Birth 2012 Celebration: December 22, 2012

Let's Create an Amazing Birth Day Celebration 

for Our World

 

Envision 100 million people uniting around the world to celebrate the birth of a new era for humanity with great love and fanfare – an historic day of global unity.

We’ll link across the world in moments of song, prayer, meditation, dance, and cultural expression over a 24-hour cycle. We’ll share laughter, perform acts of generosity and commit to global cooperation.

That is what a movement of tens of thousands is activating for Dec. 22, 2012 – an unprecedented Birth Day celebration of our creativity and common purpose to evolve a better human civilization. This will lay the tracks for many years of focused efforts on positive societal change.

Renowned evolutionary leader and bestselling author Barbara Marx Hubbard is acting as our visionary voice, traveling the world to engage people in the movement. Renowned members of the Welcoming Committee such as Jack Canfield, Michael Beckwith, Jean Houston, Neale Donald Walsch, James O’Dea and Lynne Twist have joined with her in mobilizing this movement.

Birth 2012

Dear Friend:

This invitation to participate in the Birth is the most important letter I have ever written.

Its intent is to present you with the greatest opportunity that humanity has ever consciously faced together: the effort to cocreate a planetary shift in time to avert global catastrophe by helping humanity cross the gap from “Here”– our current breakdowns – to “There” – our future of infinite possibility.

Why is this invitation so urgent?

Because our current condition of over-growth in our finite Earth system is simply not sustainable.

We will either evolve toward a more sustainable, compassionate, and creative global system, or we face the real possibility of devolution and destruction of our life support system and of much of life on Earth – within our own or our children’s lifetime!

This dangerous reality is motivating us to enter into what I call the first age of conscious evolution – that is, evolution by choice and not by chance. It means that we need to be causal in the actions and direction we take in this lifetime. What is being required of us is to learn to co-evolve with nature and cocreate with Spirit.

Again, why do I say that the timing is so urgent? Why now? Can’t we wait a while and see how it turns out?

No, we can’t wait.

It’s like the birth of a baby. You might not be ready, but if the baby is ready, it’s coming out now for better or for worse. It can either be a disastrous birth, or a gentle one.

We are being called to a great experiment, for no one alive on Earth knows how to make such a vast evolutionary shift in this short of a time.

For the first time in our conscious history we are being given the opportunity to guide and ease our transition to the next stage of evolution. This situation is new for humanity, for we are the first Earth species to consciously face evolution or extinction.

This condition may be new for us, but it is not novel for the universe. Evolution operates by “punctuated equilibrium,” meaning long periods of slow change that are punctuated by apparent sudden jumps.

For billions of years, nature has been going through such creative leaps. It has progressed from energy evolving into matter, to planets like our Earth, to primitive life, to animal life, to human life, and now to us going around the next turn on the Spiral of Evolution toward the next phase of humanity.

When we review this Big History, this deep-time past, we learn that certain lessons recur:

• Crises almost always precede transformation.
• Problems are evolutionary drivers.
• Nature takes jumps through greater synergy and cooperation within and among species.
• We are facing transformative crises and living through such a leap now – the great wake-up call for the maturation of humanity.

We have reached what systems theorists call a “chaos point.” When a system in chaos is far from equilibrium, it tries to right itself by going backward to the old; this is why we see reactive movements everywhere in society right now.

But an evolving system cannot return to the past. It must seek out new structures and systems, and quickly ascend to a new configuration – or else face rapid decline. Fortunately, according to the theory, small positive fluctuations in this sea of social chaos can jump the system to such a higher order.

This book is dedicated to the fact that we can each be that small fluctuation!

The opportunity now being offered to us from the sacred process of evolution is to participate in creating many positive fluctuations as pioneering souls. We are being called upon to shift from ego-centrism to living from our Essential Selves; to discover our vocations of destiny; to give our unique Gift to the Shift; to work toward maximum global coherence; and to evolve our communities, our world, and ourselves.

In other words, our opportunity, right now, is to become planetary birthing mamas and papas!

Joining together, we can “gentle the birth” of a Universal Humanity connected through the heart to the whole of life-and guide our Earth community into its next evolutionary Stage.

With love,
Barbara Marx Hubbard

Birth 2012 and Beyond

Birth 2012 and Beyond

Supreme Court ruling on health care a victory for...

Todays Supreme Court ruling on health care is a victory

for all Americans.

This is one womans story

of what it means to her.

The Evolutionary Manifesto by John Stewart

Our Role in the Future Evolution of Life

John Stewart

The Evolutionary Manifesto is an intentional attempt to promote the shift to conscious evolution and the evolutionary activism that will drive it. 

The Evolutionary Manifesto

The Evolutionary Manifesto is an intentional attempt to promote the shift to conscious evolution and the evolutionary activism that will drive it.  To read, discuss and circulate the Manifesto is to participate in a great evolutionary transition on this planet.

Part 1 of the Manifesto provides an overview of the shift to intentional evolution and of the worldview that is motivating individuals to actively promote the transition.  Parts 2 and 3 begin by identifying the trajectory of evolution and showing that its directionality is produced by processes that are fully understandable within mainstream science, without resort to teleology or mysticism.  They go on to use the trajectory of evolution to identify the agendas that guide evolutionary activists in their attempts to advance the evolutionary process.  In particular, Part 2 deals with our future social evolution and Part 3 with the future evolution of our adaptability, intelligence and creativity. 

Part 4 of the Manifesto explores the power of the evolutionary worldview to provide meaning and direction for human existence.  It demonstrates the capacity of the worldview to make evolutionary activism the most significant political force on the planet.  In particular, it shows that philosophical arguments such as the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ do not diminish the force of the evolutionary worldview presented by the Manifesto. 

Getting Lucky by Terry Patten

Getting Lucky by Terry Patten

We've all had times when (in the words of the song from the Broadway's "Oklahoma!") it has felt like "everything's going my way!"

And we've all had times when (in the words of the old blues song, "Born Under a Bad Sign") it has felt like "if it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all!"

Sometimes it seems like we're lucky, and sometimes we can't get a break. Our outer circumstances are out of our control, and bad things definitely do sometimes happen to good people (including ourselves) so compassion (including self-compassion) is always appropriate. But that's not the end of the story.

I'm writing today with a friendly reminder - you’re not completely powerless, even if this is one of those moments when you're feeling out of luck, and like there's nothing you can do. There is an important way in which you are always actually creating your luck!

It has to do with your felt connection (or state of disconnection!) from the all-accomplishing, loving, free, creative, inherent Goodness and power of existence. This is the "X factor" that is the reason why gratitude and appreciation are not only a healthy attitude toward life, but ultimately more realistic and sane than feeling like a victim, or even taking your good fortune for granted. 

The problem is, when you're down, it really feels like you can't get there from here.

Those two inner feeling worlds (of feeling connected or disconnected) are just that - two completely different worlds! And when we're in the wrong one, it doesn't seem like there's any way to cross over into a different universe. Especially because we're probably coping with a lot of hard facts. Life is difficult for everyone, sometimes very difficult.

The only way to make the leap is to open up and make a fresh, original, alive discovery of the greater goodness and power that's always available - what I like to call "the Good News."

It's always, at least in principle, possible to take a deep breath, release your "monkey mind," feel you appreciative, caring heart, and touch in to the radiant transcendental Grace that is the real nature of every moment of life (even the darkest times). You can actually wake up for a moment from the bad dream of being a separate, skin-encapsulated ego, threatened on all sides. When that happens, your inner weather then changes completely.

Your heart opens, and your way of showing up in life changes. Your connection to grace, becomes a self-fulfilling positive prophesy. You begin to make your own luck.

One way of looking at it is to realize that a synonym for grace is "luck." You can't reliably make yourself feel grace, but you can certainly create the conditions for that to happen. You can up your percentages. Think of it as getting lucky. That's part of what I mean by the words "spiritual practice."

A hole-in-one is just plain good luck. Same with a lot of things in life, inner and outer. But as golfer Ben Hogan once said, "The more I practice, the luckier I get."

Think about that.

Think of spiritual practice as a matter of waking up from the bad dream that tends to keep creeping back, making the decision (again and again) to do your part in "getting lucky."

Because spiritual inspiration is the single thing that can most powerfully transform your feelings, motivations, and behavior - making night-to-day changes in your inner world - in just a moment.

Practice means to straighten up again and again out of the "slump" of feeling flat, or victimized - to open out of even the littlest moments of contraction, and also to finding your way to open and to practice during major hard times that can be overwhelmingly difficult and even discouraging.

And practice means letting that clear, embodied, heart-centered consciousness transform your disposition. It means letting it restore and energize you. And it means bringing that greater loving energy to others, and taking it out powerfully into the world - even when that means dealing with difficulties.

Because if you're going to be effective in serving a higher purpose -  if you're just going to have a self-actualizing life, or even just be your best and wisest self in the midst of a difficult life - you need a strong foundation. Which means doing this simple thing - 'getting lucky' - again and again and again and again. It's ALWAYS possible, no matter how impossible it might feel.

Even in this moment. Especially in this moment!

And again tonight, before you go to sleep.

And then tomorrow morning...

Good luck!

Terry Patten

Integral Spiritual Practice

The Interfaith Amigos

The Interfaith Amigos Home Page

What is the Self?

What is the Self?

Mystics in all ages and cultures describe the self as infinite, stable and ever-present phenomena. Modern physics describe the world as a self-moving, self-designing pattern, an undivided wholeness, a dance. We, as a society, relate to the self mostly as an individual, unique, time bound form. Our common sense, as individuals and society, hasn't caught up with this picture and it still based on long-held biases and stories. The Earth is clearly round but we still act as if it was flat...

We live at the dawn of a scientific revolution, every day brings new findings from a wide range of scientific disciplines about what it means to be human. Modern science now gives us the detailed descriptions of the mechanisms our brain needs to construct what we call the self.

Could it be this illusionary image of ourselves as separate beings that is keeping us in this perpetual state of anxiety, scarcity, fear, dissatisfaction and leading us, as a society, at this very delicate point in evolution?

Video by: Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo