Giving Birth to a Better Future

Written by Corey W. deVos

All it takes is a cursory scan through the 24-hour news cycle to feel like the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Our economy is failing, our environment is suffering, all while our ideological differences become more intractable every day and our political system comes to a virtual standstill. Anxiety rules the day—a tightly wound collective anxiety that has in turn produced a staggering amount of cultural cynicism.

But is this cynicism really the most appropriate response to our current condition? At a time when it can feel like the average person has even less control over their fate then ever before—subject to unprecedented economic pressures, caught in the crossfire of one of the greatest culture wars we've seen in decades, and conditioned by a sensationalist media to believe that our world is somehow more precarious and more violent than ever before—it can be all too easy to lose hope. However, despite the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality of the media, it remains true that, for example, the past decade has seen fewer wartime casualties than any other decade in the past 100 years. The world really is becoming a more peaceful place, largely due to the obsolescence of standing armies and the rapidly growing connectivity between individuals and nations—that is, because we are evolving.

If the world really is getting better, then why does cynicism seem to prevail? The simple answer: because we do not currently possess a shared vision of the future. We no longer have the modern space-age visions of humanity colonizing the solar system in giant wheel-shaped space stations, as we did in the 60's and 70's. We no longer have the idyllic flower-power visions of Haight-Ashbury, where "All You Need Is Love" was felt to be so much more than mere lyrical expressions of sentiment or affection—it was an idealistic roadmap for the future. A tad naive, perhaps, but powerful nonetheless.

Without a cohesive shared vision, without a sort of mutually-felt Omega Point calling us into our future, it can feel like the world is moving in a million directions at once—drawing and quartering our hopes, our optimism, and our overall sense that we are actually going somewhere.

Without such a vision, cynicism and dystopia quickly fill the cultural vacuum.

Creating and nurturing this sort of vision is exactly what pioneers like Barbara Marx Hubbard and Ken Wilber have devoted their entire careers to. Bringing them both together in dialogue, we can feel a supernova of warmth, clarity, brilliance, and sober optimism exploding in our hearts, grounding our cynicism and reminding us that we really are on the right track. When we look at the world from the wide-open vista of this big, beautiful evolutionary vision, we can see that our various problems and crises are not obstacles to reaching the next phase of human existence, but rather the indicators that we are already on our way. Our emergencies are symptoms of our emergence, and could not possibly unfold any differently.

In Barbara's own words:

"From the vantage point of our birth as a universal humanity, we are not dying; rather we are in a dangerous but natural condition, just post-birth, not yet awake, yet become aware that if we do not shift our behavior from over-populating, polluting and fighting we will self destruct. We can see that we are naturally hitting a limit to one form of consciousness and of growth in the womb of Earth. We are naturally running out of non-renewable energy. We are naturally beginning to limit our population growth. We are naturally struggling to coordinate ourselves at a planetary scale, to manage a planetary ecology, to get food to all members of our planetary body, to handle our own waste, to stop the extinction of other species, etc.

These problems are no more a mistake than a baby's growth in the womb at the ninth month is a mistake. The very pain caused by these conditions is vital to our birth. Without the pressure of this pain, we would never wake up to our full potential. Our crises are leading to our evolution. They are signs of the next stage of our evolutionary life. They are forcing us towards conscious evolution—or devolution and self-destruction—that makes a huge difference as to what the meta-code we choose to evaluate our current condition.

A baby will die if it stays in the womb when it is time for it to be born. It is outgrowing the womb. Space scientist Krafft Ehricke told the story of the fetal scientist in the womb in the seventh month. The scientist is predicting that by the eighth month there will be over crowding, by the ninth month there will be deadly pollution, and by the tenth month, the organism will be dead. Of course the fetal scientist does not know about birth. He has never seen it before."

If a mother did not know about birth, she would think that she is dying. And when she saw the new–born she might be horrified! But since she knows about birth, she understands the meaning of the pain, and she is hormonally programmed to love the unknown child. Her breasts fill and she experiences unconditional love for the infant, naturally. Not because it will grow up to be a lawyer or doctor, but because it IS value, it IS life!

However, since we have never seen another planet go through its crises of a "planetary birth," many people do believe we are dying or that we are guilty and a failure as a species. When we see our potential for life, we will not fail. But we need a new memetic code to guide us, or as Teilhard de Chardin said, we might fall out of love with our species, losing our attraction for our future.

Opening our collective eyes we discover that we already have the capacity to solve every problem and realize unimaginable new capacities.

In fact, we are already beginning to do so."

- from An Evolutionary Synthesis by Barbara Marx Hubbard