The Possible Human

from: A Mythic Life by Jean Houston

Consider my fantasy of the possible human, a once and future person, who may be both what we were and what we may yet become. (She describes a female for simplicity):

The first thing that you notice about her is that she enjoys being in her body. A fullness of being inhabits the body, with its flexible joints and muscles, its movements fluid and full of grace. One senses an ebullience in the bones, an appetite for delight. She is given to long pleasures and short pains, in contrast to most of us, who experience long pains and short pleasures. And if her natural zippiness and boundless curiosity entice her into situations where she gets physically hurt, she is able to control any bleeding and accelerate her own healing.

Like the yogi adepts in the Himalayas, she can voluntarily control involuntary physical processes and stay warm in cold weather and cool in hot. (This is true in emotional climates as well as physical ones.) She can also self-regulate skin temperature, blood flow, heart and pulse rate, gastric secretion, and brain waves. Indeed, she can consciously enter into alpha and theta brain wave states for meditation and creative reverie, drop into delta whenever she wants to go to sleep, and call upon beta waves when she needs to be alert and active. Scanning her body, she self-corrects any function that needs improving.

The new Eve celebrates acute senses, which are not limited to five, for she enjoys synesthesia or cross-sensing, the capacity to hear color and touch the textures of music, capture with her nose the smell of words, and taste the subtlest of feelings. Since her sensory palette is so colorful and wide ranging, she engages and is engaged by the world as artist and mystic, seeing infinity in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower. The splendor of her sensory life graces her with an accomanying gift, an excellent memory, for she is so present to the perceptual richness of everyday life that little is lost or disregarded and all is stored in her memory banks for later review and delectation. She can time travel into these memories, walk around in them as if they were happening now-talking to this friend, realizing that moment of joy, even holding the hand of a long ago loved one. Thus, she need never feel lonely, for the past is as present as the present.

And wherever in the past wounding occurred, she can visit that time in her mind as the wiser version of her former self and bring understanding, compassion and wisdom to the occasion. This practice can free capacities that may have been frozen in the painful past and yield frutiful consequences for her present and future development. She is thus a time player, able to speed up subjective time when she needs it to go faster or slow it down so as to savor lovely moments or have more time to rehearse skills or review projects.

The possible human can think in inward images and experience subjective realities as strikingly as she can know objective ones. She listens to inward music as complex as any symphony, in fact often richer, for instruments and sounds are added that are unknown or too expensive for any formal orchestra. She views new movies on her inner screen whenever she wishes, for she knows that it is the nature of the brain to provide stories, well wrought novels for her Inward Television Station. She uses these images to entertain herself as well as to provide the materials of creativity and invention. She is already an adventurer into a vast reservoir of virtual realities and needs no machine to assist her. She knows that self-creating works of art are always budding out of the fields of her mind, and she can capture and rework them as she wishes.

Consciousness for her is a vast landscape, a continuous landscape, and she travels its length and breadth at will. She enters a state of meditation here, a region of deep trance there, finding shortcuts into the realms of fantasy and imagination, spelunking her way into the caves of creativity. She continues to discover the many cultures of her psyche and has matriculated in the Innerversity, studying all manner of knowledge and wisdom that these cultures within provide.

She has many friends and allies in the inward and imaginal worlds, the most important of whom may be the beloved of the soul, the spiritual friend who is her archetypal partner and the companion of her depth reality. And, whenever she feels ready, she journeys to the source places of her soul, where she partakes of the everlasting waters of life and spirit. She lives daily life as spiritual exercise, and her radiance affects all who meet her, for she is deeply empathic, knowing herself part of a seamless kinship with all living things. Being more, and using more of herself, she feels and cares more deeply about the decay and degradation in the social and moral order. In spite of evidence to the contrary, she recognizes others as God-in-hiding, and in whatever way she can, she calls them back to their own possible humanity. She is one about whom we might say, 'The human heart can go the lengths of God.'