Latest Jean Houston Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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!

  Jean Houston

  Sex, Issues, Would Be

  Source: scottlondon.com

• 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.

  Jean Houston

  Teacher, Stars, Kids

  Source: scottlondon.com

• We're in a decaying culture now. Naturally, the young people in the culture are going to feel themselves to be products of the decay.

  Jean Houston

  People, Culture, Decay

  Source: scottlondon.com

• 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.

  Jean Houston

  Holocaust, Intellectual, Killing

  Source: scottlondon.com

• What happens is that you discover you're carrying so much weight that 90 percent of what you thought yesterday you are thinking about today and will think about again tomorrow. Your mind doesn't change because you are carrying too large a load. So the mind is caught. It's seized by its own structures. It can't consider different ways of thinking or doing or being or relating. It's all you can do with your psychic energy to keep pulling yourself along with this huge bag that you are dragging behind you.

  Jean Houston

  Thinking, Psychics, Yesterday

  Source: scottlondon.com

• 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?

  Jean Houston

  Betrayal, Stories, World

  Source: scottlondon.com

• Journalists are among a select group, along with warriors and executioners who are authorized to do harm. As James Fallows says, a lot of journalists think that isn't so, and that everything will wash out ultimately. But I don't think they are aware of the long-term damage.

  Jean Houston

  Warrior, Thinking, Long

  Source: scottlondon.com

• 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.

  Jean Houston

  Self, Giving, Toxic

  Source: scottlondon.com

• 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.

  Jean Houston

  Years, Maps, Requirements

  Source: scottlondon.com

• 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.

  Jean Houston

  Fall, Talking, People

  Source: scottlondon.com

• We are still a pioneer culture in some ways. A pioneer culture has to put all of its muscle into surviving on the frontier and pushing back the wilderness. So when you start to talk about imagination, inner space, and the structures of the psyche, that becomes scary.

  Jean Houston

  Space, Imagination, Scary

  Source: scottlondon.com

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

  Jean Houston

  Mind, Fantasy, Allowing

  Source: scottlondon.com

• I'm a computer freak. I'm on the Internet every night. Sometimes I play dungeons and dragons with 15-year-old boys who think I'm a 15-year-old boy with a weird vocabulary.

  Jean Houston

  Thinking, Boys, Night

  Source: scottlondon.com

• Women are rising slowly but steadily into full partnership with men all over the world. This is going to change everything. When the rich mind- style of women is available - with an emphasis on process, rather than on end-product, and on making things cohere, grow and interlink - - then it changes the way we educate, it changes the way we govern, it changes the way we worship.

  Jean Houston

  Men, Mind, Style

  Source: scottlondon.com

• 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.

  Jean Houston

  Art, Names, Growing

  Source: scottlondon.com

• We have new media, new forms of connectivity, and an enormous transference of knowledge. When you study evolution, you see that when new genes meet and multiply, they create new contexts and new species. In a sense, the gene-pool of knowledge and of people connecting at all levels is literally spawning a kind of mind-pool of possibilities.

  Jean Houston

  Media, People, Mind

  Source: scottlondon.com

• 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.

  Jean Houston

  Opposites, Space, Order

  Source: scottlondon.com

• What I often do in my work is to take a great story, such as the Odyssey, the search for the Grail, the story of Jesus, or the story of the great peacemaker who helped create the Iroquois Confederacy in the 15th century. I then use these tales as templates upon which to weave psychological and spiritual exercises which allow us to open ourselves up to the larger venue of a story.

  Jean Houston

  Spiritual, Jesus, Exercise

  Source: scottlondon.com

• 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.

  Jean Houston

  Teacher, Reality, Islands

  Source: scottlondon.com

• 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.

  Jean Houston

  Thinking, Soul, Everyday

  Source: scottlondon.com

• When we start making distinctions between soul and spirit, we're in very, very murky waters. There is the whole issue of the English language, which has a rather limited vocabulary when it comes to psychological descriptions, not to speak of spiritual descriptions. We're good mythically - the English language is superb for myth. But we're not very good for psychology or spirituality.

  Jean Houston

  Spiritual, Issues, Vocabulary

  Source: scottlondon.com

• 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.

  Jean Houston

  People, Use, Levels

• I find you have to come as litmus paper and be available to whatever way you can be.

  Jean Houston

  Paper, Way, Available

  "Soul Speaking and Truth Telling: A Conversation with Jean Houston". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.awaken.com. August 23, 2013.

• I've been around for a very long time, I've been around since God had baby cheeks.

  Jean Houston

  Baby, Long, Long Time

  "Soul Speaking and Truth Telling: A Conversation with Jean Houston". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.awaken.com. August 23, 2013.

• Because of the nature of my life, because I train a great many people, I come upon such a huge variety of human species, as well as the earth species for that matter.

  Jean Houston

  People, Earth, Matter

  "Soul Speaking and Truth Telling: A Conversation with Jean Houston". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.awaken.com. August 23, 2013.