Marilyn Ferguson: Use

“No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Change

“By making us aware of the futility of this wishful thinking, the psychotechnologies help free us from unhealthy dependencies. We increase our capacity to love without bargaining or expectations, to enjoy without emotional mortgages. At the same time, enhanced awareness adds luster to simple things and everyday events, so that what may seem a turn toward a more austere life is often the discovery of subtler, less perishable riches.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Four, People Changing

Time , Dependency , Help , Thinking

“We might more accurately think of nonattachment as nondependency. Much of our inner turbulence reflects the fear of loss: our dependence on people, circumstances, and things not really under our control. On some level we know that death, indifference, rejection, repossession, or high tide may leave us bereft in the morning. Still, we clutch desperately at things we cannot finally hold. Nonattachment is the most realistic of attitudes. It is freedom from wishful thinking, from always wanting things to be otherwise.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Four, People Changing

Loss , Dependency , Freedom , Indifference

“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

“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

“Whether or not it was written in the stars, a different age seems to be upon us; and Aquarius, the waterbearer in the ancient zodiac, symbolizing flow and the quenching of an ancient thirst, is an appropriate symbol.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Introduction

Star , Age

“And it is the body's hysterical overreaction to a virus, rather than the virus itself, that makes us ill.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Three, Brains Changing, Minds Changing

Making love

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

God , Tree

“In the spirit of the Eightfold Path of Buddha, with its injunctions about Right Livelihood, Right Speech, and so on, we might also think in terms of Right Power—power used not as a battering ram or to glorify the ego but in service to life. Appropriate power.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power, p.190

Life , Thinking

“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

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

Light , Game , Relation ships