Customer Reviews

The Possible Human

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Wondering why the world makes no sense? Our culture denies or denigrates so much of the core of human experience. Dr. Houston walks you through practical exercizes to regain your birthright as a human being. I'm not fond of 'self-help' books, most of them are rubbish. But I bought copies of this one for my family, because the information in it changed my perspective about myself and the world I have to live in. I highly recommed it for intelligent people who want solid information.

Dr. Jean Houston in one of the greatest thinkers of our time and, indeed, a force of nature when it comes to exploring the boundaries of Human Capacities. Buckminster Fuller called her mind "The Eighth Wonder of the World." Anything she writes is worth reading. Everyone knows that we use only a fraction of our total capacities. Through misuse, neglect, and even bad training, all of us have lost the full potential of our minds and bodies. In the past two decades, much has been learned about reclaiming these lost abilities. Dr. Houston, the leading exponent in this area, describes how each of us can remove blocks so that we can see more, hear more, remember more, and draw on more of our inner resources. She offers a comprehensive program of exercises through which the reader can test her conclusions and integrate them into his or her own life. Based on twenty years of research, this book not only extends our concept of what the "possible human" is, but how to get there.

This was probably one of the most innovative books I've read in a while. The exercises alone made this book a great read, but she also did an excellent job of explaining the underlying theory behind the exercises. I'll admit I liked this book a lot because it does go hand in hand with some of my own experiments, but I think that anyone who's interested in exploring the full potential of the human body will really enjoy this book, because the author shows you just how to do that. Her exercises are open-ended enough to allow for innovation on the part of the reader.

What I also really liked was that she did an excellent job of citing her sources and providing readers endnotes that fleshed out tangential concepts related to the main focus in each chapter.

Never before have I had my mind stretched so far, in so many new directions. If you will actually take the time to do the exercises in this book- not just read them- a new world awaits you. I know, I know, I thought "what a load of B.S." too. Find out for yourself.

Dr. Jean Houston (born 1937) is a psychologist who also has a Ph.D. in religion; she was briefly famous/infamous in the mass media as "Hilary Clinton's Guru." She is also the author/co-author of books such as: A Mythic Life: Learning to Live our Greater Story, The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Mythology and Sacred Psychology, Jump Time: Shaping Your Future in a World of Radical Change, Mystical Dogs: Animals as Guides to Our Inner Life, etc.

She wrote in the first chapter of this 1992 book, "This book offers the material---the ideas and the exercises---presented in these introductory workshops. It is designed to give you the chance to similarly extend and refine your own lenses of body, mind, and spirit. Its goal is to help you to tap and orchestrate your hidden creative resources. The result is that you will become a partner in the co-evolutionary task, able to perceive the Pattern that Connects, able to take those actions and acquire those skills that help build the earth and nurture the possible human."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"I have always thought of a myth as something that never happened but is always happening." (Pg. 8)
"What I am suggesting, therefore, is that we have a culture with a tendency to long pains and short pleasures." (Pg. 50)
"Saints, you say, but the miracle is that anybody can do it for anybody! Our greatest genius may be the ability to prime the healing and evolutionary circuits of one another." (Pg. 123)
"It was wonderful teaching in Catholic women's colleges in the 1960s. The nuns had just leaped out of the fourteenth century and were heading faster than anyone into the twenty-first. They were enormously supportive of all my experiments and investigations." (Pg. 137)
"You are identity and holonomy, the One and the Many. You are ubiquitous through space-time, existent in the Ultimate, and uniquely yourself in local reality. You are the hologram knowing the Hologram." (Pg. 199)