“The lure of becoming” is a phrase coined by Dr. Jean Houston, internationally renowned visionary and expert in the field of human capacities, and this concept underlies much of her work. The phrase speaks to the underlying life force that drives and draws every living being to grow. This urge is shared by every person, plant and animal, and by the Earth and Universe themselves, in our common yearning to become. This life force calls all of us as humans to transcend our local identities in order to become vitally important to our communities and planet.

Dr. Houston’s passion for becoming has been the driving force in her prestigious thirty-year career as an educator, humanitarian, prolific author, cultural historian, behavioral scientist, philosopher and scholar. Dr. Houston’s formidable schedule continues to include teaching and lecturing around the world. She has authored eighteen books, including The Possible Human, A Passion for the Possible (also a widely shown PBS video), and Manual for the Peacemaker.

With her husband, Dr. Robert Masters, Dr. Houston began The Foundation for Mind Research. She also founded The Human Capacities Training Program of New York and The Mystery School, a year-long graduate study program that attracts participants from across the globe. Mystery School students examine cross-cultural, mythic and spiritual studies, history, philosophy, physics, psychology, anthropology and the many dimensions of human potential. Dr. Houston formerly served as an advisor to UNICEF for the development and implementation of programs in Burma and Bangladesh. This summer she partnered with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to offer her third annual Social Artistry intensive on the college campus in her home city of Ashland, Oregon. This program focuses on engendering a new kind of world leadership and is also taught in countries worldwide.

As poignantly revealed in her recent book, Jump Time, Dr. Houston recognizes that ours is an era of unprecedented, radical change. We are experiencing, as she puts it, “the most interwoven and massive systems breakdowns ever experienced in human history.” Yet these breakdowns are also leading us to the largest societal and consciousness breakthroughs ever imagined. Dr. Houston believes that our future depends on our ability to touch our individual depths of genius, and to envision and act from the deeper patterns underlying and interlinking our collective problems.

During our recent conversation with Dr. Houston, we asked her what she considers to be the most important values to instill in our children in order to create a peaceful future. She immediately pointed out that her answer relates to adults as well.

She told us, “Given that children today are being asked to meet a set of issues, problems and complexities that have never ever been met before – global warming, incredible shifts in climate, terrible ups and downs of the interlinked natural and economic states – we really have to ask ourselves, ‘What kind of education and nurturing do our children need [in order] to develop their own human depths and the human communities that can respond to an ever-changing world filled with such complexities?’ And ‘How can we best bring children to the recognition that our individual destinies and the world’s unfolding are vitally linked?’ so that they can begin to ask the larger questions of how they may best serve and plant the seeds of a better world.”

She went on to highlight a few solutions to the questions she had posed. Her first solution is to establish an educational system that will encourage and enliven children's natural ability to create, imagine and transcend sensory boundaries. As one example, she noted that as children explore, they inevitably discover essential, complex principles, such as geometry and physics. When those understandings are left unnourished until isolated high school classes, however, they often lose meaning and connection.

“We are not encapsulated bags of skin dragging around dreary, little egos. We are organisms with great life, symbiotic, fields within fields, and all ultimately embedded into the cosmos. Most children know this naturally,” Dr. Houston shared.

Second, she emphasized the need to restore the type of children's activities that honor social service and participation in cooperative communities. She stressed the importance of storytelling to create circles of deep sharing, “where heart and hearth are not separated by a television screen.” Through storytelling we can restore a context for kindness, generational engagement and the establishment of a sense of our place in “the great chain of being.”

Dr. Houston added that amplifying and fine-tuning children’s attention is also vital. “All great psycho-spiritual exercises are based on attention,” she explained. She added, “Attention gives intention. If attention is only given to television, movie and sports stars, then that's where the intention will go.”

Dr. Houston passionately emphasizes the need for a hands-on, sensory-rich educational system that allows a child's mind, body and heart to open. She is a proponent of making the arts foundational to all types of learning, even with the inevitability of increasing technology. She believes that too many verbal-based classrooms are stages for boredom, inability and unwillingness to engage with the world. As substantiation, she pointed out that research indicates that approximately 45% of all people best learn kinesthetically, and only 15% auditorally. She also noted that activities such as singing enhance academic skills because the mental mechanisms that process music are intertwined with the same brain functions that control mathematics, language, interspatial relations and memory. Rhythmic activities such as dancing can stimulate the mental functions of patterning and order.

“If you have dance, drama, music and visual arts critical to the curriculum,” she said, “children do not fail. When we are dancing, singing, crafting, incarnating, relating to information on all these different levels, the entire body/mind system is energized. We become passionate learners, multi-modal and multi-stimulated. This in so many ways relates back to the major question of ‘How can we create people who can respond to a changing world and its complexity?’ It is the nature of that response that will save or destroy lives. And flying hands on [computer] keyboards and screen-lit faces are not it. The juicy world is filled first with ‘music’ of people and their passions.” (However, she chuckled as she admitted that she is somewhat of a computer nerd herself.).

Finally, Dr. Houston stressed the need for us to focus on ethics and to frequently encourage our children to envision the “way we want our class, our family and our life to be.” One way to do this is to empower children by guiding them in making up the rules for their groups that satisfy principles of fairness and kindness.

“Then,” she said, “our children will move naturally into envisioning the ‘way we want our world to be.’ And it's amazing how moral, how deep, how fair children are when there are encouraged to envision and really model what they think of as a civilized society. They most often describe scenarios of wonderful cooperative learning and opportunity, with people who have zero tolerance for racism, sexism, violence and abuse of any kind.”

As our conversation with Dr. Houston came to a close, she shared, “What is needed now is training for an unknown time, democratizing the skills that in the past only belonged to the few we called ‘genius.'” She concluded, “This moves today's huge challenges into the arena of Human Potential, an area that clearly proves that when we acknowledge, honor and educate the whole mind and body, we allow every child, and every adult as well, to embrace the skills and sensibilities that I call ‘The Possible Human.’ Then we have people who can potentially transform cultures, and who are willing and able to evoke ongoing generations that are endowed with the skills, passion and courage to help their times become the most they can be.”

Unity of Greater Cleveland in Shaker Heights will hold a dinner, lectures and workshops with Dr. Jean Houston on October 7-10. For more information, please visit www.unitygreatercleveland.com or call (216) 751-1198.