Interview with Jean Houston
Possible Human, Possible World
Part 3 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

MISHLOVE: There is a wonderful story you tell me about your encounter in Australia with an Aborigine woman. 

HOUSTON: Yes, yes, that was wonderful -- several years ago. We were in the center of Australia, and she was showing me how to find food. And I said, "Well, how can you find food here? I mean, it's barren; there's nothing here." 

And she said, "What is it? You don't see? Look at these beautiful grasses. Sip this wheat resin. Ah! Isn't that beautiful! Look! You see that sink over there, mate? Under that, oh, look what we're going to find. Oh, a beautiful tuber! Ah, under that rock there -- oh, lovely mealy grubs! What a dinner we're going to have! How can you live seeing as little as you do?" How indeed? I mean, here she was leading my blind urbanity to see nature's secrets. And then I asked her, "How do we different human beings differ from the others -- from the koala bear, from the wallaby, from the kangaroo, the animals?" She says, "Why, mate, we're the ones who can tell the stories about all the others." And that is our humanity, you see -- that we tell the stories, that we see the larger picture, that we have access to the pattern that connects us. 

MISHLOVE: It's interesting that some of the most ancient, most primitive cultures -- and surely the Australian Aborigines are among -- 

HOUSTON: Perhaps the oldest, yes. 

MISHLOVE: They have that great gift of storytelling that's often lost to modern culture. Jung talks about modern man in search of a soul. 

HOUSTON: In search of a story is what it's more like, yes. That's already an abstraction, in search of a soul. Yes, you know, I think one of the problems is when we got the television set it replaced the hearth, didn't it? It was at the hearth that the grandparents or the elders told the stories, and the great chain of being between the generations was woven, and the wisdom was passed on. And now, you know, the grandparents have moved elsewhere, often south, and we're left with the television set. But we're also being given access, and more and more, to everybody's stories, to everybody's myths. And also the sense that we are now all in it together, in perhaps the greatest moment in human history, in which we are recreating the earth story. 

MISHLOVE: Well, here we are, living at a time where humanity as a whole is faced with its potential for self-annihilation. 

HOUSTON: Yes. 

MISHLOVE: And at the same time, these great myths are rising up, and there's this yearning for myth. And each myth has its own embodiment of a sense of the divine. And it's ironic to me, I think it's significant, that as we face our own potential death, that we are reminded of our divinity. 

HOUSTON: Yes indeed. I'm thinking now of the greatest Western myth. One of the key myths of the Western world is the search for the Grail. You find that is a very key myth, and in that story, the world is a wasteland. It has lost its story; it's lost its depths. And the Fisher King, who holds the secrets of the Grail, himself can only fish because he's so deeply wounded. And the knights from Arthur's court and the healers come day and night to try to help him, but nothing works.

And one day the chosen knight, whose name is Percival, or Parsifal -- his name means "piercer of the veil" to the larger story, or Parsifal, "total fool," because the total fool, the great comedian, the fool, is often the piercer of the veil. But he's just had a Ph.D. in knightcraft; you know, he's learned too much, and he knows that a good and perfect knight doesn't ask too much. He stays quiet. So this Grail is being passed in his midst of the Fisher King, and he says, "Uh --," and he doesn't ask the question. And the next morning, after he wakes up, the castle is empty, and he goes out and spends somewhere between five to seven years doing his job with no passion -- so much like ourselves; we miss our great moments. We spend seven years doing what we're supposed to do, but with no passion, with no heart, and with no story. 

MISHLOVE: Because he failed to ask. 

HOUSTON: He failed to ask the great question, and it is only after he has accumulated a great deal of human experience and a great deal of extremely hard-won wisdom, and has cracked through the membrane of his own forgetfulness, that he is then able, in the course of the story, to go back to the castle years later, and
this time he does not stand on ceremony. He goes and says, "Who serves the Grail?"; in some stories, "Where is the Grail?" The Grail appears. And then "Uncle,
what ails thee?" -- the question of compassion. 

And instantly the Fisher King is healed, and the wasteland is healed. It begins to become green again, and budding
and growing and flowing, and a new energy, a new heart, is in the minds and hearts and beings of the people. 

No one had had enough passion for the possible to
ask the great question: "Where is it? How is it? How am I part of it?" -- the Grail, the source level, the great patterns of existence that are beneath the surface
crust of consciousness. Where is it, and how does it heal and whole? How do we see the pattern of reconnection into the domain of nature, of reality, of spirit?

And that is why the world was failing, from lack of the passion to ask the great question. And I think it's the great Western story, and of course it has been
renewed and is reviving all over the place in movies and films and in stories, because we are back at that place, that we are in a wasteland -- a wasteland of heart,
of mind, of ecology, the holocaust of ecology; the diminishing of our resources. 

And we are now saying, "Where is it? What is the secret of nature? What is the secret of the heart? What does it mean to truly love? How can we find our sourcing again?" And the kind of work I do all over the world is essentially to say that the Grail is within. It is there. We have access to these capacities. It is now time for us to learn to use them. 

MISHLOVE: The wounding seems so significant here. 

HOUSTON: Yes. Wounding is critical to every great myth. Christ must have his Crucifixion, otherwise no upsy-daisy, you know. Artemis must kill him who comes too close; Dionysius must be childish and attract Titanic enemies and be ripped apart. Achilles heel; Odin's eye. 

MISHLOVE: But there is a sense too, now on this planet, there's such wounding of nature. 

HOUSTON: Such wounding. Oh yes. I mean, wounding of nature and wounding of ourselves. Most of us have somewhere between, I'd say, five to a hundred
times the amount of sheer human experience of our ancestors of a hundred years ago. And this has rendered us very wounded; I mean, some of us are so full of
holes we've become holy. But we've become incredibly available and vulnerable to each other in our wounding, in our sympathies, in our empathies. It's as if that
through the wounding of the hard shell of ego, we are now reaching out and making connections, networking -- friendships, transformational friendships between
men and women, between countries, between cultures. 

So the depths are rising everywhere. And in all the great stories the wounding was the entrance to the
sacred. It was through the wounding that the depths could rise. And the depths are rising at the same time as are all the shadows, of course. 

MISHLOVE: Do you find in your journeys around the world that in the affluent areas, where people are very comfortable and maybe less aware of their
wounding, that there's maybe less interest in asking the deep questions, like "What ails the --" 

HOUSTON: No. No, you'd think the answer would be that is so, but it isn't. I find that the asking of the question is literally pansystemic. It is Pangaia. I mean, it's
as if the whole earth is asking, whether it be somebody who is living very simply in the center of Australia, but profoundly -- and these primitives are not primitive; they are primal, they are filled with the consummate wisdom of forty thousand years -- or whether it is some sort of high-tech cyber-nerd, you know, in California. Everybody is living in a state of divine discontent and extraordinary outreach to the larger story. 

MISHLOVE: You often use this phrase. When I ask you, "What is your work about? What is your real message?" you've told me in the past that it is simply this:
This is the time. We are the people. 

HOUSTON: These are the times. We are the people. If not now, when? If not you, who? -- as Hillel said two thousand years ago. And all of us are serving as midwives, as evocateurs of the possible in each other. And we can only do it together. There's no such thing as a guru anymore. I mean, guru should be spelled "Gee, You Are You." And that's ultimately what my work is about. 

MISHLOVE: We have just a couple of minutes, Jean. Is there some final thought you'd like to leave with our viewers? 

HOUSTON: A final thought! What an extraordinary idea that there is a final thought. I think my final thought is there's no such thing as a final thought -- that we are really part of an ongoing story, a never-ending adventure; that these are the most exciting times in human history; that what we do profoundly makes a difference. But one thing that I advise people to do so that they don't get lost in their own loneliness is to find a few friends, and to start a teaching-learning community, an ongoing teaching-learning community, in which they grow together, in which they challenge each other, in which they do perhaps physical or
mental or psychological or spiritual processes, so that they really keep themselves at the growing edge. Once they start they will know what to do. 

Margaret Mead on her death bed -- I was very close to Margaret Mead, and she said to me, "Forget everything I've been teaching you about working with governments
and bureaucracies." And I say, "Now you tell me?" And she laughs; she says, "Yes. I've been lying here being an anthropologist on my own dying. Fascinating
experience," she said. "There's no hierarchy here." And I realized that if we're going to survive and green our time, it's a question of citizens' groups, volunteer
groups, getting together and creating ongoing teaching-learning communities. 

MISHLOVE: Jean Houston, thanks so much for being with me. 

HOUSTON: Thank you. 

End Part Three of Three Parts
 
 
 
 
 
 

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