e v o l v e

Barbara Marx Hubbard talks about Conscious Evolution

Audio

What is Conscious Evolution?

Conscious Evolution is a new worldview that is now emerging rapidly and garnering worldwide interest and support. It acknowledges that humankind has attained unprecedented powers to affect, control and change the evolution of life on Earth.

In simple terms, Conscious Evolution means that we must improve our ability to use our powers ethically and effectively (consciously) to achieve a positive future (evolve).

Conscious Evolution is a new social/scientific/spiritual meta-discipline. This worldview has progressed from Einstein's early admonitions that humankind cannot solve our problems from the same place of consciousness in which we created them, through noted scientists and philosophers such as Julian Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Abraham H. Maslow, Jonas Salk, to today's social scientists such as Bela H. Banathy, Hazel Henderson, Riane Eisler, Ervin Laszlo, Jean Houston, Duane Elgin, Edgar Mitchell, Ken Wilber, Peter Russell, Elisabet Sahtouris, Don Beck and many others who are building frameworks for practical application in health, governance, education, management, environment, science, the arts and media.

Bela H. Banathy, author of Guided Evolution of Society, offers this understanding of what Conscious Evolution is:

"It is a process by which we can individually and collectively take responsibility for our future.

It is a process of giving direction to the evolution of human systems by purposeful action.

And, most importantly, Conscious Evolution enables us, if we take responsibility for it, to use our creative power to guide our own lives and the evolution of the systems and the communities in which we live and work. It is a process by which individuals and groups, families, organizations, and societies can envision and create images of what should be, and bring those images to life by design."

Conscious Evolution is at the core a spiritually-motivated endeavor. Its precepts reside at the heart of every great faith, affirming that humans have the potential of being cocreators with Spirit, with the deeper patterns of nature and universal design.

Conscious Evolution is a social movement, a call to action that offers real hope for the world. In fact, it is a "movement of movements." It connects positive, life-enhancing initiatives and insights in every field leading toward a higher level of cooperative action. It stimulates learning, personal mastery and systems theory applied to social change. Above all, it brings forth practical visions of hope and fulfillment of humanity's most profound aspirations.

Conscious Evolution as a new world view is a context for a meta-discipline composed of the growing edge of all disciplines seen as parts of a living whole. It may even set the framework for a “meta-religio,” an all-inclusive space in which the great faiths and wisdom traditions can contribute their unique gifts to the conscious evolution of humanity.

The promise of Conscious Evolution is nothing less than the emergence of a universal humanity capable of co-evolution with nature and cocreation with Spirit.

We are the Generation with the Choice

We live in an unprecedented time in the evolutionary history on planet Earth. The human species has gained powers great enough to destroy our world, or to co-create a vastly better future for all Earth life. Through science and technology, we are probing into the invisible processes of creation—the atom, the gene, the brain. We are learning to place human intent into matter. We are participating in the evolution of evolution from unconscious to conscious choice, from natural selection to selection according to human purpose.

Those of us alive today are the first generation born with the choice of learning conscious, ethical evolution, or suffering devolution and the destruction of our life-support systems with unimaginably more tragedy than the world has yet experienced.

We do not have much time. Within the next 30 to 50 years, we must change our fundamental behavior to be more in alignment with our natural systems and our visions of a positive future. Never before has the human species had to change this quickly in order to survive.

We are the generation of the gap between “here”—a highly technological, over-populating, polluting, brilliant species on the brink of social and environmental chaos, and “there”—a compassionate, spiritually awakened humanity, capable of transcending the limits of our past human existence and moving toward the unknown. This “unknown” has been surfacing in human imagination for thousands of years as a species-wide yearning for—and intuition of— a higher state of being. “Cosmic consciousness, species immortality and universal life,” in the words of astrophysicist Eric Chaisson.

Gateway to Conscious Evolution our premier educational offering in the Living School, is designed to take you through the steps of a new developmental path for an emerging world, an emerging humanity. Its purpose is to help you discover how to guide your own evolution from “here” to “there”—in your personal life, together in communities, and in society as a whole. The Gateway offers a perspective for possible species success and metamorphosis in this time frame—now.

The ultimate purpose of Conscious Evolution as a world view is to foster the evolution of our species to full potential, based on the harmonious use of all our powers—spiritual, social, and scientific—in harmony with the deeper patterns of nature and the Great Creating Process itself, traditionally called God.

The Foundation for Conscious Evolution has a unique role to cultivate this worldview, which is arising in so many. Through EVOLVE, Gateway and a variety of media forms, founder Barbara Marx Hubbard and other key colleagues act as guides to identify, connect, and communicate vital ideas, people, and projects in every major field now actually working toward a positive future. We provide a new context to “converge that which is emerging” and to invite everyone to participate more fully in the cocreation of a future equal to our spiritual, social, and scientific capacities.

Foundation for Conscious Evolution - P.O. Box 4698 Santa Barbara, CA 93140 (805)682-3222