ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 3, 1996 TAG: 9607030014
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KARL VICK THE WASHINGTON POST On the cosmic continuum that runs
through the soft, open, giving heart of the New Age, Jean Houston is what
Washington might call a moderate.
Not as mainstream as yoga, but a good bit closer to it than crystal gazers,
Houston is by all accounts a figure of real standing in a field that exists to
ask what's real. Her crowd - in collarless shirts, harem pants and
close-cropped white beards - is not usually found waiting to be buzzed in at
the White House northwest gate, which is precisely why Houston stands out so
vividly in ``The Choice,'' Bob Woodward's latest portrait of backstage
Washington.
But in the slippery realm of what some still call the Human Potential Movement, Houston is more easily pinned down than many in the loose-knit group of therapists, gurus and writers who range from Dale Carnegie-style motivational speakers to disciples of ancient and exotic faiths. Her 15 books come under the general heading of Jungian psychology and mythology; she maintains that the great accomplishments of historical figures are evidence that such potential lies in all of us. Her career stands one tier removed from those of the self-help authors who make the bestseller lists; her following is within earshot of PBS Pledge Week when the guru of the hour turns middle-aged enthusiasm for self-actualization into gold right before your eyes.
Long before she hit the tabloid front pages as ``Hillary's Guru'' because of her meeting with the first lady, Houston was a fixture at seminars at the famed Esalen retreat of Big Sur, Calif., and the Omega Institute of Rhinebeck, N.Y.-main stops on a circuit that no one seems to want to call New Age anymore. The term has become inescapably derisive, a way of saying flaky in two words instead of one.
``We try to steer clear of the New Agers,'' a spokesman for the Fund for UFO Research, in Alexandria, said one day last year. ``We find they give us a bad name.''
``Experience Industry'' is the term sociologist Paul H. Ray settled on to describe nontraditional enterprises that beckon pilgrims who are overwhelmingly white and middle-to-upper-middle-class. In a national survey this year, Ray found that however ``out there'' many Americans may find portions of the New Age, roughly a quarter of adults share common ground, whether it's a holistic approach to health or distaste for ostentatious homes.
Ray, who did the survey for the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, Calif., and the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Mich., claims the potential market for the Experience industry is 44 million people.
``This stuff is obviously beyond the pale inside the [Washington] Beltway,'' said Paul Rush, marketing director for the New York Open Center, another of the stops for the circuit riders of the roads less traveled. ``To my mind Bob Woodward is the archetypal Washington power journalist, and he's obviously going to be dismissive of this sort of thing because it's outside his experience. ... Because he looks at it as Rasputin visiting the czarina.''
As it happens, archetypes - of the Jungian variety - are something of a specialty for Houston, along with myths and famous historical figures. To those who have booked her for workshops, the chat she asked Hillary Rodham Clinton to imagine with the late Eleanor Roosevelt had a familiar ring.
``Her whole thing is drawing out the latent human potential that we all have,'' said Tom Valente of Omega, once a Jewish summer camp in the Hudson River Valley, not far from Woodstock. ``When she's here, she does a great thing of calling on these great thinkers and leaders, calling on Picasso and Eleanor Roosevelt.''
Houston first advised Hillary Clinton when she and four other self-help experts were summoned to Camp David on Dec. 30, 1994, to buck up the First Couple after Republicans took the Hill. As a group, they covered most of the New Age waterfront.
Anthony H. Robbins, for instance, may be a hyperactive fixture of television infomercials whose message falls squarely within the tradition of motivational speakers such as Norman Vincent Peale (who happened to be a friend of President Eisenhower).
But Robbins is probably best known for urging disciples to walk across hot coals. (Which puts him out there with Shirley MacLaine.)
Likewise, Camp David cohort Marianne Williamson lately has been working with the medical community on empowering people with AIDS. That puts the ``Guru to the Glitterati'' (she officiated at the union of Liz Taylor and Larry Fortensky) in the company of Bernie Segal and Norman Cousins. They advocate nothing more shocking than that there is a connection between mental and physical health.
But ``A Return to Love,'' the bestseller that got Williamson on ``Oprah,'' champions a text supposedly dictated by Jesus to a New York psychologist in the 1960s. (Channeling, once removed.)
Houston did not bring to Camp David the mainstream success of author Stephen R. Covey, whose ``Seven Habits of Highly Successful People'' is totem of the moment in the business world. She lacks the impressive academic chops of anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson - daughter of pioneering academics Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and a marquee professor at George Mason University. (Like Houston, Bateson was later invited to the White House with Hillary Clinton.) And it turns out Houston doesn't even have the credentials her resume claimed: That Ph.D. in psychology was never actually awarded by Columbia, Houston admitted to the New York Daily News last week (it was from Union Institute in Cincinnati).
But in Experience Industry, a sheepskin isn't everything.
``I know that Margaret Mead thought Jean was just phenomenal,'' said Winston Franklin, chief executive officer of the Noetic Institute. ``I can't speak to her academic credentials but anybody who knows Jean knows that she's a brilliant person who's extremely ethical and is not charading as something she's not.''
Consider the Noetic Institute. Named for the Greek word for knowledge, it was founded by former Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell. As the sixth man to walk on the moon, he stood at the pinnacle of applied science. But gazing back at Earth, Mitchell was moved to broaden the definition of knowing, to reclaim the intuitive and creative side that has been valued less in the 200 years since the Age of Enlightenment.
That road naturally leads into some murky areas. Consider shamanism, ``probably the most aboriginal form of meditation, and most closely associated with nature,'' said Finbarr Lismore, a Harvard Divinity Ph.D. who spent a summer as the Omega Institute's ``answer man,'' explaining the catalogue to callers. ``The American Indian shaman goes into the wilderness, and basically there's a belief that we have what we call hallucination and mental illness. But right next to it is a genuine spiritual experience of other dimensions of space and time, and those experiences lead one to a love and openness or whatever you want to call it that traditional societies believe are what hold their society together.''
Shamanism is a hot ticket lately. The Open Center offers a five-weekend course with a guide who, through drums and chants, Rush said, ``tries to re-create some of the processes of shamanic ritual in the context of sitting on the floor in a loft in Soho.''
Also gaining popularity is feng shui, the Chinese art of placement. The Open Center offers a three-year certification course.
And there are the mystic branches of ancient faiths, such as Sufism, an order of Islam whose whirling dervishes spin themselves into trances. Rush said a Jewish mystic tradition, Kabbalah, lately has been enjoying a particular surge on the West Coast. ``There's some kind of charismatic rabbi in Los Angeles who managed to fill up the house with models and B-level movie actresses,'' he said.
Other ancient traditions such as Tarot cards and astrology never went away. They may not be the least bit scientific, but they have an appeal that can scrap the flight plan of Air Force One, as Nancy Reagan did on the advice of astrologer Joan Quigley.
``Generation after generation, whoever was in power said these things are lunatic,'' Lismore said. ``But they never wiped them out. They had a cultural and economic vitality, and that had to say something.
``It's like, no matter how many people go to the Kennedy School of Government, the ward heeler shows up again,'' he added.
Meanwhile, the mainstream keeps widening, pulling into its flow more and more of what was once called ``out there.'' Look at yoga. Consider meditation.
``People thought you had to shave your head and be a vegetarian. Now you go into Kmart and they have yoga videos for $11.99,'' said Tami Simon, whose Boulder, Colo., company, Sounds True, has been peddling New Age lecture programs and other tapes since 1985. Among its titles: ``Meditation in the Zone: How to Turn Your Fitness Workout Into a Quality Meditation.''
In recent years Bill Moyers has been the primary interlocutor between the New Age and the masses, interviewing Joseph Campbell on myth and Huston Smith on comparative religions. But for more than a generation, the New York Times bestseller list has doubled as a catalogue of what's coming in from beyond the fringe.
``Scott Peck started it all by being a psychologist who was willing to talk about spirituality. So his book has been on the bestseller list for 12 years,'' said Charles Simpkinson, a clinical psychologist who publishes Common Boundary, a Bethesda magazine dealing with spiritual issues in psychotherapy.
John Bradshaw's recovery programs made ``inner child'' a common phrase in middle America. Deepak Chopra, who trained as an endocrinologist, studied under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and now peddles a compelling mixture of quantum physics and the mystical Hindu medicine known as Ayurvedic on PBS and in bookstores.
Phil Jackson, the Chicago Bulls coach, for years hosted weekend seminars on ``Basketball and Beyond'' at Omega.
And this year, the Disney Institute opened in Orlando. Among the 60 offerings in educational vacations are ``lifestyle'' courses on ``creativity'' and ``spiritual inquiry.''
Lismore's current employer, the Stanan Group in Hempstead, Long Island, is among the companies looking to develop a ``Conscious Aging'' retirement community. It assumes an elderly population more interested in Rolfing than in golfing, more apt to envy than mock Hillary Clinton's session with Jean Houston.
It assumes, in short, that New Age will continue its progression to old hat.
``I mean,'' Simpkinson said, ``some of the Redskins are using visualization to improve their passing!''
LENGTH: Long : 185 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ``New Agers'' or the ``Experience Industry''?by CNB(Clockwi$se from right). 1. ``Hillary's Guru,'' author and lecturer
Jean Houston. color. 2. PBS newsman Bill Moyers. 3. Chicago Bulls
coach Phil Jackson. 4. author and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck. 5.
actress, author and past-lifer Shirley MacLaine. 6. author Dr.
Deepak Chopra. 7. mythologist Joseph Campbell. 8. ``guru to the
glitterati,'' Marianne Williamson.