Marilyn Ferguson citations (128 citations)

“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.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

“We have two essential strategies for coping: the way of avoidance or the way of attention.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“The more significant the question, the less likely there will be an unequivocal answer.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“Another discovery: uncertainty. Not just the uncertainty of the moment, which may pass, but oceanic uncertainty, mystery that washes across our beaches forever.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“Another discovery: We are not liberated until we liberate others. So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. Giving them freedom, we free ourselves. And they are free to grow in their own way.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“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.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“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.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“Many researchers say they have been shaken by their own findings about changes in conscious functioning because of the implications for widespread social change. There are hard facts to face, not just soft speculation.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“If we look at the reality of the world from the viewpoint of the industrial era, it is clear that there is no hope But there is another way to look at our situation. We can discover the large number of people who have decided to change. … If we do this, it seems equally impossible that we shall fail to solve our problems.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“To make the best of both worlds. Oriental and European, the ancient and modern — what am I saying? To make the best of all the worlds — the worlds already realized within the various cultures and, beyond them, the worlds of still unrealized potentialities.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“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....”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“Gradually Western thinkers were beginning to attack the very foundations of Western thought. We were naive in our expectation that mechanistic science would explain the mysteries of life. These spokesmen for a larger worldview pointed out how our institutions were violating nature: Our education and philosophy failed to value art, feelings, intuition.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“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.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“Although they themselves moved beyond the dominant ideas of their day, they carried few of their contemporaries with them. Most often they were misunderstood, lonely, even ostracized. Until this century, with its rapid communication, there was little chance for linkage among these scattered individuals. Their ideas, however, served as fuel for future generations.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“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.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“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.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“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.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“Whatever their station or sophistication, the conspirators are linked, made kindred by their inner discoveries and earthquakes. You can break through old limits, past inertia and fear, to levels of fulfillment that once seemed impossible … to richness of choice, freedom, human closeness. You can be more productive, confident, comfortable with insecurity. Problems can be experienced as challenges, a chance for renewal, rather than stress. Habitual defensiveness and worry can fall away. It can all be otherwise.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“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.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“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.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

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

“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.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Introduction

“The spirit of our age is fraught with paradox. It is at the same time pragmatic and transcendental. It values both enlightenment and mystery… power and humility … interdependence and individuality. It is simultaneously political and apolitical. Its movers and shakers include individuals who are impeccably Establishment allied with one-time sign-carrying radicals.”

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Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Introduction

“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.”

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Marilyn Ferguson