Marilyn Ferguson Quotes

We have been alienated by costs that soared beyond the means of all but the well-insured or wealthy; by specialization and the cold, quantifying approach that brushes past human concerns, and by the growing despair that comes from spending without regaining health. p. 244

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.

Just as scientists inevitably come across facts that contradict the existing paradigm, so individuals within a society begin to experience anomalies and conflicts: an unequal distribution of power, an abridgement of freedoms, unjust laws or practices... If this conflict is too intense or focused to be suppressed, a revolution eventually occurs in the form of a social movement. The old consensus is broken, and freedoms are extended.

Just as health is vastly more than medicine, just as learning transcends education, so a system of values is the context for the workings of any economy. Whatever our priorities—self aggrandizement, efficiency, status, health, security, recreation, human relationships, competition, cooperation, craftsmanship, material goods—they are reflected in the workings of the economy. p. 326

For millennia...we have lived under the power paradigm, a belief system based on independence and domination. Yet it has always existed alongside the components for a peace paradigm: a society based on creativity, freedom, democracy, spirituality. To foster a global shift...we can now create "a web of reinforcement": leadership comfortable with uncertainty, heightened public awareness of the contradictions in the power paradigm, exciting models of new lifestyles, appropriate technology, techniques for expanded consciousness and spiritual awakening.

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.

To Honore de Balzac, it seemed that humankind was on the eve of a great struggle; the forces are there, he insisted: I feel in myself a life so luminous that it might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral.

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.

Although it is rarely noted in histories of the American Revolution, many of the arch-Revolutionaries came from a tradition of mystical fraternity. Except for such traces as the symbols on the reverse side of the Great Seal and the dollar bill, little evidence remains of this esoteric influence (Rosicrucian, Masonic, and Hermetic). That sense of fraternity and spiritual chisement played an important role in the intensity of the Revolutionaries and their commitment to the realization of a democracy.

Yet there are reasons for optimism. Our error has been in assuming that we had to start with the schools. Schools are an effect of the way we think—and we can change the way we think.

These courageous few have been history's radar, a Distant Early Warning System for the planet. As we will see, some of them expressed their insights in a romantic vein, others as intellectual concepts, but all were pointing to a larger view. "Open your eyes," they were saying, "there is more." More depth, height, dimension, perspectives, choices than we had imagined. They celebrated the freedom found in the larger context and warned of the dangerous blindness of the prevailing view. Long before global war, ecological stress, and nuclear crisis struck, they feared for the future of a people without a context.

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

Long before Thomas Kuhn observed that new ideas may have to wait for a new generation's acceptance, folk wisdom made this bittersweet point. A Hebrew proverb warns, Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. Karl Pribram once commented that a new generation will learn about paradox in the early grades and will grow up understanding concepts of primary and secondary levels of reality. p. 321

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...."

We are living at a time when history is holding its breath," said Arthur Clarke, author of Childhood's End and 2001 , "and the present is detaching itself from the past like an iceberg that has broken away from its moorings to sail across the boundless ocean.