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Imagining the future—and a healthy planet with
healthy, loving human beings living well on it—has been the essence
of Barbara Marx Hubbard’s work for the last several decades. Born of
Jewish agnostic parents in 1929, Barbara experienced her mother’s
death and World War II while in her teens. Her response was to study
world religions, questioning the assumptions and exploring the
boundaries. When she
graduated from college she met Dwight Eisenhower and asked him “the
purpose of our power,” to which the newly elected President replied
“I don’t know.” She married, had children, and studied the emerging
writers of the 1960s. In 1966 she had a mystical vision of the
evolution of the universe—a vision which has guided her work ever
since.
Hubbard’s books, including Positive Futures, Conscious
Evolution, and Revelation, have
consistently provided visions—and methods for achieving those
visions—for a way of life and governance that honor individuals and
the ecosystems they depend on. She even ran for Vice President of
the United States in 1984 on such a platform. Currently, she is head
of the Center for Conscious Evolution in Northern California.
Recently, Ms. Hubbard has been joined by New
Thought minister (her church is in Warren, Michigan) Marianne
Williamson, whose many popular books, including Illuminata, A Woman’s Worth,
and A Return to Love
have brought these ideas to a new level of acceptance in this
country. Williamson, a babyboomer, grew up in a traditional ‘50s
home with a lawyer father and a stay-at-home mother. She explored a
number of careers, including cocktail waitress and lounge singer,
before she began lecturing on A Course in Miracles in the
1980s. Her recent book, The
Healing of America, has synthesized New Thought principles with
A Course in Miracles and
ecosystem management practices to provide a whole-system approach to
transforming American culture.
Together with a dozen or so other New Thought
leaders, these remarkable women are working to create a new American
renaissance—founded in a shift in consciousness and new kinds of
relationships. They have helped to form an international network of
people committed to a way of relating based on acknowledgement that
we are all part of one great whole.
From the Introduction to the new edition of Healing of America:
Love is its own
brand of genius. Our only true enemy is neither people nor
institutions, but fear-laden thoughts that cling to our insides
and sap us of our strength. Yet love casts out fear, the way light
casts out darkness. Our greatest political power, now, is to fear
nothing and love everything; then all things will heal.
Love is the only power
powerful enough to lift the chains of bondage off the human race
and cast them off for good. When the material world has been won
by the opponent, go otherworldly to find your victory.
From the
Preface:
The principles that
apply to our personal healing apply as well to the healing of the
larger world. First, all healing principles are universal because
they come from God. And second, there actually is no objective
outer world, for what's out there is merely a projection of what's
in our minds. The laws of consciousness apply to
everything.
Anything, when truly
seen for what it is and surrendered to the higher mind, begins to
self-correct. But what is not looked at is doomed to eternal
re-enactment, for an individual or for a nation.
…
A new, spiritually
based social activism is beginning to assert itself. It stems not
from hating what is wrong and trying to fight it, but from loving
what could be and making the commitment to bring it forth. A
nonviolent political dynamic is once again emerging, and it is a
beacon of light at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Its goal,
as in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., is "the establishment
of the
beloved community." Nothing less will heal our hearts and
nothing less will heal the world.
The Global Renaissance Alliance, which
Williamson co-founded with Neal Donald Walsh, has Ms. Hubbard and
Depak Chopra on the board, along with other similarly minded
leaders. The Alliance’s program called Healing 2000 is specifically
created to encourage the application of New Thought principles to
global issues.
Using the principles outlined by all New
Thought healers, they have led activities in consciousness that have
helped to turn around massive societal processes overnight.
For example, when a second
war with Iraq seemed inevitable, Hubbard and Williamson and their
network went to work to create a new idea in consciousness—one that
didn’t include the possibility of war. Their work paid off; against
all odds and expectations, the tension fizzled out at the last
minute and there was no conflict.
Since then, numerous events have been
redirected or de-fused when the people around the world who make up
their network have denied the reality of anything other than peace,
harmony, love, and wellbeing for all—and affirmed the supremacy of
those qualities in the situation.
When people pray or
meditate—particularly in numbers, and particularly in concert—an
invisible field of intention begins to vibrate within the regions
of human possibility. Spiritual power converts the patterns of
limitation and fear into channels of love and
breakthrough.
The more we do this
around the globe, and the more of us join in, the greater the
lifting of the vibratory veil.
To bear witness to
human suffering, to pour forth our love upon the regions and
situations in the world where pain and even torture rule, to pray
for both victim and perpetrator FOR IN SPIRIT THEY ARE ONE, is to
foster the materialization of a more peaceful, loving
world.
… This is a powerful
opportunity for the creation of a global spiritual intention. As
we spiritually join with each other, and thus align with the love
of God, we co-create a space in which miracles happen naturally.
In A Course In
Miracles, it is written that while we think we have many
different problems, we actually only have one: our separation from
God. So it is that while the problems of the world seem
extraordinarily complex, the answer to all of them is profoundly
simple: that we return en masse to the love in our
hearts.
One month, for
instance, we will perhaps concentrate our meditations and prayers
on Northern Ireland, … another month on race relations in the
United States, … another month on global warming, another month on
the children of the world.... but always with the same spiritual
intention: that there be love raining down from the consciousness
of heaven, permeating every molecule and redeeming every heart,
that peace might prevail on earth. ... Thus we will literally be
agents of healing for all the world. This is how we deal with
"issues," from a spiritual perspective.
These women and their friends are teaching us
that the principles and practices developed and used by the great
healers of the New Thought tradition work for societies as well as
individuals; for the planet as well as the person. They’ve
demonstrated that healing is far more than overcoming individual
dis-ease.
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