A Time of Quickening

a Talk by Jean Houston ***

It is a pleasure and an honor for me to be with you, you true midwives of soul, evocateurs of culture and consciousness, who have dared to go to your edges, pushed the membrane on the possible, cast your bread upon the water and know that it will come back sandwiches one way or another. 

My first introduction to the United Nations was a major one—it was back when I was a high school senior and president of my high school class. My school of 5,000 girls, Julia Richmond High School, was right down the street from here. Mrs. Roosevelt had just retired from the United Nations and she set about gathering young leaders, especially young presidents of their general organizations, and meeting with them in her apartment which was at 62nd  Street and Second Avenue.  And she was really giving us our marching orders for international development, for ethics, for values, for the new world.  She would say, “My dear children, you will be working in a new world, a new time, with new values.”  She would also say, “If you are a professional woman trying to make your way in the world, you can expect to get trashed!  But remember a woman is like a tea bag in hot water, it gets stronger as it brews.”  That has turned out to be so true.

Mrs. Roosevelt really instilled in us a vision of the world that was to come, and what our place could become in it as evocateurs of the possible world. And I would like to say something about my small claim to fame--I am one of the best traveled women, which I suppose isn’t that great an accomplishment at the beginning of the 21st century but I have been in over one hundred countries and taught intensively in foreign cultures.  As a result of my work as a consultant to the U.N. in human development, leadership development and capacity building I believe I have a somewhat different perspective than the media, both on the world and the place of the U.N. within it as I am often in countries where the U.N. and its various agencies are in place.  In the past few years I have worked in Albania, the Philippines, Kenya, Tanzania, Thailand, the islands of the eastern Caribbean and I am off to Nepal and Vietnam very shortly.  Throughout the world I find the U.N. doing extraordinary work--work of compassion, passion, and enormous skill—whether it is working with AIDS babies in Southern Africa or helping to establish decent housing in Asia--wherever I go, frankly, I would have to say that if the U.N. and its agencies were not in place the world would be a very different place.  And as difficult as things are now, it would be a great deal worse without the U.N. 

You are the people of the parenthesis—meaning the people at the end of one era and at the beginning of the new one. And the future is seeded and coded in this very difficult era of the parentheses, where all the shadows rise. The poet said:

Thank god our time is now.

When wrong comes up to face us everywhere, never to leave us.

The longest stride of soul folk ever took.

Affairs are now soul sized, the enterprise is exploration into God.

But what are you waiting for?

It takes so many thousand years to wake.

But will you wake?  For pity’s sake? 1

I know there are people here who are interested in all the new peace initiatives.  Some of us get on late night radio and somewhere around 2:00 in the morning, you find that you have fallen asleep but your mouth keeps on going.  Around two years ago I found myself saying words to the effect that our job was to bring about peace and the creation of a society that is so rich and so full of flavor that it makes sense to make peace and to shift the dangerous and war-embracing patterns of the millennia by offering a rich and evocative alternative. And then I found myself saying that concepts of peace we bring from the past are just too tame; peace, instead, should be alluring, and challenging and fascinating--peace should be sexy!  Well, that is what you say at 2 a.m. when you are not listening to yourself.  And several days later, Clifford Browder, who was a very elderly Greenwich Village poet, called me up and said, “I liked very much what you said about making peace sexy and so I wrote a poem for you.”  He sent me this extraordinary poem:

Peace is not

Sterile gauze, a snowflake, an insipid dove

It’s feisty and rich 

Don’t let the war boys hog it all

The spit, the spice and the glamour.

Peace is potency

Reaching and sprouting

Budding and branching

It’s lifting things

A good scrap

A hot wrestle and a cool scrub

Cleansing and hope.

Peace is the empowerment of dust

Whispers of the song before origin

As out of seed

The cathedral of the body builds itself

It’s spasms and metamorphoses

The vertigo

of mind and dancing

With the fecundator

 To the music of need. 

Peace

It is little orange bees

Spotted ladybugs on white campions.

Late June with a stink of linden

Prickles and burrs

It’s wild grapes in a bramble

A tough nut

Lovers churning

Through the night, at noon, in the morning

A juicy comeuppance

For the grim suppressors.

Peace

Is for the star-biters and the rooted. 

Don’t be dainty

Go at it

Hammer and tong. 

Peace is not purity

Limp, neat and dry.

It’s sexy. 2

So, friends, peace-making is a dynamic, growing, sap-rising concept and, when it works, we engage both individuals and communities.  And I think that what this world needs so desperately now is patterns for peaceful, evocative, effective societies and, with it, peaceful, passionately creative and effective people.  In other words, we will have the possible human in the possible society.  And here is where I think a group such as the Values Caucus and the extraordinary things you think about and work out together, can enter what is essentially a new field.  You are working out a new paradigm--one that supports sustainable development in its most primary relationships, capacities, skills and potentials and also activates both individuals and groups in ways that enhance their societal choices and commitments, liberates their inventiveness and raises esteem and cooperation essential to carrying out the goals of making a better world. In all my travels I do see a world that is shifting; it may be a world that is shifting beneath the surface crust of consciousness, but by golly, it is shifting in many areas.

Powerful forces are working in parallel and fuel each other.  We describe them as the repatterning of human nature and the regenesis of human society, the breakdown of the membrane between peoples, cultures and groups, with the necessary backlash that accompanies it.  There is a breakthrough of the depths and the pulsing of the earth and its needs--perhaps even the cosmos. When you begin to define these forces you find they have a lot to do with a new field I’m suggesting which I call social artistry.  The social artist is one who brings the same kind of skill, passion, courage, connectivity, and follow-through that an artist brings to his or her materials but in this case your materials are the social canvas.  And I have been working in social artistry all over the world in training leaders in their own development in the light of social complexity.  Many of today’s leaders--regardless of their ethnicity, class or race--have been trained to be white males from the year 1926; they have not been trained for today’s incredible complexity, nor have their cultures and their cultural genius been honored. So today when we go to work with different cultures throughout the world, we do not do what I saw in the early days of the Peace Corps volunteers, when very sweet twenty-two year old kids said, “Hello there my little brown brother, let me show you the American way of doing things.”  And there would go three thousand years of culture out the window.  Luckily they don’t do that anymore but they did at one time.

To really honor cultures where they are and find their key story provides the basis from which to weave together all manner of training and possibility.  For example, the repatterning of the human being has been essentially my main focus for many years, both in terms of studying the nature of the human potential and tapping into the immense reservoir of our human capacity. I myself have never met a stupid child, but I have seen incredibly stupid systems of education that diminish and narrow, but when you make art central to the curriculum--dancing, writing, singing, sculpting --children do not fail.  We’ve done experiments in schools all over the world—in Bangladesh, for example, tens of thousands of schools are based on the culture of art and different modalities of singing and the children run to school and the teachers are empowered.   

I was the adopted daughter of Margaret Mead.  I had a wonderful mother already and Margaret had a wonderful daughter but she said to me, “I need another daughter and it is probably you.”  She lived with us on and off for the last six years of her life and she sent me out all over the world.  She said, “Jean, go out and harvest the human potential.”  She sent me to a tribe in west Africa where they had very little history of war and very little neurosis as we understand it.  She said, “Find out what’s going on there.”  And so I lived with this tribe and it was very interesting. I watched them solve problems and they did not do so in the way most of us do, which is in subsection A, B, paragraph D.  Their solutions certainly did not read like U.N. intra-agency documents; instead they sang the issue under consideration, then they drummed it.  Then they would get up and dance it--they would close their eyes and envision the solution and draw it and, by golly, they would have the solution.  What were they doing?  They were cooking on more burners and using much more of themselves. 

She sent me to Bali and we finished up some of the work she had started years ago.  “Jean, find out why the whole culture is artists.”  And I did.  The people would shift attention on the spectrum of consciousness and enter into a very available space in which they were not laying their thoughts or ways of being on something—they would become one with the mask and let the mask emerge from inside out.  I studied the Inuit people. Why do they have almost hologramatic visual imagery. Why can they walk around engines in their mind?  Well, they have had to develop these skills because their environment was floating away.

This is the first time in human history that we have available to us the harvest and genius of the human race, and if we could apply it in all our different social programs it would make such an enormous difference.  So that has been part of my life, to go to different cultures—to Bali, to Jakarta, to Iceland-- to honor them and find out about their unique ways of being and knowing and seeing; find their key stories and help evolve a bridging between cultures and help set up schools in which people can be exposed to different ways of seeing and being.  This is the first time in human history in which we have had access to information from the totality of the human race. Now we had better begin to create a planetary civilization that honors culture, values, ethics, and the ways of being of those cultures. 

This is an extraordinary time.  We are gradually moving from a culture in which soul is a satellite of economics, into one in which economics will become a satellite to the soul—a shift so deeply needed.  So my friends, if we are going to survive the next one hundred years, the capacities that previously belonged to the elite must become the province and the requirement of the many.  I truly believe that.  So part of my work as a human development professional, social artist, and in my own foundations, has been to teach people how to tap into the creative workshops of the mind.  We do this problem solving through art, poetry and invention.  And, in the process, we discover together ways to feel at home with almost anybody, anytime, anywhere.  And I have found that most people, if given opportunity, training and access to the multiple ways of knowing, can learn to function, think and feel in new and better ways.  As Einstein reminded us in that old chestnut, “You can’t solve a problem with the consciousness that created it.” You have to evolve a different consciousness. 

I once made a study of fifty-five of some the most creative people in North America.  Among my research subjects were Joseph Campbell (with whom I worked and conducted workshops for twenty years), Margaret Mead, Buckminster Fuller (I live in the last house he ever designed, in Ashland, Oregon), Jonas Salk, Linus Pauling and a lot of people whose names you wouldn’t know but who had high sustained creativity. I discovered something quite remarkable about all of them--they were all archeologists of their own mind, they were fascinated by the inner dynamics of themselves.  They were not obsessive, they just made use of their inner world.  I once asked Margaret Mead what she wanted on her tombstone and she replied, “She lived long enough to be of some use.”  These individuals thought in images as well as in words, they thought with their whole bodies.

Margaret was perhaps the most accomplished person in the uses of the self—she thought in images, she thought in words, she thought in her whole body, she thought artfully and intuitively, she could remember eight dreams at any point, any morning. (Well, one of her husbands was a dream expert and so she learned how to work with her dreams in her courtship with him.)  She used to say, “All of my marriages were great successes!”  I spoke later with some of her husbands and they had slightly different perspectives on the matter! 

What I came to understand about these people was that not only did they develop interior imagery, but they used this imagery as vehicles in which to drop ideas; they would find that the ideas would constellate in these multiple images—feeling, touching, sensing, etc.  This is very important and I later took this development to many other different cultures. While many cultures have extraordinary internal imagery, it has been deeply compromised by bad British missionary education. When you really look at the nature of consciousness, you discover that beneath its surface crust creativity, or some kind of creative function, is going on all the time.  And if you learn to tap into it by using internal skills--those internal hooks and eyes-- you can learn to capture and ground the ideas so they stay and grow within you.

I once made a study of Mozart and one of my students at the time was a man named Don Campbell who went on to write The Mozart Effect. When people asked Mozart how such a silly, little man as he could compose such extraordinary music he would say, “It is because when I compose I enter into myself within the realm of music and the whole composition is there all at once, it is all there.  And then I come out and write it down as quickly as possible.  Whence it cometh from I know not, but I thank the Lord that it is at least Mozartish.”  It is not difficult to train people how to access the internal imagery and then to use it for creative solutions and problem solving. We Westerners do a lot of people a lot of harm with our regressive and often damaging notions of personality with the ego at the center.  We sometimes behave as encapsulated bags of skin dragging around dreary little egos, while many indigenous people think in terms of being organisms within the environment, of being symbiotic with fields of life.

And so what I have discovered in all my work is that if schizophrenia--the split personality--is the disease of the human condition, then polyphrenia--the orchestration of our many, many selves--may be the expression of our expanded health.  I will use myself as an example: I hate to write, I really hate it,  but I have twenty-five books as well as two hundred-and-four unpublished four hundred page manuscripts, and you may wonder how that is possible?  In my various schools, I write a new book of seventy pages every month and by the time I have delivered it in the three day seminars it becomes two hundred pages.  How can I do this? I can’t write.  Well, I happen to have two great skills, one has to do with talking and working with dogs and the other is cooking.  I am profoundly a dog person--my last book was called Mystical Dogs.  I learned to cook because my mother, who was born in Sicily, married Jack Houston from Texas.  They did not understand each others’ food at all and I tried to keep them together by becoming a transfusion cook--chicken-fried polenta.  As a result, I have absolutely no blocks at all when I cook and so in order to write I get into a cook persona in which I stir various ideas, simmer them with different associations and that is how I have been able to write.  But as Jean qua Jean, I can’t write because my father discouraged me as a child.  I would try to write a composition for school and he would re-do it.  I would take it out of my binder and find he had written, “Hey kid, your stuff stinks.  I’ve written you a better one that will get you an A.”  And then when I did hand in my own writing, the teacher would write me back notes, “Jean, you are not living up to your potential.” 

I find that everybody has all kinds of aspects within themselves--a meditator, a healer, a comic, a fool--all these different people who bring with them a gestalt of capacities and skills that can be summoned to our aid. So many of us prepare for failure or misery--we literally engender a chemistry of failure, a chemistry of dissolution. So we have to begin to shift that. 

A lot of us, especially in organizations such as the United Nations or any big bureaucracy, have fallen into niches in which we are seen as niched and we niche others and we are de-mythologized and demythologizing all the time.  Margaret Mead was a person who was continually preparing internally for certain kinds of processes and she was chronically successful as a result.  And I said to her, “I’ve never seen anybody so blessed.”  She said, “Yes, I’m blessed, because I expect to be.”  But she was always working at polyphrenia by bringing up different personas--ways of tapping into creativity-- using both internal as well as external imagery.

When we work as social artists across cultures we cultivate that radical empathy for others that allows us to have a sense of their sensibility--their values and their ways of being--their food, their jokes, their language.  We are living in a time of the regenesis of society because as the self is repatterned with marvelous new ways of being, the ways in which we relate to one another are necessarily shifting as we evolve new ways of interpersonal connection and being in community within a global society.

We are being asked to do things in several generations that have never been done in the entire expanse of human history.  I personally think that the rise of women, to full partnership with men is the single most important shift in history—reversing thousands of years of roles.  Did any of you see today’s op-ed opinion in The New York Times by Bob Herbert?  He wrote about the terrible things that are happening to women at the same time that women are rising.  We are experiencing things for which we are not prepared and we are finding our way, seemingly in the dark.  The movement, however, seems to be from an ego-centric and ethno-centric perspective to a world centric one, resulting in a fundamental change in the nature of civilization, compelling a passage beyond the mindset in institutions of millennia.  And you are the ones who are caught up in it—you may have preferred to have lived one hundred years in the past or one hundred years into the future, but you are caught up in the most interesting time of human history.

Many of you are living lives in which you are experiencing maybe five to ten to one hundred times the sheer life experience of your ancestors of one-hundred-and-fifty years ago.  We get so full of wholes that we become holy and, as I said, critical to this transformation is the new rising partnership within society in which women join men in the full social agenda.  Why is this so important?  Because women tend to emphasize process rather than product, being rather than doing, and it is inevitable that in such a partnership the linear, sequential solutions will eventually evolve to the knowing that comes from seeing things in whole constellations rather than as discreet facts. It is so important to have this level of integral, holistic vision and to be able to hold it.  And I think that you who are working as NGOs in the United Nations have an advantage over those who are caught in very particular agencies because you are able to see the great dynamic of interconnectivity between things--you have to be generalists, and I mean “generalist” as a definite advantage in that it gives insights into situations in ways that people who have very specific types of roles often do not have. 

You may not have power, but ultimately you have knowledge and intense intentionality and, as a result, a much more comprehensive mindset--or such has been my experience over many years working with NGOs.  You become very adept at orchestrating the multiple variables when you live in the multi-cultural reality of the modern world.  I think this raises hope for forgiveness and healing between and among nations and ethnic groups and essential to this mature consciousness is moral and ethical growth towards empathy that honors the golden rule of human interchange. And so I do think that we are right in the middle of the regenesis of social forms even if we think we are in chaos.

This is birth.  This is where we are--I absolutely believe that this is where we are.  But this place demands that governments begin to shift the emphasis from social engineering designed to fix specific problems, to an embrace of the world as an ecology, a complex adaptive system in which global awareness is applied to local concerns.  And here again we need new models. I think people within the NGOs are building these new models and orders of relationship, forging their place within a possible society in which male and female, science and spirituality, economics and ecology, civic participation and personal growth come together in an integral and interdependent matrix for the benefit of all.  And again, this is possible because the NGOs hold an enormous advantage, and indeed a passion, for the possible and a certain kind of freedom to be able to look at the complexity of the whole and the dynamics of interconnectivity and offer solutions or ways of being that remain closed to the more official point of view. This has been my experience. 

We are experiencing in our time the breakdown of the membrane. We have different mind/brain geographies today that have become available to us as a result of the cultural diversity and the inclusive worldview.  What began as migrations in global economics is now becoming a worldwide network of individuals and institutions who are quickened by the desire to create a new social paradigm in which humanity and the earth are enhanced within the context of the collective destiny.  And as the membrane of the old form breaks down--as is certainly happening in our time with tremendous backlash--a more complex and inclusive global organism is emerging.  We, as living cells within this living organism, are being rescaled to earth wide proportions in terms of our responsibility. Don’t you feel this rescaling?  How many of you wake up with a hound of heaven barking each morning at your feet that it is time to get on with it.  And with this, of course, comes this whole sense of rising from the depths.

I myself have served as an advisor to both the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa.  In knowing both of them as well as I did, I found they possessed a great similarity of practice.  I asked Mother Teresa how she could do all the things she did--things that the Red Cross couldn’t do as effectively.  How she could care and educate every little child who was left in the creche outside her convent?  How could she care for the lepers who came to her wanting to have a decent life and a profession?  She replied, “My dear, it is because I’m so deeply in love.”  I said, “You’re in love, Mother?  Would you mind telling me who you are in love with?”  She said, “I’m in love with Jesus.  I’m so in love with my beloved that I see and hear my beloved everywhere.  I see my beloved in that day old child, I see my beloved in that dying man in the street, the leper and I cannot do enough for my beloved.   Maybe that’s why my beloved cannot do enough for me.”  Then a few years later I talked to the Dalai Lama. Tibet is such a tragic situation and yet he is always so happy.  I asked him how he accounted for this.  And he replied that everyday he does exercises to make himself happy and he sends out happiness and compassion to everyone in the world and that is why he is happy. 

In both those cases, therefore, we have people who have experienced a breakthrough of the membrane, of spiritual accountability and spiritual sensitivity, whatever you want to call it. I wrote a whole book on this once called Search for the Beloved.  I believe that in order to do the great work at this incredible time, space, and psyche—at this incredible moment in human history—it is important to have some kind of practice; it doesn’t have to be a spiritual practice--it might be dancing, walking in nature, playing with dogs, journaling--anything that moves you into that deeper state of resonance and responsiveness within the universe.  Taking real time and space is so important.  Too many people, with the muchness and overwhelmingness of everyday life, tend to put off their deepest possibilities and experiences.  And quite frankly we are sufficient for a lot of things, but in these times we need sacred time and space for ourself. 

So friends, this is clearly the most interesting time in human history. This extraordinary United Nations, which has been on such a heroic journey itself in response to the call sounded in 1945, came into being when many people said it was impossible.  This is always part of the journey, the finding of allies--countries coming together and saying, “Yes, let’s do it.  Let’s do the complex work of creating a new order.”  They were able to cross the threshold of the great nay-sayers and the recalcitrant old ways of being and doing.  When I was in school, we had model U.N.’s in the fourth and fifth grade, we had U.N. parties, we had ways of applying U.N. principals in our work—I would love to see that happen in this country.  Maybe people don’t advocate the Millennium Development Goals in this country, but they should.  I would really like to see that in the classroom.  And this is something again for the Values Caucus to support--not just the creation of a model U.N. but encouraging people to ask what we can do to support the Millennium Development Goals, and their call for a sense of equality in the classroom, environmental sustainability and assistance for the poor among us. There are so many things that we could bring into regular classrooms and then we would find out what the U.N. really does.  The PR of this place is not good, how many people have noticed this?  But without the U.N. in the world, we would fail in a big way.  This message has to go out again.  The creation of UNESCO, UNICEF, WHO, UNDP and all the other U.N. agencies has been a boon for humankind.  This is the great journey of the U.N.

We are at that stage where the real work of humanity begins.  This is the time and place where we partner the Earth and work to restore the biosphere and a new kind of culture--one of kindness where we live reconnected, charged and intelligenced (if there is such a word), by the source that lies within us, in ways that liberate our inventiveness and invite deep and realistic engagement in our world and in our task. I know you feel it.  There is a quickening, an almost desperate sense of need for the human possibility in all of us to create the possible world, if we and our grandchildren are to survive.  And I think community participation--the work that you are doing in these caucuses and the empowering of grassroots development--is essential to transforming the quality of  life in societies everywhere.  It is through the work at these local levels that hope is generated for new and effective ways of shared being and shared governance.  And as Kofi Annan has said, “Good governance is perhaps the single most important factor in eradicating poverty and promoting social development.”  It has been my experience that working at the U.N., in social artistry at both local and individual levels, lays the foundation for these things. 

When I was fourteen years old I ran down Park Avenue (near my home) into an old man. I knocked the wind out of him.  He said to me, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?”  I replied, “Yes, it looks like that.”  He said, “Bon voyage.” Shortly thereafter I met him again and we started our walks.  We began to walk on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I called him by his name, which to my American ear sounded like Mr. Tayer. He had no self-consciousness at all.  He would fall to the ground and look at the caterpillar, “What is the caterpillar becoming--moving, changing, transforming. Jean, feel yourself to be a caterpillar, can you do this?”  “Well, very easily Mr. Tayer,” I said.  I was nearly six feet tall, with red spots on my face. I felt like a caterpillar.  He asked me what I would do when I became a butterfly.  I said that maybe I would fly all over the world and help people.  He told me to sniff the air.  He said, “This is the same air sniffed by Jesus Christ, Marie Antoinette, Voltaire”--a lot of French people—“and Jeanne D’Arc.”  He said, “The people of your time will be taking the tiller of the world but they cannot go directly, you have to touch all people, every culture and then you will have the great harvest of beauty, harmony and excellence.”  Mr. Tayer, as I found out years later, was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who lived across the street from me at the Jesuit directory. And this is where we are at that incredible time of history. 

I am very grateful to be here with these people who are awakening the world.      

*** A talk given at the Values Caucus, New York City, November 2, 2006

1. “A Sleep of Prisoners,” Christopher Frye
2. “Peace,” Clifford Browder