Jean Houston is an internationally renowned scholar, philosopher, and teacher. She is the author of A Passion for the Possible and many other books, the co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research, and a consultant to UNICEF and other international agencies. In this optimistic look at the future, Houston characterizes our era as "jump time" — a pivotal moment in history where we can harvest the genius of the human race in new ways of being, knowing, relating, governing, and believing.
This "whole system transition," as she calls it, consists of five forces that are outlined in successive chapters of the book. We are challenged to see ourselves as (1) partners in creation, "conscious participants in the cosmic epic of evolution," (2) activists in "the re-patterning of human nature," (3) pioneers in a true partnership society, (4) users of new technologies of instant communication and exchange of information, and (5) explorers in a spiritual renaissance.
To negotiate this "jump time," we will have to incarnate a new set of values that are "holistic, syncretic, relationship and process oriented, organic, and spiritual." Houston enthusiastically salutes our hybrid and hyphenated culture, fusion food, multi-sensory education, the Net's high tech communion, and the population group known as cultural creatives as harbingers of hope for the dawning of a new world. Although readers will notice large dollops of material here already covered in her other books, the author remains a stalwart visionary.