Jean Houston: guru of human potential

Outside New Age circles, the public knew little about Jean Houston until Bob Woodward, in his 1996 book The Choice, devoted ten pages to how Houston and Hillary Rodham Clinton became good friends. As everyone now knows, Hillary Clinton had many sessions with Houston during which, as a mental exercise, the First Lady held imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi. She balked at conversing with Jesus, calling such a dialog "too personal."

As Houston and Mrs. Clinton later made dear, in no way did the First Lady think she was in touch with the spirits of Mrs. Roosevelt and others. It was no more than what Houston calls one of her "mind games." She describes herself as a philosopher and psychologist who never attended a seance and has not the slightest interest in spiritualism.

This is true. Nevertheless Houston and her husband Robert E. L. Masters have an abiding interest in channeling. Famous channelers such as J. Zebra Knight claim to be transmitting messages from actual discarnates or entities in higher worlds, but Houston and Masters see channeling from an entirely different perspective. They are convinced that channelers, while in trance, are in contact with what Carl Jung called the "collective unconscious" of the human race. Deep inside our minds are the "eternal archetypes" - unconscious memories created by our evolutionary history - memories that are the sources of great wisdom.

Houston and Masters began their careers by experimenting with LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs as a way of tapping the collective unconscious. Their first book, Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (1966), created a sensation among young people then experimenting with such drugs at the urging of the late Timothy Leary. After LSD was legally banned, Houston and Masters turned to nondrug techniques for exploring what they called the "inner self," especially techniques based on hypnotism and mental imaging.

For three decades Houston and her husband conducted thousands of pseudochanneling sessions with subjects at their Foundation for Mind Research, now in Pomona, New York, located in a house built by actor Burgess Meredith. Subjects are put into a trance state during which they seem to speak with the voices of persons long dead. For example, one woman patient transmitted striking messages that purported to come from an ancient Egyptian goddess called Sekhmet. Masters' 1988 book The Goddess Sekhmet (reprinted 1991) is about these sessions.

Neither Masters nor Houston think an actual Egyptian goddess spoke through the woman's lips. At the same time, they are overwhelmed by the beauty and wisdom of her messages and the messages that come through other "channelers" when they make contact with the collective unconscious.

Hillary Clinton may not be aware of Houston's belief, shared by Masters, that persons in a trance state can have heightened powers of ESP (telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition).

These views of Houston and Masters are covered in some fifteen books they have written independently or together. The two most influential are Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space (1972) and Listening to the Body (1978). Earlier books authored or coauthored by Masters include The Cradle of Erotica (1963), about sexual practices in Africa and Asia, and Eros and Evil (1962), on the relation between sexual beliefs and the burning of medieval witches.

A good account of the psychic opinions of Houston and Masters can be found in Jon Klimo's Channeling: Investigations on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources. The book was published in 1987 by the New Age publishing firm of Jeremy P. Tarcher, husband of the ventriloquist Shari Lewis.

Houston told Klimo:

These [channeled] "entities" as we call them - Seth or Saul or Paul or Jonathan - are essentially "goddings" of the depths of the psyche. . . . They are personae of the self that take on acceptable form so that we can have relationship to them and thus dialogue. . . . [T]he traditional archetypes do not have for many people the power they once held. People are in a kind of free-form archetypal search. And so you get the Seths and the Salems and the myriads of very personal guides that are filling the psyche.

In 1979 Ken Carey, a young Missouri farmer, began channeling an entity named Raphael (perhaps the Bible's archangel) and later Jesus himself. Carey published his channeled gibberish in two preposterous books: The Starseed Transmission: An Extraterrestrial Report (1982) and Vision (1985). "As I communed with these spatial intelligences," Carey wrote, "our biogravitational fields seemed to merge, our awareness blend, and my nervous system seemed to become available to them as a channel for communication."

Carey's channeled material swarms with the usual New Age buzzwords - unity, vibrations, wholeness, harmony, love, and so on - without conveying anything significant. Nevertheless, Houston assured Klimo that the Starseed Transmissions are "perhaps the finest example of 'channeled knowledge' I ever encountered."