Q: How does someone deal with that when they get it? How do you figure out . . .
Jean Houston: You open up to a page, like the Bible, and you just point. (Laughter.)
Q: Is that your method?
Jean Houston: I don't know, but I just thought of that. That's not a bad idea. I think you just go through and you realize that some of the best teachers do not write the best copy. You almost have to just go, intuitively, and just sort of ask your deep self, your high self, your entelechy, to find a way, and don't look at it in terms of copy. You have a group of people out there who acquire an armamentarium of techniques and they can persuade an awful lot of people with techniques but who are really essentially still part of a kind of a greed mentality.
Q: Old paradigm.
Jean Houston: Very old paradigm, in using just surface techniques, but no depth. And with technique you can persuade for a small period of time, and you can certainly make money. And that of course is also the American way, the technique-ology, but without the art, without the art and spirit that's really behind it.
We are on the verge of a new natural philosophy, a new natural theology. It isn't there, and you're not going to find it in books. A natural, a *natural* theology requires a certain number of people to spontaneously combust into it. It can't be, you know, you're not going to have a modern Thomas Aquinas who is going to harvest all knowledge for you and then give it out. It's not going to work that way.
Q: But it's going to involve elements of what we now think of as "New Age" in a pejorative sense.
Jean Houston: Possibly, and also quantum physics and biophysics. Frankly, in order to access these different kinds of knowledges in a realistic way, you almost need to get to the essence of each one, and this is something that you can find through the Internet. And you also find it -- you find it -- it's not exactly like going to a bookstore, where you have to read.
Q: You can see the patterns
Jean Houston: I can see patterns of development that I can not see just in books. It's a "both/and," since I'll never be a non-reader, god knows. But I feel that it's almost as if the earth has grown herself a nervous system in us -- certainly we're either neurons or the cancer of the planet .
Q: Depends on your point of view. Jean Houston, thank you very much for your time.
Dr. Jean Houston, scholar, philosopher and researcher in Human Capacities, is one of the foremost visionary thinkers and doers of our time. She is long regarded as one of the principal founders of the Human Potential Movement.
