This is an excerpt from the new book Birth 2012 and Beyond: Humanity's Great Shift Toward the Age of Conscious Evolution by Barbara Marx Hubbard and the Welcoming Committee, and is reprinted with permission of Shift Books, copyright 2012. The entirety of this excerpt is written by Jean Houston, a member of Hubbard's Welcoming Committee, a group of twelve guest authors whom Hubbard calls "evolutionary pioneers [whose purpose] is to welcome us through this critical and deangerous birthing process by the exampel and demonstrations of their lifework."

So, here we are in the year of 2012, the mythic year of what? Radical transition? Kingdom of heaven? Ninth circle of hell? Opening times coming close on the heels of closing times? Or could we be awakening from the chrysalis and emerging into new ways of being? What did those old Maya really know, anyway?

Although there have been many births and deaths and rebirths of civilizations over the last five thousand years, the birth process we are witnessing in our time is far more radical than any previous births of new cultures out of old ones. We are endlessly confronted by the many seemingly impossible challenges of our time, the greatest being the threat of ecological breakdown; yet, we are constantly witnessing inspiring breakthroughs as people everywhere rise up to challenge the old patterns of the past. It's almost as if we are jumping off into a new dispensation. Clearly, whatever else this may be, we are in what I like to call "Jump Time."