Conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard

Barbara: Yes. And I have a word to this. I seem to be thinking up words all the time. And one of my favorites is eros.

Barnet: Teleros

Barbara: Teleros. I’m very telerotic. Not neurotic, I hope, but telerotic. Telos, meaning “end goal,” like Eschatology, Teleology – and eros, meaning, “juicy love.” And inbetween eros and telos is this impulse of creativity, really. And you know what I’m just realizing, this thing about the plight of the lonely sperm and all of that, is that for a relationship like this, which isn’t sexual, it has more freedom.

Barnet: Yes.

Barbara: Because sexuality has a tendency of possessiveness. Has a tendency, and it’s wonderful, but I am saying for us postmenopausal women who are going to live, you know, 80, 90, God knows what — [Laughs]

Barnet: Hundreds, hundreds.

Barbara: And the men, too! Can you realize the thought that the way we’re going to co-create the world is through supra-sexual co-creation?

Barnet: Which is a heart wavelength…

Barbara: Isn’t it?

Barnet: It is primarily a heart wavelength. But I want to add something, too. For everybody that’s listening in here. For those of you, and those of us who are not postmenopausal women-

Barbara: [Laughs]

Barnet: – and who are not women, there is a paradox here. Because although what Barbara’s alluding to is a process, a life process, it is a life journey that can be broken down, can be analyzed and carved into steps. The paradox is that, while it is a process that exists in local, discreet moments, you can also step back and look at it as something non-linear and systemic.  So it is really kind of a dynamic complexity in how it operates.

You do not have to wait to activate these aspects of self. You don’t have to wait to a particular time of your life or be a particular gender – although we are predisposed to have more intense access, perhaps, at certain times in our lives. But it is – this is something that we kind of play at in the dynamic complexity of it. And when I am with you, I am very aware of the playfulness. I’m very aware of how fertile my imagination becomes and how we feed off of each other. I am very aware of how fertile our ability to create structure and create ideas, and make plans, and have our visions put out into the world – and I’m also very aware of the aspects of me that are pushing back and are resisting. “ We can’t, we’re too small” – and that is a reference to what you spoke to earlier. The time in your life when you went back and you said, “I need to rehabilitate some of the code.”

Barbara: Oh, yes. Yes.

Barnet: And we don’t want to skip past this code piece. The code piece is a critical, critical piece. We do have a set of conditioning and some of it psychological, some of it physical, some of it genetic.  Fortunately, we now know from the work of Bruce  Lipton and others that our genetic code is not a hard-wired recipe – it is an expression in time-space,  and that through consciousness we can recreate ourselves in that way.

But it is incumbent upon us to assume the response-ability to look towards these: “yes-but’s, yes-but’s, yes-but’s, yes-but’s.” The “why-not’s,” the resistances, the pushbacks, the beliefs, the thinking, the assumptions that we’ve taken on as the ways of the world that limit us, that restrict us, that make us small, that keep us closed. To take a look at those and to be ever-willing. We don’t have to do it perfectly but ever-willing to release them or to have them lifted from us.

Barbara: So what we’re saying here, before we just open this up now for discourse, is that there are practices and certain understandings in the chrysalis. And since we’re in the subject of Regenopause for the woman and Regenopause for the man, who is no longer in a patriarchy.  I mean that’s a big thing.

Barnet: And as you said earlier, it is a very, very threatening thing for a man. We have a very, very clear model of why so. We have this very, very long love affair with chauvinism, with male chauvinism, which has been —

Barbara: Yeah.

Barnet: — which has been a gender war – at the most coarse level expressed by a disintegrated masculine, mental energy of dominating and victimizing the emotional fields mostly expressed in – expressed or represented by women.

And so we have this image of – or if you go with me and think for a moment, this metaphor from a dear friend of mine of somebody on all fours with a boot on your back. The one who is the victim in that case actually has the power. Because when the one who is on all fours with the boot on his or her back gets to his or her feet, whoever is on top tumbles.

So, what is happening here is that – with the re-covery, and the re-membrance, and the discovery of the mystery of idealized feminine energy – when women own that and when men own that – it is such an affront and a confront to the way we have been conditioned and our fundamental beliefs not only about who we are, but how the world works, how the world happens to us. And that we are in an objective universe. Even our physics tells us there is no such thing as an objective universe. So, these are fundamental, confrontive experiences that de-structure our ways of looking at the world, and people are in a panic over it.

Barbara: You know what’s so good about this particular moment in history is the crises we’re facing. However real they are – the global warming, the financial crises, the social crises, and the pain that people are suffering from – of hunger, of financial collapse, of disease, of environmental destruction – I mean, huge amounts of suffering – that now we’re empathetic. We feel it.

Barnet: We’ve discovered compassion.

Barbara: That somebody is starving somewhere in the world, we feel it to a degree and we feel it more and more. So, this crisis is allowing and indeed the evolutionary driver for these qualities because the old qualities of the masculine patriarchy and the feminine reproducer can’t solve it. It’ll make it worse, and worse, and worse.

Barnet: mm-hm.

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