By Dr. Jean Houston (about the author) Page 1 of 1 page(s)
awakeningpath.com
For Awakening Path: Dr. Jean Houston - Writer
Q: What we'd like to know, from your experience, is how do you figure out ... how does a person figure out what is likely to work for them from this vast set of choices, and when they do figure out what works for them, how do they really get themselves to practice it consistently?
Jean Houston: Interesting question. I've never been asked that before. I certainly am very familiar with the phenomenon and one of the things you find is that with Americans they sometimes get into a single practice, let's say Zen Buddhism or Tibetan Buddhism, and they stay with it for a while, but then the lure of the next practice is always there on the American scene to a degree that you don't find in other countries, or even other cultures.
We are not a single track society, probably because we began as a multicultural society, with a kind of multiculturalism of pursuit of physical, personal, and spiritual enlightenment. And being a fix-it society too [laughter] we are always looking for what is a bigger and better fix. And of course what happens is that you have a lot of people who, after ten years or twelve years, seem to know five or six practices pretty well. I don't necessarily think that is a bad thing.
I think that what has happened in America is that America is the place of the hardest of the world's physical, mental, psychological, spiritual, and electronic technologies. This is the techno-society, more so, I think, than any society that has ever been. Never before have we had access to so many different styles and ways of being, knowing, having, transforming. We're the ones who really are kind of an experimental lab -- we're what is called the "skunk works" -- where all the experiments are being made.
The problem is that it keeps you in a state of yearning all the time, because your adrenaline is always tripped ready for the next trip, as it were.
Q: Are people missing the deeper value of having just one practice?
Jean Houston: I don't know. Some people are not. Some people's way is the way of the journey.
For example, if you look at the classic Sufi way, "Well, you want enlightenment, then go to Ali who sells shoes in the south of Morocco in the market." And Ali says, "Heck, I don't know anything about enlightenment, I know about shoes. Here, you want to learn about shoes? Let's learn about shoes." And then after about six months Ali begins to drop pearls of wisdom. Then you're with Ali for two years, and Ali says, "OK, I want you to go to Mohammed, in Cordoba, a maker of fine swords." (This is the 13th century.) And you go there, and he says, "I don't know anything about enlightenment, I know about swords." And before you know it you've had maybe six or seven extraordinary teachers.
The way of spirit has often been the way of the journey -- of the hero or heroine's journey. Because different people can clearly give you different paths. You have very complex paths like Tibetan Buddhism, and if you stay within it there are an infinite number of resources because it's been around for so long, as with many of the Eastern disciplines. The paradigmatic story here is the story of the Buddha, isn't it? For six years he went from place to place to place. He was like a typical American.
Q: He tried it all.
Jean Houston: He tried it all, and then he said, "To hell with it. I'm just going to sit here until it comes." So I think the issue is to look at the story of the Buddha, and look what he did, he did something right, he did try it all. He certainly acquired the immensity of the knowledge and the technique and the practices of his time of 6th century BC in which you had a kind of extraordinary multicultural uprising.
Picking and Choosing:
Q: So people have to practice something . . .
Jean Houston: Oh they have to practice something ... because we must, as Bergson said [first in French] "remount the slope of thought" ... and part of human evolution and human becoming is doing just that, remounting the slope of thought. That's our next stage.
Q: There are an enormous number of catalogs, an enormous range of choices of different seminars and workshops and teachers and all these things ...
Jean Houston: Not available 20 or 30 years ago.
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.
Jean Houston: You're welcome.
www.jeanhouston.org
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.
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