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Dr. Jean Houston, a 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 principle founders of the human potential movement.  She said, “I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers.  Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know. There we go beyond those limited and limiting patterns of body, emotions, volitions, and understanding that have been keeping us in dry dock. Instead, we become available to our capacity for a larger life in body, mind, and spirit. In this state we know great torrents of delight.”

Forty-four years ago, along with her husband, Dr. Robert Masters, Dr. Houston founded the Foundation for Mind Research. She is also the founder and principal teacher of The Mystery School, a program of cross-cultural, mystic and spiritual studies dedicated to teaching history, philosophy, the new physics, psychology, anthropology, myths, and the many dimensions of human potential. The Mystery School is in its 24th year and takes place on both the East and West Coasts.

Jean is a prolific writer and author of over 25 published books.  One of her most recent books, Jump Time, explores a new global paradigm and speaks boldly of a regenesis of human society. The questions raised in this book and the exciting suggestion of possibilities are producing new pioneers, social artists, working on the frontiers of this new global society.

As senior consultant to the United Nations in Human and Cultural Development, Jean has helped to train leadership all over the world to help leaders in many countries develop their human capacities in the light of social change. She has worked to implement some of the United Nations’ extensive educational and health programs, primarily in Myanmar, Burma, and Bangladesh. She has implemented the social development of indigenous people through the integration of their unique cultural gift into their health and educational systems.

She has traveled to Dharamsala, India, and served as an advisor to the Dalai Lama, two American presidents, three first ladies and their equivalent in leadership the world over. She has worked with numerous corporations and has also worked with many governmental agencies, including the U. S. Department of Commerce, U. S. Office of Technology Assessment, and the Department of Energy.

She is the past president of the Association of Humanistic Psychology and has spoken or taught at hundreds of colleges and universities all over the world. Dr. Houston has been awarded countless awards. She holds a BA from Barnard College, two PhDs and numerous honorary doctorates as well.

It’s amazing to note Jean’s family history.  Her father wrote for the famous comedian, Bob Hope, and her childhood was always on the road with comedians. Her great-great-grandfather was Robert E. Lee, the beloved general to the South and her great-great-great- grandfather was Sam Houston, renowned statesman, politician, and soldier.

The great American anthropologist, Margaret Mead, lived with Jean for 6 years and considered Jean her adopted daughter. It was Margaret Mead who trained Jean and sent her out all over the world.  Mark Victor Hanson has said of Jean for so many years that she is one of his greatest teachers and mentors.  Since Mark learned from some amazing people including Buckminster Fuller, and Dr. Wayne Dyer, this is quite a recommendation.

Conducting the interview with Dr. Houston is Maureen Moss, the executive producer of the World Puja Network and a three time author. The World Puja Network provides a variety of transformational radio shows that can be found by going to www.WorldPuja.org.

   MAUREEN MOSS:  What a pleasure it is and what a beautiful way to bring in this new world that we are with such generous reciprocity. Jean, you have one heck of a resume, don’t you?

   JEAN HOUSTON:  I don’t know. I never look at it.

   MAUREEN MOSS:  Oh, my goodness, you are an amazing, but a passionate woman. What a pleasure it is for me to interview you.

   JEAN HOUSTON:   Where do you live? You’re here in my town.

   MAUREEN MOSS:  I’m your neighbor.

   JEAN HOUSTON:  Where do you live in Nashville?

   MAUREEN MOSS:  Are we going to talk about this now on the air.

   JEAN HOUSTON:  What street do you live on?

   MAUREEN MOSS:  I’ll tell you after. I’m very close to you.

   JEAN HOUSTON:  I’m up on Tillman Creek.

   MAUREEN MOSS:  You’re a stone’s throw away from me. We are neighbors, for sure. We have to talk the passion of your life. I have been an avid, avid fan of yours. I’ve sat in many of your audiences and I’ve read all of your books. I know you’re a passionate woman and I want the world to know.

   JEAN HOUSTON:   No one in the world has read all of my books. When I finish one, I never want to see it again so I don’t even know what’s in my books anymore.

   MAUREEN MOSS:  That’s okay. I do and I know so many of us do. So tell me what role has passions really played in leading you, Jean, to the amazing work you have done in the world.

   JEAN HOUSTON:  Well, I would say it is a passion for the possible that was engendered by so many travels before I was 12 years old. I went to 20 schools. My dad was writing the Bob Hope show, as well as other comedy shows at the time, and so we were always on the road. I would just see America. This is America in the 40s and 50s, which was a very different America from today. So that if you went to school in Biloxi, Mississippi one day and Ameche, Minnesota the next, you were in total different realities.

Then, because I would sometimes traverse the same schools every three years, I would notice that the children who were all so feisty and full of energy and delight and intelligence in the first grade, when I would come back three years later and they would be in the third or fourth grade, it was as if half of them had fallen away. They were still occupying their seats, but in a sense they weren’t there any more in terms of their potential.

I said, “What is going on?” I began to get filled with a sense of the necessity to help make the difference in people’s lives. Perhaps the most important experience of my life, or one of the most important, occurred when I was eight years old. My father was writing the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy show. Edgar was a ventriloquist; Charlie McCarthy was his funny little dummy who would set on his lap.

My father said, “Hey, Kiddo, you want to go talk to Charlie.” I said, “Yeah, Daddy, let’s go,” because I loved to talk to the dummy and then I would have Bergen speak through him.  We showed up and Bergen was sitting with his back to us. My father listened because Bergen was talking to Charlie; he was talking to his dummy.  He was talking with great passion to this dummy.

My father said, “I didn’t write that stuff.” Because Bergen was asking his dummy ultimate questions, “Charlie, what is the nature of love?” “Charlie, what does it mean to truly live?” “Charlie, where’s the mind?” Then this funny little dummy with his wooden clacking jaws was saying, “Well, Bergen,” and he would just come out with these brilliant, cosmically luminous answers that represented the finest thinking of the last 5,000 years. Bergen would get so excited and he said, “Yes, Charlie, but what does it mean? Is there life after death?” Questions like that. “Well, Bergen,” and these incredible answers.

My father, who was an agnostic Baptist, couldn’t stand it and he coughed. Bergen turned around, turned beet red, and said, “Hello, Jack. Hello, Jeannie. You saw us.” My father said, “Yeah Ed. What in the world are you doing?”

He said, “I’m talking to Charlie. He’s the wisest person I know.” My father said, “But, Ed, that’s you, that’s your mind coming out of that dummy’s voice.” Bergen said, “Yes, Jack, I suppose, ultimately, it is, but you know when I ask him these questions, and he answers, I haven’t got the faintest idea what he is going to say and what he says astounds me with his brilliance. It is so much more than I know.”

I tell you, friends, it was as if my future walked across me at that moment. I can feel the hair on my head rose and I knew that as we are, compared to the way that we really are, it is as if we’re living in just the attic of ourselves with all the other stories unexplored. I vowed at that point, and that gave me my passion to explore those other floors.

   MAUREEN MOSS:  By really realizing that we are just living in the attic of our life, what an incredible way to consider how we’ve been living life.

   JEAN HOUSTON:  I think that’s true. Two weeks later, I was at my favorite school that I always came back to, PS 6, which was a school that had been championed by John Dewey and his revolutionary education, so we learned mathematics through dancing and singing and drumming. Art was central to the curriculum. But they also did something wonderful in that school; they took us to meet the great elders of the time.

We were trotted across the river to meet Albert Einstein and he’d say, “What do you remember?” All I remember is that he was very big and he had a lot of hair. Then they took us to meet Helen Keller, that luminous lady who was deaf, dumb, and blind. They read to us first from the wonderful autobiography of Helen Keller where she says, “For my first six years of life, I had not concepts whatsoever. My teacher tried in vain to help me associate hand movements, hand tapping with words, I couldn’t get it.

Finally, she pulled me over to the pump and she pumped in one hand a cool clear something and in the other hand, she tapped out “w-a-t-e-r”, and Helen writes, “I stood still, my body wracked suddenly. I understood what teacher was tapping into my hand and that word “water” dropped into my mind like the sun in a frozen winter world and I woke up and I learned the names of 30 things before the end of that day.”

Of course, she went on and became one of the great evocators of the possible human in so many people. Then we were taken to meet her and she spoke to us, the fourth grade, in that luminous voice of someone who has never heard speech. At the end of her talk, they said, “Does any child wish to come up to speak to Ms. Keller and my hand shot up. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I knew that I had to say something.

So I went forward and with her entire hand, she placed it over my lips, the center of her hand on my lips. With her fingers, she read my expression. I blurted out with a child’s savage honesty, “Why are you so happy?” She laughed and laughed and laughed and she said, “My child, it is because I live each day as if it were my last. Life and all its moments are so full of glory.” That’s what she sounded like. “Life and all of its moments are so full of glory.”

Was she damaged, I suppose so. Was she damaged? Not at all. She had rewoven the remaining filaments of her senses into a web in which she caught all of reality.

Those two experiences, the Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen experience of hearing what is really in the deep mind when we allow it to come through. The experience of seeing Helen Keller with her incredible, incandescent kindness, loving brilliance in spite of the way that she came into the world, by the time she was 19 months anyway, that made the biggest impression and it impelled me in the passion for the possible.

   MAUREEN MOSS:  Did that experience, and with Charlie as well, have you really fostering the ideas about writing what became your autobiographical book of mythic life?

   JEAN HOUSTON:  Well, I think that those kinds of ideas which are filled in the story. It’s very interesting, Maureen, but when you have certain kinds of experiences and you accept them, positively creative experiences, then, I’m sure you found it in your own life and the people listening to this call, they tend to become recurrent with variations, like a fractal theme.

So that this kind of fractal of being in the right place at the right time to meet the right person who then added to the agenda, the arena of my exploration continued for me, because I appreciated it. What you appreciate always appreciates, doesn’t it?

   MAUREEN MOSS:  It does. Is it our natural ability to gain a passion for the possible just by using the greater use of our innate potential?

   JEAN HOUSTON:  I think that the greater use of our innate potential is certainly a very major way. However, we have to remember that one of the greatest potentials we all have is sloth. So you have to find, as my old friend Joe Campbell used to say, “Follow your bliss.”  Now everybody gets that all wrong. What he really said was, “Follow your bliss and it will take you down deep, deep, and deep into places you never expected to go.”

For example, you and I live in probably the best town in the United States. I think you would agree. We’re like in ancient Athens; we have the greatest art, music, theater, people, more mind and body workers per square block than anyplace in the whole world. I live, you know where I live, I live in a house that was designed by Bucky Fuller before he died. I walk in those woods with my dogs and between dogs and nature, I become utterly ecstatic and filled with the sense of the possible and the impetus to get on with it.

What is it that activates you? Is it dancing? Is it singing? Is it mediation? Is it journaling? Is it loving? Is it traveling? Everybody should spend at least a small portion of each day in doing that which delights them and certainly some significant proportion of each year going into the place that juices you, that turns on the current, that activates the evolutionary latencies.

   MAUREEN MOSS:  Is that why you wrote A Passion for the Possible, Jean, to really get that message out, to activate and imbue that flame of life and passion in us?

   JEAN HOUSTON:  Yes. I would say so and I wrote it during a kind of dark period in my life. It was a time that the newspapers were all after me for something that never happened, because I was working with Mrs. Clinton and helping her write a book called, It Takes a Village to Raise a Child and they thought that I had done a séance in the White House, which I had not. I merely asked Mrs. Clinton what would you have said to Mrs. Roosevelt about making a better life for children? That’s all it was to it, but you know what happens with the press.

It was literally like half of my professional life just fell away with all of this nonsense. So I was in this dark place and I find that when you are in a place of psychic flatland, or darkness, that is the time to go even deeper and to burrow into who and what you really are, to come back to the ground of your being and say, “What is it that I really once knew that I can now express in a new way with the shadows, the lacrimae rerum, the tears that aren’t things, the shadows that activate the great light that is really within you.” That is why I wrote Passion for the Possible.

   MAUREEN MOSS:  Which is phenomenal. In it you talk about us going about preparing ourselves. Back in ’97 when you wrote that about preparing ourselves to become stewards of the planet, filled with enough passion for the possible to partner one another to the greatest social transformation ever known. Let’s talk about that for a minute.

   JEAN HOUSTON:  Well, I believe that we are in the most critical time in human history. Other times in history thought they were it, but they were wrong. This is it. This is a time of whole system transition in which, literally, everything is up for grabs and I might also add that I feel very interested in this year, 2007.  I think it’s going to be one of the most significant years of our lifetime.

   MAUREEN MOSS:  Why do you say that, Jean?

   JEAN HOUSTON:  I don’t know. It’s just something that seems to me to be true, and as a student of history observing the patterns and recurrence of history, I think that this we are moving to what is sometimes called a unique moment, a kyrotic moment, a singularity in which we really are turning the page on history as we have know it.

There’s just too many factors, not only the great challenges, but factors of new coherence, greater understanding. I mean the understanding that is coming to us now about the nature of the universe that we are very likely looking at some of the new principles coming out of quantum physics and the great energetic systems that we find at the zero point energies.

That reality is really primed by a huge consciousness and that we are God stuff incarnate in space and time. We are the life of God individuated in time. We have access to these domains and dimensions of knowledge, of data, of understanding from literally all over the universe. We are constituent parts of a great hologram or, as the Buddhist Kama Sutra of the second century, said in the realm in the web of Indra, the reality of Indra, meaning God. There is a great network of jewels and to step into one or look at one is to set them all ringing and to see all of the others at the same time.

We are holonomic, holographic beings having access to totality at any moment. These things that are now underpinned by the new science is giving us a prospective on our reality and our greatness that hither to would have seemed more mythic than real, but now we are living in mythic times. We are missing links, whether we like it or not, which is why I found in a lot of my work, as you may know, that to tempt the great myths, the myths of the quest for the grail, the myths of death and resurrection, the myths of the great lives and legends, the myths of those who have chosen to push the membrane of the possible and enter into the larger life.

I find that these great myths give us the personal particulars of great existence, of universal existence, and then activate our local existence because a myth is something that never was but is always happened. It is the coded DNA of the human psyche that gives us the rest of the plan for the journey of our lives and tells us, “By golly, it’s time to wake up now.” This is a time of colossal awakening. 

   MAUREEN MOSS:  Indeed. You know, I think it would be great here and I know in Passion for the Possible, you wrote about the four levels of our being. I think that would be really helpful for us to talk about right now. What do you think?

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