Jean Houston and James O'Dea on the Essential Shifts (transcript)
You can download this audio program here.
Stephen Dinan: I want to welcome everyone who's joining us today. We're very excited to have our president, James O'Dea, interviewing Jean Houston, one of the true pioneers of our time. We're going to be exploring some of the essential shifts of today, and James and Jean are going to be in dialogue about this.
James O'Dea: Well, Jean. Our first question up is, How do we see our current global situation? Just a small question. Maybe if you take a first go at that and then I'll take a go and we'll chat about it. We have four questions we're going to explore this time.
Jean Houston: Well, I believe, James this is the great either/or of history. Whereas other times thought they were it, they were wrong: This is it! I would like to look at it from first of all a cosmic perspective. You know, I often speak of this planet as located in the skunkworks of the galaxy. We're not in the center, where the planets and stars are so close together, we are on the outer wing of this galaxy. It's where you keep the experimental lab.
So I think this is "god-school." I think this is a place where we really learn a great deal about creation, both within and without, and where we are allowed to make all kinds of experiments—many of which go wrong. I think that's what we're seeing today: the great wrongness and the great rightness going side-by-side in the great experimental lab which is being held in the outer wing of this galaxy.
I think also that we are in a time of shifting archetypes. That's very important. Archetypes are primal patterns from which people derive their essence and their existence. Earlier peoples always saw their archetypes in terms drawn from nature and cosmos—the sun, the stars, the earth, the ocean—implicitly knowing there are entities coming from these primal entities we spin from star matter. The sun shapes us into form and feeling, the earth's sediments make up our cells, while the ocean certainly flows it's briny way through our veins. And so many of our ancestral stories were about our relationship to the community of nature and to these primal forms: the marriage of heaven and earth, the churning of oceans to create the vector of life. In this they located a higher reality and its values in larger community, the community of things of this world reflected in the community of archetypes.
Thus they had a tremendous pattern of connection between world, between cosmos, between nature, between archetype, as the essential ecological weave that sustains all life. Human beings were seen as just more self-reflective and conscious members of the community.
I once asked an aboriginal woman in the middle of Australia, "How do we humans differ from the animals from wallaby and kangaroo and koala bear?" And she replied, with some astonishment at my naiveté, and said, "Why, mate, we're the ones who can tell the stories about all the others!" I am continuously reminded in my many, many talks with aboriginal and indigenous people all over the world that nature, the earth and all of the species, are not derivative from humans—rather that humans are entirely derivative from the community of life species.
As Tom Berry reminds us, this is the time in which we have got to become aware of our relationship to the larger order of being. We have become autistic with regard to nature and to the cosmos itself.
Now one of the things my old friend Tom Berry has said is that in our time we have come to the end of the Cenozoic period on planet earth. This is very interesting to me because the Cenozoic period begins with the end of that time when that great asteroid hits and wipes out the larger forms of life, the dinosaurs, etc. Then the period begins, lasting some 65 million years, when wave after wave of new life forms appear. It was a time of nature at her most prodigal and most creative. But now, with the biophysical assault made upon the planet, with the plundering industrial economy, the major life-giving systems—air, water, soil, the archetypes and the very architects of our being—have become full of holes. Mind has declared war on nature in the name of progress and displays its ignorance of evolutionary governance. We've forced nature to reveal it's secrets, but in the process we became autistic, losing our capacity for communication with the inner life of the natural world, such as my friends the aboriginal indigenous people display.
Non-mythic, non-storied folk are always autistic because they have lost their capacity for communion as well as communication. Instead we flail about in halfhearted measures to save the planet. So, my question for our time is, What if it's true? I also want to say that here we are at the end of the Cenozoic period and the asteroids that are hitting, as that which began the Cenozoic, is our terrible assault on nature. But at the same time we have this other weave that is being generated, in which IONS of course is playing a very major critical part, of a new order of life—a life in which we become self-conscious of our ability not just to help the planet, and to restore and regenerate the planet, but it can be a whole new order of prodigality of invention and innovation of which only a part of it is scientific.
What if it's true what our aboriginal brothers and sisters are telling us that water and sun, earth and air have soul, and call us to deep life? What if the soul of nature is communing with us, partitioned and autistic as we are, like a valiant nurse with a patient that no one really wants? Where words fail, images do not, and the picture of that earth from outer space just jolts us out of our stupor long enough for us to reach out a tentative hand to our planet as a lost child reaches out to its mother. That's why boys and girls write essays on Gaia.
JO: Jean, what a potent set of images, indeed, and so deeply accurate. At this dramatic moment it's like a curtain has been raised and something has unfolded on one side that shows us, as Laszlo's current book, the re-enchantment of the cosmos. We saw Hubbell a few months ago reorder its focus on M-101, a spiral galaxy far away, to discover a trillion stars and a billion suns the strength of our sun. And so, as you're saying, there's this grandeur that is unfolding—and at the same time is a hideous soap opera where the mechanistic, Newtonian world has just deeply gone mad in terms of it's own reductionist insanity. You have the manipulation and colonization of attention, the seduction of attention in the media that is terrible drib-drab, which is in effect close to what Erich Fromm referred to as necrophilia, when he was fleeing Nazi Germany—a gorging inside the death itself; in some sense, a hidden gorging on the inside of the wound itself. What you've been speaking about so beautifully and so elegantly is the infinite and eternal return of the biophilia, of the love of life, of creativity—and the moment that seems to be the current global moment is a moment when certainly there is some kind of time-spinner going on, where time, culture, peoples are spinning faster into some kind of optimal complexity. We're talking about this moment as optimal chaos, optimal complexity. Our challenge and our creativity is to ride that complexity in such a way that it takes us towards this life force and the re-enchantment of the cosmos rather than down into the matrix and into some lost reality show in a faraway part of the cosmos. (laughs)
JH: This leads me to ask, How do we revise the Earth's story, the life story, the human story? And most certainly the Western story. I think I began by talking about the archetypes. The archetype is one of re-genesis. It's virtually an archetype of cosmo-genesis. It involves an archetype of renewal over and against the archetype of which you've spoken so beautifully—of the shadows, the terrible shadows. Because we are living, James, out of the accumulation of our shadows, shadows that disturb all balance for the sake of media and comfort and consumer satisfaction. I think what we require is building bridges to archetypal reality.
JO: That's a good segueway into our second question: What are the most essential shifts required for us to evolve to the next level. You're saying, the building of these bridges. . . .
JH: Yes, building bridges of nature as conscious of herself and conscientiously joining in the stewardship and the partnering of the pattern and plan that sustains us. Thus, the archetype that we talk about, and the one that IONS certainly typifies, is that of pattern-reader.
Another archetype that rises out of this shift is the threshold. I think that the threshold naturally includes many other kinds of thresholds within it, but in terms of our time in history it has to do with what I suggested, with the passing from the Cenozoic era to the Ecozoic era, and the Ecozoic era is a time in which we become responsible for biological and evolutionary governance. To put it negatively: we stop imposing mechanistic patterns on the biological processes of the planet. I mean, we become stewards and pattern-keepers and -makers. This will affect (as people like Berry say) all professions. Medicine will see that the well-being of the ecosystem is the absolute condition for the health of human beings. Health professionals will have to be ecological health experts before they even begin to look at human beings. Economics will have to become ecologics, all sustainable economy dependent on the well-being of the earth economy.
JO: Why is it that—while we do see some important transformations in the field of medicine, even some startling and wonderful transformations in the area of eco-business and so on—why is it that education is at (to be polite) 19th century levels in schools? Of course there are creative schools, but why is it that this tired old world is still running around in our classrooms?
JH: I'm not too worried about it, because at the same time we've had the last forty years where we have learned so much about learning how to learn, that there's no such thing as a stupid child, that there's incredibly stupid systems of education that diminish and demean. We're educated to be white males in the year 1926 or even the year 1826. I think it's the great divide between the immensity, the sheer enormity of what we know compared to where we have come from. We are the people of the parenthesis at the end of one era, and we're still struggling; our fingers grasping on and our nails being torn at the end of that era. The cliff face is so sheer and thus we're afraid to move forward. We're treading air over the abyss and others are with their fingers and nails scrabbling on the other side.
So, we're between two eras. Whenever you have two eras you always have radical fundamentalism rising, as people try to sanctify their mediocrity and thus feel safe and secure—because not only do the new maps not fit the territory, there's no map, we don't know what the territory is, and it is the pathless path. That's why it's so critical in our time to be able to create ongoing…I don't want to say "think tanks," but action tanks to really vision a world that can be a world of that can be. That is what I meant by stewards and pattern-keepers and pattern-makers. We know how to educate the children, we know how to educate the total mind of the child.
JO: We are fearful of sharing those inner technologies. We are so fascinated by the outer technologies, and yet the 20th century saw a global sharing of the inner traditions of the great perennial wisdom on a scale never witnessed before. These technologies are now more available to us: the science of mind and emotional intelligence and deep mystical insights. It's sort of like the classroom is a data-dump. Maybe I'm reducing it.
JH: Yes, but we also remember that in the 60's and 70's there were great educational experiments. Especially during the Carter administration.
JO: You were very closely connected with that government.
JH: Yes, very closely connected with the government at the time. We all knew these things and they all worked. They all worked beautifully. But what we now have is the all-time sunset effect. Because I truly believe that this old era is going down in a blaze of light. It's almost as bad as it could be. I sometimes say that if Bush did not exist, America would have had to invent him to create a concentration of shadows from which we could no longer turn away.
What I find (and I'm sure you do too, James) in my travels all over North America, as well as around the world is awareness that we are not being educated for this incredible time of human history. The American century may well be over, as other countries start adapting to these ways of teaching children to think in images, to think in words, to think with their whole bodies, use so much more of their mind and body, learn relationship. Talking about cosmology: A child's education has also got to be education in the new story, which is the story of the universe, of planet earth, of life, of consciousness, of the emerging forms. A child should be able to look at anything by the time he or she graduates from high school, and tell something of its larger story and the larger story of creation.
JO: So much of what we know about transformation is the movement from limited and constricted beliefs and formulas of identity. How do we identify with that re-enchanted cosmos? What is the story line that takes us in, so that there is a combination (as in the myths) of personal and transpersonal. Do you have a sense that you could take us into that? How do we identify with the emerging story?
JH: Well, first of all you look at the big pictures of the universe as it is popping and spiriting, working, and creating. Then you tell one of the great stories from creation. There are many great stories. The stories of the Digger digging into the soul of the earth and coming up with new forms, the story of the creation of many different kinds of stories, of the archetypes, of the earthling emerging. You tell the great creation stories, and then you look at the new cosmo-genesis stories, and I think what emerges then from this is a whole sense that we are part of this totality.
This is the nature of what I think of as revelation. I mean, what is revelation? It is the revealing of the deeper story, the richer and the more complete reign/vein of reality, the shocking sudden surprise that is there for us at every moment had we but the capacity to see it, whether it is in symbols or in dream images, whether it is psychotic or artistic. When we are allowed to sit with the huge questions long enough, then reality gives up its shyness and then reveals itself in its fullness. I think of the nature of reality of revelation, by looking at the mystic path, originally called voices and visions, where your normal life is stretched or expanded to include other dimensions of experience, giving us a sense of the possible, of our true potential. This is why, when you teach a child to extend his or her senses, then they receive news from the universe; then they receive messages both within and without that are uniquely designed to serve as the enhancement of both local and universal life.
JO: I think when they escape those no-exit kind of stories that are about good and evil, guilt and shame, and somehow they see that, as the Gita said thousands of years ago, when you go beyond good and evil you will discover the oneness of all creation.
JH: Rumi says, 'There is a meadow and it is out there beyond good and evil. I will meet you there.'
JO: There is a story of wounding and healing, but that, properly understood, is a story of initiation and transformation. Maybe that is another very fundamental shift in our time away from dead-end stories.
JH: Initiation—you bring this up, and it is so important—it is ritual. Ritual comes from rita in Sanskrit which means art-discipline, the dance, that which illumines our transition. One of the great problems is something I'm working on right now with people who are working with troubled teenagers: The teenager doesn't have his or her ancient ritual to play out, the movement from an outmoded childhood to the emergent adulthood.
I was once involved with high schools in Westchester County where they were having suicide pacts, the kids would just die together. I realized they were not allowed to die to their childhood and take on the responsibilities of their next stage. We created all kinds of programs which, as in the classical ritual experience, they went to another place—a forest or wood, mountain—and there they were taught various mysteries and magics and ways of being. They were given new names and given training in new ways of being. Then when they came back there was a tremendous ritualistic whoop-de-doo to welcome them to new life. They were also given things to do: to work with elderly, to work with disabled people. I mean things that gave concreteness and courage and compassion and beauty to their adolescent life. You know what happened? The suicide pacts ended.
JO: How wonderful! Our third question, which is a beautiful segue, is, How does your current work and your passion fit with the larger shift that we've been talking about?
JH: I work in this whole new field of social artistry, and people can go to my website Jeanhouston.org to learn about our courses. People can bring the focus, the skill, the passion that the artist brings to his or her artistic forum, but the forum is the social canvas. So it is working on four levels of human development in the life of social complexity.
I've worked as a senior consultant with the United Nations all over the world training leaders to be adequate stewards by using much more of their inner self, their depth, and then to bring their depths forward and discover the new story. And of course at the same time bring the depths of the new story to the social context, whether it be the millennium development goals or whether it be the projects in making a difference in the world of this time. That is my passion. I've taught a mystery school and continued to do so for 23 years, bringing together the mystery of human development to the mystery of social emergence.
JO: Your mystery school is on the east coast or the west coast?
JH: It's on the west coast now. Indeed, we hope to bring it to IONS--it's happening.
JO: Wonderful. In our own case, we see in our own community, IONS, sometimes talks about the hospicing of the dying of the old paradigm and birthing the new.
JH: You're a deathing and a birthing chamber, side by side.
JO: But the hospicing is so beautiful if it's understood properly. You bid a brave and fond farewell, but a respectful farewell to all that evolutionary hope and energy that brought us to this place. I think, in some sense, we have to get over this notion that somehow we are wrong. We've gotten ourselves into a jam, but out of that jam can come something unbelievably powerful. I think the hospicing requires that sense of gratitude and appreciation for the creativity and evolution, for all of the zigzags that brought us to this moment of peril and promise. It indicates that hospicing the dying moment is to release wounds, to move on. I can see in my own passion for dialog, that there is just so little authentic dialog. There is a staccato voice in the political discourse of the planet that has accelerated in the last decade. True dialogic encounters are so lacking, and I think that one story cannot fertilize another without that kind of dialog (as you were saying at the beginning) that is so important.
JH: As you were saying that, I was thinking of the Native American statement mitakuye oyasin: "all my relations." Part and parcel of relational dialog is relational knowing. Everything, as we know, is in relationship to everything else. If you look at that marvelous metaphor of Indra's Net: you enter into Indra's Net, the net of reality, and you step into one of the jewels, and it creates music throughout all the other jewels, and you see yourself reflected in one, and you are in all others. To me, on the physical level, deep relational knowing is to look into the face of a stranger and know that his or her life is a part of your own, it's to look at someone else of a different culture or age or race or social class with wonder and astonishment. It's to … On Monday I'll celebrate having been married to the same eccentric man for 41 years, and it's to renew …
JO: Congratulations to you and to Robert!!
JH: … seeing and appreciating one's life partner as you, or one's longtime friend. It's to move beyond the familiar into the fascinating. It's always to feel that there is always a richer, deeper story in the other one that exceeds your expectations and transcends your categories. That then becomes a basis for another order of dialog.
As a public person, I often find that, after my lectures or seminars, people come up—and often they come up when you're dead tired and you don't want to go on. And they say, Let me tell you my dream! What I have had to learn to do is to realize that my preconceived ideas or fatigue may block my ability to see and perceive afresh. I found that no one I encounter is a simple either/or proposition. They are both/and, and much, much more. If I find a person tiresome or disagreeable, or catch myself going on automatic with someone because I'm tired or distracted, I stop. I just stop. And I try to reconstitute my attention and listen to the other with fuller awareness. These "stopped moments" have taught me grace, so that the other person then becomes for me a revelation—a stand-in for divinity. The greatest teachings I've received have invariably come from those people with whom I have canceled my automatic response and really took in the fullness of their presence. Maybe this is the greatest gift we can give to each other.
JO: What a practice for our times.
JH: And then I've found that the dialog really becomes juicy!
JO: It's so resonant with the notion of remembrance. There is such a symmetry in remembrance—that even though in your cultural form, as you approach me, I may never have met you before, there is some (going back to the mitakuye oyasin) sense of, "I have known you of old in the rivers of time, I have known you in the other dimensions at the cellular level in the whole struggle for creation itself." Many, many of the mystical traditions tell us that a central part of the inner technology is in fact the deepest remembrance. We disidentify from the local caricature of the self into the spaciousness where time past and time present gather together. The poets talk a lot about this symmetry of remembrance.
JH: Yes, symmetry of remembrance—that's so beautiful. I am less if I do not see you as more. Prejudice is the pathos of limited seeing, the damping down of our brains' potential, the one-track catastrophe that objectifies the other as it subjugates the self. When we allow our selves to be cut off at the level of superficial differences—skin color, body size, age, style of dress, social class—we lose the mystery and magic of the other and the mystery and magic of ourselves. How can people today cross the great divide of otherness, step out of the stereotypes and into seeing and honoring each other deeply? I think it's true story. Human connections are connected in the mother ground of shared stories. Story is powerful, primal. Whether we are entranced by the dancing flames of the communal campfire of some shamanic yesteryear, or around the flickering pixels of a television screen, stories bring us back home to the hearth of our true nature.
JO: What you have done so much for me and so many others through the Mystery School and your books and so on, is repeatedly help people see where they might be in the story—that sense of timing, of kairos, of the moment, of knowing where you are in a curving story, where the plot line might be, where the unfolding can take place. I think with this level of babble and confusion and seduction of attention it becomes harder and denser for people to see where the story is. Then we get these jolts and hurricanes and catastrophic events to sort of say, Wake Up! This is big-time! This is a time when you should really know where you are in the story and where our collective story is, calling you into being in a very unique way.
JH: Where do you find yourself in your story now, James?
JO: I find myself in this place where (as we were saying at the beginning) the Newtonian clockwork reductionist universe has run down so badly that you can now see, rather explicitly, the notion that we thought the machine was there to serve us, but in many ways we are now serving the machine. That seems very graphic to me and in my own place, the spiritual spaciousness I've always felt in my life, that spiritual spaciousness, has been called into an institute and a place that says, Yes, indeed, the cosmic story is so profound, and everything we're learning in science seems to be affirming and loving a creative universe. I'm giving a talk later this year for the Common Bond Institute, which is entitled "Killer Meaning in a Healing Cosmos." Where I find myself is increasingly supported by an interface of science and spirituality to remind us that the cosmic story seems to be nudging us toward high creativity, high fun, spacious mind, galaxies ahead of us (as it were). And yet we're in killer stories that are truly dreadful!
Our friend Demaria Perry, a young man of sixteen years old, who is the peacemaker, the Ghandi, of the streets of Watts, sent us an email just two days ago that his cousin was shot in a drive-by, meaningless murder and he needed the money to bury his cousin. So that killer story is definitely out there—it's on the streets of Watts as it is in Darfur. I feel, in my own journey, the powerful tension between that spacious cosmic re-enchantment and a reminder that we do end up doing damage, doing harm to each other in ways that the universe simply doesn't understand or support. (Or maybe the universe understands.)
But I find that the most helpful thing to me, Jean, is speaking to people at the level of complexity that it isn't either the story that either I'm a spiritual being, or that I'm coming to have a learning experience in a terrible world, but that somehow I'm part of the world that is being made. I have to live with that—whether it is choices in who my neighbors are or car that I drive, or whatever those choices are—that complexity surrounds us and we don't get off the hook. It's a beautifully immediate and manifest world that calls us all the time to make creative, life-affirming, biophilic choices, riding complexity, appreciating that (as you said) it really isn't an either/or world.
JH: Yes, it's both/and—and much, much more.
JO: It is doing the cleanup and doing the cosmic dance.
JH: The vision of our fragile planet floating in space, it comes to me like angels of old bearing a message and urgently requiring a response. I say, What does she ask of us? And I think it's nothing less—not just the cleanup but also the birth of a new planetary psychology that is at once universal, trans-psychic, trans-historical. The archetypes and their impetus for cross-cultural connections are the genomes of the symbolic psychology of our time. The electronic nervous system of the global village which has resulted in a spreading and sharing of the images and symbols of societies radically different from each other in geography and history and ethnicity. The myths, stories cooked in climates vastly different from ours, are becoming the materials of our everyday consciousness.
I saw in these great immigration rites—and they certainly were, in the last few days, rites of passage—they were also the orchestration of other symbols, of other images, and their cross-fertilization through media (and travel, of course) spurs us to rethink the possibilities of our human selves now expanded to include not only present knowledge, but also all previous visions of race and tribe and social class. I think that one of the most formidable of these shared structures is the shadow and the ways it plays itself out in the expressing the repressed and the disacknowleged aspects of ourselves and our societies.
That's what I saw in these great immigration rituals. More than therapy, more even than most peacemaking agendas, our shared apprehension of shadow archetypes from around the world—skeletal children in Africa (which you have seen and worked with so much in your life), AIDS and the other world plagues, the horrors of ethnic cleansing—offers incredible, radical new life on old problems. We waste so much of our conscious energy by seeing our shadows as entirely toxic, rarely allowing our vision to go deeper, to see the incandescent energy for healing which they contain.
I think that the shadow demands that we probe beneath the apparent hopelessness of world problems with uncommon vision. My old friend, President Jimmy Carter, for instance, was a heartfelt genius that refused to regard past patterns as obstacles to future breakthroughs. He took to Camp David, previously implacable enemies—Prime Minister Manachem Begin of Israel, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. And, in the light of his high regard (that's important, his high regard), inspired them to see the best in each other and to envision new hope for their collective future. And, of course, he and his wife continued in the post-presidency to hold simultaneously the realism of the shadow and the potential for life.
JO: Our last question here today, and you were tracking into it, What are some of the most important things that each one of us can do personally to create positive change? In my own sense of this, too, is work around essence, to somehow know that you have an essence. It goes back to that conversation we had earlier about education—it's the convening of the power of essence, the once and future story of essence.
JH: Essence from within ourselves, and seeing the essence of others. I think of essence as the intelli-key, the dynamic, the purposeful potency of our being that tells us to live the larger story. I'd say it's the intelli-key of the acorn to be a tree, it's the intelli-key of a baby to be a grownup human being, it's the intelli-key of each one of us to be God-only-knows who or what. When we tap into it metaphors fritter and fry, because it's so enormous to tap into soul essence.
Look at all these books now, James, called The Advent of Soul , The Purpose of Soul, Soul Codes. It's almost that each one of us is given our essence when we are born and it is there to guard and to guide and to unfold. When we really feel the frisson of essence we know that we are tracking the universe; we are in alignment with our deeper codes. Maybe, in fact, what we might think of as the larger structures of essence, the archetypes themselves, may be undergoing a whole system transition in our time. I really think a most remarkable and unique thing is happening. We are regrowing those psychological and spiritual potencies once known as gods (small g), recharging them through their reunion with of other versions of themselves from across time and space. We're entering into another order of relationship to them. I mean, wow, and double wow! If we can hold these emerging archetypes in an emotional, effective relationship—marry them, if you will as beloveds of the soul—then our human capacities are stepped up to mythic levels, even as the archetypes step down to partner our evolving humanity. This conjunction really has to do with what essence is: the basis for world-making and the entry to new ways of being. Just as we are coded in our genes, an intelli-key for grand purpose in our lives, maybe it is true that these same archetypes are similarly encoded with information and purpose to aid in the transformation of the planet toward its next stage of being. I think we then gain access to the impetus to the source level of our being, which urges us on through dreams and visions and internal dialog and dialog with others toward deeper life and richer service in our world. It's all about waking up; it's all about the divine human partnership. The poets have always known that. I'm reminded of the Jewish mystical tradition which says, God made human beings because he/she needed partners in creation. And as Rilke wrote, 'We are the bees of the invisible; we madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.' I think the purpose of evolution is to grow us into co-creators, who can play a conscious role in transforming the potentialities inherent in ourselves into new forms, better societies, richer meanings, high art.
We are living in kairos where everything can be lost, where everything can be found, where evolutionary wave forms, impulses for personal and cultural development are moving through us. I think when we come into phase with the creative energies of the universe, then our scope enlarges everything we see—the girl in the swing, the dog gnawing the bone, the old man in the nursing home—it becomes a celebration of the wild, exuberant, all-accomplishing energy of the divine manifestation, and in such partnership we participate in the vigor and the generosity of the divine life.
JO: You'll love the synchonicity when I sat down earlier this afternoon, knowing we were going to have this conversation, the first word I wrote in thinking about you was "god-school." And there it was. In concluding this wonderful conversation, I would say, indeed, that the best thing we can do is to remind ourselves that there's a graduating class for god-school. And, in fact, we are called to continue the story. I look forward to the story in many dimensions of the future with you, Jean Houston. Thank you for your most potent and creative wisdom that is full of this concept for me of biophilia, of life arising out of every form of despair, disaster, of crisis, into a resonant voice to awaken more life to join it. Thank you always.
JH: Amen and amen to you, James.
Great Shift Dialogues
