In our interview, Jean Houston commented about the Theory of Emotional Development of Kazimierz Dabrowski (which talks about levels of excitability or functioning), and about psychic ability in relation to giftedness.
Houston agrees that ‘psychic’ has been used in our culture as a pejorative term:
“Don’t I know it,” she says with a laugh. “I think what we call the psychic trait is something that is extended through our nervous system as part of our perceptual sensibilities.
being a sensitive
“When I made the long studies of Margaret Mead, over a six or seven year period, she was certainly what you would call, quote, psychic, but she never called herself that.
“She said she was a ‘sensitive.’ And that’s what I think a lot of so-called psychics are; they have highly developed sensitivity patterns and perceptual patterns, and they are picking up peripheral things that most people are missing.
“And then those things constellate in consciousness as images. Now, the images can then become probability patterns. And many of them are as wrong as many times as they are right; nobody talks about that.
intensity
“But because the images are in their minds with such intensity, whereas many of us will just have a kind of a passing thought ‘Oh, this is going to happen’ or ‘That’s going to happen’ and it’s just a vague glimmer — with them, it’s a whole concrete thing, and when it does happen they talk about it, and they have a tremendous sense of its inevitability.
“It’s like a hologram, operative in itself, a whole virtual reality, where for most of us it’s a vague glimmer that falls away.”
Houston thinks “a lot” of giftedness, though by no means all, “has to do with having a broader palette of perceptual capacity, being highly sensitive to all the senses, and also operating on different modes of intelligence: the ‘standard brand’ ones of visual and kinesthetic and auditory, as well as the intuitive and emotional ones.”
In an interview with Healthy Wealthy nWise magazine [March 2007] she talked about a number of artists and leaders having “high sensory ability” and able to access deep levels of the sensory, sensual aspects of both outer and inner life.
Read interview with Jean Houston.
One of Jean Houston’s book: A Passion for the Possible: A Guide to Realizing Your True Potential
Her newer book: The Wizard of Us: Transformational Lessons from Oz.
“With elegant simplicity, Jean Houston shows you how to unleash the genius that lies in the depths of your being.” Deepak Chopra, MD
“Jean Houston plays midwife to the next phase of our evolutionary journey…We are literally drawn from the smaller, personal self to the larger, universal possibility.” Marianne Williamson
Video about the book:
Jean Houston, PhD, is “a renowned teacher, philosopher, and scholar and was one of the creators of the human potential movement. With a remarkable list of colleagues and mentors that includes Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Helen Keller, and Buckmister Fuller, Houston shares her profound wisdom through engaging, firsthand accounts.” – From bio on www.beyondword.com
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