James O’Dea: The Conscious Activist
OMTIMES: In The Conscious Activist you describe an experience when you were a teenager that solidified your call to activism. Can you tell us about that?
James O’Dea: Yes, as a teenager growing up in London I became aware of the needs of impoverished senior citizens. I helped organize other teenagers to survey parts of southeast London to assess the situation. One case remains seared in my memory. I found an old lady with severe malnutrition and dementia in an unheated house with uncooked and rotting food everywhere. It was like a scene from a horror movie. It ignited my activist passion to hammer away at failings in the system. I was given a Teenager of the Year award and plenty of media attention to talk about the inadequacies of social services. At one point a senior government official contacted me and asked me to meet me to discuss my concerns. I essentially blew him off and told him he knew what he needed to do. In refusing dialogue I was living out my own version of the good guys versus the bad guys. I learned a lot from that early activism. I learned about the importance of passionate engagement but I also learned about the temptation to ride a high horse of self-righteousness. The mystic learns a lot about breaking through projections to find reality, but it can sometimes take the activist a little longer to take on that work.
OMTIMES: You talk about an experience you had studying with Jean Houston that furthered your mystical initiation. Can you tell us about that?
James O’Dea: Interestingly I first connected with Jean Houston when I was director of the Washington office of Amnesty International. We were releasing a report on the death penalty in the United States and I wanted an out-of-the-box creative thinker to help me with new approaches. She described how people are conditioned by images of violence and it is very difficult to de-condition them with the same imagery. She talked about telling a news story of human possibility. Then she invited me to be her guest at her Mystery School. It was really a great opening for me as I experienced the tremendous power in the world’s myths and the psycho-spiritual shifts that occur when we engage mythic truth. Myth is loaded with insight. As Jean would put it, “Myth is the DNA of culture!” As it turned out the Mystery School helped me see how to integrate the mystic and the activist. OMTIMES: What do you think your life would have been like had these experiences not occurred?
