Conscious Evolution: Our Moment of Choice
The evolution of man is the evolution of consciousness and “consciousness” cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and “will” cannot evolve involuntarily. The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and “doing” cannot be the result of things which “happen.”
—Gurdjieff, Letter to Ouspensky, 1916
It was a moment of choice. Lying alone in a Sydney hospital room in 1951, Zoltan Torey was on the verge of death, facing a decision that would determine not only if he lived but how he lived. A twenty-one-year-old Hungarian refugee, he had come to Australia to escape a life under communism, and was working in a local factory at night to finance his days at university. A few evenings earlier, disaster had struck. While hauling a large drum of battery acid across an overhead track, the plug came loose, and a deadly shower of corrosive liquid rained down. “The last thing I saw with complete clarity was a glint in the flood of acid that engulfed my face,” he wrote years later in his autobiography Out of Darkness. “I recall reeling back, gasping for air with my nose, mouth, and eyes full of the stuff, coughing and spluttering . . . I spun around, beginning to notice a fast-thickening fog passing over my eyes. At this point my consciousness exploded in a sense of catastrophe. There was no thought in that instant, just fragments, faces of people dear to me, and a sickening feeling of this being the end. Then the fog closed in.”
When he woke up the next morning in the hospital, Torey was blind and would never see again. His vocal cords were heavily damaged, and he could speak only in a whisper. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The true casualty of this industrial accident was something deeper in the self. Yes, the acid had burned through his cornea and ravaged his throat, but it had done equal damage to his soul. All of his dreams, his plans for the future, the possibilities that make a twenty-one-year-old get up in the morning, had been washed away in that one splash of pain and fate. As he lay in the hospital room in the days that followed, his once-bright prospects looked grim. “I virtually witnessed my life sinking, ebbing away,” he remembers.
At the height of his struggles, feverish and dangerously depressed, Torey’s will to live was clearly failing and everyone knew it. He remembers a concerned hospital staff member sitting down next to him, and suggesting: “Maybe you should pray.”
Maybe he should pray? The thought struck Torey, lodged in his mind like a problem he couldn’t solve, and as night descended on the Sydney hospital, he contemplated his situation. Yes, he was in a mess. He needed help. He knew that he might never walk out of that hospital. But pray to God? Nominally raised as a liberal Lutheran, Torey was not personally religious. In fact, he had never prayed before. What right did he have now to ask God for special favors? And even if some distant deity could hear his cries, how did it make sense, in a suffering world, that divine favor should be bestowed on him? In 1951, the world seemed to be one disaster area after another, with war, famine, and diseases still threatening much of postwar Europe and Asia. And here he was, in a hospital room, thinking God should be concerned with his personal pain just because some random act of fate had intervened in his life? Why should providence give some special dispensation to the newly blind Zoltan Torey? Maybe he should pray. He understood the need but just couldn’t bring himself to do it. It seemed the height of selfishness.
As the night deepened and the hospital quieted, Torey reflected on his own situation. What if, instead of asking God for help, he reversed things? Perhaps the more important question was not how God would help him but how he would help God? And not even God, really, but life—this process we are all a part of. How might he contribute—help further the things he deeply cared about, such as life and love and understanding and clarity?
In order to answer that question, Torey began to review what he knew about life, the universe and, well, everything. He began to reflect upon the entire sweep of cosmic history. He had always been interested in truth and science and finding the deeper meaning and mechanics of things, but now in the midst of crisis, that inner curiosity took on an urgent and focused intensity. He reviewed in his own mind what he knew about the evolution of the universe—the singularity that started it all, the breakthrough of life, how chemistry became biochemistry, and how consciousness began. And it struck him—the clear directionality of it all. Matter had become conscious. Configurations of infinitesimal atoms had over eons of time become autonomous thinking and feeling human beings. How extraordinary! The obvious conclusion stared him in the face. Human consciousness is the advancing edge of this magnificent process. And this has implications, he realized. There is a moral code embedded in that recognition. We are not just part of this process, but we owe it our interest, effort, intellect, and cooperation. We are caught up in this incredible momentum, and we carry the meaning of the process forward into the future. Evolution has given us remarkable brains and a powerful form of consciousness, and in return it is our privilege—no, our obligation—to promote and contribute to the betterment of this process. We are not victims. We have a choice.
A new path had unfolded in front of his sightless eyes, and Torey recognized that his life still had great potential for meaning. He could still add to the evolutionary process, to enhancing life and furthering human knowledge. “It would justify me and my life and my youth, the privilege of being alive,” he recalls thinking.
Torey was saved that night. Maybe not by a supernatural deity answering a pious prayer, but make no mistake—he woke up a changed man, touched by the power of an evolutionary epiphany. Making his blindness an asset, he went on to use his heightened powers of mental visualization to further our understanding of how consciousness works in the human brain, a contribution that has won him respect from some of the greatest minds in science. His 1999 book, The Crucible of Consciousness, was one of the more sophisticated attempts to model how the brain creates the experience of consciousness and how the miracle of self-reflection has evolved in the human animal. Torey is also a deep humanist, someone whose infectious love for life and for the miracle of evolution shines only that much more brightly given the backdrop of his personal tragedy.
Torey’s story is inspirational but also instructive. It represents a personal victory over the temptations of despair but also an impersonal dawning of a new context in which to see the important choices of human life. It shows how a new kind of ethical context has quietly descended on human awareness over the last years and decades, almost unrecognized, like an unseen snow falling softly during the night, only to reveal a changed world in the light of the morning sun.
Torey is part of a loose category of thinkers I’ll refer to as the “conscious evolutionists.” In a broad sense, it is simply another term that points to the new worldview that all Evolutionaries in this book embody and represent. More specifically, it refers to those individuals who see in life’s current trajectory a critical moment for our species, a time when we must consciously seize the reins of our destiny, take control of the evolution of human society, and face the future with a new sense of agency and choice. And for each of these thinkers, the word “conscious” is critical. They feel that, like Torey in that hospital bed, we must wake up and choose to lend our conscious support to the most important endeavor there is—the evolution of our species. And just as Torey reached a critical moment in his personal confrontation with despair, so too, these individuals suggest, may we as a species be reaching an inflection point in the evolutionary trajectory of human culture. Conscious evolution is the need, capacity, and urgency to take responsibility for the future of this experiment called human life. Barbara Marx Hubbard, the influential evolutionary activist who popularized the term in her 1998 book, Conscious Evolution, describes it as “a vision and a direction to help us navigate through this transitional period to the next state of human evolution.”
There are certain Evolutionaries who embody this calling with unusual passion and inspiration, and whose life stories, like Torey’s, serve as examples of this particular kind of awakening to evolution. In this chapter I’ll take a look at the lives and work of three such individuals—the Evolutionaries who have together probably done the most to bring the transformative idea of conscious evolution to a mass audience—Michael Dowd, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Brian Swimme. Or, as I like to think of them—the Preacher, the Matriarch, and the Cosmic Bard.
THE PREACHER
“Humanity is the fruit of fourteen billion years of unbroken evolution, now becoming conscious of itself,” declares the middle-aged man as he paces back and forth, punctuating his points with a dramatic gesture or a momentary pause. The reverend is in his element, and today he can feel that the crowd is in the palm of his hand.
“When the Bible speaks about God forming us from the dust of the Earth, it’s metaphorically true,” he exclaims, articulating his words like a verbal challenge. “We did not come into this world—we grew out from it, like an apple grows from an apple tree. That statement from Genesis is a traditional way of saying the same thing. We are not separate beings on Earth, living in a universe. We are a mode of being of Earth, an expression of the universe.”
Dressed in nondescript slacks and a conservative button-down shirt, Michael Dowd reminded me of the Christian ministers of my youth: the wholesome, boyish looks; the clean-cut aura; the warm, inviting smile that whispers of faith and conviction; the natural sense of connection with his audience, be it one person or several hundred. And of course, there’s the passion.
“Do you get this?” he asks the audience, eyes bright, searching around the room for response. “We are the universe becoming conscious of itself. We are stardust that has begun to contemplate the stars. We have arisen out of the dynamics of the Earth. In the words of physicist Brian Swimme, four billion years ago, our planet was molten rock, and now it sings opera. Let me tell you, this is good news! And I love talking about it!” The last words come out as a shout, and he jumps up to add emphasis, overcome by his own exuberance. The crowd at this mid-sized venue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, laughs, enjoying this unusual preacher of an unusual gospel, although old-time Pentecostal-style passion wasn’t what they expected when they signed up for an evening lecture on the “Epic of Evolution.” And the evening is just getting going.
There have been tougher crowds for Dowd, venues where he was lucky if he could convince the audience that the dinosaurs didn’t die out five thousand years ago in Noah’s flood. Today’s audience—liberal, open-minded Boston intellectuals—is a little more the norm. Dowd is an author, speaker, minister, and self-styled “evolutionary evangelist.” He and his wife, science writer Connie Barlow, were traveling together around the country, itinerant missionaries evangelizing evolution on the highways and byways of America, preaching to anyone interested in hearing the “good news” of a life informed and enriched by the “Great Story” of our cosmic evolutionary heritage. It is a story that started in the world of science but, according to them, is destined to transform the world of spirit.
It is said that those who are most passionate about religion, or for that matter about almost anything, are those who convert, not those who are born and raised within it. The most zealous teetotaler is the former alcoholic, the most passionate Christian is the converted sinner, and in this case, the most inspired advocate of an evolutionary worldview is the former antievolution fundamentalist. Believe it or not, there was a time when Dowd would more likely have been the heckler in the audience warning of the satanic evils of evolutionary theory. “I was once one of those people that you see passing out those antievolution tracts,” he admitted. “I would argue with anyone who thought the world was more than six thousand years old.” He paused, then smiled. “So whatever your name for Ultimate Reality is, he, she, or it obviously has a sense of humor.”
Born on the latter end of the boomer generation, Dowd was raised Roman Catholic, but his teenage years were marred by an early drug addiction. Eventually, deciding he needed a fresh direction, he dropped out of college and headed over to that most iconic place for new beginnings and life changes—the military recruitment office. Soon he was on his way to Germany as a newly minted military police officer. As it turned out, drugs were just as easy to come by in Germany, and Dowd’s struggles continued. Eventually, he was busted, stripped of his command duties, and demoted to infantry. Lost and confused, he drifted for a while longer until finally one day, backpacking on a mountain overlooking Frankfurt, he came upon that other renowned dealer of fresh starts and new beginnings—God. He also had a little help from an old friend.
“I smoked some good dope and I had the most profound mystical experience of my life,” he told me. “I felt that God was asking me, ‘What are you doing with your life?’ I had a vision that I lived ninety years and I died. The question haunted me: ‘What difference did I make? What changed?’ The answer I got was that maybe the mountains would have eroded a little. If there was a major flood the rivers might have changed course. Ultimately, what is the significance of a person’s life? This is what I felt God was saying to me: ‘I want you to make a difference. And it was then that I realized that I was so addicted, I was in deep trouble.”
The next Sunday, Dowd made it to church for the first time in many years. The minister was showing a Billy Graham film and at the end of the service, as was customary, he asked if there was anyone who wanted to come on down and give their life to Jesus Christ. Dowd was as ready as they come. He bolted to the front and had a born-again experience. Overnight, he became, as he puts it, “a passionate, radical Jesus freak,” and for him personally, it was truly a godsend. He stopped doing drugs and cleaned up his life.
But transformation came at a price. As Dowd’s life changed and his heart opened up, his mind closed down. He had jumped headlong into one of the more conservative, fundamentalist strains of Christian life, and as a newly saved convert, he was ready to give it his all. He took on the tenets of his new faith with great fervor: antievolution, the Second Coming, Satan, hell and damnation, the end times. He fasted, he prayed, sometimes all night long. But by the time he left Europe after three years in the service, he was also proselytizing for his new faith, visiting local scientific conferences and passing out antievolution tracts, decrying the tragic predicament of the unsaved masses on the eve of Christ’s return.
He decided to go back to college, only this time one that suited his current disposition—Evangel University, founded by the Assembly of God ministries. Even in that like-minded environment, Dowd’s commitment and passion stood out. “I walked in to class one day and I saw that they were teaching evolution. I walked out, quite certain that Satan had a foothold in the school.” He smiles wryly at the memory. “I remember saying to my roommate that I bet there are only seven real Christians on campus. And I was certain that I was one of the seven.”
Throwing himself into studying philosophy, history, and literature with characteristic passion, Dowd discovered that his once drug-addled brain still worked quite well, and he soon proved to be one of the top students at Evangel. And he also learned that some of his fellow students and teachers—committed Christians with whom he worked, studied, and prayed—actually believed in things like evolution. The more he learned, the more his worldview began to open up.
The final step in Dowd’s second conversion was a meeting with a Christian-Buddhist hospital chaplain, Tobias Meeker—a liberal-minded former Trappist monk who fully embraced evolutionary science and had a personality Dowd would not forget. Meeker was “the most Christ-like man I had ever known up to that point,” he explained. “My head was saying, ‘I need to save him.’ My heart was saying, ‘I want to be like him.’ ” Eventually, the heart won out and Dowd’s journey as an Evolutionary had begun.
Decades later, at that lecture in Boston, I was enjoying the unique result. In a postmodern, ironic world that often seems to have conflated all deeply felt spiritual conviction with Jimmy Swaggart–style fundamentalism, Dowd is something of an anomaly. And that seems to be at least one of his underlying messages—that it’s time to venture back into the waters of passion and conviction, fully supported by the open-minded curiosity of science and the inspired idealism that comes from appreciating the position in which fourteen billion years of evolution has placed human consciousness. “What evolutionary spirituality offers is a confidence, a groundedness in truth, that the liberal churches have lost,” Dowd explains. “Liberal Christians so often lack the passion. They don’t speak from that base of confidence. And now, with this Great Story perspective, we can all begin to speak again with that level of confidence.”
When Dowd speaks about the Great Story of evolution, he is talking largely about the truths of science. No longer caught up in defending the stories of scripture, he argues for the need to move beyond what he calls “flat-earth faith,” meaning faith that was forged in a cultural context uninformed by today’s scientific knowledge—which includes the primary scriptures of almost all the world’s religions. Dowd’s ministry is largely about taking the evolutionary truths of science and communicating them to audiences in ways that are rich with spiritual meaning and religious overtones. To find God, he believes, we need look no further than the inherent creativity of the entire cosmic evolutionary process. God, in his eyes, is really just another name for the totality of reality. Some might call him a pantheist, one who interprets the divine as being synonymous with the natural world. But he points out that pantheism, as an idea, was conceived in the eighteenth century, in a world unfamiliar with the marvelous reach of our contemporary scientific worldview. That’s why he prefers the term “creatheism”—a word that captures the mixture of theism and creativity that he feels better fits the universe as we know it today.
Dowd’s theological rendering marries scripture with evolutionary psychology. Our untamed human proclivities to overindulge in things like sex, food, substances, and so on are explained not by original sin but by our “lizard legacy.” Instead of lamenting the fall of Adam and Eve, he suggests that we recognize that these are deep human tendencies hardwired into us by evolution, instincts meant for another time that can and will undermine our lives today if we let them. We have a choice, as individuals, to become conscious of the evolutionary programming of our past and judge whether or not it will serve our growth and development in the future. “Understanding the unwanted drives within us as having served our ancestors for millions of years,” he writes, “is far more empowering than imagining that we are the way we are because of inner demons, or because the world’s first woman and man ate a forbidden apple a few thousand years ago.”
We have that choice as individuals, but ultimately as a species as well. And the more we collectively wake up to our deep-time evolutionary legacy and stop dismissing it as inherently antireligious or antimoral or otherwise inconsistent with a meaningful life, Dowd suggests, the sooner we can start to collectively develop the kind of broad-based shared commitment to our evolutionary future that is so needed. We can begin to make the kind of choices that align our self-interest with the interests of that larger planetary process that enfolds our species. The more we wake up to this evolutionary view of reality, the more capable we are of consciously and positively directing our own development as a species.
To help further the awakening of this shared commitment, Dowd makes a distinction between private revelation and public revelation. Private revelations are those personal spiritual experiences that we may consider important but are empirically difficult to verify. Public revelations, which in Dowd’s eyes have greater value, are verified by a community of inquiry. “New truths,” Dowd explained, “no longer spring fully formed from the traditional founts of knowledge. Rather, they are hatched and challenged in the public arena of science.” Religious people often don’t fully appreciate, he laments, the “revelatory nature of science,” although, he admits, most people simply have not been exposed to ways of thinking about evolution that glorify God while still embracing science.
This deprivileging of private revelation may be hard for some more spiritually inclined readers to accept. Indeed, Dowd’s science-inspired faith might not satisfy those who like their religious infusions laced with a little more mystical import. His approach to evolutionary spirituality tends to focus on those forms of knowledge that are the current strengths of the sciences—astrophysics, biology, chemistry, psychology—an emphasis that can bypass the subtler interior landscapes of consciousness and culture, which have been late to the party of empirical investigation. Those areas are neither his strength nor his passion. But Dowd’s point about knowledge being verified by a community of inquiry is important, and it’s one of the reasons why spirituality, which today trends heavily toward a private, individualized orientation, has fallen out of fashion in the publicly minded, peer-reviewed context of the contemporary search for knowledge. But in theory, there is no reason why private revelation couldn’t itself be open to public inquiry, challenge, and debate. I suspect that evolutionary spirituality in its future forms will embrace much more transparent, exploratory collective modes of inquiry, even in regard to the more intimate interior landscape of the self and soul.
Whatever the case, Dowd’s inspiration is infectious and his influence has been far-reaching. He is wonderfully open-minded, loves debate and discussion, and his big-tent approach has won him the respect of leaders across the cultural spectrum. “As we integrate the Great Story of cosmogenesis, the epic of evolution, into our lives,” Dowd declares, “we will see a worldwide spiritual revival.” The reason is simple. “It is a story that includes all of us. In this Great Story, there is no human story that is left out.”
THE MATRIARCH
The term “conscious evolution” conveys a great deal of meaning in its simple formulation. The basic idea is straightforward: now that we have become aware of the evolutionary process, conscious of this vast context that has produced human agents with at least some measure of free will, our choices matter a great deal. Today we can choose to direct our own destiny. No longer must we unconsciously stumble through this event called human life with little sense of whence we came, clinging with closed eyes to ancient myths or outdated worldviews, staggering from crisis to crisis, reacting as best we can to the news of the day. Finally, after billions of years, evolution achieved a remarkable breakthrough. It created a being that has the capacity to understand what’s happening! Even then, it took many thousands of years for that species to start to grasp the nature of the process it is a part of. But little by little we have opened our eyes and started to glimpse the enormity of the picture. We should not underestimate the import of our moment in this history. After eons of blind, unconscious evolution, a creature exists who can decide to consciously evolve.
Barbara Marx Hubbard has done perhaps more than any single Evolutionary to spread the idea of conscious evolution far and wide. It is a commitment she embraces with a deep, almost maternal care for the fate and potential of our species. She has been instrumental in introducing the whole idea of futurism to our culture. Buckminster Fuller noted as much, once calling her the “best informed human now alive regarding futurism.” And now in her eighties, she has lived her philosophy to the hilt, never resting upon her considerable achievements, even as she has watched the culture over the last decade begin to catch up to her prescient visions.
Unlike most of the Evolutionaries in this book, Hubbard is not a boomer. She came of age in the years when most boomers were still enjoying Gerber baby food and learning to crawl. Born Barbara Marx in New York City in 1929, she was raised in a wealthy Fifth Avenue family. Her father was a self-made entrepreneur who propelled himself up from nothing, truly living the American Dream. Her parents were Jewish, but her father was an agnostic, so Judaism was never an identity of the family. Whenever she would ask her father what religion they were, Hubbard recalls, he would tell her, “You’re an American. Do your best.” He passionately believed in the possibilities of the modern world.
A turning point in Hubbard’s life, as in the lives of many of her contemporaries, was the end of World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What was all of this power for? she wondered. She had never believed in religion, but now the religion of the modern world—progress through technology—was called into question, and she was thrown into her first existential crisis.
Within a few years, she was at Bryn Mawr College, still trying to find new meaning, “trying to be an existentialist,” as she puts it. She loved to read philosophy but struggled to find a philosophical home among the popular icons of the time. She read Nietzsche, but the idea of the Superman had been thoroughly corrupted and warped by the Nazis. Karl Marx, as she told me, may have seen an important truth—a society built on the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”—but that had been turned into totalitarianism. Science had its own brand of pessimism, with Bertrand Russell declaring that the heat death of the universe was unavoidable and that to believe anything else was idiotic. Even a brief flirtation with existentialism provided no lasting satisfaction. Perhaps it was because she had retained some deep kernel of her father’s optimism, or maybe it was because she could brook no philosophical advance that seemed so much like a retreat, but she struggled mightily with the idea that there is no true meaning to the universe except that which she gave it—a disturbing notion that simply could not take root in the not yet fully formed structures of her young mind.
She even flirted briefly with Christianity but could not reconcile herself to the idea that Eve’s guilt had caused the fall from grace. Thrown back on herself once again, this philosophically inclined daughter of America decided to seek wisdom where all budding existentialists go: Paris. And so, during her junior year, Barbara Marx boarded a plane for the city of Sartre and Camus, hoping to find meaning on the banks of the Seine.
One day, while hanging out in a café in Paris, she struck up a conversation with an artist, a man by the name of Earl Hubbard. She asked him the questions she had been asking everyone, the questions inspired by Hiroshima: “What do you think is the meaning of our new power that is good, and what do you think is your purpose?” This young man had an immediate answer: “I’m seeking a new image of man commensurate with our power to shape the future. When a culture loses its story, loses its self-image, it loses its greatness. The artist has to find a new story and until it is expressed by artists, we won’t be able to bring our culture to fruition.” Her only response was a small voice in her mind that said, “I’m going to marry him.”
Flash-forward one decade to 1960, and Barbara and Earl Hubbard are married and living in Lakeville, Connecticut. Despite their bohemian beginnings in Paris, they embraced a relatively conventional lifestyle. She had five children (“mindless fecundity” she calls it, quoting Margaret Mead) and her inheritance supported his work and their life. But Hubbard was dying inside. She loved her children deeply, but there was something more, something deeper for her to give. Her passion for finding that “new story”—the answer to the questions that had plagued her since her teen years—was temporarily suppressed. Caught between her acceptance of the gender norms of the 1950s and the passions of her inner life, she felt like she was “turning to stone.” But help was coming. The atmosphere of the 1960s was beginning to shift and Hubbard’s intellectual antennae were on the lookout for anything and everything new that she could get her hands on. The first thing that triggered her curiosity was Abraham Maslow. When she read Maslow’s theory of self-actualization, she had a key insight, one that framed her own depression in a completely fresh way. “I’m not neurotic,” she remembers realizing, “I’m underdeveloped. I don’t know what my vocation is.” The difference was important; it gave a positive context, an evolutionary context, to her struggles and encouraged her to keep searching.
The next person to show up on Hubbard’s radar was, as for so many Evolutionaries, Teilhard de Chardin, and his masterpiece, The Phenomenon of Man. Only recently allowed to be published, his ideas were unconventional—and all the more so for a Connecticut housewife. I like to picture one of the wives in the popular TV show Mad Men sitting down in her suburban living room after tucking the kids into bed, putting aside Betty Crocker and picking up Teilhard—it brings home how ahead of her time Hubbard was. And Teilhard’s writings struck her like a lightning bolt. She found in him a kindred spirit, and a deep confirmation of her own intuition that something important was coming in our future, some new way of interpreting the human experience. “I realized in reading Teilhard that the drive inside me for greater expression, greater connectivity, and greater consciousness was the universe expressing itself as a person. Instead of being a neurotic housewife, I could see myself as an expression of a universal evolutionary process, which every single person is.”
After Teilhard came Aurobindo. Then Buckminster Fuller. Soon Father Thomas Merton and Jonas Salk, and on and on and on. She was beginning to wake up to a new sense of the world and a new sense of herself. The outer conventionality of her Connecticut life was giving way to an inner evolutionary drive. Publishing the first evolutionary newsletter, she slowly became connected to a network of like-minded souls who had struggled with the same questions and were sensing the same need for new answers. But despite this newfound excitement, she was still just a woman in a house in Connecticut with five children, living these new visions vicariously while playing second fiddle to her husband. The illusion, however, was slowly cracking. The feminine mystique was giving way. It would take one more push for her to jump out of the nest and truly fly as a powerful evolutionary in her own right. And that push would come in the form of an evolutionary epiphany.
Anyone who has ever lived in New England knows just how cold it can get in the heart of February, when winter seems interminable, summer can barely be evoked as a memory, and the prolonged chill starts to seep in around the visceral edges of consciousness. It was amid the austere cold of the Berkshire Mountains, not far from Hubbard’s home, that Herman Melville once placed his stamp on the nascent American form of literature, recalling in his remarkable prose the tropical sea journeys of his youth even as the snow swirled around his house. It was this same wintery bleakness tinged with beauty that inspired Edith Wharton to settle down only a few miles from where Melville once toiled and describe in her sweeping novels the emerging politics and class problems of a rapidly industrializing America. And it was against a similar backdrop, one bitter winter afternoon in 1966 that Hubbard, a child of a now mature American power, would find the answer to her need for a new story, a new metaphor to contextualize the mushroom cloud that had awakened her conscience and shaped her life.
On that particular day, Hubbard had been reading Reinhold Niebuhr, another one-time resident of the Berkshires (though only in the more hospitable summers), and was struck by a line he had quoted from Saint Paul: “All men are members of one body.” She recalls the events that followed:
Unexpectedly, a question burst forth from the depth of my being. . . . 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 lapsed into a day-dream state, walking without thinking around the top of the hill. Suddenly, my mind’s eye penetrated the blue cocoon of earth and lifted me up into the utter blackness of outer space. A Technicolor movie turned on. I felt the earth as a living organism, heaving for breath, struggling to coordinate itself as one body. It was alive! I became a cell in that body.
Hubbard goes on to describe in great detail how this “movie” revealed to her the fundamental unity of humankind. “We are being born,” she realized. “Our story is a birth of a universal humanity!”
I felt myself tumbling through an evolutionary spiral. . . . The creation of the universe, the earth, single-cell life, multi-cellular life, human life, and now us, going around the spiral once again. It all raced before my inner eyes. . . . Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the Technicolor movie of creation stopped. I found myself upon the frosty hill in Lakeville, Connecticut, alone. There was no sign of what had happened. Yet I knew it had been real. The experience was imprinted forever upon my very cells.
I had found my vocation. I was more than an advocate, I was a story teller! . . . My personal purpose was revealed to me as a vital function in the life of the planet as a whole.
More than four decades later, Hubbard’s conviction in her personal purpose has only increased. She has parlayed that solitary revelation into an impressive body of work, and an even more impressive life. From the seed of the new story she had finally found, she cultivated a vision that has become her life’s work: the vision of conscious evolution. Its essential task, she writes, is “to learn how to be responsible for the ethical guidance of our evolution. It is a quest to understand the processes of developmental change, to identify inherent values for the purpose of learning how to cooperate with these processes toward chosen and positive futures, both near term and long range.”
“Conscious evolution” is a term that can be used in many different ways, but Hubbard captures the broad strokes of its meaning in what she calls “the three C’s:”—new cosmology, new crises, and new capacities. Our new cosmology is the story that science has revealed about where our universe came from, about the extraordinary process of which we are a part. It is important, Hubbard writes, because it gives us “a new sense of identity, not as isolated individuals in a meaningless universe but rather as the universe in person” Our new crises, she explains, are those potentially catastrophic global issues we face, such as climate change. In light of evolution’s trajectory, these are reframed as a “natural but dangerous stage in the birth process” of our next evolutionary stage. Hubbard points out that there have always been crises as part of the process—mass extinctions, ice ages, and so on—but never before have we had advance warning of our pending self-destruction and therefore had the opportunity to do something about it. We are shifting, she writes, from “reactive response to proactive choice.”
The third piece in Hubbard’s triad, new capacities, are recently developed powers such as biotechnology, nuclear power, nanotechnology, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life. She acknowledges that in our current state of “self-centered consciousness” these are potentially hazardous, and yet, she suggests, they may be exactly what we need for the next phase of our evolution. She cautions against acting out of fear and prematurely destroying these new technologies. The task of conscious evolution is rather to “guide their capacities toward the emancipation of our evolutionary potential.”
Hubbard is a visionary, but she has never hesitated to make her visions practical. In the decades that have elapsed between that epiphany in Connecticut and the writing of this book, Hubbard has journeyed down several lifetimes’ worth of roads less traveled. She participated in and supported many of the transformations of the 1960s and ’70s but never bought into the reactionary side of the countercultural movement, or its pessimistic tendencies. She has been a consistent advocate for the positive potential of a shared future, even amid the vigorous rejections of those who saw limits and ceilings where she saw open sky and new promise. She helped to create the Foundation for the Future, was a cofounder of the World Future Society, and started the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, bringing the perspective of an evolutionary futurism to a culture in need of new storytellers. And through a multitude of conferences, thought-leader dialogues, political engagements, films, books, citizen diplomacy, educational seminars, and even a nomination for vice president, Hubbard has started a thousand small fires—in the hope that some would burn out of control. A few did. Once it was an ordeal just to connect with a like-minded soul; now she encounters them all across the country. And since that day in 1966, her conviction has never wavered. She has raised the banner of conscious evolution for half a century, even when it was only seen by a handful of children in a living room in the Berkshires.
THE COSMIC BARD
In his classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, science-fiction writer Douglas Adams describes a torture device known as the Total Perspective Vortex. Those unfortunate enough to be thrown into it are treated to “one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, ‘You are here.’ ” Most victims of this device die instantaneously, he explains (with the exception of the ex–Galactic President, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who was therefore proven to have an ego bigger than the entire universe), demonstrating that “if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”
I would both agree and disagree with this statement. There’s no doubt that even a glimpse of the magnitude of our universe crushes the hubris of the human ego with the recognition of its utter insignificance. But for any aspiring Evolutionary, the opposite is also, paradoxically, true. As the conscious evolutionists will tell us, in the recognition of the vastness of the process we are a part of and our unique place in it, we can also discover the enormous significance of our intelligence and capacity for choice. A sense of proportion, therefore, is also a very healthy attribute, one with which we too often lose touch.
It is easy, when discussing the subject of evolution, to get caught up in the ins and outs of various biological theories, or to parse the complications and cultural implications of the religion debates, or even to become captivated by the many important philosophical issues it raises. And in so doing, it is easy to forget that evolution is about more than genes and DNA and selection and adaptation or even cultural stages and spirals. It is also about the vast ocean of the cosmos. It is about awe and amazement, humility and perspective. It is not just about our connection to the Earth; it is also about our spiritual connection to this immeasurable universe out of which we have emerged.
When I want to reflect on our spiritual connection with the universe, I turn to a man whom I like to think of as a human “total perspective vortex,” albeit an extremely inspiring one—Brian Swimme. A mathematical cosmologist at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Swimme has dedicated his life to helping people grasp the literally awe-inspiring and almost ungraspable context that informs the choices humans are making at this moment in history. In his magician mind, scientific facts become enriched and dimensionalized, their simple surfaces bejeweled with meaning, their ascetic truths exploding with intimate revelation. Take, for example, his description of the evolutionary process:
It’s really simple. Here’s the whole story in one line. This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans.
That’s the short version. The reason I like that version is that hydrogen gas is odorless and colorless, and in the prejudice of our Western civilization, we see it as just material stuff. There’s not much there. You just take hydrogen, leave it alone, and it turns into a human—that’s a pretty interesting bit of information. The point is that if humans are spiritual, then hydrogen’s spiritual. It’s an incredible opportunity to escape the traditional dualism—you know, spirit is up there; matter is down here. Actually, it’s different. You have the matter all the way through, and so you have the spirit all the way through. So that’s why I love the short version.
Henri Bergson once declared that the human mind is not designed to “think evolution.” But lifted temporarily by the mind of this modern mage, we can glimpse the process behind the spell of solidity, the movement of the cosmic currents within the vast ocean of matter. And what do we learn? First of all, that none of us, in this scientifically revelatory age, are in Kansas anymore. This universe is a metaphysical mystery tour of wonder. Cosmic knowledge comes at us fast and furious these days, digitized and downloadable for mass consumption. And as it does, the universe gets bigger, stranger, closer, and yet more mysterious every day—deep-space pictures, God particles, multiple universes, string theory, eleven dimensions, parallel universes, colliding galaxies, nursery nebulae, dark energy, and much more.
And still, amid that magnificent smorgasbord, perhaps the most interesting part of the universe is that we are connected to all of it. We are made of star stuff, as Carl Sagan said, we are built from a universe that has somehow been fine-tuned for life, and cosmic evolution, whatever its many meanderings, has beaten a clear path to our door. So as we twist and turn out here on this third rock from the sun, in this spiral of a nondescript galaxy in a local cluster, and as we contemplate our place, our moment, and our time, we can, for the very first time since our brains began to wonder about themselves, draw a connection from the beginnings of this particular universe all the way to us. And perhaps, for a moment, we understand that our minds and bodies, thoughts and feelings, are not only of this time and place—they are also billions of years old. In some sense, we were, each one of us, born out of and intimately connected to that same cloud of fiery hydrogen gas 13.7 billion years ago. “Not only are we in the universe,” as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson notes, “but the universe is in us.”
For Swimme, that connection was made when he was a young professor at the University of Puget Sound, a passionate academic but a disillusioned one as well. Deeply concerned about the environmental crisis, Swimme finally resigned his professorship and left the West Coast looking for answers. He had one name to guide him in his search—Thomas Berry, director of the Riverdale Research Center in New York City. Berry was a Catholic monk, originally of the Passionist order, whose response to the cultural ennui and religious weariness of the twentieth century was a powerful, new, ecologically relevant vision of human existence he called the Universe Story. He had joined the Church at the age of twenty, traveling widely and studying broadly, delving deep into the religions and cultures of the world. When I saw Berry speak in 2004 in northern Vermont, a few years before his death, he was almost ninety years old, a softly glowing ember of what once must have been an incandescent star. When Swimme walked through his door in 1981, Berry was sixty-seven and at the height of his powers. He was a deeply respected world scholar and historian, with a command of several languages, including Sanskrit; a deep fluency with the multiple cultures of Asia; books on Indian philosophy and Buddhism under his belt; all to go along with his many years spent contemplating Western cultural and religious traditions.
Swimme recalls the opening conversation:
He listened carefully as I tried to explain my misery and confusion over the destruction of the planet and what to do about it. After a long pause and without saying a word, Thomas Berry pulled a book from the thousands on his shelves. With stern visage he tossed across the table Teilhard de Chardin’s great work [The Phenomenon of Man]. . . . My disappointment was instantaneous. This was old stuff. I had come all the way across the continent to receive a book I had read back in my Jesuit high school? . . . Berry just smiled, and broke into easy laughter. . . . He pointed to the book he had put in my hands. “Begin with Teilhard. There’s no substitute for a close reading of his work.”
Berry was greatly influenced by Teilhard, but his work had also sought to modify the master in significant ways. Berry brought forth a much more ecologically oriented vision of evolution, one more in tune with post-1960s environmental sensibilities. He softened Teilhard’s anthropocentrism, and critiqued his optimism and unambiguous embrace of progress. In that sense, Berry was very much his own person, and I’ve never really considered him, as some do, the heir to Teilhard’s work. Whereas Teilhard’s visionary sense of the future vibrated with a transcendent energy and inspirational power, Berry’s kinder, gentler approach focused more on the rich diversity in the human and earth community and a sense of humility about the role that human beings have to play in the unfolding narrative of our time. He tried, with little success, to bring Teilhard’s evolutionary context to a Deep Ecology movement that was desperately in need of such a powerful, orienting story but which generally mistrusted any thinker who put much faith in modernity’s sense of optimism. Though I largely observed Berry from afar, it always seemed as if there was a touch of sadness in his work, and his thoughts often reflected something of an inner struggle between a sense of faith in the future of this evolutionary experiment and a sense of profound tragedy at the destruction humans have wrought on the Earth he dearly loved:
We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth’s functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide, and even genocide; but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the extinction of the vulnerable life systems of the Earth, and geocide, the devastation of the Earth itself. . . . The human is at a cultural impasse. . . . Radical new cultural forms are needed.
If the transhumanists represent one extreme in the diversity of evolutionary visions in this book—the transcend-at-all-costs, techno-positive, biology-is-for-wimps, let’s-engineer-the-universe sense of optimism—then Berry represents perhaps the other side of the picture, a corrective argument for a radically biocentric approach to the future, a deconstruction of human arrogance, and a deeper embrace of our immanent spiritual connection with the natural world. A future evolutionary worldview certainly needs the insights of the latter, but neither can it thrive without the forward-looking spirit of the former. The amazing thing is that Teilhard inspired them both.
Swimme, in turn, would bring his own unique qualities to the intellectual heritage of Berry and Teilhard: a scientist’s sensibility and an unsurpassed talent for communicating the majesty of the Universe Story. But before he could realize his own destiny, Swimme’s apprenticeship with Berry had another surprise waiting. As Swimme studied Teilhard, in the quiet of his room and in discussions with his new mentor, he began to suspect, he recalls, “that the fundamental categories of my mind were undergoing some sort of change. The unexamined assumptions that had been organizing my experiences in the world were now writhing under the pressure from Teilhard’s massive and penetrating cosmology.” One day, the pressure reached a climax in a powerful epiphany that brought home the living power of our connection to the deep-time context of the universe’s emergence:
I watched my four year old son climb on top of a large boulder in a deciduous forest just north of New York City. The rock, staying just what it was, suddenly became molten, and my son, staying just as he was, also became molten as did the cool forest shade and the multicolored leaves—some damp, some rotting—and the dark burbling stream. All of it blazed now with the same fire that had flared forth in the beginning and was now in the form of this forest. . . . I finally understood what Teilhard was saying.
One of my colleagues once described Swimme as a nature mystic of the twenty-first century. I couldn’t agree more. But it is also instructive to note here how different Swimme’s experience of “nature” is from the experiences of the mystics of earlier periods in history. Whereas Wordsworth, Shelley, and the other Romantics had powerful experiences of communing with the natural world, I would suggest that the experience of “nature” in Swimme’s epiphany has taken on something of a new character in this evolutionarily informed day and age. Indeed, back when Wordsworth’s mind was filled with the joy of elevated thoughts as he gazed upon Cumbria’s lakes and mountains, the natural world was still a stationary event, a magnificent yet intimate canvas against which the Romantics were able to reflect both on themselves and on the conditions of modernity. But the essential character of Swimme’s nature is not stationary at all—quite the opposite. Things are in motion, there is a deep inherent sense of time, and the core revelation is of the vast richness of the universe’s becoming.
Swimme, as he puts it, “never recovered” from his epiphany, and thus began a rich collaboration that spanned the next two decades. Together, he and Berry published The Universe Story in 1992, outlining a new evolutionary vision for what they dubbed a new age of the Earth, the “Ecozoic era.” And Swimme’s first single-author book, The Universe Is a Green Dragon, is based on a series of dialogues between a boy and his teacher, Thomas, who is partially modeled on Berry. It captures the personal side of Berry, the lightheartedness of the wise elder and master, weaving a tale of insight and wonder.
Swimme’s calling in life is to tell stories that help situate the human experience and the human power of choice against the newly revealed backdrop of an evolutionary process in which so many remarkable events are converging all at once. For example, there is an amazing amount of new information about the nature of the universe that simply wasn’t available before. “Take the discovery of cosmic evolution, the realization that the universe is expanding,” Swimme proposed in a recent interview. “It’s such a shock. The universe isn’t just a place, it’s a movement. And . . . we now realize it began 13.7 billion years ago. Even in the early twentieth century, we didn’t know if there were two galaxies in the universe, and now we know there are at least 100 billion. There’s an explosion of knowledge around evolution and the universe, and we’re challenged by what it means to take this in, because we’re discovering that what it means to be human is now different than before. Yes, we are individuals who are part of cultures, but at the same time, we are a dimension of the entire universe.” Like other Evolutionaries in this book, Swimme compares the significance of our time to the Axial Age, when so many of the great religions came into being.
When Swimme remarks that “we are a dimension of the universe,” it is perhaps hard to appreciate what that might signify. But I think it is reflective not only of Swimme’s philosophy but of his own way of approaching the evolutionary process. It is often pointed out that one of the great developmental challenges for human beings is to genuinely be able to take the perspective of another, to stand in someone else’s shoes, so to speak, and imagine life from their point of view. It is this critical capacity of empathy that allows us to actually understand the perspectives, frustrations, and sufferings of others and, ultimately, to better negotiate the multiple perspectives and worldviews that are operating in human culture today. But it strikes me that Swimme’s particular gift is that he attempts to stand in the shoes of the universe itself, to place himself into the mind of the evolutionary process, to imagine the outlook from that point of view, to glimpse the intention behind that vast creativity and intelligence. Sure, I can appreciate that evolution came up with eyesight and that it was an immensely complex, delicate process. But I could read a thousand textbooks and never get to this:
The Earth wants to come into a deeper way of reflecting on itself. The invention of the eye is an example. It’s almost like the life process wants to deepen its awareness. It first invented eyes that were made out of calcite, a mineral. It was so desperate to see, it actually found a way to see using a mineral. Scientists estimate that life invented eyesight forty separate times. It wasn’t an accident. It is as if the whole system of life was going to find a way to see one way or another. So what’s the essence of life? Life wants a richer experience. Life wants to see. And we come out of this same process. We also want to see, we want to know, we want to understand deeply. That is a further development of this basic impulse in life itself.
The context for Swimme’s message is a deep concern over the state of our planetary community. He points out that an entire geological era may be coming to a close in our time. We are, scientists tell us, in the midst of a mass extinction unlike anything that has happened since a meteor sent the dinosaurs scrambling for cover. “We happen to be in that moment when the worst thing that’s happened to the earth in sixty-five million years is happening now,” Swimme explains. “That’s number one. Number two, we are causing it. Number three, we’re not aware of it. There’s only a little splinter of humanity that’s aware of it.”
Massive expansion of knowledge. Widespread contraction of species. And at the very moment when all of this is dawning on us, we are realizing that we have a unique role to play in the unfolding of the next stage of this planet’s destiny. As Swimme points out, the force of natural selection has, in this era, in some sense been superseded by human choice: “It’s amazing to realize that every species on the planet right now is going to be shaped primarily by its interaction with humans. . . . It is the decisions of humans that are going to determine the way this planet functions and looks for hundreds of millions of years in the future. We are the planetary dynamic at this large-scale level.”
It’s what we do that matters—for us and for every creature on the planet. Again, the point Swimme is bringing home is that evolution is not just happening out there in nature. It is happening in here, in the choices we are making every day. It’s all about our choice.
In fact, choice itself may be foundational to evolution. If we put on our slightly speculative hats for a moment, we might observe that human free will and choice is itself an evolved form of agency, a quality that arguably can be traced back through our evolutionary past. There is no evidence for anything like agency in the crashing, spinning, merging, expanding world of the early universe, though perhaps we might catch a fleeting glimpse in the very expansion of the cosmos itself, the initiatory force that set everything into motion. However, billions of years later, the universe went through a major transition, what philosopher Holmes Rolston III calls the second Big Bang, the emergence of life. What is life? It’s a mystery that has been debated by scientists and philosophers for centuries, but one recent avenue of thought was put forward by complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman. In his book Investigations, he theorized that the very essence of life was the birth of autonomous agency. Poetically expanding on this theme, he writes: “Some wellspring of creation, lithe in the scattered sunlight of an early planet whispered something to the gods who whispered back, and the mystery came alive. Agency was spawned. With it, the universe changes, for some new union of matter, energy, information, and something more could reach out and manipulate the universe. . . . Agency may be coextensive with life.”
Rolston proposes that there was also a “third Big Bang”—the interior explosion that gave birth to the self-reflective human mind. Agency is again fundamental to this breakthrough. Human autonomy and freedom of choice is the radical result of this leap forward. In biology, evolution itself was the choice-maker, the default selector of fitness and adaptation, the director of nature’s unconscious script. But with the mind of the human, evolution becomes conscious and now rides on the back of a superempowered form of agency, the terrible and wonderful fact of our capacity to consciously choose. The evolution of consciousness over the last ten thousand years can be tracked as the ongoing development of our capacity to stand apart from our instincts and conditioning, and to make novel choices. Agency, then, has been there all along, and our future may depend upon our capacity to exercise that same agency, now evolved into the uniquely human freedom to choose.
If all of this sounds anthropocentric, so be it. Critics may complain, but from my perspective, the power of our human autonomy does make us special. It doesn’t mean we are God’s gift to the Earth or that we’re fundamentally separate and distinct from other species. But neither are we just another creature, one among millions. Indeed, I would suggest that the problem is not simply that we are anthropocentric, it is that our anthropocentrism is insufficient and impoverished. We do not yet fully understand the nature of our position, the evolutionary dynamics of our emergence, the precarious context of our choices, the great responsibility of our power. It is the gift of Evolutionaries like those profiled in this chapter to make us aware of the nature of this power. Conscious evolution is the willingness to shoulder the responsibility it confers.
Much has been said about the significance of our moment in history. The rhetoric has been ratcheted up, often to decibels that strain credulity and play to the extremes. Some of it has focused on the apocalyptic downsides, some of it on the unprecedented upsides, and some of it, as the three individuals profiled here exemplify, has begun to express a deeper appreciation of what an evolutionary context offers to the conversation. Now, I don’t claim to know exactly which marvelous possibility or disastrous scenario will unfold as we tumble forward, mostly unconsciously, into an uncertain, fast-changing future. But what I do know is this: there are no guarantees. Failure is an option that we could easily choose by default, by not embracing the challenge of our moment. Conscious evolution, after all, is a double-edged sword. It’s not just that we have the opportunity to consciously evolve but that we must. We cannot rely on the blind forces of history to propel us through the crisis this time. Neither can we recuse ourselves from the responsibility that has been placed into our hands as a species. Simply put, unconscious evolution may mean no evolution at all—not to mention trouble for most other species on this planet.
The opportunities are extraordinary. The downside is frightening. The moral equation is like none we’ve faced before. The task is radical but simple—to find the courage to take the reins of destiny into our own hands. To exercise our evolutionarily empowered capacity for agency, assess our situation, and consciously evolve.
It is, after all, our moment of choice.