Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Jean Houston - Page 2

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.

We live in a description of reality.

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.

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.

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

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

I'm very much an animal and nature person.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.