Jean Houston Quotations

At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I'm very much an animal and nature person.

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

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.

The ideas are secondary to the primary premise of people's potential. I'm always in wonder and astonishment.

Around my eighth or ninth year I became interested in the world's religions. I was mathematically retarded but theologically precocious. I began to correspond with seikhs in India. After about the third letter they would ask about job opportunities in America.

Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.

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.

We tend to think of the Faustian man, the one who fabricates, manipulates, seduces and ends up destroying. But the new image will be man the creator, the artist, the player.

Pathos activates the eyes and ears to see and hear. At times of pathos, illness opens doors to a reality which is closed to a healthy point of view.

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.

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

I am ready for the rest of my life to rise

When we are calling forth the depth and genius of the other, then we grow.

The illuminated ones can take any form -- a man, a woman, a child, an elder, or even a dog. It is not inconsequential that the English language allows for the dyslexia of the spelling of the word dog: God spelled backward.

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

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

Laughter lifts our spirits, surprises and sometime shocks our expectations, allows us to cross boundaries, reorders our priorities, and gives us access to ideas and associations we rarely ever thought to have.

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

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.

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

We cannot embrace the New Mind by just sitting around and talking about it. It demands that we alter not just our thinking, but our way of living down to the smallest details.

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

Education and the process of educating is a total integral, contextual situation which includes students, teachers, parents, administration and environment.

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

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.

A normal person is someone that you don't know very well.

Stories are living and dynamic. Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of Human Growth.

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.

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

I think civilization is going to get to a point where we suddenly become responsible, stewards of the whole evolutionary process. This requires domains of consciousness, not just levels and frequencies.

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.

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

Try to spend a few moments each day holding a picture of your body and your mind in a state of splendid health.

The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done - challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Development involves giving up a smaller story in order to wake up to a larger story.

We live in a description of reality.

Wth subtly developed body awareness, it is possible for the individual to become the conscious orchestrator of health.

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

Love to me is - the final lines in Dante's Paradiso, when he says, "The love that moves the Sun and all the stars" - it's what draws us together, it's why we have leaky margins with each other. It is that sumptuous, sensuous, sensitive quickening that happens when we really know ourselves as love and see ourselves as loving.

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

If you keep telling the same sad small story. You will keep living the same sad small life.

We are the love, the lover, the loving, and the love. It is the Supreme. It is the deepest force in our lives.

Just as you would not neglect seeds that you planted with hope that they will bear vegetables and fruits and flowers, so must you attend to nourish the garden of your becoming.

The world needs the sense that we are all in it TOGETHER!

The soul is the lure of our becoming.

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.

Change the story and you change perception; change perception and you change the world.

You are not an encapsulated bag of skin dragging around a dreary little ego. You are an evolutionary wonder, a trillion cells singing together in a vast chorale, an organism – environment, a symbiosis of cell and soul.

My prayer is, let me be a blessing to someone or something today.

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.

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

There is something else that is trying to come through - that lure of becoming - and it does come from the realm of spirit, it does come from the quantum universe, it does come from the great spark that is the threshold of time and history trying to emerge and electrify us.

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.

Engaging it produces an intense force, which in turn produces a mutation in consciousness. You become who you really are ...

I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.