Marilyn Ferguson Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

Our best hope now is to pay attention, to recognize the ways in which our lives and livelihood have been influenced, even run, by outmoded structures. Our ideas about work, money, and management grew out of an old stable social order irrelevant to present flux and were based on a view of humankind and nature long since transcended in science. The real world turns on different principles than those imposed by our partial economic philosophies.

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!

The perturbation would come from the privileged classes, he said, because that is the way of revolutions. They are launched by those disenchanted with the culture's ultimate reward system.

If education cannot be mended, perhaps it can metamorphose. As someone pointed out, trying to explain the difference between reform and transformation, we have been trying to attach wings to a caterpillar. Our interventions in the learning process to date have been almost that crude. It is high time we freed ourselves of attachment to old forms and eased the flight of the unfettered human mind. p. 321

There also must be an internal critique of injustices, of the management of material and human resources, and of abuses of political power. Above all, there must be criticism of the culture itself: its morality, religion, customs, and arts. And there must be demand for respect of the individual's uniqueness, with the society regarded as the medium for individual development and for brotherhood.

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.

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? p. 279

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."

In literature there is a trusted device known as the Black Moment, the point where all seems lost just before the final rescue. Its counterpart in tragedy is the White Moment — a sudden rush of hope, a saving chance, just before the inevitable disaster. Some might speculate that the Aquarian Conspiracy, with its promise of last-minute turnabout, is only a White Moment in Earth's story; a brave, desperate try that will be eclipsed by tragedy — ecological, totalitarian, nuclear. Exeunt humankind. Curtain.

Love and fraternity, once part of an ideal, have become crucial to our survival. Jesus enjoined his followers to love one another. Teilhard added, "or you perish." Without human affection, we become sick, frightened, hostile. Lovelessness is a broken circuit, loss of order.

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.