THE HALF-HOUR SILENCE

Barbara: There’s a half-hourglass there, which is a surprising thing since we usually have an hourglass. Recently I was speaking before the Society of Women Engineers in Los Angeles. After my speech a woman came up and said we don’t know where we found this, but we’re going to give it to you and it’s a half-hourglass and the theme is that humanity doesn’t have much time to change. We see ourselves at the threshold of either self-destruction or the possibility of an unlimited future. And we’re the generation born precisely at that choice point for the human race.

I have written a book called The Half Hour of Silence. It is a futurist interpretation of the New Testament. It came to me in an unusual way, which I will describe briefly, and then tell you the essence of the text. My background is as a Jewish agnostic. I was born in 1929, a great year for these questions. And within me, right as a child, there was the question as to what’s coming. What is the purpose of all this power this affluence and this industrialized society of which I was a beneficiary. I looked around me and I saw, on the one hand, a sort of meaningless affluence which wasn’t pleasing even to the people who had it. And when I was fifteen the atom bomb dropped, and the other possibility emerged for the first time that the human race could self-destruct. So, here western civilization was faced with two options—meaningless affluence or self-destruction. And neither of those options resonated with an intuitive sense of hope of something good coming out of all of this. As a young person I thought well something good is coming, I’ll find it in a book, I’ll find out what it is. The first thing I did was read through the world philosophies, looking for an image of the future commensurate with our capacities, and I couldn’t find it. The great philosophers look back to a golden age; the eastern philosophies were cyclical seeing life as repetitive; the stoic philosophies said get with whatever is; and more recently the modern existentialist philosophies said there is no meaning in the universe it’s running down to a heat death and life is an accident. None of that resonated with the sense of hope.

The second place I looked was in the great religions, as an agnostic, for an image of the future. I was excited by the Judeo-Christian idea as Paul put it—a time will come when we shall not all sleep, we shall all be changed, this mortal flesh will become immortal, and death shall have no dominion. Ah, that resonated with the sense of hope so. So I joined the Episcopal Church in Scarsdale with the question of how do we get from here to the new Jerusalem? As you can imagine, the minister didn’t even look at that question and he was preaching that man was good and man was evil, and God was good. And I couldn’t accept that, because my sense was that the potential of the individual has barely been tapped and we’re better than we know, and I wanted to know what that goodness really was for. 

So, then I took what I called the woman’s odyssey. I went to Bryn Mawr College with the idea of looking for the answer to this question of purpose in the future—in education. But I knew the first day it wasn’t there. Everything was in a box: history, math, English, no questions on purpose. Then my brother who was at Princeton at the time was a bit worried about me and he said, Well, she’s not having any dates and she’s reading all the time. And he sent a whole stream of young men to ask me out and I’d ask them what’s your purpose? (Laughter) And their purpose and my purpose we’re not exactly the same and they couldn’t answer the question and didn’t want to as a matter of fact. 

And then others were saying well, when she gets married and has children, she will get over this need for greater purpose. And I did get married, and I did have children and I made a very thorough study of it—I had five children. And with every child the need for meaning and purpose got worse—because I loved that child and I wanted to know what is that child’s meaning? By the time I got to be in my early thirties I thought I was a total failure, even though I was doing everything that society asked of me.  I had a clean home, clean air, clean children. I love my husband, and I was dying of depression. And I didn’t know why. I could have broken down but fortunately I had enough courage to keep on going and I found three ideas that began to save my life. First, Abraham Maslow, Toward A Psychology of Being. He said the individual has unused potential. Ah! That resonated. Secondly, Teilhard de Chardin. He said there is a pattern in the process of evolution leading to ever more whole systems and something’s happening now on planet earth toward more a whole system. Ah! that feels true. And then in 1962 I saw John Glenn go up into outer space on television, and I had an extraordinary sense of freedom, birth, the human race right now is transcending physically as we have in consciousness always known we would.

I began to get on the track of what I call the evolutionary perspective. I studied, I read cosmology and geology, biology. I began to have some powerful experiences of the planet itself as a whole organism coordinating and reaching into outer space, moving towards a universal future. And I got an inner commandment. And was we’re going through a birth, our metaphor, our story is a planetary birth, we are literally one body being born into the universe—go tell the story of the birth. So, in 1966 I started that. I went and told my husband; we’ve got to tell the story of the birth. He was an artist, and we worked together we developed some ideas, and gradually I formed the committee for the future. I worked with John Whiteside for ten years doing conferences, doing dramatics, testifying before Congress about the idea that the human race could have an unlimited future if we use the full capacities that we now have. But something was missing inside me. I had an emptiness at the core, still. And I got another deep inner signal which was know God, discover the patterner within the patterns. 

In 1976 I stopped everything, I went to Findhorn, I went to California where everyone goes for this stuff. I began to meditate; I began to hear an inner voice. But I still was uncertain as to what to do. And in January of 1980 I rented a house in Santa Barbara to go and write a book on this evolutionary philosophy. I had a writer’s block; I was very frustrated. And one day in February 1980 I took a drive with my sister and I gave up—she’s a real Jewish agnostic—and the two of us headed out for the botanical gardens on a gorgeous day, and I was riding along I saw a little sign that said Mount Calvary Monastery, and a true electric current went through me and I said Jacqueline we’re going to mount Calvary. I swerved off the road, and as I was driving up this path, I had a tremendous sense of déja vu. 

When I got to the top of the mountain I got out of the car and there was a little Episcopal monastery—interesting because I had tried to join the Episcopal Church—and when I got out I looked up and there was a higher mountain and there was a hang gliders club up there and flocks of people were jumping off the mountain, floating in butterfly wings above Mount Calvary. The image of metamorphosis struck my soul, and I heard a deep inner voice, and this is what the voice said to me (she turns pages and reads)

My resurrection was a signal for all of yours. Why do you suppose I submitted to the calumny of Calvary, but to demonstrate that the physical body can and must be transformed. The resurrection was a future forecast of an approaching new norm. The transformation of homo sapiens to homo universalis is the acting out of that forecast by the human species. What I did alone, all now can do together, who choose to love God the Father above all else and neighbor as self. That great commandment of pure love, combined with the knowledge of God’s processes of creation gained by science in the past two-thousand years, is the formula for victory. 

I was overwhelmed. I checked into the monastery the next weekend for a silent retreat. The inner voice began again. As I was sitting in the monastery garden it said, “go look at the predictive passages in the New Testament.” I did so. I looked at the first one which said (Reading) “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.” That’s from Corinthians. And I began to write without thinking: (Reading) “With man came the awareness of death and the effort to overcome it. All of human history can be interpreted as the effort to overcome the limits of the mammalian existence to go beyond eating, sleeping, reproducing, and dying. Through tools, language, religion, art, and now through science, industry, and technology, we strove to overcome the limits of the material world. Our generation, born at the time when humankind as a whole is born from earth-only to universal life is the first to have the capacities to act out the resurrection as the transformation.” 

I cancelled all my appointments, and I wrote for six months starting with Matthew 1, going all the way through the end of the Book of Revelation, writing what came to mind almost by a process of free association without ever organizing it myself. The basic theme of the text, which is called The Half-hour of Silence, is that Jesus is our potential self. He came into history to indicate that we can do the works that he did, and even greater works shall we do. The New Jerusalem is society at the next stage of evolution, a society of co-creators, joint heirs with Christ, imperishable beings as Paul said. The tribulations is the current meta crises that we are now going through on planet earth. The nuclear destruction, pollution, alienation is all a natural phenomenon. The judgment is the selection process, which is now beginning, and which will speed up and at some point, be definitive—a selection of the God-centered from the self-centered. 

The reason for that is that we are created in the image of God and God cannot give the powers of co creation to a self-centered species. So, there will be a definitive choice that each human being is now making, can make, and must make, as to whether to attune to God or attune to self. Anyone who remains attuned to self will not be able to evolve. And anyone who attunes to God is going to be at this stage of evolution, empowered by the capacity of the whole system. 

The Half-hour of Silence is right where we are now. The text says that there is an order of the future forming—people all over the world who are picking up the pattern in the process of creation. We are members of this order. We are discovering God’s creative process, and our mission is the alternative to Armageddon, the planetary Pentecost. The text says there can be a avoidance of destruction if all the people on earth right now who believe in God and believe we’re whole, one, and have the capacity to transform in the model of Jesus, will connect in a moment of thought, we might have a shared experience of a loving presence which will infuse the body politic with enough empathy to overcome the fear, accentuate the positive, and move on towards an unlimited future.

I am now seeking publication for this text. I believe it is the first futurist interpretation of the New Testament that has ever been written. It could not have been written until our generation because the new capacities in astronautics, genetics, cybernetics, psychotronics didn’t exist. Science has provided tools of transcendence. This book is written for believers and non-believers. The text says—and I say the text says—because it came through me as an inspiration, that God particularly loves his non-believers who had the courage to stand outside the process of creation and learn how God works. The text is literally for everyone for who wants a better future and who would like to link in a common act to save the world from destruction and move the world towards a natural future in a universe without end that has many mansions, doing the work that he did and even greater works.