Marilyn Ferguson: Trending quotes (page 4)

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

Game , Help , Learning , Self-confidence

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

Business , Making love , Change

“Another strong force for change: crisis. All the failures of education, like a fever, signal a deep struggle for health.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

Strong , Health , Education , Failure

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

School , Optimism , Thinking , Way

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

School , Universe , Parent , Education

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

Business , Education , School , Change

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

Education , Change

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

Fear , Learning , Disease

“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?”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn, p. 279

Memory , Learning , Change

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

Universe , Understanding

“A healing state of mind has specific benefits for the healer, however, and for the rapport between therapist and sufferer. A British scientist has observed a particular configuration of brain rhythms in most of the spiritual healers he has tested. (England has thousands of licensed healers, and they are permitted to work in hospitals.) One anxious physician wired to the brainwave device did not show that pattern. Finally the sympathetic researcher said, "Imagine you are about to treat a patient. You have no medicine, no equipment. You have nothing to give but your compassion."”

Marilyn Ferguson

Suddenly the physician's brainwave activity shifted into the "healing state" pattern. p. 277
The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

Imagination , Suffering

“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.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves, p. 269

Birth , Death

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

Way , Nostalgia , Imagination , Nature

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

Nature , Health , Effort

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

“Within a few short years, without a shot's being fired, the concept of holistic health has been legitimized by federal and state programs, endorsed by politicians, urged and underwritten by insurance companies, co-opted in terminology (if not always in practice) by many physicians, and adopted by medical students. Consumers demand "holistic health," a whole new assortment of entrepreneurs promise it, and medical groups look for speakers to explain it.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves, p. 242

Health

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

Family , Making love , Season , Change

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

Pain , Disease

“The autonomy so evident in social movements is hitting the old assumptions of medicine hard. The search for self becomes a search for health, for wholeness—the cache of sanity search for health, for wholeness—the cache of sanity and wisdom that once seemed beyond our conscious reach.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves, p. 241

Self-confidence , Wisdom , Health , Search