I was speaking on the platform to discontented students dressed in costumes of protest. When I spoke of our potential to become a universal species, one of the students stood up and said: “Why would you want to send this disease— humanity—into the universe?”
I felt I had to defend humanity! An anger came over me. I said fiercely: “You, stand up now! How dare you criticize the whole human race that got you from caves to the moon? What are you doing that’s good?”
He sat down!
The next day Tom Turner, Bucky’s director of special projects came up to me and said that Bucky had an announcement to make. We were on the stage together. Everyone was attentive. Tom read from a note: “Dr. Fuller recommends that Barbara Marx Hubbard run for president of the United States. It’s about time that we have women carrying the positive options for the future into politics.”
We were stunned. The audience stood up and cheered and signed a petition that I do this. Bucky felt that the idea of conscious evolution—our capacity to solve our problems and become a viable universal species—was right.
I didn’t run then, but in 1983 he urged me again. I undertook an idea campaign to be selected as the vice presidential nominee by whomever would be nominated for president on the Democratic ticket. It was Walter Mondale. I was the other woman nominated along with Geraldine Ferraro.
I had had an appointment to see Bucky. I had been studying his Critical Path. I called him and said I wanted to know exactly what he felt were the most important issues for me to run on. “Were there any of his students I should talk with,” I asked?
“No, darling,” he said, “You must see me.”
He died just before I could get to see him.
I did my best to put his ideas forward during the campaign. The key idea was that we need a new social function in the White House. At the time, I called it an Office for the Future and a “Peace Room” to be as sophisticated as the war room. Its purpose is to scan for, map, connect, and communicate what is working in the world to mobilize for coherent action. I felt that this would enhance the Design Science Revolution. It is about to be built now as Internet technology has advanced to the stage of being able to do just this.
The last thing I want to mention is the deepest. I had had a Christ experience in 1980. It had guided me to the New Testament. I was inspired by this Christ presence to write an Evolutionary Interpretation of the New Testament called the Book of Cocreation. It looked at the Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Revelation with evolutionary eyes, realizing that our generation was gaining the power to do exactly what Jesus said we would.
He was a universal human—ourselves in the future. We are gaining powers we used to attribute to our gods. I could see that if we can evolve our own Christ consciousness (love) to guide our Christ-like capacities and powers brought by technology we can heal, we can produce in abundance, we can travel the Earth with the speed of light as holograms, we can do virgin births, etc. Then, we can actually fulfill Bucky’s dream of “a world that works for everyone.”
Prior to his death, I sent Bucky a manuscript of the book I was writing. Later, I was scheduled to speak at the Annenberg Communication Center in Los Angeles with him, and he sent word down that he was “reading something” and that I was to speak to him alone. He wanted to see me afterward, in the Garden—alone.
He came down carrying my manuscript under his arms. We went into the Garden, and he closed the gate. He put his arms around me, touching his forehead to mine, saying, “Darlin’ there is only God, there is nothing but God.”
He proceeded to tell me that one day he had been walking down a street in Chicago when he felt a light lift him off the pavement, and he heard the words, “Bucky, you are to be a first mini-Christ on Earth. What you attest to is always true.”
He told me that he had gone to the New Testament and had written a document almost identical to my Book of Cocreation. Then, he hid it. “I could not use the words Christ or God,” he told me, “because I am an engineer.” He said he had hid the manuscript of his New Testament writings, but now he wanted to support my writings. When I asked for an endorsement he wrote:
“There is no doubt in my mind that Barbara Hubbard, who founded the Committee for the Future and helped introduce the concept of futurism to society, is the best informed human now alive regarding that movement and the foresights that it has produced.”
What he meant, I believe, is that both of us had a Christ experience that revealed to us the evolution of humanity from a self-centered, creature human to a whole-centered, spirit-centered universal human that is at one with the Processes of Creation and Nature.
When he put his forehead to mine I think he zapped me with the Design Science Revolution, as he did to so many others. He was and is a true light in our lives for the evolution of humanity.
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD is the founder of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. You can learn more about her work at her website www.evolve.org.
Bucky would often recount that comprehensive success is now the single option available for the survival of humankind, and that it had to be the success of everybody or nobody. This paradigm shift from “you or me” to “you and me” is essential to his message and the welfare of future generations.
Although he also worked in and talked about unseen metaphysical realms, Bucky is known for championing the fact that we now have the ability to support all people at a higher standard of living than anyone currently experiences. He was making this seemingly outlandish statement in the late 1970s, and it is as true today as it was then.
There is enough to go around, and we are fortunate that Bucky discovered that this unique paradigm shift would occur in his lifetime. During his 1930s stint at Fortune Magazine, he was able to access data on all global resources and to calculate 1976 as the year when technology would allow us to do so much more with fewer and fewer resources that there would be enough to support all life on Earth.
We now know that Bucky’s prediction was correct for food, but it was also true for all resources, both physical and metaphysical. Still, fifty thousand people die of starvation every day of the year while food goes to waste in many regions of the world. This is not the “you and me” culture that Bucky said was necessary, and we need to make a drastic shift very quickly if we are to survive and thrive.
We have the “resources, technology, and know-how,” but we need to rapidly shift our use of them from weaponry to what Bucky labeled livingry. The distinction is quite simple. Weaponry-focused resources support death and destruction while livingry-centered resources support sustainable evolution and life. Livingry includes things like food, shelter, clothing, education, clean water, pure air, an infrastructure that supports the welfare of all sentient beings, and other life supporting activities.
This is the simple strategy that Bucky proposed again and again in his presentations and writing, and it can be applied to both global and individual activities. If there truly are enough resources to support everyone, each of us needs to begin acting appropriately. Greed and hoarding need to end immediately. War is obsolete as there is no need to fight over abundant resources. And people no longer need to work for a living or as Bucky used to say “work to earn the right to live.”