Jean Houston’s Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self
Sacred Psychology in Western History
LONG READ
Orientation
How I came across Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self
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 café 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. From there I stumbled on Barbara Marx Hubbard’s book Conscious Evolution. 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 dimension on the one hand, and a cosmic dimension on the other. I was jazzed by a book I was reading called Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self. 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.
Lack of a psychological and spiritual evolution of Marx and Engels stage theory
Marxists have a stage theory of social evolution. The first stage was primitive communism. The second stage was something Marxists called “Oriental Despotism” which roughly corresponded to the ancient states of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India. They were all caste societies. From there Marx and Engels argued that the next three social formations were all class societies. Slavery corresponded to Greek and Roman civilization. The second form of class society was feudalism, which in the West lasted from the 10th to the 14th 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.
Lack of social evolution in psychology and religion studies
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.
Integration of social, psychological and spiritual evolution
The first of two people I found who actually combined social, psychological and religious evolution was Jean Houston in her book Life Force. The other was Ken Wilbur in his book Up From Eden. Jean Houston’s book will be the study in this article.
Jean Houston’s Mentor Gerald Heard
As I was reading Life Force, I noticed that she referenced a book called The Five Ages of Man 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’s 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?
He has been called “an advanced scout” 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. In 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 to the perennial philosophy of esoteric religion.
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. 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 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.
The 1940s were Heard’s most productive writing years where he turned to novels and science fiction. His early writing included nonfiction work such as Ascent of Humanity, 1929; The Social Substance of Religion, 1931; Source of Civilization, 1935; and Pain, Sex and Time written in 1941. His magnum opus was The Human Venture.
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.
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 (like a Labyrinth). 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.
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.
The Life of Jean Houston
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 “sacred psychology” 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 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 Keeper of the Lore Award for her studies in myth and culture.
Early Research on Altered States of Consciousness
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 in 1965. They married the same year and soon became known for their work in the Human Potential Movement. Both Masters and Houston continued their interest in altered states of consciousness without chemical inducement. Their book in 1972 called Mind Games 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.
Group sacred psychology
Jean had been deeply influenced by Heard’s short story Dromenon. 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 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 in light of her own subsequent research and findings.
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’s psychosocial evolution. Jean’s interest in anthropology brought with it an appreciation of social evolution and its integration into Western history.
The New Dromenon
Jane Harrison in Ancient Art and Ritual points out that 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:
- Agon or athletic contest
- The agon of the drama
At the heart of the ancient Dromenon is the principle of conflict, the conflict that comes from the anima and animus of the old self and birth of the new year and a new self. She had a yearly 10-week mystery school format of spiritual study and sacred psychology. An emphasis on myth and story began to be essential to her work since about 1980. The use of the mythic is not as implicit in Life Force as it is in her later works. Works on myth include: The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Sacred Psychology and The Hero and the Goddess. So how does the structure of her groups work?
The structure of Jean’s groups
Her groups include between 5- 25 people. Ideally, members have sufficient life experience to appreciate the historical and psychological scope of the human drama they will be required to go through. At the initial meeting, the group assigns members to take responsibility for obtaining and preparing the setting for each Dromenon. This includes music and recorder, tape or CD players, art materials, as well as bringing food for a closing celebration for each Dromenon. The setting should be treated as sacred space with no interruptions. Before the meeting, every member of the group is to read the relevant material from the Life Force book. The group discussion of this material should in most cases be the subject of the first part of the meeting. After discussing the content members are to explore the meaning of its content in their lives. There is also discussion of the changing patterns of viewpoint that members have observed in themselves since the last meeting. They are to keep a journal for their journey.
Jean’s use of Greek mythology
In 1982, Houston began teaching a seminar based on the concept of “the ancient mystery schools” which proposed that human beings have an inherent potentiality which is far deeper and wider than their experience in everyday life. All her later work involved first tapping into that potential in her group settings and then learning how to bring it into everyday life. She used Greek mythology to instill in her students a quest which was not just for individual growth but part of the evolution of the human species.
Jean’s influences in stage theories of history
In Jean’s studio, statues of the gods of Greece and Egypt sit with the most advanced biofeedback equipment. A mummy case overlooks the conference area, while a wildly colored nine-foot carving of a Garuda bird-god of Indonesia shares quarters with a xerox machine. The historical material for stage theories for her workshops were influenced by the stages depicted in St. Augustine, Vico and Hegel. She studied historical cycles of Arnold Toynbee, Walter Schubart, Spengler, Berdyaev and Pitirim Sorokin. Cross-culturally she worked with societies that have scarcely changed form since the time of Christ as well as societies that are still medieval. Every kind of society that has ever existed can be seen today in a hybrid form. Their rituals can be drawn from and incorporated into the Dromenon work.
The Five Stages of Social Evolution
Following her mentor Gerald Heard, Houston divides western history into five stages:
- Tribal societies and agricultural state civilizations
- Greek civilization from 800-300 BCE
- Middle Ages of feudalism (10th – 14th centuries)
- Modern Europe of the capitalist/scientific revolution of the 15th to middle 20th. This includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution
- Planetary civilization
These five stages mostly follow Marx and Engels’ writing. The problems with her model include the slurring over the differences between tribal societies and agricultural state civilizations. These civilizations developed cities and states for the first time. They created caste relations which were a radical departure from egalitarian societies that exist mostly on a tribal level. They produced enormous wealth and created the first divisions between mental and manual labor. What agricultural civilizations have in common with tribal societies is that they are both collectivists. However, in my opinion this is hardly enough to justify lumping them together.
The characterization of Greek society as individualistic, aristocratic and warrior-like is good. The otherworldly characteristic of stage three, feudal society also makes sense. Her fourth stage of capitalism and the scientific revolution as the explosion and expansion of goods, infrastructures and population increase follows the work of Toynbee, Vico, Spengler and Sorokin.
Her last stage, planetary civilization, makes sense if you can imagine it as spreading of communism around the world. The problem with Houston-Heard’s stages is that they really ignore the power of capitalism to destroy populations either through world wars, colonialism or the exploitation of labor. Neither do either Heard nor Houston take into account the emergence and spreading of socialism. The place of either capitalism or socialism is not worked into her global civilization.
Five Stages of Individual Development
Houston identifies five stages of individual development which compliment her stages of social evolution:
- Infancy
- Childhood
- Adolescence
- First maturity
- Second maturity
One of the more exciting proposals Houston makes is that there is a relationship between social evolution and psychological evolution. In the cross-cultural literature on the evolution of the self, there is a movement from horizontal collectivism of tribal societies to vertical collectivism of agricultural states. Greek civilization can be characterized by first order individualism or what she calls “proto-individualism”. Houston’s 4th stage of social evolution – science – can be characterized as 2nd order individualism. If she added the cross-cultural research, the model of social evolution to individual evolution would work. But she doesn’t do this. Instead, she argues that social evolution conforms to individual development. This harkens back to the old racist anthropologists who suggested that tribal society corresponds to infancy while modern industrial capitalist societies correspond to maturity. This is exactly the kind of ordering of societies that Franz Boas rightly called racist and which justified imperialism. However, if we take out the implication of social evolution recapitulating individual development there are some interesting connections.
Five Types of Selves
The first stage of individual development is the pre-individual, co-conscious human. At this stage, egotism is repressed, sensuality is important and what goes in here is what she called “polymorphous perversity”. This stage does correspond to tribal societies since their senses are heightened because of the need to survive in a hostile environment. People are co-conscious because they do everything together.
Houston called the second stage the proto-individual heroic, self-assertive human.
These are the heroes of Greek civilization, the characters in the Iliad and especially the Odyssey. Greek aristocrats are likened to a warrior kind of self, where a code of honor is vital. Doing anything dishonorable leads to shame. Mythology is very important as Greek psychology was inseparable from mythology.
The third stage of the self is called the ascetic self-accusing man. Instead of a hero, this kind of self at its best is a mystic. The Middle Ages was dominated by the Catholic Church so the ideal self was the self-denying, otherworldly individual attempting to escape from the material world. The entire feudal society of the Middle Ages was anti-materialist and anti-secular. Because the Middle Ages was dominated by a Christianity that lost the appreciation of the gods and the psychology of mythology, the stories told were allegories, not myths. Allegories are moral tales as to how to behave.
The fourth stage of the self is called the individual humanistic, self-sufficient adventuring man who is self-confident. This corresponds with the period of the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. There is an explosion of interest in the external world. If the Middle Age visionary cultivated subjectivity, the new self-sufficient individual became enthralled with objectivity. World trade spans the globe. Science reaches beyond the mesocosm of earth to explore the macrocosm of the stars (telescope) or the miniscule world or organism (microscope). There is a harnessing of energy – coal, steam and oil. Population grows, great wealth is produced by world trade, diseases are controlled and life is lengthened. Leonardo, Goethe and Bruno are the best examples of this type of self.
The final stage of the self is what Houston calls the post-individual, planetary ecological human. This is a stage where society becomes globalized. Books that support this kind of world are books like Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man
Peter Russell’s book The Global Brain; the books of Oliver Reiser such as the Integration of Human Knowledge and Cosmic Humanism and Barbara Marx Hubbard’s book Conscious Evolution. I found nothing in Houston’s work which describes the economic system or political system where globalization will take place.
The kind of self in the last stage is dialectical in the sense that it is a return to the co-conscious, egoless self of tribal societies but on a higher level. The post individualist self is wealthier, less afraid and operates at a grand global scale rather than in local identity. This self is well-rounded like individuals in tribal societies but also well-rounded in the power to use technology on a global scale. One model for this kind of self is Buckminster Fuller.
Crisis, Pathology, Therapy
For me the most interesting part of Jean’s evolutionary landscape is the connection she makes between the stages of the self and three processes.
- The developmental crisis of each stage
- The pathology which arises at each stage
- The mythological therapies that resolve the crisis and the pathology
We will go through each of the developmental stages.
Pre-Individual Tribal societies: crisis, pathology and therapy
To protect themselves from natural disasters, other animals and some other kinds of societies, tribal societies, have ideology that, at least socially, things do not change. It is true that change in these societies is slower than any other social formations, which makes the break-up of tribal societies more difficult. So too, in individual development. When a child leaves home for the first time it can be traumatic. In both cases, Houston calls the crisis a “birth drama”. The pathology in social evolution is to refuse to change. This might mean living on less and less resources born out of a refusal to seek new lands, develop new technologies and politically and economically reorganize themselves. In individual development, the pathology is called “infantilism”. This means acting out, refusing to go to kindergarten or feigning sickness to maintain dependence. Houston’s proposal for a solution is “the mysteries of the earth” which remedies the trauma of birth by becoming “a one among the many”.
In this next section I will describe what the crisis and pathology look like. Space doesn’t permit me to do this with each stage but I wanted to give you a feel for what it is like.
The Dromenon for the pre-individual: The recovery of the beginning
The experiences are divided into four stages:
- First stage recalls the hypnotic symbiosis and comforting securities of the early social group
- 2nd stage one is wrapped in the arms of another, there to undergo a terrible birth of the individual and a hero
- In the 3rd stage birth is inspired to its blessed form, we relive our birth based on the work of Fredrick Leboyer. Here the atrocities of deliveries are refused
- The classical mystery of the earth is reenacted
Stage one: the remembrance of the primal community
One member will sit in a circle, arms linked and facing each other. Members of the second group will sit back-to-back with members of the first group reaching behind them. The entire group is a woven network corresponding symbolically to the interwovenness on all levels of the early community.
After 10-15 minutes of entering into participation mystique and continuous chanting, the guide will tell some to continue chanting but that very shortly some members of the group will be touched on the head. Those touched represent the proto-individual who are trying to break away from the close and interwoven society. Those selected should struggle to break loose while the untouched ones should hold them back and keep them from moving out. (58)
Some members of the hero group will be celebrating their revolt on the outer perimeter and even launch an attack on the inner group trying to drag members off. Some may form into wandering bands of marauders, fighting among themselves and their attacking other bands (59)
This is the beginning of the waking and appreciation of your inner life.
Stage four: the mystery of the earth
This invocation is recorded in Aeschylus The Suppliants and is thought to have been part of the initiatory chants to one of the mysteries…move downward, move inward, return to the earth…of initiates and prepare to receive the ancient mystery of earth rebirth.
Like Persephone in the ancient Eleusinian mystery, ascend out the earth, cave, womb, tomb.
The meal that follows should be a simple, ancient rite, with fruits and cheeses and good bread and perhaps a little red wine, only a little, however. (70-72)
Proto-Individual Heroic societies: crisis, pathology, therapy
The heroic aristocratic society of ancient Greeks are proud individualists, easy to anger and ready to fight. These individuals are not grounded in their individualism and behave like children of 7 or 8. Their individualism is short-sighted and gets them into trouble. Their crisis is that the drive for separation winds up in fighting, which Houston likens to a Tower of Babel. The pathology of this age is paranoia, always finding enemies even when there are none. The therapeia for this is the “mystery of water” where the egotism is tempered through communing with nature. Another therapeia is that of Odysseys “holding people under the water”
Mid-individual Ascetic societies: crisis, pathology, therapy
Ancient Greek society of the heroic aristocrats was followed by the rise of a merchant, trading society of Greece developed by a democratic polis and a more sophisticated individualism of the classical Greeks of Democritus, Plato, Aristotle and the Sophists. When the Greeks were conquered by the Romans, the Roman civilization lasted 800 years including the very sophisticated Alexandrians. When Roman civilization was conquered by the tribes of Northern and Southern Europe, ancient civilization lay in ruins. The only unification which followed throughout Europe was the Catholic Church. The Church at that time was extremely otherworldly.
The feudal societies that were built were hierarchical including a weak king, decentralized aristocrats, artisans and peasants . The only individualism really came from self-denying mystics who expressed their individuality through severe control of their bodies. Turning to individual development, this is the stage of adolescence, when the body explodes faster than the individual can keep up. Their self-mortification is a strategy for controlling the body. Aristocrats in the Middle Ages expressed bodily prowess through tournaments and gymnastics. The pathology of this stage is schizophrenia where the individual is torn between the poverty of the material world and the supposed glories of the spiritual world. The therapeia of this stage is the stories of Parsifal and the Holy Grail. Houston has her group enact “the mystery of the air” which is a correction of the drive to self-mortification.
Individual humanistic adventurous self: crisis, pathology and therapeia
The emergence of the Modern world was hammered by seven revolutionary movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution and the emergence of socialism. This produced in the individual both a feeling of liberation from the closed world of the Middle Ages and at the same time a feeling that just as there were no longer ceilings, so there were no floors.
The development of capitalism produced both more material wealth and more alienation. There was specialization of labor and a loss of a sense of how all the world fit together. There were no longer Renaissance men. There was both an expansion of society as well as informational overload. The struggle of Faust typifies the psychology of the humanist-self-sufficient self. What is meaningful in life is chocked full of new knowledge. Faust solved this problem by putting the knowledge to work in what Marx called “developing the productive forces”. Most other individualists were not so fortunate, swinging between mania and depression. They were haunted by the myth of Midas, where everything touched turns to money.
The therapeia for this Promethean self was the mystery of fire, where the self becomes more disciplined and deeper, rather than wider. There are also exercises for integrating the higher self with using mandalas with both mechanical devices as well as artificial intelligence.
Planetary higher self-crisis, pathology and therapeia
At the time I first read Jean’s book, I thought there was no book more inspiring and hopeful about the next stage of civilization than Teilhard de Chardin’s book Phenomenon of Man. Though I am a materialist, I highly recommend this book by this Jesuit renegade, at least as a place to start. Vernadsky’s great book The Biosphere is strictly Marxist materialist, but a lot more technical. Buckminster Fuller’s Utopia or Oblivion shows us that the scarcity that exists in the world is socially produced, rather than natural. My article The Slavophile Russian Cosmists lays out how social visionary models need to include colonizing other planets. The anarchist Fredy Perlman characterized the history of social evolution in three stages.:
- Tribal societies – having little and being much
- Capitalist societies – having much and being little
- Communist societies – having much and being much
In this individual second maturity, if Marx had his way, we would become as well-rounded as we were in tribal societies, except on a higher level—fishing in the morning, cattle rearing in the afternoon, criticizing in the evening. A major obstacle to catapulting into this planetary world is what Jean calls “involutional melancholy”. My way of interpreting this is the zero growth, people-are-pollution, Malthusian renunciation of human societies as a higher form of nature. Instead we imagine humanity as outside of nature, as a degenerate form of nature. But we must take the Promethean self, developed first with Greeks and along with the adventurous self of the modern world sore higher, not clip our wings and beg an otherworldly god for mercy. We must continue to be proud of our individualism, while recognizing the individuality of others on a global scale in a converging confluence of agape love. This is Jean’s Mystery of the Fields exercise.
Missed Opportunities
I was very surprised that Jean Houston did not attempt to integrate Heard’s five ages with the work of Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber. In the second edition of Life Force, she mentions both but she doesn’t take things any further. This is especially a shame because in the case of Gebser, his states of consciousness could have fit in beautifully with Heard’s stages. For example, Gebser’ magical state of consciousness goes with Heard’s tribal societies. Greek civilization would go with Gebser’s mythical consciousness. Gebser has an in-between 3rd stage which he called mystical, which is perfect for the Middle Ages. Gebser’s 4th stage, mental consciousness, goes with Heard’s humanistic self-sufficient self. Gebser even has a degeneration of mental consciousness which he calls rationality. In Heard’s stages this would begin with the scientific revolution. Gebser’s last stage, which he calls integrative, has a wealth of examples showing how it would go with Heard’s post-individual planetary human stage. Gebser’s stage could have been a whole other category called states of consciousness. Further, Gebser’s work is very rich and could have easily lent itself to therapeutic group exercises.
Integrating Heard’s work with Wilbur would have been a taller order. Both Heard and Gebser are really focused on Western civilization and neither has much to say about the civilizational processes of India and China. Wilbur, with his training in Buddhism, has a lot to say about these civilizations, their individuality and especially their states of consciousness. Integrating his work Up From Eden is probably too much. However, a couple of pages of footnotes suggesting the overlaps and divergencies between The Five Ages of Man and Up From Eden could have been enlightening and inspiring while provoking new research. Please see my table below for a summary.
• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
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