Super Soul Special: Jean Houston: Lessons from 'The Wizard of Oz'

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1:12I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time. taking time to be more fully present. Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now. She is known as a scholar, a philosopher, and a visionary. Jean Houston is a prolific writer who has traversed this globe lecturing, teaching, consulting with world leaders along the way. She says her life has been devoted to pushing the boundaries of human potential. I just love that. After six decades of this work, she's become known as one of the elder spiritual states women of our time.

2:05You are one good-looking 75-year-old. Oh, thank you. I'm half Sicilian. It's 4 ,000 years of olive oil. Is that what it is? I'm listening through the system, yes. Is that what it is, or is it your gene pool, your spiritual gene pool? I think it's a passion for the possible. I think it's living in this, which must be the most interesting time in human history, where what we do will make a profound difference as to whether we grow or whether we perish. And it's that sense of urgency and possibility, the lure of becoming, I think, that keeps me going. I've worked in 108 countries, and I see, you know, I'm very positive because I'm there to see how people come together, how they help each other, how they cross the great divide of otherness.

2:53Are you, do you marvel at the breadth and depth of your 75 years here on the planet? Well, I've been very fortunate. See, I grew up in a comical family. My father wrote the Bob Hope show and all those shows. and I was exposed to, you know, absurdity and laughter as a way of life. And then I went to 20 schools before I was 12. And I was always told by my mother how lucky I was. My mother was a Shakespearean actor, so I was, as a little child, you know, made to recite, make me a willow who cabin at your gate, call upon my soul within the house. There was that. My parents were very kind people. And so they were always in human service in one way or the other.

3:39And then I was a Girl Scout from the time I was really quite young. And there we... What a generous thing to be able to say about your parents. My parents were very kind. Very kind people. You have met the great citizens of the world. I mean, the Dalai Lama and the Eleanor Roosevelt. Can I tell you about her? Please do. Well, I was, what, 16, and I was president of my high school, Julia Richmond. And Mrs. Roosevelt was gathering the young presidents of high schools and getting us together. And she was trying to get us interested in international affairs and working in the U.N. And I remember, Oprah, that she used words like wands, pungent.

4:22And we felt inspirited, you know, with a new sense of purpose. By her use of language? By her use of language and her deep presence. She had an extraordinary presence. And we just felt ourselves, you know, activated by the look. And she really got us very interested in human rights. She actually turned to me once and said, My dear, I rather suspect you're going to have a most interesting career. But remember, my dear, that as a woman in the professions, you can expect to be trashed. She didn't use the word trashed. It was something else. But remember, too, my dear, that a woman is just like a tea bag.

5:01You put her in hot water and she just gets stronger, which has proved to be so. That's good. That's good. You know, you've been described, there's so many, you were described as a mystic, a philosopher, a historian, a scholar. What words do you use to describe yourself? I would call myself an evocateur of the possible and a midwife of souls. Wow. You know, did you evolve to that or did you start out being that, really? Well, I did have an experience when I was six years old. May I tell you? Please do. It was really got me going. My father being an agnostic Baptist, but he had to become a Catholic to marry my mother, whose name was Maria Nunziata Serafina Gracia.

5:47And so they sent me to Catholic school in the first grade. And I got into a lot of trouble with the nun for asking interesting questions. What did you ask? Well, I did ask when Ezekiel saw the wheel, was he drunk? I mean, it was questions like that, that kind of thing. Anyway, Sister Teresa gave me 300 million years in purgatory. And I went home crying and my father was laughing, you know, that I got this. Because you asked the questions. That I asked the questions. And so to get away from my father and his laughter, I went and prayed in the closet. Jean remembers praying for a miracle that day, even promising to give up candy for two weeks if her prayers could be answered.

6:26And when she opened the closet door, she says something felt different. Suddenly, the whole world shifted. I didn't see anything different, Oprah. I didn't hear anything different. I was six years old. Six. But suddenly, the whole world moved into meaning. Literally, all of reality was there. And it was all moving together. And it was very, very good. and I was in a universe of fellowship in which everything was joyous and part of a great, tremendous unity of which I was a part in a state of childhood awareness. Awareness. So was that clarifying moment for you at six years old, did it last? Could you stay in that space?

7:14Did you know? Were you in that awareness always? Did that carry you from that moment? I've never been asked that. I would say that childhood kept those memories live. Adolescence gave it passion and eros. And then, you know, I went on with doctoral degrees and academics. And I almost lost it, but not quite. I was always flush against some kind of extraordinary experience or person. Wow. Lately, I've been rereading the works of Joseph Campbell, the great American writer and mythologist. If the phrase, follow your bliss, sounds familiar, that is Joseph Campbell. Millions of viewers first learned about him in the 1980s in Bill Moyer's popular PBS series, The Power of Myth.

8:01Campbell wrote about what he calls the hero's journey. From Homer's Odyssey to Star Wars and Luke Skywalker, Campbell noted the universal themes in myths and stories through the ages and around the world. And just like our favorite book and movie characters, Campbell says we are the heroes of our own life stories. You were great friends with Joseph Campbell. I knew him very well, and we did some work together. We taught seminars together. He was lots of fun. He was one of the happiest men I ever knew. I mean, bliss was no mere metaphor with him. But what he would do is he would tell a myth, and then I would provide exercises is so people could experience the hero's journey, if it was, that's what we were dealing with, to really, how do they feel the call?

8:49Campbell says the first step in the hero's journey is what he describes as the call to adventure. He says somewhere inside all of us, there is a longing for something more, a knowing that your soul's path is calling out to you. And once you recognize that feeling and heed that call, Your life, which is your adventure, truly begins. Does everyone have it? Does everyone have it? We all have it. Is every human being, do you believe that every human being has the call? In one way or another. Often the first call is, well, I want to get married or I need to get a job. The usual calls. and then at a certain point, at a point that I would call second genesis, the next level of our possibility just starts to rise and you feel, wait a minute, there's more to me than that.

9:49There simply is more. And then the call, the yearning comes and sometimes the call will come as a bummer. I mean, why did you do this? Why did you do that? Or why did this happen to me? Why did this happen to me? And then you start to seek and search and explore deeper and takes you into the deeper parts of your psyche. Have you found, discovered, recognized that there's nothing out of order, that everything that is happening can be used for the good of us? Well, I think ultimately that may be true. That's part of what my friend Jim Hillman called the soul's code. Yeah. I interviewed him a long time ago here.

10:26Yes, the soul's code. He was a brilliant man. The acorn within the oak. The acorn. Everybody has it. It's what I call entelechy or the higher guidance, the great friend. I think there is a deeper code when you finally get frustrated or yearning enough that you say, I am ready for the rest of my life to rise. So there was a time, when was it, back in the 90s, when you were going through, I think what you described as a painful period in your life, when you had gone to the White House for Hillary Clinton. Yes. And as you were sitting having a conversation, the order of things was that you asked her if she'd be interested in speaking to Eleanor Roosevelt.

11:02or what happened? Well, no. What happened is that I was helping Hillary write a book called It Takes a Village to Raise a Child, not just me, but there were others. And we were working away and working, and she was so tired. And I said, come on, Hillary, you've got to talk to somebody about, who would you have loved to talk to? And she said, Mrs. Roosevelt. I mean, Mrs. Roosevelt was, you know, a great model. And I said, all right, let's imagine a conversation. What would you say to Mrs. Roosevelt? What would she say to you? It was really, it was a classic old-fashioned role-playing game. That is all it was.

11:38And somehow it got out to the press and suddenly it was all over and it had become a seance. I've never even been to a seance, but it was a very difficult time. And you were called a guru. Well, good. Called her a guru. In my definition, guru is spelled G-U-R-U. G-U-R-U, yes. But was that painful? Because I heard that by the time you got home, the reporters had covered your lawn. Yes, hundreds. Hundreds. Hundreds of reporters. It was a slow day for news. But, you know, I went on and did something else. I went on and I began to work with people with Alzheimer's. I went from the White House to the nursing homes, and I found something so wonderful.

12:18And so that's what I did. Your autobiography, written almost now two decades ago, A Mythic Life. 16 years. Yes. Learning to Live Our Greater Story. Yes. Does everyone have a greater story? Oh, really? I hope so, and I believe it. But it does take a level of encouragement and of not just encouragement, but of development. It's a question of people getting together in teaching learning communities, teaching learning circles, growing in body, mind, and spirit together. really beginning to really expand their inner capacities, expand their sense of radical empathy to others. Wow. Radical empathy. I've got to stop with that for a moment.

13:07Expand... The inner capacities. Our inner capacity for radical empathy. Radical empathy, because then you become smarter. And I think that when we're in community, when we are really sharing, when we are calling forth the depth and genius of the other, then we grow. Then we grow. We were talking a little bit earlier about Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey. How would you describe what the hero's journey is? I mean, for those of you who are listening to us right now, you've got to read Joseph Campbell. Yes, well, Joseph found it in, he studied 240 separate cultures and myths, and he found that this was a sequence that you found in virtually all of them.

13:51Okay, now let's look at within the structure of a myth. I have a new book, as you know. The Wizard of Us. The Wizard of Us, yes. The Wizard of Us. That's right. And I take it by looking at what happens in that phenomenal story that a great deal of the world knows. Yeah. And then... It's one of my favorite spiritual teachings. Yes, it is. I remember I was probably seven or eight years old when I figured out that it was more than just a story about a yellow brick road and that there was deeper... I remember when I realized, oh, those were her friends. And the yellow brick road means going up the path and looking all outside of yourself.

14:33That's right. And then it's always right here. And it's right here. It's always right here. You're always wearing those red shoes. You're always wearing the ruby slippers. I remember that moment when I discovered that. So I guess that was your six-year-old moment. Well, yes, it was like my six-year-old moment. And what it is, is there is the first part of the call. Because the hero's journey begins with a call. You were called, were you not, by that story? Yes. As Dorothy is called to get out of that outmoded situation of Dust Bowl, Kansas, somewhere over the rainbow, that tremendous yearning.

15:05Many people feel a yearning and then they say, I don't know. That's called the refusal of the call. Yes. And then finally they can't stand themselves. Yes. And so sometimes it takes a big event to break them through. What was your big event? What was your tornado? My tornado was leaving Nashville. I felt the yearning. I felt the yearning to leave Nashville. There you go. Even though everybody said to me, you know, you're going to fail out there. It's going to be tough out there. And particularly the big one was coming to Chicago. When I moved from Baltimore to Chicago, there was every single person in my life except my best friend Gail said, you're going to fail.

15:39And I said, even if I fail, I still have to go. Because if I stay here, I'm going to be smothered. Which is exactly what he says in The Hero's Journey. If you don't accept the yearning, then you end up dying inside. You die inside. And you can't do that. So she arrives in Oz. Oz. And everything is technicolor. And the little people recognize her. And then she is sent on the road of spiritual power. The yellow brick road. The road of spiritual pollen. You find this in many myths, okay? And who does she meet? She met the disempowered parts of herself, the disempowered mind, the scarecrow, the disempowered heart and feeling, the tin man, the disempowered courage, the cowardly lion.

16:22And then comes the journey in which the intelligence is increased or the man of intelligence, the mind who thought he, if I only had a brain, he finds out he has a great brain. And so, you see, part of my work and the work in that book, The Wizard of Us, is to show people how to enhance their minds, how to enhance their brains, how to grow and amplify their heart. Are we getting better? Well, it was at Steven Pinker who just wrote a book saying, yes, there's less violence, believe it or not, less war than there was 50 years ago. That's one thing. But I think more and more people are becoming more conscious.

16:56I really see it happening. But it does need people like yourself, myself, and many of the people that we can name, as well as all those people who are out there saying, we are in the time of renaissance, of a radical new possibility, because we are in the time, truly, of either or, of grow or die, of making peace sexy, you know. Yes. Peace is potency. It's reaching. It's sprouting. It's planting. It's this new energy. It's people reaching out, crossing the great divide of otherness and making connections that they never did before. Do you feel in some way that your work has allowed you to pass the torch to a new generation?

17:38Well, you know, when I work, especially around the world, I'm often with young people. Well, I am now too, but I'm just saying even more so because I work in so many countries and I don't know that it's a passing of the torch. I find myself ignited by these young people. That's interesting. That's interesting. I think it's very mutual. I don't regard myself as being primary in any particular way at all. But to really be there with another is to see greatness. That's what I find in almost every person I meet. As we sat down and you were being miked, you just casually said, you know, I'm 75. And when you're 75, you no longer worry about what you look like and what it's going to be.

18:25You look beautiful. Oh, thank you. I would never have, I had read that you were 75. And then when I saw you, I went, I wonder, did I read that correctly? That you're 75? Yeah. How has the aging process been for you? Have you, did it bother you at all? I mean, I talked to women who were turning 40 who were like, oh, I can't believe I'm turning 40. Well, I never think about it. You never think about it? Never, ever. I mean, there's so much to do and to be. as I say, we're in this extraordinary time in human history, and I think having, you know, they say 75 years, that still is the breadth of life.

19:01You also have access to the depths. I find that that second or even third, the second half of life to be the most exciting, the most interesting. When did it get good for you? It started to get really good at 60. Really? Yeah, really good. How so? Well, because I think it was because your sense of heart, your heartfulness increases. And when your heartfulness increases. Your heartfulness increases. Fullness increases. Interesting. And in that you have a generalized affection. And it is that generalized affection. And you're always looking for both the deeper aspect of anything that you see as well as what is actually trying to.

19:47And you try to be of use. But I would also say it is to really be present to the depths and beauty within each person and the higher purpose. I really think that many people are waking up to a deeper sense of purpose. They have to. It could be the earth herself. The fact that we're sitting here talking about this means that there's enough people awake to watch us and make this viable. Tell me, 75, what is the lesson that was the hardest for you to learn? You know, so many times we keep repeating the same lesson. It comes in a different form. It wears a different pair of pants. What was the lesson that took you the longest to learn?

20:31Because I grew up in show business, there was always an emphasis on how one is seen. And not that that was very heavy, but it was always there in the back. And my father, I remember once my father, I was, when I was still quite young and I was a college professor and I was carrying an old saddleback. And my father said to me, J.D., you can't get on the plane. We're carrying that. You might sit down next to some famous professor. And I remember turning to him and saying, Dad, I am the famous professor. But I think that you go beyond caring. really, you are there to be of service, and you're not there to be seen.

21:17So I think that was the hardest lesson. I don't know if it was the hardest, but it was a major one. Tell me, what is the message that is most imperative for you at this stage in your life, that you most want people to know? I want people to know that we have been gifted by God with human possibilities and capacities that are so huge. And in many ways, we have barely begun to really tap into who and what we are. We have many, many, many different persona, many different talents within us, that our story is mythic, that we are all on hero heroine's journeys, and above all, that we are sourced in spirit, that we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

22:06And by golly, we are adequate to the challenge of the time. But also to see it in others. It's the seeing in the others. I think that's really what I meant by the seeing. It's seeing as you have so much in your life. It's the seeing in the others that engenders the others to their possibility. It's crossing that bridge of otherness. Crossing the bridge of otherness. Yes. Well, let me ask you, where do you want to be at 75? Oh, I want to look as good as you do. And I want to be fully, I want to fully embody the calling. I think I'm sort of like touching around the edges of it. And I knew that for me to release the Oprah show, which was very comfortable for me to do, and I created that base, but to release that and to step into this next generation of being able to reach people at a different level, I knew that that would be challenging.

23:04But I want to go out like a comet, knowing that I really fulfilled the mission. That's what I want. And at 75, I want to be able to sit here on a Sunday morning and say, I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. I want this platform that we're speaking on right now to be an international, worldwide service for people. And I want millions of people to join us all over the planet in the gathering of our community here to talk about these ideas that become idealized and actualized within the human spirit. That's what I want. A worldwide teaching-learning community. That's what I want! There you go.

23:54That's what I want. That's what I want. And what do you want as you sit here and in the decades to come? What do you want? I want people to really understand the power of love and loving. I want people to look out at the world and say, I am a citizen of the most beautiful planet in the world. I have been given this holy incarnation, extremely unlikely. You know, I look at people and say, you know, don't put yourself down. You won the ultimate Olympics. You are the sperm and the ovum that made it. You know, millions of sperms. The millions. I always say that, too. There they go. There's millions.

24:43But I think it is to have a deep appreciation of the life that one is given and the life of others, and then to act accordingly in the depths of that appreciation. To understand what Joseph Campbell said, the privilege of a lifetime. The privilege of a lifetime. Is being who you are. Being who you are. Yeah. What is the soul? I believe that the soul is the essence of who and what we are. I personally believe that it transcends our leaving, this mortal coil. And I think it is also in part, I think in part it is also that great friend that I talked about, that it comes with codes and possibilities and the next layers of who and what we may yet be.

25:29It is often a pain in the neck because it says, wake up. It's time to wake up. Don't go to sleep. I think it is also the lure of our becoming. That's what I think the soul is. Wow. Wow. Got to take that in a minute. The lure of our becoming. Yes. How did you even come up with those words? I don't know. I'm talking to you. The lure of our becoming. The lure of our becoming. Wow. That's fantastic. That's great. So what happens when we die? What do I think? Yes. What do you think? Well, I've nearly died on several occasions. Once it was, when I was 19, I used to jump out of planes. I mean, with a parachute.

26:11It was very interesting because one day I hadn't packed my parachute well. So I was pulling and pulling on it. Nothing was happening. Nothing was happening. And my whole life from zero to 19 went by at its own time. Was there a life review? There was a complete life review at its own time. Not every little pork chop and Hershey bar, but it was the basic one. And then either the shoot opened or you and I are having a lovely conversation in paradise.

26:41But once I had typhoid fever in Crete, and it really nearly died, but I had a profound sense of continuity. So several times that this has happened. So I really believe that we are continuous in one way or the other. And I think that this universal university that we're in gives us a great... Earth school, as you've called it. Earth school, and it may be also universe school, too. I think it gives us a great many opportunities for all kinds of learning, especially where we are in the earth, where we're given sufficient paradise, sufficient problems, challenge, opportunities, variety, in order to grow ourselves into whatever it is that we're going to become.

27:28For one thing, to become stewards of this earth instead of the bad malusers of the earth. So I really believe that it is a huge educational process, and I don't think it ends in one way or the other. In each of those examples, at 19 with the jumping out of the plane, the typhoid, were you afraid of death in that moment? No, I have never been afraid of death. Never been afraid? No, I've always had a sense of continuity from the time I was a little child. Yeah, I think it's Joseph Campbell's said, we're not afraid of dying, we're afraid of how we die. Of how we die, yes. So you sense the continuity from the time you were six years old.

28:06I think it's a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Really? So I think we're always in process. I seem to be a process. I seem to be a verb of becoming. And held by the lure of becoming that keeps us going on. Wow. What is your definition of God? It varies from day to day. When I was a little girl, it was a very personal person. As I got older, it became the universe. It became the universe in us. But mostly I think it is the wonderful words from Dante, the love that moves the sun and all the stars and moves in my heart and in yours. And is part, for me, it is also part of the evolution of our becoming because we are coded.

28:57We are coded in ourselves, but becoming we are coded in our hearts, and we are coded into we are God's seeds, becoming God's selves, I think. Ooh, that's a good one. That's a tweet, tweet, y 'all. God's seeds. Wow. You are a quote a minute. You're just an aha moment. Do you pray? All the time. All the time. Yes. Yes. What is the central focus of your prayer? Well, and the first thing I ever say in the morning is, dear God, see, I still use that language, please make me be a benefit to someone or something today. Mine is the same, use me. Yeah, use me. Use me. Can you complete this sentence, the world needs?

29:49the world needs the sense that we are all in it together yes

30:04yes boy that makes me want to weep because if we did gee everything would change if everybody just under the sound of your voice in my voice could take that in yes everything would shift Yeah, it would. All right. I believe in. I believe that we are here with deep purpose to become all that we can be. I believe that we have been given the most beautiful planet in the galaxy to work out and to enjoy. It isn't just a working out. It is truly to enjoy the gifts of our incarnation. I believe that we are headed ultimately in the right direction. I believe that we have been given sufficient stress, crisis, complexity, and consciousness to do things that are beyond our imagination, larger than our aspiration, more complex than all our dreams.

31:01I believe in love. I believe in you. I believe in me. I believe in this, the most potent moment in human history. Well, that is it, ladies and gentlemen. You cannot say another word in an interview after that. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. You can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you haven't yet, go to Apple Podcasts and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Join me next week for another Super Soul Conversation. Thank you for listening.

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