Exhibit A for Explaining the LCWR Report

April 19, 2012 By Thomas L. McDonald

Symbol for Hubbard's Group

The keynote speaker for the annual conference of the LCWR is New Age quack Barbara Marx Hubbard. If you’ve never heard of her, just try to imagine a combination of Deepak Chopra and Ray Kurzweil with an extra helping of crazy. Her big thing is Conscious Evolution, which is the latest repackaging of “est” with an added transhumanist/post-humanist subtext. Here she is explaining Conscious Evolution, which sounds like a combination of X-Men comics, techno-fetishizing, narcissism, New Age nonsense, paganism, trite bromides, bad grammar, Gnosticism, and good old heresy. (Emphasis added.)

It has become obvious that a creative minority of humanity is undergoing a profound inner mutation or transformation. Evolutionary ideas are not only serving to make sense of this change, but also acting to catalyze the potential within us to transform. (Thought creates; specific thought creates specifically. [?])

It is the planetary crisis into which we were born that is awakening our sleeping potential for transformation. Planet Earth has given birth to a species capable of choosing whether to consciously evolve ourselves and our social forms, or to continue the course we have set toward our own extinction. And the choice is clear.

All great spiritual paths lead us to this threshold of our own consciousness, but none can guide us across the great divide — from the creature human to the cocreative human. [??] None can guide us in managing the vast new powers given us by science and technology. None of us have been there yet.

What we can envision
The enriched noosphere, the thinking layer of Earth, is now replete with evolutionary technologies that can transform the material world. Within the next 30 to 50 years, we could transform our physical bodies, our minds, our social structures, and set in motion the emergence of a new civilization. [So she's a proponent of the singularity, and of the profoundly anti-Christian concept of post-humanism.]

Science: It is said that the power of quantum computing may increase exponentially in the next 50 years bordering on silicon-based life. At the same time biologists studying aging, cloning, and stem cells tell us we may reverse aging and gain a sort of immortality. One scientist writes, “We may live 600 years and only die by accident.”

Moving deeply into the nature of matter, students of zero point energy believe that we can tap into and use the infinite sea of energy that underlies everything. Furthermore, with nanotechnology we can build as nature does—atom by atom.

Expanding beyond the earth itself, space engineers envision the formation of an extraterrestrial sphere, much as hundreds of millions of years ago the biosphere was formed. We can live in an integrated Earth/Space environment restoring the Earth, freeing ourselves from hunger and poverty, exploring the vast untapped potential of human cocreativity.

Social systems: As we shift from maximum procreation to cocreation, the Feminine would be liberated from its restrictive roles, as men and women cocreate in a balanced way for the good of the larger human family. The Masculine would be released from its long-standing roles of patriarch and protector to discover the peace and ease of true relationship and cocreation.

Patterns of unification are set in motion already, as nonprofit, corporate, and governmental alliances are built around countless initiatives. Those that are successful are already witnessing the melting of borders and boundaries that have prevented successful compromise and negotiation in the past. Political events, like the fall of the Berlin wall, are foreshadowing the possibility of unification around the globe, and creating the hope that seemingly insurmountable problems may find yet find solutions.

Spiritual grounding: Jesus said, “These and even greater works shall you do.” We may actually be on the threshold of those abilities that Christ was able to do and that He foresaw as possibilities for us all. Specifically, the ability to use conscious intent, perhaps in conjunction with scientific and technological capacities, will allow us to create bodies sensitive to thought. We may find ourselves transforming the human body from its physical, animal, degenerating phase to a regenerating and evolving phase.

This capability would be the fulfillment of the words of St. Paul: “Behold I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in the twinkling of an eye at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound. This corruptible will become incorruptible. This mortal will put on immortality and death shall be swallowed up in victory.”

This would also be the emergence of what Alan Lithman calls, psyche materialis, and what the Bible calls, Adam of the quickening Spirit. [And so it was written: the first Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. (1 Cor. 15:45).]

Sri Aurobindo named the human being with this ability, the gnostic being; Teilhard de Chardin called it the ultra person; and I have selected the name, universal human and universal humanity. This type of human is a quantum jump beyond the species Homo sapiens. It is a new species that is incubating in millions now.

This is a Naissance; this is new for Earth — but it is not new for the universe. The name universal human is good because it connotes the reality that we are entering the phase of universal life.

Although we may never know what really happened, we do know that the story told in the Gospels is that Jesus’ resurrection was a first demonstration of what I call the post-human universal person. We are told that he did not die. He made his transition, released his animal body, and reappeared in a new body at the next level of physicality to tell all of us that we would do what he did. The new person that he became had continuity of consciousness with his life as Jesus of Nazareth, an earthly life in which he had become fully human and fully divine. Jesus’ life stands as a model of the transition from Homo sapiens to Homo universalis.

Summary
Now millions of earthly humans from every spiritual tradition, from many social movements and scientific lineages of human inquiry, are evolving to the stage at which they recognize their soul, their higher self. They are becoming willing, even passionately desire, to be one with that Self. And as a critical mass of humans evolving toward their new capacities arise, humanity will undergo an unprecedented shifting in our entire way of being on this planet.

We are the generations born into this moment in history. Our powers are immense. We can destroy the earth as we know it, or alternatively, transform the material and societal limits of human life. We or our children may actually live to experience either the destruction of our life support systems (with unimaginable consequences for billions of people), or the literal transformation of our bodies from creature human life cycle to cocreative human life cycle. The choice is ours.

Wow. Just … wow. Folks, that’s not merely crazy: that’s weapons-grade crazy. And this is the keynote speaker for the annual conference of the Leadership Council of Women Religious, set for August in St. Louis, Missouri, and based on the themeMystery Unfolding: Leading in the Evolutionary Now.

This is plain heresy. It’s bad science, bad psychology, bad philosophy, and, most certainly, bad religion, and the LCWR has structured their entire annual conference around its themes.

So do you still have any questions about the need for oversight of the LCWR?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godandthemachine/2012/04/exhibit-a-for-explaining-the-lcwr-report/