It would not have been surprising if Jean Houston had gone into show business. As she puts it, “My life began in a gagman’s riff.”
Her comedy writer father, Jack, sold 350 jokes to Henny Youngman for $175 to pay for her keep in a hospital incubator after a premature birth. She grew up on the road as her father moved from job to job, from Hollywood backlots to the Grand Ole Opry and all stops in between during the 1940s and ’50s.
Her mother, Mary, had studied method acting with Maria Ouspenskaya, Stanislavsky’s leading lady, and Houston herself briefly attended New York’s Performing Arts high school. She acted and directed at Barnard College and off-Broadway, and the legendary director Joseph Papp offered her the role of Viola in “Twelfth Night” for his annual Shakespeare festival in New York.
But a “still, quiet voice within” urged her to say no to Papp and a life in theater and films.
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Instead, Houston went on to become one of the pioneers of the human potential movement. In a sense she invented her own profession, which she variously describes as “sacred psychologist” and “global midwife.” Her on-the-job experiences have included swimming with dolphins, talking in sign language to chimpanzees, eating worms at a banquet in China, discussing the nature of God with Dag Hammarskjold, and living with lepers in southern India.
The call to this mythic life came early. At 6, Houston, having briefly attended a Catholic school, secreted herself in a dark closet and tried like mad to conjure a vision of the Virgin Mary. (She was unsuccessful.)
At 8 she went with her father to deliver a script to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and found Bergen asking his chief dummy, Charlie McCarthy, life’s ultimate questions in a remarkable Socratic dialogue. Even though Bergen was obviously providing Charlie’s answers, he told the Houstons that he had “no idea where it’s coming from or what he’s going to say next. It’s so much more than I know.” The moment turned Houston’s skin to gooseflesh.
One month later, back at P.S. 6 in Manhattan, Houston’s favorite of the 20-some schools she attended before age 12, she took a field trip to meet Helen Keller, and blurted out what was in her heart. “Why are you so happy?” Keller placed her whole hand on Houston’s face to read the question, laughed deeply and said: “My child, it is because I live my life each day as if it were my last. And life in all its moments is so full of glory.”
Those experiences helped Houston to turn a corner toward a future as a speaker, teacher and writer. She earned advanced degrees in psychology and philosophy of religion, and dedicated her life to exploring the fullness of human capacities. She is co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research in Pomona, N.Y., where she resides, and founder of the Mystery School, a 12-year-old institution dedicated to teaching history, philosophy, the new physics, psychology, anthropology and myth that convenes in a mountain setting near Port Jervis, N.Y., and in branches in the western U.S., Canada, Holland and India.
A consultant to the United Nations, UNICEF and other international agencies, Houston presents workshops designed to tap hidden potentials to schools, businesses and other organizations around the world, including a yearly stint at Chicago’s Oasis Center.
An interesting life
After writing 15 books, including “The Possible Human” and “The Search for the Beloved,” Houston recently tackled one of the most amazing subjects of all, her own life story, in “A Mythic Life” (Harper San Francisco), subtitled “Learning to Live Our Greater Story.”
Bill Moyers’ series of conversations with mythologist Joseph Campbell, “The Power of Myth,” on public television in 1988 sparked a resurgence of interest in mythology. So many books about the subject have been published in recent years that mainstream bookstores have established mythology sections.
The reasons for this phenomenon are no mystery to Houston.
“A myth is something that never was and is always happening,” Houston says during a recent visit to Chicago. “It’s almost the coded DNA of the human psyche that says it’s time to wake up now. Myth gives us our sense of origins, of our belonging, of where we might be going. It gives us access to a sense of having a larger life, more opportunities. It gives us a sense that it doesn’t all end in obstacles and fatalities.
“I think on the surface you’re drawn in by the story, but then unconsciously something deep beneath the surface says, `Oh my God, that fulfills, that answers something that has been in my mind, a hot spot.’ Myth really does speak to our deepest yearnings and gives us the metaphors with which we can begin to weave a new sense of our existence.”
Houston’s father opened up the world of myth to her when she was only 10. He gave her a copy of Joseph Campbell’s classic “The Hero With a Thousand Faces.” The precocious Houston devoured every word of it. Around the same time, she joined an international pen pal club and was corresponding with Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists in Asia, and valiantly studying the scriptures of these religions.
Of her father, Houston says, “For all his comedy he did encourage me, as did my mother, who passed away (earlier this month). She died saying, `I’m 88; it’s time to go. Oh my goodness, look at all the angels.’ And she rose up to meet them with a great smile.”
Houston identifies with the robust, passionate goddess Athena, whose image she wears on a medallion around her neck. She describes Athena as “pre-eminently a goddess of timing. She is the one who knows the right moment to enter a situation and make a difference.” Timing, says Houston, is her own “most fortunate quality.”
Indeed, in a way that seems magical she crossed paths with some of the most fascinating thinkers of our time. As a high school student walking her dog in Central Park, one day Houston ran into a somewhat frail gentleman with a French accent, and consequently met him periodically for about a year and a half to walk and talk about life. She knew him only as “Mr. Tayer,” an approximation of his French name.
Years later in graduate school she realized the man was Teilhard de Chardin, the great priest-scientist, poet, paleontologist and mystic, when someone gave her his book “The Phenomenology of Man.”
She also had friendships with Margaret Mead, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley and Gestalt psychologist Fritz Perls.
The untapped brain
Her career in human potentials research began while she was still a student, working with psychiatrists and physicians who had a special license to do LSD research for the government in the early 1960s.
Although Houston doesn’t recommend chemical enhancement, she found that the LSD research was “an amazing opening on the understanding of the dynamics of how the human psyche works. Our brain-mind systems have so much that is untapped that you can really begin to orchestrate and sustain many different modes of mind.
“We prepared people for weeks, months (before administering LSD), and they had a carefully guided session. We never saw a bad trip.”
When the project ended, Houston and Robert Masters, who was a subject for her studies of altered states and would become her husband in 1965, founded the Foundation for Mind Research to continue non-drug research into the nature of the brain and consciousness.
To the same end, Houston conducts workshops using mythology, music, movement and drama to help others to raise their sights and use more than a tiny fraction of their potential brain power.
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“We’re evoked by the images we hold of ourselves,” she says. “It’s important for people to change that image and begin to invent stories about what they can do. They may not live out that story, but at least it will open up the drama so that they’re not caught in the same old round of everydayness, living what Keats referred to as `a posthumous existence.’ “
But Houston quickly adds that her work “is not about just creating more optimal human beings. It’s about taking these people who are on a growth path and then turning them into social artists. Otherwise, it just becomes galloping narcissism.”
Houston herself travels the world in her self-described role as “global midwife.” For example, she currently is involved in a project with Bangladesh “establishing schools that change the status of women by utilizing the extraordinary poetic and dramatic traditions of Bangladesh. It’s a highly theatrical society.”
Wherever she travels, Houston samples the local theater scene.
“When I see really good theater,” she says, her voice growing low and fierce, “I feel something huge–and it’s way beyond envy. It is an incredible essential longing, because it is the life I chose not to have, the life that was natural and native to me.
“Yet I use my theater background in all my seminars. If you get people involved in dramatic forms, then you can drop in any exercises and they will go further and faster. It becomes mythic.”