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Interview with Jean
Houston
THINKING ALLOWED
MISHLOVE: Well, I guess the trick is instead of thinking of the multicultural society that we have as something that's pulling us down, as some people suggest, to think of it rather as an asset. HOUSTON: It's an immense asset. Yes, it's thought of as being a non-asset, because we have not yet learned how to deal with it. But it is inevitable. The whole world is going to be multicultural within about a hundred years. I sometimes think, you know, that as species die off -- what are the present statistics? One every twenty-five minutes or something? -- it's almost as if human beings are creating new cultures and subcultures. Some of us are members of many cultures. You're a member of -- if I were to say, "How many cultures do you belong to?" MISHLOVE: Possibly a dozen. HOUSTON: Name some. MISHLOVE: Well, of course I have my Jewish background. But I'm a member of an academic culture. HOUSTON: All right; academic. Jewish background, Jewish culture. MISHLOVE: Right. I'm a psychologist. HOUSTON: Psychologist culture. MISHLOVE: I have a specialty in parapsychology. HOUSTON: Parapsychologist culture. MISHLOVE: One of my great thrills is to have participated in Jean Houston's Mystery School. HOUSTON: Mystery School culture; very definite culture. MISHLOVE: I have a family. HOUSTON: Family culture. MISHLOVE: I belong to a community in California. I have a culture as a broadcaster. HOUSTON: Broadcaster culture. So
we would easily come up with perhaps a couple of dozen. And each of these
cultures is feeding you. Now, the problem is -- or the great opportunity
-- is how to make these different cultures mesh with another person's twelve
or fifteen cultures, and at the same time have access to your own depth
culture. See, many of us are foreigners to our deep culture, the spiritual
culture within -- you know, what I sometimes refer to as the beloved of
the soul, of the deep culture. We often have been afraid of this deep culture,
in fact have said, "Here there be monsters," because we're afraid of the
immense depths that are within us, the culture of our own private interior
space. And that itself is both a savage and beautiful country, and it is
rising up, this deep culture, all over the world. As cultures are becoming
more permeable, more vulnerable to each other, the deep culture of our
own interior space is rising up to give us
MISHLOVE: Well, Jung certainly
talked about the collective unconscious that manifests in dreams as embodying
all cultures. That's why he called it the collective
HOUSTON: We share it, and we seem to have very similar patterns within this depth culture. But still within each individual I find that, you know, we're not flakey, we're snowflakey. Each of us has not only unique capacities of body, mind, of intelligence. Our brains -- our brainprints, if you will -- are ten thousand times more different than our faceprints. And if we get into the deep intrastructure of our psyche, that's even much more various, while it has some commonalities. MISHLOVE: Yes, yes. It's as if the complexity within us is so vast that we have no words or symbols even to express it. HOUSTON: Well, the problem of course
is the English language. English is a harvested language. It's not necessarily
an organic language. It's a language that
MISHLOVE: Yes. HOUSTON: It's very different. I mean, for example, the original -- MISHLOVE: Chaucer. HOUSTON: Chaucer, Chaucer. Now, listen to how it sounded: "[In Middle English accent] Whan that Aprille with his showres soote / The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour, / Of which vertu engendred is the flour; / . . . Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages." The rootes and the shootes -- even if you don't understand it, it rises up in the sap. I have little children in schools learning that, and then, by God, they don't fall back to: "What do you want to do?" "Oh, I don't know; what do you want to do?" Or Shakespeare's English. Now, Shakespeare's English was very flexible. "Now I am alone. / O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! / Is it not monstrous that this player here, / But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, / Could force this soul to his own conceit," etcetera. Now, you see, that was Renaissance language. And in the Renaissance, when everything is popping out, in which the world, the golden world within is flowing into the world without, and the world is becoming psychetized with the new images of the psyche that are rising, in that, the speech patterns were so different that it was as if the head became -- the brain-mind system became a kind of sound box. MISHLOVE: More of the brain is
involved.
End Part 2 of 3 parts
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