Barbara Marx Hubbard Offers Hope for 2012

Deepak Chopra called her “the voice of the conscious evolution of our time,” and Neale Donald Walsch wrote a book about her called “The Mother of Invention.” Barbara Marx Hubbard is the co-founder and chairperson of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, and author of several books, including “Birth 2012 and Beyond: Humanity’s Great Shift to the Age of Conscious Evolution.”

While the year 2012, and the date December 21, 2012 in particular, strikes fear in many who worry it is the end of the world, Hubbard defines the date as the mark of a phase change in human history. Instead of fear, she believes we should be celebrating the birth of a new era.

“We have to celebrate and cultivate the new beginning phases of a new planetary civilization,” she told Elevated Existence in a telephone interview. “Embrace the change. You are the change, and the change has within it the emergence of a world that is far more creative than anything we have ever known.”

This new culture and consciousness is already in our midst, but it is not fully known because the media doesn’t cover it, Hubbard explained. Instead, what gets covered is everything that doesn’t work in our world.

“Every day I read The New York Times in order to see all the things I can do nothing about. They are so disastrous and painful, and they are happening. But there is this whole other world that is completely capable of transforming,” she said. “There is innovation, creativity, connectivity, inspiration, and a new mass nervous system through social media being born.”

With the innovations in technology, including smart phones, Apple products and social media, Hubbard explained a new planetary nervous system has arisen without anyone doing it consciously. This is the next stage of evolution. She also pointed out the surge in spiritual growth, the increase of people interested in spiritual and self-help books, and the large number of those attending spiritual seminars all around the world. This uprising shows there are people looking to embrace a new world.

“Paul Hawkins book ‘Blessed Unrest’ identifies thousands of organizations already working to overcome the problems and crises all over the world,” she said. “Look at all the people beginning to take personal responsibility for their health, and how they are beginning to understand food, diet, exercise, stress and relationships, and the rise in the interest of alternative health. It’s the greatest mass movement in the history of the world, and it’s not being noticed.”

Evolution by Choice
While many view the problems the world is facing as a historical crisis, what we are experiencing is an evolutionary shift, said Hubbard. We are being show the way things have been done in the past are no longer working, and it’s time to find new ways to sustain ourselves.

“The problems we are facing today are evolutionary drivers requiring us to innovate and transform or go extinct,” said Hubbard. “What we have learned from studying evolution is that crisis is essential to creating [it]. Stress creates evolution, and we need to connect with that which is creative and sustainable.”

Hubbard believes this is evolution by choice now, and we need to consciously commit our creativity and love toward shifting our systems and the way we view the world. This shift in world view and consciousness is up to us, and we can all contribute to the new world emerging, she said.

“We need to be conscious that we are effecting evolution in everything we do, and at the core of the process of evolution is a dynamic tendency to greater consciousness,” said Hubbard. “There is a map to cross the gap in this world view, and we could change global warming, the financial systems and more. We do it by connecting to what works. We have to be connected and attach to what is emerging.”

We already have new capacities in our midst that when used well, can transform societies, including our technology, Hubbard noted. And the higher consciousness of many who are awakening on the planet is also key.

“The closest thing in human history is the advent of self-consciousness coming out of the Neanderthal world. It changed everything,” she explained. “I believe a new form of consciousness is arising in our age. I call it spiritual-based, evolutionary consciousness.”

Birth 2012
December 21, 2012 marks the end of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Mayan calendar, and Barbara Marx Hubbard is joining with many other spiritual and evolutionary authors on December 22, 2012 to celebrate a global “Birth Day.”

“What is planned is an awakening of as many people as possible to the fact that we are members of one planet, and infusing our global brain with love,” said Hubbard regarding the online event. “Deepak Chopra has been saying the global brain is being rewired by social media – Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, iPads and all of that. So what we are doing is infusing that rewiring of the global brain with the experience of it being the brain of the whole planetary body.”

We have the capabilities and knowhow to make the world work for all, Hubbard explained. It’s up to each individual to harness his or her creative energy for the greater good.

“Every person needs to open up to their deepest desire to create,” she said. “At the essence of every person is a creative impulse to realize their potential.”

For more information on Barbara Marx Hubbard, and to sign up for her12-week, live online course “Agents of Conscious Evolution Training,” which includes sessions with teachers such as Deepak Chopra, Gary Zukav, Michael Beckwith, don Miguel Ruiz and more, visit www.barbaramarxhubbard.com. For more information on Birth 2012, visit www.birth2012.com

Jack Kornfield Shares His Thoughts on 2012

The rumors are still circulating about what this year will bring and what the Mayan calendar is really predicting about December 21, 2012. During our interview with best-selling author and Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield for the March 2012 issue of Elevated Existence, we asked him to share his thoughts on the year.

“It’s so mysterious and far away to understand how the Mayans saw this eternal turning of time, but to whatever extent there is something to learn from it,” he explains. “We are in 2012. It’s not something coming at the end of the year. There are grave economic problems, continuing injustice, warfare, racism, and division of the world. There is also grave ecological problems and climate change. So we are in it.”

One of the most important things we need to understand is that the solution to our problems is more than just technology and science, he says. We also need to change the human heart, which is the source of racism, warfare, greed and hatred.

“Just as we develop changing technologies, these must be married by a change in consciousness,” he notes. “We can’t feel ourselves as separate tribes and individuals, as if we didn’t interbreed with the rainforest, as if the salt water of the ocean didn’t flow through our blood, as if we didn’t all have one ancestor in Africa, or as if the universe hadn’t given birth to us out of what in Buddhist psychology is called this web of interdependence.”

While there is tremendous suffering in the world, Kornfield also sees a tremendous call for the transformation of consciousness. “Whenever things are truly difficult, people have to rely on their spirit to get them through. It’s not just this time, but I think back to my mother and my grandparent’s generation, living through the depression and war. They too had to find the strength of spirit.”

However, now with the global interconnection of the Internet and so much more, he believes we are being called to make an even bigger change – to shift from beliefs of separation and fear to the truth of our interwoven lives, he notes. “It’s really necessary now, and I’m very hopeful.”

He also believes, as Ghandi did, that it’s a false division to separate the transformation of spirit with the transformation of the world and politics, and he explains a story Thich Nhat Hanh told about those who were crowded on the Vietnamese refugee boats.

“If everyone panicked all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough to show the way for everyone to survive,” he says. “So someone on the lifeboat of the world has to be that beacon of steadiness and compassion, and be mindful and free of heart. As you do that, it changes all you touch.”

We can each have an impact on the world in this way, as everyone has a gift to contribute. His advice? “The say in Zen there are only two things – you sit and you sweep the garden. And it doesn’t matter how big the garden is,” he notes. “Find ways to establish mindfulness of breath and body, and be mindful of your own humanity. Develop loving-kindness, and then take the sitting part of the practice out and tend to the garden of the world.”

For the full interview with Jack Kornfield, see the March 2012 issue of Elevated Existence Magazine.