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Spirituality in
Jump Time
by
Jean Houston, Ph.D. |
Tending the gardens of our lives involves a kind of
cosmic yoga; we yoke ourselves back to remembering that
we are made of the same stuff as the Universe from which
we continuously arise second by second. We share its
body; we are woven into the fabric of its infinite
ecology; the productions of our hands and minds are an
aspect of its creation and live in eternity. We know
ourselves, then, as resonant waves of the original seed,
infinite beings who contain in our body-minds the design
of creation itself, planted in the field of this
particular space-time and sustained by a dynamic
flow-through of cosmic energy.
At your core you already know this to be so. Surely,
there are times in your life when you understand
yourself to be a reality surfer, delightedly riding the
waves of creation, mind opened, heart expanded, the
Universe coursing through you. In such states, you are
embraced in co-conscious awareness, no longer knowing or
caring where "I" leave off and the rest of
reality begins, or whether there is any difference. This
experience is one of the supreme givens of our nature
because the Universe in its operational mode is coded
into every one of us. The raptures of the deep self are
our native equipment, granted us by our cosmic origins.
The only requirement is joy and a willingness to say
"yes" to the new epic that dawns, right now,
in you and me and those fortunate to be alive in the
great today. We are seeds coded with cosmic dreams.
Bursting the pods of our containment, we are ready to
enter into creative partnership with the Universe and to
populate our particular corner of space-time with our
unique vision and capacity.
A Harvest of Spiritual Practices
What practices might we harvest from the cosmic
garden that can help us enter the flow of continuous
creation? What might we all do to participate more fully
in the vital renaissance that is the emerging
spirituality of Jump Time?
Tell the new story of the evolutionary
journey, for it is a tale filled with empowering
inspiration, a source of hope and change. The story of
the origin and growth of the cosmos is being recounted
and discussed in many forms, in books, on the Internet,
and at international gatherings. One of the most
complete and powerful retellings is The Universe
Story by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme.
At once the oldest and the newest of stories, the
Universe Story heals while it unites. I find that when I
tell it in my seminars or guide my students through a
reenactment of its stages, it reawakens the memory banks
of human history rooted in our cells and psyches and
brings an expanded perspective to bear on our work, our
arts, and our actions. It replaces alienation with a
sense of connectivity; loneliness with an expansive and
infinite sense of family; and life destroying
materialism with a spiritual and humane agenda. A myth
for our times, it links the personal-particulars of our
local existence with the personal-universals of Great
Life.
As scientist Mark Steiner, a participant in the Epic
of Evolution Internet list wrote me: "We need to
tell the Epic as a whole as well as to tell the
individualized stories of our sun, our planet, our moon,
our species. We need to tell it in narratives and in
dramas. We need to tell it in literal and in
metaphorical terms. We need to tell it though art and
paintings. We need to tell it in song and in dance. We
need to tell it on television and in movie theaters. We
need to tell it in comic books, children’s books and
novels. We need to tell it in street theater, operas,
and performance art. We need to tell it in rituals and
reenactments. We need to tell it in church services and
workshops. We need to tell it in buttons, bumper
stickers, and yard signs. We need to tell it with great
grandiosity as well as with the most gentle, subtle,
even subliminal of tones. We need to so fill the world
with its own story that there is no escaping it. We need
to so fill our culture with the story that it cannot
help but be transformed. Our job may well be to fill our
culture with the story so that it seeps deeply enough
into our collective consciousness to create a common,
contagious unity."
Find a retelling of the Universe Story that appeals
to you and make it part of your personal mythology. Tell
the story to your children, your friends, your neighbors
and colleagues. Keep in mind that there are those whose
religious beliefs may cause them to view the story of
the universe’s evolution as a threat. In telling the
new story, stress its universal spiritual dimension
without diminishing or disrespecting anyone’s creation
story. Told as a spiritual practice, the Universe Story
has the potential to bring together and celebrate the
common heritage of a diverse universe.
Commune with beauty wherever you find it.
Spend more time exploring and celebrating the human
glories of literature, art, music, dance, theater and
the simple wonders of the natural world. Immersion into
beauty wherever you find it calls forth inner beauties
and brings to consciousness the budding of new realities
and the freshness of a world made new, the esthetics of
evolution in action.
Artists catch the currents of the Universe and put
them into forms that call our emergent selves to
heightened awareness. Art makes perception more acute
and conception as well. It shakes the mind from its
stolid moorings so that you see deeper into the world
and time. Active appreciation of nature wakes you up to
what is going on around you, heightens your empathy,
knits you into a seamless kinship with all living
things. Bringing Jump Time knowings to bear, you
appreciate the billion-year story that has gone into the
making of this rose, that valley, this ocean breeze.
Try it now. Close your eyes for a moment and call up
in your imagination three things that enchant you with
their beauty—a baby’s face, the green hills of
Ireland, Michelangelo’s David. Visit each in
turn, allowing your body and mind to become utterly
available to—even merging with each. . . .
Even a moment of such appreciation leads naturally to
a state of flow consciousness, the dissolving of
boundaries between the knower, the knowledge and the
known. One of my favorite priestesses of flow
consciousness is the New England poet, Emily Dickinson.
Caught in the mid-nineteenth century, she managed to
bring all time into her own small space, for as she
says:
Behind Me- Dips Eternity-
Before Me- Immortality-
Myself - the Term Between -
What happens when you think like Emily and invest
each "Term" that you meet—each flower,
sunset, prairie, and bee—with totality? Pursued as a
spiritual practice, this kind of thinking leads you to a
kind of holonomic knowing, which Emily calls
"circumference knowing." You allow your mind
to wrap itself around its object like a python, but
instead of suffocating it, you give it life. You see the
before, the after, and the between of things. You catch
the glint of glory and the shadows skittering in the
corner. Then, like an artist, you burst with words such
as no one has ever heard and paint with colors from
shores unseen. You dance, like Shiva, the death and
resurrection of all, and comprehend, like a physicist,
that everything is implicate and resonant in everything
else— "stir a flower and bestir a star." A
joyous cosmology becomes apparent, a state in which
everything is flowing, pouring, bleeding, seeding, and
laughing through to everything and everyone else. Emily
Dickinson, that spiritual genius, poured out this
revelation in words that melt our very margins:
Beauty crowds me till I die
Beauty mercy have on me
But if I expire today
Let it be in sight of thee-
In this state, anything on which you focus opens up—projects,
problems, relationships, business, governance,
metaphysics, even grand designs. You awaken to the
wealth of being that is a given of your deepened human
condition and the a-ha experiences keep on coming. You
say "Yes!" to life wherever you find it,
abandon whining, welcome and celebrate the springtide of
change. Living in the grace of the world’s beauty,
Grace happens, shift happens, and the mind is prepared
to receive Reality in all its many colors.
Decondition old habit patterns that keep us
stuck in a state of illusion and forgetfulness. Whether
our particular "nonvirtue" is gossip or anger,
self-deprecation or toxic thinking, social or business
practices that hurt the souls of others, Jump Time
spirituality has many methods for bringing such
behaviors to consciousness so that they can be replaced
by self-nurturing and compassionate ways of being.
Many methods for "changing our minds" begin
by helping us to become conscious of the chain of
causality that keeps us trapped in a cycle of negative
behavior. Eastern mindfulness practices suggest that we
notice the arising and passing away of negative
impulses, without attaching to them, and by so doing,
widen the gap between the self and its behaviors so as
to provide for an interval of choice. Other schools of
spiritual psychology counsel that we practice catching
ourselves when we are about to engage in a negative
habit and saying, "STOP!" We then change the
imagery around the habit pattern by doing or saying or
thinking something else. With repeated practice, we
learn to self-orchestrate the mind and its callings with
greater skill.
Apart from those negative patterns of thought and
action accumulated over our lifetime, which are
difficult enough to overcome, are the even more
entrenched evolutionary debris of leftover archaic
attitudes and obsolete programs wired into the oldest
part of our brain. However cultured and urbane we may
be, when we feel our territory threatened, personally or
as a nation, we still regress to fanged-lip screechings
and feral crouches upon only middling provocation.
The cells and systems of our brains and bodies seem
to catch these atavisms like flypaper. Our throwback
behaviors are given credence by bible belters and
behaviorists alike; where one sees fallen nature, the
other proclaims the nastiness of our neural fixations.
Both exhort us to be dependent on their nostrums for
salvation.
Two callings seem to be warring within us. On the one
hand, the instinctual drives of habit and conditioning;
on the other, the metaphysical calling toward spiritual
realization. In this task we have glorious company. The
author of the Prapanna Gita writes around 600 BC:
"Lord, I know what virtue is, but I cannot practice
it; I know what vice is, but I have no power to desist
it." Six hundred years later, St. Paul complains
notoriously: "For the good I would, I do not; but
the evil which I would not, that I do."
Of what "evils" are we in Jump Time guilty?
Matthew Fox in Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the
Flesh writes eloquently of the sins of our time, the
release of which requires us to go more deeply into the
shadow realms of our nature. Each is a violation of the
sacred, a damning agenda of our capacity for negative
creativity through our collective moral and ethical
failings. Each tells us much about what needs to be
purified spiritually for the world to move to its next
stage.
First among the modern deadly sins, Fox writes, is
actively "wronging others," adding to the
suffering of an already suffering world. But sin, Fox
says, can also be passive, such as selfishly choosing
not to see, not to hear, not to feel what is happening
around us, as we do when we "ignore" our
planetary ecological catastrophe. Our habitual ways of
thinking can also be sinful, Fox says. In the sin of
"reductionism," we oversimplify complex issues
between human beings by attributing them all to sexism,
racism, or class conflicts. We are also guilty of
"dualism," insisting on either/or solutions to
complicated and multifaceted dilemmas. Finally, Fox
tells us, we moderns sin by a "lack of
passion," as when we distance ourselves from the
wildness of nature or put out the energetic fire that
can propel us and the world forward. [Matthew Fox, Sins
of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh, New York:
Harmony, 1999, pp. 158-9]
The best penance for our personal and collective
"sins" may be acts of public service,
restorative justice, volunteerism, and philanthropy—acts
of kindness on a planetary scale. Take compassionate
action and you transcend reductionism and dualism, for
you see the larger picture and come to know the richness
and complexity of others. Compassionate service
engenders passionate concern and sets the life force to
flow more strongly in your blood.
Enter the silence or celebrate the fullness by
making time for a practice of spiritual connection,
logging on to "Universe.org," the God Net of
consciousness. We know that the universe is a living
system of elegant design that seems intent on providing
opportunities for learning through every thought, word,
and deed. Change perspective through meditation,
reflection, or centering, or shift the bandwidth of
everyday consciousness to the divine wavelength, and you
discover yourself to be the latest flower on the tree of
the cosmos, ready to bloom.
One way of sorting through the various methods of
contemplative practice available today is to divide them
into two broad categories, which we might term "the
way in" and "the way out." "The way
in," or via negativa, is traditionally
described as the way of negation. On this path, we
retreat progressively from the circumference to the
center, clearing the muchness to get to the suchness.
"The way out," or via positiva, is the
way of fullness. This path takes us out into the world
to experience its richness, conscious of developing more
and more hooks and eyes to catch the Universe.
What’s different in Jump Time is that the spiritual
technologies at our disposal can be harvested from the
whole world: Christian centering prayer, Buddhist
mindfulness and visualization practices, African trance
dancing, Tantra and sacred sexuality, Native American
pow wows and sweat lodges, shamanic spirit journeys,
Asian martial arts, Jungian dreamwork, as well as for
some, the neo-mystical study of quantum realities. All
of these rework the landscapes of the subliminal mind so
that there are channels and riverbeds in which a deeper
spiritual consciousness can flow.
In its early stages, meditation on the via negativa
tends to require much the same effort as learning to
read--that is, a conscious changing of focus. Just as
the strange and baffling markings on the page gradually
become letters, then words, then sentences, then
meaning, so in inward-turning contemplation, we discover
a whole new way of apprehending a Reality that is first
glimpsed, gradually understood, and finally grasped. As
we empty the mind of images and thought, we sink by
stages into the great No-thing. Face to face with the
substance of all being, the energy of all creation, we
discover to our deep joy that the Universe was identical
to our own consciousness all the time, regardless of how
far or how weirdly we sought it outside ourselves.
The study of quantum physics can lead us to much the
same conclusion. The evident structures of matter are
pared away, revealing Reality in its pure energetic
state, which some mystic-minded scientists think is
synonymous with the primary energy of consciousness.
Brenda Dunne and Robert Jahn of Princeton, for example,
say that consciousness is primary and that quantum
events follow: "We do not so much regard quantum
mechanics as a metaphor for consciousness, but rather
the other way round. We think that the fundamental
concepts of quantum mechanics are the fundamental
concepts of the human mind." (Robert G. Jahn and
Brenda J. Dunne, Margins of Reality: The Role of
Consciousness in the Physical World. New York: Harcourt
Brace & Company, 1987, p. 205)
Quantum physics describes reality as a
complementarity between waves and particles. Sometimes
everything that exists partakes of one form, and
sometimes, of the other. I suspect that in the
contemplations of the via negativa, consciousness moves
away from the particle form of the sensate world and
plunges into the wave, the fathomless oceanic depths in
which Ultimate Consciousness may reside.
The via positiva turns the telescope around and looks
through the other end. By active engagement in art,
music, dance, movement, theater, and high play, our
perception is extended to the world without and the
world within, our senses sharpened so that we bathe in
multisensory delight. Through heightening our awareness,
bringing more and more content into consciousness, and
opening to the entire spectrum of emotions, sensations,
and ideas, we come to the realization that all things
are interdependent and part of the living life of the
Metaverse. We celebrate the particle in order to catch
the wave.
Choose whatever forms of innering or expanding
practice appeal to you and make time and space for them
in your life. Whether you "go out" or "go
in" doesn’t matter; the important thing is to get
going!
Find a community to support your spiritual
practice. "Practice-oriented spirituality,"
observes Princeton sociology professor Robert Wuthnow,
is "a way of imposing discipline on personal
explorations." ("Returning to Practice,"
Noetic Sciences Review, August-November, 1999, p. 37). I
suspect that in the future even traditional churches and
synagogues will adopt an eclectic range of practices.
Human potentials seminars, business spirituality groups,
men’s and women’s circles, sanghas and ashrams,
retreat centers and body-and-soul conferences, even
Internet mail lists, cater to every style and flavor of
practice. Their proliferation is further evidence that
the spiritual zeit is getting geisty.
But if you can’t find a existing group that suits
your taste, you can always start your own. In my book,
Jump Time, I write spoke about the importance of
teaching-learning communities and give suggestions for
starting them. Such communities are particularly
important to spiritual practice. Gather a group of
like-minded seekers and make a pact to support each
other’s regular spiritual endeavors. As Buddhists
explain, the three jewels of spiritual practice are
Buddha, the teacher; dharma, the teachings, and sangha,
the community of fellow practitioners. Without the
support of sangha, they tell us, the spiritual path can
be lonely and difficult, indeed!
A New Springtime of Spirit
As more and more people adopt practices like these,
signs of new growth are everywhere. In contrast to the
wasteland of government, grassroots movements sprout,
connecting fields of ideas and greening the social
agenda with greater community responsibility and
inventiveness. Millions of Cultural Creatives are
adopting voluntary simplicity and putting economics back
where it belongs, as a satellite to the soul of culture,
thus restoring the social balance. A new appreciation
and celebration of our relationship to Nature is rising,
rewriting our covenant with the Earth and acknowledging
that we humans are her steward and partner, not her
master. Aging baby-boomers are acknowledging that our
elderly are critical to the health of the planet, true
citizens of Jump Time who can deal wisely and creatively
with planetary complexity because they have lived long
enough to develop the necessary depth and simplicity.
People are responding to the stress of current issues
by going beyond themselves. So many are learning skills
they never thought to have, inspired by an undeniable
inner urge to take on heroically creative tasks they
never thought to do:
-
Joan in Massachusetts, a respected
neurobiologist, is leading a revolution in science to
bring together brain research and spirituality.
-
Francis, a male nurse and former monk,
redeems intractable patients in a California
schizophrenic ward with the sweetness of his nature and
the depth of his compassion.
-
Teresa, a New York oncologist and a
mystic, uses her spiritual presence and healing gifts to
alleviate the dread and fear of cancer patients.
-
Vendana, a physicist and ecologist in
Delhi, writes and acts to combat corporate piracy of the
world’s botanical heritage.
-
Catherine, a Connecticut documentary
filmmaker, creates programs for public television that
illumine the human spirit.
- Helmut, a stockbroker in Berlin, organizes relief
efforts to bring new hope to the children of war.
In their own ways, these and many more like them are
citizens of the Universe, models of Spirit in action.
The world mind, it seems, is forging a new container
for its spiritual seekers. Whether it is a new religion
or the blending of the best of the old ones; whether it
is more universal forms of collective worship or a
general intensification of private spiritual practice;
something unprecedented is brewing in the Earth’s
spiritual continuum. Perhaps the most hopeful sign of
Jump Time is just this: the grand company of
mystic-minded adventurers, bent on exploring every room
in the many-mansioned House of the Holy.
Copyright © Jean
Houston. All rights reserved. Adapted
from Jump Time, (New York: Tarcher/Putnam), 2000, pp.
253-264 passim.)
Jump Time is a whole system transition, a condition of interactive change
that affects every aspect of life as we know it. It is the changing of the
guard on every level, in which every given is quite literally up for grabs.
It is the momentum behind the drama of the world, the breakdown and
breakthrough of every old way of being, knowing, relating, governing, and
believing. It shakes the foundations of all and everything. And it allows for
another order of reality to come into time.
Dr. Jean Houston is a scholar and researcher in human capacities, and for the past 30 years has co-directed, with her husband Dr. Robert Masters, the Foundation for Mind Research, first in New York City and now in Pomona, New York. Their work has focused on the understanding of latent human abilities. She is the founder 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 our human potential.
Dr. Houston was the protégé of the late anthropologist Margaret Mead, who instructed her in the workings of organizations and power structures in many different cultures. With the late mythologist Joseph Campbell, Jean Houston frequently co-led seminars and workshops aimed at understanding interrelationships between ancient myths and modern societies.
Additionally, Jean Houston has made cross-cultural studies of educational and healing methods in Asia and Africa. Her principal areas of interest apart from her work are theater, archaeology and the philosophical, societal and other implications of contemporary physics. Dr. Houston's mind has been called "a national treasure".
Among her books are Public Like a Frog, The Hero and The Goddess, The Possible Human, The Search for the Beloved, Godseed, Life Force, Listening to the Body, Manual for the Peacemaker, The Passion of Isis and
Osiris. Harper/San Francisco published her autobiography, A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Stories.
Dr. Houston's ability to inspire and invigorate people enables her to convey her vision of the finest possible achievement of individual potential and share the excitement of that possibility with her audiences and student all over the world.
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