Marilyn Ferguson Quotes

Zbigniew Brzezinski, ...spoke of an "increasing yearning for something spiritual" in advanced Western societies where materialism has proven unsatisfying. People are discovering, he said, that 5 percent per annum more goods is not the definition of happiness. Traditional religion, he conceded, does not provide a substitute: This is why there is a search for personal religion, for direct connection with the spiritual.... Ultimately, every human being, once he reaches the stage of self-consciousness, wants to feel that there is some inner and deeper meaning to his existence than just being and consuming, and once he begins to feel that way, he wants his social organization to correspond to that feeling.... This is happening on a world scale. p. 364

The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning.

Critics call them narcissistic, not knowing the thoughtful nature of their inward search; self-annihilating, not knowing the spaciousness of the Self they join; elitist, not knowing how desperately they want to share what they have seen; irrational, not realizing how much further their new worldview goes toward resolving problems, how much more coherent it is with everyday experience.

By radically altering one's values and perceptions of the world, mystical experience tends to create its own culture, one with wide membership and invisible borders. This parallel culture seems to threaten the status quo; as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, Western society is outraged if an individual gives his soul as much daily attention as his grooming.

Millions living today have experienced transcendent aspects of reality and have incorporated this knowledge into their lives. A mystical experience, however brief, is validating for those attracted to the spiritual search. The mind now knows what the heart had only hoped for. But the same experience can be deeply distressing to one unprepared for it, who must then try to fit it into an inadequate belief system. p. 362

Spiritual or mystical experience, the subject of this chapter, is the mirror image of science—a direct perception of nature's unity, the inside of the mysteries that science tries valiantly to know from the outside. This way of understanding predates science by thousands of years. Long before humankind had tools like quantum logic to describe events that ordinary reason could not grasp, individuals moved into the realm of paradox through a shift in consciousness. And there they know that what cannot be is.

For too long, like the Kentucky slaveholders, we have turned our best energies toward the pursuit of secondary excitement, hoping to find in such distractions the reward that comes only from vocation. But we have a choice; now we can emigrate to a freer state, finding there new heart, new enterprise, and values that match our deepest needs.

On his historic visit to the United States, Tocqueville sailed down the Ohio River. On one hand was Ohio, a free state; on the other Kentucky, a slave state. On the Ohio side of the river he observed industrious activity, rich harvests, handsome homes. The Ohioan could enter any path fortune might open to him. He might become a sailor, a pioneer, an artisan, a laborer. On the Kentucky side Tocqueville saw only indolence. Not only were the slaves half-hearted in their labors, but the masters themselves were enslaved. They could not work their own land because that would demean their status.

The true source of wealth, Eugen Loebl concluded while brooding about economics during his fifteen years as a political prisoner in Czechoslovakia, is not its productivity, its Gross National Product, its tangible assets. Creative intelligence is the wealth of a modern society. If we see gain as a function of man's ability to think, and if we recognize the importance of the intellectual level on which the economy is based, then our prime interest will be oriented toward the development of this level. . . . We can change our reality toward the goals we desire. p. 360

In the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill saw past the early materialist promises of the Industrial Age: No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in their mode of thought. In the 1930s historian Arnold Toynbee spoke of "etherealization"—the development of higher, intangible riches as the ultimate growth of a civilization. There seems to be growing sympathy, if not a mandate, for reversing the materialist trend. p. 330

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

In synthesis may be our salvation—the path between right and left Aldous Huxley called "decentralism and cooperative enterprise, an economic and political system most natural to spirituality."

Rather than debating whether capitalism is right in its emphasis on opportunities for the individual or socialism in its concern for the collective, we should reframe the question: Is a materialistic society suited to human needs? Both capitalism and socialism, as we know them, pivot on material values. They are inadequate philosophies for a transformed society.

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 crisis is evident in the chronic nature of unemployment and underemployment: the technological obsolescence that has overtaken millions of specialized skilled workers, increasing numbers of the highly educated vying for too few white-collar jobs, increasing numbers of teenagers and women trying to enter the work force.