A Conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard
(The complete Flip interview, with only minor edits, not found in the book)

Barbara Marx Hubbard (www.barbaramarxhubbard.com) has been a pioneer in positive options for the future of humanity for forty 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 in Action, the Foundation for the Future, and the Association for Global New Thought.

Barbara was one of the original directors of the Center for Soviet American Dialogue and served as a citizen diplomat during the late 1980s. She has written many 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, Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence, and Ten Steps to the Universal Human.

Barbara told us that her worldview began changing at an early age, when she witnessed a traumatic turning point in human history. “My flip was in 1945 when the U.S. dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. I was fifteen and I suddenly saw that we were going to gain so much power that we could destroy our world. And the question that came to me was: what is the meaning of our new power that’s good? In my search to answer this, to make a very long story short, I began to see that the meaning of our power is the conscious evolution of our species on the one hand, or devolution and extinction on the other.

“When I say ‘conscious evolution’ I mean evolving our own consciousness from passively receiving the way things are to actively guiding ourselves and our social evolution. I think this is the evolution from unconscious devolution to conscious choice. We’re facing a mounting whole-system crisis because every single social system is breaking down. So there are individual flips, individual innovations, and individual breakthroughs in every system. You have to look at the crisis as evolutionary stress. And problems are evolutionary drivers. Nature forms whole systems in response to these crises, or the species goes extinct.

“There are, everyday, more and more people waking up to the crisis. It’s on the front page of Time Magazine, it’s in the news. People are concerned, even pessimistic; they’re wondering if our species can survive. It’s becoming harder and harder to trust the current system. The average person doesn’t have to be a visionary futurist to see that we need a better way.

“Bureaucratic structures aren’t up to our current challenges, because they’re organized around separation and competition. And the problem extends beyond political parties or administrations. We can’t really look to the Democrats to be the living alternative to the current structures, because they’re imbedded in them too. Many citizens tend not to be involved in politics because it doesn’t seem to make a difference. We see these structural breakdowns, and our only hope is for a new structure to emerge – one that’s a partnership model, not a dominator model – a system of connectivity, of co-creativity. All of these breakdowns are forcing us to either evolve as a species or render ourselves extinct.

“My metaphor for this whole process is the birth of a species capable of co-evolving with Nature and co-creating with Spirit… a species that has been gestating, in great beings like Buddha and Jesus, for five thousand years. Historically, the average individual couldn’t fully experience that expanded consciousness, so we formed religions and dogmas and priest classes. But within our species today, there are people whose consciousness moves toward whole organism consciousness, people who feel connected from within through the heart, the kind of people that have been doing the light work of our generation and have been experiencing the inner spiritual evolution. These people are the emergent Humanity, and I think that they represent an irresistible force.

“Evolution is constantly producing higher consciousness and greater freedom through more complex order. There is a great deal of pressure to evolve into this more universal species, as I call it. On an individual level, it’s available to everyone and it’s a free choice for everyone. You can’t be forced to evolve and you can’t be forced to enter evolution. But I believe what’s happening is that millions of us are bringing the gods home internally. We’re becoming expressions of the creative intention of the Universe as individuals. When we do that, there is a self-rewarding quality to our actions. We no longer feel completely trapped by our conditions. We feel causal, even when we’re not making a huge impact, and we resonate with others doing the same. I call this ‘the emerging communion of pioneering souls.’

“Clearly, it’s no longer enough to merely point out the failure of our bureaucracies. We must each ask ourselves what this crisis is pressing us to do that isn’t being done – that can’t be done – by the bureaucracy. The true call is for connectivity of all civil society, which can then take a new leading position. And we’re almost there. Most of us are not as aware of the breakthroughs as the breakdowns, because most of the breakthroughs are emergent and the mass media doesn’t pick them up. We must facilitate and accelerate these emerging breakthroughs. We must find ways to become connected, synergistic, and cooperative among ourselves.

“This is nothing less than a call to regenerate our planet. The planetary body itself is under stress. It’s been tortured by the rise of our industrial societies. Our social systems must change in order to restore our home. We are expressions of our Mother Earth evolving. Birth is a very good image, because birth is not easy and it doesn’t guarantee you that the mother or child will live. But there is a tendency for life to prevail.

“I call myself – not an optimist or a pessimist – but a potentialist. I don’t want to be a visionary anymore. I mean, I have a vision. But the much more important thing right now is noticing what’s happening – the breakdowns and breakthroughs – and participating in the latter.

“What I refer to as the ‘self evolution’ is happening very, very rapidly. It’s as if a core of Intelligence has begun permeating the inner spirit of millions. That transcendent experience of the divine evolutionary impulse is often felt as a yearning to create and express our deeper selves in action. Each one of us is being motivated by a Universal process that individuates as you and me. And when we say ‘yes’ to that process, it turns us on. We feel a passionate desire to join - not our genes, but our genius, our unique creativity – to birth the greater self in each of us. We’re being motivated from within by a great force. The joining of Creator and creature is co-creation. And this is the spiritual maturation of our species. The path of the co-creator is, for me, the fulfillment of all religions. As we learn to incarnate the process of creation as our own expression, this process begins to activate in us a new vitality.

“My own body is aging, but my spirit is rising. My vitality is rising. My creativity is rising. My intuition is that Woman is entering a new life cycle. We can’t continue to populate and pollute and use up nonrenewable resources. Woman, particularly postmenopausal Woman, is coming into her own during this planetary crisis. All of the Women’s Movements have led up to this. We are free, and we are beyond our childbearing years, and we have this energy. The postmenopausal Woman is vital for the survival of our species. She has a different programming and she’s always seeking what we call the ‘Regenerative Man,’ who has somehow awakened from within and can bring the masculine divine creativity into this.”

Barbara recent received an award for her work introducing a bill in Congress to create a Department of Peace. “The Department of Peace is the rallying point to a whole movement. What it’s calling for is the voice of peace and non-violence at the highest level of government. If it works it would mean that the Secretary of Peace would be in on the meetings about violence and war, and that voice would be heard by whoever is the president of the United States.

“The state department only follows the foreign policy of the administration. So the Department of Peace would have a special mandate to remind everyone in power of questions like, ‘How could this problem be solved through nonviolence, through conflict resolution, through cooperation?’ That voice is not currently heard at the highest levels of government. But I see the possibility of even the military realizing it cannot produce security by force alone. That’s clear in Iraq right now, where we have a very powerful military with no equal in the world bogged down by an insurgency. We have the ability to destroy any enemy, but we can’t build peace. We can’t build or rebuild a culture with our military. So I’m planning to meet with people in the military to see if there could be a sacred alliance between the peace movement and the new forces for security in the United States. The people in the military are so sophisticated, but they have to have a new strategy, a new purpose of providing security and peace. Their skills and capacities are vitally needed for the purpose of restoring the earth.

“I, who have been a visionary for thirty years, am suddenly one of the most practical people around. Because I’m saying, ‘well let’s do synergistic convergence events.’ SYNCON and the Peace Room are two tools we could look at as the evolution of democracy and self-governance. Using my website, I’m going to create a communion of pioneering souls called ‘The Evolutionary Edge,’ and I’m going to connect up as many people as I can. I think there is a tipping point, and as the crisis deepens, the tipping point gets closer. It’s nonlinear because all the different strands that are evolving converge simultaneously. Everything that rises converges, and I believe we’re in a zone of convergence right now that is way beyond human manipulation. It’s the same ordering process of nature that got us from subatomic particles to here.

“Now that’s a mighty power, however you want to name it.”

And it’s a flip on the grandest of scales.

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The Flip, by Jared Rosen and David Rippe, illuminates a clear path to a vibrant enlightened world where millions of people already live and thrive. It describes in vivid detail and real examples evidence of an upside down world in decay and a Right Side Up world of authentic beings bright with possibility.
The Flip is an owner’s manual for the twenty-first century full of insights, conversations with recognized experts, thought leaders, and visionaries, and actionable exercises and tips you can use to begin your own personal flip.

To read more about The Flip and additional interviews from other luminaries, experts and bestselling authors, please visit www.theflip.net

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