Barbara Marx Hubbard: Visions of a Universal Humanity

So one of the first steps we can take is to discover or ask ourselves what is that creativity or yearning that’s inside of us.  And then push further with the answers that come out of us.  I know a lot of us sometimes have a lot of fear surrounding ‘just going for it’.

Well, I don’t think you need to just leap out of the box like that.  What you have to do and what I’ve done all my life as a teacher, is first of all, I’m aware of the magnificence of the evolutionary story that from nothing at all some 13.7 billion years ago there emerged a pattern, a design that created energy, matter, Earth, life, animal life, human life, and it’s in me now.  It’s in every single one of us and I call that the impulse of evolution.  You get a sense that that impulse has direction.  Towards what?  Higher consciousness, more complexity, more synergy, more freedom of expression.  If you look at the billions of years from single cells to us, it is directional.  At that stage it’s directional.  So when you tune in to that impulse inside you and you say, “Oh, that’s my aspect of this larger story”, you suddenly feel the force is with you rather than you are all alone in a neutral universe going to down to a heap dump.

When I was 18 in Paris, I was living in the existentialist world view that there was no meaning in the universe except what the individual gave it.  And of course everybody was depressed.  The more depressed the cooler you were. If you should ever happen to have been hopeful during those days, you were considered naïve.  Well, that was me.  I was somehow innately hopeful but I had nothing to be hopeful about.