{"id":1594370,"date":"2024-04-07T01:36:36","date_gmt":"2024-04-07T01:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=149463"},"modified":"2024-04-07T01:36:36","modified_gmt":"2024-04-07T01:36:36","slug":"jean-houstons-psycho-historical-recovery-of-the-self","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/04\/07\/jean-houstons-psycho-historical-recovery-of-the-self\/","title":{"rendered":"Jean Houston\u2019s Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Orientation\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

How I came across<\/em><\/strong> Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the middle of the 1980s I had decided to return to college to get a degree in counseling psychology. I was sitting in a caf\u00e9 in the North Beach area of San Francisco waiting for my interview to get into Antioch University. It had been ten years since I had recognized that I wanted a more expansive view than what Marx and Engels had to offer. I began studying the work of Teilhard de Chardin, especially The Phenomenon of Man<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> From there I stumbled on Barbara Marx Hubbard\u2019s \u00a0book Conscious Evolution. <\/em>I also became interested in books that had a sensitivity to the visionary possibilities for the globalization of society through the work of Oliver Reiser and General Systems Theory. I wanted to expand the work on social evolution so that it had a biological <\/em>dimension on the one hand, and a cosmic <\/em>dimension on the other. I was jazzed by a book I was reading called Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self<\/a>.<\/em> Up until this book, I perceived western history, western psychology and western spirituality as all separate disciplines. This book integrated all three into one movement. This tells the story of the dialectic between social evolution and psychological development through the description of Life Force<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lack of a psychological and spiritual evolution of Marx and Engels stage theory<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Marxists have a stage theory of social evolution. The first stage was primitive communism. The second stage was something Marxists called \u201cOriental Despotism\u201d which roughly corresponded to the ancient states of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India. They were all caste <\/em>societies. From there Marx and Engels argued that the next three social formations were all class<\/em> societies. Slavery corresponded to Greek and Roman civilization. The second form of class society was feudalism, which in the West lasted from the 10th\u00a0<\/sup> to the 14th\u00a0<\/sup> centuries. The last form of class society was capitalism, which is roughly coextensive with the modern world, beginning with the fifteenth century into its decline in the 21st century. After a successful revolution against the capitalists, Marx and Engels predicted that first socialism, then communism would replace it. There was no integration of this model with the evolution in the micro psychology in individual development. Further, since spirituality was inseparable from organized religion, Marx and Engels only saw religion as an ideology of the priests to oppress the population for their benefit and that of secular rulers.<\/p>\n

Lack of social evolution in psychology and religion studies<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the field of psychology treated the evolution of society as having little or nothing to do with the problems of how people learn, how emotions get produced, the stages of cognitive development or how mental illness evolved. As for spirituality, monotheism seems to have had little to do with psychology or social evolution. They imagined that in the evolution of religion, monotheism was an advance over the polytheism of ancient times but it was not connected to the evolution of human societies.<\/p>\n

Integration of social, psychological and spiritual evolution <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The first of two people I found who actually combined social, psychological and religious evolution was Jean Houston in her book Life Force<\/em><\/a>. The other was Ken Wilbur in his book Up From Eden<\/em><\/a>. <\/strong>Jean Houston\u2019s book will be the study in this article.<\/p>\n

Jean Houston\u2019s Mentor Gerald Heard<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I was reading Life Force,<\/em> I noticed that she referenced a book called The<\/em> Five Ages of Man<\/em><\/a> by someone named Gerald Heard. His book was written in 1963. I was very eager to read the book but in the days before the internet and Amazon, the chances were slim to none I would ever find it in a used book store twenty years later. But, thanks to the wonderful resources of Moe\u2019s Books in Berkeley, I found a copy. It was expensive ($50.00 in the early 1990s) but in retrospect, it was well worth it. So, who was this guy Heard anyway?<\/p>\n

He has been called \u201can advanced scout\u201d on the Aquarian Age frontier. He played the role of global midwife to a New Age of human potential movement long before Jung or Joseph Campbell became popular. Heard was born in London in October of 1899 to parents who were landed gentry. At the age of 17, in the midst of a crisis in faith, he turned to and embraced secular humanism. Gerald was involved in progressive education along with social and prison reform. While in Ireland, he came to know George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats. Heard also was involved with an agricultural cooperative in Ireland and he was a champion of an Irish cultural Renaissance. \u00a0In 1926, he became a public speaker and made a name for himself as a science journalist for the BBC. He worked on an editorial board that included Julian and Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. In the middle third of the 20th century, he was a well-known polymath. He influenced Huxley away from the cynicism of The Brave New World<\/em> to the perennial philosophy of esoteric religion.<\/p>\n

In the early 1930s Heard became influenced by Hindu and Buddhist thought. He transitioned from being a secular humanist to a mystic. He learned exercises for regulating his diet, attitude, inspiration and meditation. In the 1930s and early forties Heard was involved in the research committee for Society for Psychic Research. <\/em>With World War II looming, he emigrated from England to the US with fellow pacifist Huxley and never returned. He had a long-cherished dream to establish a place where\u00a0 the study of comparative religion could be combined with research into the techniques of meditations. In Los Angeles they joined the Vedanta Society of Southern California as a place to nurture his dreams.<\/p>\n

The 1940s were Heard\u2019s most productive writing years where he turned to novels and science fiction. His early writing included nonfiction work such as Ascent of Humanity, 1929;<\/em> The Social Substance of Religion, 1931; Source of Civilization, 1935; and Pain, Sex and Time written in 1941. <\/em>His magnum opus was The Human Venture.<\/em><\/p>\n

Like Jean Houston, in the 1960s he pioneered the study of LSD and its value while it was still legal to do so.This early hero of the Esalen founders of the Human Potential Movement died in 1971 in Santa Monica at the age of 81.<\/p>\n

For my purposes, what is most important about Heard was his attempt to connect social, psychological and spiritual evolution. In terms of psychology and spirituality, Heard published a remarkable fictional story Dromenon<\/em><\/a> (like a Labyrinth)<\/em>. The story is of an archeologist who encounters an ancient therapy which involves the mystical transformation of body, mind and spirit by following the pathways inscribed on the floors and walls of a medieval English cathedral.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Each of his stages was beset by a specific crisis-ordeal under which the individual was either broken down or transformed and then went on to the next stage. Heard suggested therapies of initiation for each stage along the lines of ancient mystery traditions. The psychotechnology that Heard advised as providing for the initiation of movement included LSD, electrical stimulation and walking on fire.<\/p>\n

The Life of Jean Houston<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like Gerald Heard, Jean was an early pioneer in the Human Potential Movement along with her husband Robert Masters. She was born in 1937 in New York City and is still alive and working 87 years later. Her father was a comedy writer who also developed material for theatre, movies and television. This helped Jean to develop her theatrical approach to what she later called \u201csacred psychology\u201d and group dynamics. She continued to live in NYC after her parents got divorced and she graduated from Barnard College in 1958. Jean was an interdisciplinary from way back. She received a PHD in both <\/em>psychology and religion. This further supported her later work in sacred psychology. She has taught and lectured at many colleges and has made a name for herself as a social visionary. In the mid 1990s she was given the\u00a0Keeper of the Lore Award<\/em>\u00a0for her studies in myth and culture.<\/p>\n

Early Research on Altered States of Consciousness<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the 1950s up until the mid 1960s, psychological research on the effects of LSD was legal and she met her husband working on a government research project on the effects of LSD. This led to their book The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience<\/em><\/a> in 1965. They married the same year and soon became known for their work in the\u00a0Human Potential Movement. Both Masters and Houston continued their interest in altered states of consciousness without <\/em>chemical inducement. Their book in 1972 called Mind Games<\/em><\/a> detailed their findings of the power of guided imagery and body movement for altering states of consciousness. Together they conducted research into the interdependence of body, mind, and spirit through their Foundation for Mind Research until 1979.<\/p>\n

Group sacred psychology<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jean had been deeply influenced by Heard\u2019s short story Dromenon<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0<\/em>Her rites of passages are powerful new versions of what Heard, following Cambridge anthropologist Jane Harrison, terms the Dromenon. In 1975 she formed the Dromenon Center which was named after the ancient Greek rites of growth and transformation. In Pomona New York, she began to offer workshops on this material. She used the Dromenon<\/em> book and often implemented it in her seminars by inscribing it on the floor and having her participants walk its pathways. She crafted her own transformational rituals as I will illustrate later in the article. Around 1978, she decided to offer an experimental advanced Dromenon workshop in which she would rethink some of the themes of the Five Ages of Man <\/em>in light of her own subsequent research and findings.<\/p>\n

From her study of Toynbee, Sorokin and others, she attempted to discover a relationship between social evolution and individual development. Child psychologists like Stanley Hall and his student Arnold Gesell have suggested that the individual infant, child and adolescent are recapitulating in their individual growth phases of past epochs of humankind\u2019s psychosocial evolution. Jean\u2019s interest in anthropology brought with it an appreciation of social evolution and its integration into Western history.<\/p>\n

The New Dromenon<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jane Harrison in Ancient Art and Ritual<\/em><\/a> points out that <\/em>for the ancients the enactment of the Dromenon extended the boundaries of the self so that it became part of the larger social order. From the spring of Dromenon there arose two of the main forms of Greek life and civilization:<\/p>\n