This is the full broadcast portion of the interview. It was continued in-studio with an additional 58-minute discussion which is available on our 86-minute DVD.
We are living at a unique historical moment when the cultures of the entire world are available to us, and we are challenged as we have never before been. In part one of this two-part program, Dr. Jean Houston describes the range of human capacities that are found in different cultures. She focuses on language as an expression of the way societies cultivate human potential.
In part two of the full DVD, Jean expands upon the learning experiences she had with Margaret Mead, elaborating on her own experiences working with different cultures. To illustrate her work in human capacities training, she leads an exercise called “Cleansing the Doors of Perception.” Then follows a powerful poetic reading by actress Peggy Nash Rubin. Jean then elaborates on how these experiences may call forth within the viewer new visions and deeper understandings.
Jean Houston, Ph.D., is founder and director of The Mystery School, a program of mythology and culture. She is past-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology and also director of the Human Capacities Training Program. She is author of numerous books including Search for the Beloved, Godseed, Lifeforce, Mindgames, Listening to the Body (coauthored with Robert Masters), The Hero and the Goddess and The Possible Human.
“For many years, I have been a student of spirituality and states of consciousness. For many more years than that, I’ve been a student of dogs,” says bestselling author Jean Houston, whose study of this subject is the basis of Mystical Dogs. Houston has spent a lifetime bridging the worlds of animals and humans, exploring a realm that pet owners have glimpsed and indigenous peoples have known for millennia. The author identifies dogs, with their deceptively uncomplicated, joyous, loving nature, as custodes animi, guardians of our souls. She shows how animals, particularly dogs, are often the best spiritual teachers. For example, in Houston’s hands, a seemingly simple story, such as a man saying goodbye to his beloved dog, becomes a striking metaphor about personal and planetary transformation.
As I travel around the globe speaking and training, I have consistently found that most people ask me the same question, “How do I discover my purpose in life?” In the past, who you became was determined by your family and circumstances. You didn’t have much choice. But now there is an open moment in history where you have the chance to tap into the soul of your purpose.
Millions of people right now are experiencing a yearning and desire to awaken to their unique gifts and offer them in service to the world — while living a life of joy and fulfillment. It’s a surging of the human spirit, a virtual global awakening, at a scale that no one has ever seen before. Simply put, people are longing to finally feel fully alive and to fulfill their unique purpose in life.
So then why is living a life of meaning and purpose so difficult? It is because our current social systems have not been set up to prepare us to live a life of true purpose. That’s because today’s culture exists not to nurture our highest aspirations, but to ensure our basic survival. Our educational system is designed to create good workers who will slot into jobs and careers later in life — not to empower fiery, creative people who are forging the path ahead together. Our social contracts exist to perpetuate the status quo — not to encourage our highest potentials to blossom. Is it any wonder why so many people’s best attempts to evolve themselves and our culture fall short of the goal? We simply haven’t been trained in how to bring the possible future into the present.
It’s not that they don’t have the talent or interest to live a purposeful, meaningful life. The issue is far simpler. People struggle to activate their “purpose code” because they haven’t woken up to — or are only partially awake to — our situation as a human race. Most people hold on to old, limiting beliefs of themselves and our human story. Overwhelmed by all the changes in the world around them, most people live their lives within a “small story” and therefore confine themselves to a “small self.” That’s why so many people feel that they don’t have a purpose, or that they aren’t able to actually live the life they were born to live.
There is a saying that “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” I believe that it is butterfly time. Just as the guidance cells in the mush that is the caterpillar in its cocoon suddenly begin to activate the transformation of mush into butterfly, so too this is the time when we realize that the guidance or imaginal cells of our bodies, our communities, and, yes, even of the cells of our planet are calling us to come together in all our parts to form something gorgeous, interdependent, living lightly on the earth, cross pollinating cultures, ideas, spiritual forms, glowing with the light that suffuses us, becoming transparent to transcendence. And to rise out of the mush we have been caught in these many hundreds of years and to take flight in the air of the new story which is emerging in our time.
For the fields we traverse, the many flowers of mind states and soul knowings we now enter are those that belong to the whole earth, to many cultures, to what I am calling “PanGaia.” And as the butterfly pollinates and cross pollinates from place to place, flower to flower, so do we also if we have the will and the willingness to discover our purpose and be part of this extraordinary moment in time.
Three Keys to Empowering New Beliefs
The first key to activating your life’s purpose is to hold new beliefs about yourself and about your role in the great story of where humanity is headed.
Living a great life requires that you understand the challenges and opportunities of our moment in history. To understand this for myself, I’ve gathered information from my work in over 100 countries and 40 different cultures, and what I’ve discovered has served as a sure guide on my path. Specifically, I have found five great shifts in our understanding of the story of our time that are affecting everything we do today. I believe that awakening to the power of these shifts will help you cultivate your sense of compassion and of the infinite possibilities of this moment.
The Five Shifts Are:
1. Our understanding of who and what we are and what we need to become in order to be able to deal with the complexity of our time is evolving.
2. Human societies are in the process of re-patterning. Social constructs are dissolving and whole new stories are trying to emerge, such as the rise of women to a full partnership with men across the globe, and many others.
3. How we conduct business and governance is shifting in the midst of vast ecological and financial changes. This is perhaps the most important social event of the last 5,000 years, because these issues impact almost everything in our lives.
4. The rise and fusion of different cultures — we are swiftly moving toward a planetary civilization that accentuates the uniqueness of each culture while blending them together. Think of the great fusions of food, of music and of beliefs.
5. Whole new orders of spirituality are emerging that are not about religion. The new cosmologies are giving us a view of ourselves that we never had before. For the first time ever, we find that we don’t just live in the universe, but that the universe lives in us.
6. This journey begins by letting go of old beliefs and patterns to make room for the new beliefs and capacities that will empower you to awaken to and live your higher purpose.
The second key allows you to discover and realize the vast field of inner intelligences — using multiple means of knowing and being in order to gain insight into life at a level to which most people rarely have access. These skills are to be found on four levels of your human capacity, sensory-physical, psychological-emotional, mythic-symbolic and unitive-spiritual. As you learn how to utilize the extraordinary capacities to be found at each of these levels, you literally move into new ways of being. For example, you will learn how to play with time in such a way as to take five minutes and experience it internally as hours — these are “hours” you can use to develop a skill or move a project forward.
You will learn to access “inner experts” — willing helpers or personas that will help you navigate the complexity of life with elegance and confidence.
The third key gives you the means to break free from unconscious, habitual ways of reacting to life that were born thousands of years ago, and embrace higher ways of being for a new era. You will discover ways to move through life with ebullience in your bones and an appetite for celebration — seeing everything as an expression of the creator. You will move through life, motivated not by guilt or obligation, but by gratitude and an abiding zest for doing the things that are called forth by living out of your higher purpose.
Dr. Jean Houston is presenting a free 75-minute downloadable audio seminar titled “3 Keys to Discovering and Living Your True Purpose Available Now” at www.DestinyandYou.com.
Dr. Jean Houston is a scholar, philosopher and one of the foremost visionary thinkers and doers of our time. She is considered one of the principal founders of the Human Potential Movement. A powerful and dynamic speaker, she has served as consultant to several agencies of United Nations, including UNICEF and the UNDP. She has worked in more than 100 countries training leadership at every level to enhance skills and purpose so as to bring a new mind to bear upon challenging issues. A prolific writer and author of 26 books, including “A Passion for the Possible and The Mythic Life,” Dr. Houston has recently joined the faculty of Evolving Wisdom, today’s fastest growing global e-learning company specializing in transformative education, to provide her wisdom online in a cutting edge format. www.DestinyandYou.com.
Chickie and the Path of Awakening
We were both pups when my parents got her—I about eighteen months old, she somewhat younger but older by far in wisdom and experience. She had already had a brief career in the movies, having played one of Daisy’s puppies in the Dagwood and Blondie series. But now, too old for the part, she had been given to my father in lieu of payment for a script he had turned in. He was a comedy writer for radio and occasionally movies, and excelled in writing jokes and scripts but not in collecting the fees owed him.
Her name was Chickie, and she was a wonderful mix of Welsh corgi and bearded collie. A white star blazed on her chest, and she had four white feet and a white tipped tail to complement her long black fur. Even though she was scarcely over a year old, she was already motherly and sat by my crib for hours on end, making sure that no harm would come to me.
If I cried, she would be off to my mother, insisting that she come immediately. If I wanted to play, she would bring toys, hers as well as mine. My Dad caught on that this was a special dog with high intelligence plus something else. He taught her many tricks, learned from the dog trainers at the movie studio. Lassie’s trainers gave him pointers on how to get Chickie to respond to hand signals, as well as to climb ladders, bark on cue, walk on beach balls, dance on two legs, and jump rope with a willing human. This she did readily and well, but there was more to her still—perhaps one would call it a deep sense of ethics. She seemed virtue incarnate, a Saint Francis of Assisi of dogs, who took on responsibilities of saintly cast. I thought of her as my sister and, what with all of our travels, my constant and closest friend.
Thus it was a shock when one day one of the actors in a picture my father was working on came home with him, saw Chickie, and immediately wanted to buy her. “Jack,” said the actor, “that is the greatest dog I ever saw in my life. I’ll give you fifty bucks for that dog.”
“Can’t do it, pal,” said my father. “It’s the kid’s dog.”
The actor persisted. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks for the dog. I know you need the money.” Indeed, we did, and driven by the panic of incipient poverty, the one thing he dreaded more than any thing else, my father acted in an uncharacteristic manner.
Excusing himself, he went into the kitchen to discuss this with my mother. “Certainly not!” she adamantly declared. “It’s Jeanie’s dog.”
“You’re right, Mary,” my father sheepishly agreed. “It’s just that I think I’m going to lose my job at the studio and am damned scared of not being able to bring home the bacon.”
“Well, you certainly cannot bring home the bacon by selling the child’s dog,” my mother fumed. “Anyway, if we go broke again, I’ll just do what I always do—start an acting school for children.”
A few days later the actor came back, saying, “Jack, I’ve got to have that dog on my ranch. I want that dog. I’ll give you 250 bucks for the dog.” During this ordeal Chickie and I were sitting on the floor behind the couch, listening in horror. I was already making my running-away plans with her.
“Well, I sure do need the money,” said my father. “Just a minute; I’ve got to talk to my wife.”
“Mary, he’s offering 250 bucks for the dog! We can always get Jeanie a new dog at the pound!”
“No way!” said my mother.
The next day the actor returned. He had rarely known failure and was not about to start now. “Jack, I’ll give you 250 bucks and my secondhand car. I know you need a car to get around.”
“Wait a minute,” said my father. “I’m sure this time I can convince my wife.” Upon hearing the latest offer, my mother, bless her heart, stormed out of the kitchen, stalked up to the actor, and chewed him out. “Ronald Reagan,” she railed, “how dare you try to take away my child’s dog!” At least he knew a good dog when he saw one.
Maybe it was that threat of being parted from each other, but after that incident with the actor, Chickie and I took to having long jaunts with each other. We would be gone for hours at a time, and either my parents were too busy to notice or they trusted Chickie’s care of me. With Chickie in charge, I was given a great deal of freedom to wander in a world as miraculous as it was marvelous.
Behind our house was a large wooded area where Chickie and I began what I have come to think of as our travels in awakening. Two hours with Chickie in the woods yielded an incredible range of learnings. Chickie was more nose than eyes, and I quite the other way around. But together we investigated the endless treasures of forest and meadow. I remember crawling on four legs in order to follow more closely her interests and discoveries. As she sniffed out deer scat, mice holes, squirrel trails, and bug routes, she would occasionally turn around and check with me to see if I saw them too.
Chickie taught me to be alert to both the seen and the unseen, the heard and the unheard. A whisper of wings would turn her head and mine would follow, waiting for the flutter that would finally announce to my human-hindered head, “Bird on the wing!” Chickie would lift her nose, her tail would signal attention, and we would be off and running to follow the adventures of the air—entrancing molecules luring us to destinies both savory and dangerous. Once it was to a camper’s discarded remnants of fried chicken, but once, too, it was to meet up with the snarling fury of a bobcat. Chickie barked, and I, knowing that human words were useless, barked too. Our defiant duet seemed to work, for the bemused cat slunk off, never to be seen again.
Chickie gave me metaphors for my later life’s work, especially when it came to digging. Paws scratching away at apparently nothing soon revealed dark secrets hidden in the earth—old bones, ancient feathers, and things so mysterious as to be beyond human knowing. Years later I would probe and dig into the soil of the human subconscious with something like Chickie’s fervor to find there the bones of old myths, the feathers of essence, and the great mysterious matrix that still sustains and lures the human quest.
Those early years with Chickie were a whole education in looking, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching—the feast and lore of the senses. For many years now I have been helping schools in the United States and many other countries to improve education by making it sensory rich, hands on, art centered. When asked who my mentors have been—John Dewey? Maria Montesori? The Carnegie Institute?—I can only reply in truth, “Chickie.”
Chickie and I traveled in others ways as well. In fact, we crossed the Mississippi river by train many times before I could spell it. “There it goes, Jeanie-pot!” my father would bleat with excitement. “There goes the Mississippi, the father of waters. Quick, look out your window while you can still see it.”
“I’ve seen it,” I’d say, my eye affixed firmly to my comic book.
“Whaddya mean, you’ve seen it? The greatest river in the world! The crossroads of American history—La Salle, Showboat, the Louisiana Purchase, Huckleberry Finn! And you say you’ve seen it.”
“But Daddy, we just passed over it going the other way a couple of weeks ago.”
“Yeah . . . well, that show in New York didn’t pan out too well. We’ll give California another try. I think I can get back with Bob Hope, and if not, Fibber McGee and Molly could always find room in their closet for me, and if not them, I could always try . . .” Two days later he was writing for Amos and Andy, and if he was lucky, we were set in one place for thirteen weeks—maybe.
For years Chickie served as the center for calm and a kind of spiritual tranquillity in our life of constant change brought about through my Dad’s work as well as his penchant for eccentric adventures. Even though I went to something like twenty different schools all over the country before I was twelve, I would always come home to Chickie, who regarded all of life as delightful and who maintained a saintly comportment and stability in the face of any whimsy we humans could invent.
People sometimes ask me how I can keep myself in reasonable mental and physical health even though I sometimes travel up to a quarter of a million miles a year and have a life of ridiculous complexity. In reflection I realize that Chickie’s influence continues, to wit: Stay centered in eternity regardless of how much chaos is happening in time; look upon all people and events as opportunities for furthering life and its promise; and greet everyone as a potential awakened one—God in hiding, or dog in drag!
In addition to taking care of us Chickie also taught me my best lessons in ethics and responsibility. She seemed to have little self-interest.
Many of her actions were clearly for others. She was empathy personified, whether in consoling with me when I was upset or in the way she would listen to humans as they railed against their supposed fate. Her answer was simply to be there, to place her head upon their knee and look at them sweetly in the eye, her gaze unblinking and never wavering. However, if their blue mood went on too long, she would try to entertain them, bringing over something to throw or, if that did not work, amusing them with one of her dancing tricks.
When my little brother was born, it was under Chickie’s tutelage that I came to take care of him. I remember when he was very young, he managed to bang together some orange crates in the shape of a rocket. For weeks he had been telling us that he was going back home to where he came from up among the stars. One day, Chickie came madly running toward me, barking in distress and pulling me by my dress to our bedroom. I raced after her and found my little brother balancing in the open window in his “rocket.” He waved happily at me saying, “Bye, bye. I go up home now.” I grabbed his little body and pulled him back as the rocket fell eleven floors to the street.
Entering into another realm, that of the spiritual epiphany, Chickie accompanied me on the most important experience of my entire lifetime. It turned out to be my key experience in awakening. I have described it in other books, but not from the perspective of Chickie’s critical role in it. It happened in my sixth year. I had been sent to Catholic school in Brooklyn, New York. My father had been tossed off the Bob Hope show for an excess of high spirits, and we were broke and living with my mother’s Sicilian parents in the Italian section of that noble if bad-mouthed borough.
Theologically precocious, and buttressed with questions designed by my agnostic comedy-writing father, I would assail the little nun who taught our first grade with queries that seemed logical to me but blasphemous to her. “Sister Theresa, when Ezekiel saw the wheel, was he drunk?” Or “Sister Theresa, I counted my ribs and I counted Joey Mangiabella’s ribs, and we have the same number of ribs, and so do all the other boys and girls. See? (At that moment, on cue, all the children in the class lifted up their undershirts to prove the point.) “So if God took a rib out of Adam to make Eve like you said, how come . . .?
Then there were the Jesus questions. “Sister Theresa, how do you know that Jesus wasn’t walking on rocks below the surface when he seemed to be walking on the water?” And “Sister Theresa, when Jesus rose, was that because God filled him full of helium?”
Then there was the day of the question that tipped her dogma as well as her dignity. It had to do with Jesus’ natural functions and whether he ever had to go to the toilet. Her response had her looking like a black and white penguin in a state of hopping rage. She jumped on a stool, tacked up a large sheet of heavy cardboard and in large India-ink letters wrote:
JEAN HOUSTON’S YEARS IN PURGATORY
All further theological questions of an original bent met with the little nun X-ing in more years for me to endure in purgatory, and each X stood for a hundred thousand years! By the last day of the first grade I had accumulated something like 300 million years in purgatory to my credit. Spiritually bereft, I told my father about the debacle and he, finding it very funny, took me off immediately to see the motion picture The Song of Bernadette.
This famous movie is renowned for its scenes of Saint Bernadette’s vision of the holy Madonna in the grotto at Lourdes, which thereafter became a famous place for healing. Unfortunately, during the holiest of scenes, with Mother Mary appearing in luminous white in the grotto before the praying Bernadette, my father burst into long, whinnying, uncontrolled laughter. It turned out that he had known the starlet playing the role of Mary and found the incongruity between her Hollywood life and the role she was playing hilarious. Leaving the theatre finally in a state of mortal embarrassment, I pulled away from my still laughing father in order to get quickly to my house in order to emulate Bernadette’s remarkable vision.
My destination was a guest room with a very long closet that looked a lot like a grotto. There were no clothes in the closet for Chickie had commandeered it as a nest for her new eight puppies. I explained my need to Chickie, feeling that she would not mind my moving her pups, being as she would want me to open a space for the greatest mama of them all to show up. When she protested mildly, I further explained that I didn’t want the Holy Mother to step on her pups. After that, Chickie watched my actions with interest.
Kneeling in the now cleared Brooklyn “grotto,” I prayed to the Madonna to show up in the closet as she had for Bernadette at Lourdes. I began by closing my eyes and counting slowly to 10, while promising to give up candy for two weeks if she would only show up. I opened my eyes to encounter the Madonna Chickie lovingly carrying one of pups back into the “grotto.” I kept on counting to ever higher numbers, promising all manner of food sacrifices—mostly my favorite Sicilian delicacies like chicken with lemon and garlic sauce—but my revelation was only to be more and more puppies back in the closet.
Finally I counted to a very high number, 167, and having given up all calories, I told the Holy Mother that I could not think of anything else to give up, so would she please, please, please show up as I really wanted to see her. This time I was sure that she would make it. I opened my eyes, and there was Chickie contentedly licking all eight of her puppies.
“Oh Chickie,” I sighed and reached out to pat her, whereupon she bestowed on me a kindly lick and a compassionate look as if I were her ninth puppy. At that moment came a vague spiritual forewarning, as if I had prayed for the Madonna and seen her in one of her many forms in Chickie, the all wise, all loving mother, and her care for her pups. But still I yearned for the movie version and did not yet recognize the truth of what I had been given. And so Herself offered me another chance. In a dreamy, unspecified state I went over to the window seat and looked over at the fig tree blooming in our yard. And suddenly it all happened—the most important awakening state of my entire life.
As I have written, “I must in my innocence have unwittingly tapped into the appropriate spiritual doorway, for suddenly the key turned and the door to the universe opened. Nothing changed in my outward perceptions. There were no visions, no sprays of golden light, certainly no appearances by the Virgin Mary. The world remained as it had been. Yet everything around me, including myself, moved into meaning.”1
Only in reflection have I come to realize how much of what I then felt and knew had been prepared for me by Chickie and her guidance in the ways of awakening. All those rambles that we had taken together were now one ramble, all the smells and sights of nature to which she had introduced me were present along with the fig tree
blooming in the yard, Chickie herself and her pups in the closet, the plane in the sky, the sky itself, and even my idea of the Madonna. All had become part of a single unity, a glorious symphonic resonance in which every part of the universe was a part of and illuminated every other part, and I knew that in some way it all worked together and it was very good.
My mind had awakened to a consciousness that spanned centuries and was on intimate terms with the universe. Just as Chickie had taught me, everything was interesting and important: deer scat, old leaves, spilled milk, my Mary Jane shoes, the fig tree, the smell of glue on the back of the gold paper stars I had just pasted on the wall paper, the stars themselves, my grandfather Prospero Todaro’s huge stomach, the Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad, Uncle Henry (the black porter who took care of me on the train across the country), the little boy fishing in the lake who waved to me on the train when I was crossing Kansas, the chipped paint on the ceiling, my nana’s special stuffed artichokes, my father’s typewriter, the silky ears of corn in a Texas cornfield, my Dick and Jane reader, and all the music that ever was—all were in a state of resonance and of the most immense and ecstatic kinship.
I was in a universe of friendship and fellow feeling, a companionable universe filled with interwoven Presence and the dance of life. This state seemed to go on forever, but it was actually only about two seconds, for the plane had moved only slightly across the sky. I had entered into timelessness, the domain in which eternity was the only reality and a few seconds could seem like forever.
Somewhere downstairs I heard the door slam, and my father entered the house laughing. Instantly, the whole universe joined in. Great roars of hilarity sounded from sun to sun. Field mice tittered, and so did angels and rainbows. Even Chickie seemed to be chuckling. Laughter leavened every atom and every star until I saw a universe inspirited and spiraled by joy, not unlike the one I read of years later in the Divine Comedy when Dante described his great vision in paradise: “D’el Riso d’el Universo” (the joy that spins the universe). This was a knowledge of the way everything worked. It worked through love and joy and the utter interpenetration and union of everything with the All That Is. And the Madonna—Chickie—was at the center of it all.
In this direct knowledge lay what I later learned was the mystical experience. This experience is not something to be kept sacrosanct in esoteric cupboards. It is coded into our bodies, brimming in our minds, and knocking on the doors of our souls. It is our natural birthright, and naturally it is most available when we are still children. As a child it charged me and changed me and probably gave me the impetus to do the things I later did. It showed me the many faces of God, and for weeks afterward I went around seeing this face in every creature, plant, and person—even in Sister Theresa, who was somewhat bothered by my beaming approval of her inner self.
“Madonna, Madonna, show up, show up!” I had shouted. And of course the Madonna had showed up, present in Chickie with her unconditional love and care for her pups and for me. Kneeling in front of her and her altar of puppies, I had asked for everything and everything is just what I got. And even today, whenever I see a statue of Mary I can not help but be reminded of Chickie’s boundless love, the ultimate Madonna bringing the puppies back into the closet, bringing them back into the manger.
As it happened, Chickie lived for a very long time (something like 140 years of dog time), suffering little but one very original and mystical neurosis. As soon as she boarded a train and for about an hour or two afterward, she got the stigmata: all four paws would begin to bleed like the hands and feet of some medieval saint. The vet could never figure out why this would happen, so we all accepted my mother’s Catholic interpretation of it as being a sign of God’s favor. Certainly, by her actions and saintly comportment, Chickie belonged among the circle of the blessed, so it seemed very reasonable that, along with Saint Francis of Assisi, she should be so honored.
Chickie lived with us until around my ninth year. Then one day, my father took her by the leash and told me to say good-bye to her at the elevator door of our apartment building. He informed me that he was going to give her to a friend who had a farm in Connecticut.
“Why, Daddy? Why would you give her away? She’s my sister. You can’t just go and give away my sister and best friend!”
“You kids are not taking her out for walks enough, and she will be happier on the farm.”
And with that my dear Chickie left my life forever. To this day I have never understood why my father took her away. In retrospect, however, I realize that at that time he was starting to leave us in order to marry another, and perhaps getting rid of Chickie was one of his first acts of detachment.
When I was seventeen, my mother rented a summer house for us on Green Farms Road near Westport, Connecticut. Daily, my brother and I would take long bike rides along Green Farms Road. I always felt that somewhere on that road was something that I had lost, and if only I could find it, I would be restored to grace again.
Several times that summer my father came up to visit us. After each visit, he’d leave to “visit a friend who has a farm further up on Green Farms Road.” Just before my
Dad died in 1986 he told me that he also had been visiting Chickie, who even at that time was living very happily on that farm. He never told me that she was just up the road, but something in my soul must have known she was there, since I felt so called to journey up and down that road on my bike. That she was very happy on the farm I have no doubt for she lived to be more than twenty years old.
Chickie was only the first of the remarkable dogs I have known and loved who have revealed to me, through their oneness with nature, facets of the mystical path. Unsullied in their essence and with a natural attunement to the Source, they have a purity that makes them wonderful companions as well as guides for our path back to wholeness.
Chickie was the means for me to understand on the most primal levels the nature of “awakening,” the initial stage on the mystical journey. Under her innocent tutelage, I experienced that place where the field of our being shifts and the deepest coding of our life emerges, an unlooked for act of grace. In her presence something in me woke up, rising through all my parts and seeming to reconstitute the whole. My senses become more acute, gaining something that our animals just naturally experience—the air flooded with information, the land infinitely interesting and full of continuous surprises to engage the eye, enthrall the nose, astonish the ear. All flowers become friends, humble bread tastes of manna from heaven, and every thing and every one seem lit from within—a kingdom of God in the midst of what we once thought of as ordinary reality.
Long after Chickie was gone, I found words to describe the experiences I had shared with her in the poetic succinctness of poet and mystic William Blake: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand, / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your Hand, / And Eternity in an Hour.”2 Blake also said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, / Everything would appear as it is, Infinite . . .”3
Awakening can have the most tremendous effect for good on the life of those who experience it, as it had on me after my own revelation, making them wonderfully creative and useful. They seem to live at a higher level, with insight and ideas from some larger expanse of mind, to the betterment of their fellows and community. Yet few arbiters of reality recognize the place where these awakened ones dwell, or dare name it. Whether awakening begins in surprise as a gift from God or from grace or from evolution or from a peculiar synchronicity between nature’s elements and one’s own state of receptivity or from a wonderful dog, one feels powerfully affected by the sheer unexpected glory of it all.
What we think of as nature mysticism often occurs with such surprise. You are watching the ocean come in, and suddenly you are on every shore, in every ocean, and within every shining drop. And why not? If we are part of the One Reality, as mystics tell us and as many physicists confirm, we are ubiquitous through this universe and in touch with all its parts and particulars. It just takes the shift in consciousness that awakening awakens to experience this absolutely.
In my childhood, Chickie was my William Blake, providing in his own being the key to an experience that showed me that everything was interrelated in an organic universe founded on truth and beauty and a pattern that connected everything with everything else. Early on, I was able to see that all this was part of a holy perfection and was utterly serving of the good. With Chickie as spiritual guide, I also experienced timelessness and entered that state in which the categories of time are strained by the tensions of eternity.
I came to realize that what we call normal time is just the veneer of infinite time. Great eternity surrounds us and indwells us, and we come to think of past, present, and future as merely special laws within its much larger laws. I discovered then that we are citizens in a much larger universe and that we are able to enter into this kingdom of the larger order here and now.
In its everyday form, awakening is experienced as mindfulness—being present and awake to the sights and sounds and particulars of our daily lives. We go off of robot and become alert to the splendor of existence, be it seen in a sunset or a rose, an old man’s craggy face, the eyes of an animal, or the side of a mountain. We become awake to the nuances of emotion that pass between ourselves and others. And we respond in turn with a fuller expression to the other’s need or question. We move beyond that half-asleep state called ordinary waking consciousness.
And when we do, reality changes. We find ourselves in a world so startling in its vividness, so alive and resplendent in all its parts that we wonder at what planet we have arrived. We realize that we have lived as dim and diminished versions of ourselves, and vow to do so no longer. Chickie was my conduit to this larger reality. With her guidance I came awake to a world once known, long forgotten but held in trust by dogs for their human charges should they agree to follow their lead.
However it comes, awakening is the greatest experience of remembering who and what we really are, why we are here, and how it all fits together. Waking up has never been more important than at the beginning of the new millennium because, as of this moment, the species we call human is on a collision course with global cataclysm. Awakening brings with it answers, solutions, new ways of seeing and doing and being, and, best of all, the impetus to follow through and bring these answers into our particular world and time.
Solutions to our current dilemmas are coded in what we might call symbolically the Mind of the Maker, the Warehouse of God. In states of consciousness such as those awakening stimulates, the bandwidth increases and, with it, the capacity to access this greater realm of knowledge and creativity.
Strange as it seems, we can do this. Judging from the accounts of so many who have had an awakening experience, such access is always there—it is part of our innate human equipment. These experiences are fundamental to the human condition; they are part of our inheritance, the deeper givens of our existence. They are probably coded into our mind/brain system and are our call back to our “spiritual home place.”
The opportunity for us today is how to take this natural ability and make it normal, an ordinary-extraordinary part of our regular experience. How can we engage in everyday applied awakening? The story of Chickie gives us some important clues. Chickie was ever curious, always looking, sniffing, digging, and rolling in the continuous revelation of nature, discovering its sumptuous wonders and sharing them with me. For us this means to go forth and do likewise. It means that we halt our automatic responses to things, cease living a posthumous existence.
One celebrated way of doing this is the “stop” or “gathering mindfulness” technique, in which one is able to wake up to the realities both within oneself and without. To begin, walk around the room, but then take a few seconds to stop and become conscious of everything you are doing, seeing, hearing, and feeling—in other words,
allowing the moment to become charged with presence. Suddenly the world ceases to be just background noises and becomes a richness, and your brain/mind system ceases to be on automatic as you reorganize your perceptions into mindfulness.
Do this “stop” exercise now for the next few minutes—simple things like picking up a glass, walking to the door, looking at your shoes. But stop before you take any action, and then do the same action or act of attention consciously, bringing full mindfulness into the act. As you become more conscious of your actions, you will become more naturally aware and alert. Your field of mindfulness will expand and you will feel yourself inhabiting your reality and not just being a bystander.
If you would start by practicing this technique for five minutes a day, then gradually increasing day by day the minutes in which you stop before performing any movement and then doing it mindfully, in a month’s time you will be well on your way to having gone off of automatic and into conscious orchestration of your life. Your senses will have expanded because, together with your continuing to journey and explore in imagination your inner sensory world, you will have done much to reweave your perceptions. And not just your perceptions. This simple technique will spill over into your relationships, memory, thinking, and feeling, as well as increasing your capacity to learn and even to create.
Life, then, is no longer a dream but a vast creative enterprise in which one can focus one’s enhanced energies and attention to partner with creation itself. Too many people go through life oblivious to most of what is around them, several times removed from reality and many times removed from any passion for the possible. Mindfulness gives passion with clarity.
Most spiritual traditions consider it to be the best possible state of being. With regard to the outer world, it is a quality of heightened awareness and awakeness to life and its experiences. It can be described as becoming alert for 360 degrees. With regard to the inner world, mindfulness demands similar awareness, so that you become able to orchestrate your internal states, whether it be for creative exploration in inner realms or for meditation and prayer.
There is also the state of mindfulness that is referred to as “being conscious of being conscious,” what the mystic philosopher and consciousness teacher G. I. Gurdjieff referred to as “self-remembering.” In this state you are aware of yourself reading my words, but you are also aware of the experiences you have just explored in the last few minutes as well as the background of sensations in the room where you are sitting, your own bodily sensations, ideas that cross your mind, and your general mood—all of these held together simultaneously. You are aware of all these things, but on the front burner of your consciousness you are also aware that you are aware. I know I am asking much of you, but isn’t your life worth it?
To further awakening, devote time to explore and celebrate beauty in nature as well as in poetry, art, music, and the emerging spirit of the times, with its budding of new realities in the wake of the winter of a passing age. Gather unto yourself congenial friends—two legged as well as four legged—who share your drive toward awakening so that you keep on advancing on the path.
Immersion in beauty wherever you find it calls forth inner beauties and brings to consciousness the freshness of a world made new. Reading the rich metaphors of poetry especially can shake the mind from its stolid moorings, and you see deeper into the world and time. Perception becomes more acute, and conception as well. You wake up to what is going on around you, become empathic, know yourself as part of a seamless kinship with all living things. Thus you come to feel and care more deeply about the decay and degradation in the social and moral order.
Like Chickie, you become sensitive to other people’s pain as well as joy and offer them the companionship of soul. You reverence their being and hold them as holy—gods in hiding. This helps them to awaken as well as keeping the spirit of possibility alive in yourself.
You say “Yes!” to life wherever you find it, abandon whining, and welcome and celebrate the springtide of change. Like a happy dog, greet each day with wonder and astonishment. Then grace happens, shift happens, and the mind is prepared to receive Reality in all its many colors and textures.
Awakening further requires that you take time and space out of your usual day for a practice of spiritual connection. We know that the universe is a living system of elegant design that seems intent on providing the opportunity for learning on all levels. Access levels of consciousness on the divine wavelength, and the learning unfolds. We are built to travel the wavelength of consciousness and to enlarge it when we wish to live in a larger universe.
Better still, change perspective through meditation, reflection, or focus, and discover yourself to be the latest flower on the tree of the cosmos, ready to bloom. This requires the sun and rain of attention, a conscious dwelling in the midst of eternal fecundity. What had been there dimly as background awareness then moves to the foreground. In this state anything that you concentrate on opens up—objects, ideas, relationships, business, governance, even grand designs. We awaken to the wealth of being and the “Aha!” experiences keep on coming.
Above all, let your animals guide you. They know the way.
Internationally acclaimed for her groundbreaking United Nations and UNICEF leadership training, and for her founding role in the Human Potentials Movement, bestselling author Dr. Jean Houston has guided thousands of people from across the globe on a transformative journey in search of their ‘essential selves’. Now, in her latest release, The Hero and the Goddess, Houston invites you to embark with her on her most important journey yet, a provocative exploration of antiquity’s greatest epic, Homer’s The Odyssey.
The Hero and the Goddess reveals the timeless power of myth to liberate the psyche. In this engaging journey with the Odyssey’s immortal archetypes the reader truly becomes the hero of old and the goddess divine. With provocative exercises accompanying each chapter, Houston brings Odysseus’s mythic quest to life. Tailored for the individual as well as for group study, The Hero and the Goddess connects the seeker to the ageless wisdom embodied in archetypal figures, those venerable beings dwelling in us all.
By becoming the cunning warrior, the goddess protector, a faithful mother, and endearing son, we meet with the honest reflections of our deepest yearnings and betrayals, our subconscious feelings of loss and grief. Awaiting the champion who stays true is that of the newly ‘awakened self’. And although the mythic journey begins in you, these great archetypes most reveal the transcendent revelation of ‘oneness’, the impetus for a higher global consciousness. This transformative journey brings resurrection and healing to those who dare to embark on the path of The Hero and the Goddess. Set sail and be discovered as the Athena and Odysseus within, welcomed home to join again the “Divine
Jean Houston is one of the pioneers in the exploration of human potentials and the study of human consciousness. She is the founder and principle teacher of The Mystery School, established in 1983, a year-long seminar program dedicated to developing full human potential.
She is author of over fifteen books, including The Possible Human, Life Force:The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self, and A Mythic Life.
For more information, please visit the author’s website www.jeanhouston.org
Orchestrating Our Many Selves
Jean Houston on the Fallacy of
Self-Mastery
by Amy Edelstein
WIE: You write in your book A Passion for the Possible that “human beings are not constituted to be content with living as thwarted, inhibited versions of themselves. Throughout history and all over the world, people have felt a yearning to be more, a longing to push the membrane of the possible. They have entered monasteries and mystery schools, pursuing secular as well as esoteric studies. They have practiced yoga, martial arts, sports, dance, art. They have left home and family to adventure beyond the ordinary, embarking on visionary and spiritual quests.” Are you suggesting that what motivates an individual to pursue excellence in any of those disciplines, be it creative or athletic, is the same as what motivates an individual to pursue spiritual evolution or enlightenment?
JH: I think they come from different levels of the self. I talk about four levels in my work—the sensory, psychological, mythic and spiritual levels. So I would say that more likely what motivates people to pursue excellence is from the sensory and psychological levels, and what motivates them to pursue spiritual realization is more from the mythic and spiritual levels. But that impetus, the great sounding chord that says “it is time to be what you are” is there all the time. This is what I try to communicate in my workshops, seminars and books. The simplest book I ever wrote was A Passion for the Possible, in which I try to lead people into ways of enhancing each of the levels. And all of this works to some extent. But if you’re talking about enlightenment, I think it is a balance between all of the levels. At different times in life one level may be more emphasized than another, but above all it is the finding of the essential self that then becomes the orchestrator, the evocateur of these many levels of the self.
WIE: You speak about being “a conscious participant in an unfolding drama,” about the personal drama of life as an impersonal event and about our own struggles as equivalent to the challenges faced by heroes in the mythic stories. You also very passionately ask people to act with strength, courage and perseverance, and not to stop in the face of obstacles. In light of this, would you say that you are calling people to live from the realization of what you refer to as the “unitive level,” or could we say that you are also calling people to live a life of self—determination or, in other words, self-mastery?
JH: Again, I will not use the term “self-mastery”! I’m calling people to live out of the larger story, out of the capacity of their own destiny. The reason I use the great stories like the search for the Holy Grail and The Odyssey is that these myths help us tap into the extraordinary coding, which allows us to express the deepest truths about ourselves. We can find these deepest truths through realizing that we are part of a greater story. You see, we are storied beings; stories are just flowing through our bloodstream. We are a story at every second of our life, and the stages of our lives are great stories. What I try to do is help people to find these eternal stories that are there. These mythic tales of death and resurrection, rites of passage, quests and discoveries are organic constructs of the deep psyche. And they are there to show us that the story isn’t over. A few of us may get stuck, get depressed, get caught up in our own insularities, but when we find the motivating story, then the personal-particular becomes part of the personal-universal and we move on. The yellow brick road unfolds and the journey is before us.
WIE: Would you say that we need to live from these higher levels in order for evolution to take place?
JH: I would say that it’s as if we have a million potentials and we tootle and hoot on about twenty of them. Part of my work has been saying, “My God! Look what we’ve got! Look what’s there!” It’s not just in our body and mind, as Joseph Campbell thought, but in our very psyche. It’s not just cultural, it seems to be structural. It’s part of the resonance of the universal story that is activated in us, and when we tap into it, all kinds of potentials begin to unfold. If we are exploring our lives through the larger personae which we have within us, through the greater story, and if we are ultimately spiritually sourced in the ground of our being, we’re cooking on more elaborate burners, and the fire is under the crucible of spirit.
WIE: In your travels all around the world, having met thousands of very unusual individuals, who would you say would be the greatest example of self-mastery? Who would you say was the greatest example of enlightenment? And what was it about them that distinguished them from each other?
JH: I wouldn’t describe an example of self-mastery, but I would of enlightenment. The most evocative example for me was an old man who I used to take walks with. When I was fourteen years old my parents got divorced, and I was just grief-stricken about it. I took to running down Park Avenue, late for school—I would run from my grief. And one day I ran into an old man and knocked the wind out of him. I picked him up and he said to me in a French accent, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?”
I said, “Yes sir, looks that way.”
He said, “Well, bon voyage!”
I said, “Bon voyage.” And I ran to school. The following week I was walking my fox terrier, Champ, and I saw the old man coming out of a building. I lived at 86th just off of Park Avenue and the old man lived somewhere around 84th and Park.
He said to me, “Ah, my friend the runner, you have a fox terrier. Where are you going?”
“Well sir, I take Champ to Central Park after school. I just think about things.”
“I will go with you sometime, okay?”
I said, “Well, sure.”
“I will take my constitutional.”
Now he was something. He had no self-consciousness at all. He had leaky margins with the world. He had a long French name but he asked me to call him by the first part of it, which to my American ears sounded like “Mr. Tayer.” So I called him Mr. Tayer. We walked for about a year and a half, off and on, mostly Tuesdays and Thursdays. He would suddenly fall to the ground and look at a caterpillar: “Oh, Jean, look at the caterpillar! Ah, moving, changing, transforming, metamorphosing. Jean, feel yourself to be a caterpillar. Can you do that?”
“Very easily, Mr. Tayer.” I mean, here I was, a fourteen-year-old girl nearly six feet tall with red dots on my face—I felt like a caterpillar!
He said, “What are you when you finally become a papillon, a butterfly? What is the butterfly of Jean?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Tayer!”
“Yes, you know, you know. I know you know. Now, what are you transforming into?”
“Well, I think when I grow up I’ll fly all over the world, and maybe I’ll help people.” It turned out to be largely true.
WIE: It certainly did.
JH: “Ah! Bon, bon, bon.” And he’d say, “Oh, Jean, lean into the wind!” There are these strong winds off of Central Park. “Ah, Jean, smell the wind! Same wind once went through Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus Christ felt this?”
“Yes. Oh, Marie Antoinette, here she comes! Genghis Khan, not so good. Joan of Arc, Jean D’Arc! Be filled with Jean D’Arc! Be filled with the tides of history!” We had all these wonderful games about life: “Jean, look at the clouds, God’s calligraphy in the sky!”
He would suddenly stop and look at you, and he would giggle and you would giggle, and he’d giggle and you’d giggle, and then he would look at you laughing and laughing as if you were the cluttered house that hid the Holy One. I would go home and tell my mother, “Mother I met my old man again and when I’m with him I leave my littleness behind.”
Toward the end of our walk together one day, he stopped suddenly and he turned to me and said, “Jean, what to you is the most fascinating question?”
And I said, “It’s about history, Mr. Tayer, and destiny, too. How can we take the right path in history so that we even have a destiny? My friends at school all talk about the H-bomb, and I wonder if I’ll ever get to be twenty-one years old. Mr. Tayer, you always talk about the future of man as if we had a future; I want to know what we have to do to keep that future coming.”
He said, “We need to have more specialists in spirit who will lead people into self-discovery.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Tayer?”
He said—and this is exactly what he said; I was taking notes because I knew I was in the presence of greatness—”We are being called into metamorphosis, into a far higher order, and yet we often act only from a tiny portion of ourselves. It is necessary that we increase that portion. But do not think for one minute, Jean, that we are alone in making that possible. We are part of a cosmic evolutionary movement that inspires us to unite with God. This is the lightning flash for all our potentialities. This is the great originating cause of all our shifts and changes. Without it there is nothing but struggle and decline.”
And I said to him, “What do you call it? I’ve never heard of it. Can something as great as that even have a name?”
“You are right,” he said, “it is impossible to name.”
“Well, try to name it, Mr. Tayer. I’ve heard that once a thing is named, you can begin to work with it.”
He seemed amused and he said, “I’ll try.” And then he said, “It is the demand of the universe for the birth of the ultra-human. It is the rising of a new form of psychic energy in which the very depths of loving within you are combined with what is most essential in the flowing of the cosmic stream.”
I didn’t really understand what he was saying, but I nodded sagely, and I said I would ponder these things, and he said he would also. One day toward the end of our time together—this was actually the last day that I ever saw him—Mr. Tayer began talking to me about the lure of becoming, a phrase that then became a part of my language. And also about how we humans are part of an evolutionary process in which we are being drawn toward something—which he called the “Omega point”—full of evolution. He told me that he believed that physical and spiritual energy was always flowing out from the Omega point and empowering us as well as leading us forward through love and illumination. And it was then that I asked him my ultimate question, the one that I must say has continued to haunt me all the days of my life: “What do you believe it’s all about, Mr. Tayer?” His answer is enshrined in my heart. He started by saying, “Je crois”—I believe. “I believe that the universe is in evolution. I believe that the evolution is toward spirit. I believe that spirit fulfills itself in a personal God.”
“And what do you believe about yourself, Mr. Tayer?”
He said, “I believe that I am a pilgrim of the future.”
It was the Thursday before Easter Sunday, 1955. I had brought him the shell of a snail. “Ah! Escargot!” he said, and then he began to wax ecstatic for the better part of an hour about spirals and nature and art, snail shells and galaxies, the labyrinth on the floor of Chartres Cathedral—which later became a symbol of my work—and the Rose Window and the convolutions of the brain, the whirl of flowers and the circulation of the heart’s blood. It was all taken up in a great hymn to the spiraling evolution of spirit and matter, “It’s all a spiral of becoming, Jean!” Then he looked away, and he seemed to be seeing into the future and he said, “Jean, the people of your time, toward the end of this century, will be taking the tiller of the world. But they cannot go directly.” He used the French word, directement. “You have to go in spirals, touching upon every people, every culture, every kind of consciousness. It is then that the newest in the field of mind will awaken and we will rebuild the earth.” And then he said to me, “Jean, remain always true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love.” Those were the words that he said to me. Then he said, “Au revoir, Jean.”
“Au revoir, Mr. Tayer! I’ll see you on Tuesday!”
And Tuesday came and I brought Champ, and Champ whimpered; he seemed to know something. And my old man never came. Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday. Eight weeks I waited and he never came again, because it turned out he had died on that Sunday in 1955.
Years later, somebody gave me a book without a cover called The Phenomenon of Man. And when I began to read it, I said, “My God! That’s my pal, that’s . . . oh my goodness. . . .” And I went to my friend and asked, “Have you got the cover to the book?” And she gave it to me and I flipped it over and, of course, there was my old man. No forgetting that face! Mr. Tayer had been Teilhard de Chardin.
WIE: That’s extraordinary!
JH: He was the most enlightened person I’ve ever met. He certainly has had a profound influence on my life, on my sense of history and of who and what we are. He was childlike, always in a state of wonder and astonishment. Always in a state of, as I said, leaky margins with reality. There wasn’t a question of self because he was so embodied in all things, in all existences. And he saw spiritual and physical energy as utterly necessary to each other. So that’s ultimately what I have to say about the whole thing and what I really believe.
WIE: I’d like to begin by asking how you would define “self-mastery.”
Jean Houston: I would never use the word “mastery”! I thought I’d tell you that right away. Maybe that’s a feminine point of view—I can talk about an orchestration and a balance of capacities, but I don’t think I’d ever use the word “mastery.” To me, it smacks of galloping chutzpah! I just don’t think self-mastery exists. How’s that for a beginning?
I think the nearest that we can come to talking about self-mastery is to talk about the nature of essence; and when we touch into essence, latent abilities and skills suddenly jump into life.
WIE: How would you define “enlightenment” then?
JH: I think enlightenment exceeds definition because it is so experiential; the mystics say it’s unexplainable. But if I can speak about it as a process, I can get closer. I’d say it’s an extraordinary effort of reweaving the self in body, mind and spirit that can be accomplished by a depth of loving, by a giving over of the local self to the godstuff. It is the honing of one’s inner and outer perceptions so one is able to see, hear, touch, taste, feel and intuit the immensity of what is really there. The veils of the self are lifted.
WIE: Exponents of self-mastery and enlightenment each tend to see their approach as leading to the realization of our full human potential. Yet closer examination reveals these two approaches to be radically different. The highly accomplished individuals who we have come to call the “Self Masters” express what could be described as an “I Can” spirit. They are individuals who have made enormous effort to break through seemingly unbreakable barriers, and who exude a powerful confidence that comes from their fundamental knowing that “I can do it!” Jack LaLanne would be a good example of someone who embodies this “I Can” spirit. On the other hand, enlightenment is described by the great traditions as a fundamental groundedness in what is referred to as “Being” itself, or “I Am.” Would you say that the “I Can” and the “I Am” are basically antithetical modes of transformation?
JH: Well, not from the perspective of God. You see, you can get extraordinary confidence from being “in the flow” in great sporting moments. For example, when I was fourteen or fifteen I was a very serious fencer. I really loved it and I was pretty good. Once, in New York, I was in a round-robin—where you keep competing until you lose—and what happened to me was fascinating. There were men and women, and we were fencing with foils. All the fencers were much older than I was, and they were some of the city’s best. Well, as I began to fence I suddenly found that I was in “the zone”! No longer just a pretty good fencer, I had tapped into the essence of fencing. I was the sport! Anticipating all moves, seeing all opportunities, I couldn’t tire. Endless waves of energy filled me. There was no possibility of beating me. One after another, twenty opponents came up and were defeated. And there I was, “Quarte, sixte, paré, et là! Strike to the heart!” On and on it went—my essence and the essence of the sport in a rapturous union of movement and spirit. That kind of gallant élan filled me. I was all the great fencers who ever were, Scaramouche, Cyrano de Bergerac. I felt as if their spirits were joining with mine for one last great bout, until after six hours of continuous fencing, the match was stopped and I was declared the winner. How did this happen?!
Several times in my life I’ve been in that state, and it’s not a state of “I Can,” I assure you. It is as if your essence joins the essence of the action itself—almost like you tune into the god or goddess of the action, the very archetype of it. It’s much more complex than saying “I Can” and “I Am.”
WIE: When speaking about cultivating our highest human potential, the approach of self-mastery advocates the use of discipline and effort to push ourselves through limitations, while the traditional teachings of enlightenment point to the realization of a condition of effortless “letting go” as the ground for deep and abiding change. What do you see as the fundamental basis for the realization of our full human potential?
JH: We’re so different from each other. We’re as different as snowflakes. I often say, “We’re not flaky, we’re snowflakes.” Some people are pushers and some people are relaxers-into. That’s why, when I teach, I always try to provide a variety of ways into the unfolding and enlisting of capacities. My workshops are filled with music and dance and jokes and enactments and “process” as well as cognitive exercises, because the point is to reach people through whatever form. That’s why there are so many different forms of yoga—karma yoga, bhakti yoga, hatha yoga, dhyana yoga, etc. You can’t just talk about one particular way.
WIE: I understand, but just to pursue this question a little further, individuals who seem to have achieved an unusual degree of self-mastery often claim that through the consistent development of greater and greater control over our bodies, thoughts and feelings, it is possible to discover a deep sense of fulfillment and a profound experience of inner freedom. Enlightenment teachings, on the other hand, generally state that it’s only through a complete giving up of control, a submission to “Thy will” rather than “my will,” that we can experience true spiritual freedom. What is your view of these two different approaches to inner freedom?
JH: I would never use the word “control” here. I just don’t think it can be achieved! I would say instead a kind of “genial orchestration.” And you’ve also got to realize that you’re talking about the difference between the muscular West and the more relaxed East. Our Calvinistic theology is: Try! Try! “I will labor in the vineyard of the Lord to know if I’m worthy or not,” or, “Am I among the 144,000 elect? I can only prove it by trying harder and harder.” It’s a cultural lensing. Look at the stories that make up our culture’s mythic structures: Horatio Alger. Sail over the sea! Cut down the forest! Build! Push! Those are the words of a frontier psychology. And a frontier psychology will manifest especially in religious or spiritual experience as: Keep pushing, keep trying. Whereas the other is surrender: Surrender into love, surrender into being. The great mystics say, “My God, my Love, Thou art all mine and I am all Thine!” They talk about the intensity of loving; theirs is a culture of love. You see, the union with the Beloved is a different perspective.
What happens in either case is an alchemy, no question. It is an alchemy in which the human being attempts to become what he or she truly is, and in which they perhaps experience and express the greater life for which we have all been coded. You see, I believe that we’ve all been deeply coded for a much larger life. And I believe that what we’re calling “enlightenment” is coded in us as part of our inheritance. For different people from different parts of the world, there are certain patterns of journeys and stages of unfolding—not unlike the unfolding of the coding of the DNA structures in the genes.
My problem with those who will themselves to a certain end is that they lose access to the coding, and then they only gain the culture’s notion of what is good and best and bright and beautiful. You just have to look at Vanity Fair or Vogue magazine to see what I’m talking about. I think our potential is much richer than that, and I think that the Easterners have a deeper and more subtle and perhaps even a truer grasp of it.
WIE: You said you would never use the term “self-mastery,” and that maybe that’s a feminine point of view. It might intrigue you to know that it was very difficult finding women to interview for this issue of WIE, apparently because women don’t tend to speak about their achievements in the same way that men do. For example, Susan Powter wouldn’t go near the term “self-mastery” either. In spite of the fact that she expresses many of the qualities of self-mastery in her own life, she felt strongly that “mastery” represents a patriarchal view, and she insisted that we speak about this subject only in terms of natural processes and other more “feminine” concepts. Why do you object to the term “mastery,” and why do you think women in general object to both the word and the concept?
JH: I think “mastery” offends the senses of anybody who has a real ecological sense of the world. Sir Frances Bacon talked about extending the empire of man over things, and we see where that has brought us—our so-called mastery has resulted in so much destruction. So I think that’s why. Mastery just reflects such a narrow bandwidth. It is like making a slave of the self and then mastering your inner slave. In this country with its horrendous history of slavery—with its “Ho Massah! Yessah Massah!”—the word has fearful connotations. In addition to that, there is the sense that you are mastering the self. Who is to say that the self doesn’t have its own agenda, which may be much larger than one’s own ego’s view of what that agenda should be?
WIE: In the course of our research for this issue, we looked at many individuals who expressed the unusual qualities of self-mastery: control, discipline, perseverance in the face of obstacles, going beyond limitations and deep confidence and positivity. We read about some extraordinary women, including Billie Jean King, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Jan Reynolds, who skied Mt. Everest, and Ann Bancroft, the first woman to go to the North and South Poles. To our surprise, we found that even these outstanding individuals didn’t describe their accomplishments with the degree of confidence and pride they undeniably warranted. In fact, King and Bancroft, in spite of their achievements, slipped into depression, disillusionment and despair. They didn’t sustain the same positive outlook on life—
JH: The way the men did.
WIE: Yes! We were intrigued by this, and we spoke with Beverly Slade, a psychologist who has studied the way women relate to excellence. She had some very interesting things to say. One of her primary conclusions is that women don’t want to speak about their own abilities because it’s socially unacceptable for them to do so; and if they do, they risk losing their relationships—the friendship, support, protection, and affirmation of men and of women. It’s acceptable in our culture for women to stand out if they are nurturers, like Mother Teresa, but women risk censure if they speak with confidence about their attainments, about their cultivation of self-mastery. What do you think about her conclusions?
JH: I think that is partially true, but I think there is a deeper story to it. The deeper story is that women are devoted to process rather than product. I think the underlying reason is that women are devoted to making things grow—so you do something and then it’s time to move on and do the next thing.
WIE: What do you mean by being “devoted to process”?
JH: Well, to be devoted to process is to really look at each stage as it unfolds, to see how the things cohere, develop, grow. The way or the path is what is important—it is the ways and the means; it is not the end. If you’re watching little children grow, if you’re taking care of things in process, then that’s what’s important and you get on with it.
WIE: From all I’ve heard about your teaching work, you really give everything you possibly can to what you are doing—you go all out. It doesn’t seem to be just about process. It isn’t only that you enjoy the preparation for one of your talks, for example, but that you give everything to make it exceptional. This is one of the qualities that we’ve found in self-mastery—giving everything, going for broke.
JH: To me that is not a mastery of the self. That is merely an orchestration of many qualities that I have developed over many years. It is my self in its efflorescence, you see, the fullness of my being. A fuller use. I even hate the word “use”; I would say—”fuller unfolding” or “being in the service of something that it seems very important to do.”
WIE: What do you think it is in you that drives you to go all the way when other people would settle for giving less than everything?
JH: Well, it is not ambition. I’ll tell you what it is—it’s a sense of time, of history, and a sense of urgency; knowing that we could lose it all. These are the times and they’re so critical. I figure I have maybe thirty or thirty-five good years left of my life. And I would hope in that time to continue to be able to do something to be of service to the planet, to people.
WIE: What do you think about the message of individuals like Anthony Robbins, who teach that the force of transformative change is materialized through taking action, that we control our own destiny through the decisions that we make? Or Jack LaLanne, who says he doesn’t know anything about grace, and asserts that “God helps those who help themselves”? Or Dan Millman, former world-class gymnast and author of books about human transformation, who endorses as a way to live the popular slogan “Just do it!”?
JH: That’s a very Western point of view!
WIE: The enlightenment teachings, on the other hand, point to surrender as the way to transformation. Would you say that genuine evolution is achieved through our own efforts, as these extraordinary individuals suggest, or is it found through naturally surrendering to that process of “unfolding,” as you have described it?
JH: Well, my point of view is that it is both plus much, much more—it’s not one or the other. As I said earlier, people are very different in the ways that they approach this. To be able to give a cogent answer, not only would I have to study these people’s work, but I would also have to look at long-term results in people’s lives. And I mean long-term results, not just people saying “I had a wonderful time at the seminar,” because that’s easy to get. We live in a testimonial world. To me the proof of the pudding is: are they kinder? Like the Dalai Lama says, “My religion is kindness.” Also, what is the service to the world that people are giving? Are they trying to make a difference and make this a better world? I feel that it really comes down to that.
WIE: You write in your book A Passion for the Possible that “human beings are not constituted to be content with living as thwarted, inhibited versions of themselves. Throughout history and all over the world, people have felt a yearning to be more, a longing to push the membrane of the possible. They have entered monasteries and mystery schools, pursuing secular as well as esoteric studies. They have practiced yoga, martial arts, sports, dance, art. They have left home and family to adventure beyond the ordinary, embarking on visionary and spiritual quests.” Are you suggesting that what motivates an individual to pursue excellence in any of those disciplines, be it creative or athletic, is the same as what motivates an individual to pursue spiritual evolution or enlightenment?
JH: I think they come from different levels of the self. I talk about four levels in my work—the sensory, psychological, mythic and spiritual levels. So I would say that more likely what motivates people to pursue excellence is from the sensory and psychological levels, and what motivates them to pursue spiritual realization is more from the mythic and spiritual levels. But that impetus, the great sounding chord that says “it is time to be what you are” is there all the time. This is what I try to communicate in my workshops, seminars and books. The simplest book I ever wrote was A Passion for the Possible, in which I try to lead people into ways of enhancing each of the levels. And all of this works to some extent. But if you’re talking about enlightenment, I think it is a balance between all of the levels. At different times in life one level may be more emphasized than another, but above all it is the finding of the essential self that then becomes the orchestrator, the evocateur of these many levels of the self.
WIE: You speak about being “a conscious participant in an unfolding drama,” about the personal drama of life as an impersonal event and about our own struggles as equivalent to the challenges faced by heroes in the mythic stories. You also very passionately ask people to act with strength, courage and perseverance, and not to stop in the face of obstacles. In light of this, would you say that you are calling people to live from the realization of what you refer to as the “unitive level,” or could we say that you are also calling people to live a life of self—determination or, in other words, self-mastery?
JH: Again, I will not use the term “self-mastery”! I’m calling people to live out of the larger story, out of the capacity of their own destiny. The reason I use the great stories like the search for the Holy Grail and The Odyssey is that these myths help us tap into the extraordinary coding, which allows us to express the deepest truths about ourselves. We can find these deepest truths through realizing that we are part of a greater story. You see, we are storied beings; stories are just flowing through our bloodstream. We are a story at every second of our life, and the stages of our lives are great stories. What I try to do is help people to find these eternal stories that are there. These mythic tales of death and resurrection, rites of passage, quests and discoveries are organic constructs of the deep psyche. And they are there to show us that the story isn’t over. A few of us may get stuck, get depressed, get caught up in our own insularities, but when we find the motivating story, then the personal-particular becomes part of the personal-universal and we move on. The yellow brick road unfolds and the journey is before us.
WIE: Would you say that we need to live from these higher levels in order for evolution to take place?
JH: I would say that it’s as if we have a million potentials and we tootle and hoot on about twenty of them. Part of my work has been saying, “My God! Look what we’ve got! Look what’s there!” It’s not just in our body and mind, as Joseph Campbell thought, but in our very psyche. It’s not just cultural, it seems to be structural. It’s part of the resonance of the universal story that is activated in us, and when we tap into it, all kinds of potentials begin to unfold. If we are exploring our lives through the larger personae which we have within us, through the greater story, and if we are ultimately spiritually sourced in the ground of our being, we’re cooking on more elaborate burners, and the fire is under the crucible of spirit.
WIE: In your travels all around the world, having met thousands of very unusual individuals, who would you say would be the greatest example of self-mastery? Who would you say was the greatest example of enlightenment? And what was it about them that distinguished them from each other?
JH: I wouldn’t describe an example of self-mastery, but I would of enlightenment. The most evocative example for me was an old man who I used to take walks with. When I was fourteen years old my parents got divorced, and I was just grief-stricken about it. I took to running down Park Avenue, late for school—I would run from my grief. And one day I ran into an old man and knocked the wind out of him. I picked him up and he said to me in a French accent, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?”
I said, “Yes sir, looks that way.”
He said, “Well, bon voyage!”
I said, “Bon voyage.” And I ran to school. The following week I was walking my fox terrier, Champ, and I saw the old man coming out of a building. I lived at 86th just off of Park Avenue and the old man lived somewhere around 84th and Park.
He said to me, “Ah, my friend the runner, you have a fox terrier. Where are you going?”
“Well sir, I take Champ to Central Park after school. I just think about things.”
“I will go with you sometime, okay?”
I said, “Well, sure.”
“I will take my constitutional.”
Now he was something. He had no self-consciousness at all. He had leaky margins with the world. He had a long French name but he asked me to call him by the first part of it, which to my American ears sounded like “Mr. Tayer.” So I called him Mr. Tayer. We walked for about a year and a half, off and on, mostly Tuesdays and Thursdays. He would suddenly fall to the ground and look at a caterpillar: “Oh, Jean, look at the caterpillar! Ah, moving, changing, transforming, metamorphosing. Jean, feel yourself to be a caterpillar. Can you do that?”
“Very easily, Mr. Tayer.” I mean, here I was, a fourteen-year-old girl nearly six feet tall with red dots on my face—I felt like a caterpillar!
He said, “What are you when you finally become a papillon, a butterfly? What is the butterfly of Jean?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Tayer!”
“Yes, you know, you know. I know you know. Now, what are you transforming into?”
“Well, I think when I grow up I’ll fly all over the world, and maybe I’ll help people.” It turned out to be largely true.
WIE: It certainly did.
JH: “Ah! Bon, bon, bon.” And he’d say, “Oh, Jean, lean into the wind!” There are these strong winds off of Central Park. “Ah, Jean, smell the wind! Same wind once went through Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus Christ felt this?”
“Yes. Oh, Marie Antoinette, here she comes! Genghis Khan, not so good. Joan of Arc, Jean D’Arc! Be filled with Jean D’Arc! Be filled with the tides of history!” We had all these wonderful games about life: “Jean, look at the clouds, God’s calligraphy in the sky!”
He would suddenly stop and look at you, and he would giggle and you would giggle, and he’d giggle and you’d giggle, and then he would look at you laughing and laughing as if you were the cluttered house that hid the Holy One. I would go home and tell my mother, “Mother I met my old man again and when I’m with him I leave my littleness behind.”
Toward the end of our walk together one day, he stopped suddenly and he turned to me and said, “Jean, what to you is the most fascinating question?”
And I said, “It’s about history, Mr. Tayer, and destiny, too. How can we take the right path in history so that we even have a destiny? My friends at school all talk about the H-bomb, and I wonder if I’ll ever get to be twenty-one years old. Mr. Tayer, you always talk about the future of man as if we had a future; I want to know what we have to do to keep that future coming.”
He said, “We need to have more specialists in spirit who will lead people into self-discovery.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Tayer?”
He said—and this is exactly what he said; I was taking notes because I knew I was in the presence of greatness—”We are being called into metamorphosis, into a far higher order, and yet we often act only from a tiny portion of ourselves. It is necessary that we increase that portion. But do not think for one minute, Jean, that we are alone in making that possible. We are part of a cosmic evolutionary movement that inspires us to unite with God. This is the lightning flash for all our potentialities. This is the great originating cause of all our shifts and changes. Without it there is nothing but struggle and decline.”
And I said to him, “What do you call it? I’ve never heard of it. Can something as great as that even have a name?”
“You are right,” he said, “it is impossible to name.”
“Well, try to name it, Mr. Tayer. I’ve heard that once a thing is named, you can begin to work with it.”
He seemed amused and he said, “I’ll try.” And then he said, “It is the demand of the universe for the birth of the ultra-human. It is the rising of a new form of psychic energy in which the very depths of loving within you are combined with what is most essential in the flowing of the cosmic stream.”
I didn’t really understand what he was saying, but I nodded sagely, and I said I would ponder these things, and he said he would also. One day toward the end of our time together—this was actually the last day that I ever saw him—Mr. Tayer began talking to me about the lure of becoming, a phrase that then became a part of my language. And also about how we humans are part of an evolutionary process in which we are being drawn toward something—which he called the “Omega point”—full of evolution. He told me that he believed that physical and spiritual energy was always flowing out from the Omega point and empowering us as well as leading us forward through love and illumination. And it was then that I asked him my ultimate question, the one that I must say has continued to haunt me all the days of my life: “What do you believe it’s all about, Mr. Tayer?” His answer is enshrined in my heart. He started by saying, “Je crois”—I believe. “I believe that the universe is in evolution. I believe that the evolution is toward spirit. I believe that spirit fulfills itself in a personal God.”
“And what do you believe about yourself, Mr. Tayer?”
He said, “I believe that I am a pilgrim of the future.”
It was the Thursday before Easter Sunday, 1955. I had brought him the shell of a snail. “Ah! Escargot!” he said, and then he began to wax ecstatic for the better part of an hour about spirals and nature and art, snail shells and galaxies, the labyrinth on the floor of Chartres Cathedral—which later became a symbol of my work—and the Rose Window and the convolutions of the brain, the whirl of flowers and the circulation of the heart’s blood. It was all taken up in a great hymn to the spiraling evolution of spirit and matter, “It’s all a spiral of becoming, Jean!” Then he looked away, and he seemed to be seeing into the future and he said, “Jean, the people of your time, toward the end of this century, will be taking the tiller of the world. But they cannot go directly.” He used the French word, directement. “You have to go in spirals, touching upon every people, every culture, every kind of consciousness. It is then that the newest in the field of mind will awaken and we will rebuild the earth.” And then he said to me, “Jean, remain always true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love.” Those were the words that he said to me. Then he said, “Au revoir, Jean.”
“Au revoir, Mr. Tayer! I’ll see you on Tuesday!”
And Tuesday came and I brought Champ, and Champ whimpered; he seemed to know something. And my old man never came. Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday. Eight weeks I waited and he never came again, because it turned out he had died on that Sunday in 1955.
Years later, somebody gave me a book without a cover called The Phenomenon of Man. And when I began to read it, I said, “My God! That’s my pal, that’s . . . oh my goodness. . . .” And I went to my friend and asked, “Have you got the cover to the book?” And she gave it to me and I flipped it over and, of course, there was my old man. No forgetting that face! Mr. Tayer had been Teilhard de Chardin.
WIE: That’s extraordinary!
JH: He was the most enlightened person I’ve ever met. He certainly has had a profound influence on my life, on my sense of history and of who and what we are. He was childlike, always in a state of wonder and astonishment. Always in a state of, as I said, leaky margins with reality. There wasn’t a question of self because he was so embodied in all things, in all existences. And he saw spiritual and physical energy as utterly necessary to each other. So that’s ultimately what I have to say about the whole thing and what I really believe.
Biography of Jean Houston
“In our time we have come to the stage where the real work of humanity begins. It is the time where we partner Creation in the creation of ourselves, in the restoration of the biosphere, the regenesis of society and in the assuming of a new type of culture; the culture of Kindness. Herein, we live daily life reconnected and recharged by the Source, so as to become liberated and engaged in the world and in our tasks.”
Dr. Jean Houston, scholar, philosopher and researcher in human capacities, is one of the foremost visionary thinkers and doers of our time, one of the principal founders of the Human Potential Movement. A powerful and dynamic speaker, she holds conferences and seminars with social leaders, educational institutions and business organizations worldwide.
Jean Houston has worked intensively in 40 cultures and 100 countries helping to enhance and deepen their own uniqueness while they become part of the global community. Her ability to inspire and invigorate people enables her to readily convey her vision – the finest possible achievement of the individual potential.
In 1965, along with her husband Dr. Robert Masters, Dr. Houston founded The Foundation for Mind Research. She is also the founder and principal teacher since 1982 of the Mystery School, a school of human development, a program of cross-cultural, mythic and spiritual studies, dedicated to teaching history, philosophy, the New Physics, psychology, anthropology, myth and the many dimensions of human potential. She also leads an intensive program in social artistry with leaders coming from all over the world to study with Dr. Houston and her distinguished associates.
She is a prolific writer and author of 26 books including A Passion for the Possible, Search for the Beloved, Life Force, The Possible Human, Public Like a Frog, A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story, and Manual of the Peacemaker.
As advisor to UNICEF in human and cultural development, she has worked to implement some of their extensive educational and health programs. Since 2003, she has been working with the United Nations Development Program, training leaders in developing countries throughout the world in the new field of social artistry. Dr. Houston has also served for two years in an advisory capacity to President and Mrs. Clinton as well as helping Mrs. Clinton write, It Takes A Village To Raise A Child. She has also worked with President and Mrs. Carter and counseled leaders in similar positions in many countries and cultures.
A past President of the Association of Humanistic Psychology , she has taught philosophy, psychology, and religion at Columbia University, Hunter College, the New School for Social Research and Marymount College, as well as summer sessions in human development at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of British Columbia.
In 1985, Dr. Houston was awarded the Distinguished Leadership Award from the Association of Teachers Educators. In 1993, she received the Gardner Murphy Humanitarian Award for her work in psychology and the INTA Humanitarian of the Year award. In 1994, she received the Lifetime Outstanding Creative Achievement Award from the Creative Education Foundation. The following year, she was given the Keeper of the Lore Award for her studies in myth and culture. In 1997 she was made a Fellow of the World Business Academy and in 1999 she received the Pathfinder award from the Association of Humanistic Psychology. In 2000 she was given the prestigious Millennium Award from Magical Blend Magazine.
Dr. Houston holds a B.A. from Barnard College, a Ph.D. in psychology from the Union Graduate School and a Ph.D in religion from the Graduate Theological Foundation. She has also been the recipient of honorary doctorates.
Hosted by Patrick Michaels, this excerpt from the PeaceMakers News Report, from Goodnewsbroadcast.com, features Jean Houston http://www.jeanhouston.org
I begin with some words from Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to John Adams: “Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction.”
You may rightly say that with so many shadows and challenges and with the avalanche of avarice accosting us, how can we ever deal with them in such a way that our higher humanity, our required human, is not compromised? We can either undergo a progressive deactivation of the conditioned and pathogenic personality wrought by present civilization, the way of the excellent therapist, or we can find the ways and means to the emergence of a more profound awareness in which the experience of being and the felt meaning of life have their foundation, and which, in spite of constituting our true nature, lies ordinarily, in our so-called civilized condition, in a darkened, or veiled condition — as if asleep. With regard to methods, probably both are appropriate here: the release of old conditions and the discovery of ways into the light.
When Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents, I doubt that he had the idea of the dazzling darkness that lay beneath the darkness of civilization. We can learn to wake up, and, in so doing, find ourselves re-patterned to what I have been calling the required human.
Not only has my experience working with individuals, groups and cultures over the last four decades and in over 100 countries nurtured my trust in the intrinsic goodness of humans and in the individual’s possibility of leaving behind destructiveness, but it has also nurtured my hope in collective transformation; and now that we are undergoing a planetary crisis, I must admit to being apocalyptic — if by this one means a person who believes that, in spite of our life-or-death crisis, it is within us to ensure that it may not be a fatal one.
As Arnold Toynbee has well argued, many civilizations have risen and faded away, and others (like our own) have been transformed through something akin to a hybridization. But there is yet to be a civilization that undergoes that death-and-rebirth process that we have come to know to be the essence of individual transformation, as manifest through the experience of those who have completed it: the prophets, enlightened individuals and mythic heroes. In light of such a conception, it is appropriate that we hope that the decaying structure of Western Christian Civilization learns to die well, so that the regeneration of our social body may take place in the best of possible conditions.
How can we not hope for such a collective death-and-rebirth when the commercial interests of the powerful devastate our environment, our values, our quality of life, our education, our culture, and even life itself? And can we not hope that the destruction of life and the mind may at least serve to stimulate awareness and thus accelerate a regenerative process, in the same way that diseases, by stimulating the organism’s defenses, can become the indirect cause of their own cure? Funny as it may sound, it was not at all absurd for the Sufi E. J. Gold to write during the 1980s in a humor magazine, “As Brother Rabbit said, maybe civilization is nature’s way of telling us to slow down.”
We are swept by an impetuous current. Indeed, a cultural death is evident not only in our loss of values and in the degradation of wisdom into mere information, but also in the generalized devaluation of our earlier points of reference. Thus, a great part of the Western world’s population is now disenchanted with governments, authorities, experts, ideologies, and even with science and philosophy, not to mention religions. “It is unforgivable that so many problems from the past are still with us, absorbing vast energies and resources desperately needed for nobler purposes,” said U Thant — then Secretary-General of the United Nations — as early as 1970, on the occasion of the organization’s anniversary. After proceeding to review some of these problems from the past, such as the armaments race, racism, violations of human rights, and “dreams of power and domination instead of fraternal coexistence,” Secretary-General U Thant observed:
While these antiquated concepts and attitudes persist, the rapid pace of change around us breeds new problems which cry for the world’s collective attention and care: the increasing discrepancy between rich and poor nations, the scientific and technological gap, the population explosion, the deterioration of the environment, the urban proliferation, the drug problem, the alienation of youth, the excessive consumption of resources by insatiable societies and institutions. The very survival of a civilized and humane society seems to be at stake.
It has been recognized that the situation requires an interdisciplinary approach that has come into vogue worldwide. Yet beyond the interdisciplinary approach, I believe it is important to attend to the heart of the macro-problem, that is, the fundamental ill from which the diverse aspects of our problematique derive, in much the same way that different bodily symptoms are, at base, manifestations of the same disease. My friend Claudio Naranjo believes that is found in the dominance of he patriarchy in all forms. I agree with him in part, but I also think that it comes from the fact that we are not yet collectively aware of what is occurring on this planet and in our souls that lie beneath the distractions of so many challenges. This is the cosmic agenda that is now ours, and the need for the required human to respond to that agenda. Let me pose several arguments here.
First, the issues of the patriarchy. It began in the Bronze Age, a rending of the roots of consciousness from the sense of spiritual partnership and divine engagement. As the remarkable work of Marija Gimbutsas and others has shown, the culture of Europe from about 8500 to 3500 B.C. was essentially a neolithic agrarian economy accruing around the rites and worship of the Mother Goddess. The findings of archaeologists James Mellaart in Catal Huyuk in Turkey and of Gimbutsas in south eastern Europe reveal civilizations of extremely complex and sophisticated arts, crafts technology and social organization.
Further, as an immense amount of evidence indicates, these were basically non-patriarchal, egalitarian societies, with descent and inheritance passed through the mother, and with women playing key roles in all aspects of life and work. The art of this period is non-heroic; indeed, there are no signs of heroics, conquests or captives. That came later, much later. Instead, the art abounds with scenes and symbols from nature, with sun and water, serpents, birds and butterflies, and everywhere, images, figurines and votive offerings of the goddess. All in all, one gains the impression of a gentle, high culture that was nurturing, playful, and pacific.
This culture was exported to Crete, where it flourished in populous, well-organized cities, multistoried palaces, networks of fine roads, productive farms, an almost-modern system of drainage and irrigation works, a rich economy with high living standards, and the lively and joyous artistic style so characteristic of Cretan life and sensibility. Again, this was a culture of male-female equality and partnership, and again, the spiritual authority and guiding principles were those of the Mother Goddess. It was in this civilization that Athena arose, primarily as an aspect of the triple goddess in her role as patroness of arts, crafts and sciences.
The gentle civilizations perished under the marauding bands of Indo-Aryan invaders. (Indo-Arayan is a generic term for the waves of invaders that conquered many peoples during this period. Specifically, these invaders were the Aryans in India, the Hittites and Mittani in the Fertile Crescent, the Luwians in Anatolia, the Kurgans in Eastern Europe, and the Achaeans and, later, the Dorians in Greece and Crete.) Warrior nomads, they not only imposed their own rigid authoritarian rule, replacing matricentric values with patriarchal ones, but also inflicted an ideology and the style of divided consciousness (such as we’ve just discussed) that shattered the finely wrought symbiosis between humans, nature, culture and spiritual realities.
Their consciousness divided, their loyalties uncertain, the invaders felt both drawn and terrified by the gentle complexity of the high civilizations in which they found themselves. They were both fascinated and frightened by the pervasiveness of its eroticisms. Thus they muscled and armored themselves against the enticement of its sensualities. They feared, dreaded, and violated the places and persons who bore witness to the ongoing communication between seen and unseen orders that they themselves had long since lost. (We see a late version of this in The Iliad when the holy communicant and prophetess Cassandra is ravaged and the altar of Athena is defiled.) Thus, to keep up his separateness, the patriarchal hero invader, whether he be in Greece, India, or the Fertile Crescent, dreads the caress. When he gets close, it is to subdue by duel or rape.
Not that these invaders didn’t adopt many of the ways and skills of the more ancient cultures, as the Achaeans, for example, adopted much of the Minoan culture. But they did so in such a way as to tear out the feminine threads in the cultural tapestry, leaving ragged social fabrics, missing many pieces, lacking many parts. The patriarchal systems that began then were found to have invaded everything, and what we have now is the vast, planet-wide sunset of this period.
And thus the devastation of today.
As Chris Hedges has written:
At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money.
Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed. How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out.
There are a few isolated individuals who saw it coming. The political philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul and Andrew Bacevich, as well as writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, David Korten and Naomi Klein, along with activists such as Bill McKibben and Ralph Nader, rang the alarm bells. They were largely ignored or ridiculed. Our corporate media and corporate universities proved, when we needed them most, intellectually and morally useless.
Sheldon Wolin argues that a failure to dismantle our vast and overextended imperial projects, coupled with the economic collapse, is likely to result in inverted totalitarianism. This phrase “inverted totalitarianism” describes our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state.
It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics.
“Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics — and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.” As balance to this kind of hopeless thinking, Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, writes to Obama:
But political possibilities are shaped in part by the public discourse of the president and the administration, and it is here that you can have a huge impact. Your presidency will have lasting significance if you dedicate your energy to legitimizing a new set of values for our society, or what the Network of Spiritual Progressives calls a New Bottom Line for American society. Instead of judging institutions, social policies, corporations, legislation, a presidency, an economic plan, or even personal behavior as “rational,” “productive,” or “efficient” primarily in terms of how much money or power has been accumulated,
we need to also focus our attention on how much love and kindness, generosity and caring for others, and ethical and ecological sensitivity have been generated. We should measure our progress by how much we’ve increased our capacities to recognize others as embodiments of the sacred, by how much we’ve increased our capacities to respond to the grandeur and mystery of the universe with awe, wonder, and radical amazement. If you can help Americans recognize that our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and the well-being of the planet itself, and that well-being has to be judged in terms of a New Bottom Line that includes material well-being but goes far beyond that, you will earn a significant place in the history of the human race.
The Work of Our Time
After President Obama and his administration took office there was, for a while, a spirit of renewal in the air, framed by feelings of optimism and hope. Many of us sensed that long-neglected problems could now be honestly grappled with, and that we would find the courage needed to envision and build a future worthy of our humanity. Given the challenges of the last 18 months, some of those hopes have dimmed. Nevertheless, new social research in Europe, Japan and the U.S. confirms a willingness to deal with the big issues and think globally.
Many people worldwide are making a fundamental shift to values of ecological sustainability, personal development, and hope for change. Many say they see themselves as citizens of the planet as well as of their own country. What is extraordinary is that it is not just a single country or region that is shifting its values; our whole planet is developing a capability to take up a larger view of what we can do. This shift in deep priorities and goals is a wave of change that can carry all of us into a wiser future and come together to build a global civilization.
At the same time, all of us — from ordinary people to international institutions — are hurting. This is because we have put off dealing with critical challenges that now are undermining the world we grew up with. The most serious challenge to our civilization is that generated from the entanglement of energy, environment and the economy. The most urgent of our challenges are the current financial meltdown and the escalating effects of climate change. We are no longer experiencing occasional crises in an otherwise healthy system. We are now in the midst of a series of cascading crises of the system itself.
Communism collapsed because it was not economically realistic. Now unregulated free market capitalism is collapsing because it is not being ecologically realistic. Business as usual, founded on a mantra of unrestricted growth and development, is no longer sustainable. As we look ahead, we can expect an accelerating stream of crises, emanating seemingly out of nowhere, like last year’s financial meltdown, and reverberating around the world with unpredictable, destabilizing and cascading effects. Crises will only hit harder and be tougher to overcome until human civilization either declines into ruin or human ingenuity creates a higher-level vision of the future that will usher in a new era in human affairs. It is this challenge, this complexity, that frames the sense of the need for PanGaia, a planetary civilization that cares for the well-being of all peoples and the planet.
What Needs to Be Done?
We urgently need to come together to make sense of our time in history. We need to inquire as deeply as we can, not only to see what the facts are, but what principles and design criteria we need to apply to understand our challenges and frame our decisions. We need to build whole-system solutions that take all aspects of our humanity into account. What is at stake is nothing less than the shape of human existence on planet earth. What is required is nothing more than a shift in human consciousness. As Einstein observed, only with a different consciousness can old problems be solved. All of us must work together to create the future we seek, combining facts and values in a new way for a new time. This is the time to envision a new story, perhaps even a planetary civilization with high individuation of cultures.
I am dedicated to bringing together people in many fields and cultures to envision what PanGaia, a “world that works,” would actually look like. I am inspired to do this because of an elderly man whom I met as a teenager and with whom I would take walks in New York’s Central Park. He told me that the people of my time would be “taking the tiller of the world.” But, he warned, they cannot go directly but must go in spirals, touching upon every people, every culture, every kind of consciousness.
It is then, he said, that the noosphere, the field of mind, will awaken, and we will rebuild the Earth. He took my hands and looked at me intently. “Jeanne, remain always true to yourself, but move ever upwards towards greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourself united with all those who, from every direction, every culture, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge. Ah, so much I wish I could live to see it.”
“See what, Mr. Tayer?” (I called him Mr. Tayer because his long French name was too hard to pronounce.)
It seemed that he didn’t hear my question. Instead, he seemed to already be seeing something else. He seemed to be in ecstasy. He began to talk, in faltering but eloquent spasms of speech. “All around us, to the right and left, in front and behind, above and below, we have only to go a little beyond the frontier of sensible appearances in order to see the divine welling up and showing through. See, over there, in that cherry tree, in that rock, in that child. By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.”
Mr. Tayer continued to speak about everything — war, pain, beauty, death, rebirth. He told me the present chaos was not the end of the world but the labor pains of a new Earth and a new humanity coming into finished form. At the end his voice dropped, and he whispered almost in prayer, “Omega…omega…omega…” Finally, he looked up and said to me quietly, “Au revoir, Jeanne.”
“Au revoir, Mr. Tayer,” I replied, “I’ll meet you at the same time next Tuesday.” For some reason, Champ, my fox terrier who always went on our walks together, didn’t want to budge, and when I pulled him along, he whimpered, tail down between his legs, looking back at Mr. Tayer.
The following Tuesday I was waiting where we always met, at the corner of Park Avenue and 84th Street, but he didn’t come. The following Thursday I waited again. Still he didn’t come. The dog looked up at me sadly. For the next eight weeks I continued to wait, but he never came again. It turned out that he had died suddenly that Easter Sunday, but I didn’t find that out for a long time.
But his visionary words stayed etched in my memory. Years later I read his ideas about the noosphere in his book The Phenomenon of Man — for Mr. Tayer was the great priest-scientist-visionary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who had lived across the street from me at the Jesuit Rectory of St. Ignatius. In it, he wrote:
A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fires spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered in incandescence. Only one interpretation, only one name can be found worthy of this grand phenomenon. Much more coherent and just as extensive as any preceding layer, it is really a new layer, the “thinking layer,” which since its germination … has spread over and above the world of plants and animals. In other words, outside and above the biosphere is the noosphere. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959, p. 182)
Dr. Jean Houston, scholar, philosopher and researcher in human capacities, is one of the foremost visionary
thinkers and doers of our time. She is long regarded as one of the principal founders of the Human Potential
Movement.
She holds a B.A. from Barnard College, a Ph.D. in psychology from the Union Graduate School and a Ph.D. in religion from the Graduate Theological Foundation. She has also been the recipient of honorary doctorates. Jean Houston: why we are here.
