Marilyn Ferguson
We rarely think to mark the trail for others to follow. 'Live and learn,' we say, acknowledging the value of experience. We usually forget about 'Live and teach.'Collection: Experience
Achievers have an enabling attitude, realism, and a conviction that they themselves were the laboratory of innovation. Their ability to change themselves is central to their success. They have learned to conserve their energy by minimizing the time spent in regret or complaint. Every event is a lesson to them, every person a teacher.Collection: Success
The paradigm of the 'Aquarian Conspiracy' sees humankind embedded in nature. It promotes the autonomous individual in a decentralized society... The new perspective respects the ecology of everything: birth, death, learning, health, family, work, science, spirituality, the arts, the community, relationships, politics.Collection: Politics
Problems can be experienced as... a chance for renewal rather than stress.Collection: Chance
Your past is not your potential. In any hour you can choose to liberate the future.Collection: Future
Yes, an individual could be electronically stimulated to fear, anger, or euphoria from a distance. However, the procedure is complicated, not always accurate, and far too tedious and expensive as a method for taking over control of the world.Collection: Anger
Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Change
A self-defined challenge is an irresistible teacher.Collection: Teacher
Radical common sense is the wisdom gleaned from the past that recognizes the perishable opportunities of the moment. It is the willingness to admit error and the refusal to be deterred by failure.Collection: Failure
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 agreement or by emotional appeal.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Change
If we continue to believe as we have always believed, we will continue to act as we have always acted. If we continue to act as we have always acted, we will continue to get what we have always gotten.Collection: Believe
Transformation is a journey without a final destination.Collection: Journey
Things fall apart, so they can fall together at a higher level of order.Collection: Fall
The East contemplated the forest the West counted the trees...the mind that knows that trees and the forest is a new mind.Collection: Tree
Our biggest failure is our failure to see patterns.Collection: Patterns
We cannot leave the trap until we know we are in it.Collection: Traps
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.Collection: Learning
Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.Collection: Funny
The mind aware of itself is a pilot... vastly freer than a passenger mind.Collection: Teaching
Fear is a question What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.Collection: Fear
The other side of every fear is a freedom.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Life
Uncertainty is the necessary companion of all explorers.Collection: Companion
An atmosphere of trust, love, and humor can nourish extraordinary human capacity. One key is authenticity: parents acting as people, not as roles.Collection: Keys
only that which is deeply felt can change us. Rational arguments alone cannot penetrate the layers of fear and conditioning that comprise our crippling belief system.Collection: Feelings
The creative process requires chaos before form emerges.Collection: Creative
We have two strategies for coping; the way of avoidance or the way of attention.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Believe
Risk always brings its own rewards: the exhilaration of breaking through, of getting to the other side; the relief of a conflict healed; the clarity when a paradox dissolves.Collection: Change
The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning.Collection: Love
Health and disease don't just happen to us. They are active processes issuing from inner harmony or disharmony, profoundly affected by our states of consciousness, our ability or inability to flow with experience. This recognition carries with it implicit responsibility and opportunity.Collection: Responsibility
The difference between transformation by accident and transformation by a system is like the difference between lightning and a lamp. Both give illumination, but one is dangerous and unreliable, while the other is relatively safe, directed, available.Collection: Change
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Body
Many artists have said that when life itself becomes fully conscious, art as we know it will vanish.Collection: Art
The beginning of personal transformation is absurdly easy. We have only to pay attention to the flow of attention itself.Collection: Personal Transformation
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.Collection: Healing
Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.Collection: Stress
Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshall 'facts.Collection: Answers
Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Oxygen
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.Collection: Bridges
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.Collection: Change
If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Buddhist
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Dream