Jean Houston Quotes

The soul is the lure of our becoming.

I believe that we are stewards of a time that is upon us - but often we need the encouragement of each other to be able to wake up to this extraordinary time and possibility.

Human connections are deeply nurtured in the field of shared story.

The world needs the sense that we are all in it together.

We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released.

No matter the situation, never let your emotions overpower your intelligence.

Occasionally we will be overwhelmed, but mostly we will be enchanted.

Critical to any practice of sacred psychology is training in multiple imageries to facilitate the inner realism of journeys of the soul.

If you are going to learn mathematics, you have to learn it not simply as an abstraction but as it is applied. I always say to teachers, for goodness sake, take the kids out first to look at the stars in order to understand infinity.

Paul Brunton was a great original and got to a place of personal evolution that illumines the pathways of a future humanity.

The more you love, the more loving you become. That's just the way it works. It is a generosity of spirit.

We needed a "psychenaut" program to be the opposite of the astronaut program in order to explore the enormous domains and dimensions of inner space. We need inner space exploration. We need to have access to more capacities in order to be adequate stewards of this most incredible process of transformation in human history.

We compensate for what we don't do internally by projecting and allowing our minds to be marinated in chronic fantasy.

I'm very much an animal and nature person.

I don't think that any great issue ever gets resolved. I think we outgrow them.

If you travel as much as I do - 165,000 miles last year - you exist nowhere. You're always between heaven and earth, you're always arriving in a new place, you're always starting from the beginning - talk about origins - and you don't know quite what's going to unfold. You live in the unexpected and the inexplicable all the time.

A myth is something that never was but that is always happening.

I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know.

We are sitting on a cornucopia of knowing that we had no way to access as a democracy. We couldn't get the democratization of the human capacity before our time.

Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.

Time has driven out sex and money as the central issues. Now if it could only drive out the issue of power we would be somewhere!

Certainly one is brought to the brink of one's sense of who one is, what one has to do, why me, why now, why in this time in history? I am really driven, believe it or not, am awakened by a sense of being in this powerful axis, this turning point in human history.

Over-intellectualizing can justify practically anything. Reason has reasons that can create holocausts. In the 20th century, we have certainly seen how much killing and disaster has been championed with superb intellectual reasons.

Each person is a really a great treasure house of capacities, possibilities, energies.

The tendrils of a new, deeper form of spirituality are growing. It's the greening under the surface crust of consciousness and social paradigm.

Laughter is the loaded latency given us by nature as part of our native equipment to break up the stalemates of our lives and urge us on to deeper and more complex forms of knowing.

If you're looking ecologically, then we are in very big trouble, yes. But if you're talking about people sinking, I'm not so sure that's true. There are cycles of rise and fall, as there have been since time immemorial.

I find that all over the world, not only is there an acceleration of just about everything, but that many of the old patterns are deconstructing. New ones are arising. It's tremendously exciting, challenging, and also sometimes, well, scary.

As you allow the beloved to grow within you, you will discover a steadfastness to the spiritual journey.

Sometimes my life has been Odyssean - landing on strange islands of consciousness and reality and meeting very curious monsters who turn out to be very great teachers. Sometimes my life has been a quest for a grail of knowledge and education. Like Parsifal, my life has been a quest to pierce the veil, stumbling along but eventually finding it.

Now is the time when we must renew ourselves and live as if we and all of life is sacred, and as if everything we do makes a difference.

In a world such as ours, where we have to cross the great divide of otherness or we will not survive, love is perhaps the most critical aspect that is there in our humanity, to both activate and to practice.

We have barely begun to tap into the genius of our humanity.

We all get betrayed or we all betray. Life is so complex that it's almost impossible to avoid that. Betrayal is also a critical theme in all the world's great stories. If Christ had not been betrayed, would you have had the resurrection?

In our time we have come to the stage where the real work of humanity begins. It is the time where we partner Creation in the creation of ourselves, in the restoration of the biosphere, the regenesis of society and in the assuming of a new type of culture; the culture of Kindness. Herein, we live daily life reconnected and recharged by the Source, so as to become liberated and engaged in the world and in our tasks.

Vulnerable is a catch-all word like "love" and "schizophrenia."

I think of spirit as that which evokes us - the lure of becoming that keeps calling. And I think of soul as that which gets us through the cartography of everyday life.

I am deeply activated by a sense of history, and have been since I was a tiny child. Really feeling that these were the times, we were the people, this was the most critical time in human history. Other people thought their times were the pinnacle and this is it. This is where we really, together, make a decision of whether to evolve or perish.

You are not a passive observer in the cosmos. The entire universe is expressing itself through you at this very moment.

Your brain has one function-to do exactly what you tell it to do.

Patricia Sun is a solar light of consciousness whose wisdom rays cover the world. Everywhere I travel through out the earth, I find people whose lives have been enhanced and transformed by her luminous work.

Ironically, we are all too often educated out of rather than in to an awareness of the body.

It would be wonderful if people could grow together in groups, teaching and learning communities where they empower, evoke, explore the enormous capacities of the human condition.

You've had a whole lot of experience, but everything is also radically new at each moment, and you have to bring a kind of childlike second-level innocence to bear upon all situations, if you are going to be of use and you are going to really learn from the situation or the people.

When a culture is not mythologically instructed, not instructed in story that gives us a call, then we start looking for quasi-stories, little toxic stories that keep our selves alerted and spared until we find another story.

We have all been brought up with an ethical system of 2,000 years ago, an industrial-managerial system of 200-300 years ago, a statecraft system of 200 years ago, and so on. None of this is working very well for the requirements of a time as complex and variegated as our own. So we stand shuttering at the threshold, with no clear map.

What I find on the Internet is fascinating because whole subcultures are developing. And they really are cultures. They have their art forms, their music, and their language. They have their spirituality, they have new names. It's almost like watching colonies of little organisms develop under a petri dish. You can really see these cultures swarming and growing and developing and spawning on the Internet.

I am ready for the rest of my life to rise.