Jump Time: Shaping Your Future In A World of Radical Change [Hardcover]

Jean Houston (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 2000

One of the founders of the human-potential movement shows how the millennial passage portends a new birth of humanity--a unique "jump time" in both global and individual consciousness.

In Jump Time, bestselling author and scholar Dr. Jean Houston explains how a series of concrete, identifiable elements have been building over the previous generation and how they point to a quantum leap forward for each of us. Her powerful book shows how humanity is on the brink of this leap and that every individual can participate.

Among the areas Dr. Houston explores are:

The shift in human nature that is moving people to discover and use dormant or little-known capacities.
How the breakthroughs in technological connection and the new ways of being in community in global society are repatterning human consciousness.
How a dramatic new awareness of our shared and intermingled ecology, culture, economy, and ethnicity are creating a different kind of human being for the twenty-first century.
How the uprising of spiritual yearning and cross-fertilization of the wisdom and practices of world spiritual tradition are newly uniting us to one another as well as to the universe.

Jump Time is the culmination of Dr. Houston's work as a psychologist and cultural anthropologist for a generation. It is the ultimate statement of the revolution in human potential and a crowning achievement from one of today's most dramatic and adventurous social thinkers.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Houston, a leader in the human potential movement and author of the best sellers A Mythic Life and A Passion for the Possible, believes that humans are entering a critical stage of rapid change. (The human potential movement says that people only use a small percentage of their positive potential, which can be unlocked by different means, e.g., role playing.) The world, she asserts, is shifting from an ethnocentric view to a global one thanks to the Internet, which is decentralizing information and reforming new cultural neighborhoods. Houston points to the Renaissance, another period of rapid change, and poignantly points to Shakespeare and da Vinci as two people who were "myriad-minded"Da quality that children need to develop today. Also attractive are the whimsical chapter titles ("Wok and Roll in the Rainbow World" and "Psychenauts in Cyberspace"). The best of Houston's work so far, this will become another best seller and is recommended for academic and public libraries.DLisa Wise, Broome Cty. P.L., Binghamton, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Jean Houston, Ph.D., is the bestselling author of many books, including The Possible Human, The Search for the Beloved, and A Passion for the Possible. An internationally renowned scholar, philosopher, and teacher, Dr. Houston is the codirector of the Foundation for Mind Research in Pomona, New York, and a consultant to UNICEF and other international agencies.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 291 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher (May 18, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585420328
• ISBN-13: 978-1585420322
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #381,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Power to Change the World, June 16, 2000

By 

Lois Fein (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jump Time: Shaping Your Future In A World of Radical Change (Hardcover)

Every now and then a book comes along that changes the way I see the world. When I first read Joseph Campbell's "The Power of Myth," it had an enormous effect upon me. When I read Jean Houston's "Jump Time" I felt like all things are possible and I could be a participant, a co-creator in shaping our future. It energized me to continue to do good in the world and to work towards creating a better planet. As an teacher, I found her chapter on education profound and insightful. It's a blueprint for the kind of education I have been working to create all of my life. Compassionate, intelligent, and sparkling with great clarity, "Jump Time" is a MUST read.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A blooming masterpiece!, June 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Jump Time: Shaping Your Future In A World of Radical Change (Hardcover)

One of the most provocative, profound and powerful books I have ever read. Houston puts us right in the center of "the biggest change in human history". I have never been so exhilerated by a book before. It makes you want to go out and be part of the change that is happening.

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE EXPERIMENT OF A LIFETIME : JUMP IN !, October 25, 2001

By 

MaClaren "Consort of Reason" (Ormond Beach, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jump Time: Shaping Your Future In A World of Radical Change (Hardcover)

I floated an experiment with this book. You know the sort of assay: let the book fall open and follow your gaze to a line, any line. As a personal venture, such experiment, homely and amateur, has, over time, yielded me an efficient, effective test of a writing's worth. In the present case, the line from Jump Time that caught my gaze referenced the Iroquois "Ceremony of Condolence." The ceremony is, at once, a mystical practice and a practical device which affords immediate succor and, in the long-term, transforms grief into life-affirming perspective.

Any book worth your time will afford such affirmation. It will transport you even as it grounds you, affirms the richness of the "every day." As with the single line from the "Ceremony of Condolence," the whole of Houston's Jump Time achieves a delicate balance between the transcendent and the quotidien. The book rewards the investment of your time. Why? On any page, you will find Houston's signature blend of the numinous and the no-nonsense: blueprints for education (with real-time examples); "a harvest of spiritual practices" (leave the paltry single crop to Fundamentalists); a model for international peace-making (underscored by the author's solid diplomatic work) which is downright prescient in its aptness for our era; finally, a privileged glimpse into our own interior riches, our "entelechy." Ultimately, then, the signature blend is the keenest of provocations. Houston's anecdotes and antidotes provoke because the blend is packed into the loaded stuff of Jump Time.

Houston takes care not to restrict the definition of Jump Time. With mastery, she draws with a broad metaphysical brush. She variously defines the phenomenon as "radical change" and the "time of the parenthesis" (whet your appetite?) Nevertheless, she astutely avoids force-feeding her reader with a facile, definitive take. Ultimately, we all know, instinctively, what Jump Time is (if you don't, turn on CNN), and Houston knows, respects that fact --in spades. She is here, at our private altar of the arm chair, to evoke and provoke -- to enrich the intimations we already possess deep in our psyches --collective and singular.

Among the many joys peppering Jump Time, the reader will experience Jean Houston as an exuberant, proximate, compassionate narrator. Forget disaffected cynicism. This book is Jean Houston, plain and not-so-simple; not so simple because Houston has a preternatural knack for gifting us with the complex while sheltering us from the dogmatic.

In the final analysis, Jump Time were better dubbed Jump Timely. Prescient and topical, the tome is a lifeline in a world where all bets are off. In this new world, this post-September 11 realm, we are, as nations and individuals, struggling to quell our fears, define our next steps. Our spirits falter under the weight of our leaders' well-intentioned but wan rhetoric -- rhetoric that, with another major wave of terrorism, may go the way of bankrupt metaphor.

In this mind-numbing hour when, as Houston reminds us, "affairs are soul-size," Jump Time appears as a manual for meaning, as primer for the "New Mind" that is a prerequisite to personal and global survival.

Do yourself a cosmic favor: buy the book, try the experiment. It is the experiment of a lifetime.