Table Of ContentTHE AOUARIAN
CONSPIRACY
THE AOUARIAN
CONSPIRACY
PERSONAL AND SOCIAL
TRANSFORMATION IN THE 1980s
BY MARILYN FERGUSON
Foreword by Max Lerner
Routledge & Kegan Paul
London and Henley
First published in Great Britain in 1981
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
39 Store Street, London WC1E ?DD and
Broadway House, Newtown Road,
Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 1EN
Printed in Great Britain by
Unwin Bros Ltd, Gresham Press, Old Woking, Surrey
Copyright© 1980 by Marilyn Ferguson
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism
ISBN 0-7100-0829-5
For
Eric, Kris, and Lynn
Time, events, or the unaided individual action of the
mind will sometimes undermine or destroy an
opinion without any outward sign of change . ... No
conspiracy has been formed to make war on it, but its
followers one by one noiselessly secede. As its
opponents remain mute or only interchange their
thoughts by stealth, they are themselves unaware for
a long period that a great revolution has actually
been effected.
-ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
And I strive to discover how to signal my
companions .. . to say in time a simple word, a
password, like conspirators: Let us unite, let us hold
each other tightly, let us merge our hearts, let us
create for Earth a brain and a heart, let us give a
human meaning to the superhuman struggle.
-NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS
This soul can only be a conspiracy of individuals.
-PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
Contents
Foreword by Max Lerner 11
Acknowledgm.ents 15
Introduction 17
CHAPTER 1 The Conspiracy 23
CHAPTER 2 Premonitions of Transformation
and Conspiracy 45
CHAPTER 3 Transformation: Brains Changing,
Minds Changing 65
CHAPTER 4 Crossover: People Changing 85
CHAPTER 5 The American Matrix for
Transformation 119
CHAPTER 6 Liberating Knowledge:
News from the Frontiers
of Science 145.
CHAPTER 7 Right Power 189
CHAPTER 8 Healing Ourselves 241
CHAPTER 9 Flying and Seeing:
New Ways to Learn 279
CHAPTER 10 The Transformation of Values
and Vocation 323
CHAPTER 11 Spiritual Adventure:
Connection to the Source 361
CHAPTER 12 Human Connections:
Relationships Changing 387
CHAPTER 13 The Whole-Earth Conspiracy 405
APPENDIX A Summary of Questionnaire
Responses 418
APPENDIX B Resources for Change 421
References and Readings 429
Index 438
Foreword
by MAX LERNER
I first encountered Marilyn Ferguson in her book, The Brain
Revolution, and later in her remarkable bi-weekly research re-
port, the Brain/Mind Bulletin. Both gave me a foretaste of what
was to come.
Now, with The Aquarian Conspiracy, she has written a book on
the transformation of our consciousness that will itself leave a
mark on the consciousness of our time.
Marilyn Ferguson is the best reporter today on the farther
reaches of investigation into the life and human sciences. She
represents a new kind of investigative journalist-not a sleuth
after the corruptions of a politician but one tracking the spoor
of a new research idea in all its windings; following it to its
sources and its affinities in allied fields, its conclusions, its im-
plications for the whole spectrum of human thought and con-
sciousness.
She has had the courage to undertake this book as a
participant-observer of the transformative process. Setting out
to shed some light on the riddle of intelligence, she got en-
snared by the mysteries and revelations of brain research,
reached out to every discipline radiating from it-and was
never the same again.
She has proven to be a whirlwind of information, thought,
and activity, a whole exploratory "network" in herself.
Conferences on the mind's dimensions and the brain's func-
tioning have called her everywhere. One day she would be in
Los Angeles, the next two days in Denver, the weekend in
11
12 The Aquarian Conspiracy
Houston or Princeton, then back to San Francisco or San Diego.
She lives on conferences, programs, and discussions as the rest
of us live on protein and carbohydrates. Her observation post is
in every auditorium, her garrison on every university campus,
her spies in every little consciousness group and every labor-
atory.
Nietzsche talked of philosophy as the gaya science, the joyful
science, and to Marilyn Ferguson the area of knowledge she
has staked out for her reporting and synthesizing is a joyful
science. She describes with excitement the world of those who
have strained to see past the blinders on the human spirit and
have thrown them off, and she matches her own mood to their
sense of optimism. "I bring you good news" is her message.
It is news that we are in the midst of a knowledge revolution
that shows signs of breakthrough: that researchers in the
human sciences are moving independently in converging lines
toward common targets; that they are discarding traditional
models of the cosmos and ourselves-of the nature of nature
and the nature of human nature-and reaching for new ones;
that they have been spurred on by recent work on the brain
hemispheres, on molecular biology, and biochemistry, on the
genetic code, on primatology and ethnology, on biofeedback
and altered states of consciousness, on medicine and psycho-
therapies, on archaelogy and astronomy, on the evolutionary
process, on the structure of language and the nature of mean-
ing, on leadership and power, and on the governance of
peoples and nations.
Thus, the startling fact is that for the first time an American
renaissance is taking place in all the disciplines, breaking the
boundaries between them, transforming them at their farthest
reaches-where they all converge.
The reader will meet a number of key concepts on these
pages-paradigms and paradigm shifts, entropy and syntropy,
holism, holographs, the uncertainty principle, dissipative
structures, punctuated evolution. This is not a "populariza-
tion" that reduces the essence of these concepts in any way. It
is, rather, the humanizing of the research and discoveries that
have heretofore been beyond the reach of all but the initiates.
We must all be grateful to the author for her impressive skills
of exposition and synthesis that make the book a forerunner of
others to come, once the path has been blazed. It is bound
to become an important element in the "open conspiracy" of
search, research, and intelligence it describes.
A final word about the book's mood. I have for some time
