AN INTRODUCTION
BY JEAN HOUSTON
Some years ago I found myself sitting on the ground in a village in
India watching a television dramatization of the Ramayana. The
village’s one television set was a source of great pride, and all the
villagers had come from their fields and houses to be inspired and
entertained by the weekly hoe in which the many episodes of this key
myth of the Hindu world were so gloriously produced. The story tells
of Prince Rama (an avatar of the god Vishnu) and his noble wife
Princess Sita (a human incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi, and how
they have been betrayed and banished to live in a forest for 14 years.
Nevertheless they are very happy, for Rama is noble, handsome and full
of valor, while Sita is virtuous, beautiful, and completely
subservient to her husband. They are, in other words, the archaic
ideal of the perfect married couple. Unfortunately, their forest idyll
is brutally interrupted when Sita is abducted by the many-headed,
multi-armed demon Ravana, who promptly carried her off to his kingdom
of Sri Lanka. Enter the saintly monkey Hanuman, who with his army of
monkeys and bears, along with Rama, is eventually able to vanquish
Ravana, and his formidable troops and demons and rescue Sita. Rama
takes her back, however, only after he is convinced of her virtue and
the fact that she not once sat on the demon’s lap.
There is never a
minute in the Hindu world when this story is not enacted, sung,
performed in a puppet show, a Balinese shadow play, or a stage
performance. It is the core myth of the Hindu psyche. And this
television series was a lavish treatment, filled with spectacular
efforts, exotic costumes, thrilling music and dance, and acting
appropriate to the play of the gods. The villagers were as entranced
as I, for this was religion, morality, and hopping good theater music
all in one. Furthermore, they were joined together in the knowledge
that all over India at that moment hundreds of millions of people were
watching this program with the same fascination. Suddenly the old
Brahman lady who owned the television set, was sitting next to me on
the ground, turned to me and said in lilting English, “Oh, I don’t
like Sita!”
“Pardon?” I was
aghast. This was like my Sicilian grandmother saying she doesn’t like
the Madonna.
“No, I really don’t
like Sita. She is too weak, too passive. We women in India are much
stronger than that. She should have something to do with her own
rescue, not just sit there moaning and hoping that Rama will come. We
need to change the story.”
“But the story is
at least three thousand years old!” I protested.
“Even more reason
why we need to change it. Make Sita stronger. Let her make her own
decisions. You know my name is Sita and my husband’s name is Rama.
Very common names in India. He is a lazy bum. If any demon got him, I
would have to go and make the rescue.”
She turned and
translated what she had just said to the others who were sitting
around. They all laughed and agreed, especially the women. Then the
villagers began to discuss what an alternative story, one that had
Sita taking a much larger part, might look like. It was a
revisionist’s dream, listening to people whose lives had not changed
much over a thousand years actively rethinking their primal story. It
was like sitting in a small town in Southern Mississippi, listening to
Christian fundamentalists rewrite the Bible. Astonished and
exhilarated, I sensed that I was experiencing in this village a
beginning stage of the re-invention of myth, the changing of the
story. No matter that this primal tale was ancient beyond ancient,
venerable beyond venerable, it belonged to an outmoded perception of
women and their relationship to men and society, and it had to change
or go.
The fact of the
matter is that we are required to change the story not just in India
but everywhere in the world. Patterns of millennia have prepared us
for another world, another time, and, above all, another story. At the
same time, exponential change, unlink any ever known in human history
or prehistory, has confused our values, uprooted our traditions, and
left us in a labyrinth of misdirection. Factors unique in human
experience are all around us—the inevitable unfolding toward a
planetary civilization, the rise of women to full partnership with
men, the daily revolutions in technology, the media becoming the
matrix of culture, and the revolution in the understanding of human
and social capacities. The zeit is getting geistier as the old story
becomes ever more antiquated. It cannot address the multiples of
experience and its attending chaos. We have become so full of holes
that perhaps we are well on our way to becoming holy.
Since the new
story, the new mythology, is not yet in place, it is up to us
separately and together to carry out the work of reenvisionment. But
can one ever really change, or even invent a myth? Go beneath the
surface consciousness of virtually anyone, anywhere, and you will find
repositories of the imaginal world—the teaming terrain of myth and
archetype: holy men and wise women, flying horses, talking frogs,
sacred spaces, deaths and resurrections, the journeys of the heroes
and heroins of a thousand faces. Having taken depth probings of the
psyche of the people of the world many times over, I know this to be
so.
Myths, after all,
contain the greater story that never was but is always happening.
Their waters run far deeper than the compelling tales told around
ancient campfires to explain the seasons, the weather, and the
formidable conflicts found within human societies and the human soul.
Myth does server as a manner of explanation, but is also a mode of
discovery, for myth is the coded DNA of the human psyche. It is the
stuff of the evolving self that awakens consciousness and culture
according to the needs of time and place. It is the promise of our
becoming.
When we undertake
to work consciously with the great old myths, a rich and varied world
of experience opens up to us. We can travel with Odysseus, experience
the passion play of Isis and Osiris, wander with Percival in search of
the Grail, and die and be reborn with Jesus. Within the spoken or
ritually enacted myth we can allow out lives to be writ larger, the
personal particulars of our local existence finding their
amplification and elucidation in the universals of the greater story
and the larger characters that myth contains.
Those of us who
work with myths, like the authors of this book and myself, find that
our clients and students, have entered the realm of the ancient
stories and their personae, seem to inherit a cache of experience that
illumines and fortifies their own. They soon discover that they too
are valuable characters in the drama of the world soul, pushing the
boundaries of their own local story and gaining the courage to be and
do so much more.
How, then, can we
change the patterns so deeply woven into the structure of our psyches?
Until recent decades, I doubt that one could have done much more than
alter certain details. Now, however, in a time of whole system
transition, when everything is deconstructing and reconstructing,
myth, too, requires its redemption. This is the crisis and opportunity
the authors of this potent work help us navigate. They have embarked
on as critical a task as one could attempt at the cusp of the
millennium—how to go about the dominant myths by guiding people into
the realms of the psyche wherein they have the power to change their
own essential story. They work on the premise that all over the world,
psyche is now emerging, larger than it was. We are experiencing the
harvest of all the world’s cultures, belief systems, ways of knowing,
seeing, doing, being. What had been contained in the “unconscious”
over hundreds and thousands of years is up and about and preparing to
go to work. What had been part of the collective as the shared myth or
archetype is now finding new rivers of unique stories flowing from the
passion play of individual lives.
This does not mean
the dismissal of traditional myths, but rather that now as the
outmoded maps of tradition no longer fit the territory, we must live
our lives with the mythic vibrancy of those who inhabited the ancient
stories. We are mentored and informed by the ancient myths, and we are
also in an open moment, a jump time when myth is re-creating itself
from the stuff of personal experience. For the development of the
psyche, this is as monumental as when people stopped depending on the
meanderings of the hunt and settled down to agriculture and
civilization. Just as we are becoming capable of discovering our own
personal mythologies, we are being required to encounter them. In so
doing, we add our deepening story to that of the emerging New Story
and, with it, the new planetary civilization.
What is offered in
this book is essentially a technology of the sacred, a high art form
as well as a once and future science. It finds its theory and practice
in the teachings of the mystery schools of old, in shamanic training
and initiations, as well as in the modern laboratories of
consciousness research and the cutting edges of psychotherapy. While
fiber optics, interactive television, global computer networks, and
other information super highways give us access to the world mind, the
authors belong to a small group of artist-scientists who are providing
us with the high ways to the world soul.
In my
Mother/Father’s house are many mansions. Maybe so, but part of our job
is to help provide the furniture and set up housekeeping in the rooms
of the mansions that heretofore were relatively uninhabited by our
conscious minds. As masters of the geography of the inscapes, David
Feinstein and Stanley Krippner guide you into a most comprehensive
developmental program for discovering the uniquely personal worlds and
wonders that lie within. To this end, they have provided an ensemble
of state-of-the-art methods to travel and train in inner space. These
include guided imagery, dream incubation, working with the Inner
Shaman, even rewriting your own history through the emotionally
corrective daydream. You will be taken on journeys backward and
forward in time, so that you might heal old wounds and transform
obstacles into opportunities. Now powers are opened as you learn to
reframe your story as a fairy tale, finding within your own body the
metaphors for conflict and conciliation, discovering power objects,
personal shields, and inner allies. Always reminded and reconnected to
the myths of generations past, you are luminously led to become a
pioneer in the undiscovered continent of the myths of times to come.
Since culture is
everywhere being newly reimagined, nothing is more necessary than a
rebirth of the self. This book is meant to breach our souls, unlock
the treasures of our minds, and, through the divine act of
remythologizing, release the purpose, the plan, and the possibilities
of our lives. We are regrown to greatness and take our place with
Percival and Penelope, with White Buffalo Woman and Lady of The Lake,
with Quetzalcoatl and Bridget and Mr. Spock. And the name of the new
character out of that myth is You. And the name of the myth is your
Story—reframed in the light of the understanding that has come from
this process, and reconceived the renewal of self and history.
“Thank God, our
time is now,” the poet Christopher Fry says, “when wrong comes up to
meet us everywhere. Never to leave us, till we take the longest stride
of soul men ever took.” This stride of soul must carry us through
every shadow toward an open possibility, in a time when everything is
quite literally up for grabs. We can do no less. The psyche requires
its greatness, as do the times. This adventure in personal mythology
is one very important, very original, and exciting way to greatness,
or should I say, responsible living of the life we are given.
The times they are
a changing. Back in that village in India, after the beautiful episode
from the Ramayana ended, the next program all of India was watching
was the prime-time soap opera of some seasons ago, Dynasty! As
I looked at the dubious comings and goings of the characters, I didn’t
know where to hide my head. My hostess saw my embarrassment at the
comparative low level of American television and, patting my arm,
said, “Oh, sister, do not be embarrassed. Don’t you see? It is the
same story.”
“How can you say
that?”
“Oh, yes, indeed,”
she continued, her head wagging from side-to-side. “It is the same
story. You’ve got the good man. You’ve got the bad man. You’ve got the
food woman. You’ve got the bad woman. You’ve got the beautiful house,
the beautiful clothes, the people flying through the air. You’ve got
the good fighting against the evil. Oh, yes indeed it is the same
story!”
Thus are myths and
metaphors recast, redesigning the human fabric and all our ways of
seeing. It is the privilege and the particular challenge of the
authors of this remarkable book to witness and assist a new story
coming into time through the living content of the life of you who are
reading these pages.
These are the
times. We are the people.
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