Barbara Marx Hubbard is a futurist whose life is a testimony to her belief that humanity has the power to cause its own evolution consciously…

Born into a wealthy family with a father who taught her to “do her best,” Hubbard was free to pursue her spiritual needs at an early age. When the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, Hubbard as a teenager began questioning the purpose of our power. From that point forward, she approached her education, her relationships, and her life’s choices in the context of two questions: “What is the purpose of humanity’s power?” and “What is my purpose?”

An avid reader, Hubbard devoured books and ideas, raised five children, and through a series of personal revelatory experiences arrived at her purpose in life: to be a beacon of hope, to communicate to humanity the story of our evolution and potential. Hubbard’s own quest for purpose has brought her into association with prominent thinkers and leaders such as Jonas Salk, Buckminster Fuller, Lancelot Law Whyte, and Thomas Merton. In 1984 her name was placed in nomination for the Vice Presidency of the United States on the Democratic Ticket, with a “Campaign for a Positive Future.”
Barbara Marx Hubbard is the author of The Book of Co-Creation, Part I and II. Part I is The Revelation: Our Crisis is a Birth, an interpretation of the Book of Revelation in the Bible which shows us the remarkable potential available to each individual. Hubbard believes that Jesus provides an example for us of what any human being can become. The Revelation reveals how humanity will evolve by using our vast creative power in harmony with the divine pattern.

Hubbard says that she would launch a Creative Revolution by enlarging Thomas Jefferson’s great statement to say, “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All people are born creative, endowed by our Creator with the inalienable right to realize our creativity, for the good of ourselves and the world.”

Thresholds: Would you describe what you mean by co-creation?

Hubbard: I mean there is a major shift in the relationship between humans and God, from the passive creature child to the active participant in the process of creation. We are the “co” and the Creator is the “creator.” We are the first generation to be conscious of evolution, and responsible for guiding our evolution on a planetary scale. Conscious evolution occurs on three levels. The first level is a deeper intuitive knowing of the pattern — attunement, guidance to the process of creation, both personally and for our species. The second way is through science and technology. We’re learning how nature works. We can build new life forms. We can clone embryos. We can build new worlds in space. We can change bodies. We can create new organisms. This is literally physical co-creation. It has now happened. The third way is socially. We must become co-creators because we’re affecting our social environment by everything we do — how many babies we have, what kind of cars we drive, how we handle our waste. We have become co-creators with nature and nature’s God in handling our social as well as our physical environment.

Co-creation occurs because we are created in the image of God and now is the time when the Godlike powers are being given to the human race. If we misuse those powers we will go through an Armageddon-type scenario because self-centered humanity cannot inherit these full powers of creation. They are too destructive. All throughout history there have been individuals who have shifted from the separated self to the unified self, but now, because of the power, there has to be a much larger number of people making that shift rapidly. And that’s why I call it the Age of Co-creation.

Thresholds: How do you propose that people learn how to be responsible for this power that we have?

Hubbard: Well, there are many different ways in which it is happening. One is the whole New Thought movement. Thousands of people are attracted into a spiritual growth practice to attune to the inner divine. In Unity and Religious Science and Christian Science millions of people are learning about the indwelling divine and how to relate to it. Through the environmental crisis and the feedback from our environment that we will destroy our life support systems, we’re scrambling to understand how a whole planetary system works, how to preserve species, how to get the feedback from nature and not destroy this natural system. With the advent of global television, we’re aware of what’s happening throughout the planet. We’re aware of hunger, starvation, disease, violence, torture. So on the social level, we’re learning by feeling with other members of our species as well as other species, like the whales and the endangered species, that we have to be responsible. The new information is flooding in from many, many quadrants.
Even deeper than all of this is the fact that nature raises consciousness and freedom through the formation of a more complex and harmonious order. Nature raises consciousness through more complex systems, as from molecule to cell, single cell to animal, or animal to human. There’s no doubt that planet Earth is a living system. It’s “complexifying,” Teilhard de Chardin’s phrase, rapidly. We’re all members of this one complexifying body. By the very nature of the organism that we’re part of, we are each being connected into the larger whole. We tend to be more aware of our part in the whole now by natural evolution.

Thresholds: How do we bring up the next generation to have some kind of vision of that, and to be a part of the whole? One of the things I see as a problem is that in the public school system you can’t even talk about God or bring up anything that is considered to be religious. How do you see education fitting with bringing about a vision for the future?

Hubbard: Well, I think there is just a terrible lack in our educational system on all levels. I mean, when you think of the public schools and the degree of violence and despair and drug abuse, that is a serious social disease. We’re going to realize that only through educating the person can our society evolve. Policy changes at the governmental level, Social Security and social welfare programs alone will not suffice. There has to be a shift in our understanding of the value of the person. Education is going to have to focus on values and responsibility, and how to be responsible for your health, for your relationships, for your diet, for your vocation. The current educational system just doesn’t do it! Usually things evolve through success. So the children who are fortunate enough to be in schools like Montessori or Waldorf schools or [those] who go to schools like I saw today [Unity Church in Overland Park, Kansas] with 200 children who are in Unity Church Sunday school [experience] a powerful effect. Their parents are in New Thought so they are getting it at home. As more and more parents are sensitive, of course the children will be getting it that way, too.

Thresholds: In your address at Unity today and in your book, you speak of the importance of people discovering what their personal vocation is and really fulfilling their destiny. What do you think is the best way for people to do that early in life?

Hubbard: I just want to give you my theory of “from procreation to co-creation”. We are the last generation to be able to be fruitful and multiply up to maximum. One more doubling is ten billion and that will occur in forty years, they say. You can’t double once again and keep going at all. So that means the entire history of most women, most of the time, has been to have many children and die young. Our generation has already shifted. I’m probably the last generation to have five children without thinking. How old are you?

Thresholds: 36.

Hubbard: And how many children do you have?

Thresholds: None.

Hubbard: You see? There you are. By the time I was thirty-six I had five. And that takes a lot of energy. So the energy that I put into childbearing you have available for creative vocation. And what I’m noticing, in women like my daughters who are your age as well as in older women like myself, is that we are being activated from within by a passion to create which has the same dynamics at a higher level as pregnancy and birth and maternal love. When we fall in love with a vocation, I call it vocational arousal. It’s a supra-sexual desire to fully express our genius, not to reproduce the species now but to evolve the species. Because the species does not need more and more babies. It needs more and more evolved humans. So it could well be that nature is inventing a passion as great as sexuality and I’m calling it supra-sexuality. It’s the passion to identify your own unique genius code, to find partners in co-creation, to join not your genes but your genius in the expression of your life purpose. From my own experience and that of many younger women that I know, we are being aroused at a passionate level to find that vocation. Now when you say how do we find it, for many people it’s very difficult. They feel a frustration, and that should be recognized as a divine discontent. If you recognize your frustration, the next step is to intend that you will discover that which is your deeper purpose. The way to do that is to find out from within what gives you the greatest joy — the compass of joy. Let that compass guide you, light by light, peak by peak, until you find what you can do. We recommend that people form core groups, we call them Rings of Empowerment, to help identify your vocation in deep dialogue, resonance and inspired insights. These little core groups could be called birthing circles for the co-creators, birthing circles for the universal beings, for the Christ self that has a greater role to play in the world but can’t come out and get a job for it, can’t just have a label on it. These small circles that support and nurture us to do this are very vital at this time.

Thresholds: Today it was very obvious with the energy of the people at Unity Church, and it was very obvious at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, that there are people who have an urgent desire to do something now. These people are driven to fulfill a destiny, but oftentimes in day-to-day activities it’s a lot harder to find people like that.

Hubbard: Yes.

Thresholds: What’s the way to do that? How do you cause those link-ups to happen?

Hubbard: You have to take initiative. Anybody who really has vocational arousal and who wants to evolve needs to take some initiative, and there are many ways to do it now. You can — through very small publications, through going to conferences, to joining a New Thought church that’s very active and filled with life. I’m sure that at Unity Overland Church if you looked at all the bulletins and all the people that are coming there like Gary Zukav, and Jean Houston, and Barbara Hubbard and Matt Fox, and this and that, [if] you just went to three or four things, and then you read the books of those people and you look at the small publications that they recommend, you could be completely plugged in in two months. But you have to take that step. It won’t fall on your head.
But I can tell you, it’s so much easier now than it was thirty years ago. When I was a housewife in Lakefield, Connecticut with five children, Maslow had barely been published. There was no human potential movement, no spiritual potential movement, no women’s movement, no futurist movement, no nothing! So people in the nineties are very fortunate. The sixties was a great burst of, you might say, cosmic consciousness, but it wasn’t refined. It didn’t give you any practices or real disciplines. People got very excited, but we didn’t have the grounded way. Then in the seventies we saw the complexity of the social problems. They’re not easy to solve. In the eighties, although we had a conservative government, we began to have these great big peoples’ events like the 1986 World Healing Meditation, 1987 was the Harmonic Convergence. Between 1988 and ’90 Gorbachev led the Communist empire into self-dissolving, the Berlin Wall came down, we had the second Earth Day. We had a real powerful breaking up of old forms. Now recently, the Arab-Israeli peace treaty. The consciousness is shifting. And I personally believe very deeply, not only in the personal change but in mass events, where the mass consciousness aligns itself and brings itself to bear on shifting the overall consciousness of the Earth. I think that that’s happening. My own view is that we have the opportunity now, collectively, to shift the consciousness from fear to love by doing it ourselves en masse, and that we can avoid the violence if we do this.

Thresholds: Speaking of fear, one thing that I have encountered with some people who are in organized groups, churches or organizations who have an idea that they have some truth, is that sometimes there is competition or arrogance or thinking that our way is the only way or better than yours. It seems counterproductive to what everybody is trying to produce. Do you have some ideas about how people can get beyond that?

Hubbard: Well, I think anyone who thinks their way is the only way is by definition not the way. (Laughs) Anyone who is exclusive will be excluded, by their own exclusiveness. I have a great tolerance in that I know there’s a selection process and we don’t have to be the one to judge. You know, “Judge not that ye be not judged.” If I can just take care of my own self-judgments and not be judgmental, I don’t have to do anything about the people who might be more exclusive. Tend to your own consciousness. I think I might feel differently if I was in among a group of neo-Nazis or fascistic people who were wounding others. Then you’d have to take action. But in general, if a group is narrow-minded or exclusive, I think the thing to do is really just simply to not pay attention to it and move on.

Thresholds: What kind of discipline do you practice yourself? In your book, the higher voice or the inner voice where you interpreted the Book of Revelation, would you call it the voice of God, or is that your own higher voice?

Hubbard: I felt it to be a hierarchy of voices. In that book, there’s the voice of the normal, rational consciousness. I call that the seeker who asks. “What do you mean by this? What does that mean?” Then there seemed to be my own higher intelligence that would respond. Above that, there seemed to be a Christ voice that would say, “I, Jesus Christ, did such and such and such and such.” That voice had a different quality to me. I was guided to read the New Testament. I experienced an electrifying Christ voice that spoke as our potential self — the future human. There also were some passages that said, “we.” And I think it was voices of the elders, the saints, the seers, the community of beings whose consciousness is concerned with earth. I think I tapped into a whole community, actually.

Thresholds: Are you still in contact with that?

Hubbard: I’m most in contact with my own Christ self, the inner knowing, the indwelling divine. And then, what feels to me like a living presence of a higher being that is omnipresent for us all, that is more than my own personal higher self. When I’m fully aligned between the rational self, my own higher wisdom, and the Christ, then I’m in complete alignment, and that for me is co-creation. Then I feel I am in the flow of being a co-creator.

Thresholds: And you can tell, I mean, you know when you’re in that state of consciousness?

Hubbard: I do, and it has characteristics. It’s joyful, it’s effortless, I call it the four S’s. You experience synergy, which occurs when we are part of a whole community, each doing and being our best. It’s synchronicity, things happen at the right time without you planning them. There are apparent coincidences that you couldn’t possibly have planned. Then there is what I call supra-sex, there is the excitement of your full expression of your unique genius joining with others. It’s very arousing and very stimulating. And then there’s syntony, which is a word Eric Jantsch coined, to mean picking up the pattern from within. He compared it to DNA/RNA. DNA is the genetic code and RNA models itself on that pattern and then picks up protein and brings it in and builds the cell according to the template of the DNA. Jantsch felt that in our evolution we attune to, you might say, the planetary or universal DNA or God’s intention, and through that inner attunement we, like the RNA, can go forth and build that which we are guided to do. And so the fourth S is syntony, a more sensitive ability to attune to the deeper design or God’s will, however you want to put that.

Thresholds: Do you do meditation regularly?

Hubbard: I do.

Thresholds: Had you started meditating before you ever heard an inner voice or did you develop that afterwards to enhance it?

Hubbard: I started meditating early in the seventies. My first efforts were very halting. I tried to say the Lord’s Prayer to myself without my mind wandering. That took me about six months until I finally could get through the Lord’s Prayer without losing attention. And then, I began to hear an inner voice. One of the first phrases I heard was, “There is a library of consciousness. You can tune into any consciousness you want.” And so I began to tune in to Churchill, or Kennedy, or people who excited me who were not there. And I would feel their presence. Then, when I read Teilhard de Chardin I became involved in the process of creation itself, evolution. And I started to feel grateful to the universe for creating this. I remember one day I said, “Thank you, thank you.” And I heard an inner cosmic-like voice that said, “Thank you, Barbara.” I felt relationship between me and It, the human and the divine.

So I studied A Course in Miracles. In studying A Course in Miracles I really learned to listen to what they call the voice for God. I was also reading Science and Health. And it was in studying A Course in Miracles and reading Science and Health that I began to really hear a very deep inner voice and I recorded it in my journal. I have 112 volumes of journals, big black notebooks, since I was eighteen. I cultivated through my journal writing, an ability to listen. Then when the Book of Co-Creation occurred, it was of a whole different order. I mean, I was definitely taken up by a higher intelligence. And if you read that book you can see it has a different quality than my own higher wisdom. It comes from a Christ consciousness. That’s the way I felt. I was inspired by the scriptures, so that lifted me up. And now I do a constant dialogue with the inner Christ. I feel that he is my partner.

Thresholds: What is the Foundation for Conscious Evolution?

Hubbard: The Foundation for Conscious Evolution is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose purpose is to spread the ideas of conscious evolution. It started with the publication of my book, and now it’s supporting me in going out with these ideas. We have published some other books as well, we’ve supported a man called Roger Weir, he’s written a book Jesus in Alexandria about the early life of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. We give seminars and gatherings, and we’re going to publish a newsletter as a vehicle for the ideas that humanity is becoming co-creative with God.

Thresholds: How do you get funded to do all of this?

Hubbard: Our first funding came from Laurence Rockefeller. Now my book is selling very well, in fact, we’ve sold out the first printing. So the proceeds from the book and my talks all go into the foundation and support its work.

Thresholds: It seems like sometimes for people who are just beginning to get involved in raising their consciousness it is a struggle to support themselves and be able to do what they really want to do.

Hubbard: It is, it is.

Thresholds: Is there any advice that you would have?

Hubbard: Well, my experience has been that whenever I surrender to the highest that I know, is when I got resources. I struggled a lot with some of my earlier efforts which were not centered in the Christ. They were more social action things like Soviet American Citizen summits, Vice Presidential campaign, and things like that. And I struggled a lot to get the money. When I surrendered to the Christ, resources flowed in. And so, if that’s an example, then maybe it’s daring to do that which is the highest in you, which sometimes might seem to be the least viable. I mean this Book of Co-Creation is much more far out than let’s say my efforts at citizen diplomacy where I was very much on the ground. You know, getting people together, taking big trips over to the Soviet Union. That you might say was more practical. But we could never raise money for it. Whereas with this — talking about the alternative to Armageddon and the planetary pentecost and the natural Christ and the planetary birth — I have been highly successful. And that may be something for everybody to think of, if you surrender to the highest in you and are not concerned as to whether or not it is popular, [that] may be your greatest service and also the source of your resources. But you have to test it out, try it and get the feedback.
I’ve noticed that in the earlier days I didn’t mention Christ. I didn’t mention God. I was always trying to be sure that I didn’t offend anyone who might not believe that way. I was in the futurist world. And I wrote some good books like Evolutionary Journey that told the whole evolutionary spiral. It’s a very good book. It never sold particularly well. This last summer I went to this World Future Society General Assembly that’s made up of government planners and corporate executives and teachers and The Revelation was the best seller in the whole conference! And it was completely of a different order than what that World Future Society usually is. Their people would be more like Alvin Toffler and John Nesbit and futurist research groups. But in my work, when I finally revealed my most deep spiritual truth, is when it penetrated into that community which is very, very different from that book. So this leads me to believe that what people are longing for is a deeper truth, and we’ve come to the end of just the ordinary solutions. They don’t seem to work anyway.

Thresholds: Do you think that sometime soon this deeper truth is going to enter into the field of politics so that government will be aligned with it also?

Hubbard: I think so. I think that Hillary and Bill Clinton are remarkable in several ways. One, that they are definitely like a co-presidency with a man and a woman and that probably has more effect than any of us can imagine. It is very subtle, but it has brought the woman forward as an equal in a beautiful way and the fact that Bill Clinton has the strength to be able to have such a powerful woman as his partner and have no problem with that is the best thing about Bill Clinton that I know. I think that their effort is to be social healers, to come from compassion, and to have a Christian love and spirit of caring for everyone, like universal health coverage. However I think it’s going to show up that the problems will not be resolved by what anybody can do at the governmental level. We need a spiritual awakening of people at the grass roots level for it to work. What will trigger that spiritual awakening is yet to be fully seen, but I don’t think it will be politics as we know politics….•

Thresholds: When you were campaigning for Vice President, how were you hoping to change politics?

Hubbard: What I tried to do in my political campaign was very grass roots. I invited people to form centers. Each center was to scan for everything that works in their community and to map it, connect it and communicate it horizontally and vertically up through the media until we began to get a feel for the emergent activities in all areas. I suggested that in the office of the Vice President there be a Peace Room as sophisticated as a War Room that would actually have big maps of breakthroughs everywhere. Each country would be invited to have a Peace Room. All those peace rooms would be connected and you would see in health, education, business, energy, art, those things which were leading to a more creative, sustainable, compassionate world. And I said to the people, at the core of your little centers should be the spirit of each of us as co-creators. What I was doing was actually in an embryonic way initiating a spiritual politics. I was the other woman whose name was placed in nomination for the Vice Presidency in 1984 along with Geraldine Ferraro. And I think I was allowed to get that far at the convention just to demonstrate that the ideas were correct.

Thresholds: Are you still interested in the political arena?

Hubbard: I would be very interested in working with a presidential team that wanted to be itself a model of transformed people, who wanted to reveal their own practices, and who wanted to say, “We can’t do this as a separated people.” So what we do is we meditate, we pray, we visualize. We take personal responsibility for our own health. We tell the truth. We have a reverence for all life. We tolerate differences. We’re going around the country saying, ‘Who wants to evolve?’” It would be a vast educational program. I think you might find millions of people who would respond to a new kind of politics. What we’re really aiming at is not world government but self government, that each person would become self governing, responsible for their health, for their emotions, for their attitudes, for their healing. So it would be a revolution in self government, and I can see a presidential team going forth and asking who would like to participate, because the only solution is our own evolution. And then you could call upon a vast team of volunteers who are teachers and consultants.

I was thinking in the Second World War we had victory gardens when people had little vegetable gardens [in the cities]. We could have victory gardens for people and the victory would be that each person felt free to do their best. What kind of grass roots campaign would that be? And how would we do that? And who would help? It’s a wonderful idea because it’s gentle. It has to be shown that it won’t work any other way. I don’t think it will happen automatically but if social unrest continues and crime continues to build, and we don’t seem to have any solution, and more policemen don’t help…..

I had an interesting time of meeting with CEO’s of America’s prison system. These are the men who run the prison systems. I presented to them the evolutionary perspective. Tthen I broke them up into leadership core groups and I said, “Let’s say that what I am saying is true that we are taking a quantum jump. What would you do with the prison systems to prepare for the new?” And they just amazed me. They said the prison systems as they are are a complete failure. And more money will create more failure. And we’re training criminals. The only thing we could do is completely re-conceptualize prisons as universities and join with all the other community services to say our goal is the education of the person. We have to start right from the beginning and say if people are not educated in value systems and don’t have some sense of community there is nothing we can do. But we are the place of last resort and it’s going to get worse, not better, and these were supposedly the most pragmatic and tough people in the world. I found them the most imaginative, because they knew the problems better than almost anyone. They were so excited by what they came up with. They advocated that one of them go to the Attorney General and ask for a whole new synergy at the local level where all the different health care and social services came together and reconceptualized the whole thing as an educational process. What stage of social breakdown is required for breakthroughs to occur at the larger scale?

Thresholds: How else can we achieve breakthroughs to cause social evolution in a productive way?

Hubbard: Another very important thing is the maturation of television. Right now we’re being aware that television is deadly and that violence on television breeds violence. Now anyone could have guessed that they spend billions of dollars to sell us things on television because people do buy what they see. Well, they will do what they see as well!
There are many groups now working on the idea of a twenty-four hour a day channel on television for the news of who we really are. After I finished the Book of Co-Creation I was at Mount Calvary monastery and I stood in front of this little cross up there. I had received a blasting revelation of good news, just a total blast of potentiality [!], and I said, “Now what do you want me to do about this?” Because it was overwhelmingly potential! And the answer was, “Create a twenty-four hour a day channel on television for the news of who you all really are.” This is to be designed as in 2001 Space Odyssey. The context is the universe. We would remember the fifteen billion-year story of creation. We would place ourselves in this cosmic drama as the generation to make the choice to destroy our world or to transform it. Each story of innovation, success or creativity would be seen in the light of its contribution to our on-going evolution. Everyone is an actor in the play, in the “globe theater of earth.” Everything that you and I do is affecting the destiny of the whole. This television channel would in fact be a vehicle that would shift the tide.
So I called Gene Rodenberry, who did Star Trek and was a friend of mine. We spent a couple of weeks together designing a new news show, but then his agent wouldn’t let him do it. Bucky (Buckminster Fuller) said the world will be saved by a swift telecommunications revolution. So it could be that the planetary nervous system is elaborating itself and through CNN it’s a global nervous system now. It’s really amazing. We’re going to have 500 channels very shortly. Somebody told me the other day that we’re really going to have an infinite number of channels through fiber optics. This is a global brain. Now the infantile networks that are putting on violence and news that is only partial — not allowing the new news to come through, filtering out all the small tendrils of creativity and innovation and spiritual growth, just filtering all of that out as though it doesn’t exist — that’s sick! That may be the greatest cause of illness that there is when you really come down to it, that what the mass media chooses to communicate as news is as though your own personal nervous system only told you of your own pain and gave you no images whatsoever of your own potential.

So, the evolution of the media and the evolution of politics probably will go together because right now mass media and mass politics are synergistic with one another. If you had, let’s say, an evolving media that puts on the creative, innovative teachers of all kinds and projects of people and offered it in such a way that gave public participation opportunity…..I see that there would be a call-in number and people have an opportunity to find out about what they see and participate in it, and an 800 number to find out where’s the project in my city that would suit my vocation of destiny. And you start turning people on to the work that is most creative for them and then tell the story of what happens to those people, and before you know it you could have a social evolution through media and participation!

Thresholds: Do you think that this country with its extensive communications network will lead the way?

Hubbard: The whole advertising industry is playing to sex and power whereas the frustration is of supra-sexuality and empowerment. Supra-sexuality is the desire to express our life purpose and our creativity, and empowerment is different than power. It’s the desire to fully emancipate our potential in such a way that other people’s potential is also emancipated. It calls on those four S’s of syntony and synchronicity and supra-sex and synergy. So, we’re at a place of social breakdown. Now this country has less of it than others, but we have more opportunity to transform than any country in the world because we’ve handled more of the basic problems than anyone in the world.
We’re facing problems of individuality and affluence and violence in the most materially successful culture the world has ever seen. You can see that part of the violence is caused by the individuality, by the expectation that each person should have as much as the other. They see it on television. That’s the American ethic. All those people taking drugs and doing crime are expressing a violent and aberrational cry for self expression. Whereas if you’re completely put down in a society where you have no hope you probably wouldn’t find that degree of violence. If you go to New Delhi where there are hundreds of thousands in abject poverty, you don’t find that degree of violence as you find on our streets because we have a higher expectation and it’s driving us crazy, literally crazy. And I think that a lot of that violent insanity has to do with suppressed creativity.

The current job market doesn’t take people in, and it’s closing down and shutting down rather than opening up. But the world’s needs are opening up and there’s no conduit between the personal creativity and the social needs. Social welfare doesn’t…I think what we should do is have a vast campaign to identify the creativity of all the people who are now left out and find the place where they are most creative in utilizing whatever their gift is. I mean, just that, the linkage between the person’s unique creativity and a social need in the community. It’s deeper than ordinary education because it would be a treasure hunt to find that genius of the person, and we know that every person has some talent, and that true self actualization comes from giving your best. But very few people have an opportunity to do that.

Thresholds: People learning how to do their best…what you’re saying is that sometimes people must get to a point of seeing that other things aren’t working to realize that they need to create something different. It seems to me that many social welfare programs temporarily take care of people’s needs and relieve their pain, so it prolongs the urge for somebody to find out what their inner resources are.

Hubbard: It does, because the way the social welfare is given does not come to the person and say, you’re in need now but we basically need you. Society needs your talent and so we’re going to use this time of social welfare not just to pacify you and try to take care of you, but to educate you. I realize this sounds idealistic and some people maybe are not motivated or some people are not highly creative, but if the expectation of social welfare was to find that creativity, you would be amazed what you’d find. If the goal of social welfare, was to find the place where that person is most needed, it would be a vast vocational educational program. Vocational in the deep sense of the word.

That would be the next stage for social welfare. And then the people who are truly helpless and truly sick, that’s something else. But a vast number of people on social welfare are not truly helpless or truly sick, and probably social welfare makes them helpless and sick the way it’s designed. I know this is an extremely complex problem, particularly in the large cities where you have underclasses and generations of hopelessness. This is extremely difficult to do, but if we don’t do it, we’re going to have a vast social revolution on our hands. And yet the wisdom that it would take to do this requires the highest degree of spiritual wisdom.

I think that’s what attracted me about the politics, would be to raise these issues from the point of view that we can’t solve it the way we’re going. It’s like the prison executives, they had to say, this isn’t working in order to revise the prison system. As long as they were going on saying we’ll just do a little bit more and a little bit better with a few more policemen, nothing could happen. They would have to break the pattern and it’s extremely hard to break patterns. You have to be a true hero or heroine to break a social pattern, and it has been easier to do it out of fear and desperation than out of innovation and creativity. In other words, people are more likely out of anger to break a social pattern, like in the Communist revolution they broke a social pattern but they created a greater monster.

Source: SOM