Barbara Marx Hubbard: So let’s begin, then, at the beginning. We’re all here right now because of some things that Jean had said to me the last time we talked, which has been several months now. You were talking, Jean, about feminine consciousness, and the fact that it has gone through three major transformations. Why don’t you state this thesis, and then we might talk about where we are, and what this new form of consciousness might become.
Jean Houston: I was actually looking at three major periods of history. Civilization begins with the Neolithic period, when man stops depending upon the meanderings of the hunt and begins to settle down into agricultural societies. These, of course, were the great Neolithic societies, most of which were dominated by matrilinear forms. Women did not govern, but there was much more creative interplay between male and female elements in the society. The great goddess cults evolved from this. The impetus here is one of tribal interdependence and very intense organization in which each part is related to every other part. The thrust principle would be Eros as opposed to Logos. I don’t mean Eros in terms of sexuality, but Eros in terms of the fine symbiotic connections between things – essentially the love principle (More about Eros and Logos by Jean Houston).
With the coming of the great city-states, especially along the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, came the urban revolutions that were always male-dominated. Instead of a seamless web of kinship, as in the Neolithic societies, they were based on hierarchical, highly structured typologies and very specific kinds of functions — a division of the human into parts. You inevitably have rather exclusive male dominance in these societies, with females being relegated to functions and functionaries. The thrust here is Logos: linear chains of being.
Somewhere around 500 B.C. we begin to see the breakdown of this. You have the rise of a lot of savior gods, especially between about 500 B.C. and the second or third century A.D., and a new kind of individuation. The great eras of mysticism occur at this time. Thee notion of a new kind of brotherhood begins to yeast here. Women are able to be participants in terms of spiritual realities, but not in terms of existential realities. You have also at the time the rise of major empire states — the Roman Empire, for example — which, again, are linear and hierarchical.
In our own time, with the extraordinary complexity of hierarchical events that you write about so well, Hazel, the hierarchical chain of being has begun to break down. With the breakdown of ontological structures — social, cosmic, moral, religious — there is a rising of the depths.
When psychological energy is no longer bonded to social forms, it has to go elsewhere, and it goes inward. With this rising of the depths — which occurred also in the second-century Roman Empire, in seventeenth-century England with the coming of the Jacobean Era, and in Hitler’s Germany — you have always the lowest common denominator: the soothsayers, the covens, the witches, the Gnostic sects. But also…there is the possibility of new forms of being. You see this with the Gnostic and Christian forms arising in the second century. It is a new kind of individuation in which there is really neither male nor female. It is a new combination of these in the human whole…
In our time, we have reached a critical density of global interdependence. There is such resonance between the organism and the environment, ourselves and the environment, environment and planet, and planet and god only knows what, that we are coming to a flowering of global civilization.
In my own work, for example, I do two types of things to find out about human potential. I take depth probings of the psyche. I will actually look intensely in many states of consciousness at what the capacities of any given individual are. I will also then take a cross-cultural approach. I look at the ptentials throughout the inventories of human resources. Why is it that the Orunta have this acute orchestration of their senses? why do the Eskimo think only in pictures? Why do the people of Uganda have this extraordinary plasticity and kinesthetic thinking through their hands? In this portrait we begin to get a portrait of the human condition and human capacities. It is a kind of implosion of human factors: a cross-cultural plurality of the givens of the human condition…
With the rising of the depths, and with the freedom of women from the encapsulation of roles, we are also witnessing the rise of feminine principles…the feminine quality is rising in men, the masculine quality is rising in women, but it is not as simple as that. It is not the two put together; it is almost a new kind of gender and species. It is a different notion of what it means to be human.
In your economics, Hazel, this is essentially what you’re doing. The metaphors are difficult because we have no paradigm for this. How do you find a paradigm for an emergent? This is the problem with so much of our work…
Barbara Marx Hubbard: About this rising of the depths — let me explain my attraction to space colonies in this context. It started with what I think of as an “expanded reality” experience. I was taking a walk one day in 1966 and asked myself a question: What in our age is comparable to the birth of Christ? Then I went on autodrive in a semi daydream, walking around the hill, losing track of time and space. Suddenly the blue cocoon of Earth opened up. My mind’s eye was on the moon and I literally felt myself as a cell in the body of our planet Earth. I sensed an answer — We are being born into the universe!
The image I’ve been having is…the image of a fetus wrapped up in a kind of placenta in my head. It looks like the image at the end of the movie 2001.
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