Author Forum
Welcome to the new Kosmos Author Forum, where we will host online conversations between readers and our contributing authors and artists. We are excited to launch this new interactive feature with the incomparable Jean Houston, who kindly took time from her busy schedule to speak with us on the phone to answer the reader questions below. We've left her words verbatim to keep the conversational tone.
In the next few months, we will host conversations with Richard Hames, John Räätz, Nipun Mehta, Gerrit Greve, Chris Jordan, all contributors to the Fall/Winter 2009 issue. When our upcoming issue launches in May, we will let you know the new group of participating authors.
Jean Houston, March 2010
Questions inspired by her recent Kosmos essay The Emerging New Story. "The zeit is getting geisty!"
Dr. Jean Houston, scholar, philosopher and researcher in Human Capacity, is one of the foremost visionary thinkers and doers of our time. She has long been regarded as one of the principal founders of the Human Potential Movement and one of the leading experts in the field of myth and archetype. Read more.
Question 1 to Jean Houston: Have you made an attempt to weave the five themes from your article into a new story yourself?
Submitted by: Jean Watts, Facilitative Leadership Institute, New Orleans, LA
These five themes are arenas in which I work all the time. The first one is the repatterning of human nature. A great deal of my work is about human capacity development. I’ve worked for decades in this field and, hopefully, I try to use myself in part as a guinea pig for the repatterning of human nature, especially as it relates to four major levels of the human psyche. One, of course, is sensory and physical enhancement and this has been part of our expertise for many years. At the Foundation for Mind Research and now the Jean Houston Foundation, we have studied and applied the extension of the sensory-based inner senses and outer senses so as to have a more highly attuned functioning of the body-mind. One way to start this attunement is with psychophysical work such as the Feldenkrais type of work that my husband developed in the master’s technique, which is about psychophysical repatterning and restructuring. Then psychologically—really exploring the amplitude of the human psyche. We are not just encapsulated bags of skin dragging around dreary little egos that we have within us. There is a great array of persona of which ego is but only one! Studying the array of persona and what happens when you utilize these different personas—be it healer, meditator, cook, whatever is it—so that we are not caught just in the ego constructs. Studying the phenomenology and generativity of the creative self and how we bring creativity to bear. I’ve done many studies in creativity. And, of course, exploring the question of utilizing time in its many dimensions in many different ways. So that’s just the short answer.
When we get to the mythic and symbolic, I’ve done a great deal of work in mythic structures. A myth is something that never was but is always happening. It is the coded DNA of the human psyche. In my Mystery School, we study the great myths. We take a great myth—say, from Isis and Osiris, to Psyche and Eros, to my favorite, The Odyssey, the great tales of the journey of the hero or heroine, their death and transformation, discovering the insights that allow them to live in a realm of amplified power. And then there’s the question of how we apply these to our own lives, not simply the mythic structures, but also the great legendary mythic heroes of all times—from Odysseus to… even Emily Dickinson, you know, or Thomas Jefferson, or Helen Keller, who wrote a book about that.
Spiritually is where I put a great deal of my emphasis—the mystical path. The path of the mystic provides more evolutionary accelerators than just about any other path.
So those would be examples of how I apply the repatterning of human nature. And then of course, I take this work into the world, to the next level of the repatterning of human societies. This is a great deal of my work in the field that I’ve helped create called Social Artistry, which means human development in the light of social change. I’ve worked in many countries—probably over 100 countries—and intensively in 40 cultures over many years with international agencies, largely with the UN agencies, helping to develop new or evolving structures for societies that can answer the complexities of the times, especially with the UN in terms of the fulfillment of the UN Millennium Development goals.
When it comes to the breakdown of the membrane, this is also work that I do all the time: crossing the great divide of otherness between cultures, between peoples and, of course, within the great structures of the self, of the psyche.
When it comes to the issue of the rising of the depths, that is something I believe is happening. I, myself, have a spiritual practice, which I’ve had all my life. A contemplative practice—and not a day goes by where I don’t utilize that. But also it’s true that the zeit is getting geisty and we live in the time of the rising of spiritual experience as opposed to religious creed or dictums. This is something I find to be universally true.
And then there’s the theme of the breakthrough of the earth. We’re living in the time of the great earth changes and the earth is really demanding of us that we join her in appropriate stewardship, especially around the issues of preservation of the earth and climate change.
We are citizens in a universe larger than our aspirations, more complex than all our dreams. We are cosmic agents on earth in space and time.
Question 2: How does one grow into resilience and what supports resilience in a community and a culture?
Carol Moe
Member of Transition Denver
A lot of resilience comes out of the things that I’ve just spoken about. You simply keep working on yourself. You keep using more of your enormous potential. Part of the great problem of our time is a horrible overuse of the ecology of the outer environment and a terrible underuse of the ecology of the inner self. Keeping one’s self in a state of cooking on more burners, thinking in images, thinking with the whole body, dancing, emoting and incarnating the intention that you have for a larger life—this does make a profound difference to one’s resilience. And to have the passion for the possible that allows one not only to discover what that possible is but also to engage those possibilities in many new ways. When you bring more of yourself to the table, you find that you take initiatives that you would not have before.
We’re living in a time where there has been so much change that the reset button of history has been hit! What one does and how one goes about it and the actions one takes truly will make a difference in whether we grow or die. Ultimately, the answer to that question in my life was when Margaret Mead, on her deathbed, told me to forget about all of the things she had been teaching me about working with governments and bureaucracies. She had a vision that if we were to survive and grow it would be about people getting together in ongoing teaching-learning communities. She said, “Doing your kind of work, Jean, doing other people’s work, but always growing together in small community in body, mind and spirit.”
You have to take on projects that grow out of the larger perspective that you gain through your work on yourself and in community—because community will keep you doing it—and then you go out with these amplified sensibilities and you are able to make a profound difference.
And that’s what provides resilience, I think. It isn’t just sitting around and talking about it. It’s really activating and actualizing one’s potential and this is what I do in communities all over the world. It’s not just grassroots, it’s bodyroots, mindroots, soulroots from which one grows and creates the things that are necessary for society.
Question 3: My worry is the growing mega-corporate domination of public life. How can we transform their greed into generosity? Their "me first" values into "all of us first" values? Their being part of the problem to being part of the solution? Does it start with corporate leadership, shareholders, consumers, or government? Or is this worry just a misconception on my part?
Todd Waymon
Partner, Contacts Count
It’s not a misconception. This is certainly very important. Whether it has the enormous domination that people seem to think it has is another question though. Some people give up because they think it is all corporate, but I think that is a misconception. I know too many people in high places, and middle places, and low places in corporate life who are using their job, their work, their life to better the state of the world. It’s just that we hear about the Bernie Madoffs and the corporate greed people because that makes a much better story. But for each one of those stories, I could give a hundred—well, maybe not a hundred, but a whole lot—stories of people in corporate life who are taking their stewardship and their responsibility very seriously.
But we still have to respond to the man’s question and worry, which are both appropriate and true. The mega-corporations are breaking down and we saw this in the financial realm. You can only get to a certain place of complexity when it doesn’t work anymore. Many people are leaving the mega-corporations or being thrown out of them.
The largest issue to me is how you heal the mega-corporations. One of the things that I’ve been doing is helping to establish teaching-learning communities within the mega-corporations so that people are operating out of a much more creative, healthy and ultimately empathic view. Then they work as world servers, rather than world destroyers. This means involving employees in the mega-corporations in working with kids and hospitals so that they have that human involvement simultaneously with their corporate involvement. That’s what it takes. It takes the hands on, sensory-rich, being responsible (response-able) in community. Then they can bring that back into corporate life.
Finally, I’d advise that this reader get in touch with the Conscious Capitalism people. John Mackey, who is the head of Whole Foods, has helped create that. They have a yearly meeting and they really look at this issue in a critical way. That would be an important lead.
Question 4: International, national and local food security is the biggest issue in the Arctic, the most rapidly changing place on Earth. As the industrial age moves fast-forward in the Arctic, the Yup'ik and Inuit indigenous peoples are being subjected to loss of cultural freedom, destruction of our ancestors’ knowledge, and other forms of oppression. Indigenous culture can provide our planet with solutions of resiliency, adaptation and management for biological integrity in order to survive the climate catastrophes now happening.
With actions such as severely limiting resources that are allocated for Alaska Native Corporations and other Tribes, the state of Alaska is one of the most oppressive regimes to indigenous peoples. What is the best way for Alaskan indigenous peoples to wake up people in the United States and Alaska to stop destroying our culture, spirits and freedom to be human? How can the Tribes provide ways of knowing and wisdom for survival in these changing times?
Carl G. Wassilie
Yup'iaq global citizen, indigenous biologist, member of Alaska's Big Village Network
This is certainly true and yet the irony is that Alaska receives probably more grants than just about any state in the union. At least this was the case when I was working there last year. Why the people are not getting these grants to do these things I do not know. I think that the grants are there.
Indigenous cultures provide us with an enormous set of solutions because they’ve been around much longer than the other, economically dominating groups. So at this time when the survival of the earth is the biggest question, I think indigenous peoples may provide the finest and deepest answers. That has been my experience all over the world, not just with the people of the far north, but also the people of the far south and other places in between.
The strategic issue is that I hope that the indigenous people are using the new extended technologies and interconnectedness (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace) to give courses on the Internet and create a collective outreach of sharing information and training people—training all of us—and not just talking to themselves or complaining. There’s nothing wrong with complaining until it takes the form of being the victim. The story has to be shifted from being the victims to being the leaders, to being the trainers, to being the educators. And I think that would have an enormous effect.
Question 5: How can people best connect online with others to find the best outlets—either jobs or volunteer opportunities—to use their unique talents to improve the state of humanity and/or the planet? What is the most effective website?
Richard Melton
Kailua, Hawaii
That’s a huge question. I can start a liturgy where some of these things are. This is something that would be almost a whole issue of Kosmos Journal.
Let’s see, just to scratch the surface. The UN has a huge listing of international work that you can do and be part of. The Peace Corps. YES! Magazine would have tremendous answers for that. Ode magazine would also have tremendous answers for that.
It’s such a huge question that I feel that it can and should have much more content devoted to it by Kosmos Journal. This is where Kosmos can really create an interrelationship between YES! and Ode and many others that can really begin to provide advice, to be a kind of spider in the center of a huge web.
Just google ‘voluntary organizations’ and you’ll find an enormous amount. But this reader was asking about the most effective website. I’m not sure. I don’t know how to answer that, but I think that’s something that Kosmos can answer.
