The Revelation:
A Message of Hope for the New Millennium

On a fateful afternoon in February 1966, I was taking my usual daily walk. It was a freezing day. The trees stood black and brittle against the winter sky. There was no sign of life anywhere. I wrapped my scarf around my face to protect myself from the bitter cold and walked with my head down to avoid the wind.

I had been reading Reinhold Neibuhr on the subject of community. He had quoted St. Paul's famous statement: "For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ." As I contemplated that idea, I felt a deep frustration.

The early Christians had a story to tell: a child was born . . . Everyone could understand this story, from kings to peasants. Unexpectedly a new question burst forth in my mind. I spoke it out loud. Lifting my voice to the ice-white sky, I demanded to know:

"What is our story? What in our age is comparable to the birth of Christ?"

I knew it must be one story for all of humankind, for we are all members of one planetary body.

I lapsed into a daydreamlike state, walking on the path around the top of the hill, in deep concentration and receptivity. My thoughts quieted down. I was poised from within to catch the slightest hint of revelation.

Suddenly my mind's eye penetrated beyond the blue cocoon of Earth, lifting me up into the utter blackness of outer space. From there I witnessed the entire sweep of Earth's history, as though I were viewing a technicolor movie.

I witnessed the Earth as a living body, just as the astronauts did. It was alive! Then I experienced a kinesthetic imprint of the planetary organism. I felt myself to be a cell in that body. Earth was gasping for breath, struggling to coordinate itself as a whole. The pain of its whole body was being communicated through the mass media, the nervous system of the world. I felt everybody's pain as my own . . . for we are one body.

Then the movie sped up. I saw something new. A flash of extraordinary light more radiant than the sun surrounded the planet. Instantly, all of us were attracted to the light. We forgot our pain, and at that moment of shared attention, empathy began to course through our planetary body. Wave upon wave of love flowed through all people. A magnetic field of love aligned us. We were caressed, uplifted in this field of light. We felt our inner light rising. Mass healings occurred. People flooded out of their houses, offices and buildings, meeting each other in ever-growing gatherings, embracing, loving one another. It was like a thousand Berlin Walls coming down at once . . . all over the world.

A beat began to pulse through the planet. The air cleared, the waters purified. Food coursed through the whole system, reaching all of our members. The mass media throbbed with light, carrying stories of our transformations while itself being transformed in the process.

Rockets rose majestically, carrying the seed of Earth life into the universe. The Earth coordinated herself as one body.

With each wave of harmony, the glowing light that surrounded us intensified. We were being coordinated by an invisible design. The light became brighter and seemed to fuse with the light that is within us. Each of us was a point of light, growing brighter as we joined with other points of light. As we connected on Earth, millions of distant points of lifelike light also appeared in the surrounding universe. And as we harmonized, they became even more visible and were drawn to us . . . life to life, light to light. We were attracting beings comparable to ourselves.

I heard a tone, a vibration that oriented us in one direction. The entire human race was magnetized by that sound. The animal kingdom was gentled. The lion did lie down with the lamb. The glowing light around our planet seemed to be intelligent, loving, familiar. It was about to speak with us directly. We were straining to understand, yet were too immature to fully recognize the meaning of the sound.

Then I heard the inner words clearly:

Our story is a birth. It is the birth of humankind as one body. What Christ and all great beings came to Earth to reveal is true. We are one body, born into this universe. GO TELL THE STORY OF OUR BIRTH . . . Barbara!

My vocation! To tell the story of our birth! My prayers had been answered. I had found my path, I knew why I was alive. The search for the cause had been found. "Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God. Our story is a birth!"

In response to those words, which had seemed to come from deep within the universe, billions of us opened our collective eyes and smiled. It was a Planetary Smile -- like the first smile of a newborn baby when her nervous system links up and, seeing her mother, her tiny face relaxes into an amazing, radiant smile. Somehow she knows her mother, even through she has never seen a human being. And just as that baby knows her mother, humankind knows the light. Even if we have never seen it clearly, each of us has, in a secret place in each of our hearts, experienced the light that has been seen by all mystics. Now, for the first time we were seeing it together. Ecstatic joy rippled through the planetary body . . . and through me as one of its billions of members.

I saw that it was true. We are being born. Our defense systems, our economies, our communication systems, our cultures are all linking, despite our differences. We are one body, whether we like ourselves or not! The same process that joined atom to atom, molecule to molecule, and cell to cell, is now joining us. We are the generation born when the whole planetary body is being born.

The world crisis suddenly made sense . . . our condition is dangerous but natural. Of course we must stop our unrestrained growth in the womb of Earth; we must handle our toxic waste, shift to renewable energies, restore our Mother and begin to explore the universe beyond our home. We simply have to grow up! We've never seen another planet go through its birth process. Maybe we're normal!

"Behold, I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed." Omega! The planetary birth is a real event in cosmic time.

This was an expanded reality experience of something that is really happening to us now! When we take the perspective of ourselves as a universal species and speed up time to see the pattern in the process of evolution, it all becomes obvious.

With that the technicolor movie resumed. The whole story of our birth unfolded, like a speeded-up film of the growth of a plant from bulb to bloom. I witnessed the life of our planet, from the quantum instant of its conception to the quantum instant of our collective awakening, of our birth as one body.

I felt myself tumbling through an evolutionary spiral. Each great quantum transformation was a turn on the spiral -- a radical leap to a new order of being. "I," the macrocosmic, universal I, the "I" that is "we," the "I" in each of us that was, is, and ever will be, experienced the whole story of creation as our story.

I felt the spiral unfold: the creation of the universe, the formation of the Earth, the appearance of single-celled life, of animal life, and of human life. Then we began to approach our own turn on the spiral. I saw the early religions in India, Egypt, Greece, Israel -- from Buddha to Christ -- as harbingers of the next stage of evolution. They demonstrated to us that we are higher beings, founders of the future. I saw the emergence of science as the great tool for understanding how nature works, so that we can evolve consciously with her. I saw democracy as the great liberator of human potential. I saw the explosion of the atomic bomb as the beginning of our collective labor pains. It was the signal that the Cosmic Child, humanity, could either kill itself by remaining in self-centered consciousness in the womb of Earth, or instead emancipate itself for universal consciousness and action.

The next turn on the spiral began, revealing the "synergy" of which Bucky Fuller wrote. The separate parts of humanity and Earth are coming together to form a whole that is greater than and unpredictable from the sum of its parts. Synergy feels like love, loving one another as ourselves. We are, in fact, one body! Our capacities as a whole are infinitely greater than when we are separate tribes and nations. Once our consciousness shifts from feeling separated to knowing that we are all members of one body, our vast technological genius begins to serve the growth of ourselves as one planet. And that consciousness shift can happen in the twinkling of an eye! In fact it is now happening in millions of us throughout the world.

Once our consciousness shifts collectively, of course we can restore the Earth. We can feed all people. We can control population growth. We can shift our military from "weaponry to livingry," as Bucky said. We can emancipate unique potential. We can! We can! We have the capacities to do it already, we just don't know that we can. The Cosmic Child can live. Our birth is natural. Yet we must know that we are being born, not dying, else we will not fully activate our new capacities before it is too late.

I saw the rockets as nature's seed pods of Earth-life bursting into the universe. I saw our mass media -- our planetary nervous system -- link up and report our growth, awakening all of humankind's members to their parts in the process of growth.

I realized that in the very same decade when we were learning to preserve our Earth and limit growth here, we were also stepping off the planet to begin the establishment of new worlds in space. At the same time we were also beginning to learn the language of DNA, the genetic code that designs bodies for this Earth.

We are becoming universal humans! We will have to change our bodies to live beyond this Earth for which they were designed. Naturally! New bodies will be essential in a radically new environment. Nature always creates new bodies for new consciousness, in order to transcend new frontiers: the fish, the bird, the hominids, Homo sapiens . . . and next, Homo universalis. We, too, shall evolve new bodies for new worlds, only this time it will be through conscious rather than unconscious evolution.

Astronautics, genetics, cybernetics, and nanotechnology (the ability to construct at the atomic level) are natural capacities of a universal species that is moving from its terrestrial to its universal phase. Furthermore, those powers are far too great to be contained by a biosphere, or in self-centered consciousness. They are meant for cosmic consciousness and universal action. For us to stay in this stage would be like a baby trying to remain in the birth canal. It would kill us all.

"Oh, my God!" I thought. This whole process is really the birth of a universal species. It is not a metaphor, it is an actuality. What we call "evolution" is actually an organic process that creates beings capable of evolving consciously. We are becoming conscious evolutionaries!

I saw humanity, at the next turn of the spiral, gaining the powers of co-evolution and co-creation, just as all our religions told us we would. ("Co-creation" means conscious co-operation with the process, direction, and purpose of evolution -- the implicate order of the cosmos: God.)

I saw, perhaps most fundamentally of all, that the vast effort of humanity to "be fruitful and multiply" would have to be curtailed in our generation. One more doubling of the world population will destroy our life support system. Our Mother will not support us if we continue to grow in numbers! We must stop. Where is this powerful prime energy to go? In a flash I saw it!

The energy of procreation is to be emancipated for co-creation, for chosen work, for vocation. The sexual drive to reproduce the species is now being transformed into the suprasexual drive to evolve the species. We desire to join, not only our genes but our genius, to evolve ourselves and our world. Sexuality and suprasexuality are about to merge in one great orgasmic effort to evolve!

What had happened in my own life, the search for meaningful work, was a natural extension of sexual energy. Imagine when the whole world turns on to its creative drive!

The so-called "population crisis" is a crisis of our planetary birth. The limits to growth on Earth shift us from procreation to co-creation. Creativity will be emancipated en masse. The passionate love of chosen work which Maslow discovered in all self-actualizing people is the next stage of sexuality. That's why it's going to happen! And we are going to love it as much as we love sex!

All of these thoughts flashed through my mind in a single gestalt, an integration of everything I knew. It was a kinesthetic experience of a natural set of events that is happening right now.

Then the technicolor movie stopped. It had lasted a few minutes at most. I stood alone upon the hill. Tears of joy were frozen upon my face, my heart was bursting with joy. Ask and it shall be given. Knock and doors will open. There was no outward sign of what had happened. Yet I knew it was real. It's happening now. I had seen with universal eyes. I ran home, the cold air searing my lungs and my face, to tell my children and my husband that I had to "go forth and tell the story of our birth."

I rushed out to Earl's study to tell him, feeling suddenly shy. What should I say? I blurted it out with terrific enthusiasm. Instantly I felt his pain. He looked crushed. "Barbara, I thought I was going to make you happy," he said, sadly. "But I see you want to do it for yourself." I embraced him to comfort him, to tell him I loved and needed him. But I knew in my heart that I had to express myself, as well as support him. I could not be secondary any longer.

The flame of expectation rose to a burning intensity, motivating me to seek an expanded vocation, an evolutionary connection between my need for personal growth and the needs of a world in transition. My second life began, a chosen life. I felt free within myself, for I had a purpose related to the evolution of the world. I worked with a powerful joy to understand the Story of Creation at the dawn of the Universal Age.

I read cosmology, geology, biology, paleontology, anthropology, history, religion, current events, and futuristic books to trace the outline of the story. I saw the evolutionary spiral as the spine upon which to hang all knowledge. Through studying cosmo-genesis, bio-genesis and homo-genesis we would learn "conscious evolution," deducing guidelines by which to co-design a positive future.

Conscious evolution is the "meta-discipline" of our age, a discipline in which every field and function of human endeavor recognizes itself as an aspect of a universal process that moves toward greater complexity, freedom, and order. Reality is, in Bucky Fuller's phrase, "a verb, not a noun."

I wrote a "Center Letter" to a thousand persons, whose names I collected from books, magazines, and friends, people like Lewis Mumford and Father Thomas Merton, asking them what they thought was the next stop for a positive future. I invited Abe Maslow to lunch. He was another soul mate, a brother. He shared with me his "eupsychian network," his list of over three hundred people who were leaders in the young human potential movement. He deeply encouraged me. "Barbara," he said, with that gentle, twinkly look, "never let the bastards get you down." He was fighting the "reductionists" in his field, the guardians of the prevailing view that we are "nothing but" the consequence of our biochemical drives. They were attacking him, as they were Jonas. (Later, as he was dying of a heart ailment, he scribbled me a note from the hospital: "Barbara, you represent life. Keep going.")

I wrote to everyone in Maslow's network, asking for their positive views on our future. Many responded and I published their responses. The Center Letter spread. People in Africa carried it on bicycles. It went behind the Iron Curtain. I received letters from all over the world. Whomever I liked, I invited to lunch. Within six months I was connected to leaders of the emerging world.

My young teenaged daughter, Woodleigh, said, "Mom, you have transformed from a cave-age lady to a space-age lady in one year!" This was the truth. When we discover our life purpose we are changed. We enter a new life cycle. We are no longer aging and dying, we are growing and evolving.

It is an interesting fact that I have not been really sick enough to spend even one day in bed since the Planetary Birth Experience. (I capitalize it because I believe it is a real event that may come in our lifetime.) I used to get colds, sore throats, stomach upsets frequently. Since that day in 1966, if I feel an illness coming on, I have merely to think of the experience and I feel connected to the Whole Planetary Body. Energy floods my system . . . and I am healed!

I began "breakfast dialogues" with Earl. He was brilliant, an artist with words. I would ask him questions about the meaning of space, of freedom, of the United States. He answered with vivid images and ideas. We began to shape the evolutionary philosophy that would guide my life. I took notes. I taped it. I typed it. I edited a book for him entitled The Search Is On. I organized an exhibition for him at the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art entitled "The Challenge Is Freedom," with words and paintings. I loved his words. We sat for hours every morning. It was genuine co-creation. My love for him deepened as my life expanded.

Yet I now had my own friends. I was fully engaged in my own creative life, publishing the Center Letter, talking for hours on the phone with Jonas, seeking out new writers and thinkers and meeting them for lunch. Lancelot Law Whyte, who had written The Next Development of Man, and I became close friends, discussing philosophy far into the night. I found I could communicate these ideas so that people were touched in their inner knowing, awakened and enlivened by what I said.

During this process, despite our deepening relationship, my husband and I grew apart. I tried to readjust our relationships to be two equals working together. But everything I was doing felt to him like a rejection. He had a different picture of marriage. From his point of view, I had stopped being his "wife" when I developed a life of my own. This sounds archaic now, since the woman's movement, but then we had no guidelines to transform our relationship midstream.

Together we had conceived and raised five beautiful children. And we had given birth to "a new image of man commensurate with our capacity to shape the future," as we had said at the Chez Rosalie eighteen years earlier. Yet the growth in me was implacable and irresistible. I no longer knew how to hold my marriage together now that I had found my vocation. I was caught on the cusp of the old relationship between men and women, and the new.

Of course, the drive for creative self-expression can be balanced with relationship if the two partners are conscious from the beginning that they are to be equals. But my husband and I did not understand how to make this shift at that time.

With anguish in my heart, I told my beloved children, with whom I had the deepest relationship, that their mother was a pioneer, making a new place for them. My nine-year-old son, Wade, said to me, "Mother, we know you love us, you are doing what mothers are supposed to do. You are creating the future."

Now, I can say, with gratitude and relief, that what seemed like a grave failure may actually have been a liberation for both Earl and me. Most important, the effect of my life on my children has been surprisingly positive. The five children and four grandchildren have become extraordinarily loving with one another. My daughter Alexandra, who is a whale researcher, said, "Mom, we are like a whale pod." By some grace, the children love one another and me with an unconditional, totally supportive love. They are all following their own "vocation of destiny" with a passion as great as my own.

When I was fifty they gave me a birthday party. "What did I do well as a mother, and what did I do badly?" I asked them. Their answer was, "What you did well was to believe in your own dream and do it the whole way. What you did badly was you didn't know how to say 'no' to us. We could have used more guidance."

Somehow by having surrendered to my own deepest calling, while expressing my love for them, I had given them an example which they have followed and from which they are now reaping the rewards. Even though separation, and then the divorce, was surely painful to them, each of them has a deep sense of purpose and is following a unique chosen life. They have had to earn their own way, for I could not support them as my father had supported me. I feared that I had been a poor mother, but the fact is, they benefited from my example. They know in their thirties and forties that their lives have just begun.

Back then in the 1960s I did not know how it would turn out. But as Robert Frost said, "My life was a risk . . . and I took it." Having secured my love for my children as best I could and sought forgiveness from my husband, I moved into the larger world to fulfill my destiny.

World renowned futurist, speaker, citizen diplomat, social architect and prophetic politician, Barbara Marx Hubbard is the founder of the Center for Conscious Evolution. In 1984, her name was placed in nomination for the Vice-Presidency of the United States.

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

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