Marilyn Ferguson Quotes - Page 2

War is unthinkable in a society of autonomous people who have discovered the connectedness of all humanity, who are unafraid of alien ideas and alien cultures, who know that all revolutions begin within and that you cannot impose your brand of enlightenment on anyone else.

Many artists have said that when life itself becomes fully conscious, art as we know it will vanish.

So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves.

Sometimes in astronomy, a heavenly body has been virtually invisible until a single observer detects its presence and points it out to his colleagues, who then see it with increasing clarity. Perhaps a myriad of unknown senses are only awaiting our consciousness.

The beginning of personal transformation is absurdly easy. We have only to pay attention to the flow of attention itself.

Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.

The popular prophets have underestimated how strange the truth can be. The human brain, that 'perfect instrument,' that 'fabulous electronic dance,' can be our open sesame to an infinitely richer life than we have believed possible. The fluent, liberating, creative, healing attributes of the altered states can be incorporated into consciousness. We are just beginning to realize that we can truly open the doors of perception and creep out of the cavern.

Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshall 'facts.

Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.

The person and society are yoked, like mind and body. Arguing which is more important is like debating whether oxygen or hydrogen is the more essential property of water.

If we are to find our way across troubled waters, we are better served by the company of those who have built bridges, who have moved beyond despair and inertia.

Cultural transformation announces itself in sputtering fits and starts, sparked here and there by minor incidents, warmed by new ideas that may smolder for decades. In many different places, at different times, the kindling is laid for the real conflagration-the one that will consume the old landmarks and alter the landscape forever.

If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!

Mystical experiences nearly always lead one to a belief that some aspect of consciousness is imperishable. In a Buddhist metaphor the consciousness of the individual is like a flame that burns through the night. It is not the same flame over time, yet neither is it another flame.

Whatever the rationale, the suppression of unorthodox cancer therapies and the sustained persecution of their proponents by government and colleagues runs counter to freedom of thought, much less freedom of choice.

There are legions of [Aquarian, New Age, One World Religion] conspirators. They are in corporations, universities, and hospitals, on the faculties of public schools, in factories and doctors offices, in state and federal agencies, on city councils, and the White House staff, in state legislatures, in volunteer organizations, in virtually all arenas of policy making in the country.

Before we choose our tools and technology, we must choose our dreams and values, for some technologies serve them, while others make them more unobtainable.

Never have so many been so high so often. When a Boston research group decided to compare the effects of marijuana on experienced and inexperienced users, it took them two months to line up nine student subjects who had never used marijuana.

Power is a central issue in social and personal transformation. Our sources and uses of power set our boundaries, give form to our relationships, even determine how much we let ourselves liberate and express aspects of the self. More than party registration, more than our purported philosophy or ideology, personal power defines our politics.

When one begins the transformative process, death and birth are imminent: the death of custom as authority, the birth of the self.

Love is a context, not a behavior.

Suddenly creativity is the popular goal. Ironically, a quality dissonant with our conventional education process is greatly in demand in adults - and those who survive the system without losing their creative integrity are richly rewarded. The magic word in a book's title almost ensures sales: Creative Stitchery, Creative Cookery, Creative Gardening. ... Perhaps we are trying to develop something that was innately ours.

Spirituality is a kind of virgin wisdom, a knowing that comes prior to experience.

General Systems Theory, a related modern concept [to holism], says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.

Our past is not our potential.