Dolphin Relationship Aquarium

Interview with Jean Houston
Possible Human, Possible World
Part 1 of 3 parts

THINKING ALLOWED
Conversations On The Leading Edge
Of Knowledge and Discovery
With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove
COPYRIGHT (C) 1998 THINKING ALLOWED PRODUCTIONS
Reprinted with permission from Thinking Allowed Productions

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to explore human and cultural potential. With me in the studio is
Dr. Jean Houston, a grand master in the field of human potential. Dr. Houston is the director of the Foundation for Mind Research in New York. She is the
director of the Human Capacities Training Program, a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and was chosen the Teacher of the Year by
the National Association of Teacher Educators in 1985. Dr. Houston is the author of twelve books, including Mindgames, The Possible Human, The Search for
the Beloved, The Hero and the Goddess, Godseed, and Lifeforce. Welcome, Jean.

JEAN HOUSTON, Ph.D.: Thank you, Jeffrey.

MISHLOVE: What a pleasure to be with you again.

HOUSTON: It's a pleasure to be here.

MISHLOVE: Your career in human potential goes back a very long way, and I think there are many stories from your childhood that have to do with it. As a
child you grew up knowing Teilhard de Chardin, and we can talk about that. But I think one of the most interesting things about your childhood is the
remarkable father that you had who was a humorist and wrote jokes for Bob Hope --

HOUSTON: Everybody, everybody.

MISHLOVE: And many of the great humorists --

HOUSTON: Yes. Amos and Andy, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly -- all of them. And I went to twenty-nine schools before I was twelve, you know, because Dad was always on the road writing these shows. I mean, I would go to school in Biloxi, Mississippi one day and Bemidji, Minnesota the next. And in those days it was like literally going from Mars to Earth, the different realities. But I think I got interested in human potentials because of my father's career. I
was just remembering how one of the most thrilling things that ever happened to me was when my father said to me when I was eight years old, "Hey kid, do you want to come and talk to Charlie?" -- Charlie McCarthy, the dummy of Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist.

MISHLOVE: I remember. I was very young at the time.

HOUSTON: He wore a little tuxedo and was full of wise-cracking remarks. And I used to love to go and talk to him, because we would have these marvelously
funny conversations, with Charlie sitting on Bergen's knee. And I said, "Let's go, Daddy." So we went, and there was Bergen in his hotel room, and the door was open. So we just walked in because we heard voices, and there was Bergen, talking to Charlie, with his back to us, asking Charlie ultimate questions: "Charlie, what is nature of life? Charlie, what does it mean to be truly good? Charlie, where is the soul?" And this little dummy was answering with the wisdom of the universe. It was as if all the greatest philosophical minds of five millennia were condensed inside that little wooden head and coming out of those little
wooden jaws.

And Bergen got so excited at these extraordinary, numinous answers that he said, "But Charlie, Charlie, how can we ever really know anything? Charlie, what or who is God?" I mean, no slouch he, for questions. And the little dummy would listen and then pour out these incredible gems of high crafted wisdom. And my father, who was an agnostic Baptist, got very embarrassed by these answers, and he coughed.

And Bergen turned around and turned beet red and said, "Hello, Jack. Hi, Jean. I see you caught us." And my father said, "Yeah, and what are you doin'? I didn't write that stuff. You're rehearsing, aren't you?"
"No rehearsal, Jack. This is real. I was asking Charlie the most important questions, and you heard the answers."

And my father said, "But that's -- that's you,
that's your voice, that's your knowledge coming out of that dummy's mouth." And Bergen said, "Well, yes, 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's going to say, and what he says astounds me with his wisdom. It is so much more that I know."

And I could feel -- I as a little child, eight years old, felt as if my whole future was condensed in that moment -- that as we are, compared to the way we think we are, we inhabit such a tiny part of our reality, maybe the attic of ourselves, with the first, second, third, and fourth floors relatively uninhabited and the basement locked except when it occasionally explodes. And from that moment, my life, in a sense, my life course was set, because I knew that I had to devote my life to helping people access these extraordinary domains of knowledge, of potential, that we all have, but have shut ourselves off from.

MISHLOVE: Since I mentioned Teilhard, I think we should also say you were gifted with a friendship with him as a young child, about the same age also.

HOUSTON: No, I was older. I was fourteen. I once ran into this Frenchman on the street and I knocked the wind out of him, and he said to me, when I was
about fourteen, "Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?" I said, "Yes sir, it looks that way." He said, "Well bon voyage, bon voyage." And I ran to school, and the following week I met him, and we began to take these walks in the park, and they were numinous.

He would say, "[French accent] Oh, Jeanne, Jeanne, look, look, a caterpillar! Hm! Jeanne, what is a caterpillar, huh? Moving, changing, transforming, metamorphosing. Jeanne, feel yourself to be a caterpillar." "Oh, very easily, Mr. --" I called him Mr. Teilhard -- "Mr. Teilhard." "And feel your transformation. Oh, Jean, sniff the wind. [Sniffing] Same wind once knew PSre Jesus-Christ. [Sniffing] Ah, Marie Antoinette. [Sniffing] Ah, Jeanne d'Arc! Be filled with Joan of Arc." It was extraordinary.

Everything was sentient; everything was full of life. He looked at you, he looked at you as kind of a cluttered house that hid the Holy One, and you felt yourself looked at as if you were God in hiding, and you felt yourself so charged and greened with evolutionary possibilities. And I used to go home and tell my mother, "Mother, I met
my own man, and when I am with him I leave my littleness behind." And of course I found out years later, after he had died, it was Teilhard de Chardin I was
meeting.

MISHLOVE: It's an interesting phrase -- "I leave my littleness behind."

HOUSTON: Leave my littleness behind, yes.

MISHLOVE: It seems that for many of us -- I know in my own life -- at times we get so caught up in our littleness we forget there's anything else.

HOUSTON: Well, we don't have time to do that anymore, do we? I mean, we are living in the most complex times in human history. I realize other times in history thought they were it. They were wrong; this is it. I mean, what we do -- in my travels around the world, which now are almost a quarter of a million miles, working in many cultures, in many, many domains of human experience -- I really discover that maybe we have ten or fifteen years of an open corridor to
make a difference.

Many people, all over the world, are really haunted by this. They wake up with a sense that they just cannot live out their lives as encapsulated bags of skin dragging around dreary little egos, and that all the walls are crashing down. I mean, we have extraordinary -- the membranes have cracked through as cultures begin to flow into each other. We are on the verge of a true planetary culture, with high individuation of individual cultures.

Cultures are becoming more so, not less. The potentials of different cultures -- the potentials, for example, of an African culture that I have studied, which has no history of war, no neurosis as we understand it, incredible problem solving. And when I studied this culture in West Africa, and I saw how they solved problems -- they didn't say,
"Uh, yes, what is it, A, yes, Subsection 1, 2, 3 --" No. First they danced the problem. [Singing] And then they sang it, and they danced it, and then they envisioned it, and then they drew it, and they talked about it, and they danced it, then they breathed it, and they all had the solution. Because they were operating on many, many frames of mind.

In the harvest of world culture that is happening in our time, what we are gaining is not only different frames of mind -- thinking in images, thinking in words, thinking with our whole bodies -- but we are gaining access to the ecology of the genius of the human race. We are all becoming Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, but accessing this incredible domain of the human genius, so that we discover, for example, that we are in a state of
chronic education.

I have never met a stupid child. I have met incredibly stupid systems of education that diminish our ideas of ourselves, that give us a very limited, local notion, and we can't get away with it anymore. And we have incredible access to who and what we are. It's not for nothing that the whole earth as an image is in our mind at the same time as the whole brain, the whole, whole mind, and all these cultures converging, and -- what should we say? We gestate in
each other.

MISHLOVE: I guess there's a sense in which, if we look at the animal kingdom -- how each species manages to develop some unique quality of what an animal
can do -- it's as if cultures each foster different aspects of what it is like to be human, what is possible for a human.

HOUSTON: Yes, I think that is so. And now for the first time in human history, it's as if we have all these cultures that are coming together -- because of planetization, because of the rise of women to full partnership with men in the whole domain of human affairs, because we have such easy access to each other.

By the year 2000 this is going to be a world of colossal busy-bodiness. Anybody will be able to call anybody. I remember a year and a half ago I was in the
Orinoco, deep in the jungle, and out comes from the jungle a man, naked, who probably had never seen a wheeled vehicle, with a transistor radio clapped to his
ear, probably listening to the ball game from Mexico City. So that we have this extraordinary interdependent world, and then of course we have the access to the
understanding of human potentials. We're living in the golden age of the understanding of who and what we can be.

End Part I of three Parts

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