Jean Houston on sensitivity and perceptual capacity
In our interview, Jean Houston comments about the Theory of Emotional Development of Kazimierz Dabrowski (which talks about levels of excitability or functioning), and about psychic ability in relation to giftedness. Houston agrees that ‘psychic’ has been used in our culture as a pejorative term:
“Don’t I know it,” she says with a laugh. “I think what we call the psychic trait is something that is extended through our nervous system as part of our perceptual sensibilities.
“When I made the long studies of Margaret Mead, over a six or seven year period, she was certainly what you would call, quote, psychic, but she never called herself that. She said she was a ’sensitive.’ And that’s what I think a lot of so-called psychics are; they have highly developed sensitivity patterns and perceptual patterns, and they are picking up peripheral things that most people are missing.
“And then those things constellate in consciousness as images. Now, the images can then become probability patterns. And many of them are as wrong as many times as they are right; nobody talks about that.
“But because the images are in their minds with such intensity, whereas many of us will just have a kind of a passing thought ‘Oh, this is going to happen’ or ‘That’s going to happen’ and it’s just a vague glimmer — with them, it’s a whole concrete thing, and when it does happen they talk about it, and they have a tremendous sense of its inevitability. It’s like a hologram, operative in itself, a whole virtual reality, where for most of us it’s a vague glimmer that falls away.”
Houston thinks “a lot” of giftedness, though by no means all, “has to do with having a broader palette of perceptual capacity, being highly sensitive to all the senses, and also operating on different modes of intelligence: the ’standard brand’ ones of visual and kinesthetic and auditory, as well as the intuitive and emotional ones.”
In an interview with Healthy Wealthy nWise magazine [March 2007] she talks about a number of artists and leaders having “high sensory ability” and able to access deep levels of the sensory, sensual aspects of both outer and inner life.
One of Jean Houston’s book: A Passion for the Possible: A Guide to Realizing Your True Potential
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Related Talent Development Resources pages:
High sensitivity resources : articles sites books
Psychic ability
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