Friday is Book Day on the blog, when we take a look at books – old and new — that I highly recommend you not miss. This week’s recommended reading: Jump Time – Jean Houston.
There are very few people in the world today with a mind as brilliant as that Jean Houston. Regarded around the world as one of the clearest thinkers and greatest visionaries of our time, Jean Houston’s writings are worth reading no matter what her subject. the full title of the book in question is JUMP TIME: Shaping Your Future in a World of Radical Change. I consider it must reading for anyone who is serious about playing a role in the creation of their tomorrows — both individually and collectively.
Jean Houston has been described by many as a leader in the human potential movement. She has written the bestsellers A Mythic Life and A Passion for the Possible. She believes that humanity is now confronting the most critical time in its history. A time laden not only with danger, but also with opportunity. A time of enormous, perhaps unlimited potential.
Moreover, Jean sees the human species shifting from…

…what she would call an an ethnocentric view to a global one. This is the result of the creation of new forms of communication. Indeed, the creation of instant communication (the Internet, cell phones, personal handheld computers, pagers, etc.), allowing us to know about ourselves in the moment that we are creating ourselves anew.
Library Journal calls this “The best of Houston’s work so far.” I agree with that assessment. In a powerful text that is both deeply insightful and delightfully humorous at the same time, Dr.Houston provides practical and potent ideas on ways to create a truly new future for ourselves, our community, and our planet.
Written a number of years ago, this text could have been published yesterday. It foresaw the enormous challenges that our world would face in the post 9/11 environment which has been created by those who would use terror as a means of resolving our differences and creating the world in a particular way. It offers great mountains of hope in the form of wonderful ideas and practical suggestions and perfect examples of how average everyday people can shape their tomorrows by the way in which they act in their todays.
As an author, Jean Houston is extraordinarily generous, allowing us to crawl into the quiet and deepest spaces of a wildly fertile mind, to share those spaces and play in our own mind with what we find there. This is love making at the highest level. And no one loves life and humanity more than this Gift to Us All who calls herself Jean Houston.
You will not find a more stimulating book to read in this decade.