Science has always tried to understand nature by breaking things into their parts. Now it is overwhelmingly clear that wholes cannot he understood by… - Marilyn Ferguson

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

The nations of the world, Tocqueville once said, are like travelers in a forest. Although each is unaware of the destination of the others, their paths lead inevitably toward meeting in the center of the forest. In this century of wars and planetary crisis, we have been lost in the forest of our darkest alienation. One by one the accustomed strategies of nation-states— isolation, fortification, retreat, domination—have been cut off. We are pressed ever more deeply into the forest, toward an escape more radical than any we had imagined: freedom with—not from—each other... the end of winter, the watering of deserts, the healing of wounds, light after darkness—not an end to troubles but an end to defeat.

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.