This article is adapted from a keynote address Jean Houston delivered at the 1998 annual
conference of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

 The Possible Human . . . and Conscious Evolution 

by Jean Houston

In evolutionary theory Jump Time  is known as the time of punctuated equilibrium – when a species is living at the edge of its tolerance  in a state of gestation and ferment and suddenly jumps to a new order of being. This is it. This is the time. 

There is an interesting notion popularized by Peter Russell: to see the 15 billion years of evolution condensed into a year-long film. The film opens with the Big Bang, which takes in this year-long epic about a hundred-millionth of a second. Then the universe begins to cool and in twenty-five minutes you have stable atoms forming. Nothing much happens for the rest of January or, for that matter, for the whole month of January – just the dull, slow sight of a gradually expanding gaseous cloud. Time to go out for popcorn. Come back for February and March, when the gas clouds begin to form into clusters of galaxies and stars. This goes on for months, stars occasionally bursting into supernovae, with new stars birthing out of the left-over star stuff. In early September, after eight months of film, our own solar system forms. Now things begin to form a little faster. Earth arrives and the complex molecules start to form. By the beginning of October, bacteria and simple algae appear. Photosynthesis develops around October 7, and throughout the rest of the month of October and the first week of November, the oxygen level builds up.

By November 10 complex cells with well-developed nuclei evolve, and with this sexual reproduction becomes possible, and evolution accelerates. Now we are up to late November, and although the major part of the film is over, what we would consider real evolution is just beginning. In the beginning of December simple multicellular organisms appear. A couple of days later we see fish and other sea creatures, while vertebrates crawl out onto land a few days after that. From Christmas to mid-day December 30, the dinosaurs dominate the picture. And then, sometime after the middle of December 31, our early apelike ancestors appear, but do not begin to walk upright until eleven o’clock in the evening of December 31.

Now it really accelerates. One and a half minutes before midnight, human language begins to develop and with it probably the origins of self-reflective consciousness. In the last 30 seconds, farming begins. Buddha achieves enlightenment five and a half seconds before the end, and a second later, Christ shows up. In the last half second of the film the Industrial Revolution begins, and World War II occurs less than a hundredth of a second before midnight. In the tiniest fraction of a second, a flash, we have the world since 1945 – not much longer than the flash that occurred with the Big Bang when the film began. And still everything is accelerating, showing no signs of slowing down, only speeding up faster and faster.

What is evolving in front of our eyes today is not so much biological evolution but conscious evolution. We have become conscious of our capacity to direct and co-create the next film. We now have the role of accelerating the evolutionary process.
 
This is especially critical, given the fact that we are now in Jump Time. In evolutionary theory Jump Time is known as the time of punctuated equilibrium – when a species is living at the edge of its tolerance in a state of gestation and ferment and suddenly jumps to a new order of being. This is it. This is the time. We are in a hot house environment: lots of members of the species congregated together with the aim of healing the whole self so that we can respond to the strange attractor, the lure of becoming that is calling us into new ways of being.

And yet, people and nations live as hobbled giants – Gullivers pinned down by the Lilliputians of limited thought, habituated patterns, toxic culture, or lives of serial monotony. How do people and nations learn to see and hear and feel our way into the mind of the maker in ways which add to the health and aliveness of those around us, renew our spirits, regain a deepened sense of our life’s purposes, acquire courage to heal what has been hurt, replenish what has been exhausted and to redeem, in Mr. Eliot’s beautiful phrase, the unread vision of the higher dream that each of us carries to restore our world and all its living things to a new wholeness? For it would seem that we also contain within ourselves a cultural inheritance as well – not genes, but memes –     constellations of cultural memory, which also includes perhaps the woundings of the past.

Thus, in our time every shadow has risen, every hurt has come forward to be healed. We are in a time when not only are we required to heal the personal and ancestral wounds but also to heal the hurts of nations and cultures. Therefore, not only do we have to find ways of building new careers and communities as other times required but we must do it faster and deeper. Not only do we have to multiply new ways of being, living, tapping into vast untapped potential of our over-endowed brain, but all of these human potentials have to be bridged to social potentials. We cannot sit on the sidelines watching things grow worse. We need to savor the journey of engagement and draw strength from its challenges – to mend the broken connection between our beliefs and our lives.

I believe that in large part that is what the healing  journey is about. For then, as my friend Paul Loeb puts it, “such involvement offers us gifts that enrich our personal lives. It gives us a sense of purpose, pride, and service; teaches us new skills; shows us how to confront daunting obstacles; lets us experience new worlds; builds powerful camaraderie, friendships, partnerships, and sometimes even romances; and confirms the meaning of our choices and lives. It links us with America’s buried strains of engagement and community: from the pioneers whose barn-raising parties made possible the complex ecology of survival, to the political dissidents who helped abolish slavery, brought about women’s suffrage, unionized workplaces, desegregated the South, challenged the Vietnam War, and helped end South African apartheid...” – and now are fighting for religious freedom in Tibet.

Remember that the ancient Greek word “idiot” described those who refused to participate in civic life. We strengthen our society, our world, and ourselves enormously when we find ways of expressing and working in social betterment, when we allow ourselves to become healers of a world in need, a world in which people and nations have been accelerating at an unparalleled rate in our ability to inform each other – printing, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, photocopying, computers, global telecommunication networks, internets – each move increasing prodigiously the quantity and availability of information. Humanity is now linked into a new cell of many cells, similar in structure and importance to the emergence of the first multicellular organisms a billion years ago.

Part of our hybrid nature provides our greatest woundings as well as our potential strengths. We are experiencing the harvest of all the world’s cultures, belief systems, ways of knowing, seeing, doing, being. For some, the richness and variety of world culture is just the press of a button or the touch on a computer key away. What with the information superhighways, no one need be ignorant of anyone or anything again. The world mind is taking a walk with itself. This world network portends a potential renaissance of world culture and a decentralization of power, a radical democratization of everything and eventually everyone with all the responsibilities that this entails. And yet, as we have said, coextensive with this development is the virtual breakdown all over the globe of traditional ways of being, bringing with it the breaching of the soul and the rise of content from the inner world that up to now had largely been kept hidden.

All over the world, what had been hidden in the collective psyche is now emerging, larger than it was. What had been contained in the “unconscious” over hundreds and thousands of years is up and about and preparing to go to work. This fact is the news that rarely makes the News, and it will have consequences greater than anything we might imagine. The negative consequences of this revivification of hidden content are there to be seen on the media – violence, oppression, the explosion of old fears and hatreds in countries that for decades had been contained under the lid of totalitarian regimes, the frequency of alcohol and chemical addictions, especially among those who feel that they have leftover life to kill. “Thank God, our time is now,” poet Christopher Fry says, “when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere. Never to leave us, till we take the longest stride of soul men ever took.” Or as a Seattle environmental activist who had recently celebrated her hundredth birthday said after just  telling the story of her entire remarkable life, “You do what you can. And then you do some more.” This stride of soul must carry us through every shadow toward an open possibility, in a time when everything is quite literally up for grabs. We can do no less. The psyche requires its greatness, as do the times.

Perhaps, then, it is our innermost psyche – the “nature that lies within” – the inner mirror of the Great Nature which has pushed the universe at large along on its evolutionary journey, that is the “who” calling us to be more than we ever thought we could be. Physicists know this force as the “strange attractor,” the universal principle by which increasing complexity produces beauty. In human terms, it is our lure toward a destiny beyond our present knowings, “the hound of heaven.”

 But how do we claim our present destiny? How do we access the immensity of what we contain in spite of the cataracts that have grown up around and within our body-minds as well as in our personal history and in our social history? There is no doubt that a larger life is latent in the human species and that we live only a small part of the life that is given. For the first time in human history perhaps we can begin to live that life which we are given.

Eden exists in each of us in the form of latent human capacities, which can be awakened and called into play. My studies have shown me that the fall from paradise is no mere metaphor, that we humans endure the loss of many exquisite abilities, and many balanced and beautiful ways of functioning have become distorted, inhibited, or blocked.

Consider my fantasy of “the possible human,” a once and future person, who may be both what we were and what we may yet become: The first thing you notice about her is that she enjoys being in her body. A fullness of being inhabits that body, with its flexible joints and muscles, its movements fluid and full of grace.  She is given to long pleasures and short pains. And if her natural zippiness and boundless curiosity entice her into situations where she gets physically hurt, she is able to control any bleeding and accelerate her own healing.

Like the yogi adepts in the Himalayas, she can voluntarily control involuntary physical processes and stay warm in cold weather and cool in hot. (This is true in emotional climates as well as physical ones.) She can also self-regulate skin temperature, blood flow, heart and pulse rate, gastric secretion, and brain waves. Indeed, she can consciously enter into alpha and theta brain wave states for meditation and creative revery, drop into delta whenever she wants to go to sleep, and call upon beta waves when she needs to be alert and active. Scanning her body, she self-corrects any function that needs improving.

This new Eve celebrates acute senses, which are not  limited to five, for she enjoys synesthesia or cross-sensing, the capacity to hear color and touch the textures of music, capture with her nose the smell of words, and taste the subtlest of feelings. Since her sensory palette is so colorful and wide ranging, she engages and is engaged by the world as artist and mystic, seeing infinity in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. The splendor of her sensory life graces her with an accompanying gift, an excellent memory, for she is so present to the perceptual richness of everyday life that little is lost or disregarded and all is stored in her memory banks for later review and delectation. She can time travel into these memories, walk around in them as if they were happening now – talking to this friend, reliving that moment of joy, even holding the hand of a long-ago loved one. Thus she need never feel lonely, for the past is as present as the present.

And wherever in the past wounding occurred, she can visit that time in her mind as the wiser version of her former self and bring understanding, compassion, and wisdom to the occasion.  She is, thus, a time player, able to speed up subjective time when she needs it to go faster, or slow it down so as to savor lovely moments or have more time to rehearse skills.

The possible human can think in inward imageries and experience subjective realities as strikingly as she can know objective ones. She listens to inward music as complex as any symphony, in fact often richer, for instruments and sounds are added which are unknown or too expensive for any formal orchestra. She views new movies on her inner screen whenever she wishes, for she knows that it is the nature of the brain to provide stories, well wrought novels for the Inward Television Station (ITS). She uses these imageries to entertain herself as well as to provide the materials of creativity and invention. She is already an adventurer into a vast reservoir of virtual realities and doesn’t need any machine to assist her. She makes use of the fact that self-creating works of art are always budding out of the fields of her mind, and she can capture and rework them as she wishes.

I have found that most people, given opportunity and training, can learn to think, feel, and know in new ways, to  become more creative, more imaginative, and to aspire within realistic limits to a much larger awareness, one that is superbly equipped to deal with the complex challenges of modern life. True, we have never achieved the fully functioning person described above, but we are getting closer.

So many realities lie within that it would be impossible to explore them in a short paper. Let me say that in my research there are  four major levels I have found to be present whenever I have taken depth soundings of the human psyche – the sensory, psychological, mythic, and spiritual. By developing access to these levels and familiarity with the riches they contain, I have found that people undergo extraordinary growth in creativity and general life enhancement. Using imginative journeys such as I describe in a recent book of mine, A Passion for the Possible, I offer the reader ways to access and develop these levels.

The Sensory Level: As  we wake up our senses, we activate our capacity to think, feel, and understand things in multiple ways. We enrich our concepts and lay down new pathways to appreciating the world about us and within us. Some techniques involve travelling to a place in the interior self that is known as the realm of sensory life. There, one meets in one’s  imagination great exemplars of various senses like Helen Keller for touch, James Beard for taste, Georgia O’Keefe for vision, Mozart for hearing, and Babe the Pig for smell. Each of these experts gives one an experience of intense sensory imagination, thus activating the interior senses.

Regular practice in which one imagines different sensory experiences grows new connectors in your brain-mind system, mindgates between inner and outer reality. Once these gates are open, trade and commerce can flow between your imaginative and everyday worlds. Bridging the continents of mind and body is the key to living in a larger and more vibrant reality.

The Psychological Level: We have to ask ourselves about the acquiring of a new psychology. How do we train  ourselves to live in an interconnected world, an ever-changing world, a world in which the unexpected is the expected, and the breakdown and reconstruction of everything we ever knew is daily fare? We seem to be attending a vast funeral for a way of being that has been ours for hundreds, even thousands of years. Our personal and collective psychologies have not kept up with the new psychology required to be stewards of so much change. The rise of despair and neurosis that attends that despair is universal. But we are also the ones who will carry on. We have an unparalleled opportunity to cultivate the human capacities that we need to deal with the opening times that follow upon closing times.

Critical to this new psychology is the integrative or essential self. It  has a radiance that our local self does not. It is in touch with both our life and the Life of the Universe. It is in touch with the wisdom of the earth and the wisdom of the heart. It can put us in touch with the unexplored continents that lie within our minds and bodies, for it knows the maps of the soul and the treasures that can be found there.

The Essential Self knows the possible paths our life may take and wants to help us choose the best ones. It knows how to turn imagination into reality and make the life we live fulfilling and creative. Above all, it knows why we are here and what we yet can do; where we can go and why we need to go there.

Closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet, the Essential Self is the mysterious friend who has always been ever near, however much we have denied its existence.

The Mythic Level: We are in mythic times, for clearly we are living in a time in which our very nature is in transition. The scope of change is calling forth patterns and potentials in the human brain-mind system that as far as we know were never needed before. Things that were relegated to the unconscious are becoming conscious. Things that belonged to extraordinary experiences of reality are becoming ordinary. And with the coming of so many realities and ways of being from all over the planet, many of the maps of the psyche and of human possibilities are undergoing  awesome change. That is why the myths are rising – because they give us maps and templates of who we are and and what we may become.

The Spiritual Level: Wandering the Earth as I do, I eventually run into everybody. And almost everybody I meet seems to be on a spiritual quest, or if not, they have a growing hunger for it. The hound of heaven woofs at their heels urging them to wake up to their spiritual possibilities.

People meditate or fast or pray in search of Divine connection. They make outlandish promises – giving up sex, calories, comfort. They go mad or go manic, become zealots, hush their minds into quiescence and empty themselves of thought hoping to tempt God to fill the void.

They walk on burning coals, sit in the snow, count their breaths, twirl into ecstasy, make pilgrimages to places where God or His/Her local incarnations are reputed to have placed their feet. They try out religions as different as possible from the ones in which they were raised, go on spiritual shopping sprees, twist their bodies into uncomfortable positions, change their names.

I’m not criticizing these practices; I’ve tried them all. And don’t laugh – so have you, in other ways, perhaps. There are many signs that point to your being on a spiritual quest, even if you have not named it as such:

Do you wonder every time you pass a book counter if truth is to be found on its shelves today?
How many books have you bought this year that have “soul” in the title?
Are you always heading off to a seminar or a church retreat?
Is your house filled with angel images – cards, statues, books, candles?
Do you have an acupuncturist, a massage therapist, a medicine cabinet full of supplements?
When you get the flu, do you take vitamins and echinecea instead of standard brand antibiotics?
Do you frequent health food stores?
Have you thought about trying to be a vegetarian?
Have you quit the softball league and signed up for a class in yoga or Tai Chi?
Are you surfing the Internet?
Do you find yourself hiding what you’re reading when your relatives enter the room, even though it’s not the least bit sexy?
Have you divorced a spouse because he or she just wasn’t on the same wave length?
Do your kids think you are weird?
Do your CD’s thrum with chants and drums and Celtic harps?
Are you a fan of TV shows about mythic heroes, outer space, immortals, parapsychology?
Are you sometimes unaccountably surprised by joy?
Are you reading this article?

If you have answered “yes” to any of the above, chances are you’re hooked! As well you might be, for the complexity of the present time seems to demand a deepening of our nature if we are going to survive. Deepening requires exploration. And for all its byways, exploration leads ultimately to the spiritual source of our existence.

Not since the days of Plato and Buddha and Confucius, some 2500 years ago, has there been such an uprising of spiritual yearning. But instead of being a Mediterranean and Asian phenomenon, as it was then, the explosion of spirituality is now happening worldwide.

We have been endowed with universal means since our brains are biological stars – that is, energy-burning stars of consciousness whose systems have a dynamic resemblance to the fusion and fission processes that form and shape our universe. And our thought processes and creativity are the planets around our starry brain. Some of the planets are inert, dead matter, who may once have been alive, but through   catastrophes like the comets of misfortune or by hanging out in the wrong emotional latitudes and have become dust bowls. Others are green and filled with the   nutrients of oceanic life. But the brain could also be seen as a collection of stars – as in a galaxy – each neuron standing for each star. Is it not remarkable that there are 200 billion stars in our galaxy and 200 billion neurons in our brains?

 What I am saying is that the inner cosmos of our brain-mind system is part and parcel of the outer cosmos of the universe and its system. They cannot be interpreted apart from each other. There are literally thousands of examples of similarities in process that we could give. The important thing to remember is that since the cosmos is organic rather than  mechanical in nature – creative and full of purpose, rather than purposeless, we must say that we are the same. When we know ourselves as the universe in innovative process we gain a larger sense of our unique role and destiny in time. We know ourselves as both avatar and player.

There is a beautiful metaphor in spiritual literature of seeing the universe and the Spiritual reality that comprehends it all as a great rose. Imagine now this rose, and your life up to now as having traveled through its petals. Now, here, you are at the very center of the Rose. You move into a dazzling darkness in which it seems that everything is contained. You have only to think of something and it appears. You have entered the Mind of the Maker – the Creative Force at the center of all there is. Realities sweep through – stars and starfish, icebergs and ice cream, mountains and microchips, dolphins and daisies. Creation in its unending abundance.

Through it all, beneath it all, creating and sustaining it all is the Presence of Love. Love that is tender and raging, always yearning and utterly complete. Love that burns in our marrow, lures us into mystery, forgives our unskilled behavior, calls us into greatness. Love that is ascending prayer and descending grace. Love that moves the sun and all the stars. Love that is the heartbeat of Eternity in time. In the presence of such Love, your heart dissolves its fortress walls for the Beloved to enter.

There is, for now, no more seeking. You are Home, home to a sacred place that has always been within you. You had simply forgotten the way. Here in the Home Place, you rest at the Hearth of Love. You understand as you have never  before that your heart is part of Great Heart. Your mind, part of Great Mind. Your soul, part of Great Soul. You and Everything have become water poured into Water.

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