Barbara Marx Hubbard is one of the original contemporary designers of the “conscious evolution” movement. Recently she wrote to me to express some thoughts in regards to this post and was generous enough to allow me to share them with you.
From Barbara:
About the question of freedom, I was originally inspired by Teilhard’s Law of Complexity/Consciousness: as systems increase in complexity they increase in consciousness and freedom, as you say.
Here is an intuition: If the “purpose” of evolution is to create beings ever more capable of conscious life and if we are eventually to become co-creators on a galactic and universal scale we need to become unique yet universal humans, indeed “god-like” humans. A robotic design for universal evolution would not bring forth genuine creativity from its “offspring.” The metaphysics I most feel attracted states that “god” is reproducing godlings. As Jim Gardner hypothesizes, eventually we will converge with and culturally co-create with other beings that are born from their own planetary wombs into ever increasing intelligence and creativity.
This is simply a more divine purpose.
Anyway, I like it better. If the universe is responsive to request, maybe we are the universe itself intending!
Best, Barbara Marx Hubbard
P.S. It is interesting to think of the evolutionary meaning of freedom as increase in creativity. From the Creative Intention or Evolutionary Impulse point of view it makes sense.
In reading Barbara Hubbard’s short piece I experienced an immediate resonance with her sentiment. Following on from the discusion that arose from your previous blog that got into free will expressed as choice, Freedom when experienced as increasing creativity, takes on more of an movement into vertical development as opposed to what more often that not, appears to be the horizontal development that comes from increasing choice.
The entry for Conscious Evolution in Wikipedia was deleted in 2005. The Articles for Deletion are telling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Conscious_evolution
We could collectively write a new entry using this blog. It requires neutrality, rigor, and references. Who will kick it off?
Brian – I think that is a great idea…I want to read through the reasons why the original entry was deleted and think about how to write a new one, but I am curious what everyone thinks…