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Marilyn Ferguson

213 quotes

“The instruction booklet for Stargate, a contemporary symbolic game relating to consciousness, opens: The turning about is upon us, the turning of mind, the expansion of eyes... the light that shapes from within.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Always, the vision of evolution toward the light. Light is the oldest and most pervasive metaphor in spiritual experience. We speak of enlightenment, the city of light, the Light of the World, children of light, the "white-light experience.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“L i g h t . . . light, wrote T. S. Eliot, visible reminder of invisible light.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To Honore de Balzac, it seemed that humankind was on the eve of a great struggle; the forces are there, he insisted: I feel in myself a life so luminous that it might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In The Reflexive Universe Arthur Young, inventor of the Bell helicopter, offered in speculative scientific terms an idea as old as myth and Plato: We represent a "fall" into matter from light, and the lightward ascent has begun again. p. 385”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dream of light and liberation is poetically expressed in an apocryphal contemporary Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ. For too long, it says, our temples have been the tombs of the hidden things of time. Our temples, crypts, and caves are dark. We have been unable to see the patterns. "In light there are no secret things.... There is no lonely pilgrim on the way to light. Men only gain the heights by helping others gain the heights.... We know that the light is coming over the hills. God speed the light. p. 386”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The personal paradigm shift is like a sea-crossing to the New World. The immigrant, try as he might, cannot persuade all his friends and loved ones to make the journey. Those who stay behind cannot understand why the familiar did not hold the immigrant. Why did he abandon his accustomed homeland? Saddest of all, how could their affections not hold him?”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ongoing personal transformation moves one away from the Old World—sometimes abruptly, more often over years. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, people change jobs, even vocations, in the wake of shifting perceptions.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many old friendships and acquaintances fall away; new friendships, even a whole new support network, take their place. Based as they are on shared values and a shared journey, these new relationships are perhaps more intense.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Relatives, colleagues, friends, and marriage partners, understandably threatened by these changes, often exert pressure on the individual...These pressures only widen the gap. You don't stop an immigrant by trying to revive his hopes for the Old World.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Relationships are the crucible of the transformative process. They are bound to alter, given the individual's greater willingness to risk, trust in intuition, sense of wider connection with others, recognition of cultural conditioning. p. 387”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The wider paradigm of relationships and family transcends old group definitions. The discovery of our connection to all other men, women, and children joins us to another family. Indeed, seeing ourselves as a planetary family struggling to solve its problems, rather than as assorted people and nations assessing blame or exporting solutions, could be the ultimate shift in perspective.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we consider that any child being abused is our child, the problem changes. When we see our culture, our social conditioning, or our class as an artifact rather than a universal yardstick, our kinship expands. We are no longer "ethnocentric," centered in our own culture. p. 402”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A society in flux will have to create its families in new ways. The new family is emerging from networks and communities, experimental and intentional groups, friendships. The American Home Economics Association redefined the family in 1979 as two or more persons who share resources, share responsibility for decisions, share values and goals, and have commitment to one another over time. The family is that climate that one 'comes home to,' and it is this network of sharing and commitments that most accurately describes the family unit, regardless of blood, legal ties, adoption, or marriage.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human beings have a kind of optical illusion, Einstein once said. We think ourselves separate rather than part of the whole. This imprisons our affection to those few nearest us.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have seen the truth, Dostoevski said. It is not as though I had invented it with my mind. I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul forever.... In one day, one hour, everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love and fraternity, once part of an ideal, have become crucial to our survival. Jesus enjoined his followers to love one another. Teilhard added, "or you perish." Without human affection, we become sick, frightened, hostile. Lovelessness is a broken circuit, loss of order.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The worldwide quest for community typified by the networks of the Aquarian Conspiracy is an attempt to boost that attenuated power. To cohere. To kindle wider consciousness.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this time of uncertainty, when all our old social forms are crumbling, when we cannot easily find our way, we can be lights to each other. p. 403”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Victor Hugo prophesied that in the twentieth century war would die, frontier boundaries would die, dogma would die—and man would live. "He will possess something higher than these—a great country, the whole earth... and a great hope, the whole heaven.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today there are millions of residents of that "great country, the whole earth." In their hearts and minds, war and boundaries and dogma have indeed already died. And they possess that large hope of which Hugo wrote. They know each other as countrymen. The Whole Earth is a borderless country, a paradigm of humanity with room enough for outsiders and traditionalists, for all our ways of human knowing, for all mysteries and all cultures. p. 405”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have had a profound paradigm shift about the Whole Earth. We know it now as a jewel in space, a fragile water planet. And we have seen that it has no natural borders. It is not the globe of our school days with its many-colored nations. p.407”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All countries are economically and ecologically involved with each other, politically enmeshed. The old gods of isolationism and nationalism are tumbling, artifacts like the stone deities of Easter Island.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are learning to approach problems differently, knowing that most of the world's crises grew out of the old paradigm— the forms, structures, and beliefs of an obsolete understanding of reality. Now we can seek answers outside the old frameworks, ask new questions, synthesize, and imagine. Science has given us insights into wholes and systems, stress and transformation.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The greatest single obstacle to the resolution of great problems in the past was thinking they could not be solved—a conviction based on mutual distrust. Psychologists and sociologists have found that most of us are more highly motivated than we think each other to be!”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we see each other as obstacles to progress, our assumption is the first and greatest obstacle. Mistrust is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our old-paradigm consciousness has guaranteed its own dark expectations; it is our collective negative self-image.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The shift for which we have waited, a revolution of appropriate trust, is beginning. Instead of enemies, we are looking for allies everywhere. When an international conference, "The Future of the West," convened at the University of Southern California, the authorities agreed firmly on one point: The conference had been misnamed. The West, they said, can have no future apart from the East.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The global village is a reality. We are joined by satellite, supersonic travel, four thousand international meetings each year, tens of thousands of multinational companies, international organizations and newsletters and journals, even an emergent pan-culture of music, movies, art, humor.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For millennia...we have lived under the power paradigm, a belief system based on independence and domination. Yet it has always existed alongside the components for a peace paradigm: a society based on creativity, freedom, democracy, spirituality. To foster a global shift...we can now create "a web of reinforcement": leadership comfortable with uncertainty, heightened public awareness of the contradictions in the power paradigm, exciting models of new lifestyles, appropriate technology, techniques for expanded consciousness and spiritual awakening.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once these ideas coalesce into a coherent new paradigm grounded in transformation, we will see that humanity is both a part of creation and its steward as well, "a product of evolution and an instrument of evolution.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We need not wait for a leadership. We can begin to effect change at any point in a complex system: a human life, a family, a nation. One person can create a transformative environment for others through trust and friendship. A warm family or community can make a stranger feel at ease. A society can encourage growth and renewal in its members.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We can begin anywhere—everywhere. "Let there be peace," says a bumper sticker, "and let it begin with me." Let there be health, learning, relationship, right uses of power, meaningful work.... Let there be transformation, and let it begin with me.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because human choice remains sacrosanct and mysterious, none of us can guarantee a transformation of society. Yet there is reason to trust the process. Transformation is powerful, rewarding, natural. It promises what most people want...The new world is the old—transformed.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Hunger Project assumes that solutions do not reside in new programs or more programs. According to the best informed authorities and agencies, the expertise to end hunger within two decades already exists. Hunger persists because of the old-paradigm assumption that it is not possible to feed the world's population... The Hunger Project does not compete with older hunger organizations; rather, it publicizes their activities and urges enrollees to support them.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Aquarian Conspiracy is also working to ease hunger—for meaning, connection, completion. And each of us is "the whole project," the nucleus of a critical mass, a steward of the world's transformation.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this century we have seen into the heart of the atom. We transformed it—and history—forever. But we have also seen into the heart of the heart.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We know the necessary conditions for the changing of minds. Now that we see the deep pathology of our past, we can make new patterns, new paradigms. "The sum of all our days is just our beginning....”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Transformation is no longer lightning but electricity. We have captured a force more powerful than the atom, a worthy keeper of all our other powers.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Awakening brings its own assignments, unique to each of us, chosen by each of us. p. 417”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In their sharing of strategies, their linkage, and their recognition of each other by subtle signals, the participants were not merely cooperating with one another. They were in collusion. "It" — this movement — was a conspiracy! At first I was reluctant to use the term. I didn't want to sensationalize what was happening, and the word conspiracy usually has negative associations. Then I came across a book of spiritual exercises in which the Greek novelist, Nikos Kazantzakis, said he wished to signal his comrades, "like conspirators," that they might unite for the sake of the earth... Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau... quoted from a passage in which the French scientist-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin urged a "conspiracy of love.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical change in the United States. Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought, and they may even have broken continuity with history. This network is the Aquarian Conspiracy. It is a conspiracy without a political doctrine. Without a manifesto. With conspirators who seek power only to disperse it, and whose strategies are pragmatic, even scientific, but whose perspective sounds so mystical that they hesitate to discuss it. Activists asking different kinds of questions, challenging the establishment from within.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Broader than reform, deeper than revolution, this benign conspiracy for a new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural realignment in history. The great shuddering, irrevocable shift overtaking us is not a new political, religious, or philosophical system. It is a new mind — the ascendance of a startling worldview that gathers into its framework breakthrough science and insights from earliest recorded thought. The Aquarian Conspirators range across all levels of income and education, from the humblest to the highest. The Aquarian Conspirators range across all levels of income and education, from the humblest to the highest. There are schoolteachers and office workers, famous scientists, government officials and lawmakers, artists and millionaires, taxi drivers and celebrities, leaders in medicine, education, law, psychology. Some are open in their advocacy, and their names may be familiar. Others are quiet about their involvement, believing they can be more effective if they are not identified with ideas that have all too often been misunderstood.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“New perspectives give birth to new historic ages, Humankind has had many dramatic revolutions of understanding — great leaps, sudden liberation from old limits. . . A paradigm is a scheme for understanding and explaining certain aspects of reality. . . Usually at the point of crisis, someone has a great heretical idea. A powerful new insight explains the apparent contradictions. It introduces a new principle — a new perspective.New paradigms are nearly always received with coolness, even mockery and hostility. The idea may appear bizarre, even fuzzy, at first because the discoverer made an intuitive leap and does not have all the data in place yet.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you understand the basic change taking place in any one major area, it is easier to make sense of the others. This discovery of a new pattern transcends explanation. The shift is qual-itative, sudden, the result of neurological processes too rapid and complex to be tracked by the conscious mind. Although logical explanations can be laid out up to a point, the seeing of a pattern is not sequential but all-at-once. If a new concept does not click into place for you on first encounter, read on. As you move through the book you will come upon many related ideas, connections, examples, metaphors, analogies, and illustrative stories. In time, patterns will emerge, the shifts will occur. From the new perspective, old questions may seem suddenly irrelevant.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These courageous few have been history's radar, a Distant Early Warning System for the planet. As we will see, some of them expressed their insights in a romantic vein, others as intellectual concepts, but all were pointing to a larger view. "Open your eyes," they were saying, "there is more." More depth, height, dimension, perspectives, choices than we had imagined. They celebrated the freedom found in the larger context and warned of the dangerous blindness of the prevailing view. Long before global war, ecological stress, and nuclear crisis struck, they feared for the future of a people without a context.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Transcendentalists — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller, along with several dozen others — rebelled against what seemed the dead, dry intellectualism of the day. Something was missing — an invisible dimension of reality they sometimes called the Oversoul. They sought understanding from many sources: experience, intuition, the Quaker idea of the Inner Light, the Bhagavad Gita, the German Romantic philosophers, historian Thomas Carlyle, poet Samuel Coleridge, Swedenborg, the English metaphysical writers of the seventeenth century. Their term for intuition was "transcendental reason." They anticipated the consciousness research of our time in their belief that the brain's other mode of knowing is not an alternative to normal reasoning but a kind of transcendent logic — too fast and complex for us to follow with the step-by-step reasoning powers of our everyday consciousness.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1902 William James, the great American psychologist, redefined religion not as dogma but as experience — the discovery of a new context, an unseen order with which the individual might achieve harmony. Our ordinary consciousness filters out awareness of this mysterious, enlarged dimension, yet until we have come to terms with its existence we must beware lest we make a "premature foreclosure on reality." Of all the creatures of earth, James said, only human beings can change their pattern. "Man alone is the architect of his destiny. The greatest revolution in our generation is that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After a visit to the United States in 1931, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin sailed back to China from the San Francisco Bay. Enroute the Jesuit paleontologist framed an essay, "The Spirit of the Earth," inspired by his growing conviction that a conspiracy of individuals from every layer of American society was engaged in an effort "to raise to a new stage the edifice of life." Back in Peking he set forth his major thesis: Mind has been undergoing successive reorganizations throughout the history of evolution until it has reached a crucial point — the discovery of its own evolution. This new awareness — evolving mind recognizing the evolutionary process — "is the future natural history of the world." It will eventually become collective. It will envelop the planet and will crystallize as a species-wide enlightenment he called "Omega Point."...No one can call himself modern who disregards this evolutionary thrust, he said. To our descendants it will be as familiar and instinctive an idea as the third dimension of space is to a baby.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The egg is breaking, the chromosomes are splitting to go forward with a new pattern of life. Those of us who seem most alien . . . are the ones who are going forward to create the life as yet inchoate. We who are affected cannot make ourselves clear... This is the era when apocalyptic visions are to be fulfilled. We are on the brink of a new life, entering a new domain. In what language can we describe things for which there are as yet no new names? And how describe relations? We can only divine the nature of those to whom we are attracted, the forces to which we willingly yield obedience. . . .”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a 1940 letter Aldous Huxley said that although he was profoundly pessimistic about collective humanity at the moment, he was "profoundly optimistic about individuals and groups of individuals existing on the margins of society." The British author, living in Los Angeles, was the hub of a kind of pre-Aquarian conspiracy, an international network of intellectuals, artists, and scientists interested in the notion of transcendence and transformation. They disseminated new ideas, supported each other's efforts, and wondered whether anything would ever come of it. Many of Huxley's interests were so advanced that they did not come into their own until the decade after his death. When such ideas were heresies, he was a proponent of consciousness research, decentralization in government and the economy, paranormal healing, the uses of altered awareness, visual retraining, and acupuncture.”
Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source