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What does it mean to live a mythic life?
A myth is something that never was but is always happening. Its not a superstition.
The myth contains the coded DNA of the human psyche. It gives us the rest of the
story. It gives us the larger pattern.
Sometimes by pursuing the great stories -- the life of Gandhi, Emily Dickinson, of
Helen Keller, the life of the Ramayana, the life of Christ, the life of Buddha, the lives
that are our own lives with large -- we find that the personal particulars of our own
lives are then raised to the personal universals. And something within us is evoked to
live a fuller, richer more compassionate life.
Living this heroic journey means finding our own myths, for only by finding our
larger story can we begin to live out of that larger story, and fulfill our supreme
destiny.
One of the most exciting things about finding our larger story and awakening to our
purpose is writing the short and long versions of your mythic journey. Through this
exercise, you catch glimpses of yourself as the hero or heroine in your story.
The question that now arises is, How do I truly become the hero of my own story in
all aspects of my life, and live a truly mythic life?
In this article, I will take you through the 11 Powers of the Universe and show you
how you can become the conscious creator of your own mythic adventure through the
understanding of these powers. This overview seeks to begin to introduce you to the
complexity while the advanced training will help you to step into synergistic co-
operation with these living forces.
I am about to hand you the keys to the kingdom. Are you ready?
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Copyright Jean Houston/Evolving Wisdom 2011. All rights reserved.
Drawing upon the work of Brian Swimme and his wonderful and thoughtful
understanding of the nature of the cosmos, let us now enter the Powers of the
Universe for guidance, and also as the basis for emerging archetypes as seen in both
their scientific as well as their psychological dimensions.
Viewed in a new way, these powers traditionally thought of as scientific
understandings of cosmological principles can be seen afresh as archetypal helping
powers.
The 11 Powers of the Universe are:
1. Seamlessness
2. Centration
3. Allurement
4. Emergence
5. Homeostasis
6. Cataclysm
7. Synergy
8. Transmutation
9. Transformation
10. Interrelatedness
11. Radiance
The metaphors that are arising from our understanding of these powers utterly stretch
our mind, our imagination, and with it, our capacities so we can truly integrate and
embody our heroic story.
If the student is ready, your humble teacher has magically appeared. Again I ask you
my friend. Are you ready to truly understand your role in the universe?
Lets now gain an understanding of the first power, and that is Seamlessness.
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One of the great powers is simply the fact of SEAMLESSNESS, sometimes called the
Ground of Being, the Quantum Vacuum, the Space/Time Foam, and/or the Zero Point
Energy Field. And we arise out of this seamlessness. Everything rises and falls away.
So what is seamlessness? It rises up and refines itself through definition. And as you
think, dream, define, engage; then the foam itself collapses until youve got a wave
function that is able to result in something.
It is there, where what weve been talking about, the invisible universe, comes the
dark matter out of which everything arises. We are 99.9% pure generativity. 99.9% of
you is the realm that gave birth to the universe. You are a mode of the Earth, and even
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Copyright Jean Houston/Evolving Wisdom 2011. All rights reserved.
before that you are a mode of the cosmos. This seamlessness is probably what Bohm
referred to as the implicate order that harbors everything. It is that 99.9% that we call
the vacuum.
The art and science of creativity and manifestation has to do with your ability to bring
pattern and form into the wave of seamlessness. This is how you co-create with the
universe.
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Everything in the universe moves toward becoming centralized, in itself. The universe
billows out of the Big Bang. And then this billowing fractures and it forms something
more central, which were galaxies.
The galaxies themselves break apart in this energy and form stars. The stars spin off
from themselves after theyre centralized and they form planets. And the system
moves toward a certain end, which is in point of fact from our perspective ourselves.
There is a direction, a flow, in all of this. Center fraction out, Center fraction
out. And its true of our lives. We get to a centered central place in our lives. And
then what happens? It fractures. And so you look for balance again, and you find it for
a while, and it fractures. And then new creations come out of it.
In the history of the universe on this planet, the early Earth was a very watery realm
with all kinds of interactions going on, but they resulted finally, all these interactions,
especially when it was hit by lightning, in a cell. The cell membrane could withstand
the chaos of the wild sea. It could preserve the growth of the complexity of this new
reality with its new adventures.
Something pushed out and asked for interrelatedness. And what came out of that
Centration of the cell were multi-celled beings, which then allowed for evolution and
for animals and for another kind of consciousness.
Now how is Centration focused upon individual humans? We have gotten beyond the
point of carrying our local life forward as with animals. We have gotten to the point of
being so self-conscious in this universe, being the universe conscious in itself, that we
are entering into participation with this universe.
And the universe has gotten to the point that we have become a nucleus in the cell of
the universe, able to participate in its re-formation, of which this strange story of the
Hadron Collider is a very major piece, because its mimicking the conditions of the
Big Bang and creation itself. This is where we are and it is phenomenal!
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Copyright Jean Houston/Evolving Wisdom 2011. All rights reserved.
What has happened is that the modern industrial consciousness, which tried to shape
our environment, shaped our humanity, blocked our participation in Centration. It was
a side arm.
The universe organizes itself so that we can find meaning in our depths, in our
individuation, in becoming new centers of individual Centration. We have moved into
Centration, into high individuation, with personalities that are as varied and as
different as the multiform of species that are in our reality.
Now, we are beginning to participate in the membrane aspect of consciousness. What
does the membrane do? It is permeable and it is a barrier. It makes judgments about
what it will let in, what it will let out.
As the cell we are being asked by the membrane to become as intelligent as that
membrane, and by and through our consciousness to choose which are the realities
were going to let in, which are the realities were going to release and let out.
The way that we return to Centration and become part of the universal participation in
our speciation, in our growth, in our becoming, is to go beneath language and to
contact the universe directly.
We can do it by communicating with birds, or with our animals, or with the trees.
Nature gives us back our Centration in the depth of ourselves, and the depth of
ourselves is the whole blooming universe.
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What we mean by allurement is that which is the bonding, that which keeps the
galaxies together. Thats the electromagnetic attraction to each other!
Thats your attraction, the wild attractions. Thats the grand attractors that are evoking
you. Those are the things that you are drawn to. What wakes you up, and calls to you
in the back of your mind, and attracts you to itself.
You yourself are a principle of allurement whether you like it or not. You are a
walking magnet, whether you like it or not.
So what we want to do, if we are playing the universe through our own beings, is to
be capable of falling into union and into love with everything fluttering our
eyes as we do so!
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Copyright Jean Houston/Evolving Wisdom 2011. All rights reserved.
Emergence is when the universe assembles itself. Now if we remember the creation
of the universe, it flares forth, doesnt it? It emerges in a fraction of a second. And
then it flares forth further as atoms. And then it emerges as stars and as galaxies and
then as planets. And then the myriad forms of life show up.

The point is that we are now in a point in time in which the Earth is facing a moment
of emergence. Its another geological era. We have come to the end of the Cenozoic
Era, which was the proliferation of many species and the beginning of the cutback of
these species. We are now, according to Thomas Berry, entering the Ecozoic Era, the
era in which we become very mindful of life and co-creative in the life process.

Thus, we are part of a geological era. We have become a geological force. The human
is a new moment in geology, because we are a geological formation, albeit a very
chaotic one.

Our task is to reinvent this major form of human presence through agriculture,
ecology, education, governance, spirituality. All of these major instruments and
institutions are part of this transformation. And this will occupy the best creative
minds for the next two centuries.

We are in a place of a deep activation of creativity; the imagination is central. But the
universe transcends even our imagination when it operates in us, because when the
universe operates in itself, we are no longer simply imaginative.
We are imaginal!
In having access to the imaginal we can receive the blueprints, the guidance, forms
and patterns. And these are very powerful things.

How do you get from imagination to imaginal? You build internal structures. You
build up inner sensory systems. Then you can drop in an idea, one that concerns you
from culture, spirituality, governance, education, healing. You can drop it in after you
have activated that imaginal mind, that mind will take it up.

Then you will find that as you continue to think along those lines, youll have sensory,
psychological, symbolic, and spiritual imagery. Accruing around the idea or concern.
And then at a certain point, the process moves to another level and you will actually
have imaginal imagery, so that you will no longer be the one who is promoting the
thought. The thought will take you over. And once it takes over, youre in an imaginal
realm.

Thats why in those 4 Realms of Being that we talk about, which are also the 4 Keys
of Integration Sensory-Physical, Psychological, Mythological, and Spiritual they
are actually ways of getting into the strata of the mind. And as you develop your
relationship and familiarity with these strata, they take you inevitably into the
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Copyright Jean Houston/Evolving Wisdom 2011. All rights reserved.
imaginal, which is the mind of the Quantum Source Reality, and the great Place of
Generativity.
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Anything you achieve has got to be continued; a kind of sustainability. Thats what
homeostasis is. What is the value that is being maintained? What is protecting the
value, and maintaining the achievements that the universe has uncovered? It is
homeostasis. But its also homeostasis, that when kept too long, will inevitably lead to
CATACLYSM to break it apart.
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Every 100 million years theres a vast extinction of species. Were right in the middle
of one. Thats the bad news. The good news is that the cataclysm has come upon us at
a time in which we are being asked to speciate, and move to a new form or a new kind
of consciousness where we can orchestrate the breakdown to a breakthrough.

It also means that in times of cataclysm, you dont go struggling back to the way your
life was. You actually invent, create, look for Source, and put in a new garden in your
psyche. And thats the secret, and this is what innovates and extends the world.
You dont go back to your old ways.

Why? Simply, because you are part of this incredible evolutionary movement that
requires of you, radical reinvention, in order to speciate and go beyond your ordinary
destiny.
And by stepping into your supreme destiny, you will help move the world in the most
massive shift in human history into virtually a new species that can be a deep and
good steward of the Earth in her time of cataclysm.
Thats why so many of you have had so many cataclysms in your life. Its training.
Those are your training wheels. Homeostasiscontinuing for too long, statically in
the same patterns until the changing reality can no longer sustain it, till it breaks
down into cataclysm.
The cataclysm we face today is a phenomenal time in history. Never before in history
has so much of the population of the world been attempting to make themselves
relevant to the time, and to redress old wrongs, and to recover ancient wisdoms that
can be put to modern and future process, and to cross the great divide of otherness and
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Copyright Jean Houston/Evolving Wisdom 2011. All rights reserved.
enter into radical empathy, and to regard the huge problems of our time as
opportunities in work clothes.
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All civilizations have collapsed or imploded on themselves. The time it takes to rise is
the same as it took to collapse.
To understand complexity in self and the universe is to understand synergy. It is what
happens in relation in the universe. You have positive synergy mutually enhancing
relationships.
The Emperor Penguins survive intense winters by the outside edge of penguins who
after standing too much of the freezing cold winds take turns going inside to warm up.
It takes a large size of a group to survive the winter. Synergy allows them to survive.
Synergy in the universe is a relationship that enables endurance. And now, life is
making a new demand for synergy to us. The challenge of our time is for synergy to
operate through consciousness of planetary role, to give birth to a new form that will
actually become planetary.
We are going from one form of humanity to another that involves a growth in form
and complexity. We are moving from an industrial civilization to a planetary
civilization.

In the emerging society we are and trained and based on the notion that we are
fundamentally an earth community. We need a way to lead to social cohesion by
taking on the struggle of ecosystems in collapse, one that is far greater than enmity
between human groups. This can be a response if we understand the synergistic
relationship with other cultures and groups.

All the different forms remain but with the planetary form of consciousness emerging,
the older nationalistic forms begin to diminish. Synergy requires that this movement
take place. We are participating in the birth of a society in which the fundamental is
mutually enhancing relationships aligning our energies with this cosmological
power.
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Transmutation is how form changes through time. Everything is changing. Natural
selection is an early version of transmutation. See the nature of the universe in terms
of huge moments.
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Copyright Jean Houston/Evolving Wisdom 2011. All rights reserved.
First is the birth of the universe, with elementary particles-plasma without structure
and radiant energy that changes into atoms.
Then, mass clouds of atoms become galaxies. Within the galaxies, another archetypal
moment of transmutation is when primal stars fall into stellar system with planets.
Earth, from molten rock, becomes a living planet. Then from the early forms of life
into advanced ecosystems of which the human is a part. These are the major moments,
and throughout, change is happening every moment is a moment of transmutation.
These powers are ones that pervade the universe. Transmutation is soaked into every
cell and shows up in heightened capacity in certain psyche. A mind that is sensitive to
the dynamics of the whole, with insistence upon good outcomes, but not in a
dogmatic way, but rather in its ability to change and find the way through. The
negative form of the psyche permeated with transmutation is depression, cynicism, a
sense of guilt and being highly critical of most everything.

Transmutation in form of a human is a disciplined person who has a keen
understanding of structure. What does it feel like to be the power of transmutation as
a human? When the power of transmutation is most alive, one feels that one does not
fit in. Does that sound familiar?
This woundedness is directly related to the sensitivity. For those who feel the most cut
off are often the ones that have the greatest capacity for providing what is necessary.
They feel the universe has made a judgment on the Cenozoic era. They are part of the
new emerging story, the new mythos. Their personal sense related to the deeper
contour of the worlds transmutation. Constraints on human activity have to allow the
world to flower. We align human energies of transmutation with the energies of the
planet.

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It was as if the universe was going for life from the very beginning. Life is central to
the universe. Life may have a larger role to play than we think, getting us into co-
design. The universe had to transform itself over and over again to get to life.
Transmutation is change at individual level. Transformation is about the work into the
whole context by the individual. Consider space-time binding the way the universe
folds back into self into the present. Early structures are still being present. We are
composed of early structure of the universe in hydrogen atoms.
Galaxies come along and hold the potential for all kinds of transformation. With the
emergence of life, the galaxies enable planets to come into existence and planets hold
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Copyright Jean Houston/Evolving Wisdom 2011. All rights reserved.
the capacity for life. With life there is a way of holding the memory of an event that is
used to structure matter.
Cells remember how to use the power of the sun in photosynthesis. In sexuality two
beings fuse but bring together the ancestral memories of their cells, carrying through
the shuffling and new combinations of genes, so that a new kind of being can happen.
There is the harvesting of all past into presentspace-time binding.
An individuals experience can become the source for the recoding of the planet. You
have thought of yourself as re-coders, in fact, you really are re-coders. You contain in
your life all the main evolutionary events that are remembered in the DNA. Now, the
power of one person is being folded into the cultural DNA because of the power of
language. We see the universe becoming more intense in its folding back on itself.
With the recoding of the human, we have before us the chance of bringing into the
universe information, ideas and learning that otherwise would not be present. We as
humans are bringing into the universe lineages that were previously blocked out.
What enters into this life of the planet is the unborn futurefolded into this moment
here. This view of planetary future is way of showing what the universe is attempting
to get to.
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Care is at work here, care in the universe. The universe developed at 13.7 billion years
and there was care at work. Parental care emerged in the universe and is valued by the
universe. Think of it operating for 100 million years. Wow.
How we position ourselves in our relationships is crucial. Each is an act of the
imagination. The dominant paradigm in our world is filtering us into everything. .
Lets look at the universe and find how it operates, and show how we can learn with
regard to our relationships. Caring in evolution begins with the reptiles that hang
around their babies and do not consume them. Care is a multi level word. In the
baboon world tenderness is one of the qualities that the lady baboon looks for in the
male baboon.
The movement into the planetary human is a delicate process because it involves the
imagination. Care has to be evoked. We are in that moment in which we need to
activate these cosmological powers to enter into richer relationship with the universe.
This is the extension of human subjectivity. This is the power of experiencing from
another perspective, and to occupy another form of consciousness.

The universe is expanding at just the rate to lead to life because the universe cares
about life. The cosmological power of care is using the symbol of the great mother in
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Copyright Jean Houston/Evolving Wisdom 2011. All rights reserved.
order to reflect on its own nature. The role of the human is to provide a vessel for a
comprehensive care to come forth into the universe.
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The sun is the great radiance in our lives. There are two levels to this radiance. The
sun creates helium in its core. It compresses hydrogen into helium with the release of
light. Particles of light are photons. Radiance releases and creates the light, emanating
as waves and then collapsing as photons. The sun is giving off these gravitons-
messenger particles that penetrate all into the earth, generating enormous response of
pulling us to the sun.

Then there is the radiance of the moon. Photons come out from the interaction with
the sun on the moon. In the interaction, the moon creates new photons moonlight.
Moon is bathing us with gravitonsgravitation. Earth responds to the flood of
gravitons with tides.
The human perception is much the same two parts; the surface and the deep; the
immediately presented and the causal. We have identified our perception with the
surface, but have lost some of the depth perception. Thus while we may have
empirical facts, there is little depth and appreciation of the perception of artists and
sensitivities of every kind. And too many of our decisions are made on broken
perception.

To become the human form of radiance, we develop a subtle spirit to respond to the
subtle spirit in another. We have to develop the container that can hold this kind of
beauty. This may be our ultimate role.
The power of radiance requires contemplation. Resonance is the primary form of
prayerreverberating to the point that you become the radiance that is flooding the
world. With a desire to display, everything is to be admired.
Movement into radiance is to recognize and feel it surging out of us. All the powers
named of the universe are one, and seamlessly involved with each other. All these
powers are attempting to bring forth radiance. Lack of confidence or doubt may cover
radiance, because centration is not working deeply within us. Half-baked allurement
keeps us involved with stuff. The one dimensional world view of materialism
homeostasisin which a dominant paradigm holds us in a sub-human state of being
locks us up in tiny worlds that come from failure of tapping into the power of
transmutation which calls us to transmute and deepen.

But, by creating a culture in which these great Powers of the Universe which keep the
universe going can be understood as existing in ourselves, we make ourselves radiant
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Copyright Jean Houston/Evolving Wisdom 2011. All rights reserved.
and resonant with the emerging self, and the future which awaits us. Our most
splendid radiance comes from our most supreme destiny.

Your supreme destiny awaits you.
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Copyright Jean Houston/Evolving Wisdom 2011. All rights reserved.