Is sex evolving? Barbara Marx Hubbard, the grand dame of
the “conscious evolution” movement, emphatically
states, “Yes!” As an author, a futurist,
and the president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution,
Hubbard has been at the forefront of an emerging worldview
positing that humans are at the threshold of a new phase in the
evolutionary process. And this, as she reveals here, has great
implications for our favorite pastime.
A wonderfully spry and energetic seventy-five-year-old,
Hubbard freely admits to “not being that sexually
oriented” and says that sex had never been primary in her
relationship with her eighty-one-year-old partner, Sidney. While
that would, under most circumstances, consign the sexual
dimension of a marriage to the back burner, in Barbara's case,
she has characteristically used it as an opportunity to discover
a deeper evolutionary significance and possibility.
“Wanting to be responsive to Sidney,” she says,
“I began to ask myself, 'What is my heart's true desire?
If recreational sex is not what motivates me, what
would motivate me at the deepest part of my
being?'” That question led Hubbard and her partner into a
dynamic exploration of the evolutionary significance of
sex. And as she explains in the following interview, when two
people come together with the conscious intention to evolve, sex
becomes a “regenerative” experience that can ignite
passion—the passion to become a new expression of man and
woman, co-creative partners with the evolutionary process
itself.
What Is Enlightenment: Barbara, you have
recently been speaking about a new form of sexuality called
“co-creational” or “regenerative” sex.
Could you begin by describing how co-creational sex is different
from procreational and recreational sex?
Barbara Marx Hubbard: In procreative sex, there's a
higher purpose, which is to create life. The fact that the
woman's body is capable of receiving a fertilized egg and
creating another being is mysterious, miraculous, and sacred.
That is its most profound purpose, the extraordinary miracle of
the biological imperative. So there is a sacred meaning to
sexuality, which is to reproduce the entities that are engaging
in sex, no matter what those two entities think they're doing!
Recreational sex, on the other hand, is for intimacy and
pleasure. It's enhancing in many ways, but it doesn't have the
higher sacred purpose of procreational sex.
In evolutionary sexuality, or what I call
“co-creational sex,” rather than reproducing the
couple or engaging in intimacy and sexual pleasure for
recreation, the sacredness of the intimacy is compelled by a
vision of the couple evolving through their union. In
that sense, evolutionary sexuality is comparable in its
sacredness to procreational sex. While nature's purpose is to
reproduce the species through procreation, in co-creational sex,
we are using the sexual impulse to evolve the species for the
highest purpose.
WIE: How did you begin to discern a higher
evolutionary purpose for sex beyond that of reproduction?
Marx Hubbard: I began to observe a fundamental
inequality between men and women in their later years and sought
its significance. As we live longer and longer lives, more and
more women are entering menopause. They are no longer producing
eggs, and yet men continue to produce sperm until they die. So I
began to ask myself, “Is there a higher purpose for the
sperm, since the man continues to produce so many of them? And
if he loves a postmenopausal woman and she has no eggs, is it
possible, through intentionality, to unlock a higher purpose
within the coding of the sperm? What if the woman desires, above
all else, not a new baby, but a new body and a new
being—sensitive to spirit, capable of self-healing,
self-generating, and self-evolving?”
Currently, males inseminate women to conceive babies, and as
men get older, they have recreational sex. But what if the
woman's desire brings forth from the male sperm its true
fulfillment and noble purpose? What if the male inseminates the
woman with the evolving potential inherent in the sperm,
triggered by the woman's desire to give birth to her
self? What if he is consciously inseminating and
co-creating with the woman the new being who is required for the
evolution of life on earth? The woman has the biological
capacity for self-reproduction through sexuality, and she may
also have the capacity for self-evolution through
sexuality. Now this exploration is occurring only in the realm
of intention and imagination—in the imaginal
realm. But men find it very empowering when the woman says,
“I feel that the sperm has a higher purpose.” It's
very arousing to the man, that's for sure! It really would be
shocking if I became the Dr. Ruth of “evolutionary
sexuality.”
WIE: If there was demonstrable proof of this,
something unprecedented would happen in the elder generation in
this country, and in the world. It would definitely start a
revolution!
Marx Hubbard: It would! Sexuality is not just a
small aspect of life; it is an expression of the life force of
evolution. And that life force in the postmenopausal couple has
a higher purpose that hasn't been fully experienced yet. The
intention, the love, and the intimacy this idea generates in my
partner and me is itself vitalizing—even if it hasn't
actually changed my DNA. I've projected this forward into the
future, imagining that if we really are going to be
able to extend our life span to a radical degree, then sexuality
would have to assume a higher purpose beyond recreation in order
for it to take on the sacred dimension of procreational sex and
express the dynamism inherent in the life pulse. We are a
self-evolving species now, and consciousness evolution is not
only about our psyches and our social action but also about our
own bodies. To raise sexuality to the possibility of
regeneration and self-evolution is a wonderful exploration.
WIE: You have coined the term
“regenopause” to represent this new perspective on
the postmenopausal years.
Marx Hubbard: Yes. When I was fifty, I was diagnosed
with a form of chronic cancer, and I began to search for the
deeper plan of my being. I heard an inner voice that asked,
“Would you like to regenerate or would you like to
die?” I had no idea I had such a choice! And this inner
voice said, “Cancer is the body's panicked effort to grow
without a plan; regeneration occurs when you say yes to the
deeper plan of your being.” I realized that this deeper
plan involved tuning in to the evolutionary process and becoming
an embodiment of that. When a woman in her menopausal years is
overcome by a profound impulse to co-create and to self-evolve,
this signals a next phase in the life cycle of the feminine. I
asked for a word that would describe what I was going through in
my postmenopausal years—the internal liberation, as well
as the desire for co-creation—and the word just flashed:
regenopause.
Regenopause happens when the woman gets so turned on to her
creativity and her life purpose that it starts to activate her
at the cellular level. When an increased spiritual desire to
participate in evolution crosses over into the aging process, it
sends a signal that says, “We're not finished, folks.
We're not ready to go yet. It would be a waste of evolutionary
time to die now because look what it took to get us here!”
Our species is being asked to self-evolve, or we will devolve
and die. And I think that the regenopausal woman who is
activated by this life purpose is, perhaps, the missing link in
the story. So many women are entering menopause, so many women
are turned on, and our culture is finally open enough to call us
forth without trying to destroy us. It's the first time in
modern history that we can even begin to see the potential of
the “feminine co-creator.” We haven't seen this
full-scale woman until now because, in our culture, women
haven't been allowed to pursue this except in a very narrow way.
So regenopause transforms menopause into a new and open-ended
life cycle, which doesn't have an existing lid, or an existing
label, or a social image of itself.
WIE: You seem to be observing that women in their
later years are awakening to an evolutionary or developmental
context for their lives—that they are thinking about what
it would mean to evolve and to be free in ways they hadn't even
begun to consider when they were younger.
Marx Hubbard: That is exactly right, and I was one of
those women. I got married in 1951 at the age of twenty-one, and
I was of the generation that Betty Friedan wrote about in
The Feminine Mystique. Through interviewing
hundreds and hundreds of women, she discovered that we had no
self-image after the age of twenty-one, and that that was
accompanied by a kind of malaise and sadness. Then in the
sixties, we burst out with the women's movement. But I think
that there is a third phase to the women's movement in the third
millennium, because over the last fifty years, the evolutionary
perspective has taken hold. This new phase is about the drive to
self-evolve and self-express, which is different from wanting
equal rights in the masculine world. It's deeper, and it's
motivated by a passionate love of our potential.
WIE: This next step is the most exciting
aspect of what you're talking about because it would mean
transcending many of the premodern, modern, and postmodern
notions of what it means to be a man and a woman. It seems that
you're pointing to a natural, unpremeditated, and spontaneous
expression of a liberated masculinity and a liberated
femininity.
Marx Hubbard: This is the new Adam and the new
Eve—whole being with whole being at the Tree of Life. In
the story of Genesis, Eve was not only going for the Tree of
Knowledge, she was heading for the Tree of Life, which is the
tree of the gods. And it seems to me that the human species is
heading for the Tree of Life. We have the power to destroy
worlds and build worlds, to change our own bodies, and perhaps,
eventually, to have ever-evolving life. Now, when the woman has
become whole, so that her own masculine and feminine are joined,
and the man too has become whole, they can come together beyond
domination and submission in such a way that will bring forth the greater potential of each. So we see the couple as a very powerful arena of self-evolution. And when you add sexuality—from procreation to recreation to regeneration—you begin to see the New Man and the New Woman gaining the wisdom to guide the new powers of humanity forward.