stimulated. Then, of course, my brain, your brain, is extended through the Internet, and the computer, and the communication, and the cell phones. So, actually, we have a global brain. And how big our own personal brain gets within the global brain, I don’t know. And then there is the whole idea that our genetics can also be affected, both by our emotions and by the understanding of DNA. And I remember going with Jonas to one of the laboratories and it said on the door “stamp out physical death.” Now, Jonas didn’t approve of this, but I know people like Greg Stock and others who are fairly well assured that we’re going to understand our own DNA, and we’re going to cure certain diseases, enhance certain trains, and eventually Homo sapiens sapiens will develop its own successor, both in the intelligence realm and possibly genetically. But if we don’t actually open our hearts and love one another as part of this larger whole, we’re not going to get to all of that stuff. So I don’t want to be overly futuristic…

28:06

Hubbard

It’s a wonderful word, and, you know, thinking of motherhood, having had five children, and the difference of knowing the meaning of the pain for, let’s say, a mother’s ability to be resilient, I’ve often thought if I didn’t know that I was pregnant and giving birth, I would die out of shock at the whole thing. But so, resilience—I haven’t thought of it this way—but when the mother knows it’s painful but meaningful, and that it’s going to give birth to new life, you get ten thousand times more resilient than if you think it’s a terrible mistake and you’re dying. And so faith, and understanding of the process in the sense that you’re going somewhere that matters, and maybe you have a part to play in it, makes you so much more resilient than if you think everybody’s failing, you’re failing, and the Earth is going to collapse, or society’s going to collapse. So resilience—yes. But what causes it? A sense of involvement, direction, purpose, hope, faith, vision, maybe?

29:39

Hubbard

You know what I just think that my narrative in the near-term—like, between 2009 and 2012—would be that, by 2012, there’s enough connectivity of that which is working, creative and emergent, for humanity to feel connected enough to have our first planetary smile. Our first coordinated feeling—not that we’ve solved all the problems. But if you take the terrible ones like hunger and poverty and environmental collapse, that there are the resources—like Bucky said years ago: resources, technology, and know-how to handle it. And because our systems are connected and our hearts are connected—not just system—that we’re going to make it. By 2012. Once we do that, I think we have an immeasurable future.

31:08

Hubbard

You actually increase my smile by the resonance with whatever it is in you that makes it possible for you to have this smile. Which then, hopefully, will communicate to the people watching this making it more possible for them to smile to somebody else. And it’s exactly what you’re saying.

32:40

Hubbard

No. And it’s so wonderful to meet you and, you know, to find all the background you have that you came to this idea. And what experiences made it possible for you to be this way, in terms of your deep mindset?

Hubbard

So you got that whole overview perspective that you’re talking about? Being so important. Outside the system that you were a part of?

Hubbard

Outside their actual… where they were. Yes.

35:26

Hubbard

You know, Tom, that picture of the wheel that I—

Hubbard

Well, if you think of our turn on the spiral like this, the wheel is a matrix of functions—health, education, economics, science and technology, and so forth—and it’s identifying what’s emergent and creative in every function, mapping it so that you see there are clusters, connecting it and communicating. And what we would like to do in the Foundation for Conscious Evolution is create that matrix. And it can be really small to begin with. It’s not like you have to map the whole world. But you have a small beginning. And you invite people in. And you tell the stories; many stories. But there’s also an overall story that a culture needs. And I think the overall story is: our crisis is a birth, and that we are emerging as—potentially—a co-creative, universal humanity. And everyone is needed. And everybody’s creativity is needed. And I have had a really fabulous vision of NASA being able to help us have global peace rooms so that anyone, anywhere on Earth, could register what they want to create. And it would be recorded, and they would be helped to find their teammates. And you get turned on. I call this vocational arousal. So if you have 6.5 billion people and everyone is creative, 90% of us don’t get a chance to get anywhere near expressing it. So I see, ultimately, a massive uprising of creativity; a Renaissance of creativity. But I would like to start with a small template of the wheel. Like you told me the web got started? There are a lot of people working with it, but I would like to do it for exactly the reasons you’re saying.

Hubbard

Super-sex?

Hubbard

Supra-sex!

37:40

Hubbard

Yes. I’m writing a book on it right now. Here’s the idea: that when we hit a population limit on planet Earth and we knew one more doubling would kill life, the procreative drive is rising up and expanding into the creative drive. And the creative drive is not just my profession or my ambition, the creative drive is the life pulse—like the sexual drive to have the baby. It’s a life pulse. The supra-sexual drive to express creativity through joining with each other is a life force. And it’s a life force that nature is making pleasurable. However, we don’t know much about how to do it, because society is structured in pyramids, separation, competition, jobs, even relationships. So the joy of supra-sex is a call for people’s creativity. And I want to have that website so people can put in what they want to create. And we would have an uprising, like Jonas said, of wellness. Basically, it’s creativity. Creativity is the life force. It’s the creator within.

Hubbard

That’s lovely: newborn grandparents!

40:27

Hubbard

I love that idea. And here’s… it’s a kind of double-grandparenting, since I’m a grandmother of eight. I, way back when I met Jonas and Bucky and those people, I began to have what I call a second motherhood. The first motherhood was having the babies. And I was a mother 24/7. But then I realized I had something to give birth to in myself, which is a life purpose. So the second motherhood is: you have to nurture who you are becoming. What I found out is that what I was becoming then was a gift to my children. Rather than a frustrated, somewhat unhappy woman, I became an evolutionary futurist. So, yes, it wasn’t so easy, because the mother changed mid-stream there, with five children, when I met Jonas. And beyond—I mean, it wasn’t just Jonas. So my children gave me a birthday party when I was 50. And I said, “Tell me what I did well as a mother.” Because I felt—I got a divorce, and I took all my children to Washington, D.C. It was in the 70s I did this. And it was hard. It wasn’t an easy thing. But they said, “What you did well was you followed your life purpose while loving us.” So that five out of five have a vocation.

Now, grandmothering—if you have second motherhood, there’s also a second or third grandmothering. Because if a woman has become a second mother and is giving birth to some creative life, she gets to be a grandmother! Well, she has even more to give to the grandchildren. And then I coined this word for the post-menopausal woman, which is re-genopause. Not only is she going to be a newborn grandmother, but she’s an evolving woman—and man, this goes… speaking as a woman. And if we have life extension, or certainly longevity, which we’re heading into. They say there are more people 100 years old now than ever have been before. Do you realize how long a lifespan that is? What are you even going to be doing?