The New Evolutionaries

Courtesy of Lindsey Dawson.

With great hair, perfect makeup and huge CVs, they’re the world’s new  powerful females. But forget tired old feminist notions. This lot still want to change things, but differently – via conscious evolution. Not heard of it before? You will.   

The movers and shakers are mostly American – hence the big hair. But they have big minds too and have been chipping away at this idea for years.

At www.evolve.org you can meet the maven of the movement, Barbara Marx Hubbard.  “Conscious Evolution is a new worldview that is now emerging rapidly,’ she says. “It acknowledges that humankind has attained unprecedented powers to affect, control and change the evolution of life on Earth.
In simple terms, it means that we must improve our ability to use our powers ethically and effectively to achieve a positive future.”  

In other words it’s about working with others to do good, rather like your local Lions Club.

But the visionary Barbara and friends are thinking big, driven by the conviction that the whole planet is royally stuffed and right now is our last chance to rescue it.  

The web is quaking with sites devoted the cause. Marilyn Nyborg is pushing Women Waking The World.  Kathy Eldon is heading the Creative Visions Foundation. Dr Elizabeth Debold teaches Evolutionary Enlightenment, which is about discovering the “explosive emergence of a new women's spiritual liberation”.

The Feminine Power Global Community –  tinyurl.com/2cdabuq –   is keen to tell us all about "the three power bases of the co-creative feminine”. The push is to reach for “the power to change your life, the power to realize your destiny and the power to transform the world.”

Whoo, heady stuff. Aspirin, anyone? There’s a tide of similarly urgent prose out there.

Jean Houston at tinyurl.com/25ve8jp says it’s about “all of us together co-creating the human and social changes needed to make a better world.”

I feel like shouting back, “Jean! Love your work, but co-creation? I can barely co-create a coffee date. The world is a tall order!”

Having been to a few of her events I know she’d come back at me sternly with her favourite saying by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”           

For more, check out the gals at Women on the Edge of Evolution. At tinyurl.com/2dhr535 they offer hours of info for free.

And for one of my favourite takes on changing your world go to a wise bloke, influential author Peter Russell. He works with lovely images and calming words. Enjoy at tinyurl.com/2exkq99

What’s to watch

The Ross Sisters  

Be amazed as a trio of singin’ and dancin’ Texan siblings in gingham shorts twist themselves into human pretzels in a dance routine bizarrely called Solid Potato Salad. Simon Cowell would adore these super-flexible teens. It’s just a shame that Aggie, Elmira and Maggie were hot in the 1940s. Now, thanks to YouTube, they’re famous again in this clip from a New York show called Broadway Rhythm. They look like they never ate spuds, but “solid” apparently meant good or excellent then. They sure were. tinyurl.com/yatkuej

Who’s to admire

Rives

He does have a first name (John) but must think it’s smarter to be known just as Rives. And he is smart. Catch him on the wonderful TED website. The performance poet and storyteller plays with the pre-dawn time of day, 4am. The six-degrees-of-separation game is simple compared with his clever spin on freaky number four. “For a time that I find to be the most placid and uneventful hour of the day, four in the morning gets a lot of bad press,” he muses, before going on to detail all sorts of coincidental mayhem. tinyurl.com/mcader

This is from Lindsey’s “Webmistress”  column in Next magazine, July issue, out now.

By Lindsey Dawson