I had the pleasure of interviewing Jr. Jean Houston, Pioneer of the Human Potential Movement… Her full article is featured in the Jan/Feb Issue of 2012. You can receive 11:!1 for Free in 2012 by going to the Free Coupon on the www.1111mag.com website. Enjoy!

SIMRAN: It seems that much of the leadership roles have been directives from the top down. For a real change to occur, it’s now going to have to happen from the level of the people up. How do people do that in their own lives? What is good enough, what is big enough to help initiate that kind of change?

DR. JEAN HOUSTON: In my own life, it’s a sense of the mission of being alive in this time. I was born with this. I remember being mission-oriented when I was two-years-old. “I’m in a very nice time, it’s time to do something.” And the thing is, I think because we find our- selves in this extraordinary time, where what we do will make a difference as to whether we grow or die, this is requiring that sensibility that’s like a kind of thundering underneath the ground of conscious- ness saying, “Get on with it.”

In regard to the average person, historically, in times of radical crises, it is that level of radical challenge and difference that causes a kind of rising in consciousness to say, “It’s my time now. It’s my turn. It’s time to do something.” This is where community is so important, because by oneself, one can feel buffeted by the change of circumstances and give up. So, one of the things is to help people find a better story, because story tends to give people the structure within which they will live their lives. I think it’s something that people are looking for. “What is the better story?”

The American Dream, as it had been for certainly a hundred years or more, is not there in the same way. When you think of your grandpa, or even your dad, who would take a job and expect to be
in it most of his life, and then retire, and that’s just not true anymore. The old certainties are gone. The certainties about nature… in the course of this conversation, at least one species has died—has

become extinct. So with the world that is crumbling and the rise of things that were never there before, it’s as if the depths of the human spirit are rising.

I loved it when she said, “If you do not maintain your uniqueness, your authentic difference, you end up boring God. It takes all different parts, with all their tremendous variations. We are not just flaky folks, we are snowflake in terms of variation.”