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A Passion for the Possible: A Guide to Realizing Your True Potential
Author: Jean Houston (Author)
In fact, we will need a gathering of the potentials of the whole human race and the particular genius of every culture if we are going to survive our time. She gives examples of creative problem-solving from cultures as varied as a tribe in West Africa, artists in Bali, from the Inuit peoples of Canada and Alaska, the dervishes of Turkey. She sees the West’s great contribution to the coming world culture is that women are leading the way “to the rise of women around the world to full partnership with men in virtually the entire domain of human affairs. And as women are being equally empowered, men are being freed to discover that activities often seen as ‘feminine’—feeling, nurturing, collaboration, celebration, relationships—are in fact the domain of all.”
Jean Houston points to the evolution of the global village, where instant communication, via the media and the Internet, brings information and news quickly to people everywhere. “It is as if a worldwide nervous system is in the works. Each of us is a brain cell in that system, with powers that once belonged to kings.”
In order to survive living in such an interconnected world, so different from our past, Jean Houston believes that we are encoded with an astonishing array of potentials. The heart of this book is a series of guided imagery practices that she believes will help the reader begin to recognize, and then to tap into these potentials and possibilities. The imagery exercises are designed to take the reader on a journey to heightened awareness in the realms of the sensory, the psychological, the mythic (“Did you know that you were the Mything Link?”), and the spiritual.
Preceding each of the guided imagery exercises is a helpful introduction that includes some of Jean Houston’s own experience in exploring the realm. For example, before the imagery offered for the psychological, she shares her painful experience of “one of life’s betrayals” in the controversy surrounding her experience with Hillary Rodham Clinton. The media portrayed it as a séance and witchcraft, during which Jean Houston and Hillary Clinton consulted the shade of Eleanor Roosevelt about “building a better world for our children.” Jean Houston says it was simply “an imaginative exercise,” probably much like what she offers in this book.
The book’s conclusion begins, “Now the cat is out of the bag. With your senses tuned and your psyche primed, with a mythic path beneath your feet and the immensity of Spirit holding it all in love, your life can be your work of art, your great creation, your everyday passion.”
This book will be a delight for Jean Houston’s many students and admirers. Readers may find the evocative writing alone to be worth the price of the book, and some may find the imagery exercises to be just what they need to heighten their mindfulness about the sensory, the psychological, the mythic and the spiritual in their own lives. However, I found myself strangely unsettled as I finished the book. Jean Houston raises such profound, engaging, intriguing questions about humanity’s evolution to this point, and the critical nature of the historical threshold on which we stand. Though she doesn’t use these words, she is pointing to the same overarching need that philosophers and prophets see: the need for metanoia, a fundamental transformation of human consciousness.
Questions for Personal Reflection or Group Exploration:
- Considering the changes that are unfolding on our planet—particularly how the media and the Internet make instant news, information and opportunities available to everyone, even in the remotest and least developed areas—what do you feel are the greatest challenges and the greatest opportunities generated by this growing interconnectedness?
- What capacities, skills and talents do you bring to this time of planetary transition? What capacities, skills and talents do you need to explore and develop?
- In Jean Houston’s words, “What would you be like if you started today to make the most of the rest of your life? If you turned a corner and awoke?”•
Barbara Neighbors Deal, Ph.D., is a literary agent and writer in Ojai, California.