There is so much to learn from other cultures. Here lies a worldwide harvest of human powers and potentialities, drawn from profound studies of the cultures and civilizations of many lands and many peoples. There is so much to learn and understand from the skills and knowledge from all over the earth. Each civilization contains riches beyond even a gleaning of the planet’s physical wealth, its oil, its diamonds, its metals. I have made it my life’s work to seek the human capacities activated within cultures around the world.
The intensity of this time burns in me because of a vision of a new interdependent world, with the old barriers between cultures dissolving, along with the phobias that sustained them. Doorways are opening to an exchange not only of information, but also of true minds and hearts in mutual discovery and creation.
A more inclusive organism is in the process of being born, a Planetary Human. We each serve as a living cell within this new organism, and we are being re-scaled to planetary proportions in both our responsiveness and responsibilities. Blessedly, this inclusive worldview inspires us with renewed hope and caring.
Do you vividly remember the first pictures of the earth beamed from outer space? For the first time we saw our world as one living being. I believe these photos touched us with the possibility of cherishing every other person and culture on this earth. How do we invigorate and embody that sense of cherishing? How can we come to know more deeply those people and the cultures they developed? That is, in part, what power is about.
Events have accelerated wildly since those first pictures. People and ideas are fast becoming interconnected in ways that create a new environment - virtually a new world mind. But for a new world of cherishing, one that is safe for every part of the planetary body, we need not only the new mind of connectedness, but also energy, passion and high skills. These high skills, I believe, have been brewed in cultural cauldrons around the world, and it is this genius of many cultures that we must engage through new ways of being and of understanding.
Part of my work, over decades, has been the study of cultural potentials in over 40 cultures and then bringing these together for use in education, health care, social welfare, relationships, personal growth, work, art and creativity. One of the delights of such work has been bringing what I perceive as an essential cultural gift from Greece to a group of business leaders in India and vice versa; or West African problem-solving techniques to South American social workers. I have found that challenges arising in one culture can often be met by applying strategies and stories developed in another.
I have thus had the high honor of being one of those able to assist in this harvest of genius from many cultures, with the avowed goal of creating the first true planetary persons with global minds and earth wide hearts. This is possibly one of the first times in human history that such a harvest could occur. Become a social artist, someone who cares for cultures, for peoples, for the world in effective and useful ways.
When you focus on different cultures, you activate different parts of the brain, the body, the mind, the emotions and the soul.
A sampling of the possibilities:
- The art of creativity and deep empathy: From India, the power to evoke the creative imagination.
- The nature of making peace possible: From the Iroquois Confederacy, we learn ways of establishing and maintaining peaceful and productive communities.
- Dreamtime as creative source and resource: The potency most alive in Aboriginal Australia with its elegant understanding of the symbiosis of human, animal, landscape and the constantly creating meta worlds.
- Discovering the Inner Artist: From Bali, comes the art and ritual of “doing everything as beautifully as possible.” Activating the aesthetic state of consciousness within the body/brain gives us the power of gaining and enhancing artistic skills and abilities.
- Problem-Solving in the real world: This gift of the peoples of West Africa awakens a profound sense of community, as well as the capacity to honor the body’s wisdom and aliveness.
Dr. Jean Houston, prolific author, philosopher, scholar and teacher, has been a pioneer in the field of sacred psychology for more than 30 years and has co-directed, with her husband Dr. Robert Masters, the Foundation for Mind Research. Their work has focused on the understanding of latent human abilities. Dr. Houston has been an advisor to UNICEF in human and cultural develo
pment and past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. She has taught philosophy, psychology and religion at several colleges and universities, including Harvard Divinity School. Her books include Jump Time, as well as The Hero and the Goddess, The Search For the Beloved, and her autobiography, A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story. Her PBS special, A Passion for the Possible, has been widely shown. Her book of the same title was published by Harper San Francisco in l997.