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Marilyn Ferguson Quotes
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Marilyn Ferguson was an American author, editor and public speaker, best known for her 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy and its affiliation with the New Age Movement in popular culture.

A founding member of the Association of Humanistic Psychology, Ferguson published and edited the well-regarded science newsletter Brain/Mind Bulletin from 1975 to 1996. She eventually earned numerous honorary degrees, served on the board of directors of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and befriended such diverse figures of influence as inventor and theorist Buckminster Fuller, spiritual author Ram Dass, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine and billionaire Ted Turner. Ferguson's work also influenced Vice President Al Gore, who participated in her informal network while a senator and later met with her in the White House. Wikipedia  

✵ 5. April 1938 – 19. October 2008
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson: 128   quotes 3   likes

Marilyn Ferguson Quotes

“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

“The hope for real social transformation need not rest on circumstantial evidence. One major arena, health care, has already begun to experience wrenching change. The impending transformation of medicine is a window to the transformation of all our institutions. Here we can see what happens when consumers begin to withdraw legitimacy from an authoritarian institution. We see the rise of the autonomous health seeker, the transformation of a profession by its leadership, the impact of the new models from science, the way decentralized networks are effecting wide geographic change.”

Marilyn Ferguson

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

Hope , Health , Way , Science

“Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found it was ourselves.”

Marilyn Ferguson

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

“The new political awareness has little to do with parties or ideologies. Its constituents don't come in blocs. Power that is never surrendered by the individual cannot be brokered. Not by revolution or protest but by autonomy, the old slogan becomes a surprising fact: Power to the people. One by one by one.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power, p. 240

People

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing

Truth , Soul , Making love , Love

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing

Thinking , Parting

“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.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing, p. 402

Universe , Problem , Change

“Awakening brings its own assignments, unique to each of us, chosen by each of us.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy, p. 417

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

Past , Making love , Change

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

Heart , History

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

World , Hunger

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

World , People , Nature

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

Peace , Learning , Health

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

Idea , Parting

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

Music , Travel , Reality , Art

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

Self-confidence

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

Motivation , Problem , Thinking , Past

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

God , Country

“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.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy, p.407

School , Water , Color , Nature

“Today there are millions of residents of that "great country, the whole earth."”

Marilyn Ferguson

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
The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

Country

“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.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing, p. 387

Sense

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing

Understanding , Marriage , Hope , World

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing

Support , Friendship

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing

World , Personality , People , Change

“L i g h t . . . light, wrote T. S. Eliot, visible reminder of invisible light.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eleven, Spiritual Adventure: Connection to the Source

Light

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eleven, Spiritual Adventure: Connection to the Source

Light , World , Children

“The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eleven, Spiritual Adventure: Connection to the Source

People , Search

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Ten, The Transformation of Values and Vocation

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Ten, The Transformation of Values and Vocation

Disappointment , People

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Ten, The Transformation of Values and Vocation

Personality , Change

“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.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Ten, The Transformation of Values and Vocation, p. 323

Hunger , Life , Making love

“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.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn, p. 321

Children , People , Communication , World

“If we are not learning and teaching we are not awake and alive. Learning is not only like health, it is health.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn, p. 282

Learning , Health

“The revolutionary principle introduced by Gandhi resolves the paradox of freedom. He called it satyagraha, "soul force" or "truth force."”

Marilyn Ferguson

Satyagraha was essentially misunderstood in the West, described as "passive resistance," a term Gandhi disavowed because it suggests weakness, or "non-violence," which was just one of its components.
The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power

Truth , Soul , Freedom

“Generation after generation, humankind fights to preserve the status quo, maintaining "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know," a bit of folk cynicism that assumes the unknown to be dangerous.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power, p. 197

Fight

“A political paradigm shift might be said to occur when the new values are assimilated by the dominant society. These values then become social dogma to members of a new generation, who marvel that anyone could ever have believed otherwise.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power

“The discovery of freedom, for instance, means little if we are not empowered to act, to be free for something, not just from something. As fear falls away, we are less afraid of power's Siamese twin, responsibility.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power

Fear , Freedom

“The Prescription: We must face our pain and conflict. Until we quit denying our failures and muffling our uneasiness, until we confess our bewilderment and alienation, we can't take the next and necessary steps. The political system needs to be transformed, not reformed.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power

Pain , Failure

“The Crisis: Our institutions—especially our governing structures—are mechanistic, rigid, fragmented. The world isn't working.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power

World

“There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. Everybody's crew.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Marshall McLuhan
The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power

“Just so, our natural power is sapped by the parasites of the centuries: fear, superstition, a view of reality that reduces life's wonders to creaking machinery. If we starve these parasitic beliefs they will die.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power

Fear , Life , Reality , Nature