Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential by Barbara Marx Hubbard Posted by: DailyOM

A Seminal Work of Visionary Hope, Updated for the 21st Century

In this era of government gridlock, economic and ecological devastation, and seemingly intractable global violence, our future is ever more ripe for and in need of fresh, creative reimagining. With her clear-eyed, inspiring, and sweeping vision of a possible global renaissance in the new millennium, Barbara Marx Hubbard shows us that our current crises are not the precursors of an apocalypse but the natural birth pains of an awakened, universal humanity. This is our finest hour.

Conscious Evolution highlights the tremendous potential of newfound scientific knowledge, technological advances, and compassionate spirituality and illustrates the opportunities that each of us has to fully participate in this exciting stage of human history. As we do, we will bring forth all that is within us and not only save ourselves, but evolve our world.

EXCERPT

Discovering the Importance of the New Story

It was a cold November day in Paris in 1948 during my junior year abroad from Bryn Mawr College. Somehow I had separated myself from my classmates and wandered into Chez Rosalie, a small caf on the Left Bank. A wood fire was burning and the smell of Gauloises cigarettes filled the air.

I sat at one of the wooden tables and ordered my lunch. A tall, handsome young American man opened the door, letting in the cold. There was only one place left for him to sit, opposite me. I smiled at him, immediately attracted, and introduced myself. He told me his name was Earl Hubbard. He had such a special intensity that I decided to ask him questions that had dominated my thoughts ever since the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Japan three years earlier, when I was fifteen years old, in 1945. My horror had stimulated these questions: What is the meaning of our new scientific and technological powers that is good? What is the purpose of Western civilization? What are positive images of the future commensurate with these new powers?

In my quest for answers, I had read through philosophy, science fiction, and world religions. But amazingly, except for brief glimpses in science fiction and mystical revelation, I found none. The philosophers looked back toward a golden age, as the Greeks did; or were cyclical, as in Eastern thought; or were stoical, believing there was nothing new under the sun as the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius said; or were existentialist, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, proclaiming that the universe has no inherent meaning except what we give it as individuals. Finally, I read the materialistic philosophers who proclaimed that the universe is nothing but matter and is inevitably degenerating to a heat death through increasing disorder or entropy as stars burn out, and with them all life will die. Although some visionaries and mystics foresaw a life beyond this life, beyond death, I found no positive visions of the future to work toward in this life.

With these questions I became a metaphysical seeker. My upbringing had been Jewish agnostic. I was a spiritual tabula rasa a blank slate with no religious beliefs. When I asked my father What religion are we? he answered, You are an American. Do your best! But at what? I wondered. My father was a Horatio Alger type, a poor boy from Brooklyn who had become the toy king of the world. He told his children that the purpose of life was to win, to make money. But I couldnt believe him. I knew that even if everyone had money, everyone would be as frustrated as I was, seeking the meaning of life but finding nothing. Material comfort alone could not be the goal of existence. I had grown up with so many toys that by the age of six, I knew that more toys would not make me, or anyone else, happier.

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