These Are the Times; We Are the People
by Jean Houston, PhD
I use the term “jump time” to refer to what we sometimes call “punctuated equilibrium.” When you look at the fossil record, you will see a species moving along, looking quite the same for a long time--and then, within a very short time, in terms of evolutionary perspective, there’s a jump--and the species shifts and changes. These changes don’t necessarily happen gradually, or over very long periods.
I suggest that this is what is happening now to humanity.
We have seen a series of jumps in the past,
but probably never one as radical and far-reaching
as the jump we are experiencing today.
This is probably the single most critical time in history, the time in which we make a decision whether to grow or die. Other people, in other times, believed that their time was it--they were wrong. This is it! So many different factors are coming together to really make what I call “whole system transition.”
The problem is that most people have not been trained for whole system transition. They were trained for another era, in which things moved more slowly. Working with leaders all over the world, I find that many of them have been trained to be the equivalent of white males of the year 1926. They’ve not been trained for this extraordinary shift, in which we decide whether we grow or die. Part of my work is to prepare people for this shift--at all levels, from heads of state I’ve worked with to people who are pushing the broom.
To paraphrase Albert Einstein, the consciousness that created a problem cannot be the same consciousness that solves it. My work for many years has been in human development. Now, working with the United Nations and other international agencies, my task is to help prepare people to use more of their minds, bodies, spirits and energies in a consummate ecology of use of their own inner spaces and capacities--in the light of social change. We suffer from a gross overuse of the outer world, and a horrendous underuse of the inner world. This is where so many of our problems arise.
The whole notion of 2012 is very interesting. I’ve read the literature, and I know José Argüelles, who’s an extraordinary, brilliant, wildly radical, and innovative thinker. The connection of Mayan prophecies and the Mayan calendar with the precession of the equinox and the shifting of the ages is fascinating. My own take on it is that we have been in this extraordinary time now for some years.
It is in the nature of the linear Christian calendar, especially, to focus on a special time when the Messiah comes. We evolve, we reach a certain point, and then the great event happens--the heavens open up and the redemption occurs. This is a very strong theme in Western culture. So naturally, the whole notion of 2012 really pops into some minds and says, “This is it! This is the redeeming event.” It’s a very ancient way of perceiving history and time.
But I don’t think this time is about redemption. I think it is about evolution. What we’re being asked to do is to grow in the amplitude of our spirit, our being, in the utilization of the incredible resources of our body, mind and spirit, in our ability to cross the great divide of otherness and really speak to each other in unique and powerful ways. I think that people are focusing on the notion of 2012 because it gives us a sense of specific space and time, an event around which we can gather resources and begin to become adequate stewards of biological and social evolution--stewards of our planet and of ourselves.
We’re being asked to recognize and develop our innate capacities, and bring them to bear upon the great issues of our times.
The most important capacity to develop is the sense that you are important in this time, that you are not an encapsulated bag of skin dragging around a dreary little ego, but an organism at one with both the world and the changing times. With that sense, you release a lot of old holding patterns and obstructions.
You begin to realize that you have capacities that you didn’t know you had, or that you may have had as a child and then lost--capacities for creative imagination, and for many different ways of thinking: thinking in images; thinking with words; thinking kinesthetically with the whole body; thinking from the heart. And when you bring this extraordinary reservoir of capacities to yourself and the world, you find ways of crossing the great divide of otherness. You are able to work in teams in much more fluent, flexible and creative ways. You make things happen. But it really starts from the inside out, not from outside in, as we in the West have been taught; creativity is alive beneath the surface crust of consciousness all the time.
I’ve had the good fortune to study, in person, fifty-five of the most creative individuals in North America, extraordinary people such as Margaret Mead, Buckminster Fuller and Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist whom I knew and worked with for twenty years. I found that these folks were archaeologists of their own minds, spelunkers in the caves of their own creativity. Thus, they had the inner hooks and eyes, the inner images, feeling states and abilities to grasp a creative idea as it evolved and emerged.
They gave the passion to the possible to do something about it. Thinking in images--not just visual images, but auditory and kinesthetic images too--gives one the neuronal enthusiasm to leap to an extraordinary level of creativity. I find that people who think in images are able to do more and think faster. The mind in this state of heightened creativity races, selects, synthesizes and sometimes does the work of months in moments. We need to tap into these capacities in order to become the humans this era requires.
We’re living in a time where time itself is in a wild acceleration. How do you live, psychologically, in a jump time, where everything is changing constantly? I show people how to take on many different modalities of time, even what we would call subjective time, when one can experience in minutes what sometimes would be hours or days. There are parts of the mind that do not know time. And the brain is not hardwired, as we previously thought. On the contrary, it has remarkable capacities for reorganizing and regrowing itself.
People like Bruce Lipton are showing that thinking, learning, acting, intending (that’s a big one), meditating and enjoying can activate the basic genetic structures of our bodies and minds so we can not only shape our own brain anatomy and behavior--we can literally grow new capacities. I believe from many years of research, we can even grow new, evolved human versions of ourselves. This is a great cause for hope and action in this critical time.
A myth is something that never was but is always happening. Myth is, I believe, the proto-DNA of the human psyche. My old friend Joe Campbell believed that it was coded in the body, and I suspect that this is true, because a myth functions by serving as the lure of becoming. It gives you a basic story template, out of which you can begin to take on the larger sense of who you are, where you are, what you yet can be.
We have been living in mythic times for some time now, and a great deal is being required of us.
We are mythic beings, embarking continually on journeys of growth and discovery. The whole notion of 2012 is an image around which our time’s requirements are traveling like planets around the sun. And if the idea of 2012 is making people grow up and be responsible, then great. Hegel once wrote about world-historical individuals, people whose passion corresponded to the turning of their time, that whether they were out front or behind the scenes, they became the entrepreneurs of progress. They did a lot of work on themselves to be relevant, resonant and ready for the great challenges of their times.
That’s what we need to do to meet this extraordinary jump time. I don’t personally believe that any horrible thing is going to happen. But I do think that if people can use the year 2012 as a point to grow themselves into ready stewards of this planetary process, let’s not hold back.
Jean Houston, PhD, scholar, philosopher and researcher in human capacities, is one of the foremost visionary thinkers and doers of our time. She is regarded as one of the principal founders of the Human Potential Movement. In 1965, along with her husband Dr. Robert Masters, she founded The Foundation for Mind Research. She is also the founder and principal teacher of the Mystery School, a program of cross-cultural, mythic and spiritual studies dedicated to teaching history, philosophy, the new physics, psychology, anthropology, myth and the many dimensions of human potential.
Dr. Houston is a prolific writer and author of twenty-six published books, including A Passion for the Possible, The Possible Human and A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story. Her book Jump Time explores a new global paradigm and speaks boldly of a re-genesis of human society. The questions raised in this book and the exciting suggestions of possibilities are producing new pioneers--social artists--working on the frontiers of this new global society.
Dr. Houston also offers seminars in social artistry. A powerful and dynamic speaker, she holds conferences and seminars with social leaders, educational institutions and business organizations worldwide. Dr. Houston has worked in over one-hundred countries and is the recipient of many awards. She works at all levels of leadership and is currently broadening her work with the United Nations as a Senior Advisor to the UNDP--training leaders in developing countries in this new field of social artistry (human development in the light of social complexity). In 2007, Dr. Houston received a mandate from Dr. Monica Sharma, the Director of Leadership and Capacity Development for the UN, to train ten-thousand trainers, who in turn will be training some one-hundred-million people worldwide by 2017.
Jean Houston’s ability to inspire and invigorate people enables her to readily convey her vision--the finest possible achievement of the individual potential--while sharing with her audiences and students the inner fire and excitement of that possibility! Visit www.JeanHouston.com
Excerpted from Transforming Through 2012: Leading Perspectives on the New Global Paradigm (Yinspire Media). Used with permission. To check out the book or to download free chapters, please visit: http://www.transformingthrough2012.com/
