Barbara Marx Hubbard – Evolutionary Citizen Solutions in a New Energy World
Living Dialogues
Duncan Campbell
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Episode 69 - Barbara Marx Hubbard – Evolutionary Citizen Solutions in a New Energy World

Episode Description:

“Thank you so much, Duncan.  You are definitely a co-creative partner!” – Barbara Marx Hubbard

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with Barbara Marx Hubbard, President of the foundation for Conscious Evolution, who helped create the field of conscious evolution.  In addition to contextualizing the current global economic crisis and tipping point U.S. election as a great evolutionary call and opportunity, we discuss the proposal of Barbara and others for a three-point “Citizen Solutions” program to be integrated into the U.S. Vice-President’s office (as Barbara initially proposed when her name was placed in nomination for Vice-President in 1984), carried on the Internet, and embodied in local and regional Citizen Solutions Councils, to which each of us can contribute.

This democratization of engendering practical transformative proposals reflects the already emerging “prophetic consciousness” present in many of us (and in potential in all of us), and evolution’s requirement for a democratization of awareness, collaboration, and benefits for necessary change to take place – as illustrated in one example by my proposal for New Energy Bonds.  

Next week, on Program 70 in dialogue with globally-acclaimed author (Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization) Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and President of the Earth Policy Institute, we go into the details of why and how the New Energy Economy can and must be realized as the next major step in the conscious evolution of our species in the very near future, activated and empowered by understanding what technology and resources are already at our disposal, and the urgency of mobilizing to do so -- much as, for instance, FDR and America did in mobilizing existing resources and a determined and generous national will to emerge stable and stronger from the economic collapse of the 30s, leading the way to the beginnings of global consciousness with the creation of the United Nations after World War II.  Exciting new ideas emerge from the dialogue on the spot.

 For a summary of the practical proposed solutions I have made in this time of required change, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com.  Visit my blog at Duncan.personallifemedia.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Transcript

Transcript

“Duncan Campbell, I heard about your podcast a few months ago, and have been deeply listening to all the dialogues with your fantastic friends/guests. Your words, ideas, and wisdom are truly inspirational.  You have evoked a new appetite for knowledge in me that I hope to share with a starving younger generation. Thank you for doing what you do, and creating a unique space, void of boundaries and classification.  A breath of fresh air!  Much love and respect.” – Amit Kapadiya

In furtherance of creating and maintaining the planetary dialogues now required in the 21st century, I have featured a special series of dialogues on this site with myself and other elders in the weeks leading up to and including the 2008 Olympics hosted by China and the U.S. election season.  These dialogues address various specific political aspects of our planetary crisis, with its dangers and opportunities for a visionary and evolutionary shift. (We remember that the Chinese character for “crisis” is often described as meaning both “danger” when visioned from a fear perspective, and “opportunity” when visioned from a wisdom perspective.)

In my preceding dialogues I have talked in various ways about the need to generate dialogues across generational, ethnic, gender, and national boundaries -- building bridges of understanding and wisdom in the cooperative spirit and reaching out required by our 21st century realities, and the essential roles that we all are called to play in our evolution for it to take place.

This is the time for renewed dialogue, for visionary and inspiring discourse producing practical and innovative solutions together, to engage our own elder wisdom and youthful inspiration, and in so doing to experience and exemplify that “Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation”™.

And that is what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.

 

Other programs you will find of immediate interest on these themes are the three mentioned in this Dialogue 69:  Program 28 with Michael Dowd on The Great Story – the Epic of Evolution, Programs 35-36 with Paul Hawken regarding the already-existing, under-the-radar emergence of an enormous web of collaborative citizen movements worldwide, and Program 37 with sociologist Paul Ray on the creation of a new global wisdom culture and political paradigm. Also you may wish to listen to Program 58 with Ted Sorensen, counselor and co-visionary with John F. Kennedy, Program 59 with Robert Thurman on a potential paradigm-shifting partnership between the Dalai Lama and China, and Program 61 with David Boren on our seeing the need for new energy and transpartisanship to save the middle class.

 

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM.  TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN, SOBONFU SOME. TED SORENSEN, ROBERT THURMAN, DAVID MARANISS, DAVID BOREN, GEORGE LAKOFF, TOM HAYDEN, JAY INSLEE, BRACKEN HENDRICKS, BOB GOUGH, VAN JONES, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com.  Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.

All the best, Duncan.

P.S. As a way of further acknowledging and appreciating your part in these dialogues, and since I cannot personally answer all of them, I have begun to publish from time to time in these pages some of the numerous (unsolicited) appreciations received from you.

 

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Announcer 1: This program is brought to you by personallifemedia.com.

Woman 1: Thank you so much Duncan. You are definitely a co-creative partner.

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Announcer 2: From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous counsels and ancient wisdom traditions through the work of Western visionaries, such as Plato, Galileo and, quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning, a dia (flow) of logos meaning beyond what anyone individual can bring through alone. So join us now as together with you, the active, deep listener, we evoke and engage in Living Dialogues.

Duncan Campbell: Welcome to Living Dialogues. I am your host, Duncan Campbell, and with me for this particular program, I am truly delighted to have as my guest Barbara Marx Hubbard, known to many of you for her numerous works in the field of the evolution of consciousness and in this regard, she is really a great colleague of what we do here on Living Dialogues as she is a colleague of Michael Dowd, another mutual friend, who has done great work in this same area and many of the other guests here on Living Dialogues. So Barbara, what a real treat and pleasure it is to have you here on the program.

Barbara Marx Hubbard: Well thank you, Duncan. It was so great to meet you at the Big Tent.

Duncan Campbell: And we should tell people about the Big Tent. In this particular case, was located in Denver, Colorado during the Democratic National Convention in August of 2008 and one of the presentations that was made there was by Barbara and her team including Eleanor LeCain and others about a great new proposal that has been made coming out of your work.

And Barbara, you might want to talk about the Citizens Solutions Council and that will be the topic of our program today but before we get into that, I would like you to share maybe something from your personal experience of how you personally came to this field of the evolution of consciousness and now the application as we do here also on Living Dialogues of that insight of the evolution of human consciousness to very practical real world applications and in doing so, maybe we start from something you might spontaneously think about from your own childhood, that as you look back is there maybe an event or two that turned out now in hindsight to be a real harbinger of your life calling?

Barbara Marx Hubbard: Thank you, Duncan. Yes, for me there was and it really was the explosion of the atomic bomb.  I was fifteen when the United States dropped those bombs and after the horror of the use of this power, a question arose which is, what is the meaning of all this new power that is good? What are positive images of the future based on science, technology, social systems and I had been taught that the American Dream was inevitably good and that power was good and I grew up with a lot of the generals of the Second World War who were godfathers of my half brothers including Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, George Marshall, and so on. And so I thought well, I will go ask President Eisenhower what he thinks is the meaning of all this new power. And I asked him and he said “I have no idea” and then I began to read philosophy, religion, science fiction and I found there wasn’t any comprehensive, positive imagery to move us forward except life after death or Heaven or Paradise or new Jerusalem.

So then, to make a very long story short, I began to research. I discovered Teilhard de Chardin, the great Catholic paleontologist who discovered a spiritual force in evolution.  I discovered Aurobindo, the great Indian teacher. I discovered Ken Wilbur and on and on until I began to realize that the meaning of our power is conscious evolution, that is to say, we are understanding evolution. We are affecting it by everything we do. We have to be conscious of how to evolve and this is a huge breakthrough for evolution itself not just for humanity because it took billions of years to get a species intelligent enough to be able to see its own evolution and destroy its own future, like we can. That’s the great wakeup call.

So I woke up with the idea that we were waking up and then my image for it is that our crisis is the birth of a more universal, co-creative humanity and then I was able to move that into the political arena through my work with Buckminster Fuller to suggest that in the office of the Vice President that there be a function as sophisticated as a war room. I call it a peace room, the map track connect and communicate what’s working in America and the world.

So in a nutshell, Duncan, from the explosion of the bomb, to the discovery of the evolutionary story, to the realization that our systems are breaking down and new systems are breaking through and innovations everywhere that we are at the edge of a new political movement or rapid further devolution and destruction.

Duncan Campbell: Well that is just so excellently put, Barbara. On this program, we recently have been talking and my formulation of facing a tipping point in which we can take a great leap forward or a tumbling point, in which we will take a great fall backward into the evolutionary muck and noting that of the various manifestations in life forms that have been present throughout the history of the planet, 99% of them are extinct. And so not only is there no guarantee of immortality of this species as perceived by our current species wide, I would call adolescent consciousness and particularly that consciousness that is represented by the American sense that everything America does is always good and that we are meant and destined to somehow have dominion over the world in the name of a Christian god, i.e., the policy of the George Bush administration

Barbara Marx Hubbard: Yes

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell