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.
The thing about everybody is that they try everything. For sheer creativity and inventiveness, nothing beats spiritual adventuring.
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.
Mostly, they shout at God, begging the Great One to finally show up in their lives.
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 book?
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 their 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.

When I was five years old, we moved from Hollywood, California where my comedy writer Dad had just been kicked off of the Bob Hope show for an excess of high spirits. We ended up in Brooklyn, New York for the next eight months to live with my mother’s Sicilian family, the Todaros. My Dad, Jack Houston and I felt like strangers in a strange land, what with the different language, food, music, and the ebullient, Italianate life in the streets. The Catholic Church was a mystery as were all the Saint’s festivals and the rowdy street fairs that accompanied the mystic parades down the avenues as burly men carried the huge Saint of the week. Invariably she (the saints were mostly “shes”) was dressed in gorgeous satins which could barely be seen, covered as they were by a massive number of dollar bills offered by the faithful. As Dad was a Southern-spawned, agnostic Baptist brought up on grits and chicken fried steak, his stomach was naturally adverse to the vendors offers of spicy sausages stuffed into a roll with onions and pepper, cannoli, (the fried cake tubes bursting with marsala custard), Zeppole (golf ball sized rounds of fried dough filled with jam) and other joys of Sicilian festival cooking. He would give me a sickly look and proclaim in words from a Texas and Louisiana childhood, “Jeanie-pot, I feel knee –walking, commode-hugging sick.”

Just then my Grandmother, Vita Todaro who I called “Nana” noted my poor father’s greening complexion, and taking him by the arm, announced, “Aspetta! Veni ca Giaco, Andiamo a la Casa.”

Back at the house, Nana placed a picture of the Madonna in Dad’s hand, while she brewed him a potion made of the juice of a few flowers and other secret ingredients. Either the Madonna or the potion worked as he soon felt better.

As I went to the window to watch the exuberant festival passing by our house, my Nana came over, and with a broad smile, grandly swept her hand over the proceedings and said, “Abbondanza!”

She did not speak much English, not needing it, living in the Sicilian enclave of “Brookalina”. But that one word took on a great significance between us.

At her great family Sunday dinners she would wink at me when I looked shocked at the vast array of Sicilian foods, the groaning table no mere metaphor.

“Abbondanza,” she would chirrup in delight.

And then when La Famiglia, all the sons and daughters and cousins and remote kin and their spouses and friends, all 30 of them would argue and sing, and offer many toasts with the homemade red wine, she would smile in deep satisfaction and exclaim over the noise, “Abbondanza”

She would take me on walks through Prospect Park to look at the latest plantings, the trees, bushes, ponds, meadows of grass. “Abbondanza” If she saw a baby carriage, she would peek in at the newborn and murmur her favorite word.

One night she took me outside when the stars were bright and raising both her hands to the heavens, she affirmed the generosity of the cosmos. “Abbondanza!” Then, turning to me, she placed her hand on her heart and then on mine and together, we understood, and together
said “Abbondanza”.

That was a long time ago, but my Nana’s celebration of life has stayed with me in all corners of my life. It has turned heartbreak into understanding, and allowed the appreciation and gratitude for the little things of life; the happy wag of a dog’s tail, the smile on the face of the clerk at the checkout counter when she looks me right in the eye and says, Have a nice day,” and really means it; the gruff agreement of the bear in my apple tree when I congratulated him on consuming so many apples, wished him well and suggested that he come back later when the dogs were asleep; the memory of my father’s wild humor and fascinating eccentricities; my mother’s fey, almost fairy-like qualities and ability to do almost anything she set her mind to; the lost term papers I recently found garnered with a great red C; the Autumn fall with colors that stain the eyes with glory; reading a great novel in a hot bath on a cold night. And then I think of the time in which we live, and for those, reading this book, the good fortune of having access to the sheer abbondanza of this era of access to education, knowledge of many cultures, multiple disciplines. Why you can mine the depths of human possibility, hangout at the furthest reaches of psychological functioning, have both means and time to explore what in the past was impossible. The cosmos in its macrocosm and microcosm dimensions is in our mental back yard, as is the history of the planet, its species and the story of the human journey. The world’s art, literature, music—all there to be experienced for the asking. And farther, to have the relative comfort, security, and opportunity to live life in ways that to your ancestors would have seemed to be that of legends, a truly mythic life. As my friend Andrew Cohen has put it, “…we enjoy a degree of freedom that is unparalleled—personal, political, religious and philosophical. There have never been human beings who have had the extraordinary liberty we have to experiment with our own lives—to think in whatever way we want, to do almost anything we want, to say anything we want, to go anywhere we want, to be whatever we want.” (Andrew Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment. New York: Select Books, 2011, p. 78)

Now you would think this prodigious a wealth of opportunity would have everyone shouting “Abbondanza”. But sadly, too often this is not so. Most moan and regret the pains and losses of their lives, pay little heed to the blessings, focus only on the hot spots, oblivious to the grand journey that is their birthright. Along with Cohen, I see this journey as the gift of evolution, all the millennia of development and discovery that have led up to you and me. We each carry the impulse of the evolutionary agenda; our minds are star gates, our bodies are celled of mysteries containing the memories of the past and the unfolding of the future; our spirits remain conscious that we are in the forefront of a 14 billion year experiment that has resulted in your life. We are evolution in action, in beauty, in abundance and in the consciousness that this is so. And this miracle is occurring while living on the most beautiful planet in the galaxy. And yet, too often, we keep our eyes and other senses focused on the ground of our misery. What a waste.

“Discrazia!” my Nana would have said.

And now we are in the time of incarnation, the time of the crossing of the threshold into the metamorphosis of the Gods into co-creative agents. Thus we have access to a deeper strata of psychogenetic material to be woven into human form and function, material which could not be received by many until we had the global village, the rise of women to full partnership with men, the miniaturization of technology and the paradigms of a science that gives us the universe in a grain of sand, and finally, the re-evolution of human capacities and human aspiration. Now that we can take on the depth and complexity of the larger psyche the old gods are thrusting up their faces to be re-grown as well — Athena, Zeus, Krishna, Kali, Inanna, Kundalini. Or DNA, RNA, the power of the atom, intergalactic nebula.

In this time of much change and the compounding of complexity, we need to use capacities that we never knew we had–or ones rarely used or even lost, perhaps, since childhood or the childhood of the race. We might refer to these capacities as evolutionary accelerators. They serve to propel us from beneath the surface crust of sleepy consciousness and our own human nature and biology. They serve, too, to help us get beyond the shuttering of our local cultural trance so as to have the courage and capacity to nurture the forms of the possible human and the possible society. For there is no question but that we are patterned and coded with potentials few of which we ever learn to use. It is as if we had in our body and mind a vast orchestral range of a million keys, and we have learned to play but a small fraction. The journey to discover what these missing keys are and how they can be used is what my life is all about.

I have tried to bring this model to schools throughout the world with varying success. In Asian countries which were once part of the Raj, one must first lift the prison gates of nineteenth-century British education (which the Brits themselves have long abandoned). I have tried to convince both teachers and government administrators that the old medium is no longer adequate to the new messages beaming at us from the world and time. Now, in the new millennium, we can no longer be educated for the year 1926 or earlier. Yes, we must continue to learn to read and write and cipher, but we also need to embrace an education for liberating the ability to imagine, to dream, and to expand the limits of the possible. We require education at its edges, education that guides us through the munificence of our capacities and inspires us to become stewards of this most critical time in human history. My life has been a search for the education that would nurture this goal and make it happen. And the places where I learn the most about how to do this is in other cultures.

In studying culture, I discover that yes there are basic things you must look at for it is culture that probably defines our humanness, that defines who and what we are and what we care for. It is culture that mediates the cosmos to the community, that mediates the cosmos to the brain, to the soul, to the very depths of who and what we are. Culture–that is, art, religion, poetry, dance, cooking, education, myth, spirituality, games, styles of dress, rituals of passage, sexual preferences, rituals of passage, science, play, courtship, sports, music, language, ways of defining work, storytelling, gesture (as well as inner gesture), and recreation. It is all of these that mediate the great patterns of archetypal evolutionary charge to the human social grid of reality. Cultures are the organs and enzymes of the body of society.

Where there is a culture there is always an open moment, there is always the availability of ourselves to be coded and gifted from the Deep World. How often have you listened to a piece of music, done a dance, stood in awe before a sculpture, and felt the Deep World available to you? Without the grid of culture in society we would have no availability to the Depths, or very little. Where culture is trivialized or leveled, then little can come through unless we go beyond culture into absolute silence and deep listening to the cosmic culture and its music and messages.

And lo, the infinitesimal seed sprouts into a great tree that holds in its branches a trillion galaxies, each blossoming with a hundred billion or more stars. Whirlwinds of energy swirling through the branches coalesce into biosystems of planetary scale, each home to billions of organisms that balance each other in self-sustaining ecological webs. Nourishing each bud of this immense flowering is the great tree, which links every expression of the garden’s unfolding in energetic resonance, such that anything that happens in any part is known instantaneously to the whole.

As the budding life forms of the biospheres complexify, the most advanced among them jump first into awareness of themselves and then into awareness of the Great Gardeners who planted them. Problems that arise at each stage of their growth create opportunities for learning, experimentation, and new expression leading the advancing ones to deeper and more profound understanding of themselves and their world. As this understanding grows, they develop ways to meet their physical needs with less and less expenditure of energy and resources, so that more and more of their awareness can be devoted to tending the garden of their consciousness and culture. Soon, the winds of the technology they have evolved are cross-pollinating the flowers of many places and knowings.

Venturing out to explore the worlds of the very large and the very small, first in their imaginations and then through their technological advances, these adventurous ones come to discover the wonders of the cosmic tree. They begin to understand that all life is engaged in a process of continuous creation and that birth, growth, death, and new birth are all expressions of energy in motion. They come to see that the cosmos both within and without is a living organism, a single unified garden, recreated in its entirety moment by moment by the love and intelligence of the Gardeners which flows continuously through the Great Tree like nourishing sap.

They discover, further, that along with the knowledge of the Great Tree comes a radical freedom. They know themselves to be free to make mistakes, to face evil, and to experience suffering, for suffering is the inevitable consequence of the great potential of their seeded nature, locked into a still maturing consciousness. Yet, over time, as their scope of vision widens, these beings evolve toward transcending their suffering. As they do, they come to a more and more expansive understanding of who they are and what they yet may be and do.

Knowing at last that all is within all, the totality present in each part and each part fully connected to the whole, these beings—and we are they—move beyond the limited conceptions of the local laws of form and gain access to the very patterns of creation. With this knowledge, they join the Gardeners in their task of planning and planting cosmic gardens and nourishing them with their own intelligence and love. And so, the cosmos continues to bloom.

The cosmic story which I have told is itself a hologram for living in Jump Time. It reminds us that we, too, are Gardeners who can farm the fields of space/time, the generative ground of our being, creating gardens of consciousness, landscapes filled with the blossoms of our minds and spirits. Tending the gardens of our lives involves a kind of cosmic yoga; we yoke ourselves back to remembering that we are made of the same stuff as the Metaverse from which we continuously arise second by second. We share its body; we are woven into the fabric of its infinite ecology; the productions of our hands and minds are an aspect of its creation and live in eternity. We know ourselves, then, as resonant waves of the original seed, infinite beings who contain in our body-minds the design of creation itself, planted in the field of this particular space-time and sustained by a dynamic flow-through of cosmic energy.

The European Renaissance was such a golden time when internal and external realities flowed together. In the midst of vast social and religious upheavals, a miracle occured. Ideas and images were excavated from their Greek, Roman, and Hebraic origins, forgotten texts were translated, esoteric attitudes became more widely available. A veritable archaeology of the Western world’s past thoughts and dreams was unearthed, and the horizon of what it meant to be human was greatly extended. Thus Shakespeare’s lines of pure Renaissance exaltation:

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!

But something else was happening too. The human psyche itself was growing, and the imaginal worlds of inner space were budding and flowering into the external world in a phenomenal growth of science, art, music, literature, and statecraft. The internal world knew the cosmos for its own, and the external world became “psyche-tized.”
I believe we are in a similar period of cultural and personal expansion today. We are experiencing not just the revival of ancient images, but also 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 of a computer key away. What with fibre optics, interactive television, global IT networks, and other information superhighways, (one could almost say metahighways) no one need be ignorant of anyone or anything again. This world network portends a renaissance of renaissances. In many ways, it has already begun. 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 has largely been kept hidden. I think of a conversation I had in Taiwan with a school teacher who had been brought up in a traditional Chinese family. “I am aware every day of so many new desires, many many new ideas, many new ways of learning,” he told me. “I feel like I have inside me a sleeping dragon who has just woken up. I want to go flying everywhere and see what’s what. And somehow I know that I must find a way to do it. Otherwise the dragon will devour me.”

All over the world 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 extra 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.” This stride of soul must carry us through every shadow towards 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.

To respond and become proactive in the mythic tasks that are now upon us, our basic human nature is challenged to deepen, discover, evolve. Rilke said it best. ‘We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable.”

In the course of the Mystery School training, the participant is guided to an awareness that we are in a state of emergent properties, characteristics latent in us or emerging from us virtually unknown before, but, as of now, deeply required of us. We know that virtually all complex systems exhibit emergent properties as elements are added and complex behavior and capacities emerge. The emergence of unique, unexpected properties as individual components is combined into increasingly complex systems; these provide a greater simplicity and a higher order of usefulness. The most popular example of this is H in two parts added to O — what emerges is a brand new quality that neither H nor O has–namely Wetness! Now apply this analogy to human life and see what emergent new capacities emerge given the unique elements of challenge in which we live today.

We have seen in our time a countless number of small quantitative changes coming through our technologies, the character of our societies, the size of our populations, the massive crises and economic downfalls and their impact on the ecosystems –adding up to spectacular changes and results: together – these changes have created a time with growing complexity, unpredictability, and accelerated pace of events around us. It takes a very different sort of mind and body and spirit, not only to deal with this without breaking down, but also to be able to understand and offer solutions that would not appear in the usual mind set. And this is the mind set that we hope to gestate in the course of this book. And so we ask:

• What are the characteristics of a new species?
• What are the mysteries we contain?
• What is really required that we need to develop in ourselves?

We recall Einstein’s quote, about it taking a different consciousness to solve a problem from the consciousness that created it. What is the nature of the different consciousness that can problem-solve? The Mystery School answers this question as well as provides evocative teaching that allows us to serve the deep process of life, and not simply to learn more about ourselves. The participants become explorers of the first order, Magellans of the mind, Columbuses of consciousness.

Regardless and in addition to the subjects we explore each session, the exploration shows that you have a body and a mind that is loaded with treasures and phenomenal capacities – capacities for thinking in many different ways—through images, words, feelings, music, intuition, that he or she is multi-modal in the ability to relate and understand the world from different perspectives. The Mystery School demonstrates ways of re-orchestrating the body for healing, for youthening, for experiencing ebullience in the bones. The school demonstrates that one can speak to one’s own brain—both head brain and heart brain directly, befriending it, entering into deep co-creative partnership with it to do remarkable things.

The school offers essential methods to enter into the creative realms of the mind wherein one finds the unexpected universe available to the participant for information, high creativity, and spiritual experience. We show how one can select for new possibilities and turn them into probabilities for one’s life: that one can be a co-creator in the design of social structures that enhance life rather than diminish it. Above all, that what one has deemed the extraordinary can become the ordinary and the necessary.

On the spiritual level, the school tells of the powerful guidance that is there for each for the asking, the partnership with principals and qualities that, for lack of better terms, throughout the ages have been designated in metaphorical form as angels, archetypes, helpers, the higher self, the Oversoul. These are principles which assist creation in the recreation and growth of ourselves to the fullness required to take on stewardship of this world at this unique moment in time.

Mystery schools and special studies throughout the ages of have always taught this. But now the need is greater than ever before, the stakes are higher, the well being of the earth Herself is at risk, and thus the teachings have to be more intense, even more outrageous to shock or surprise our everyday selves into deciding to cross the threshold into greater life. As Ralph Ellison said, “It takes a deep commitment to change; it takes an even deeper commitment to grow.” The Mystery School is offered in such a way as to quicken the charge to change and grow.

On a more philosophical level the book will show how we are that interface between creation itself and manifestation of that creation in this form, time and place. Creation is the ever-present origin; it is going on at every second. At every fraction of a second, the universe releases itself and renews itself. That’s a mystery and a stupendous one, and when we get into an awareness, understanding and deep feeling for it, everything in us shifts. From the study of those mystics and high creative types who have gotten into this state, we discover that suddenly the world enters into superb synchronicities, coincidences abound and things come one’s way to help one in the creative process. What occurs is a kind of serendipity of happenings. Further, helpful information comes from both the outer world as well as through inward inspiration in such a way as to seem almost miraculous.

Thus, The Mystery School takes you on a journey into the outer reaches of inner space: what we may call trans-dimensional thinking and living. One becomes willing to break on through to the other side.

How do we come to terms with the fact that we are the universe in miniature – with access to macro and microcosmic dimensions and all put in this little package called me and you in space-time? In the course of the school we learn how to activate the optimal templates of our humanity for the renewing of our bodies, the expansion of our intellects, and learning to live with soul-charging enjoyment of the opportunities that suddenly appear, which could not be seen while we were contained within the walls of the old story. In this way The Mystery School is truly a psyche-naut program, helping to put the first full human being on earth. The serious reader will discover an ecology of soul-driven living; how to fulfill the universe’s plan for you: when the Soul of the World and your soul come together. This is truly the tap-dance of kingdom come.

To learn more, visit Mystery School.