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Marilyn Ferguson

213 quotes

“The spirit of our age is fraught with paradox. It is at the same time pragmatic and transcendental. It values both enlightenment and mystery... power and humility ... interdependence and individuality. It is simultaneously political and apolitical. Its movers and shakers include individuals who are impeccably Establishment allied with one-time sign-carrying radicals.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It" has infected medicine, education, social science, hard science, even government with its implications. It is characterized by fluid organizations reluctant to create hierarchical structures, averse to dogma. It operates on the principle that change can only be facilitated, not decreed. It is short on manifestos. It seems to speak to something very old. And perhaps, by integrating magic and science, art and technology, it will succeed where all the king's horses and all the king's men failed.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Conspire, in its literal sense, means "to breathe together." It is an intimate joining. To make clear the benevolent nature of this joining, I chose the word Aquarian.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although I am unacquainted with astrological lore, I was drawn to the symbolic power of the pervasive dream in our popular culture: that after a dark, violent age, the Piscean, we are entering a millennium of love and light—in the words of the popular song, "The Age of Aquarius," the time of "the mind's true liberation.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether or not it was written in the stars, a different age seems to be upon us; and Aquarius, the waterbearer in the ancient zodiac, symbolizing flow and the quenching of an ancient thirst, is an appropriate symbol.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever their station or sophistication, the conspirators are linked, made kindred by their inner discoveries and earthquakes. You can break through old limits, past inertia and fear, to levels of fulfillment that once seemed impossible ... to richness of choice, freedom, human closeness. You can be more productive, confident, comfortable with insecurity. Problems can be experienced as challenges, a chance for renewal, rather than stress. Habitual defensiveness and worry can fall away. It can all be otherwise.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the beginning, certainly, most did not set out to change society. In that sense, it is an unlikely kind of conspiracy. But they found that their lives had become revolutions. Once a personal change began in earnest, they found themselves re-thinking everything, examining old assumptions, looking anew at their work and relationships, health, political power and “experts," goals and values.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They have coalesced into small groups in every town and institution. They have formed what one called "national non-organizations." Some conspirators are keenly aware of the national, even international, scope of the movement and are active in linking others. They are at once antennae and transmitters, both listening and communicating. They amplify the activities of the conspiracy by networking and pamphleteering, articulating the new options through books, lectures, school curricula, even Congressional hearings and the national media.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Others have centered their activity within their specialty, forming groups within existing organizations and institutions, exposing their co-workers to new ideas, often calling on the larger network for support, feedback, back-up information.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once you have grasped the essence of this transformation, many otherwise inexplicable events and trends in the immediate environment or in the news may fall into place. It is easier to understand changes in one's family, one's community, the society. In the end we will see many of the darkest events in the context of a brightening historic picture, much as one stands back from a pointillist painting to get its meaning.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In literature there is a trusted device known as the Black Moment, the point where all seems lost just before the final rescue. Its counterpart in tragedy is the White Moment — a sudden rush of hope, a saving chance, just before the inevitable disaster. Some might speculate that the Aquarian Conspiracy, with its promise of last-minute turnabout, is only a White Moment in Earth's story; a brave, desperate try that will be eclipsed by tragedy — ecological, totalitarian, nuclear. Exeunt humankind. Curtain.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We stand on the brink of a new age, Lewis Mumford said, the age of an open world, a time of renewal when a fresh release of spiritual energy in the world culture may unleash new possibilities. “The sum of all our days is just our beginning." Seen with new eyes, our lives can be transformed from accidents into adventures. We can transcend the old conditioning, the dirt-poor expectations. We have new ways to be born, humane and symbolic ways to die, different ways to be rich.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The emergence of the Aquarian Conspiracy in the late twentieth century is rooted in the myths and metaphors, the prophecy and poetry, of the past. Throughout history there were lone individuals here and there, or small bands at the fringes of science or religion, who, based on their own experiences, believed that people might someday transcend narrow “normal" consciousness and reverse the brutality and alienation of the human condition.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The premonition was recorded, from time to time, that a minority of individuals would someday be yeast enough to leaven a whole society. Serving as a magnet culture, they would attract order around them, transforming the whole. The central idea was always the same: Only through a new mind can humanity remake itself, and the potential for such a new mind is natural.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although they themselves moved beyond the dominant ideas of their day, they carried few of their contemporaries with them. Most often they were misunderstood, lonely, even ostracized. Until this century, with its rapid communication, there was little chance for linkage among these scattered individuals. Their ideas, however, served as fuel for future generations.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who had premonitions of transformation believed that future generations might detect the invisible laws and forces around us: the vital networks of relationship, the ties among all aspects of life and knowledge, the interweaving of people, the rhythms and harmonies of the universe, the connectedness that captures parts and makes them wholes, the patterns that draw meaning from the web of the world. Humankind, they said, might recognize the subtle veils imposed on seeing; might awaken to the screen of custom, the prison of language and culture, the bonds of circumstance.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The themes of transformation have emerged with increasing strength and clarity over time, gathering impetus as communication expanded. At first the traditions were transmitted intimately, by alchemists. Gnostics, cabalists, and hermetics. With the invention of moveable type in the mid-fifteenth century, they became a kind of open secret but were available only to the literate few and were often suppressed by church or state. "...”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Meister Eckhart, the German churchman and mystic of the fourteenth century; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in the fifteenth; Jacob Boehme, a German, in the sixteenth and seventeenth; Emanuel Swedenborg in the seventeenth and eighteenth. We are spiritually free, they said, the stewards of our own evolution. Humankind has a choice. We can awaken to our true nature. Drawing fully from our inner resources we can achieve a new dimension of mind; we can see more.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I see through the eye, not with it," said poet-engraver William Blake, who lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The enemy of whole vision, he said, was our reasoning power's divorce from imagination, "closing itself in, as steel." This half-mind was forever making laws and moral judgments and smothering spontaneity, feeling, art. To Blake, his age itself stood as the accuser, characterized by fear, conformity, jealousy, cynicism, the spirit of the machine. Yet this dark force was only a "Spectre," a ghost that could be exorcised from the minds it haunted.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Cosmic Consciousness, written in 1901, Richard Bucke, a Canadian physician, described the experience of an electrifying awareness of oneness with all life. Persons who experienced such states of consciousness were becoming more numerous, he said, walking the earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing another air of which we know little. "This new race is in the act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gradually Western thinkers were beginning to attack the very foundations of Western thought. We were naive in our expectation that mechanistic science would explain the mysteries of life. These spokesmen for a larger worldview pointed out how our institutions were violating nature: Our education and philosophy failed to value art, feelings, intuition.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In The Open Conspiracy: Blueprints for a World Revolution (1928), novelist-historian H. G. Wells proposed that the time was nearly ripe for the coalescence of small groups into a flexible network that could spawn global change. “All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things," Wells once said, "and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings who are now latent in our loins shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool and shall touch the stars.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, was drawing attention to a transcendent dimension of consciousness usually ignored in the West, the union of the intellect with the intuitive, pattern-seeing mind. Jung introduced an even larger context, the idea of the collective unconscious: a dimension of shared symbols, racial memory, pooled knowledge of the species. He wrote of the “daimon" that drives the seeker to search for wholeness.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Phenomenon of Man was limited to private circulation during Teilhard's lifetime because the church forbade him to publish it. In it, he warned that a mind awakened to this evolutionary concept may experience fear and disorientation. It must create a new equilibrium for everything that had once been tidy in its inner world. “It is dazzled when it emerges from its dark prison.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the late 1930s a Polish count, Alfred Korzybski, pointed out yet another aspect of consciousness — language. Language molds thought, he said, laying out the principles of General Semantics. We confuse it with reality; it creates false certainties. With words we try to isolate things that can only exist in continuity. We fail to see process, change, movement. If we are to experience reality, Korzybski and his followers said, we must acknowledge the limits of language.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“C. S. Lewis, novelist and essayist, described what seemed to him a kind of secret society of new men and women, "dotted here and there all over the earth." One could learn to recognize them, he said, and clearly they recognized each other.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To make the best of both worlds. Oriental and European, the ancient and modern — what am I saying? To make the best of all the worlds — the worlds already realized within the various cultures and, beyond them, the worlds of still unrealized potentialities.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Indeed, diverse cultures were impinging on each other more by the day. In his enormously influential Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan described the coming world as a “global village," unified by communications technology and rapid dissemination of information. This electrified world, with its instant linkage, would bear no resemblance to the preceding and of the human family, a single consciousness?”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1967 Barbara Marx Hubbard, a futurist moved by Teilhard's vision of evolving human consciousness, invited a thousand people around the world, including Maslow's network, to form a "human front" of those who shared a belief in the possibility of transcendent consciousness. Hundreds responded, including Lewis Mumford and Thomas Merton. Out of this grew a newsletter and later a loose-knit organization, the Committee for the Future.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Erich Fromm, in Revolution of Hope (1968), foresaw a "new front," a movement that would combine the wish for profound social change with a new spiritual perspective; its aim would be the humanization of a technological world.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we look at the reality of the world from the viewpoint of the industrial era, it is clear that there is no hope But there is another way to look at our situation. We can discover the large number of people who have decided to change. ... If we do this, it seems equally impossible that we shall fail to solve our problems.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“George Cabot Lodge, statesman and Harvard business professor, said, "The United States is in the midst of a great transformation, comparable to the one that ended medievalism and shook its institutions to the ground. . . . The old ideas and assumptions that once made our institutions legitimate are being eroded. They are slipping away in the face of a changing reality, being replaced by different ideas as yet ill-formed, contradictory, unsettling.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are living at a time when history is holding its breath," said Arthur Clarke, author of Childhood's End and 2001 , "and the present is detaching itself from the past like an iceberg that has broken away from its moorings to sail across the boundless ocean.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many researchers say they have been shaken by their own findings about changes in conscious functioning because of the implications for widespread social change. There are hard facts to face, not just soft speculation.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The capacity for denial is an example of the body's sometimes short-sighted vision. Some of the body's automatic responses hurt over the long run more than they help. The formation of scar tissue, for example, prevents the nerves in the spine from reconnecting after an accident. In many injuries, swelling causes more damage than the original trauma.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And it is the body's hysterical overreaction to a virus, rather than the virus itself, that makes us ill.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our ability to block our experience is an evolutionary dead end. Rather than experiencing and transforming pain, conflict, and fear, we often divert or dampen them with a kind of unwitting hypnosis. Over a lifetime, more and more stress accumulates. There is no release, and our consciousness narrows. The floodlight shrinks into the slender beam of a flashlight. We lose the vividness of colors, sensitivity to sounds, peripheral vision, sensitivity to others, emotional intensity. The spectrum of awareness becomes ever narrower.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have two essential strategies for coping: the way of avoidance or the way of attention.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In his 1918 diary, Hermann Hesse recalled a dream in which he heard two distinct voices. The first told him to seek out forces to overcome suffering, to calm himself. It sounded like parents, school, Kant, the church fathers. But the second voice—which sounded farther off, like "primal cause"—said that suffering only hurts because you fear it, complain about it, flee it.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only way out of our suffering is through it. From an ancient Sanskrit writing: Do not try to drive pain away by pretending that it is not real. If you seek serenity in oneness, pain will vanish of its own accord.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Conflict, pain, tension, fear, paradox... these are transformations trying to happen. Once we confront them, the transformative process begins.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Another liberation — freedom from "attachment" — is perhaps for most Westerners the least understood idea in Eastern philosophy. To us "nonattachment" sounds coldblooded, and "desirelessness" sounds undesirable.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We might more accurately think of nonattachment as nondependency. Much of our inner turbulence reflects the fear of loss: our dependence on people, circumstances, and things not really under our control. On some level we know that death, indifference, rejection, repossession, or high tide may leave us bereft in the morning. Still, we clutch desperately at things we cannot finally hold. Nonattachment is the most realistic of attitudes. It is freedom from wishful thinking, from always wanting things to be otherwise.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By making us aware of the futility of this wishful thinking, the psychotechnologies help free us from unhealthy dependencies. We increase our capacity to love without bargaining or expectations, to enjoy without emotional mortgages. At the same time, enhanced awareness adds luster to simple things and everyday events, so that what may seem a turn toward a more austere life is often the discovery of subtler, less perishable riches.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Another discovery: We are not liberated until we liberate others. So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. Giving them freedom, we free ourselves. And they are free to grow in their own way.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Another discovery: uncertainty. Not just the uncertainty of the moment, which may pass, but oceanic uncertainty, mystery that washes across our beaches forever.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Or, as Kazantzakis expressed it, the real meaning of enlightenment is "to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darknesses.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig described the risk of pressing reason to its furthest reaches, where it turns back on itself. "In the high country of the mind," he observed, "one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of the questions asked”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more significant the question, the less likely there will be an unequivocal answer.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Vocation is the process of making one's way toward something. It is a direction more than a goal. Following a peak experience, one of the conspirators, a housewife who later became a filmmaker, said, "I felt as if I'd been called to serve on somebody's plan for mankind." The conspirators typically say they feel as if they are cooperating with events rather than controlling them or suffering them, much as an aikido master augments his strength by aligning himself with existing forces, even those in opposition.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source