MYTHS FOR THE HEARTLANDS
DR. JEAN HOUSTON
in conversation with
ALEXANDER BLAIR- EWART
For
more than twenty-five years Dr. Jean Houston has lectured and conducted
seminars and courses at universities throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
She has served on the faculties of psychology, philosophy, and religion at
Columbia University, New York University, and the University of California.
She is past-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. In 1985
she received the National Teacher-Education Association’s award as
Distinguished Educator of the year (USA).
Dr.
Houston is director of the Foundation for Mind Research and author of Life
Force (1980), The Possible Human (1982), The Search for the Beloved (1987),
Godseed (1987), and The Hero and the Goddess (1992). She is also coauthor with
her husband, Robert Masters, of Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space (1990)
and Listening to the Body (1979). She has written numerous articles and
created hundreds of instructional audiotapes in the field of human capacities.
ALEXANDER B LA I R - EWART: In your book The Search for the Beloved you define
the human being in terms of a “this is me,” “we are,” and “I am” framework.
This certainly echoes the older ways of viewing the human being, as in body,
soul, and spirit. Why do you prefer this approach as a way of talking about
the human being rather than the right brain/left brain paradigm?
DR.
JEAN HOUSTON: I think it’s because there is so much of the right brain/left
brain paradigm that simply isn’t true. This paradigm originally represented
Sperry and Bogan’s split-brain research—all about what happens if you sever
the corpus callosum resulting in a separated brain. It was put forth in the
fifties and gained a lot of credence in the sixties. And it was dealing more
with pathology than with the whole brain. From this research it was shown that
different hemispheres of the brain clearly have different kinds of emphasis
and function. But the fact of the matter is that the brain is infinitely more
complex than that. When you talk about the fully functioning brain you have to
talk about it as an orchestral instrument, just as you cannot talk about the
harp or the drum- carrying Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5. We are so much more
than our brains. And it isn’t a case of there being no critical and immensely
valuable research and results of research that have come from split-brain
theory, but that the more one delves into it, the more one realizes that to
try to define human existence by only that kind of paradigm is like listening
to the earth with a stethoscope. -
ABE:
The trouble I’ve always had with the left brain/right brain paradigm is that I
see it as materialism sneaking in the back door of the new age.
JEAN
H: Yes, and it’s kosher, you see. It makes people feel good because it serves
the current mythos, which is scientism. This is very quickly dying, but we
still have the last dregs of it. And even some of its arbiters are the first-
to say that it is like the tip of an iceberg which is a much vaster
phenomenon. Also, if you want to speak of neurological kinds of definitions,
what about the midbrain? What about the mammalian brain? What about the old
brain, the limbic system, the reptilian brain? So maybe we are rather the
triuned ones, and the problem is that two of our brains don’t even talk
because they have no speech. [laughter] We exist in this marvelous state of a
kind of schizophrenia of brains.
ABE:
At the risk of sounding as if I’m suffering from conspiracy theories, do you
think that the left brain/right brain paradigm was being deliberately pushed
by anyone?
JEAN
H: I think it’s more unconscious than that, an unconscious urge, a kind of
will to power. And people who are in an entropic mode are utilized by these
forces of entropy. Now, whether you call them demonic or whether you call them
Gaia’s natural homeostatic function, [laughter] I don’t know. I myself don’t
necessarily adhere to either the conspiracy theory or the illuminati theory. I
do think that you see entropy everywhere in all kinds of forms and it looks to
the untutored eye or to the paranoid eye certainly as a force of conspiracy.
ABE:
Why do you find it so absolutely essential to use a threefold way of looking
at the human being rather than just working with the left brain/right brain
paradigm which seems so popular?
JEAN
H: Because I don’t wish to be popular and I don’t mind being inaccurate. But I
want to be true—true and inaccurate. I think the left/right paradigm is
accurate but not true. It’s just that we have to keep a certain level of—well,
I don’t want to say vagueness—but let us say a softer outline, a softer
boundary between things. When you begin to constellate it in brain, the
boundaries become much more rigid. And also the use of the metaphors that
become applicable to “I am,” “we are,” “this is me” allow for a much larger
application of metaphor and feeling, whereas the brain tends to close it down.
Also, to be perfectly honest, this is merely one of many, many different kinds
of processes and metaphors that I use.
ABE:
I found it interesting that you included the gods in your “we are” aspect.
JEAN
H: What we are calling gods, which are the great patterns and paradigms that
exist in psycho-spiritual forms, get constellated around particular cultural
archetypes and particular feeling archetypes, and that belongs to depth
development. I do believe that the depth realm exists. Now, whether it is part
of the psyche’s continuum I do not know. I suspect that it’s both, and plus
much much more.
ABE:
You go beyond that and you seem to say that the “I am” is monotheistic, it’s
unity oriented.
JEAN
H: I wouldn’t say “mono”. I would say it’s the integration of all these parts.
It is the integral reality rather than the monotheistic reality. I’m not
particularly monotheistic in my psychology.
ABE:
It appears to be in the “I am” that you cross the bridge from psychology to
the mystical.
JEAN
H: I think I cross it earlier. I cross it probably in the bridge between the
“this is me” and the “we are,” because sacred psychology more often than not
deals with archetypal and mythic structures, symbolic structures that illumine
the other two parts of the continuum.
ABE:
I was wondering if you are prepared to describe your current favorite way of
articulating things, in the sense that an artist, for instance, will go
through different phases.
JEAN
H: I’m in one of those great transitional periods, which means that I will use
everything that I have ever learned. And I’m yearning at another thing—this
whole membrane theory, the theory of correspondences. I had a very, very
important dream.
Did I tell you about it?
ABE:
I don’t know if you did.
JEAN
H: I had known Joseph Campbell for many years, since I was in my early
twenties. I had done eight or nine seminars together with him, and I owe a
great deal to his work and theories. Two weeks,- after he died in November of
1987 I woke up one morning having had a dream, and having been so physically
distressed in the course of the dream that I woke up with muscles strained and
stretched, barely been able to move. I hadn’t torn anything, but by golly I’d
come awfully close. I limped out of bed and felt this great weight on me, and
I couldn’t figure out why.
This
was the dream: Joseph Campbell had just died, or was about to die, and he
called to me to come over to him. His face was gray and he said to me, “Jean,
help me finish the correspondence.” Now I knew that Joe was about eighteen
years behind in his correspondence. [He said, “Come to Upper Riverside Drive
and help me finish the correspondence.” I was trying to think, well, what is
Riverside Drive? Riverside Drive is the upper west side where I had gone to
school at Barnard College in Columbia. But it still didn’t make much sense.
And so, in the dream I said, “Joe, I can’t, I’ve got all these things I’ve got
to do, I’ve got all my relatives coming, and I’ve got another book. Joe, I
can’t, but I’ll send one of my close associates who is much more efficient
than I am.” So I sent him my associate and he sent her back saying, “You have
to come and help me finish the correspondence.” So I went, and then I woke up.
Well I couldn’t figure out what the dream was about, and why I was in such a
deep state of distress about it. About a week later a colleague of mine came
to visit, and I told him the dream. He said, “Well, of course, it’s about
helping him finish the correspondences, the correspondence between things.”
And wham, there was one great breakthrough revelation! Of course, that’s what
it was about! Joseph Campbell had guarded, had harvested the mythos of just
about every region of the world, and what was not in place yet was the
correspondence between these mythic symbolic understandings—the myth and
ritual structure of so much of our brain, our psyche, and the relationship of
this mythic/symbolic structure to economics, to history, to science, to art,
to literature. Part of the basic matrix of the human condition is the weave of
a template of the mythic/symbolic structure which is such an incredibly
indigenous part of our being, and which helps to illuminate so many patterns
of correspondence, So that’s where I am, whether I like it or not. [laughter]
Those are my marching orders.
ABE:
Those correspondences first began to emerge in a serious way in the nineteenth
century at the point when comparative religious study developed as a field of
scholarship.
JEAN
H: Yes, with Frazer, with his great gargantuan smorgasbord of correspondences.
But it’s as if the world has truly turned a corner since then. I’m as familiar
as anyone with all that massive amount of work, but it’s as if there is a
whole other thing present now. For example, when Joe and I would work
together, the way it would work was that he would tell me a myth, say The
Odyssey or the search for the Grail, and then I would say “Stop” every five
minutes or so and I would create or project a form of ritual or psychophysical
process that would illuminate that stage in the story. Then we would do some
of these exercises together. The audience seemed to lap it up. And he used to
say to me, “How can you think of those things?” He always found it quite
amazing, and I used to think to myself, how could you not? [but I never said
it. For me the myth was something not just to be enacted, but to be done. For
the ancient Greeks—”the things done and the things said”—they always had to go
together.
ABE:
That work certainly enriched the experiential work that you have been doing
with drama and storytelling.
JEAN
H: Oh yes, very much so. In many of my seminars I take a very great story or
stories and they become patterns in which these experiential processes
illumine the mythic structures. We’ve lost, and probably rightly so, the
ancient, ancient cultic significance of many of these mythic structures. Take
for example The Odyssey. The Odyssey contained an enormous amount of
very primitive material—e.g., the death of the solar king who goes down into
darkness with Xerxes and then is resurrected with Penelope. The Odyssey is
filled with these ancient matrilineal cultic rituals. But all of what Homer
changed, although he did not recognize it (he changed much for aesthetic
purposes), became an extraordinary story. Then, of course, it’s a mystery
play, it’s a series of rites of initiation, at a time when the other mysteries
are really deepening all over the place. So my doing it as a mystery play, as
a mystery rite, brings it now to a kind of consummation of all these stories
that contain a loadedness, almost a genetic code of unfolding on every
possible level, as it was for the ancient Greeks. The great ancient Hellenes
essentially got their education by going over and over The Iliad and The
Odyssey, because their coding evoked the latent drama of the glory that was
Athens, because it contained the story of the birth of high civilization, and
a partnership with the gods rather than a dependency.
ABE:
It’s interesting that we are naturally to some extent genetically coded to
respond to those myths, which in turn are coded to natural rhythms and cycles
and experiences of life. But somehow we’ve lost the connection.
JEAN
H: Yes, very well said. I see a certain amount of my work as keying the
coding. And that’s why, when I work in all these countries, what I look for is
the root mythos to see if it contains the coding that can uncode that society
for its next stage.
ABE:
That points to something else, Jean, which is what we are doing to Fe
ourselves collectively in this society in the way of education, and in the way
II that popular culture is handled, which is that we are perversely and
probably unconsciously withholding from ourselves the one thing that we need
individually and collectively, which is to get re-membered. Do you see any
positive signs of change there? Do you think the educational system is going
to change?
JEAN
H: Yes, I do. I think that just being exposed to so many people who are in a
state of either breakdown or re-membering is almost a reweaving, to take you
back to The Odyssey, whose main metaphor is weaving. It’s a reweaving that
happens when you have the critical conjunction, the crisis of consciousness,
of necessity and of the earth changing itself. Because we are not just the
latest product of the metabolism of the galaxy. We are the neuronal network of
the planet, which I believe at this critical point in history is changing. I
cannot buy into, let us say, the early twentieth-century despair about the
lack of progress. First of all, the idea of progress is such a dopey idea
anyway. There is no such thing as progress; you can only talk about progress.
But in the process of the planet where we are now, I think that we are not the
only ones minding the store, that, if you will, our genetic coding is not just
latent in our organism. It is extended. We are not just encapsulated bags of
skin dragging around dreary little egos. We are symbiotic with many fields of
life. And when those fields are being charged, then I think that we are being
charged accordingly. I think that although you can talk about very deep cycles
and patterns of unfolding, you can also talk about extraordinary catalytic
jumps that occur from time to time. Darwinism of the steady state growth is
certainly not true. We know that the jump phenomenon is more the rule than the
exception.
ABE:
So you’re essentially saying that life, in its totality on planet Earth,
contains within it the capacity and even at this point the urgency to right
itself and become well, having been unwell.
JEAN
H: There is so much pathology on the planet. You only have to fly over the
Earth to see these great yellow mushrooming clouds of pollution over the
cities, with so much pathology and erosion. But there is also an immense
yearning for health and this is also carried to the messenger circuits of the
self, to we as individuals, who are the neurons of the planet.
ABE:
This is in the long term quite a positive and optimistic picture of things.
JEAN
H: We are the people. I mean, I realize that other times in history thought
they were it. Well, they were wrong, this is it! [laughter] I mean, why are so
many movements coming to a kind of head? What is trying to happen in the
world? There are factors such as planetization, the new technology, but also
the rise of the archaic, mythic structures trying to reweave and regrow
themselves. How does a culture reweave itself? It’s almost as if the root myth
bears the seeds of its own unfolding, of the next stage of the social forms. –
ABE:
On the other hand, is all of this evidence of a dying away?
JEAN
H: It’s both/and, not either/or. It’s a dying away, or let us say a
transduction, a transforming of parts. I think it’s more like alchemy than
death around the world. There is a very interesting theory that is moving in
scientific circles that we have spent too long looking at the DNA structure of
things. But DNA may not be where it’s at, that tradition that says it’s in the
cell. It is really in the cell membrane, because the cell membrane gets to a
certain point of expansion and then it has to multi-cell and become something
else. And it’s as if the nucleus of many civilizations is dying, or undergoing
profound change, while the membrane is “out there.” I think a lot of the new
age movement, not everything by any means, is essentially a cell membrane
phenomenon, of this jump to a next level. And this is happening in societies
as well as in individuals.
ABE:
How is all this going to show up, for instance, in economic transition,
political transition, all of those kinds of things? Because if there is going
to be a new age, then there’s obviously a transition phase from this age to
the new age.
JEAN
H: That could take some time because, you see, instead of moving to a
planetary culture, a kind of ecology of cultures, we could move into a very
long interim period in which the tactician, the tactical artist gains the...
ABE:
...upper hand?
JEAN
H: [laughter] And thus all the management consultants all over the place. New
age, of course, is a term that is on the American dollar—the Novum Ordum. It’s
a term that recurs in one form or another about every seventy-five years. And
what is different about this one is that never before have we had so many
factors that are unique in human history literally endemic all over the
planet. So that the ante has been raised and the complexity is much greater
than it has ever been, and thus the shift or jump phenomenon can be more
profound.
ABE:
Are you saying that there are certain tendencies in human beings that may
hijack the alchemical process, hijack the revolution?
JEAN
H: Yes. There’s the sense of homeostasis which has always been in us—business
as usual, only more so. Another is a loss of the great patterns of connection
to most of the great stories. It is the great patterns that are in eclipse for
many people. And again, because of the fact that you have so many factors that
are unique in human experience, people often have lost the vertical dimension
in the pursuit of the horizontal. On the other hand, you also have an awful
lot of good news. On the physical level never before have you had so many
people interested in their own health, and interested in the extension of
their body and by corollary their mind. On a psychological level the emphasis
on a kind of reflection on what it is to be human is something that I see as
happening all over the world in ways I think are unique. It’s not a collective
interest in the tribal identity as much as it is the personal identity, and
mythically I think the great stories are rising. Spiritually the Zeit is
getting Geisty. [laughter]
ABE:
What is the relationship between anxiety, as normally defined, and the
quickening, as spiritually defined?
JEAN
H: At a certain point I think that they overlap each other, and they may look
very much the same. Then, you see, “By their fruits you shall know them,” and
anxiety will often become narcissistic, cannot get out of its own puddle.
ABE:
Is the rise of the mythic, or what you call the great stories, the alchemical
agent that turns anxiety into the quickening?
JEAN
H: Yes.
ABE:
So is anxiety a sort of entropic quickening, where the individual hasn’t made
contact with the mythic?
JEAN
H: Yes. I think that’s an excellent perception.
ABE:
I think I’m beginning to get some sense of what you’re about. I’ve noticed a
lot of people who appear to be very progressive in post psychological thought,
neo-Jungian and post-Jungian and new age, who seem very reluctant to take the
plunge and describe what that bridge is that takes one from the more
academically respectable psychology into the mystical. You don’t seem at all
afraid of that. Why?
JEAN
H: It is a fear and trembling, because you are literally going where—not where
angels fear to tread—but where angels don’t tread. [laughter] And I think that
one has to expand the metaphors. To me it is not so much the leap between two
disciplines, or into an unknown discipline, as it is an extension of metaphor.
Living as I do in so many metaphors, and having worked for so many years with
the human psyche and with what beings can be, it becomes very blurred between
one level of discourse and the other. Now, I lived for many years as a college
professor. I grew up in that world and it has a great deal to offer, a certain
kind of discipline, and a recasting and harvesting of the past. But the fact
is that we cannot indulge in that exclusively. It is a question of having many
frames of mind, frames of reference.
ABE:
Free thinkers had to have the wars of the town and gown to form Oxford and
Cambridge. And now we have universities which have, according to Canadian
philosopher George Grant, turned into multiversities—they just produce for and
serve the technoculture. My pet theory is that new age universities now have
to emerge as a new point of growth, largely from people who’ve left the
university plus a wave of fresh, new, raw geniuses coming up out of the ranks.
Do you see that as happening?
JEAN
H: Yes, it is happening. It started as a trend in the sixties with the
creation of a very large-scale adult education program. I think that there is
the multidimensional, not just the multi-university that is emerging. In the
United States there are programs at union graduate school that offer
legitimate credentialed degrees, but of which the exploration is truly an
exploration into one’s own capacities and depth, as well as offering very
innovative studies in the particular disciplines that one is pursuing. So I
think that what you’re talking about is happening almost by default. I wish
that it had more conscious and conscientious direction. I would take it right
to grade school. We’re being educated for about the year 1915, not the immense
complexity of the multicultural world, which is what we’re emerging into in
the next millennium.
ABE:
We’re struggling with nineteenth-century political and social paradigms, like
left wing/right wing, capitalist/communist. Obviously this emerging
mythic-world consciousness and nineteenth-century polarized, political
paradigms are not going to make very comfortable bedfellows. Do you see the
political/social sphere adapting or absorbing this new material, or do you see
it as being washed away altogether in due course?
JEAN
H: Let me just speculate in certain ways. I’m thinking that in the fourteenth
and fifteenth century there was something that was well known, called
“Fortuna’s Wheel,” and it was a wheel that represented the stages and cycles
of life. The wheel would turn’ and another cycle would come up. I would say
that we are gradually beginning to move out of homo politicus and economicus,
where economic paradigms are central to the understanding of self and state,
which we’ve been in since certainly the nineteenth century. And that because
of the complexity of world change; it is almost as if another kind of
human—homo ecologicus—will emerge in this shift to another mode. In no
previous civilization did you have economics at the core of the human
curriculum. Economics is only one image among many—politics, the religious
life, the artistic life, etc. This is the first time in history that we have
economic issues colonizing the psyche and the society. I think that we’re
going to be moving from that into either another emphasis, or a much more
balanced structure of emphases. It is not unlike what happened with the human
ego. If we were in the minds and bodies of our ancestors of six hundred years
ago, we would not recognize their psychology at all because they did not have
the dominance of ego. Ego was but one image among the multiple images of the
psyche. And I think, similarly, in society, economics is one image of the
multiple images. The world is too complex to be strained through the lens of
economic structures. I’m speaking almost biologically here, that biologically
it’s a very bad match right now, and it just can’t sustain itself.
ABE:
All right, so there’s a revolution in world consciousness which is evident.
Who is leading that revolution?
JEAN
H: I feel, ultimately, that it’s a depth phenomenon, so that you cannot speak
of a leader, General this or that.
ABE:
I’m talking in terms of a cultural, metaphysical leadership. What we’re
talking about here, Jean, is our baby—Western humanity’s baby at the moment,
isn’t it? Because there certainly isn’t a ground swell of this “breaking
through into a new consciousness” happening in China, and much of what was the
Soviet Union is still trying to get itself into the early twentieth century.
JEAN
H: Now there I would disagree with you. I think that a lot more is going on in
the former Soviet Union. It’s not there up front yet. We sort of perjure that
area of the world by talking about it as a kind of backward, donkey culture.
But I think what has happened is that here you have one of the most religious
cultures in Europe, and then after the first Russian Revolution it seemed as
if the icons of the saints were replaced with the icons of Marx and Lenin.
ABE:
Which was in itself a state of cultural slavery?
JEAN
H: And then the theology went underground and emerged as a very complex and
brilliant science fiction. Those things are true. But in those countries you
also find that there is an intensity of focus on depth issues and depth
aspects of the psyche to such a degree that you’d have to go to the United
States to find a comparable emphasis. So they may be backward in terms of the
way we look at things, but I’m not sure that something very profound isn’t
happening. I was in South India a couple of months ago, working, and I asked a
man in a village, “What is it that you’d like to learn?” He said, ‘I must
learn how to improve my mind, so that my soul and my people can deepen.” I’ve
heard this everywhere. And the images of the language that they use may not be
new age, but they are, if anything, even older. They are the perennial
philosophies.
ABE:
What I’m getting at, Jean, is that unless something is out there and up front,
in that larger sense, it doesn’t really exist!
JEAN
H: I’m not sure of that. But when you ask, “Where is the leadership?” I think
that it is not seen yet, but it is emerging. I think it should not be seen too
overtly too soon because then it will be polarized, become a celebrity, and
that’s the worst thing that could happen. You see, it has occurred in some
ways in the twentieth century but it became very demonic because people simply
had not done their human homework.
ABE:
Are you talking about the Third Reich?
JEAN
H: I’m talking about the Third Reich as a demonic mythic form. I’m talking
about what happened in Italy as a demonic mythic form. Certainly Stalin was a
member of an old Gnostic cult (and so was Malenkov), and that was a demonic
form as well. I would hope that we have had a catharsis of these forms so that
these deeper things can happen. What happened in the sixties was a kind of
jubilant celebration of the sense of this renewal, but there again people had
not done the depth levels of their homework. I think that has happened in the
ensuing thirty years, and it has involved coming to terms, not only as a
people, but also as social entities, with, in my own metaphor, the “possible
human,” trying to create a possible society.
ABE:
Certainly in any large gathering there will be X percent of people who are on
the brink of some kind of breakthrough or breakdown. I feel that that is a
phenomenon which is only going to grow, that in the latter half of the
nineties and on into the twenty first century, more and more people are going
to “lose it” within the context of mystical experience.
JEAN
H: Well, this is a very interesting and important phenomenon, and it is one
that has always been known throughout human history. You know, Francis of
Assisi was one of the most disorganized human beings who ever lived, but he
broke through or broke down, as his family believed, and actually came through
incredible fevers. He had an enormous series of fevers for six months, then
went into a state of utter limbo and numbness that went. on and on. And it was
like he’d fallen into a vacuum. It was only later that it came back. He
prayed, he yearned for it. He had also had a pattern in his culture that said
that spiritual experience might just happen to look like this, and then this
happened. If we want to talk about Teresa of Avila, if she had lived today,
she would have been considered really quite neurotic. The point is, what is
the mode of the lens of diagnosis? A great deal of the mystical experience or
of the experience of the losing of one’s boundaries by present pathologizing
language is really very crazy. Part of the problem is not a question of the
distinction between what is pathological and what is mystical, but a sense
that there are certain times and places within the psyche in which they look,
and indeed may be, identical. But the point is found in the guidance and the
patterns that are then engendered. They are like supersaturated solutions;
everything is available, and what is the seed crystal that one is going to
drop in that is going to create a new crystallization of the psyche? We almost
need halfway houses for people who fall into the vacuum.
ABE:
Yes.
JEAN
H: And that is what we do not have. I think that so much of our
psychotherapeutic treatment is based on models of pathology and not models
of...
ABE:
.. .the entire human being.
JEAN
H: Yes.
ABE:
What is The Search for the Beloved a metaphor for?
JEAN
H: It’s a metaphor for the search for that connection within the depths of
ourselves that is a kind of partnership. This is a very ancient form of
belief, that we are sitting on the icebergs of ourselves and the depth of that
is that god/self, that entelechy, and the relationship is often very powerful
and positive when it is experienced emotionally. I am interested in the
therapy of cultures. Therapaia is the ancient Greek word, whose root meaning
is support or caring, and whose secondary meaning is thea. I think that there
is a more ancient meaning which is doing the work of the whole, doing the work
of the god. And what is the therapaeia of cultures? Cultures can in a sense be
looked at as a person can be looked at, because culture is the person writ
large. I worked with the Institute of Cultural Affairs all over the world
trying to work on many levels of society to begin to evoke in a therapaeic—not
therapeutic—manner the elements that can lead to whole system transition
instead of a systemic breakdown, which is much more, unfortunately, the
prediction. See, I come out overtly as an expert in the human capacities, but
my covert agenda is the evocation, the eliciting of a culture to its next
stage, without there having to be so much breakdown.
ABE:
So you’re sort of a priestess of the possible.
JEAN
H: In heirophantic language I suppose I am. I would use the term midwife or
evocateur. I don’t know that it’s priestly.
ABE:
Do you think that part of the need for a mythic reawakening in people is due
to the exponential intrusion of technology into every aspect of our lives?
JEAN
H: You see, it’s happening in places which are essentially non- technological
societies. I’ve been on almost every continent in the world and worked in many
bioregions. And I see that the fascination with this is virtually universal,
so you can’t just say high tech. However, if we go deeper into your question,
there is a chestnut I heard from Paul Tillich many years ago that “history may
be the shadow cast by eschatology,” meaning not just that there are events at
the end of history that are pulling us forward, but that they are being bled
through or seeded through by the great patterns of creation, by the
evolutionary impulses, and now it’s as if they are so intense at this
particular point that we are experiencing their shock waves, and the only
thing that gives us enough pattern to understand these radical transitions
that we are going through faster than at any time in human history is a mythic
structure. We are living in mythic times and so we look at myths to try to get
some kind of sense of who and what and where we are, some cartography to guide
us.
ABE:
What comes to mind is Toynbee’s concept of archaism. When humanity is at a
certain crisis point, you have a polarity, archaism to futurism, and he talks
about how both of these lead to tyranny and fragmentation.’ What is there
about this reawakened mythic consciousness that frees it from the double bind
of this polarity?
JEAN
H: Well sometimes, of course, it’s not freed; Hitler would be a supreme
example of that. A big leap backward into the future. But I think that what is
unique in the mythic structures is the other alternative, which is connected
to the Creek term palingenesea—the continuous birth. The hero, the heroine,
the mythic being who decides to take on the larger life is generally born in a
time of dying, in which he or she lives in an outmoded situation and has to
travel, journey, search, quest beyond the outward situation, either to ingress
to the great “causal zones” within, or to exgress into another realm. Now I
think what is happening, what the new mythic imagery is suggesting, is that we
are heading upwards to heaven, into outer space, or downwards onto the earth
into paradise. It’s either heaven or paradise. They are the only logical
alternatives. We cannot have cities like Tokyo or Los Angeles or these
megalopolises like Sao Paulo, which are heading towards thirty million people
by the end of the century. The earth cannot support that. Now this is no to
say that technology is bad, but it may be that with the incredible conjunction
of technology with the human imagination set free, some of us, not all, but
some of us may not really be appropriate for this planet anymore. [
ABE:
Yes, a different kind of human adventure.
JEAN
H: Yes, the mythic time that we are talking about and the new adventures, but
if we have to go out, we go out with elegance and grace and with a very
different kind of consciousness. Not with what science fiction writers
suggest, you know, the essentially archaic, baronial, feudal consciousness
that they describe.
ABE:
Can I pull you back into the concept of palingenesea? Toynbee talks about the
concept of palingenesea as maybe being the thing that rescues one from all
these dangerous byways and then he points directly at the figure of, I
suppose, what we would call the “Cosmic Christ.” The human individual as an “I
am” who has the power of rebirth in him and who has inherited the Earth.
JEAN
H: You also have in the East very similar thoughts about Buddha and the Maha
Buddha, the Maitreya. There are other end-of-history archetypes. I could pick
at least ten or fifteen of them.
ABE:
Do you feel that’s where we are now, at the end of history?
JEAN
H: Let’s put it this way: I think we’re at the end of ideology.
ABE:
Oh yes, absolutely!
JEAN
H: We’re certainly at the end of ideological history. History has been the
contention of ideology, contention of villages and nations and ideological
states. I think we are truly coming to the end of it and we will certainly see
the petering out of it by the twenty-second century.
ABE:
When you look at deep ecology and what that means politically, you see every
ideology in the world crumble before that, because all of our political
structures are going to be determined by ecology.
JEAN
H: Ecology is the ultimate leveler of all of these ideological forms. When you
start talking about deep ecology, you’re also by the way talking about the
deep psyche.
ABE:
Yes. A whole Earth culture, a different sense of time.
JEAN
H: So that psyche is being activated, ecology is being activated. The cosmic
person is being activated, you know, the Purusha of the old Vedas, the person
who is both organism and environment, symbiotic with worlds within worlds
within worlds, both within and without themselves, who has access to the “I
am,” access to these depths that they could not have access to as long as they
were having to spend all their time keeping their metabolism going and having
to contend with ideological forces. So when you get beyond metabolic
maintenance and/or sustenance and you get beyond ideology, it means that the
human brain/mind spiritual system is available for much much more and then
those pulsings and mythic codings start coming in.
ABE:
Beautiful. So now what’s arising here is a pair of opposites. A yin force and
the yang force. Let’s say the yin force is deep ecology because it embraces
everything.
JEAN
H: Yes. That’s the paradise center.
ABE:
And we also have the “I am” within the mythic.
JEAN
H: Within the mythic within the psyche.
ABE:
Yes.
JEAN
H: The “I am” as being itself.
ABE:
And the “I am” in each individual is fully awake within the yin force of a
deep ecological awareness of the Earth. What is the bridge between the “I am”
and deep ecology?
JEAN
H: I think the bridge may be the mythic itself. I think of the Sanskrit notion
of the yidam. What is the yidam? The god, the goddess, not. God. Not God
itself, but the amplified persona of the psycho-spiritual pattern and
archetype that allows you through identification and extension the way to
access “I am that being.” Now obviously there are many religious traditions
that do it directly like Zen Buddhism, where you polish or hone yourself into
“I amness,” where you do not need the archetype in between. Most religions and
all popular religions require the yidam as the beloved, that amplified
extended self, the archetype of the larger self to which- you connect. I’m not
saying that we’re necessarily moving into that, but I think a great deal of
what we call the “channeling” phenomena is essentially a modern way of trying
to access this mythic structure that brings you directly to the “I am,” that
allows you leakier margins and more opened and fluid boundaries which you
don’t have in your ordinary everyday existential self.
ABE:
Yes, but...
JEAN
H: Many yes buts. [laughter]
ABE:
Let’s raise the yes but of the fact that the phenomenon of channeling means
that for one thing the person doing the channeling is unconscious. I’m talking
about deep-trance channeling, where the individual who is doing the channeling
is pretty well in a coma and some other aspect of them or some other entity is
speaking through them and often not saying terribly enlightened things.
JEAN
H: My husband and I have read literally tens of thousands of pages of this
material coming out of people in deep trance. And when people started to
publish this stuff we couldn’t understand it. We said, “People pay to buy
books full of this?” [ But it gets beneath the surface crust of consciousness
and the automatons of the creative unconscious are happy and willing to
present entire automatous realities. -
ABE:
So are you saying that channeling is an expression of the unconscious in a
Jungian sense?
JEAN
H: Yes, but the unconscious can shade into much more because we are organism
and environment. It shades into another environment, which is lensed through,
I think, the personal unconscious. For some people that’s all it is and for
others it may be much more of a lensing and focalization.
ABE:
Where does the “I am” emerge from that phenomenon?
JEAN
H : I think the “I am” is always there in the midst of it. There are all the
classical mystic texts of Meister Eckhart, saying, “The ‘I’ by which I see God
is the same ‘I’ by which God sees me,” and he got into a lot of trouble with
the Pope over that one. Or Saint Francis saying, “What we are looking for is
who is looking.” So I think it’s a permeation, not necessarily a hierarchy. We
hierarchicalize it so as to understand it, but that’s purely a mapping. It’s
just a question of the releasing of the lensing.
ABE:
I agree with that completely, but then there’s this difficulty of the
unconsciousness involved in channeling, if indeed what is occurring is that
God is becoming aware of Itself -
JEAN
H: Yes, I would say what we call gods or “yidams” or archetypal structures
certainly grow themselves in part through us. I would agree with someone like
Kazantzakis that we become the saviors of God to the degree that we allow for
self-reflection. When we get to the realm of “I am,” I am the first to say I
don’t know. [ We can’t assume and speak for the gods. I don’t know that we can
speak for Being itself. Perhaps Being itself does put us out. Let’s say I’m
looking right now at a figure of a monkey. If I were to be comical about it, I
would agree with someone like Terence McKenna who says that “we are not
monkeys but we are in monkeys.” [
ABE:
Ah yes, I see what you’re saying. -
JEAN
H: And maybe we are God-seeded primates. How did that brain develop so very
fast? Those frontal lobes? Transcending all kinds of evolutionary expectation.
Could it be that we are quickened? That was part of one of the great turnings
of prehistory when the depths, the energies, and the need to propagate all of
the Earth was such that something occurred so that these primate species
suddenly were activated by this deep pulsing from the Earth’s unconscious, the
Earth’s psyche, or from an even larger metabolic structure. Part of our
problem is that we do exist in brains that in part are very primitive. Two of
them don’t even talk to each other anymore, so that our finest ideas get
caught in ideology, and that’s monkey business. Read the newspapers. Take
somebody like Christ, you know, who comes in the old traditional mythology to
redeem the old Adam, meaning the old primate. He gets caught up a tree.
ABE:
In relation to ideology, the only way to protect yourself from being swallowed
by an ideology is to keep the big questions open.
JEAN
H: Yes, quite.
ABE:
And coming back to the mythic, how does myth keep questions open?
JEAN
H: Because it requires palingenesea. It requires this constant shock and the
big turnaround. It’s always the road of trials or the road of challenges. It
speaks to our deepest yearnings. It is, as I’ve often said, a coded DNA of the
human psyche so that you can’t get really stuck or caught in it. It’s also
like a force field that keeps lighting up new arenas of our mind. It’s a kind
of potent coded-symbol system that releases some of our own coding. We’re in
mythic times because we’re in times in which our coding is being released.
ABE:
What’s causing that release?
JEAN
H: Well, remember 2001: A Space Odyssey, that great picture where you had that
funny rectangle? [ Every time they touched it, they’d go whoop! Clearly,
coding got released. We’re being uncoded through the sheer uniqueness of our
time, the fact that we are moving towards planetarization with an awareness of
the planet being alive; we are moving towards whole systems transiting
positions all over the world. We are moving to the rise of women to full
partnership with men. A radical technology in which imagination joined to
computers, electronics joined to biofacture, joined to genetic engineering,
joined to whole new energy bases. Joined to the accessing of the spiritual
mythic in symbolic systems of the whole world, so that they’re not insular
anymore. They’re bleeding through. We are creating virtually a second Genesis.
This, you know, to all effective purposes, is releasing a coding. Haven’t you
felt yourself being progressively uncoded over the last twenty or thirty
years?
ABE:
Oh yes, indeed. I’m about as uncoded as you can get by now. [laughter] In your
experience of doing seminars and working with people at so many levels, can
you talk about the process? How does it work?
JEAN
H: There’s a great deal of telling of the mythic story and of one’s own story
as it relates to the myth. So already the personal-particular is elevated to
or moves into the personal-universal within a broader context. There are many
exercises that serve to release habituated structures—brain exercises,
physical exercises, mental exercises.
ABE :
Do those exercises emerge out of the myths themselves?
JEAN
H: No. The way I work them is that I look at the myth and the exercise
presents itself.
ABE:
Mythic creativity in the moment...
JEAN
H: Yes. If I were, for example, to look at Odysseus getting out of the cave,
dealing with the Cyclops, well, he uses phenomenal intelligence. Now, we might
enact that, yes, but then we would look at what is the nature of this
phenomenal intelligence. So we would study Odysseus’ mind and discover that he
had craft, cunning, wit, and he was able to entertain a variety of
possibilities. We’d then create an exercise to engage that. You see, it
relates both to Odysseus and to the person’s own life.
ABE:
By talking about Odysseus, you just plugged into the awakening
mythology that arises around space visitors or extraterrestrials.
JEAN
H: Yes. He was one of the world’s first spacemen. [laughter]
ABE:
Do you have any thoughts about that whole phenomenon, people like...
JEAN
H: Whitley Streiber?
ABE :
Whitley Streiber and the impact that he’s made, Jacques Vallee’s books, etc...
JEAN
H: Well let me tell you what I truly think. I don’t know if we’ll have
visitors from outer space. I cannot speak for that. I live in a county—the
Hudson River valley—where everybody sees them and I’m the only person who
hasn’t. I feel that a lot of it is eschatology casting its shadow. When you
look at the phenomenology of mystical experience . . . take someone like
Hildegard of Bingen. . . she was seeing behind her closed eyes flying discs,
whirring vortexes, lenses of light. And there’s a lot of this that’s in the
psyche to herald an annunciation, to announce another possibility. I’m just
wondering if this isn’t part of the world psyche waking up, in which we begin
to see these things, because what I think is happening is so overwhelming and
so utterly beyond our expectations that it is safe to think of these phenomena
as being “out there.” “Out there” we can deal with. But if it’s part of the
whole collective psyche, a cocreation, then it’s scary.
ABE:
What is the role played by myth in the creation of your own reality? Because
obviously if you’re trying to create your reality out of seminars for success,
there’s a certain lack of real richness there.
J E A
N H: There is something wrong with a great deal of so-called new age thought
and also new thought—Christian Science and that kind of thing— which assumes
reality without shadows, without a constant holographic reverberation of the
people. I do not believe that I by myself, as some kind of insular
encapsulated being, make my own reality.
ABE:
One is constantly encountering the world?
JEAN
H: Well, I think we are more of a “we are.”
ABE:
Yes, “we are” is balance.
JEAN
H: I think of Doris Lessing’s wonderful point in the Shikasta series where she
talks about how the original great society had the suchness of “we,” and the
suchness of “we” I think is what creates reality; it’s the ripples, you know,
cascading.
ABE:
In that sense of the modern human being working at reality, working at
deepening on one side and on the other trying to be more functional in the
external world, what sort of things are people needing to get hold of in order
to nourish that process?
JEAN
H: Well, I think a great deal of it has to do with meaning. When you are
living at the time of the death of ideology and the end of history in that
sense, you’re also living in a time of the ending of traditional meanings. So
it’s the question of meaning, the understanding of one’s own depths as they
shade into others’ depths, in relationship. How does one stop long enough to
become attuned to these great pulsings that are occurring, the rhythms of
awakening? Then how does one transduce them in terms of the vehicle of one’s
own self within history, and then transmit them? Just the other day I came up
with: Stop, Attune, Transmute, Transmit.
ABE :
Yet there’s a lot of fear attached to the breakdown of ideology. It’s not
terror, but it’s the realization that a bridge is being burned. I look out
into the world and I see that there are millions of people who are not only
unable to burn that bridge, but who are fighting very violently against this
process. We have Islamic and Christian fundamentalism. We have all of these
fanaticisms. How long is it going to take to work itself out?
JEAN
H: Who can say? Certainly we’re looking at the next hundred years, because
phenomenal ideologies are going down that have thousands of years in the
matrix of history. But I also feel that so much is coming up, so much social
invention and spiritual possibility. There are new ideologies and subcultures
coming up within these so-called fundamentalist forms.
ABE:
So in the place of ideology, which is linear, rigid, and falling apart, you
have the rise of the mythic.
JEAN
H: The rise of the mythic always attends the end of ideology, any ideology.
This is true for the end of any age. We are in no ways unique in any of this.
ABE:
What are the major examples of that?
JEAN
H: All right, let’s take the sixth and fifth century B.C. Look at China, let’s
say the end of the Chang dynasty, during which the country broke into many
feudal warring states. In the midst of this chaos in China, who rises within
decades of each other? Lao-tzu, Confucius, with his deep empathy and
heartfulness, all these people who are looking for alternative ways of dealing
with the end of history.
ABE:
Toynbee comes to mind again. He talks about how a period of violence is often
followed by a very peaceful renaissance.
J E A
N H: You have Lao-tzu who is really looking at the naturalist’s way of being,
and Confucius tuning into nature as a way of getting back to the source. Down
south you have Mahavira, the fain, and of course Buddha. Buddha’s great
invention, which Toynbee says. is one of the greatest inventions of human
history, is the Sangha community.
ABE:
The holy family.
JEAN
H : The holy family. To the west you have the Pythagorean communities,
communities based on sense and number, logic, music, and mysticism. And I
could go all over the world to show what’s happening in that extraordinary
sixth century B.C. But in every case it is the breakdown of the feudal states
that forms the context for these developments.
ABE:
When you talked earlier about living in this very unique time within these
mythic rhythms, what came into my head were the words myth under pressure...
JEAN
H: [laughter] Hothouse myth.
ABE:
Yes.
JEAN
H: You’re quite right.
ABE:
We also have nuclear power in the world. The myth which is holism, of the
unity of Earth and humanity, still has this deadly challenge before it and
maybe that’s also part of what is fertilizing or firing myths to awaken from
inside us as we encounter the shadow side of technology. In that sense there’s
a time pressure, isn’t there, at this turning point, and the uniqueness is
that it’s happening planet-wide all at once?
JEAN
H: That is my experience literally all over the world. All over the world you
find pictures of the whole Earth tacked up, in huts in Africa, down in
southern India. This whole Earth image is everywhere. And at the same time the
old mythic structures are arising to be remythologized.
ABE:
Are those old reawakened mythic structures and the emergence of the
planetarization of consciousness going to merge?
JEAN
H: Well no. I think we’re moving towards a planetary myth, but it is not
something that is exclusive and it does not swallow its own children.
ABE:
A really new cosmic and planetary myth, with ancient roots.
JEAN
H: I think it is. It’s a family of mythic structures with an overarching
planetary myth that will start in our time. We will probably have a pretty
good idea of its true nature, I imagine, by the middle of the next century.
