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Jean Houston
Contents
Jean Houston is a individual tour de-force. Intelligence fortified with incredible focus, erudition and ENERGY. l was amazed and entranced by her presentation at the "Turning to Wisdom" conference held this month (October 1998). She has been at the forefront of the human potential movement since the beginning and clearly is a most respected teacher and valuable resource in the movement of personal/spiritual/social/global transformation. If the Universe ever provides you with an opportunity to see or be with Jean Houston, don't let it pass you by.
Do yourself a favor and check out her website @ http://www.jeanhouston.org.
~Roger
Writings
All this and more at the Jean Houston website: http://www.jeanhouston.org/
- The Gardening of the Cosmos
An Open Letter to President Bill Clinton
The Gardening of the Cosmos
by Jean Houston
And now, in conclusion, a few speculations on the cosmos as a flower. We might term this cosmofloralology. I come to this through some reflections on my friend Duane Elgins new book, Awakening Earth.
1. I myself would begin with the great Gardeners, who decide to plant a new garden. They themselves live in the Big House, what I will postulate as the Meta Universe. When our cosmos blossomed into existence from an area smaller than a pinpoint some fifteen billion years ago, it emerged out of an infinitely deep domain of the Gardeners vast intelligence, creativity, energy. This is the ultimate, generative ground of our being. It provides the nutrients and the light of the Life-Force that continuously sustains our cosmos as a unified organism. It is the ground as well
as the light of the Universal garden. It is highly likely that the Meta Universe has other groundings, other gardens, that the Gardener has created an array of cosmic systems or gardens of which ours may be only one of many, many.
2. Then the Gardener plans the Dromenon, what we may call the Sacred Geometry that is central to the plan. This can be seen as the symbiosis of the interconnecting patterns with its organic stages of growth. This is the Great Seed, small as a pinpoint designed so that it inflates from this tiny seed, and then grows to contain the vast flowering that is a trillion galaxies, each with a hundred billion or more stars. Placed within this is the field of space/time, which it is itself an invisible fabric, probably like the electromagnetic life fields or auras that surround each living plant, or being, and continually provides the space and time within which matter can present itself. The great pattern also contains whirlwinds of spacious energy which give the appearance and feel of 'solid" matter. Put into these fields a cosmic information system, one that connects quadrillions of miles in resonance, instantly. Thus anything that happens is known to the whole, immediately. Place into this next life - that is sentient forms that can evolve to more complex and conscious entities. From this life let there emerge the design for planetary scale ecosystems with "billions of unique living organisms that can feed off each other in a process that can be sustained for billions of years." Allow next for a cosmos that is so self reflective and co-conscious in all of its parts that at a certain level of evolution , its organisms can achieve conscious awareness of the mind of the Meta-Universe, as well as adding their productions into the Mind of the Whole. This is called mystical or high creative experience.
Then "design a process that enables the cosmos to be recreated in its entirety, at every single moment. The flow of continuous creation must include the fabric of space/time, the capacity for thought, feeling, as well as reflective consciousness, and all forms of matter. " (p. 305)
3. Evolutionary Movement to great Reflective Consciousness: This schema of the Gardeners provides for emergent fields and environments that entities, then people and civilizations move through in an emergent learning process, each new dimension awakens a new set of perceptions and potentials that we are free to recognize and actualize or not. Thus by recognizing at this point of space/time that we can understand and participate very fully in the direction and pattern of personal and social evolution. We reach certain states in the co-evolution of matter and consciousness which reveals, as is now happening, the existence of a higher Universe, the Meta-Universe of the Gardeners, also in Eastern mystical terms called the generative ground of pure awareness, from which matter and consciousness arises, and which we are now invited to join. This is the state of Coevolution in which we take major leaps in our perceptual paradigms, greatly increase our frames of reference. This will develop the entelechy of what we are, seeds, coded with the same substance and content as the great seed, and therefore continually created from - and identical with the Gardeners and the Garden of the meta-universe.
4. In order to have time and space to sustain this co-evolution we require what is known as Ephemeralization. Both matter and culture and consciousness gradually become lighter, more refined, more subtle. Thus on the material side our needs can be met with proportionately smaller increments of energy and resources. We move from spending all our time in muscle work, to industrialization, and finally to high tech which requires high soul and culture to maintain itself. Similarly with the ephemeralized technology, we are linked into a global mind field which itself increased the energy, fertilization and creativity the personal and world consciousness. High tech provides the winds with which the pollen developed in the flowers of many cultures can be moved to cross fertilize of the flowers of culture and consciousness.
5. This requires Symmetry, the dynamically reciprocal relationship between matter and consciousness. Thus consciousness and matter become mutually enabling, with the growth in consciousness providing the insight, empathy and creativity needed to orchestrate material development into a sustainable pathway for the future. Thus as Elgin puts it, "The goal of evolution is not to move from matter to consciousness; rather it is to integrate matter and consciousness into a co-evolving spiral of mutual refinement that ultimately reveals the generative ground from
which both continuously arise. Matter and consciousness support each other in their mutual ascent toward and ever -wider scope of integration and differentiation, unity and diversity. At very high levels of mutual refinement and dynamic alignment, the deep Meta-universe from which both continuously arise is directly evident as nondual or unified awareness." (P. 295.)
6. Continuous creation - continuous birth, growth, death, new birth in the entire cosmos which is a unified system, a living organism, a living garden, that is being "continuously re-created in its entirety by the flow-through of an unimaginable amount of energy in a process of extraordinary precision, patience, and power. . . " Because all is energy in motion, for the world to appear stable and solid, the completely flowing nature of the universe must be profoundly orchestrated and coordinated by the Gardeners. All flows comprise one great song, one giant interrelated garden, a single creative expression. We are in our essence part of this continuous creation and re-creation. When we alter the lens of our knowing to really know this, then we have radical freedom of choice to
reconstruct our bodies, minds, lives, drawing upon the great storehouse of paradigms and inventions which is the unobstructed universe.
7. Related to this is the fact that this is a Holographic cosmos in which any change anywhere results in a change everywhere, All is within all, the totality present with each part, and each part fully connected to he whole. Beyond our local law of forms, there lies the meta universe which can connect us instantaneously to the immensely vast cosmic system which allows for higher and more creative laws to predominate. Examples.
8. This leads to the understanding that the universe is a self-organizing system, feedback on itself to create more various forms of expression. It is interconnected in all its parts. In this we resemble the torus- a geometrical representation that shows how a self-referencing system works, how material and consciousness dimensions work together to create emergent and evolutionary realities. Thus, at the center, the essence of our being we are completely open to and connected with the flow-through of the Life energy that itself is flowing out from the Meta-Verse. And yet we are also at the sides , of the torus, uniquely differentiated, self-organizing systems that lens in our own particular ways this Life energy within the local fabric of space and time.
9. With this comes the dramatic condition which we are given of radical freedom. We are free to make our mistakes, encounter suffering, face evil, and generally discover those choices and ways of being that bring us closer to the deep ecology that is our universe. Suffering is the inevitable consequence of our seeded great power joined to a limited situation and a still maturing consciousness. Except now we are in the most radical of all moments, which says that if we do not quicken our maturation and use our great powers in an ecological way, if we do not return to the wisdom of the garden we are going to have a very long winter indeed. "We are here to live
ethically in the infinitely deep ecology" that is the garden of Eternity.
10. Finally we come to what has been a major theme of this year's mystery school, the stages of development. We have seen how as there are stages in the development from foetus to elder, so, too, are there stages along the way as we progress toward our wisdom state as a planetary civilization. Review. Each stage in both pre-history and history represented an integrated pattern of technology, culture, politics, perceptions, and the use of emerging human capacities. Each stage represented a certain kind of flowering. All the major elements of each stage tend to be internally consistent and supportive of each other. Thus it can endure for hundreds, and even thousands of
years. before it becomes too successful and enters into a hyperstasis and excluding self satisfied character that creates the crisis that moves both individuals and societies into a larger and more inclusive and questing level of perception and action. Problems and opportunities arise at one stage that can only be resolved at another more comprehensive stage, just as it is with human development. Another stage then "provides a new way of seeing how to cope with the stresses created by the exhaustion of the soil of the previous stages evolutionary potentials." (Discuss however, the variant of all this, as to when the soul of a culture become exhausted, sometimes, it lies fallow and then is recreated at a higher level of consciousness, as sometimes happens among indigenous peoples.) In other worlds the Gardeners in the Meta-Universe seem to have designed a series of stages, which are not set, but re open ended in order to create an optimal flow for learning and experimentation and new expression which nevertheless leads us into an increasingly more inclusive scene of ourselves and the larger reality. Ultimately we join this larger universe and move into the Big House, where we are given materials and scope to create our own Gardens. Thus the Cosmos continues to flower.
An Open Letter to President Bill Clinton
by Jean Houston
In late June of 1996 my porch and lawn were covered for days on end with reporters and
cameramen all looking for news of something that never happened. A White House leak of a
tape of Mrs. Clinton and I doing an imaginative exercise of reflecting on what Mrs. Roosevelt
might have said about building a better society for our children sent the media looking for
adjectives as well as adversaries. "Seance!" the front pages of the newspapers shouted.
"Witchcraft!" And even, that most dreaded of all maladicta - "Guru!" Needless to say, the
distortions of the media not only embarrassed the First Lady but played havoc with my life and
career.
Unexpected and unsolicited notoriety has led me to ask what is going on here? Why is it that
when a couple of intelligent women get together to discuss critical issues and even employ a
rather ordinary inward turning exercise to help focus their ideas the media pundits do the
equivalent of holding up a cross and throwing garlic around their necks? Have they regressed
to the middle ages? Or are their minds so constricted by the Beltway that they have become
illiterate when it comes to understanding natural processes in the discovery of meaning. I
suspect that two great phobias were at work -- the fear of the rising feminine and the fear of
the imagination. Put them together and you have the Shadow of our age with its dread before
that which is not materialistic, manipulatable, and ripe with open greed. manipulatable. When
the emphasis is seen to be on process rather than on product, on making things cohere,
develop and grow from within rather than from without, then old minds get frightened and rush
to make bad news out of what is really the righting of an ecological wrong. For we are
suffering from an ecological catastrophe that comes from a gross overuse of the outward
world and a terrible underuse of the inner world. Or, as Jesus says in the gnostic Gospel of
Thomas, "If you bring forth what is within you,what you bring forth will save you. If you do not
bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
Thus, whenever psychological and spiritual energy no longer bonds to outward social forms,
then people and institutions, even, mirabile dictu, heads of state, embark on quests for the
green world within to help re-seed the wasteland without. They realize that when so much
political discourse is about the economy, then "stupid" is the apt word to describe those
priorities. They realize too that answers lie not with economic or political initiatives but with a
deepened citizenry. We can no longer afford to live out of the ethos and edicts of a
psychologically and ethically deficient age.
The mainstream must tap into the deep stream in order to renew itself. To do that we must
humbly but tenaciously acquire the inner capacities along with the deepened moral and spiritual
life to match our outer powers. How is this to be done?
On her death bed Margaret Mead had a vision which she shared with me. She said that the
way we were going to survive and "green our world" was by establishing teaching-learning
communities in which people would gather regularly in their homes, churches, business,
schools. Together they would engage in processes to improve their minds and bodies, while
seeking to deepen their values, recover their spiritual life, and take the capacities they had
gained into the world of social action. A day before dying she said to me, "Go out in the world
and help set up those communities, Jean!"
"Yes, Margaret, " I replied. "I'll try and do that."
Subsequently, a large part of my work has been to set up teaching-learning communities that
help people and organizations on their quest to recover their unique earth-and soul-saving
wisdom as well as finding ways of implementing that wisdom in the fields of education, health,
business and governance.
In cutting edge corporate life these communities quest for new paradigms based on moral and
spiritual principles in business as well as life, as well as pursuing innovative and internal ways of
enhancing creativity, along with values, vision and higher purpose. Role playing, building
community and shared vision from inside out, discovering a better story or myth to guide one's
decisions needs to become common coin in commerce as it is in counselling. "Give a Shift" the
employees of Xerox wear on their tee shirts, a sentiment that governance would be well
advised to employ lest the Macarena become the metaphor of political life--most of the
movement taking place while your feet stay in the same spot.
Working with hospitals and medical groups, we try and create teaching-learning communities
that engage all hospital employees - from top administrators and physicians through those who
scrub the floors and empty bedpans in ongoing learning experiences that provide for
continuous personal growth and professional development. Inevitably, they come to discover
ways of making health care proactive rather than reactive, patient centered rather than doctor
or nurse centered, restoring compassion to the medical professional, and engaging the patient
in his own process of healing. They become entrepreneurs of a whole new era of health care,
one that liberates while it heals, breaks boundaries while it creates bridges, and above all,
empowers the patient with privacy, autonomy, information and support to make appropriate
decisions.
Teaching-learning communities lend themselves well to our educational institutions engaging
parent, teachers and students, and yes, even school boards, in the marvelous and mysterious
process of learning how to learn. In an age as complex as ours life long learning is key to our
survival. Schools can become intergenerational with elders becoming educators as well as
continuing students. So much is known now about the many kinds of intelligence that are ours.
I have never met a stupid child only debilitating and brain-damaging systems of education. As
we have discovered, a child can learn almost anything and pass the standard tests- if she is
touching, hearing, seeing, and feeling information. She can delight in doing so because she is
using much more of her mind-brain-body system than conventional teaching generally permits.
So much of the failure in school and home stems directly from boredom, which itself stems
directly from the larger failure to stimulate and not repress all those wonder areas in the child's
brain and soul that could give him so many more ways of responding to her world and
therefore becoming capable of envisioning a different future for themselves and others.
Additionally, schools can model a civilized society: realistic training for employment and
community involvement combined with zero tolerance for racism, sexism, violence and
psychological abuse. Civics should begin in the classroom, as early as the first grade, and be
carried out into projects in the community.
What a wonderful thing it would be if our government workers joined in teaching-learning
communities, encouraging each other to develop their capacities but also to take time each day
to reflect on the eternal values that need to be brought to light in a changing world. How
different things would be if Congress could begin to ask the great questions. These are not to
be confused with the questions that the pollsters ask which tend to give a reading of only the
most superficial and ephemeral attitudes. They rarely supply the X-factor - the deep evolving
sensibilities coming through the back door of history which signal the coming of change and
regeneration. These are elicited by the great questions, and throughout history true leadership
has known how to ask them. What is the purpose of our lives? What is the good? How can
we make a better world? How do we serve a higher end? With these questions the leader is
able to clarify and define, to conceive and articulate goals that lift people out of their petty
preoccupations, carry them above the conflicts that tear society apart, and unite them in the
pursuit of objectives worthy of their best efforts.
With these questions, the leader then becomes the evocateur, the envisioner, the transformer,
the one who elicits higher needs and potentials and engages the full person of those who follow
or work for her, converting followers into leaders and leaders into moral agents.
In your acceptance speech, President Clinton, you spoke of building a bridge to the world of
the new millennium. Those were visionary words, and America is hungry for vision. At a time
when all systems are in transition and global forces challenge the function and importance of
heads of state, the role of the President becomes that of visionary and social artist, the one
who both sees and evokes patterns of possibility within the rough clay of changing social
structure. To do this means releasing the winning strategies that got you elected, and taking on
the transcendent function of inspiring a vision of what we may be as individuals, communities,
and members of our fragile planet.
It is possible that after a long period of de-mythologizing, the office of the presidency can be
restored to its place of sacred stewardship. This requires a lot of personal work on the part of
the President, a lot of deepening into his own deepest beliefs. I know you Bill Clinton. And I
think you can do it.
[ Jean Houston ]
letter published in the January, 1997 issue of "Tikkun",- re-printed, in shortened form in the Spring issue of the "Journal of Noetic Science"
Jean Houston Home Page http://www.jeanhouston.org/
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