Excerpts from the writings of Jean Houston, an advisor to Hillary Clinton who has assisted the First Lady in conducting imaginary conversations with the spirits of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mohandas Gandhi:

• I have come to believe that humor is the next best thing to God. For me laughter is the ultimate altered state. At the peak of roaring laughter one exists as in midsneeze. Laughter under social conditions also allows the soul to be congregationalized.

• You may also allow yourself to become very small and walk along the yardstick of time, experiencing it as a vast road. Following Mr. Jefferson, he leads you to a place that seems to be a meta-Monticello. And you realize that you are no longer in 2295. You are moving into a world which is outside of space and time.

• The brush of angel wings stirs our souls as some long-forgotten paradisiacal memory of the future.

• Hold the child in your arms as you are being held by your own extended being. The three of you are now together, a trinity that is a perfect oneness.

• I have watched people die and people be born, both literally and spiritually, on every continent of the globe, and I have seen the dreams of millenia become real and the realities of the last hundred years fade away into dreams.

• The door to the universe opened. Everything became part of a single Unity, a glorious symphonic resonance. I had awakened to a consciousness that spanned centuries and was on intimate terms with the universe. Everything mattered. Nothing was alien or irrelevant or distant. The farthest star was right next door.

• Like Athena, who emerged fully grown and armed, according to my relatives I was also quite a full person by the time I was 5. Like Athena, I was musical and was taken up by wise old men and given an extraordinary education.

• Below my generally benevolent nature lies a more archaic warrior. Like Athena, I seek to reweave the world. I am always rescuing people who have been cast aside. Also I seem to show up in many people's dreams.

• Presently we are living at a time of extraordinary insight into both the microphase and macrophase of the phenomenal world. With the concomitant expansion of our ways of knowing, a new story is finally beginning to become available in its basic outline.

• If Eve hadn't eaten the tempter's augmented fruit, we would still be featherless bipeds living on welfare in the garden instead of going out there and finding division and delectation, trauma and transcendence.

• The inner life of this [piece of blue] cheese would make for a bestselling and slightly salacious novel. Soft and runny in your mouth, it hits the back of your throat, stunning you with its fullness. Then it becomes intellectual, philosophical.

• I often blow to smithereens people's normal experience of clock time. Time is a juicy god.

• The holoverse dances for your benefit in ordinary and extraordinary ways. New forms emerge as we tune into the resonant fields of an evolving reality.

• The high actualizer I have known, the pragmatic saints and world-making mystics, have been essentially of that genre: they have allowed their body-minds to become fields of space-time from which can be harvested the formings of the Form. Their will and intentionality have become macrophase and consonant with the primary order. Of course they get the job done.

ABC reporter Jim Wooten, on "World News Tonight," June 24, 1996, explains the political fallout following revelations about Ms. Clinton's use of Ms. Houston's services:

Such role-playing conversations are traditional counseling techniques, and Ms. Houston describes Mrs. Clinton as beleaguered, in pain, and seeking help.... The unwritten subtext here, of course, is that even here at the end of the 20th century there is a political price to be paid for those in public life who seek help for their private problems.

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