Marilyn Ferguson: News

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Two, Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

Life , Making love , Relation ships , Nature

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Two, Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

Drawing , Nature

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Two, Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

Idea , Time , Nature

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Time , Reading , Understanding , Question

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Idea , Support

“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

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Science , History , Law , Education

“Sooner or later, if human society is to evolve—indeed, if it is to survive—we must match our lives to our new knowledge. For too long, the Two Cultures—the esthetic, feeling humanities and cool, analytical science—have functioned independently, like the right and left hemispheres of a split-brain patient. We have been the victims of our collective divided consciousness.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Six, Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science

Knowledge , Science , Feeling

“The Greek prefix syn ("together with"), as in synthesis, synergy, syntropy, becomes increasingly meaningful. When things come together something new happens. In relationship there is novelty, creativity, richer complexity. Whether we are talking about chemical reactions or human societies, molecules or international treaties, there are qualities that cannot be predicted by looking at the components.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Six, Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science

“Today we are on the brink of a new synthesis. In the past four centuries western science has experienced a continuous shattering and reforming of its basic concepts. Now the scientific community has begun to recognize striking correlations between their findings and those expressed abstrusely by ancient mystics. This is a convocation of visionary men and women pioneering this new synthesis.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Six, Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science

Past , Communication , Science , Women

“If a new prototype of society is to emerge, rather than a coup d'etat, dialogue and debate must occur at the highest levels.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Five, The American Matrix for Transformation

“A New Order of the Ages Begins, says the reverse side of the Great Seal, and the Revolutionaries meant it. The American experiment was consciously conceived as a momentous step in the evolution of the species. The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind, Thomas Paine said in his inflammatory pamphlet Common Sense (1776).”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Five, The American Matrix for Transformation

Sense , Pain , Age

“The Original Dream. We have forgotten how radical that original dream was—how bold the founders of the democracy really were. They knew that they were framing a form of government that challenged all the aristocratic assumptions and top-heavy power structures of Western history. The Revolutionaries exploited every available means of communication. They linked their networks by energetic letter writing. Jefferson designed an instrument with five yoked pens for writing multiple copies of his letters. The new ideas were spread through pamphlets, weekly newspapers, broadsides, almanacs, and sermons.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Five, The American Matrix for Transformation

Democracy , History , Dreams , Communication

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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