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Marilyn Ferguson

213 quotes

“We have been alienated by costs that soared beyond the means of all but the well-insured or wealthy; by specialization and the cold, quantifying approach that brushes past human concerns, and by the growing despair that comes from spending without regaining health. p. 244”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Health care (including medical insurance) is now the third largest industry in the United States; medical costs are roughly 9 percent of the Gross National Product. Federal health costs are over fifty billion dollars. Neighboring hospitals duplicate expensive equipment, doctors order unnecessary laboratory tests to protect themselves from malpractice suits ("defensive medicine"). Even a simple office call now represents a major expenditure to the average person. Runaway costs, especially hospital charges, have made it all but impossible to enact any sort of national health plan. p. 244”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we respond to the message of pain or disease, the demand for adaptation, we can break through to a new level of wellness.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For all its reputed conservatism, Western medicine is undergoing an amazing revitalization. Patients and professionals alike are beginning to see beyond symptoms to the context of illness: stress, society, family, diet, season, emotions. Just as the readiness of a new constituency makes a new politics, the needs of patients can change the practice of medicine.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything of importance is already known, a sage said—the only thing is to rediscover it. Much of the current excitement about healing is a kind of collective remembering, a homecoming to the old wives and old doctors.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Scientific discoveries about the richness and complexity of nature reveal the poverty of our usual approaches to health, especially our efforts to deal externally, forcefully, and invasively with systems whose delicate balance can only be corrected if the inner physician is recruited. Just as outer reforms have limited effect on the body politic, external treatments are insufficient to heal the body if the spirit is in conflict.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In many instances traditional ways are being re-adopted, not out of nostalgia but because we recognize that our "modern" approaches have been an aberration, an attempt to impose some sort of clumsy order on a nature far more ordered than we can imagine.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The twentieth century gave us four-hour bottle feedings of infants, induced labor of childbirth and Caesarian-section deliveries for the convenience of hospitals and doctors, birth and death segregated into isolated, sterile environments empty of human consolation. p. 269”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are in the early morning of understanding our place in the universe and our spectacular latent powers, the flexibility and transcendence of which we are capable.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If our memories are as absorbent as research has demonstrated, our awareness as wide, our brains and bodies as sensitive; if we can will changes in our physiology at the level of a single cell; if we are heirs to such evolutionary virtuosity—how can we be performing and learning at such mediocre levels? If we're so rich, why aren't we smart? p. 279”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This chapter is about learning in its broadest sense. It's about our surprising capacities, new sources of knowledge, mastery, creativity. It's about the learner within, waiting to be free. And it's about how the learner came to be unfree... about our culture's great learning disability, an educational system that emphasizes being "right" at the expense of being open. p. 280”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We begin to see the unease and disease of our adult lives as elaborate patterns that emerged from a system that taught us young how to be still, look backward, look to authority, construct certainties. The fear of learning—and transformation—is the inevitable product of such a system.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can only have a new society, the visionaries have said, if you change the education of the younger generation. Yet the new society itself is the necessary force for change in education.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's like the old dilemma: You can't get a job without experience, but you can't get experience because no one will give you a job.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Schools are entrenched bureaucracies whose practitioners do not compete for business, do not need to get re-elected or to attract patients, customers, clients. Those educators who would like to innovate have relatively little authority to change their style.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of the Aquarian Conspirators surveyed, more were involved in education than in any other single category of work. They were teachers, administrators, policymakers, educational psychologists. Their consensus: Education is one of the least dynamic of institutions, lagging far behind medicine, psychology, politics, the media, and other elements of our society.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are heroes in education, as there have always been heroes, trying to transcend the limits of the old structure; but their efforts are too often thwarted by peers, administrators, parents. Mario Fantini, former Ford consultant on education, now at the State University of New York, said bluntly, The psychology of becoming has to be smuggled into the schools.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yet there are reasons for optimism. Our error has been in assuming that we had to start with the schools. Schools are an effect of the way we think—and we can change the way we think.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Another strong force for change: crisis. All the failures of education, like a fever, signal a deep struggle for health.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The business of the Aquarian Conspiracy is calm diagnosis of that illness—to make it clear that synthesis is needed—paradigm change rather than pendulum change.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the streambed of education is being enlarged, one formidable force altering its contours is competition. Learning is where you find it: on "Sesame Street," in inner games of tennis and the Zen of everything, in teaching and learning cooperatives, in computers, on FM radio, in self-help books, in magazines... and television documentaries.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most potent force for change, however, is the growing recognition of millions of adults that their own impoverished expectations and frustrations came, in large measure, from their schooling.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we are not learning and teaching we are not awake and alive. Learning is not only like health, it is health. p. 282”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Long before Thomas Kuhn observed that new ideas may have to wait for a new generation's acceptance, folk wisdom made this bittersweet point. A Hebrew proverb warns, Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. Karl Pribram once commented that a new generation will learn about paradox in the early grades and will grow up understanding concepts of primary and secondary levels of reality. p. 321”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All over the world, children and young people are being exposed, via the communications revolution, to such ideas. They are not limited to the parochial beliefs of a single culture. p. 321”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If education cannot be mended, perhaps it can metamorphose. As someone pointed out, trying to explain the difference between reform and transformation, we have been trying to attach wings to a caterpillar. Our interventions in the learning process to date have been almost that crude. It is high time we freed ourselves of attachment to old forms and eased the flight of the unfettered human mind. p. 321”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Making a life, not just a living, is essential to one seeking wholeness. Our hunger turns out to be for something different, not something more. p. 323”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Buying, selling, owning, saving, sharing, keeping, investing, giving—these are outward expressions of inward needs. When those needs change, as in personal transformation, economic patterns change.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Spending is an opiate to many people, a balm to disappointments, frustrations, emptiness. If the individual transforms that inner distress, there is less need for drugs and distractions.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Inner listening makes clearer to us what we really want, as distinct from what we have been talked into, and it might not have a price tag. We may also discover that "ownership" is in some sense an illusion, that holding on to things can keep us from freely enjoying them. Greater awareness may give us new appreciation for simple things.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If work becomes rewarding, not just obligatory, that also reorders values and priorities. We will look at the evidence for a new paradigm, based on values, which transcends the old paradigm of economics, with its emphasis on growth, control, manipulation.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because the economy is such a political issue it is propagandized, rationalized, lied about. Because our beliefs about the economy affect it, as in the "confidence index," business and government try to buffer the reaction of investors and consumers to unnerving economic news. And because divergent viewpoints are loudly argued, you can choose whom to believe”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are illusions of rescue by technology, by the reshuffling of moneys and resources. But our temporary easing of this chronic illness—scarcities, dislocated markets, unemployment, obsolescence—is as dangerous as the medical treatment of symptoms when the cause of disease is unknown. Our intervention in the body economic, like intervention by drugs and surgery, often leads to severe side effects requiring further and deeper intervention.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The crisis is evident in the chronic nature of unemployment and underemployment: the technological obsolescence that has overtaken millions of specialized skilled workers, increasing numbers of the highly educated vying for too few white-collar jobs, increasing numbers of teenagers and women trying to enter the work force.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our best hope now is to pay attention, to recognize the ways in which our lives and livelihood have been influenced, even run, by outmoded structures. Our ideas about work, money, and management grew out of an old stable social order irrelevant to present flux and were based on a view of humankind and nature long since transcended in science. The real world turns on different principles than those imposed by our partial economic philosophies.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rather than debating whether capitalism is right in its emphasis on opportunities for the individual or socialism in its concern for the collective, we should reframe the question: Is a materialistic society suited to human needs? Both capitalism and socialism, as we know them, pivot on material values. They are inadequate philosophies for a transformed society.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In synthesis may be our salvation—the path between right and left Aldous Huxley called "decentralism and cooperative enterprise, an economic and political system most natural to spirituality.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just as health is vastly more than medicine, just as learning transcends education, so a system of values is the context for the workings of any economy. Whatever our priorities—self aggrandizement, efficiency, status, health, security, recreation, human relationships, competition, cooperation, craftsmanship, material goods—they are reflected in the workings of the economy. p. 326”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill saw past the early materialist promises of the Industrial Age: No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in their mode of thought. In the 1930s historian Arnold Toynbee spoke of "etherealization"—the development of higher, intangible riches as the ultimate growth of a civilization. There seems to be growing sympathy, if not a mandate, for reversing the materialist trend. p. 330”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The true source of wealth, Eugen Loebl concluded while brooding about economics during his fifteen years as a political prisoner in Czechoslovakia, is not its productivity, its Gross National Product, its tangible assets. Creative intelligence is the wealth of a modern society. If we see gain as a function of man's ability to think, and if we recognize the importance of the intellectual level on which the economy is based, then our prime interest will be oriented toward the development of this level. . . . We can change our reality toward the goals we desire. p. 360”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On his historic visit to the United States, Tocqueville sailed down the Ohio River. On one hand was Ohio, a free state; on the other Kentucky, a slave state. On the Ohio side of the river he observed industrious activity, rich harvests, handsome homes. The Ohioan could enter any path fortune might open to him. He might become a sailor, a pioneer, an artisan, a laborer. On the Kentucky side Tocqueville saw only indolence. Not only were the slaves half-hearted in their labors, but the masters themselves were enslaved. They could not work their own land because that would demean their status.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For too long, like the Kentucky slaveholders, we have turned our best energies toward the pursuit of secondary excitement, hoping to find in such distractions the reward that comes only from vocation. But we have a choice; now we can emigrate to a freer state, finding there new heart, new enterprise, and values that match our deepest needs.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Spiritual or mystical experience, the subject of this chapter, is the mirror image of science—a direct perception of nature's unity, the inside of the mysteries that science tries valiantly to know from the outside. This way of understanding predates science by thousands of years. Long before humankind had tools like quantum logic to describe events that ordinary reason could not grasp, individuals moved into the realm of paradox through a shift in consciousness. And there they know that what cannot be is.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Millions living today have experienced transcendent aspects of reality and have incorporated this knowledge into their lives. A mystical experience, however brief, is validating for those attracted to the spiritual search. The mind now knows what the heart had only hoped for. But the same experience can be deeply distressing to one unprepared for it, who must then try to fit it into an inadequate belief system. p. 362”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By radically altering one's values and perceptions of the world, mystical experience tends to create its own culture, one with wide membership and invisible borders. This parallel culture seems to threaten the status quo; as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, Western society is outraged if an individual gives his soul as much daily attention as his grooming.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Critics call them narcissistic, not knowing the thoughtful nature of their inward search; self-annihilating, not knowing the spaciousness of the Self they join; elitist, not knowing how desperately they want to share what they have seen; irrational, not realizing how much further their new worldview goes toward resolving problems, how much more coherent it is with everyday experience.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Contemporary mystical experiences from many individuals and many parts of the world have centered in recent years on a collective and intensifying vision, the sense of an impending transition in the human story: an evolution of consciousness as significant as any step in the long chain of our biological evolution.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The consensual vision, whatever its variations, sees this transformation of consciousness as the moment anticipated by older prophecies in all the traditions of direct knowing—the death of one world and the birth of a new, an apocalypse, the "end of days" period in the Kabbalah, the awakening of increasing numbers of human beings to their godlike potential.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The seed of God is in us, Meister Eckhart said. "Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God seed into G o d .”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source