Marilyn Ferguson Quotes

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.

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.

Our past is not our potential.

An atmosphere of trust, love, and humor can nourish extraordinary human capacity. One key is authenticity: parents acting as people, not as roles.

As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, new scientific theories in any field are regarded with skepticism because scientists become attached to the old perspective earlier in their careers.

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.

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.

The creative process requires chaos before form emerges.

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

Our biggest failure is our failure to see patterns.

Although most of us are complacent in our assumption that science is gaining on the unknown, scientists are acknowledging that man's own brain is complex beyond any hope of complete understanding.

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.

Making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool, the essence of human intelligence; to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationships, context.

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.

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.

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

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

The other side of every fear is a freedom.

The most disturbing and wasteful emotions in modern life, next to fright, are those which are associated with the idea of blame, directed against the self or against others.

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

By definition, revolutions are not linear, one step at a time, event A leading to event B, and so on. Many causes operate on each other at once. Revolutions shift into place suddenly, like the pattern in a kaleidoscope. They do not so much proceed as crystallize.

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

The East contemplated the forest the West counted the trees ... the mind that knows that trees and the forest is a new mind.

Uncertainty is the necessary companion of all explorers.

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.

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

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.

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.

Martin Buber said he sensed a rising hunger for relatedness Men would no longer rise in rebellion merely against one oppressor or another but against the distortion of a great yearning, 'the effort towards community.'

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.

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.

New perspectives give birth to new historic ages. Humankind has had many dramatic revolutions of understanding - great uses of fire and the wheel, language and writing. We found that the earth only seems flat, the sun only seems to circle the earth, matter only seems solid.

We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically. On the other hand, if we know that we are part of an open universe, and that our minds are a matrix of reality, we will live more creatively and powerfully.

Transformation is a journey without a final destination.

Love is a context, not a behavior.

Those who have most at stake in the old culture, or are most rigid in their beliefs, try to summon people back to the old ideas.'

It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear ... It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to.