Jean Houston Interview

Summary

Jean Houston describes a childhood experience of profound unity that shaped her lifelong understanding of human potential. The conversation explores accessing deeper layers of wisdom, humanity’s evolutionary possibilities, and the difference between heroic self-discovery and the heroine’s path of helping others.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can a spiritual experience in childhood continue to shape a person throughout life?
• How can people access wisdom and creativity beyond their ordinary knowledge?
• What does it mean to see unity and divinity in all beings?
• How is the heroine’s journey different from the traditional hero’s journey?

Key takeaways

• A powerful experience of unity can become a lasting foundation for spiritual life.
• People may contain far more wisdom and creativity than they consciously recognize.
• Seeing the deeper essence in others can guide compassionate action.
• Periods of chaos and trauma can prompt humanity to evolve beyond familiar patterns.
• The heroine’s journey includes helping others discover their hidden strengths.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if you’ve watched hundreds, you’ve heard me say this over and over again. But if you haven’t, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and check the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll find all the previous ones archived in several different ways.

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❤️ Meeting remarkable people

My guest today is a real honor to have on. It’s Dr. Jean Houston, PhD. First I’ll read her little bio and then make a few comments. Jean is a scholar, philosopher, educator, and a recognized pioneer of the human potential movement. She’s widely recognized as a visionary leader and multicultural expert. She’s the author of over 30 books exploring human possibilities and positive action in the world, which is interesting because she says she hates to write. So maybe she’s masochistic, I don’t know.

She served as an advisor in human and cultural development for UNICEF and to national and international heads of state. She actually helped Hillary Clinton write that book, It Takes a Village to Raise a Child. Jean has devoted her life to developing processes to activate the latent abilities in individuals, groups, organizations, and societies.

Over the last 60 years, Dr. Houston has worked in over a hundred—I think it’s 109 countries now, right?

Jean: That’s right.

Rick: As an international speaker and teacher. She is the Chancellor of Meridian University and a dedicated champion of the human spirit.

So thank you, Jean, and thank you so much for—she’s probably spent a total of about three hours working through technical things to get this to work, so I really appreciate your patience and perseverance and laboring through that with us.

You know, it’s said in Buddhist and Hindu circles that we have a huge mountain of karma and that when we come into this life, we couldn’t possibly take the whole mountain with us. We wouldn’t be able to work that much off, so we just take a little bucket or a suitcase, and that’s what we work off in this life.

So I feel like you kind of represent a huge mountain of wisdom and experience, and in the past week I’ve only been able to take a little bucket from that mountain that I’ve been working through, primarily in the form of listening to a number of your interviews and talks, and also reading these two books, which is what my local library happened to have: The Wizard of Us, which is a sort of deep analysis of the story of The Wizard of Oz, and Mystical Dogs, which is a story of many of the dogs you’ve owned over the years and equally deep considerations of the lessons you’ve learned from and with those dogs.

But if my suitcase or bucket doesn’t happen to match yours, and if there are things that I don’t know about you or don’t think to ask, or anything else that comes to mind during this interview, please feel free to just lead us off in any direction that you’re inspired to do.

Jean: Thank you.

Rick: Yeah. So one interesting thing about you that one learns when beginning to become familiar with you is that you have met and befriended an incredible range of people, everything from Ronald Reagan—although he wasn’t so much of a friend because he tried to take your dog away.

Jean: That’s right, tried to buy my dog.

Rick: Yeah, he tried to buy your beloved Chickie, I believe the dog’s name was. Eleanor Roosevelt, Edgar Bergen, who was the ventriloquist who had the puppet Charlie McCarthy, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Abraham Maslow, Joseph Campbell, Margaret Mead, Hillary Clinton, and I’m sure dozens of others that you could name.

So wow, you have some interesting karma in terms of meeting these brilliant, influential people and being one yourself. I guess it’s birds of a feather kind of a thing. I suppose one of the earliest—well, maybe you’d like to comment on what I’ve said so far before I launch into something.

Jean: Well, it’s true I’ve been extremely fortunate in having met some of the most interesting people of the last three centuries. I mean, I’ve known plenty of people who were born in the 19th century. In fact, I remember when I was three years old, I attended probably the last march of the Civil War veterans on both sides.

An old man came up to me, an old Confederate fellow. He was very tall, or I was very short, and he leaned down and took my hand. He said, “Little lady, you’re shaking the hand that shook the hand of my papi, and my papi shook the hand of Jefferson.”

Rick: Wow.

Jean: Thomas Jefferson. So, you know, some people have a kind of fractal return for certain kinds of events and patterns, and mine has always been that I seem to have been—I’m like the female Forrest Gump, you know. I seem to have been in the right place at the right time to meet these people.

I met Teilhard de Chardin by literally running into him and knocking him down, and he picked me up. He said, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?” I said, “Well, it looks that way.” He said, “Well, bon voyage.” I said, “Bon voyage.”

The Evolutionary Agenda and the Universe Within

Thereafter, for almost three years, off and on, we met and walked in Central Park together, which got me started in my interest in the whole evolutionary agenda, which is both part of our human givenness, with all its problems and glory, as well as perhaps the fact that we don’t just live in the universe, but the universe lives in us.

Thereafter, for almost three years, off and on, we met and walked in Central Park together, which got me started in my interest in the whole evolutionary agenda, which is both part of our human givenness, with all its problems and glory, as well as perhaps the fact that we don’t just live in the universe, but the universe lives in us.

Rick: Now, as I was reading and listening to various things about you, one of the first experiences that jumped out to me, at least, as being really pivotal in your spiritual awakening was when you watched the movie Song of Bernadette with your father, which is a wonderful little movie. You know where I’m going with this, so why don’t you take the story from there?

Jean: Well, my father was an agnostic Baptist in Texas, married to my mother, who was a Sicilian Catholic. My mother was born in Sicily. Her name was Maria Annunciata Seraphina Graziella Fiorina Perpetua Tadaro, married to Jack Houston of Texas.

He had to become Catholic to marry my mother, but he and the priest traded jokes instead of theology, and the priest finally said, “Jack, you’re just a natural-born pagan. Here, I’ll give you a learner’s permit so you can get married, but if any kid comes along, you’ve got to raise them Catholic.”

So when I was five years old, my father was kicked off the Bob Hope show for an excess of high spirits. This happened quite frequently.

Rick: Spirits meaning of the alcoholic type, I suppose you mean.

Jean: No, no, no, I mean just his energy was—

Rick: Hilarity and whatnot. Okay.

Jean: That’s right. So anyway, he remembered his promise, and we found ourselves living with my mother’s parents in Brooklyn, New York—or Brookalina, as my grandmother called it—and were sent to Catholic school.

Well, everything was fine except my father would gag at my catechism and give me the most interesting questions for the horrible little nun every morning. “Sister Teresa, I counted my ribs and I counted Joey Bonjabella’s ribs, and I want to know: if God made Eve out of Adam’s rib, how come?”

And I would have all the children lift their undershirts to prove that the girls—we all have the same number of ribs. “Sister Teresa, when Jesus rose, was that because God filled him full of helium? Sister Teresa…”

And then the big question, the big one that haunts the mind of every little Catholic child: “Did Jesus ever have to go to the bathroom?”

Sister Teresa blew up, and every time I asked a question—which I did every day—she added a million years or so. At the end of the first grade, I had 300 million years in purgatory to my credit on this big sheet: “Jean Houston’s years in purgatory.”

I went home crying because I could not believe this stupid stuff, and my father roared with laughter. He said, “Come on, kiddo, I’ll show you what they did to a real saint.”

He threw me on his shoulders and ran past the Sicilian neighbors going, “Purgatory, purgatory, purgatory, purgatory, purgatory, special.” And the Italian Sicilian neighbors would say, “Hey, there goes crazy Jack, crazy Jack, you’ll go kill a bambino.”

And so we went to see The Song of Bernadette, which was so beautiful.

Rick: Great movie, yeah.

Jean: Everything was fine, and the old lady sitting next to me, with her chest full of holy medals, would say, “Eee, che bella questa sante!” What a beautiful saint, you know. And then came the great moment where the Virgin Mary appears in the grotto to Bernadette. All of us are in this rapture of religious devotion. It’s really quite a beautiful scene.

When suddenly this horrible, mule-like, Whittian laugh begins to fill the entire theater, and it is coming from my father, who’s in complete hysterics. “Ha ha ha ha!”

“Daddy,” I said, “stop that. This is the holy play.”

“I know, but do you know who is up there playing the Virgin Mary?”

“No, Daddy, who?”

“Linda! I met her last year at a party in Beverly Hills. Linda Darnell! Hot dog! I told her she’d go far!”

The Sicilians were all making very nasty gestures at me. I said, “Daddy, get out of here. Go to the bathroom,” which he did, and he came back in still displaying the same hilarity.

Well, going home, I am full, full of purpose. I know I have to see the Virgin Mary, and I run home. I run up to where we had a guest room and a closet that was empty because my puppy, Chickie, had just filled it with her own nine puppies. I got the puppies out of the way, and I began to figure that it looked just like the grotto.

I began to pray, “Lord, please, please, please show up in the closet for me the way you did for Bernadette.” I would count to ten, and I would give up candy. I’d give up candy for six months, and I counted to higher and higher numbers. There were always more puppies back in the closet because poor old Chickie kept bringing them back.

Finally, I said, “Virgin Mary, I’ve given up everything. I don’t know what else to give up. Please show up.” I said, “I’m going to count to whatever it was—a hundred and sixty-eight or something—and please show up.”

I closed my eyes, and I could almost feel her coming. I knew she was flying over the Brooklyn Bridge looking for me. Finally, I opened my eyes: no Virgin Mary. Chickie had gotten all nine puppies back in the closet. I gave up, and I got up.

I had no thoughts whatsoever. I went over to the window seat and looked down and saw my grandfather, Prospero Tadaro, putting the smudge pots under the fig tree. He knew of his feet only by rumor. He was so heavy.

Anyway, suddenly the whole reality opened up. I didn’t see or hear anything different, but all of reality was there. I knew that I, the fig tree in the yard, my grandfather, my idea of the Virgin Mary, new wheat in Kansas, the little boy outside of Iowa—I think it was Iowa—as we went by in the train, who would wave his hand at me, and the autistic man who sold comic books outside a Bloomingdale’s—all of reality was there.

The fish and Sheepshead Bay, old ladies dying in Shore Road Hospital—it was like what we now know as a vast hologram, in which everything was united with everything else in this great fellowship of great oneness.

The Joy That Spins the Universe

Then I could hear my father enter downstairs laughing, and immediately all of reality began to laugh. Years later, when I could read Dante in the original, I came across the great lines, “Gaurizzo l’universo,” the joy that spins the universe. That is what it was, and it was so powerful—so powerful was that experience—that it really sustained me for the rest of my life.

All of reality was there.

I never had an experience like that again, but I saw the unity of all being. Then, of course, in recent years, I spent a lot of time studying quantum physics, which also addresses that fact: that we are, if you will, part of that unified field, God-stuff, if you will, immersed in this biodegradable space-time suit that we wear. We have access to that kind of totality, as I did when I was five or six years old.

Rick: Even though you never had another peak experience like that, perhaps, I get the impression that it altered you in a way that was abiding—that you never went back to the way you had been.

Jean: Well, I can’t. I mean, the way I had been had been as a child.

Rick: Yeah, but something shifted.

Jean: Something shifted, as if infinity became—not nonlocal, but local for me.

Rick: Yeah.

Jean: And I was always in that state of, what should we say, radical empathy and radical immanence. That’s the saying.

Rick: Yeah, always meaning you continued to be that way.

Jean: I think so. Even during the nasty parts, or the downers, of my life, it was always there as an undergirding beingness.

Rick: Yeah. I’m sure it is. That’s what most people say about spiritual awakenings: when they happen, they can be quite flashy or dramatic or interesting or whatever, but after a while, one returns to normalcy. Yet something has been incorporated or integrated, and so you actually might be living the same state, but it doesn’t seem unusual. You just take it for granted because it’s become part and parcel of your ordinary functioning.

Jean: Well, it allowed me to continue to see this in other people.

Rick: Yeah.

Jean: I mean, if I have any gift at all, that is it: to see the God in hiding, to see that this is part of the great unity. Even though people are behaving terribly, I continue to see them and then create processes, ideas, and interactions that would be able to evoke this essence, this primordial essence that we all contain, and to see it. It’s its own unique, remarkable, strange reflection that is there—a reflection.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a line in the Gita about the sage being able to see the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self.

Jean: Yes, yes.

Creativity and the imaginal realm

Rick: Yeah, nice. So, going from the sublime to the mundane again, we can keep swinging back and forth. Your father was a writer for the Hope Show.

Jean: Yes, and Burns and Allen and Fibber McGee and Molly and all of it.

Rick: And Abbott and Costello, I think. Didn’t you say he wrote “Who’s on First?”

Jean: All right, this is what he did. He was with Abbott and Costello when they were in vaudeville, and that bit actually began as a vaudeville piece. Then my father was also working on the movie in which it occurred, which was a baseball movie in 1941.

My father claimed to have written the joke, which I think he did, but when you look at the joke itself, it’s Talmudic. It’s a Jewish joke, it really is. So I think it was my father and two Jewish guys, because I think they claim it also. It really was.

A lot of the jokes that came out of Hollywood, especially in the ’60s, were written by a few non-Jewish writers and a lot of Jewish writers, because comedy was a sort of Jewish cottage industry then, and even now. So that’s what I really think it was.

Rick: It’s true. For some reason, a lot of comedians seem to be Jewish. For a culture that has actually seen more than its share of tragedy, they seem to have an edge in terms of comedy, and maybe there’s a connection there.

Jean: Well, when you look at the way that you study Torah with a whole group of guys, and you take that same group of guys studying Torah and davening and trying to work to elicit the admiration of the rabbi, it is very similar to what would happen, let’s say, in the old RCA Building, where you have the same guys fifty years later trying to get a smile out of Sid Caesar or something like that. So they have the same parallel.

When you look at rabbinical work with the Torah and the interaction of the young students, it’s very similar to what happens in comedy.

Rick: Interesting. Now, don’t forget as we go along: anything that pops into your head, feel free to take us off on a tangent, and we’ll do that. Meanwhile, I’ll just keep leading us through some points that have jumped out at me.

One was an interesting story you told about Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, where he was in a hotel room and you kind of came up behind him without his knowing it and overheard him interacting with his dummy. Go ahead, tell us that one.

Jean: Well, yeah, Dad was writing for Edgar Bergen at that time, and he would take me everywhere. He said, “Hey, kid, you want to go talk to Charlie?” Charlie was the little mannequin, the little puppet, and I loved to do that because Bergen would then interact with me through the puppet. We would have to say funny things to each other, and I loved doing that.

So we went up to the hotel room, and he didn’t hear us, but he was talking to Charlie. Edgar Bergen was talking to Charlie with great intensity and fascination because he was asking Charlie ultimate questions.

“Charlie, what is the nature of love? What is faith? What does it mean to be a full human being? What is the difference between mind and reality? Why do I feel separate?”

And this little dummy, with his little clacking jaw, Charles would say, “Wow, Bergen!” The wisdom of millennia would pour out of his little clacking jaw, and we could actually see—we were sitting, and he was sort of catty-corner to us—what we could see was Bergen’s mouth making more of a “mmm, rrr, mmmm,” you know.

Rick: Being a ventriloquist, he wasn’t moving his mouth, yeah.

Jean: And yet his eyes—his eyes filled with astonishment. My father, the agnostic Baptist, couldn’t stand it, and he coughed. Bergen turned around and said, “Oh, Jack, you’ve caught us!”

“Yeah, Ed, what in the world are you doing, talking to Charlie?”

“He’s the wisest person I know.”

“Yeah, but that’s you. That’s your mind coming out of that cockamamie dummy’s mouth.”

“I know, I know, but when I ask him these questions and he answers, I haven’t got the faintest idea what he’s going to say. What he says astounds me with his brilliance. It’s so much more than I know.”

What he says astounds me with his brilliance. It’s so much more than I know.

Whoa! I could feel my future walking across my mind at that point.

Rick: Yeah, I’ll bet you’ve had that experience thousands of times when you’ve been up speaking in front of groups, where something will come out of your mouth and you’ll think, “Where did that come from?”

Jean: “Where did that come from?”

Accessing the Mythic Level of Creative Wisdom

Rick: Actually, I think it was in—I don’t remember which of these two books it was in—but I was just reading last night where you were talking about an exercise in which one could sort of go into the mythical level, perhaps it was, where resides all the wisdom of the ages, which great inventors and composers and so on have managed to tap into and have actually attributed many of their works to. One can actually cultivate the ability to do this.

Jean: I mean, so many say, “Whence does it come from?” It is so much more than I’ve ever studied or known. You know, in the classical mystical experience, there is a stage called voices and visions, where the mystic, the enlightened person, or the person who’s in a state of radical creativity just seems to know, begins to experience, and sometimes even discovers things that are much too early in history.

Hildegard of Bingen is a superb example. She was born in 1098 and died around 1183 or something like that. But the music that she composed—some of it was several hundred years ahead of where it should have been, especially in the polyphony of the music—and the ideas that she had about the nature of plants and the nature of psychological states were really extraordinary.

When you look at Leonardo da Vinci, he pursued states of mind, expression, and invention that were hundreds of years ahead of his time. Well, yeah, but we see this all the time. It’s just that those are famous examples. Part of my work has been to work with inventors and creative people and bring them to a state of awareness in which the thing they’re looking for is already there.

It is as if, you know, they say, “On Earth as it is in Heaven.” Let us expand our metaphor of Heaven and say that that’s actually the nature of reality itself. I mean, obviously, there are—you know, if you were now discovering, for example, just in our galaxy alone, how many multiple millions and billions of planets there are, of which at least 10% of the stars have habitable planets.

We are on a medium-sized star in an outer wing of this particular galaxy. I think that’s where they put the Skunk Works. You put your regular businesses on the highway, and then back in the lower forty, you have the place for your experimental lab. It’s almost like this is a laboratory. This is God’s school.

We have enough sufficiency of chaos, consciousness, and complexity to warrant this being a place where we, God’s seeds, filled with enormous levels of yearning, are reaching for something more—which is what I would call speciation, the emergence of the next stages.

But it always seems to occur, if you look at history, in times of trauma and chaos. That sets the fire that is hot enough within us that we begin to go beyond our local history and our local selves and begin to move into something else. That’s why so many people feel a call and they don’t know what it is, but we’re in calling times.

That’s why the Hero’s Journey, which Joe Campbell and I did—we did a number of seminars together—he said, “This is something that we were always looking at.” We did have one big fight, because the call is the first part of the Hero’s Journey, and he didn’t seem to give much credence to a heroine’s journey. You know, a good old 1920s Irishman that he was, even Catholic. When I would talk about the heroine’s journey, he would say, “Well, you do it then. I’ve done enough on the hero’s journey.”

I think what we’re seeing around the world now is a quickening of the understanding of the heroine’s journey. So that’s why I wrote that book, The Wizard of Us, because it’s a classical heroine’s journey.

It differs from the hero’s journey because what does she do that the hero often does not do? She stops along the way and helps people or beings. She takes the Scarecrow down from his pole and says, “Join us, join us,” and helps him discover that, boy, not only does he have a brain, he’s got a very great intelligence.

With regard to the Tin Man, who is caught in his mechanism and is rusted, she oils him and helps him release his true sympathies—the fact that, if not a physical heart, he has an enormous emotional genius. She does the same in her own way with the Lion and lets him find his courage, his fortitude, his strength, and his goodness.

So that’s very different. That is the heroine’s journey, as opposed to just the young adolescent male trying to find himself, fighting his way past his obstructions and his high hormone problems. There are many other things.

Rick: There are about half a dozen points in there that I’d love to expand on with you, but I think maybe I’ll choose one of them. Let me put it this way: A lot of people these days are obviously interested in spirituality and awakening and enlightenment, whatever we want to call it, but I think a lot of times it gets dumbed down a little bit.

People think of it in terms of, “Well, you kind of realize your essential nature, which is unbounded and pure awareness, and in doing so you realize that you are not a person, that you are just this sort of absolute level, and that the world is illusory and not worthy of very serious consideration, and you’re done.”

I think you have a much more nuanced and rich perspective on the whole thing: that this pure absolute, or whatever we want to call it—our true nature—is not just some plain-vanilla field, but is a vast repository of all the intelligence, energy, and creativity that we see expressing itself in the universe, with all its diversity and amazing qualities, and that one can be a co-participant or co-creator in that creative process by tapping into it. Is that a fair assessment of the way you would see things?

Jean: Yes. To start at the basic level of that, we are not encapsulated bags of skin dragging around a dreary little ego. We are organism-environment; we are symbiotic with the whole.

We are not encapsulated bags of skin dragging around a dreary little ego. We are organism-environment; we are symbiotic with the whole.

It’s not just great spiritual wizards who have said that. You find it in the most ancient of literatures, but you certainly find it also in the new physics, which seems to give a new level of metaphor and credence to that.

To give you an example, I have never met a stupid child. I’ve met incredibly systemic and reductionist, mind- and spirit-reductionist forms of education, because a child is already a beingness of wonders. How do you keep the wonder factor going?

That’s why, when I was working with UNICEF and even with the UNDP—the United Nations forms of development, the big developmental part of it—I tried to help shift schools around the world, especially in countries where British imperialism had any foot in them. British-type schools were really pretty terrible, schools that the Brits themselves had abandoned a hundred years before.

We put in schools where art is central to the curriculum, where a child dances and sings and emotes and feels information in multiple ways—the whole body-mind, the whole mind of the whole child.

We find that children do not fail if they’re acting out information, if they’re sculpting it, if they’re singing it and dancing it. I’ve done many, many studies on this. Then you find that the teachers get interested too, and the kids start going to school and loving school, because school becomes an evolutionary quickening and not the place where one is contained and constrained within very limited Western notions of what the mind is—which is not true.

Rick: So I think you wrote a book called The Possible Human or something like that, right?

Jean: Yeah, it was something like that. It was called The Possible Human.

Rick: Yeah. So please describe what you think a human being living his or her full potential would be like. Then a second question from that would be: What would a world be like that was comprised of such people?

Jean: Well, I think that they would have a natural joyousness. That’s first. I think that they would have very rich—I think they do. It’s not what I think; I think it’s what they do. They have access to acute sensory awareness, not just the five senses but probably eight or nine other ones beyond those.

They would also have within themselves what are called the interior proprioceptors, so that they would experience inner music, inner touch, and inner feeling. Thus, you could drop in an idea—any idea—and the idea would then take on a kind of virtual-reality fullness.

When I studied fifty-five of some of the most creative people in North America, among my research subjects was Bucky Fuller, whose last design I live in—the house that he designed.

Rick: Yeah, your house.

Jean: Yeah. Bucky Fuller, Margaret Mead, who worked with me—we worked together for the last six years of her life, and she could essentially live with us part of the time. Here come more dogs.

Rick: Yeah, we’re letting them in.

Jean: Joseph Campbell, and many people whose names you do not know, but who had pushed the membrane of the possible in terms of their own lives. In all cases, they were fascinated by their own minds, and they were spelunkers in the caves of their own creativity. They just used much more of themselves, so they were imaginative.

Imagination is very important, because imagination takes us into the realm of the imaginal—the coded potencies of knowledge and understanding that are there beneath the surface crust of consciousness. Therein, they use their minds and bodies in very different ways, which I teach people how to do, so that you do tap into not just the ground of your being but into the depths of beingness itself, which lies beyond your everyday local use.

We expand use. You know, it just occurred to me when I asked Margaret Mead, “What would you like on your tombstone?” She said something fascinating. She said, “She lived long enough to be of some use.” I thought, boy, that’s what I want on my tombstone.

But it was also that she used, in the best possible way, so much more of herself and didn’t just put it on the shelf like most of us do. She remained, in many ways, childlike. I found this true with Joe Campbell, too—not maybe childlike, but certainly adolescent in some ways—and his joyousness and his bliss.

We would walk together in nature, I remember, and he was happy, happy, just celebrating the sheer, vivid gorgeousness of life. So that’s part of it also.

I would say that their inner life is as rich as their outer life, in fact even richer. Thus, they have access to levels and depths of consciousness that allow them to commune not just with, let’s say, the infinite inside, but to commune with the great archetypal and symbolic structures that themselves are part of this codedness that we have access to, which we’re referring to as the imaginal realm.

Not imaginary, but the imaginal realm. That imaginal realm is very close to what Plato called the eidos, the divine ideas that we all contain, and that’s what also sustains and feeds their creativity.

Rick: So if you had to guess, what percentage of the population would you say are actually functioning like that these days, out of this set of eight billion or so people on the planet?

Jean: I have no idea.

Rick: But I mean, like 1%, half a percent, 10%?

Jean: I don’t know. I mean, let’s put it this way: with all these countries and different cultures that I’ve visited and, in some cases, lived with, I find that when they are in different states, whether they are in ritual states or dance states or states of celebration, I would say that it’s a very high percentage. When they go back to everyday ordinariness, it then shrinks. So it’s not what the percentage is; it’s just what is rising and falling.

Everybody who’s watching this or listening to this knows that they have been in these states where suddenly they are the knower of the knowledge and the knowing. They are the dancer of the dancing and the danced. They are the joke, the laughter, and the laughter itself. It just all comes together, and we all have access to that. So I would say sometimes it’s 50 percent of the human race. Sometimes it’s… I can’t put a number on that. It depends on where you are or where you agree to be, and the great practice of joy. Joy seems to be key here to that opening.

Rick: I think Gallup has done polls which indicate that quite a significant percentage of the population has had glimpses of the kind of thing you’re talking about. And so the question is how to make it more than a glimpse. I guess the question there is, what is it that suppresses or prevents it from being more than a glimpse? Why don’t we function this way all the time, and what can we do on a mass scale to be able to do that?

✨ Collective awakening and social artistry

Jean: Now we’re cooking with gas, okay. All right, one of the things that I’m doing as chairman of the Palace, you know.

Rick: Yeah, explain what the Palace is.

Jean: Well, the Palace is one of the great movie houses built in 1929, before they stopped doing that. It has 3,600 seats and is a place of a great deal of celebration and art, as well as movies. And now we continue to do that. It occupies all of 175th Street and Broadway. I’ll be there in the next few days.

But I have a kind of meta-sangha, you know—sanghas, a meeting of communal minds. In it are Lynne McTaggart, Duane Elgin, the physicist—you get the idea.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve interviewed Duane.

Jean: And we meet often, every week, and we discuss the new physics and the emerging spirituality. One of our members is Lynne McTaggart, who wrote The Field, The Bond, and now The Power of Eight, and The Intention Experiment—what happens when you bring people together in intention.

She has gotten phenomenal results, especially with regard to healing. I belong to a circle here in Ashland. We meet every Monday night when we’re around, and we help people who have healing issues. The healing doesn’t have to be just in the body, though often it is. It could be in the mind or in their sense of limitation. And we see people open up, open up, open up.

I mean, a good friend of mine who was just riddled with cancer is no longer riddled with cancer. He was preparing for his death; he gave everything away. Now I just had dinner with him the other night, and he was in an extraordinary state of ebullience and abundant healthiness. We’ve seen this so much.

So I said to Lynne and my group—and at the Palace also—I said, let’s do it with hundreds of thousands of people. Because Lynne and I had also—it was her project, which I helped with—brought Israelis and Palestinians together to really reach across, to really see each other, and brought people of the Arab Emirates to really see and touch each other by Zoom and livestream. We’ve done that. And then we tried to raise the level of peacefulness in Jerusalem. In fact, after that, we did see this.

But now I said, let’s do it as a great, joyous lifting of spirit around the world. We’ll do it in early 2019, in the spring. We will have this great collective of hundreds of thousands of people tuning in with the intention of lifting the human spirit, lifting the cadence of joy. We’re going to do that. We have the technology to do that, and also everybody will be able to see a lot of everybody else because they will be livestreaming. I’m doing a lot of this now.

Then we’ll have regular follow-throughs of continued connection, but also in spirited communion, if you will. But also knowing that this already brings with it a spiritual momentum, doesn’t it? And then what is the follow-through?

Is the follow-through some of the things that I do? I’ve created a field called social artistry: human development in the light of social change, and the inner development, psychological development, and spiritual development that seems to be necessary to allow a human being, in their lifetime, to achieve a whole new level of understanding, celebrating, and creating with their humanness.

Then there are very real things that they can do, whether it is the Sustainable Development Goals or very real things that they can do in their lives to make the difference, to let them become the difference that makes the difference, so this becomes a worldwide form. This is galloping chutzpah at its best.

Rick: Some people are pretty pessimistic about the prospects of the human race. I mean, there’s an environmentalist or ecologist named Guy McPherson who feels like, “We’re cooked, we’re done, and maybe we have a decade left before everybody dies.” I don’t get the sense that you are pessimistic, but then if you actually look at his facts, there are some pretty serious things that could happen—methane releasing and all kinds of things. So how do you think it’s going to turn around, if it does?

Jean: You use the metaphor—you said we’re cooked—and at one level, if you look at just the logic of it, you would have to say, as we’re going now, by the end of the century there’ll be 150 million humans left who will look awful and will be tripping over abandoned electronic appliances.

Yes, that’s a metaphor, and it’s the kind of metaphor that appeals to the very old brain, the old reptilian-amphibian brain that is trying to keep us safe but is scared all the time. I think, yes, at one level that would be true, but then I say, what else can we cook up?

So I’m trying to find ways of cooking up the human potential, the human capacity, the human… The fact is, I don’t think that a 13.8-billion-year experiment that possibly began with a Big Bang has, at least in our world, reached the point where it’s ready to just finish with us, with the experiment of humans being over. I don’t think that that’s true, and I don’t think it necessarily has to do with running off to other planets. That part may be so.

No, I think that we have barely begun to tap into our higher usefulness and our higher use. I just refuse to believe that. That’s why I’m looking for the moment that would activate the human spirit to begin to act, not in these crazy, giving-up ways.

The devolution that we’re seeing is part of our loss of faith in ourselves and the loss of our beliefs. But because we have no lure of becoming, the old stories are over, or they’ve dropped out. Now we either have to have the regeneration of the story or a whole new story—not only your own unique story, but a collective story coming back into time. That’s what I’m looking for. And there are factors, all kinds of factors, that are rising up and speak to that.

One of the most important, I believe—now remember, since 1958 I’ve been traveling quite constantly over the planet. We’ve seen so many societies, seen their myths, their stories, their creation myths. We’re in the midst of a new creation. A new creation is always preceded by a dissolution. We’re in the time of big-time dissolution, aren’t we? But we’re also in the time of re-creation.

Women’s Partnership in the Life Agenda

What do we see that’s unique? The rise of women all over the world to full partnership with men in the whole domain of not just the human agenda, but the life agenda itself. With women, the emphasis is on process rather than on product, on making things cohere, develop, and grow. That’s one thing.

Another is technology, which can be used for absolute ill or deep goodness, and people being able to connect. Once you can connect in one way, let’s say technologically, then the connection becomes something more than just the technology or the technique. It is already a meta-level. It is a metaphysical level within ourselves and between us that is also arising all over the Earth.

In my walks with Teilhard de Chardin, in the ways we were seeing things, we would talk about that. I was 14 years old, and he would say, “Oh, Jeanne, the people of your time will be taking the tiller of the world, but you cannot go directly. You have to touch every culture, every people.” And that has been possible.

Now we’re not necessarily using it wisely, but all over the world people are looking for ways of wisdom, for the great communion, the great connectivity, and not for following one madman or one leader on a horse. Instead, they are following some kind of instinctive presence, a presencing that is happening. I find it everywhere.

But I do find it, quite frankly, around the world—not just because I’m a woman, but among women. With women, as I said, the emphasis is on process and continuity and making things live and grow. And this, then, you see, is releasing men to be what they can be, instead of following in the ancient patriarchal traditions.

Some new traditions, new possibilities—a whole new world. And it’s there, brimming, and we get pictures of it from all over. We just see it bubbling.

In the days that we’re doing this, we’ve just had an extraordinary funeral that I watched on television with John McCain, who represents both the patriarchy and his moving away from it in his own life in interesting ways. And then there’s Aretha Franklin, who could sing. She had a gospel voice, and she would sing the spirit into whatever was the subject she was singing about, whether it was “Respect” or “Think.” But these are aspects of these different sides of this arising energy. Don’t you find it in your life?

Rick: Yeah. I’ve always felt that—well, firstly, personally, I’ve often felt like an instrument of the Divine, and I think you feel that way too, that there’s something larger that sort of governs my life.

Sometimes people say about this show, for instance, “Oh, it’s such a wonderful thing you’re doing,” and I have to do a double take. I think, “Am I doing anything? What am I doing?” I just feel like there’s…

If we extrapolate out to the world at large, I don’t think that anything ever gets accomplished merely by human effort, because I think that, as we were saying earlier, humans derive their inspiration, intelligence, and ability from something much deeper, which we all share. And that something deeper seems to be rising up now or becoming enlivened.

It’s like if the ground of a forest becomes much more fertile somehow, then all the plants just begin to thrive, and maybe weeds or noxious things that thrive better in infertile soil begin to die.

So I feel that there’s a big shift, as you were saying just now, and a lot of things are dying—structures and systems and ways of thinking that are no longer really sustainable—and that a lot of other things are emerging and beginning to flourish. It’s exciting to watch it happen.

It’s not necessarily obvious to most people that it is happening, and some people may be feeling like all hell’s breaking loose and we’re all going to perish. But if you can see the signs, I think that something good is happening.

Jean: Well, this is what I see all over the earth, and you do see the breakdowns. I mean, Mrs. Roosevelt, whom I knew in my mid-teens because I was president of my high school in New York City, Julia Richmond, was gathering us, those of us who were heads of our general organizations, to get us interested in the United Nations and international affairs. She used words like wands. She would evoke in us, in our well-earned adolescent skepticism, the power of the beauty of possibility and being part of the transformations of our time.

And one day she turned to me and, vaguely imitating her, she said, “My dear, I rather suspect we’re going to have the most interesting career, but remember, my dear, as a professional woman you can expect to be trashed.” She didn’t use the word “trashed,” but it was something like that. I just don’t remember what it was.

And then she said, “But remember too, my dear, a woman is just like a tea bag. You put her in hot water and she just gets stronger.” And I have found that to be true.

A woman is just like a tea bag. You put her in hot water and she just gets stronger.

And this is something else that I find, again, all over the world: the rising energy of women of courage who are getting stronger. They do not make the front page of the newspaper. People say, “Oh, that poor little woman.” But that poor little woman is out there with a lot of weather. They are keeping the race going. They’re keeping the energy and the new programs.

Wherever I go, women, especially women of a certain age—it’s like post-menopausal zest—they’re out there and they’re calling in the projects and bringing things. They’re following the sequences of making things happen. And they are trying to help the men to also have a new order of a sense of possibilities.

And I find this in women scientists, too. You find that it is the men scientists who are talking about the decline, the end, and, “Forget about it, we’re out of here.” And it is the women who are writing a very different kind of science with the warnings. Yes, I mean, they’re not unrealistic, but also, “This is what we can do, and let us do it.” It’s not only what we can do; let’s do it.

And when you look at the writings of somebody like Hazel Henderson—do you know who she is?—you’re in for a big surprise. She’s probably one of the greatest creative economists of this time, and I’ll put you in touch with her. But the way she works with economics to create whole new orders, new ways of being, new possibilities, and really as a guide to a new kind of world, she is almost unparalleled.

Look at Monica Sharma. You know who Monica Sharma is?

Rick: Oh, I’m a dummy. I’m afraid I’m wrong. I know who Vandana Shiva is, if you’re going to mention her.

Jean: Monica Sharma is probably one of the most brilliant people alive today. She was head of the whole AIDS effort for the United Nations and knows how to take a small experimental group and go to scale, which then affects hundreds of millions of people, as she did with the UN with the AIDS and HIV/AIDS crisis, among many other kinds of things that she does.

She goes back and forth between India and the States and wrote a very great book on transformational leadership. Monica Sharma. It’s a dense book, but it is filled with brilliant, brilliant ideas about how to make a much better world that works.

And this is what I’m finding. Now, I’m just saying that I am noticing, and I can’t help but notice, that the men are giving us all the signs of, “It’s the end, it’s closing time, it’s closing time.” Just like, I believe, T. S. Eliot—what is it in? Samson Agonistes—where he writes they’re at the bar and they say it’s closing time.

But the whole point of closing time is that it is closing time for the old story, but it’s also opening time for a whole new story. And a lot of creative people, women and some very good men, are really coming together and opening this new story.

And so, in our own ways, we are very fortunate to be living in ending times, closing times, and opening times. It’s like being at the end, caught in the abyss, caught in the great parenthesis: the end of one era, not quite the beginning of a new one, but leaping across, our fingernails holding on to the earth and the rocks of the next order.

Creating the Possible Human and Society

But we have to invent it. We need to create the lure of becoming. What does the possible society look like? And part of my job is to help create the possible human who then has the wherewithal to be able to tell the new story and to have the passion for the possible, the passion of the follow-through, and do what is absolutely needed to make this happen.

But we have to invent it. We need to create the lure of becoming. What does the possible society look like? And part of my job is to help create the possible human who then has the wherewithal to be able to tell the new story and to have the passion for the possible, the passion of the follow-through, and do what is absolutely needed to make this happen.

Rick: Yeah, in just about every talk and interview I’ve heard you give, you’ve said other times thought they were it, but they were wrong. And one might argue, “Okay, yeah, but the Civil War was no picnic, or World War I, or World War II, and so on. Those might have seemed like it.” So I think I could answer this question, but I would rather hear you do it. What is it about our time now that is it, and what do you mean by it? I know you’ve kind of just been saying it, but let’s poke at it a little bit more.

Jean: It’s worldwide. Everybody’s involved. Nobody is innocent of our time. That’s number one. That’s the big thing. It is global. It’s this little planet, this beautiful blue-and-green, silver planet floating in the womb of the cosmos.

I helped an astronaut remember what he saw when he was out there. Ed Mitchell was out there, and one of the things he said is that you go out there and look at the Earth, and he had the music of Camelot coming on—the optimal society, Camelot. And there she is, this beautiful planet. There was no division and there were no wars seen. It was this great, incredible, beautiful beingness.

Something happened in us when we saw our Earth from outer space and realized that we were part of this incredible majesty, a beauty beyond almost anything that one could imagine, and that we then became responsible—response-able—to really make the difference.

So he went up there an astronaut and came back a psychonaut, devoted to inner space, and created the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He was a good friend of mine, and I admired him enormously—his courage and his stick-to-itiveness.

But the thing is, your question really is about being at the end of one time and the beginning of a new time. Everybody I know, at some point in their life, feels this call. It’s like the hound has been going at the heels in the morning: “For God’s sake, stupid, wake up!” I get it every morning. It’s like my Sicilian grandmother saying, “Hey, stupida!” You hear that kind of thing: “Get up and do what you can do and what you have to do.”

But the thing is that, by oneself, and just reading the news over and over again, it’s a kind of poisoning. It again affects that old reptilian-amphibian brain that is trying to be super-protective and fearful.

How do we create joyous interactions and communities? We do need something that we are thinking forward. How do we think ourselves forward to a world that works?

That’s why I helped in this whole field called social artistry, in which you really do the work on yourself. You have to do the work on yourself. You understand the powers of inner contemplation, the powers of what healing is. We’re built for healing. That’s part of our modus vivendi. We are built for healing.

And I don’t mean healing like preemptive wars. That’s being a healing force. It’s never worked. I mean healing in which you really see the possibility in the other and the possibilities in the society.

And not being told how, but to really begin—not redemption, but evolution; not salvation, but co-creation. The Buddhists talk about interdependent co-arising, don’t they? And as we think of things, those energies are also being thought by the universe herself.

Once we can bring this together, there are, just like there were for Hildegard and some of the people in the Renaissance, many kinds of renaissances, where we suddenly become startlingly awake to new ways of being, to passionate possibilities in our own field or wherever we are. And we do what we can. We do what we can, wherever and however we are.

In my own life, yes, I work on giant projects, but I also work locally and on various things that I can do. For example, I’m a serious foodie. I mean, I have two very big talents. One is I can talk to any dog, and the other is I’m a decent cook—a good cook—because my mother, Maria Annunciata Seraphina Graziella, would cook Italian food.

My father from Texas didn’t understand it, and so, in order to keep them together, I became the world’s first fusion cook, making chicken-fried polenta, you know. But I’m always looking for ways to cook up new possibilities.

When I knew Buckminster Fuller and came complaining about something, he said, “Oh, Jean, don’t complain. Build a better model.” And that’s it. What are the better models that we can really build wherever we are, with whatever we’re doing?

Whether it is something I’m very interested in—the co-op movement in groceries. We have one of the great, great food cooperatives in Ashland, Oregon. Whether it’s the co-op movement or whether it is what a friend of mine did—she used some of my work and became mayor of the town, and then went on to become the president of all the mayors in America.

But finding ways of crossing the great divide of otherness in a time of so much exchange and diversity—for which very few of us have been prepared, for levels of diversity. Before, it was just a few diverse people. Now it is all of us thrust into this great cocoon of co-creation and interdependence that we have never been prepared for. That’s part of our problem.

What do we do in education? What do we do in education? I wrote all kinds of books about this sort of thing. How do we, as I say, cross the great divide of otherness, starting in schools, so that we can see the essence, the brilliance, the imagination, the dance, the food—that’s the big one—the singing, and the different cultural styles of each other, and be stunned and awakened by joy at this great difference instead of seeing the other as that which is to be feared?

Because that’s what has brought us to a lot of our problems. The world has accelerated it. The ways of being have accelerated so fast that many people have been turned on by the soldiers of fear, the con men of fear, because it’s exciting and it appeals to our—what should we say?—our reptilian part of the brain. But it also appeals to the negative story, which gives us a thrill. It’s like watching a horror movie.

But now, what is the other movie? What is the other story? We are in a virtual reality in which we are co-creators, not just with infinity but with each other. But to do that, we have to tap into the ability to see the other as containing so much more, and thus reflecting this back and forth.

That’s the new order of relationship, the new orders between men and women. Everybody’s very confused because the standards have been in place for thousands of years. Suddenly, the page of history, the page of relationship, the page of creativity has been turned, and there isn’t necessarily a manual that tells us how or where to go. And that’s why we try to be determined through old manuals, which have their problems.

Rick: One thing that comes to mind as you’re speaking is that I’m reminded again of your story of praying in front of Chickie’s closet when you were six. There’s that verse in the Bible: “Seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened.” One thing I’ve observed many, many times is that when people have an earnest intention to awaken, to realize more, or to do something, nature responds. It’s as if the gods say, “Hey, boys, we’ve got a live one here. Let’s give him some juice.”

If people are wondering, “How can I get as enthusiastic as Jean? How can I be so optimistic? How can I be so productive?” I would say, whatever lights your fire, just put your energy in that direction, because that to which we give our attention grows stronger in our lives. Whatever inspires you, whatever you want to meditate on—whatever really gets you going—put your attention there.

You could probably quote Goethe. He said something wonderful about how if you just start in that direction, all sorts of unexpected and unforeseen influences come to your aid. You just have to start and persist, and then things tend to keep going. You build momentum and get the wind of the divine intelligence in your sails, to throw in a few metaphors.

Jean: “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp—for what’s a metaphor?”

Rick: Yeah, good one.

No, I find the wind in the sails. We are interdependent, is it? As the Buddhists say, interdependent co-arising. As you begin to create this energetic momentum toward doing something, then you are carried. Then the universe says, “As a hot dog, we’ve got a live one there,” and you discover that you are in a state of co-creation, and the so-called miraculous happens.

Jean: No, I find the wind in the sails. We are interdependent, is it? As the Buddhists say, interdependent co-arising. As you begin to create this energetic momentum toward doing something, then you are carried. Then the universe says, “As a hot dog, we’ve got a live one there,” and you discover that you are in a state of co-creation, and the so-called miraculous happens.

Miracles are merely the activation of more patterns of reality than we normally allow ourselves to see. The miraculous becomes an everyday thing, whether it’s a phone call, the right person, or whatever. Everything we have to remember is really interconnected. If we become passionate about one or more kinds of things, then that passion creates collegiality, companionship, and relationship, and all these things are interconnected.

Miracles are merely the activation of more patterns of reality than we normally allow ourselves to see.

We are bonded electrons, if you will—very large bonded electrons with each other—just like showing that one bonded electron is in sync with another one. If it turns right, the other one turns right; if it turns left, the other left. That was the work of John Mueller.

Rick: The complementarity, I think it is.

Jean: The complementarity of it all, yeah. That’s why the new physics is providing us with wonderful, not just physical but psychological and spiritual, metaphors. It is a fractal. The new physics is a fractal of the wisdom of sages over millennia.

Rick: Yeah.

Jean: All of this has come, so we are a great big unity.

Rick: One of its metaphors is that of the phase transition. In a laser, for instance, if you get a square root of one percent of the photons to entrain, then the rest of them sort of join in and you have this coherent beam. Applying that to society, we don’t know how close we may be to an actually rather sudden and dramatic shift once we reach the hundredth-monkey level of coherence.

Jean: Well, what I see around the world and in so many different groups is that people are becoming part of a coherent beam that is very, very different from what you get as the news on the internet or on television or wherever. But people are looking for the negatives in the coherent beam; they’re not looking for the creative forms that are part of our daily life.

Women, culture, and a new balance

Rick: Yeah. One thing you’ve come back to several times—I’m sorry, go ahead.

Jean: No, go ahead.

Rick: One of the things you’ve come back to several times is the role of women. I was listening to something just this morning about this group of women in an African country where there had been continuous warfare. It was ruining the whole economy and society and making life hell for everybody, and the women got fed up.

Somehow or other, the men were in a hotel conferring with each other about trying to reach some kind of solution. But for the first time in a while, they were being fed well and were in a comfortable place, so they were really enjoying it. They were in no rush whatsoever to reach any kind of resolution.

A whole group of women encircled the hotel and joined arms and said, “We’re not going to let these men leave this place or even let any food in until they reach some kind of solution.” The men tried to break their little line, but the women wouldn’t let them through. So they ended up reaching a solution in about 24 hours.

What do you feel? I think this probably reflects something deeper in the collective consciousness of humanity. Society has been patriarchal for so long, and perhaps we could blame a lot of the life-threatening problems that plague the world on that patriarchal mentality. Maybe something is shifting in the collective consciousness now that is resetting the balance—not to become a matriarchal society, but to be a balanced society. Go ahead and elaborate on that, if you would.

Jean: Well, what would a balanced society look like?

Rick: Good question.

Jean: And that’s something about which we’ve wonderfully invented novels. What was his name? Ernest Callenbach. He wrote a book called Ecotopia. This was about 30 or 40 years ago, and it depicted a balanced society. It was truly pretty funny because the women ran the governments, and the men were all artists, musicians, and painters. They were very creative, so it allowed men another avenue for their efforts. But do look at that. Ecotopia probably came out in the ’70s, I believe.

I think the important thing is that we are the ones who are inventing the balance. I’ve been seeing little stories popping up for many, many years. Let me give you an example.

In 1991, I was in India, in South India, and I was in a village where every Sunday they put up the television set—the old Brahmin lady owned it—in a tree. People came in, tied up their water buffaloes, and sat down to watch something that all of India was watching at the time: the many episodes of the Ramayana.

Rick: Yeah, by Ramanand Sagar, I believe the guy’s name was. I watched the whole thing.

Jean: You did? Yeah. So it was very beautiful.

Rick: It was great.

Jean: On Sunday they would come in and watch this great story of Rama and Sita and how they had lost their kingdom and gone to live for—what was it, 12 or 14 years—in the forest. Then Sita is abducted by Ravana, coming in from Sri Lanka, the Ravana of ten heads, and then there is the great war to bring her back, et cetera.

It was so beautiful, just gorgeous: the sets, the costumes, the singing, the music, the dancing, the glory of the words. As I was sitting there in a state of marvel, saying, “Boy, I wish we had something like this in the United States,” the old woman turned to me and said, “Oh, I do not like Princess Sita. She is much too passive. Too passive, very passive, very bad. You know, she just sits there crying and waiting for Rama to come and rescue her. It’s a very bad example. We live in India; we are much stronger than that. We have to change the story.”

I said, “Madam, the story is at least three or four thousand years old.”

“That’s right, it’s too old. We have to change the story. It’s a very bad example; we are much stronger than that.”

Then she was having a conversation with all these people, mostly farmers sitting on the ground watching this, and they were all laughing and putting in new ideas. I thought, “My God, this is like watching the rewriting of the Bible in a small town in Mississippi.” I was absolutely shocked.

She looked at me and said, “Listen, don’t be so shocked. You know, this is the rise of women. This is the rise of women. You have to realize this is going to happen all over the world. You’re seeing it happen in India; it happened in India; it happened everywhere.”

Then it came to the end and there was a commercial. What came on but Dynasty? Boy, was I embarrassed.

She said, “Don’t be embarrassed. Don’t you see? It is the same story.”

I said, “How can you say it?”

“It’s the bad man, it’s the good man, it’s the bad lady, good lady, but beautiful clothes flying through the air, good versus evil. Yes, indeed, it is the same story.”

So here, downloaded by satellite, was Dynasty following upon this extraordinary ancient story. It was really also about the need for the rise of women to stop the pattern of warfare. What she was saying was, “It is the same story. It is the same story.”

This is part of the myth. There is a new myth rising. We are myth-making beings; we are mythic beings. Get beneath the surface crust of consciousness of almost anybody, anywhere, as I’ve tried to do in many places, and you find that we are filled—almost instinctually, coming in with our mother’s milk—with the great stories. It’s part of a deeper part of the collective psyche of the human race.

But what I was also witnessing there in India in 1991 was the changing of the story.

Rick: I guess the Me Too movement is probably indicative of this changing story that you mentioned. There are a number of other very helpful—or hopeful—signs that are arising. On the other hand, things are looking a little dark in the political climate. We’ve withdrawn from the Paris Accord, and we’re undoing a lot of the progressive, environmentally friendly legislation that the previous administration introduced.

It almost seems like we’re regressing and progressing at the same time. There’s some kind of tug-of-war going on here, which is also a famous story in Indian literature: the gods and demons having a tug-of-war, using a snake as a rope, and I think Mount Meru is the thing that the rope wraps around. By doing that, they produce nectar out of the cosmic ocean or something.

Maybe that’s what’s happening with this polarity. That’s the word you hear on the news all the time. Political commentators are saying how polarized we’ve all become, and we seem to be becoming more so. Where do you think that is going to end up?

Jean: I think the question of the polarity, or the divine dialectic that is always between things, is that it begins to generate, in its polarity, a third thing, which is the nature of the dialectic, isn’t it?

There are polarities in everything. There are polarities in nature, polarities in biology, and polarities in the way the sun—

Rick: Electricity.

Jean: Electricity. I mean, look at things: polarity comes with reality itself. The point of the polarity is that it causes us to go deeper and generate the next thing, the third thing. That’s why I think that as the polarity becomes more intense, as it is doing now, what is also trying to arise—sometimes in fashionable ways, sometimes in foolish ways, sometimes even in ways that are so far out we cannot believe that they exist—is something new.

For example, what is one of the things arising in our time all over the world? The belief in other cultures elsewhere.

Rick: Other planets, other galaxies.

Jean: Planets, galaxies, or whatever.

Rick: Sure—Star Trek, Star Wars, all that.

Jean: But when you look at the nature of what is the mythic form of our time, it’s science fiction. It’s a major mythic form. So let’s say in the late 19th century Jules Verne is writing about the ships under the sea, the journey to the center of the Earth, and going to the moon. Yes, that happens.

In the 1930s and 1940s, it’s about societies in collapse and breakdown: Brave New World, 1984, and that happens. In the 1960s, Stranger in a Strange Land, and many, many remarkable stories of societies that are both breaking down but are also breaking through, which is something—the collapse and regression of societies that then begins to create new societies.

The stories of automatons, robots: here come the robots, here come the robots, and here they are. But also, what is happening in the big mythic things of our time is societies that have broken down, the end of utopias, the opposite of utopias.

Rick: Dystopias, I suppose you’d say.

Jean: The dystopias. A lot of science fiction is about the end of the world and the beginning of societies.

Rick:Blade Runner, things like that.

Jean: Yes, but also beyond that, the new things that you find nowadays are people—often women, by the way—who are out there and on the frontier creating new worlds.

Also, there’s the going inside to find alternative worlds. It started as fairylands, but now it’s more than fairylands. It’s evolving; it’s these strange, evolving societies. It’s like The Wizard of Oz, which is why it’s so popular now: you go over the rainbow, you leave the world as it was and enter the world that is trying to emerge. That’s the fairy-tale stuff.

Mythic Stories of Tyranny and Collective Renewal

So, going into that, what I’m seeing is that the new stories are emerging. But they’re always about—not always—the tyrant who comes, and the very naughty man who comes, is destructive, is narcissistic, brings the breakdown of the best of the older societies, and then it is followed by—not by a unique individual, but by people coming together and co-creating new orders, new societies. And that’s what I’m seeing in terms of following this pattern, this mythic pattern.

Rick: Having said that, do you have a sense of a timeline? Are we talking election cycles, years, decades, centuries?

Jean: I believe that within the next, let’s say, 80 years, to the end of this century, we’re going to see much more total breakdown, certainly. And then we’re going to see what is already happening; it’s just happening beneath the surface crust of ordinary political or social consciousness: the emergence of new ideas, new ideas for society, new forms of being. I believe that absolutely, from what I’m seeing literally all over the world.

Rick: Yes, and in case 80 years sounds discouraging to people, because most of us watching this won’t be alive in 80 years—in fact, nobody watching this will, unless they live a long time—you can have heaven on Earth now. You can, regardless of what the rest of the world is going through, develop a state of experience that pretty much enables you to live in joy and bliss and wonder and creativity, and so on.

So don’t let the state of the world discourage you. Who was it that said it’s a lot easier to put on shoes than it is to pave the Earth with leather? Just put on your own spiritual shoes, so to speak.

Jean: That’s right. That’s why you have the rise of so many—not so much spiritual movements as people seeking spiritual paths to enter, to bring eternity into time, to bring a larger sensibility of what yet can be.

A lot of my work is, as I said, social artistry: human development in the light of social change. I’ve trained many, many people, and they go into societies—and these are people of all races—they go into societies that are in difficulty, and they work from inside out and bring very real change.

This is happening. You don’t get this on the front pages because it’s hard and deep work. It’s deep work. They’re afraid of the deep work, but the deep work is going on everywhere, and that’s the untold story.

Rick: Yep.

Jean: Because what Sita did in the news story was stop the war and arrange for a whole new order of society, and that’s what the old lady was saying. Sita is stronger than we think, and that’s part of it.

The children of all the lands must be honored. That’s what we think. I mean, if one were to just write out every day the good things that they see happening, and then decide which ones are the ones that speak to them to enter into a new order of action, then we start having another world.

Yes, we’re going to see very hard times. We have to educate ourselves for that, and that’s probably in community, collective community, one kind or another. But I do see personally that by the end of the century, or maybe even before, we will have a whole new order of global civilization with high individuation of culture.

Culture is not becoming less or Americanized or Russianized, but becoming more, because the creative depths are rising.

Rick: That’s a good point, worth touching on for a moment. Using that forest metaphor that I used before, in the Amazon, for instance, where the ground is very fertile and it gets plenty of rain, it’s not that all the plants become the same. There’s huge diversity and variety because the ground is so rich and nourishing for the plants.

So this kind of world you’re talking about won’t mean everybody is the same, and thereby somehow unity is created. There can be very deep and profound unity and harmony, and yet simultaneously an even greater diversity and flourishing of culture.

Jean: Yes. We’re undergoing a sea change to something rich and strange by this meeting of hitherto privately divided and distinguished worlds.

We’re at that point of, “Oh my God, look who’s just come across the border. Ahhhr, wait a minute. Look at the richness that is there, what this culture can give us, what we can give this culture.”

Western egocentrism is something that has a great deal to answer for, and it is dying by its own weight and narrowness.

The center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with passionate intensity. What rough beast, its hour come round at last, will slouch into Bethlehem to be born.

That’s the rough beast, the emergent new being that is going into a whole new sacred understanding of ourselves and our time. We are in sacred times, and we are born in—this is born in—time.

Crossing the divide of otherness

Rick: A couple of brave souls managed to send in a question, even though our livestream wasn’t working today. So let me ask you these, and then, if you have the time, there’s some other things I’d like to get into, but if it’s getting a little—

Jean: No, it’s all right.

Rick: Okay, good. So this one is from a fellow named Rahul Kulkarni from Bangalore, and he asks:

How can one overcome or work around the cultural conditioning that heavily colors one’s perception and thinking, and which is continually reinforced by the limiting beliefs and prejudices of that same culture?

Jean: Well, I think, Rahul—is that his name?

Rick: Yes.

Jean: I think you’ve answered it. You’ve already talked about culture and culture being inhibited, but at the same time, you’re aware, especially in India, of many, many, many, many other kinds of cultures.

It is not only an honoring of these other cultures, but allowing yourself to learn something of them—to learn to eat their foods, which you can certainly do in India, to dance their dances, and to have real conversations.

One of the things that I’ve done in India, because I’m an old India hand in my own way, is—well, I’ll give you an example. I was doing something for the Tata Company, which is one of the bureaus in Tata.

Rick: They make trucks and things over there, right?

Jean: Well, they’re the big, wealthy organization, but they had these young, very high-caste, young executives. They were a wonderful group of boys, by the way, I might add. And they said, “What have you been doing?”

And I said, “Well, I went to the village over here, and I went into a very simple temple, and I was looking at the statues of the gods. An old man who had grown up following the British rules for good English said, ‘Sir, do you know what those are?’”

“Now, there is Vishnu, and Vishnu—he is the manager; he gets things working. There is Brahma, the creator, and over here is Shiva, but it all goes away in the great fire of being, and it comes back together again. And there is Ganesh, who lifts away all the obstructions. But after all, what is he saying? It is all name and form. Ultimately, ultimately, it’s all the big One.”

“Now, there is Vishnu, and Vishnu—he is the manager; he gets things working. There is Brahma, the creator, and over here is Shiva, but it all goes away in the great fire of being, and it comes back together again. And there is Ganesh, who lifts away all the obstructions. But after all, what is he saying? It is all name and form. Ultimately, ultimately, it’s all the big One.”

And I said, “You guys, you’re talking about these people. Yes, they’re terrible. They’re just simple peasants; they don’t know anything.” And I said, “Wait a minute. This man just taught me more than I’ve learned from you all week.”

Anyway, I arranged for them to meet people from the village. These rather elegant, elite Brahmana or Kshatriya men, high-caste people, met people from the village. They also called in a young boy, an eight-year-old boy who was a genius on the drum. He played so many intricate rhythms.

Then I had them talk to each other about the problems they faced. One person in the elitist group was having a terrible time with Sanskrit, and somebody from the village was also talking about things they were trying to understand in the planting season because the weather was changing.

But anyway, back and forth, back and forth, until we got into the fact of a kind of collective humanity. The result was that they created situations so that people who were thought to be only good for cleaning toilets could go into training for management. Yes. And at the same time, the little boy was teaching them, giving them tabla lessons.

I mean, I’ve done this kind of thing so often that it’s just sort of automatic with me. But when you bring people together, when you cross the great divide of otherness, you discover that the so-called others have talents that are part of your hidden talents, which you don’t even recognize.

Suddenly, you realize that you can play the tabla, or you realize that you have a sense of the orchestration of management. Again, this is what I mean, but it means putting people into situations where this great appreciation exists.

And you were saying things earlier, Rick, that essentially what you were saying is that what you appreciate is going to appreciate.

Rick: Yes, you have to be interested.

Jean: Yes, and I try to bring in situations where this kind of co-appreciation can take place.

Rick: Yes, and there’s a valuable nugget in what you just said, which is that I think in Western society, we’ve tended to regard traditional cultures as primitive, and to think that they don’t really have anything to offer us—that they have a very simplistic understanding of the way the world works and all.

Then some people obviously read books like Black Elk Speaks, or they go to Peru and take ayahuasca, and they’re looking into what so-called primitive cultures may have to offer.

But perhaps it’s much, much more than we realize. Perhaps if there were a true flourishing of all cultures, ancient and modern, we’d find that the ancient cultures have as much to offer the so-called modern cultures as the modern cultures do them.

Jean: Yes, but to answer Rahul, it’s a question of getting out of your own limited social sphere.

Rick: Yes.

Jean: Not just visiting, but interacting, eating the food. And now, of course, I realize that you have a caste system issue, and that you’re going to have to work with yourself. But if people would just say, “Every week I will do something where I will cross that great divide of being another being, an other, and look for a kind of co-humanity,” generally it is found in the arts.

It’s found in art, it’s found in music, it’s found in the crafts, and above all, it’s really seeing the other as the God in hiding.

Rick: I love that phrase. You’ve used it a couple of times. Just on your previous point, before I say that, obviously the internet is kind of doing that. I mean, it’s spreading everything everywhere. It’s a many-to-many kind of arrangement now, as opposed to one-to-many. I wouldn’t have been able to do what I’m doing right here years ago. I would have had to own a television station or a network or something, too.

Jean: That’s right.

Rick: Nowadays, anybody can do it.

Jean: Now you’re your own network.

Rick: Yeah.

But anyway, this thing about God in hiding, I like that phrase. It’ll shift our gears a little bit, and I have another question that came in. I often like to think that God is hiding in plain sight, because if we look closely at anything, particularly with the aid of science—which has enabled us to look more microscopically and fundamentally, and with greater understanding of the way things work—we see unbelievable, awe-inspiring creativity and intelligence displayed.

When you see that, I wonder how any scientist or heart surgeon or anybody else could be an atheist, because they’re staring at the marvel of intelligence right in the face, so to speak, on a daily basis. That’s more of a comment than a question, but do you kind of see it that way, too? I mean, don’t you feel that the Divine is just sort of shouting at us from every little bug on the sidewalk?

Jean: Yes, but it’s also to cultivate, again, what one had in one’s childhood: the capacity to be surprised by joy and to always be in a state of astonishment.

Rick: And perhaps to do that, you—go ahead.

Jean: All right, let me give you an example. When I was eight years old, I went to a very great school, PS 6, where sometimes they would take groups of us to meet the great elders of the time. We met Helen Keller, and I’ll tell that story in a moment, but we also met Albert Einstein.

Einstein was in the habit then of meeting with groups of children, because he found that very intriguing. And so we went there, and he was very sweet. He seemed a little vague, and he had a lot of hair. As I recall, he had two different-colored socks on, but he was very sweet.

One of our smart-aleck kids—he was a New York kid—said, “Mr. Einstein, how can we get to be as smart as you?” And he said, “Read fairy tales.” We didn’t like that answer at all. So another smart-aleck kid said, “Well, Mr. Einstein, how can we then get to be smarter than you?” He said, “Oh, read more fairy tales.”

It turns out that he meant the imagination, and that his strongest quality was not a talent for math, which he really didn’t have. What he had was a huge imaginative capacity. That was his biggest thing. He could glide the light beams, and he could experience things in his whole body-mind in such a way that they could percolate through one of his channels, which was the scientific or the mathematical one.

That taught me so much about the power of imagination. Bring imagination, as I said, and you get back into the imaginal, the great codes of existence, which are happy to rise and meet your imagination, so that you co-create with the universe. So that was one of them.

Then we also met Helen Keller. And that was so wonderful, because our teacher, Miss Riley, read to us from Helen Keller’s memoir, where she talked about how, for the first—what, for six years of existence—she had no concepts. She was this strange little being, just grabbing food over the table and not really making the connection between words and concepts and things.

Miss Keller grabbed her by the hand and took her out to the ivy-covered pump house. With one hand, she pumped the water, or something, and with the other wrote on her hand, “Water, water, W-A-T-E-R, W-A-T-E-R.”

Helen writes, “I stood still, rapt. That word ‘water’ dropped into my mind like the sun in a frozen winter world. And I woke up, and I learned the name of thirty things by the end of that day.”

With that, we were put on—what bus was it? Was it the Madison Avenue bus, or was it—I guess it was the Fifth Avenue bus. And we went to, I think, 66th or 67th Street. It was the Cosmopolitan Club, I think, as I recall.

Miss Keller, who was a handsome woman, a large woman, quite a handsome woman—she would have probably been in her late sixties at the time—spoke to us in this luminous voice of someone who had never heard speech. But we understood her because she had learned to make sounds by touching the lips.

Anyway, it was an interesting voice. It was like the voice of the ocean or the voice of the whales. It was quite an extraordinary voice. You can hear it sometimes on YouTube.

They then asked, “Would any of your children like to speak to her directly?” My hand shot up, and I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I knew I had to talk to her. I went up, and she placed her entire hand on my face. With the center of her hand—this is what I remember—she read my lips, and with her fingers she read my expression, my character, whatever. And I blurted out, with a child’s savage honesty, “Why are you so happy?”

Rick: And she could understand that just by feeling your face?

Jean: Yeah, she could. It wasn’t just lips. It wasn’t just like that, though there may have been some of that. But I said, “Why are you so happy?” And she laughed and laughed. She said, “My child, it is because I live each day as if I were a child. I live each day as if it were my last. And life, in all its moments, is so full of wonder.”

Life, in all its moments, is so full of wonder.

I think she said, “Wonder.” And life, in all its moments, was so full of wonder.

Was she damaged? Of course she was not damaged at all. She had rewoven the remaining filaments of her senses into a great net, if you will, and she caught all of reality. That gave her enormous commitment to service, to making a difference, and to helping disadvantaged people.

Rick: Wow, that’s such a cool story. My grandmother knew her, too. My grandmother went blind. She did Braille before she went blind, and then eventually read Braille because she was blind, but she had some kind of relationship with Helen Keller.

Jean: Well, you know, years later—not so many years later—I was a Girl Scout. I was a Girl Scout for many, many years, one of the best things that I ever did in my life. We worked at the lighthouse for the blind in New York City, and I read books for the blind, but I also learned Braille.

I realized it’s not just a different kind of way of knowing; it gives you openness to an entirely different, extended reality. It’s very interesting to lose a sense for a while, and then all the other senses wake up in an extraordinary way, as they did for Helen Keller. She was brilliant.

Rick: Interesting. Here’s another question that came in. This is from Marty in Kansas City, and hopefully this question will be clear. He says, “What do you see as the relationship between recognized presence and synchronicity? How do you develop them?”

Jean: Well, of course, my old friend Deepak does a lot of work on that. He wrote a very interesting book about it called The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire. In fact, he and I are about to have a long talk about that.

Synchronicity is merely the statement that everything is interconnected. Among the ancient Celtic peoples, it was called the ways of weird. Not weird as we understand it—”Hey, man, you’re weird.” It was nothing like that. The weird was the way of the enormous connectivity of things, both seen and unseen, and the way they would come together. If you put your mind or your awareness to it, you would see the connections.

So that would have to do with synchronicity. Presencing, I feel, is where you allow your beingness to be filled with the presencing of the unity of it all. Synchronicity is one example of your seeing what is the nature of reality in the first place. Things that seemingly are disparate begin to come together, and the presencing is the great unity itself, felt in perhaps an emotional or spiritual way.

The stages of mystical development

Rick: I think Margarita will appreciate that. So, I was wanting to talk with you about Evelyn Underhill’s “Eight Organic Stages.” Do you feel like you’d like to get into that?

Jean: No, I’m fine, but it’s a very long statement. I mean, I could make a short version of it, perhaps.

Rick: Well, let’s spend ten or twenty minutes on it, if you feel like you can spend that much time.

Jean: And by the way, what kind of doggy do you have?

Rick: We have two of them here. Can we hold up the dogs?

Jean: Please.

Rick: Yeah, this one. This is the new dog. Okay, this is the new guy. We got him; he was found running loose on the streets, and he’s a Chiweenie, which is a combination of—

Jean: Yeah, we think. Dachshund and Chihuahua.

Rick: And his name is Theo.

Jean: Theo, hi.

Rick: He’s pretty cute. We’re still kind of potty-training him a little bit. He’s young. He’s got his ears back, but his ears are huge. He has these big bat ears.

Jean: I can see that.

Rick: And this one, this is Luna, and I know you had a dog named Luna.

Jean: I did, indeed.

Rick: She is some kind of a—she’s a rescue, also. All our dogs have been rescued. She’s some kind of a rat terrier mix or something. She has a strong hunting instinct. Really smart.

Jean: Yeah, smart and affectionate, and everybody says how beautiful she is.

Rick: Yeah, so this is Luna.

Jean: Very beautiful. Hello, Luna.

Rick: Okay, now Theo is tangled in my microphone cable, so let me—there, there we go. Good. So, I’m glad you asked that, because we wanted to show you our dogs.

Jean: Well, Evelyn Underhill, who was a mystic herself, wrote a book called Mysticism when she was fairly young. I remember it was perhaps about ten years before, not even that long, William James came out with The Varieties of Religious Experience. So there was an enormous amount of interest, especially in England, America, and France, in the nature of the mystical experience.

Again, it’s interesting that all this came out just as Europe, within a few years, began to plunge into its worst war ever during World War I. So it’s always the chaos and the cosmos that come together, that rise up at the same time.

She talked about these stages that she had studied. Now, remember that she was primarily a student of Western mysticism, so she didn’t have a great knowledge of shamanic things, or even of the Eastern forms, because it was around that time that there was a gathering, but not so much the publication of the understandings and scriptures of the East. There had been some, but not what subsequently happened.

Fascinatingly, it was about the same time that quantum physics rose as the wisdom traditions of the world were being harvested. So both were parallels of each other—Einstein and Joseph Campbell’s own teacher, rising at the same time.

Okay, now, her first stage is awakening. You wake up, whether it is, “Whoa!” It’s all one, like what happened to me when I was five or six years old. Because that is part of a natural, instinctive part of being. It all makes sense; it is all one great unity.

It could be nature mysticism, if you’re sitting at a beach and you see the sparkling of the sea and suddenly you are in a drop, but that drop is all drops and all water everywhere. It could be looking at a person with love and suddenly it is all love. Love is the nature of everything.

However it happens, it brings one to a sense of one’s unity with totality. It is the great waking up. One of the great examples is Cosmic Consciousness, the books on cosmic consciousness, which also came out a little bit before that time. There is a man riding in a coach—this is from the 1880s or 1890s in England—and suddenly everything is fire, everything is pure light altogether.

So you have people writing their own experiences, a lot from early in that time. It’s interesting because it’s also the time that will result in a great deal of war, but it’s also the time of a great deal of transcendent knowledge developing in parallel.

Then she follows it with purgation or purification. You say, “Oh, I’ve had this big experience, but I’ve got all this heavy baggage of my dislike and hatred, and all the really naughty things that I did in my life.” And it’s purging time.

It can take the form that Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, went through: all the worst forms of purgation in sixth-century India, walking in a squat for miles, or eating one little grain of rice a day, or a little jujube. He said, “I got so skinny I pressed my belly button and felt my backbone,” driving himself to near death until he was lying in the waters, trying to cool himself off during what he thought were his last minutes of life. Suddenly he said, “Why am I doing this? I have just this body to achieve my enlightenment. No! I’m going to sit under this tree until I find enlightenment.”

I think it was more complex than that. And so he comes into that state of enlightenment and discovers that his self is also all that there is. He is being this as part of the great ones.

In modern days, we might call it restorative justice. You may have done some really lousy things, and you may have enormous regrets about them, or you may just keep dwelling on the same old things in a state of—what should we call it?—serial monotony of negative thoughts. You live a serially monotonous life and say, “I will get out of this.” How? Through acts of kindness, acts of goodness, restorative justice. That’s been one of the great forms.

And then, of course, the third stage is illumination. Suddenly you are clear, and when you’re clear, everything becomes light. You are illumined. You might be illumined creatively. You may be illumined with an understanding of the inherent beauty of the universe, of the inherent beauty and brightness of existence. But you are illumined. You become a bearer of light.

That is followed by high creativity, voices, and visions. With the mystic, you are able to live in that state. With the high creative, you enter into profound knowledge of the reality of the way things work. You become a high creative. You are in that state of co-creating with creation itself.

Rick: Contemplation and introversion.

Jean: Introversion. “I’ve got to go deeper. I’ve got to go deeper. I’ve got to be able to get to a place of sustaining this.” And so you pursue deeper contemplations, entering into even deeper states of being wherein a larger measure of the understanding of totality resides.

This also becomes a great movement among peoples, and that’s when you form the sanghas, the great community of those who are part of the seeking. But mostly it is also entering into the depths of one’s own luminosity.

And that, of course, is then followed by joy—incredible states of joy, which may be the natural bliss of creation. When I watch my dogs in the morning lying on their backs, all 350 pounds of them, kicking their paws in the air and looking at me laughing, it’s as if they’re saying, “It’s food time. Let’s eat joyously. Now let’s go run up the hills, go throw the ball, throw the stick. Wow, isn’t life wonderful?”

It’s the sheer joyousness of everything, the celebration of everything. That is followed by the fact that what goes up must come down: the dark night of the soul.

Suddenly every kind of negative thought you’ve ever had about yourself and about life rises up. What you thought of as beautiful becomes an empty stage set, a cardboard existence. That’s when you really have to talk to a friend and say, “I am in such a weakened state. Would you be God for me for three months? Just tell me what to do.” And they say, “Yes, I will be God for you for three months.”

But it is the inevitable catharsis of all the old thinking, all the old patterns, even the patterns of society. You become stupider and stupider. You think nobody likes you, including your own dogs. Of course, your dogs have another idea.

That is followed by the great unity of being, where finally you break through and realize it was all a great oneness all the time. You try to live the life of a God-inspired, unity-inspired being, where daily life is a spiritual process, daily life is spiritual exercise, and daily life is the exaltation of being the one in the many and the many in the one.

You become a beacon to others, an evoker of the sacred in others, the one who is the midwife of souls.

You become a beacon to others, an evoker of the sacred in others, the one who is the midwife of souls.

Rick: That is a beautiful summary. I sometimes have debates with people about the direct versus progressive approach to spiritual development. Some people think that all you have to do is realize that you are already enlightened, and that the whole notion of progressiveness or gradual unfoldment is too much of a concession to maya or something.

But I think, practically speaking, I can’t think of any examples of anybody who has just woken up one day and said, “That’s it, I’m done, I’m finished,” and who really is. We are naturally all works in progress as long as we draw breath.

Jean: We are works in progress, and the universe is a work in progress.

Rick: Absolutely.

Jean: Sometimes, in many spiritual traditions, you bring in the Tibetan word yidam. Yidam is the river to the source. So the yidam might be an archetype, a Buddha, a Christ, a Mary, a Saraswati, or even legendary figures that have been elevated to spiritual-sourcing status, like Joan of Arc, whatever.

Many people then develop a relationship to an archetype who may at one time have been an ordinary human being or may have been an angel, however people see it. But the yidam then supposedly has a larger frame of beingness and brings that angelic or spiritual quality, so that you are able to be helped and trained.

Some of the work I do in terms of spiritual teaching is showing people how to be in touch with an essence or intelligence that can be helpful, that can be a guide on this great path.

Rick: Have you been guided by a particular archetype yourself?

Jean: Yes, all my life.

Rick: And that archetype was Athena, I think I heard you say.

Jean: Yes. It was the Athena that was there before I was born. I would not have been born if my mother had not dreamed of an Athena type.

My father wanted me to be aborted and was telling my mother, “Get rid of the kid. We’re in the middle of the Depression.” And I would say to her, “I’ll get on the Bob Hope show. You can have as many kids as you like.”

My mother did not know what to do. Then this dream kept coming. In her dream, a limo picked her up and took her to a palace. A lovely, tall woman in a long blue gown, a sort of Greek thing, would dance and sing with her, and my mother called her Blue Devil.

“Now, Mary, you must keep the baby.”

“I know, but my husband says—I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, just ignore him.”

Anyway, she continued until it was too late, and I became, in my mother’s second form, very small.

My father was a great father, quite frankly, after I was born. He thought I was lots of fun. He said, “Kiddo, you’re more fun than a barrel of monkeys.” I became my self-image.

I didn’t really know about this until my father was driving me to Esalen to interact with Alan Watts. He said, “Well, kiddo, you turned out pretty good. I’m glad we decided to keep you.” I didn’t know that.

So I asked my mother, and she said, “Yes, the story was true. She had never told me this.” When she was in her nineties, or pretty close to that, I said, “Mother, this palace that you went to—was it like the Doge’s palaces when I took you to Italy and we saw them in Venice?”

“Nothing like that.”

“What was it?”

“Well, it was more like a Greek temple.”

“Really, Mother? And this Blue Devil—was that her name?”

“No, that was my pet name, Birg.”

“Really, Mother, what was it?”

“Well, name some goddesses.”

“Aphrodite, Hera, Artemis, Athena…”

“Stop. That’s who it was.”

Rick: Hmm, interesting.

Jean: So it’s not like worshipping Athena, where people worship Mary or anything like that. It’s nothing like that. It’s just a sense of a kind of energy that has to do with culture and civilization and making it work, which is really what part of my life has been about: creativity.

It follows, without my even having known about it before, some of the patterns. But it isn’t like worshipping Athena. It’s nothing like that.

Rick: But do you think that these energies, such as the one your mother was inspired by, are real entities of some sort, who dwell on some subtle level and who guide humanity?

Jean: Well, Jung would say that, wouldn’t he? That these archetypal structures are, as would Joseph Campbell, inherent in the human condition and patterned according to the culture.

So, for example, if we were talking about the Athena-type archetype in India, it would be something close to Saraswati, or Bridget, perhaps, in the Celtic realms. You can find variations of it. Or is it just part of something, part of the creative unconscious that pops up and finds itself symbolically patterned according to cultural expectations?

The Kuan Yin archetype, which you also find in Mother Mary, as well as in other kinds of feminine helping presence. Or is it just a member of a much, much, much, much, much older civilization somewhere in the universe, where part of their jobs, or what they decide to do, is to go into some of the more troublesome planets and peoples and serve as an evocateur, as a wisdom figure?

I don’t know. But they’re there. They’re there all over the world. There are almost no cultures that I know of that don’t have them.

Rick: For some reason, that appeals to me intuitively or something. I just sort of feel like there are these impulses of intelligence that are entities, just as much as you and I are, but that sort of dwell in a different dimension and kind of intercede or assist in human affairs, and that we can connect with, be inspired by, be guided by, or so on. I don’t know. Somehow, it makes sense to me.

Jean: But sometimes they are ones that you discover in yourself. I mean, Carl Jung discovered one that he called Philemon, who was a very present guiding spirit or energy for him. Philemon—the great friend. You could also think of it as the great friend.

Rick: Well, I think if we know ourself in the deepest sense, then indeed that which we are does contain all entities, all intelligences, all knowledge, everything.

Continuing the work

Anyway, I’ve probably taken enough of your time. This has been a major undertaking for you, all of the technical stuff.

Jean: Not at all. It’s been a great pleasure.

Rick: Yeah, for me, too. It’s been an honor. I think we’re going to meet in a month or two out at the S.A.N.D. conference. I believe you’re going to be there.

Jean: I will be there for at least three days of it, yes.

Rick: Great. Well, I’ll see you there.

Jean: And I’m going to be discussing some of these things, especially in the light of the new physics, because I’ve been exploring the implications of the new physics for everyday life in the quantum universe. It opens up a whole new set of human capacities that most of us have never thought of before.

Rick: You know, I hate to say this, but I thought of one more thing that I wanted to ask you. Several times I’ve listened to that debate—or if you want to call it that—that you had with Deepak, and also Sam Harris and, I think, Daniel Dennett, or one of those guys.

Jean: You couldn’t have heard it because they cut out my part, the part that you see. No, I disappeared. I said a few things, but most of what I said was cut out. They decided I wasn’t interesting.

Rick: I thought it was an interesting debate, but if you were to do that over again, perhaps not with a live audience, but sitting around in the living room with tea in a civilized way—because it turned into sort of a zoo—what would you say to these guys? What would you have said in retrospect that you didn’t get to say?

Jean: What I would have done in retrospect is, I wouldn’t have gone into an argument because there would have been no point to it. They were calcified in their belief systems. I would have taken them through a series of exercises in which they would then tap into something that was both universal and beautiful. I mean, one of them was already a meditator.

Rick: Sam Harris has done pretty serious practice.

Jean: A serious practitioner, but without any theological or metaphysical agenda attached to it. But I would probably take him into an experience in which he would feel it very personally, and it would then take on a personal cast, perhaps an archetypal cast.

But in terms of conversation, no, they were dyed-in-the-wool what they were, and this is what they did for a living. They go around and make these kinds of patterns. But I actually did say things, and it was all cut out. I was just there for seconds.

Rick: I remember you were on the stage. Yeah, anyway, that’s a whole other can of worms we don’t have time to open, but it’s a thing that interests me, this whole new atheist viewpoint, which represents the materialistic paradigm that dominates our culture, and what it might take to have a much richer and…

Jean: No, then you would need an all-day, or two- or three-day, experience of hanging in there with each other.

Rick: Yeah, like a weekend symposium or something.

Jean: But not for the hour or so that it was, when they came in. Deepak and Sam Harris were already a dynamic duo in the argument. So that’s why it just became what the two of them do together.

I was sorry that I had agreed to that when I found out, and I didn’t want to do it, but Deepak pleaded with me to do it. I was not represented there, I think I can say.

Rick: Yeah, okay, well, we’ll leave it at that. Out of all the books you’ve written, if people want to get started learning more about Jean Houston, which one should they start with?

Jean: Well, for learning something about me, it would be my autobiography, which is called A Mythic Life. It came out about 20 years ago and contains a pretty good perspective on the kind of work that I do.

And then, for the working book, the working book is probably The Possible Human. That’s also an early book, so those would be the two. A Mythic Life is also a very funny book, so it’s the kind of book people would enjoy.

Rick: I wish our library had had those, too. When I checked these out, the librarian said, “Oh, Jean Houston,” and said, “I’m going to put these books on hold and read them after you return them.”

Another question I wanted to ask you is, you’re still cooking at the age of 81, you’re traveling, offering webinars, and all that kind of stuff.

Jean: All kinds of things.

Rick: Yeah. So what can people do if they want to actually get engaged in that way with you, do something interactively with you, or attend some webinar or something?

Jean: Well, what they can do is go to my website, jeanhouston.com—Jean Houston, one word, dot com—and they’ll learn about various things. They will get regular information about seminars or webinars or whatever it is that I’m doing.

Rick: Okay, good.

Jean: And also, if they’re interested in having a doctorate, taking a doctorate with me in human development and social change, then they would go to Meridian University, meridian.edu.

Rick: So it’s a regular accredited university that has a doctorate degree?

Jean: Yes, there’s a doctorate degree in my studies in leadership and social transformation.

Rick: Is it online, or do they have to physically go there?

Jean: No, you have to physically go there for two weeks.

Rick: Oh, two weeks isn’t so bad.

Jean: And then it’s also online, but it’s very interactive. Yes, it’s fully accredited.

And then, through the Organization of Evolving Wisdom, there are all kinds of courses that are given online—very interesting ones, especially the ones on quantum physics and also the ways of purpose and awakening. So those are things that you can actually take as whole courses.

Rick: Great.

Jean: I mean, there’s lots of things. And go to the books—I mean, a lot of them are still there.

Rick: Sure. All right, well, I’ll link to all that on your page on batgap.com, so people can just click from there and find those things.

Okay, great. Thank you, Jean.

Jean: Thank you very much.