Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Jean Houston

American Contemporary Psychologist, Scholar, Lecturer, Author and Philosopher, Pioneer of the Human Potentials Movement

"Myth is a kind of lensing system for the mind of God. It carries the codings of existence."

"Creative work and expression are the natural activities of the human being who is able to release, at least temporarily, the inhibitions of habituations and culture."

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

"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."

"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. "

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

"Creation may be actually making something out of everything."

"Life is about exploration, about experience, and the purpose of life may very well be experience. God wishes to experience life through you."

"What the world so desperately needs at this time is patterns for peaceful, passionately creative and effective societies. And, with it, peaceful, passionately creative, and effective people: in other words, the Possible Human in the Possible Society"

"A story is our life writ large, seen symbolically. Once it's seen and experienced symbolically, it then can be actualized and manifested. 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."

"America has recently lost its major projection ? the former Soviet Union. You see, you can always take a part of your shadow and project it onto another country. That's easy. You'll feel virtuous and good. But then you're left with that shadow when the object of your projection dissolves. So it has to go other places. And I think it has been projected on the new age, women, and a lot of other things. Our shadow also creeps through in our movies and television entertainment which has never been as violent as it is now. America is looking for another story. We've lost our mythic structure. 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. I think that what happened with me and with Hillary fell within one of those subcategories, one of those grotesque stories, in the hopes that maybe some part of it would lead to a greater story."

"G.U.R.U - Gee, you are you!"

"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 han we know. There we go beyond those limited and limiting patterns of body, emotions, volition, and understanding that have been keeping us in drydock. Instead we become available to our capacity for a larger life in body, mind, and spirit. In this state we know great torrents of delight."

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

"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."

"Life is God made manifest and the point of creating is to experience it."

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

"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."

"It would be a good thing to live your life as worthy of this great creating intelligence because that is the path to spiritual evolution and ultimate delight."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"There are two great shadows in the American psyche. One is the rise of women ? powerful women, intelligent women. There have always been powerful and intelligent women, but they have not necessarily been in the public eye before. And the other is the fear before imagination. Take those two together and you really have the shadow of our age."

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

"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. There is also fear of that which is not objective, rational and spelled out. Meanwhile, we allow an extraordinary amount of toxic fantasies to fill our minds. That's the irony. We compensate for what we don't do internally by projecting and allowing our minds to be marinated in chronic fantasy."

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

"We all live as inhibited versions of who and what we really are."

"Where is the time for reflection in our culture? Where is the down- time? I think this is what is lacking. When you look at presidents and prime ministers, they are zipping all over the place. I think of Thomas Jefferson. He had to travel long, long miles on horseback."

"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. Other times of history thought they were it. They are wrong. This is it. Not only have we inherited all the old problems and old patterns, but we have new ones that one ever thought of before."

"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."

"You are God's stuff. You are infinite potential lensed through space and time and body and mind."