The Revelation:
A Message of Hope for the New Millennium

We are the seed of a fully human species. Our desire to grow is the pulse and power of evolution itself, motivating us to realize and fulfill our life purpose. Deep personal stories often reveal the pattern of the future human.

Each of us is an expression of the overall evolutionary journey. By tracing our individual stories, we discover our unique participatory role in the great transformation of our time.

My own personal story led me to the planetary story, which in turn led to my awareness of the universal potential of the human race and to my participation in a communion of pioneering souls attracted to the evolution of the world.

Everything that rises, converges. As we live our own stories fully, we discover our vocations of destiny, we attract to us our life partners, and we actualize our unique potential as vital members of the evolving world, at the time of its Quantum Transformation:

Behold, I show you a mystery:
We shall not all sleep;
but we shall all be changed . . .

All my life I have been a seeker for meaning. Born of a Jewish agnostic family in 1929, I received no spiritual training. I did not even know we were Jewish! My father never mentioned our past.

He was Louis Marx, a Horatio Alger type, raised in Brooklyn in poverty, risen to wealth as a toy manufacturer by the time he was thirty, sitting on top of the world in a triplex apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

He was strong, vibrant, smelling of fine cigars, exuding power and excitement. Broadway openings. Trips to Europe. Gifts and toys -- toys everywhere. He wanted nothing to do with the Old World. His was a world of new promise: if you worked hard, you could do anything. I grew up with an innate sense of hope. I was completely happy as a child, so naturally happy that I did not even notice it.

When I asked my father what religion we were, he answered, "You are an American."

"What does that mean?"

"It means do your best," he replied.

At what? I wondered. His purpose was to make money. What was my purpose to be? I felt, even as a child, a call to serve a great and unknown cause.

When I asked him why he always worked so hard, he said, "I was tired of standing at the end of the line."

When I was twelve my mother became ill with breast cancer. We moved from New York to Scarsdale. A terrible gloom descended upon our house. I prayed to God for mother's recovery, offering my life for hers in a bargain with God -- to no avail. After a painful and mutilating mastectomy she died. My father came home from the hospital and awoke us in the middle of the night. "Little mother is dead," he said. "There is nothing to do but cry." We all crowded onto his lap, four brokenhearted children and a devastated man, sobbing.

Suddenly I stiffened. A deep protest arose within me. I could not accept her death. It was intolerable. This horror is not inevitable! There must be something more. A fierce rage awakened in my soul at the injustice of innocent suffering. An aching void contracted my heart, hurting like an ancient wound. I wandered around the Scarsdale mansion, lonely, crying, seeking for what I did not know, trying to take care of my younger brother and sisters. This was the beginning of my quest to understand the future of humanity.

Three years later, when I was fifteen, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. I remember vividly the shock . . . and then the questions arose which have magnetized my attention and directed my life from that day forward:

What is the meaning of our power? What is the purpose of science and democracy? Are we headed toward destruction? Or are we moving toward meaningless affluence, which had already struck the rich in the developed world?

Neither seemed right. Neither corresponded to the magnetic attraction for the future that pulled at my solar plexus, calling for something more, something new. Again the question, what is new? What are we aiming for that is desirable? I saw that if we continued to "work hard" in the direction we were going, we could destroy everything!

Although I did not articulate it this way at the time, I started on a search for an image of the future commensurate with our capacities and our aspirations. My innate sense of hope as an American was infused with the feelings that we were moving toward something great, unprecedented, wonderful . . . yet what could it be?

I admired my father tremendously. Yet I could not be what he was. I was a member of the next generation of Americans. What was I to do my best at? I certainly could not do my best at more of the same if that was going to destroy the world.

The answer must be in a book. Someone must know! So I began to read with a deep hunger for meaning. I had to find out what our power is for. The answer to this question was, for me, the Holy Grail.

I read like a child starving for life. I remember sitting in bed with books piled all around me, falling on the floor, covering the night table. First, the world philosophies. What do they say about the future? Very little indeed. Either they look backward toward a golden age; or are stoical, accepting nature as is; or repetitive, expecting nothing new under the sun; or existential, asserting that there is no intrinsic meaning, only what you make up; or absurdist/nihilistic, based on the inevitable increase of entropy and the heat death of the universe.

None of these philosophies resonated with the intuitive hope, the magnetic sense that something great is coming in the future.

In 1948, I wrote in my journal:

It's Christmas, but I feel none of the mystery, the peace or the warmth that comes to one on Christ's birthday . . . There is a constant pull in the middle of my stomach . . . I've achieved nothing, yet those same eyes have seen visions of untold glory. There is a key to my desires, which I hold but can't use . . . I'm like a magnet feeling the attraction of another magnet, yet held apart. Either I will respond to it or die . . .

I turned to the world religions, looking for one thing: the image of the future equal to our collective capacities. Much more interesting! They all "predicted" transformation. Especially the Judeo-Christian vision, which suggested a time would come in history when, as St. Paul said, "We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed . . . in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet shall sound, the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed . . . (I Corinthians 51, 52).

There! The magnetic pull was for that. Every fiber of my being was excited. That must be the meaning of our power. But what is that? And how do you get from Scarsdale, New York, to the New Jerusalem?

I tried to make the mystical leap of faith from here to there, but my rational mind would not go. I failed, falling into a metaphysical abyss, between secular reality and spiritual faith.

In desperation, I joined the local Episcopal Church. I'll always remember the unsuspecting priest -- affable, pallid, correct, traditional. "How shall we all be changed?" I asked him. "Is the resurrection, the ascension, and promise that we will do the works that Christ did true? Is there any reality to this? I want to go the whole way with it if it's true."

The priest look embarrassed. I had the feeling that he did not really believe any of it.

He preached that God was good, while we were helpless and guilty.

I wanted to rise up and say, "No! It's not true. We must be great. God would not have created us helpless." But I did not dare. Besides, when I prayed I heard no voices, saw no signs. Only silence. I despaired and left the Church.

The next step in my quest was academia. I went to Bryn Mawr College with my burning question: What is the meaning of our power? There I could not even ask the question. Every subject was in separate boxes: mathematics, English, science, the philosophy of religion. There was no subject called "The Future of Humanity." I spent most of my time alone, reading philosophy.

I wrote in my journal during my freshman year:

How can people live and not know why they are living? What is the purpose of life, beyond things? My difficulty is that I cannot find a way to get experientially to the ultimate reality. There is no method to connect that ultimate reality with the personal need for purpose . . . All my life I have absorbed and absorbed -- never once given. By using myself as a catalytic agent I hope to give pattern and form to the mass of sensations which have impressed themselves upon my brain. The power of intelligence is the power to connect, relate, and integrate impressions. We are all surrounded by facts and truths, but in order that we understand them, we must put them into a configuration.

By this time my brother and father thought that something was wrong with me. I was always in my room reading. They thought I must be very unpopular. So my brother, Louis, who was at Princeton, sent a stream of attractive young men to "take me out." (She needs a man! She should get married and have children. That will make her happy.) Of course, I asked each of the suitors the questions: What is the meaning of our power? And I also asked them: What is your purpose? Quite understandably, they had something totally different in mind than I did!

I was at a metaphysical impasse. I could not find the way forward.

At age eighteen, I took my junior year abroad in Paris, at the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Sciences Politiques, an elite school for French civil servants. One days I separated from the group of girls I traveled with, for the first time going all alone to have lunch. It was a cold November afternoon. Wood fires filled the damp Paris air with a delicious aroma.

The tempting scent of roasting food attracted me to a little restaurant called Chez Rosalie. There were only two empty places, opposite each other in the crowded room thick with the smoke of Gaulois cigarettes. In a few minutes the door opened, and a tall, young American entered. He had a large aristocratic head with thick, curly dark hair and full lips . . . very handsome, I thought. His eye caught mine. There was nowhere he could sit but opposite me! I smiled secretly . . . I felt attracted to him. I pushed my breadcrumbs about on the wooden table and sipped my wine, hardly daring to look up. Finally, I raised my eyes to his and asked him if he'd like some of my wine. He said yes. We began to talk. I asked him my perennial question.

He spoke slowly, deliberately, his gray blue eyes holding me in a powerful gaze. He drew his breath in and answered as though he had been holding this jet stream of an idea for eons and was finally letting it out: "I am an artist. My purpose is to create a new image of man commensurate with our capacities to shape the future."

Instantaneously the idea flashed through my mind, "I'm going to marry you." (And I did!)

That afternoon we sat in the little café while the owner swept up around us, smiling sweetly, knowing as the French do, that we were falling in love. Earl Hubbard told me that when a culture loses its story of where it is going, it breaks down. Only when a society has a shared story that gives hope can it be great. For example, when the Homeric legends were written down, the Greeks then had a story out of which the Golden Age was born. And when the Gospels were written down, Western civilization had its story. In our time, he said, there is no shared story that gives hope to us all. The Gospels, as usually interpreted, are narrow, unscientific and exclusive. Materialistic scientism's story of universal heat death, and its assertion that there is no design, meaning or direction in the process of creation, makes all human aspiration for higher life a hopeless illusion. Humans have no greater purpose than the other animals. In fact, we are so destructive that we may well (and perhaps should) become extinct before we destroy the world. Modern society has no shared story that fits current knowledge and gives us hope.

Earl said that the last great image of the human being was created in the Renaissance, in Michelangelo's sculpture of David, the noble nude body, assured, humble, at once human and divine.

"Imagine a rapid film sequence," he said. "Start with the statue of David -- now see the gradual break-up of the image into points of light in the paintings of Manet, Monet and Pissaro. Now the image breaks up in Picasso, watch it disintegrate and disappear in [Jackson] Pollock's great splattered streaks of light . . . Where are we? We've gone!"

He said he had to return to America, for it was our turn on the stage of history. "This is our indelible moment," he said. It was in this new world that an artist would discover the new image of man. I knew in that instant I would join him on this quest.

Yet as we were preparing for the wedding I began to feel fear. I was being drawn away from my purpose, into some new identity, lost in materiality. Earl wanted a home and children. He wanted me to cook and clean and care for him. He asked me what kind of stove I would like! I was horrified. I didn't want any stove! I smiled as though it were wonderful, but my heart was sinking. I wanted to go back to Paris. I wanted to get a job in Washington. I wanted to be a great person. But I had no model of the woman I would like to be. I thought something was wrong with me.

We were married at the majestic St. Thomas's Church in New York City. Even as my father and I walked toward the altar, I felt as if I were moving inexorably toward a head-on automobile crash. Although I could see it coming, I felt helpless to do anything about it.

I loved my husband deeply, yet right from the beginning I had no desire to be anyone's wife. It felt weird to be "Mrs. Earl Hubbard." What happened to Barbara Marx? What happened to the questing, passionate girl seeking a great cause?

In 1952 my father took me to see his friend, President Dwight Eisenhower. I was shown into the Oval Office and was electrified by the brilliant and charismatic gaze of the new president. "What can I do for you, young lady?" he asked pleasantly.

I looked into his intense blue eyes and said, "Mr. President, I have a question for you."

"Yes?"

"What is the purpose of our power?"

He appeared startled. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, shook his head and said slowly, "I don't know."

It flashed through my mind, "We'd better find out."

The church didn't know. The university didn't know. The most powerful political leader in the entire world had no idea. The United States, now the mightiest country in history, had no sense of direction. Our vast technological-military-industrial power was focused on defense and consumption.

We had moved to a small artist's studio in Lime Rock, Connecticut, in the foothills of the Berkshire mountains. I became a homemaker. It was the 1950s. I lived in a beautiful New England environment, with clean air, clean water, but no purpose. Instead of pursuing my question, I immediately began to have babies . . . one, two, three, four, five! I joined the League of Women Voters, the car pool, the play group, the debating society, feeling drained, disoriented, exhausted.

I loved the miracle of giving birth -- the labor pains, the delivery, nursing, caring for the new life. I adored my children. In fact, they gave me my greatest joy, the only respite I had from the aching void. Yet as soon as each child was weaned, my question deepened, as did my feeling of depression. If I did not even know my purpose, how could I be a good mother? I loved my husband and children with all my heart, but my life's purpose was unknown, unengaged, unrealized. I was a lost soul trapped in the material world, reproducing my species with no sense of purpose.

It was an old fashioned marriage. Earl believed a woman's place was in the home, supporting her husband and children. I devotedly played that role, wanting to please him. I took care of the children, cleaned the house, cooked the meals, and wrote in my journal. This was before the emergence of any of the "movements," particularly the women's movement. One day as I was thinking of people I admired, I could not think of a single woman, except perhaps Marie Curie or Eleanor Roosevelt. My heroes were Pericles, Lincoln, Churchill.

Earl was painting seven days a week with fierce intensity. I wanted to die. I wrote in my journal, which had become my lifeline:

How can I trust myself when it seems I am always wrong? Does the higher meaning I'm after exist at all? Whatever wrongness exists in me is in so deep and down so far that it is me. If I'm wrong, it's my very nature to be wrong. There's nothing I can do to change who I am. I have no alternative being to turn into. I must live it out as Barbara, then die.

It is the fall of 1957, six years after marriage. I have come to the end of my endurance. No matter who I am with -- Earl, my father, even my own children -- I feel as though I were separated from them by this invisible shroud. I am able to converse, but not to initiate conversation. If they stop talking, I stop talking. I feel panicky. I search my brain for something to say, to assert myself, to feel alive at least, but incredibly, I can find nothing. Emptiness. I'm frightened. I smile and act as if this is the way I am supposed to be, this stone woman. I have no understanding of what's happening to me. I only know that the enormity of my failure overwhelms any tiny gesture I make to rescue myself.

Gradually, in the 1960s, as I entered my thirties, I found my way to the light, to the new shared story. Three great modern thinkers provided me with the logic of hope. They laid the foundation for a new vision of our future that is equal to our power and aspiration. They provided clues to the mystery of the meaning of our power.

First came Abraham H. Maslow's Toward a Psychology of Being. It saved my life. He said that once our deficiency needs are relatively easily met, our growth needs for a richer sense of beingness, for chosen work of intrinsic value, become imperative, as necessary as food is to the hungry. If we don't grow at that stage, we get psychologically ill. It is normal to desire more than comfort. He also pointed out that all self-actualizing people feel related to a chosen life purpose and a transcendent or transpersonal order beyond mere personal self-fulfillment.

I realized that the human being is so constituted that we are driven to actualize our potential beyond maintaining material survival or comfort. In this "beyond" lies our greatness. Our potential has barely been tapped. Most people, for most of the time, have had maximum numbers of children, worked eighteen hours a day to survive, and died young. Now, our generation will have fewer children, live much longer lives, and succumb to illness if we don't find our life's purpose.

As long as Western society has no further goal than material well-being, even if all people were to reach that state they would still feel incomplete until they also found their chosen life purpose.

I understood my problem was growth potential unused, because I did not know what to work for. I had not found my vocation. I was underdeveloped, not sick! My alienation was a divine discontent, driving me toward the next level of growth. I was determined to learn how to be "normal," joyful, natural in the 20th century. I sought to find my life's work.

Through Maslow I discovered the first answer to my perennial question: the meaning of our power, our affluence and technologies, is to free us to find our creative vocation and to actualize our potential through meaningful, chosen work.

The second life-saver was Teilhard de Chardin's Phenomenon of Man. An epiphany! Teilhard described a continuing, evolving pattern in the process of nature which leads to more complex whole systems with higher consciousness and freedom. From molecule, to cell, to animal, to human, and now to us on planet Earth . . . the process is still going on. We are approaching a time when the whole world will link up in an interfeeling organism.

Teilhard called this advent "Omega," the "Christification of the Earth." Each of us, being members of the one body, will be collectively lifted up in consciousness. This is a natural occurrence, and can be expected to happen in real, historical time.

Not only does the individual have unused growth potential, so does the world, so does our species, so does the universe! Something new is coming. The magnetic attraction was right. I could trust my intuition.

"Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed." Is this mystical intuition of forthcoming great change an actual evolutionary forecast? Might this change be a natural evolutionary step, occurring in real time once the planet is sufficiently evolved for us all to be connected up as one body? Is our extended nervous system, the electronic and mass media -- television, radio, computers (and now faxes) -- laying the basis for this change?

I began to get "hot." The mystery seemed to be unveiling itself to my wondering eyes.

A second answer emerged: The meaning of our power is to connect the world into one living, interacting organism of far greater capacity than the sum of our separate parts. Science and technology are a vital part of the noosphere, the thinking layer of the Earth. Through the mass media we are being linked into a single, vast body that is about to become collectively self-aware!

For me, ideas are not abstract concepts. They are living, breathing beings that transform our lives. I realized that the image of reality we hold is the most important idea we have. For as we think about reality, so we feel, act and create. I literally began to be flooded with excitement, like a detective in a mystery story who has just found a great clue.

The third discovery was R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller. In his little book, Utopia or Oblivion, he said that the human mind is designed to know the design of nature. The universe is not going down to increased disorder; it is instead building up toward ever higher order because it is increasing in intelligence -- through us!

Intelligence, proclaimed Fuller, is not physical, it is metaphysical: we cannot know less, only more. We are rapidly learning how to do ever more and more with ever less and less. Our technology is becoming ephemeralized, miniaturized, and aesthetic, like nature's technologies: photosynthesis, DNA, the human brain.

We now have the technology, resources, and know-how, Fuller said, to make of this world a 100 percent physical success. We can begin our work as citizens of local universe, which is to educate ourselves to our full potential. We can become self-evolving, self-regenerating and eventually continuous humans, transcending the mammalian life cycle. The growing edge of technology is giving us the power to transform ourselves as well as our world.

I was thrilled with this tremendous affirmation of my intuition that something new and great is coming: The individual human has enormous untapped potential. The planet itself is evolving toward a quantum leap, wherein all of its members will experience themselves as part of one body. We have the ability to overcome physical lack, and even to change our physical nature -- our body/mind systems. These great evolutionary goals are the meaning of our power.

One day I took a walk, overwhelmed with gratitude. I said out loud to the universe, "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" Then I heard the inner words, which seemed to flow from the heart of the cosmos directly into my heart: "Thank you, Barbara!"

I felt ecstasy, joy, beatitude. The pain that I had felt since my mother's death healed in that instant. Instead I felt warmth, mother's love, yet at a far different scale. There is a relationship between me and IT. I am not alone. I am not abandoned. I am part of this cosmos. My desire is Its expression. Its expression is my desire. I and It are connected! My aspirations to be more, to do more, were not the false and wishful thinking of an ignorant and stupidly hopeful, naive woman. They were the direction of evolution itself! The aching void was, at least in that moment, filled. This was the "good news" that my restless mind had so desperately sought.

Now that I knew this, what should I do? What will happen when the world discovers all this? Will everyone feel as I do? Am I crazy . . . or is this true? I began actively to seek out my vocation of destiny sensing that I was to be an "advocate for humanity."

It was clear to me that our species has no vision of its collective potential. While we are continually being told everything that is wrong with us, and made painfully aware of our failures, who is offering us a vision of our possibilities? Yet without a vision, our species will perish.

In 1962 John Glenn penetrated our blue biosphere into outer space. I had a sense of our species at the moment of physical transformation. Not only is our consciousness expanding as the mystics have proclaimed for ages . . . so also, our bodies are transcending Earth-boundedness. When I saw the rocket rise on television the words FREEDOM! BIRTH! exploded in my mind. I found myself trembling, crying, as though "I" were being born. We could become a universal species! That was part of the purpose of our power, our technologies, our sciences. They provided us with the skills to carry us beyond the womb of our mother Earth into a universe in which there may be life-systems comparable to our own. The Western world has been developing the technologies of transcendence commensurate with our visions of transcendence.

It was like being alive when the fish flopped out upon the dry land: a critical evolutionary event, and this time we are here! I saw, however, that most people were lacking an evolutionary perspective and could not understand the meaning of the space program.

I began to move beyond my role as a wife and mother of five. In my reaching out, I met Jonas Salk, the great biologist. He is a radiant, magnetic man, a poet of biological wisdom, a prophet of the coming evolutionary change. I had written to one of Jonas' board members, Jerry Piel, head of The Scientific American. I proposed a Theater of Man to be established at the Salk Institute. It should be the place to dramatize the evolutionary destiny of the human race, I wrote. He showed the letter to Jonas.

One day the phone rang. It was Jonas. "You have expressed my dream," he said. You have stated my vision far more clearly than I could . . . we must be two peas in the same pod! May I take you out to lunch?"

The very sound of his voice activated my whole being. I knew my life would never be the same again. Several days later he drove up. It was a glorious September day. The trees glittered golden and yellow, the freshly mown lawn smelled sweet, the apple trees were laden with red, shining fruit, glowing in the heat of the noonday sun.

He opened the door and looked into my eyes. "This must be Eden," he said, smiling at me. "Yes," I answered, "and I must be Eve."

As we drove to New York I told him all the things that were "wrong" with me: my love of the future, my desire to evolve, my feeling of connectedness with all being. He smiled and said, "Barbara, there's nothing wrong with you. You combine the characteristics needed by evolution now! You are a bivalent bonding mechanism -- you have hooks on two ends. You are just what's needed, and I will introduce you to some others I have found."

I cried with happiness in the car, pretending to have a bad case of hay fever. The "ugly duckling" I feared myself to be was a swan! My life was suddenly meaningful: I was an essential participant in the universe!

Teilhard once described this experience. He said, "You have only to take two people in a gathering, endowed with this mysterious sense of the future. They will gravitate instinctively toward one another; they will know one another . . . no racial or social barrier seems to be effective against this force of attraction ..."

Jonas said he had spent a quarter of a century finding such "mutants." He would introduce me to those he had found. And so he did. Al Rosenfelt, science editor of Life Magazine, Dr. Joel Elkes, head of the Department of Neuropharmacology of Johns Hopkins University, Louis Kahn, the architect . . . each meeting was a revelation, an affirmation so deep that I began to feel genuinely transformed. For those of us who have this mysterious sense of the future it is absolutely essential to meet others who share our passion. Our evolutionary potential is activated by the contact.

I was joyful, radiant, filled with a vitality. I felt as though my very cells were being rejuvenated. I wrote in my journal:

This Christmas of 1964 is the best of my life, not because I've achieved my ideals but because the problem of identity has disappeared. I can never again say I am nothing, for as all people are, I, too, am the inheritor of the evolution of the ages. In my genes are the generations. Every cell in my body identifies me with the great and terrible adventure of inanimate-to-animate-to-human, and every desire of my being sets me passionately to work to further the rise of humaneness out of humanity. I am what was and what will be. If I am nothing, life is nothing; that it cannot be -- and be.

Meanwhile, Earl was developing a new artistic image. First he eliminated the body. "Our physical bodies are no longer our instruments of action," he said. "Our physical functions are being assumed by our extended bodies, our new machines -- our rockets, our telescopes, our satellites. Our personal body is becoming our 'house of thought.'"

As the body was disappearing in Earl's paintings, the background was opening out toward the universe that we had seen during John Glenn's space flight. The background became velvet black, the color of the universe, and the face became a glowing starlight, the synthesis of all color. It represented individual awareness.

"From the new perspective of space," Earl said, "humans become humankind" one body on Earth, reaching out to make contact with other life."

This image of the face as starlight against the universe of black imprinted itself deeply into my being. It awakened an emotional receptivity, an expectation of something about to happen. Our quest, the purpose of our marriage was being realized. This was a new image of man. . . . except I posed for it . . . it was womankind in the universe that I saw!

I felt a tremendous inner tension. The intellectual ideas had burned themselves into my heart, my body, my soul. The hundreds of hours of reading, questioning, and discovering were preparing me to experience, indeed to embody, that which I had understood.

Reprinted from The Revelation: A Message of Hope for the New Millennium

by Barbara Marx Hubbard by permission of Hay House. All rights reserved, 1996.

Watch for "Scene 2: The Planetary Experience" in a forthcoming issue of The Monthly Aspectarian.