Audio 2: Conscious Evolution

The Greatest Story Ever Told: Audio series with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Marc Gafni

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Friends, welcome to the new world story, the universe a love story. The Greatest Story Ever Told episode 2. This is Marc Gafni together with Barbara Marx Hubbard, she’s got three names, I only have 2. We are here with the second episode, the second installment of this great story. What we said the first week is that reality is not merely a fact, it’s a story. That itself is the great new story. The great new scientific story of reality which includes all of evolutionary science. All of systems theory, chaos theory, complexity theory, all the social sciences, as well as the interior sciences. The sciences of interiors of all the great traditions brought together in an integrated seamless weave of contemporary wisdom. Like the best snapshot of reality available to us at this moment in time is that really is not a fact, it’s a story.

A story means it’s going somewhere, and the public name for that story is evolution, but not evolution as a scientistic dogma. By scientism we mean not science, science is awesome, scientism is dogmatic claims in the name of science. Evolution is not a scientistic dogma, it doesn’t say anything about the world being random, or meaningless, not at all. Evolution is a statement of meaning, and it’s a scientific statement of meaning which says reality is going somewhere. That’s shocking, and as Barbara said, right, correctly, right? Einstein didn’t know that. Einstein thought we were living in an eternal cosmos, we now realize it’s going somewhere. It’s evolving, wow. There wasn’t one Big Bang there was three Big Bangs. There was the great flaring force of cosmological evolution in which the cosmos, the physical universe as we know it comes into being. Then that physical world that we like to call the physio-sphere awakens again in this momentous leap into life. The biosphere.

Then the third Big Bang, the third great cycle of evolution, right, is the awakening of culture of human life as we know it. As consciousness becoming aware of itself, of self-reflection to these 3 Big Bangs. Cosmological evolution, biological evolution, cultural evolution are part of the great story of reality. Now it’s only in the last couple of hundred years, and really to get all three of these in the last fifty to sixty years that we realize that this is so. We realize reality is not a static, eternal, unchanging fact. Reality is a story, and stories have plot-lines. What we said last week was, in the first episode, is that based on the best information available to us at this moment in time in history we know something about the plot-line of the story. The plot-line of the story is love. As we said, that’s not a religious statement, it’s not a fanciful poetic metaphor, right, it’s not merely a religious claim, it’s not human potential movement, you know San Francisco idea. Not at all, it is the best approximation of the integration of all knowledge we have today, and all of the sciences across the board available to us at this moment in time.

The universe is not merely a fact it’s a story. It’s not an ordinary story, but it’s a love story. What we said in our first episode is just like in our lives the organizing principle is love, that we seek love and we seek to love. We seek to move towards to make contact. We’re allured and our life is the sum total of our allurements. An attraction allurement being drawn towards and the desire to give, right. To love and to be loved lie at the very core of our reality. Which is why the entire world is driven by music and most of the songs in music are love songs. Music itself in its essential structure is about attraction and allurement, right, between notes. Right. All or Mathematics that is a kind of symmetry, right, of attraction. That love is the nature of reality itself. That the universe is a love story, but it’s not static fact of love, it’s a love story going somewhere. The plot-line of reality is love.

Just to make that clear in episode 2, so were really we get what that means in a deep way, let’s take one example. One of the most popular ideas, right, deeply rooted in the writings of Donald Winnicott, and some of his predecessors, Donald Winnicott is a great psychological theorist. That is what’s today called attachment theory. Attachment theory is about the nature of the babies attachment or relationship with the baby’s parents. There are different kinds of attachments, there’s a baby who has secure attachment. There’s a baby who has insecure attachment. There’s what’s called avoidant attachment, a baby who avoids the attachment. There’s what’s called disorganized attachment. I mean sometimes I feel secure, sometimes I avoid. One of the things that we know now is that nature of our attachment to our early caretakers, the nature of the inner quality of that relationship is actually one of the primary indicators for the entire rest of our lives. How we’ll succeed in every dimension of life, including relationships, so that’s called attachment theory.

One of the core principles of attachment theory is that if a baby is completely taken care of, fed, kept warm, a roof over its head, a great Deluxe Rolls Royce crib, right. Everything that you could possibly need for physical survival, but the baby isn’t loved, isn’t held and loved, the baby actually will have a wrecked life. There are longitudinal studies that have been gathered in the last 30-40 years which actually plot the outline of the life of a baby who received all of the necessities of survival but didn’t receive love. There was actually a violated attachment, if you will, and that’s [inaudible 00:07:06]. If all of life is about survival, and the baby received everything the baby needed for survival but just didn’t have the love, why would that destroy the trajectory of the baby’s life? Why would that cause massive neurosis, even sometimes psychosis? Why would it cause a host of psycho-social, and psychological, and mental breakdowns right across the life of the baby as is documented in the psychological literature of attachment theory?

That would only make sense if you understand that the baby didn’t receive love from its mother or father. The mother or father for the baby is the universe, right. The mother and father, the early caretakers are the universe of the baby. Because the universe is a love story and the mother and father are the universe of the baby, so the baby doesn’t receive wholesome, beautiful, caring, tender love, the baby can actually feel. The fact that the baby has all the accoutrements of survival is insufficient to produce a whole and healthy baby. That would make no sense at all if the universe was just about survival. No, the universe is a love story, and because the universe is a love story attachment really makes sense. Does everybody get that? It’s a very beautiful idea.

What that tells you is is that the notion that the universe is a love story is the implicit, unspoken axiom of attachment theory. That’s what we mean when we say the universe is a love Story isn’t a fanciful idea, it’s actually when you explicate the orienting underlying generalization of every major field of thought, gradually over the course of the next episodes, you realize they all point in the same direction, the universe is a love story. That’s unbelievable. So lady B, beloved, my beloved in the universe is a love story, take it away.

Barbara Marx Hubbard

It’s very interesting to note in attachment theory, if the baby isn’t loved, isn’t held. No matter what else it may be given it doesn’t mature well. I’m going to start at the end of the story of conscious evolution, which is right now for one moment, and Teilhard de Chardin said, the thing that would be worst thing that could happen right now is that humans would fall out of love with ourselves. That we’d fall out of love with humanity. We’re a mess and so it the newborn baby, but the mother is able to love the newborn baby. To love Humanity right now with all the things that we are doing to each other, it’s so easy to fall out of love with ourselves, and I had not thought about it, Marc, as attachment theory. But I’m saying that when we understand the story of conscious evolution, from unconscious to conscious, which I’ll go into in just a moment, we realized that we’re the very first generation who was ever conscious of evolution.

Conscious of the billions and billions of years it took for us to get here. Not only conscious of evolution but conscious that we’re affecting our own evolution by everything we do. The food we eat, the babies we have, the stories we tell, the thoughts we think, is affecting the evolution of our whole species. One of the great realities that we’re offering in telling the new story as a love story is really to allow humanity to fall in love with itself again. Because if we can fall in love with ourselves again it’s going to be possible for us to come through the crisis of this birth of ourselves as a growing humanity. To come through it and activate the incredible genius, in spiritual genius, social genius, scientific genius, that’s available to us right now. I’m going to go back for a moment and start at the beginning, and carry us through this journey of evolution in the most extraordinary story that the world has ever known.

It starts with no-thing at all. It starts with consciousness. It starts with source, with spirit, with God, and out of that no-thing at all came the Big Bang. In which were patterned the exact energy and structures that made it possible for the entire universal story to emerge. That Big Bang as they call it is literally in every one of us. We were originated by a perfectly, incredibly beautiful design that has created matter, life, human life, and now planetary human life. Just going around the next turn in the spiral of evolution, and you can visualize the whole story of conscious evolution as a spiral. Starting with the remarkable 2 seconds of energy that is like sperm hitting the egg, the process began. The god force activated, created the energetic that began this whole system, and the mystery of that is beyond any ones full understanding.

Whether we think God did it, whether we are scientists and we think it happened through physical activity alone. Whether we are aware of the mystery of it as a spiritual story of creation. However we see it, the fact is that we now know it happened. We can see it as a spiral formation of universe, and then see the next turn on the spiral the formation of earth. The rock of earth gets formed. Amazing miracle, and then on that rock of earth who could have imagined life, the little tiny single cells, and the DNA begin to invent itself. And there is nobody on earth right now who could even invent a DNA. That genetic code at the center of every cell. That genetic code began to replicate, replicate, replicate, until the earth became filled with life. Then out of that miracle we had fish coming out on the seas onto the dry land. There was no vegetation. It was barren.

If we had landed out of the seas at that time we would have had to wear a space suit or we would not have been able to breathe. All of that has been formed over these billions and billions of years, and then we see the very origins of early human life. Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthal, then Homo Sapiens, the creature that knows it knows. Then finally us Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Not only do we know and know that we know, but now we know that we’re part of the entire evolutionary story of creation embodied in us. With conscious evolution we recognize that every thought, every thing, everything that we do is affecting our own evolution, and you might say even deeper, we know that we are evolution. Every atom, molecule, and cell of ourselves is evolution. We know that whatever that process is that brought us from no-thing at all to everything that is, is animated in you and me right now as our own impulse. To be more, to love more, and to do more, and to express more of our own creativity.

When we become conscious of evolution we become conscious of the awesome source of creation, creating within us. Then in order to know what to do now, since no species on this earth has ever been conscious of evolution or having to make choices about its own evolution, there’s some lessons here, and I’ll just mention a few of them. When you look at the 13.7 billion years of evolution you can see it as a spiral, and you will see that quantum transformations are nature’s tradition. That means to say natures goes from no-thing at all to being a universe, and out of the universe you get an earth, that’s a quantum. Out of earth you get life, that’s a quantum jump, radical newness. Out of single celled life you get a quantum jump, animal life. More complexity. Out of animal life another quantum jump, the most intelligent animal until you get a jump and something new happens, the earliest human.

Then out of the earliest human you begin to get the ever more advanced humans until you get to us in another quantum jump. From the most intelligent humans to humans who are learning how the process of creating actually is working, and can take a quantum jump of destroying ourselves by misusing our power. Or a quantum jump of evolving ourselves, and since the universe is a love story the direction that we can choose is to our greater love, to our greater freedom, to our greater awareness. That’s the awesome potential of conscious evolution. We also learn in looking at this spiral that problems are evolutionary drivers. Every time nature hits a crisis, it either goes extinct and all the species that lived at that time are extinct, or it goes to higher order. This is very helpful to us because obviously we have crisis today that could truly destroy our life support system, but if we realized that crises precede transformation we also can look at our new capacities and say, “Is this crisis moving us to a higher level of evolution?” The answer could be ‘yes’ depending on our choice.

There’s another lesson of evolution, wholism. The tendency to create whole beings is inherent in the nature of reality. Single cells make multi cells, multi cells make huge bodies. We have, they say 52 trillion cells, in each one of us. Each of them a unique individual cell creating a body of incomparable greater intelligence than the sum of its parts. We just add to that quantum change what’s happening on earth, is planet earth is becoming a living system. We’ve seen ourselves from space, we’re one body, we’ve seen our communication system, our production system, our warring systems, we’re a living system and we’re in a quantum jump in evolution. The higher consciousness freedom and order, or to devolution and destruction. The only difference is in conscious evolution we’re the first species to be aware of it, and I’d like to complete with the good news of this lesson of evolution.

Evolution raises consciousness and freedom to a more complex order. Single-cells to multi-cells, to animals, to humans, to planet earth, every one of those turns in the spiral led to more conscious entities. The entities had more freedom to choose just as we have more freedom to choose than an animal does. What makes for the quantum jump is more complex order, more connectivity, or we could say more love. I will complete our story here, that we are at the exact moment of quantum jump in evolution. We have choice to devolve or evolve consciously, and by knowing that our new story is a story of love we’re choosing more love, more freedom, more caring. By doing that, the impulse of evolution within it is carrying us forward. We’re not doing this alone, we’re doing this in process that is a multi-billionaire year journey of the genius of the Divine evolution itself. That’s conscious evolution now.

Dr. Marc Gafni:

In conscious evolution now is evolution awakening in love with itself. The move from unconscious to conscious evolution is really a move from unconscious love to conscious love, because how does the evolutionary story work? At the very base of the story we have the impulse that causes something to come from nothing. That mysterious impulse, why is there something rather than nothing? The impulse that causes something to come out of nothing, what is that impulse? The interior sciences suggest that that impulse is love. It’s love that moves the very stirring from within that bursts the creativity of cosmos. That’s the revelation of the interior sciences. But even if we leave the interior sciences aside we just start from the moment of the Big Bang, the moment of the great flaring force we see that love or what we might call evolutionary Eros, or evolutionary love is driving the entire story.

At the very base of reality is allurement or attraction, and we’ll talk more about allurement and attraction later in later episodes, but for now let’s just say that electro magnetic attraction, what is electro magnetic attraction at its very core? Electromagnetic attraction at its very core is the allurement that exists between subatomic particles. That allurement that exists between subatomic particles draws them together. It creates the attractive force that allows for reality to exist. The very building block of matter and all of its levels is attraction, right, is allurement. What is allurement if not the movement towards higher and higher levels of recognition. Mutual recognition, mutuality, embrace in union, love like any other name. Electromagnetic attraction that which causes the yearning between subatomic particles, that causes them to come together and form a relationship, and then new configurations of relationship, new configurations of intimacy actually drive the evolution of the entire story.

The entire story of evolution is, from a scientific perspective, driven by new configurations of love, or new configurations of intimacy. Amino acids, proteins, right, amino acids that are the building blocks of proteins structure themselves in a particular way in a new configuration of intimacy, and then a newer emergent in evolution is born at the subatomic level. When quarks come together in a particular way hadrons are formed. When atoms come together in a particular way, right, and you get a molecule, then molecules are attracted, allured, they love each other in a particular way. All right, they’re drawn to each other, and you have complex molecules. None of this is a given, the fact that the universe, right, is driven by allurement and attraction is not a given. That is the universal love story. Gravity itself, on the celestial level, is but a physical law, but that physical law isn’t physical, it’s not flatland, it’s not materialist. Gravity is just a way of saying attraction, allurement, love. It’s what drives the entire story all the way up and all the way down.

Now, when that loves comes awake, when it’s aware of itself, when we become aware that actually we are love awakening in our choices, then the entire process of the universal love story moves from an unconscious process, which is happening based on the inherent impulse towards attraction, allurement, love built into the system, then that impulse awakens in us and we become conscious actors in the story. We awaken as the central players in the universal love story and we actually affect through our choice the future acts. We affect the plot line of the story. For the first time we’re happening to the story were not driven by the unconscious plot line of a story, right, moving it along we become the writers of the story. We become co-creators in the story. We become the playwright of the story. We participate and co-create with the original Divine impulse the next chapters of the story. That’s who we are right now. That’s the next step in the universal love story. This is the end of episode 2, this brings to a close episode 2.

Barbara Marx Hubbard

I’m saying farewell on this podcast on the new universe, a love story.

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