A Teacher
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Conscious participation in humanity’s evolution
The transmission
Barbara Marx Hubbard (1929-2019) was an American futurist, author, and public speaker widely called “the mother of conscious evolution.” Born into the wealthy Marx toy-manufacturing family in New York, she awakened in the early 1960s after reading Teilhard de Chardin, Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, and Sri Aurobindo, and spent the rest of her life arguing that humanity has reached a threshold where it can—and must—take conscious responsibility for its own evolution.
She co-published an early newsletter on evolutionary transformation (The Center Letter) in collaboration with Maslow, ran in the 1984 U.S. vice-presidential nomination process proposing a governmental “Peace Room,” and authored The Hunger of Eve (1976), Conscious Evolution (1998), and Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence (2001).
Her central idea, conscious evolution, she defined as “the evolution of evolution from unconscious to conscious choice.” Hubbard’s place in the Atlas is as a primary modern source of the participatory, purpose-driven strand of mind-power: the conviction that the same creative impulse that moved cosmic evolution is now expressing through the individual’s own yearning to grow and contribute (It's All Play, Life Is a Dream).
Drawing Teilhard’s “Law of Complexity-Consciousness” into a practical, optimistic framework, she taught people to dis-identify from the anxious “local self,” contact an “Essential Self,” and act as a “co-creator” of a desirable future.
She represents the bridge between humanistic psychology (Maslow’s self-actualization), Christian-evolutionary mysticism (Teilhard), and the contemporary “evolutionary” / social-transformation spirituality movement—distinct from manifestation’s private-outcome focus, oriented instead toward vocation, collective futures, and the maturation of the species.
What they gave
Conscious evolution: Reframed evolution as something humans can now consciously participate in and direct through choice.
- Local self → Essential Self: A practical identity shift from the anxious ego to a deeper, calmer creative self (All Is One).
- Vocational arousal: Named the deep yearning to create and contribute (“what is mine to do?”) as the personal signal of one’s evolutionary purpose (It's All Play).
- Co-creative / evolutionary visioning: Developed group and individual practices for envisioning and aligning with a life-affirming future (“shared intention creates reality”).
In their words
We are now changing our understanding of how nature evolves; we are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice.
In the past our glorious visions of the future—heaven, paradise, nirvana—were thought to happen after death. The newer thought is that we do not have to die to get there!
The root of the word is “noos,” meaning “mind.” The noosphere is the mind sphere, the thinking layer of Earth, the “global brain,” the larger social body created by human intelligence.
The time is ripe to move toward a new evolutionary agenda—not to reform but to transform based on the full and appropriate use of our immense new powers.
To awaken our magnificent social potential, we need first and foremost to become aware of our “new story,” our evolutionary story.
Yes, something is dying; however, the media do not recognize that something is also being born.
This is a call to those who are experiencing a deep motivation to be more, to find their life purpose and to contribute their gifts to the evolution of the world.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Teilhard de Chardin (evolutionary mysticism, the noosphere); Abraham Maslow (self-actualization, the growth motive); Buckminster Fuller (whole-systems optimism); Sri Aurobindo (evolution of consciousness).
- Taught / Influenced: conscious-evolution and social-transformation movements; the “evolutionary leaders” and shift / new-paradigm networks; contemporary purpose-and-vocation spirituality.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- The Hunger of Eve1976
- Conscious Evolution1998
- Emergence2001