The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Re: The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson

Postby admin » Tue Apr 30, 2019 4:03 am

Part 2 of 2

THE TRANSFORMATION OF BUSINESS

Increasing numbers of business leaders are trying to articulate a new perspective. One Aquarian Conspirator who works with top management people around the country refers to the new "businessmen-philosophers" who talk to each other until three in the morning about their own changing values and their discoveries of human potential. Business executives may be the most open-minded group in the society, far more open than scholars and professionals, because their success depends on their being able to perceive early trends and new perspectives.

Robert Fegley of General Electric described "a new breed of top executives" taking charge of American corporations, broader and deeper than most of their predecessors, more current, literate, articulate, open. Between 1976 and 1978, he said, the amount of time spent on public issues by chief executives of the top thousand corporations doubled — from 20 to 40 percent. "There is a deep interest in public attitudes and a desire to do something — not only to communicate 'our side of the story' but also to re-examine company policy and change it where necessary. ..."

The president of Trans World Airlines, C. E. Meyer, Jr., ex- pressed the sense of transformed values in an editorial in the airline's magazine in July 1978. The most important change of the past decade was not technological advancement, he said, but "the virtual revolution that has occurred in our collective social awareness." After the turbulence, violence, and confrontations of the late sixties came a period of looking inward, "as if our whole people, shocked and deeply sobered by those years of uproar . . . began working quietly to sort out the merits of all those causes." We have tried to heal divisions, both with insight and with effort, resulting in a qualitative change in our national attitude — our concern for the environment, job security for the work force, dignity for the handicapped, enhanced purpose for the aged, and higher regard for the consumer. These causes are no longer considered controversial but “society's unfinished business," he said.

Big business, in its need to understand the potential impact of the new paradigm, is becoming aware of the networks of the Aquarian Conspiracy as resources. This was the subject of a “preliminary document on emerging trends" published under the Diebold Corporate Issues Program in 1978: The Emergence of Personal Communications Networks Among People Sharing the New Values and Their Possible Use in Sensitizing Operating Management . Its authors urged that management try to "plug into" such networks, where new concepts were developed and experimented with before moving into the marketplace.

Such networks are submerged, of low visibility, "yet much of our future originates there." The report compared them to the committees of correspondents that helped design the American Revolution and to the "invisible college," the secret network of scientists in England before scientific research was legally sanctioned by King James II in 1663.

In a section titled "Why We Do Not See Them," the report pointed out that groups emerging from the underground always fear attack; and, being essentially creative, they shun formal organization in favor of flexibility and new forms.

Before we can discuss these networks, we have a cultural problem to overcome Important organizational forms may exist which have none of the characteristics we usually associate with organizations. But their impact in originating the ideas that are shaping our times is undisputed, and increasingly they are so pervasive that we are surrounded by them. It seems to me there is a common thread. ... In one sense, it's a more idealistic, more humane outlook — a feeling that such goals possess, by being so clearly morally right, an unarguable kind of authority.

That's part of it, but in another sense, it's a supremely pragmatic and realistic view they take of such things — recognizing that change of this kind, being irresistibly right, is also therefore inevitable, and that those who try to stand in its way can only dissipate their energies and substance in a futile effort to hold back the tide.
 

As an example, the report describes one such underground network, whose main orientation is radical science and transpersonal psychology and whose photo-copying is furnished by the vice-chairman of American Telephone and Telegraph.

Changing Image of Man , the now-classic report issued by SRI in 1972, described a new transcendental social and business ethic characterized by self-determination, concern for the quality of life, appropriate technology, entrepreneurship, decentralization, an ecological ethic, and spirituality. The report urged a rapid corporate understanding of this emergent order, "probably the most important observation of our time."

The new order offers as exciting a challenge as the great geographical expeditions and technological breakthroughs of history, the report said.

THE VALUE OF VOCATION

The contemporary individual's struggle to find that higher purpose — to find meaning in work — was discussed at length in The Gamesman, Michael Maccoby's composite portrait of the new corporate rebel. The gamesman is more innovative and playful than his predecessor, the "organization man," but still judges wins and losses by left-brain, manipulative rules. In a section titled "The Head and the Heart," Maccoby explored the uneasiness and frustration felt by many gamesmen, who acknowledged that they found little opportunity in their work to develop compassion, openness, humanness:

People think of the qualities of the heart as opposite to those of the head. They think heart means softness, feeling, and generosity, while head means toughness, realistic thought. But this contrast itself is symptomatic of a schizoid culture in which the heart is detached from the rest of the body. In pre-Cartesian traditional thought, the heart was considered the true seat of intelligence. . . . The head can be smart but not wise.


In the new paradigm, work is a vehicle for transformation. Through work we are fully engaged in life. Work can be what Milton Mayerhoff called "the appropriate other," that which requires us, which makes us care. In responding to vocation — the call, the summons of that which needs doing — we create and discover meaning, unique to each of us and always changing.

That famous transition, the mid-life crisis, may be due in part to the cumulative effect of decades of denial, the sudden thrust into consciousness of pain that can no longer be sedated. One sensitive observer of the phenomenon said that it manifests as "either a cry or a call" — a cry of disappointment or the stirring call to new purpose — to vocation — experienced by one who has been engaged in introspective, transformative processes for some time.

However intently the person with a vocation may pursue his purpose, he should not be confused with a "workaholic." The workaholic, like an alcoholic, is indiscriminate in his compulsion. He attempts to find meaning by working. The individual with a vocation, on the other hand, finds meaningful work. A vocation is not a job. It is an ongoing transformative relationship.

The participants in the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire represented nearly every vocational field: education, psychology, medicine, business, publishing, television, research, government, law, dentistry, the clergy, anthropology, sociology, nursing, the arts, theater, music, the military, political science, economics. There were a few whom a census taker might have considered unemployed: retired persons, housewives, independently wealthy persons — all leading busy lives, pursuing vocations that defy easy description.

In many instances, the individuals defined themselves unconventionally, often in terms of how they actually function, rather than the narrow specialty in which they were trained. A physician described herself as a teacher, a teacher as a futurist.

In a gentle prod toward helping others transform work and wealth, some Aquarian Conspirators actively engage in a kind of institutional rehabilitation — counseling corporations, smoothing the way for new experiments, new jobs, new products; making professional assessments of coming change. Others are models of change, having invented or transformed their own livelihoods. For them Right Livelihood is, more than a Buddhist ideal, a component of mental health.

Some of the sharpest internal conflict reported in the survey was in the struggle to reconcile the old work with the new perspective. During what we have termed the entry-point stage of the transformative process, the new ideas do not seem to threaten work and relationships. During the second stage, exploration, there is the uneasy hope that this new interest will be no more than an intensive avocation. By the third stage, integration, it becomes apparent that the transformative process can't be compartmentalized. As one businessman said:

It will impinge on your work, or your priorities change. The new consciousness affects the way you function in your job. It usurps every waking moment. You look at the world through a different grid, with different eyes.

It's easy for the work to become less important. It's hard to keep making widgets after you've seen the sun. If your job can expand with your vision, you're lucky.


At this critical juncture, the discoveries that accompany transformation are like a compass. The sense of vocation, of having discovered a meaningful direction, strengthens the re- solve to bring work in alignment with belief, head with heart. The new respect for intuition, tacit knowing, encourages risk taking. Security, in the conventional sense, is an illusion. Success itself is redefined. A businessman-conspirator said:

I used to define myself in terms of specific accomplishments. Success might be an A in school — later it was business deals. Now success has to do with living my life in harmony with the universe. It's a question of context and content. You can see individual events, "successes" and "failures," as content. But in the context of life there isn't winning or losing — only the process.

When you experience life as broader, richer, more complex, the events manifest differently.


Conventional goals of success are like a blueprint drawn up by an architect who does not yet know the terrain, who has outlined a structure too rigid for nature. Vocation has more the quality of an inner summons to move in a particular direction, feeling one's way, or of a vision, a glimpse of the future that is more preview than plan. A vision can be realized in many ways ... a goal, in only one. The transformative process enables us to be the artists and scientists of our lives, creating and discovering as we go. There is the awe and excitement of cooperating with the life process, of becoming more sensitive to its clues, nuances, promises.

The clearer sense of self transcends job categories and roles. You are not primarily your job — carpenter, computer programmer, nurse, lawyer. When the respondents to the questionnaire were asked whether or not they regularly read literature "outside your field," many replied that they considered everything to be in their field.

The wholeness experienced through the transformative process says that there doesn't have to be a break between work and pleasure, between convictions and career, between personal ethics and “business is business." Fragmentation becomes increasingly intolerable to the person moving toward greater awareness. As the anesthesia wears off, one feels the tearing of flesh and spirit. And it becomes hard to ignore the context of one's work. Products and services don't exist in a vacuum, after all. They reverberate through a whole system.

The experience of greater connectedness, of unity with others, generates new ways of thinking about problems: joblessness, forced retirement, poverty, fixed incomes, makework, welfare cheating, exploitation. A policy analyst said, “If we think we are a large family, rather than a large factory, we will deal with these problems differently."

The growing network of support — the Aquarian Conspiracy itself — encourages the individual in the lonely enterprise of changing jobs, starting a business, changing the practice of a profession, revitalizing institutions. It is a do-it-yourself revolution, but not do-it-by -yourself. For example, friends in Washington, D.C., started a "go-for-it-group" to encourage each other in their vocational goals. They counseled, inspired, and prodded each other, ruthlessly pointing out the rationalizations and delaying tactics each was using to postpone the risk of a new step. Within a year, several had begun to realize their dreams. A librarian had started her own acting company, an attorney had opened a center for the study of psychology in law, another member turned her farm into an artists' colony, and a bureaucrat resigned his job to go into business with friends.

New attitudes change the very experience of daily work. Work becomes a ritual, a game, a discipline, an adventure, learning, even an art, as our perceptions change. The stress of tedium and the stress of the unknown, the two causes of work-related suffering, are transformed. A more fluent quality of attention allows us to move through tasks that once seemed repetitious or distasteful. We make fewer judgments about what we're doing ("I hate this," "I like this"). Boredom diminishes, just as pain abates when we drop our futile resistance to it.

When the ego is no longer running the show, we make fewer value judgments about the status of the job at hand. We see that meaning can be discovered and expressed in any human service: cleaning, teaching, gardening, carpentry, selling, caring for children, driving a taxi.

The stress of the unknown is transformed by an attitude of trust and patience; when we have learned that breaking apart and reordering are the nature of things, we are less unsettled by the need to change our way of working, to develop a new product, to learn a new skill, to reorganize a task or even a company. The need to innovate becomes a challenge, not a threat.

Carla Needleman, writing of her experience as a craftsman, described this paradox, the goal that betrays the process:

The attitude of the achiever is so fixed in us that we can scarcely envision a different way of our lives. . . . The fact of our lives is uncertainty, and we crave certainty. The fact of our lives is change, movement: We long to ''arrive.''

... I had come to realize that the solidly entrenched attitude toward results — "success” — poisoned all my efforts, and that I could not change it. I wanted to make beautiful pottery, and that desire, which is a kind of avarice, prevented me.

The need for success is a constrictive force that bars me from immediate participation in the moment as it appears, that prevents the all-important conversation with the material of the craft, prevents openness of relationship, prevents a kind of quickness of response much swifter than the cautions of the mind. The need for success distorts pleasure.


A new understanding of success and failure shifts the emphasis in work from the product — "getting there" — to the process itself. Focusing on the goal is a kind of artificial certainty that distracts us from the possibilities inherent in our work. To work creatively and meaningfully, we have to be alert to the moment, willing to change our plans as events show us new possibilities. We need to risk, cooperate with new developments, reconcile conflicts.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF WORK

Work also becomes a medium through which the individual can express the vision of the Aquarian Conspiracy. A New England professor said, "One of my joys in life is passing along the word of the coming transformation to students hearing it for the first time." Composer Harry Chapin said, "After a while, you've got to find a way to plug in. Most of us lack perspective on our own lives. I try to write about that in my music — ordinary people going through extraordinary moments in their lives."

Paolo Soleri, who has attempted through his Arcosanti architecture to "build a bridge between matter and spirit," traces his inspiration to Teilhard. "I became very excited about a book of his I found in the late sixties. I realized that in a very clumsy way, I was translating what he was saying into environmental terms. Eventually I developed my model, which is probably parallel to his."

There are lawyers trying to find less adversarial ways to practice their profession, who see a new role for the law as mediator. A 1978 Columbia University seminar on humanistic law for deans of law schools looked at the implications of the new paradigm, especially its emphasis on cooperation and collaboration.

Calvin Swank, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama, predicted that even police departments will be affected "as more and more people become absorbed in their own growth and potential." "Self-actualized cops" will question the usual conformity to authority. They will trust their own judgment, based on experience and intuition, and police departments will be unable to cling to their antiquated ways in the face of changing social values.

In many ways the military, with its guaranteed financial base, has more opportunity to fund innovation than any other institution. Jim Channon, a lieutenant colonel in the army's public affairs office in Los Angeles, created a hypothetical "First Earth Battalion," a futurist vision of what a transformed military might be like. The soldiers of the First Earth Battalion seek nondestructive methods of conflict resolution. Their first loyalty is to the planet. After Channon introduced the notion at an army think tank in Virginia he was inundated with requests for more information. He created a packet of material and a T-shirt decal to send out in response to calls from army personnel all over the country. The army's Task Force Delta authorized him to prepare a multimedia presentation on the First Earth Battalion, an idea that seems to generate the response William James called "the moral equivalent of war," a sense of purpose as urgent as the confrontation of danger but without violence.

Task Force Delta itself, the army's tool for innovation and transition, includes systems theorists, semanticists, and specialists in personal growth and the psychology of stress; the structure of the organization is circular rather than the conventional pyramid of a hierarchy.

The constellation of transformative values — wholeness, flow, community — can give meaning to many different kinds of work. And transformation also changes work relationships: between worker and manager, worker and product, worker and consumer.

NEW WORKING RELATIONSHIPS

“It would seem," Tocqueville observed in the mid-nineteenth century, “as if rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they would set less value on the work and more upon the workman; that they would never forget that a nation cannot be strong when everyone belonging to it is individually weak."

In the same way that a gifted teacher releases capacities in the learner, a gifted manager helps workers realize potential skills, enterprise, creativity. The transformative manager encourages self- management in others.

We are entering a period of real change in work relation- ships. A growing number of managers prefer to be catalysts rather than just power wielders, and an emergent breed of autonomous employees gives service but not subservience. This shift is causing not a little discomfort to those who are not changing. Some employees would rather be passive than take on new responsibilities or create their own work plans, which can frustrate the manager who is no longer a traditional boss. One executive commented that his own changes caused him to want not only a new set of friends but a new set of co-workers. On the other hand, autonomy in employees has proven stressful to many traditional managers.

A report from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research warned that traditional management styles will have to give way. Recognizing the growing autonomy of employees, American Telephone and Telegraph arranged weekend retraining sessions for seventeen hundred managers in 1977 and 1978.

The traits of highly successful managers are strikingly similar to the traits of good teachers discussed in Chapter 9. One study of sixteen thousand managers found success associated with a trusting attitude, concern for the personal fulfillment of employees, a lack of ego, willingness to listen to subordinates, risk-taking, innovation, high expectations, collaboration, and the ability to integrate ideas. IBM, hoping to uncover the traits of chief executive officers (CEOs) in order to design a test to screen management talent, found no overall pattern but a constellation of attitudes about change. CEOs saw systems as open rather than closed, change as organic rather than mechanical. They focused on process more than on goals. And they were creative.

A McGill University report described successful managers as unusually open to the complex and mysterious, interested in “soft” and speculative information (facial expression, tone of voice, gestures, hunches, intuitions). Another study portrayed the successful manager as “scanning the environment, perceiving, brainstorming, intuiting, daydreaming." Executives seemed to call more often than most people on right-hemisphere processes, judging from an EEG study, whereas corporate analysts relied on left-brain strategies, such as qualification.

Ron Medved of the Pacific Institute, a Seattle organization that stages personal development seminars for large institutions, envisioned the coming change:

The New American Working Machine is founded on the philosophy of working smarter, not harder — from the bottom up. (The Japanese have taught us that those who do the work seem to know more about how to do it than anyone else.) There will be a fresh emphasis on innovation and streamlining, for there is no security in our current levels of national productivity.

The New American Working Machine will enjoy a different organizational structure. Bureaucratic dinosaurs with level upon level of decision-making won't survive the competition from new-form management styles both here and abroad. . . .

New American Managers will be recognizable not because they have all the right answers but because they know how to ask the right questions. . . .

The New American Worker seems to be in for the biggest change of all ... a new vision of himself or herself.

The New American Working Machine looks different than many of the worlds you and I work in. While it promises a better world, it challenges us to do a whole lot of growing and changing to get there In a very real way, the New American Working Machine is banking on the sleeping genius in every one of us.


"Sleeping genius," human potential — whatever term they use, new management theorists are interested in the latent capacities that can unfold, given motivation. For instance, workers in the Lucas Aerospace plants in England, threatened in 1974 with the consolidation of their seventeen factories, organized to brainstorm ideas for socially useful products their employer could manufacture. They inventoried their skills, everything from engineering to manual labor, and assessed the company's equipment. Then they issued a questionnaire to the entire work force asking, "What do you think you should be making?" One hundred and fifty viable ideas were translated into designs, specifications, and analyses. Although Lucas's management had been slow to take on the new products, by 1979 the company had manufactured some prototypes and was working with the employee group.

The workers were nominated for the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize by international peace groups and by several members of the Swedish parliament in recognition of their grass-roots effort to convert military into nonmilitary production.

C. Jackson Grayson of the American Productivity Center in Houston, whose research is supported by two hundred of the nation's top corporations, blames the bureaucratic structure of business for suppressing the desire and abilities of individuals to feel they contribute. Contrary to what's being said, "People haven't lost the work ethic," he said.

There is a definite trend toward decentralizing power in companies — dismantling the pyramid, as one consultant„.put it. According to Frank Ruck, who became vice-president of Chicago Title and Trust, "Making organizational changes in work can make people happier, as well as enhancing productivity — a double payoff."

Increasingly, professional management theorists are urging the use of flexible structures, work arrangements that shape themselves to human needs, that tap latent potential. The need for drastic action is evident in the slowdown of American productivity. Despite accelerated technology, the output per man-hour of work in the United States increased only 21 percent between 1970 and 1977. That compared to 41 percent in West Germany, 42 percent in France, 41 percent in Japan, 38 percent in Italy.

"Job enrichment" and "humanizing the workplace" were integrated into management philosophy in many companies in recent years. Semi-autonomous work teams were formed. Higher pay was awarded on the basis of proficiency tests, not job description. Signed time sheets replaced time clocks, those infernal symbols of dehumanization and lack of trust. Assembly lines were broken into smaller components. Some companies adapted consensual management ideas from Japan, Norway, and Sweden. By 1976 more than a thousand United States companies and government agencies were experimenting with "flex-time," a procedure that allows employees to choose their work schedule within certain limits, built around a core period: 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., for instance, or 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

The American Council of Life Insurance trend-analysis pro- gram reported in 1979 on "The Changing Nature of Work": a new breed of employee seeking work consistent with personal values; greater flexibility of hours and type of work; more cooperation between management and employees; non-hierarchical organizational structures; a work environment increasingly compatible with physical and mental health.

A Labor Day advertisement by the Communications Workers of America emphasized the concern for meaningful work:

This Labor Day finds masses of American workers searching for the self-esteem that comes with an interesting, challenging, and productive job. A national public opinion firm has been polling young people for several years. They find that regardless of sex, race, or type of employment, people under thirty want jobs that are meaningful and offer a chance for personal growth. . . . [They are] seeking improvement in what is broadly called "the quality of life.'"


THE VALUE OF PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

These external changes have been fruitful, but they are not enough. Now those concerned about productivity and people have taken the inner route, turning to methods designed for self-actualization. Personal development has become the complement to job enrichment and a humane workplace. And, as one management trainer observed, "We turned to these techniques for pragmatic reasons, and a lot of us got hooked."

Werner Erhard once used the term "high intention" to describe an attitude that contributes to the marked superiority of some workers in any organization:

People who have no intention just go through the motions. They make mistakes, they can't handle things, nothing around them works, they don't do things completely, they complain all the time. What gives people superiority at a task is true intention. That makes you attuned to everything. You handle everything, and your mind doesn't give you reasons for not noticing and not handling things. I don't enjoy people who have low intention. I don't enjoy playing for low stakes I want the person with whom I am interacting to have something at stake.


High intention cannot coexist with a low self-image. Only those who are awake, connected, and motivated can add to the synergy of an organization. Everyone else adds to entropy, randomness. To achieve major changes in worker attitudes, management is turning increasingly to training techniques drawn from consciousness research.

Trainers are now talking about cultural trance, the fear of transformation, alternative realities, paradigm shifts, insights, the importance of individuals learning to "see through new eyes." A two-part article in Training, a professional journal, said, "As trainers we cannot afford to ignore what is happening in the human-potential movement." It quoted a bank executive on the awakening of his staff through personal-growth seminars: "For my money, these soul-searchers are our future."

Personal-growth training doesn't and shouldn't promise more widgets per hour, fewer grievances, less overtime, or more sales — "but then neither does your liability insurance." Mostly people will begin to feel better about who they are and what they're doing about their lives. "There is no accounting entry headed 'number of people who feel good about themselves.' But perhaps, just perhaps, that's an outcome much too big and important for inclusion on a mere profit and loss statement."

Many companies have undertaken stress-reduction training programs for their employees, biofeedback training, programs to enhance creativity. Some have set aside quiet sites for rest and meditation. Indeed, the health aspects of the transformative technologies are a major rationale for corporate support. A fully functioning employee with a healthy self-image is money in the bank — at any rate, that was the original rationale, but now many companies seem to consider the development of employee potential as part of their social responsibility.

General Electric has sponsored conferences on right- and left-brain research relevant to creativity. Menninger Foundation seminars on "The Other Self" have been staged for many corporate groups. "Companies are caught in a 'revolution of rising expectations' of what it takes to be fully human," said Layne Longfellow of Menninger. "Somebody raised the ante. We face an aspiration gap between what we are and what we're beginning to consider normal."

Intuition need not be the exclusive province of executives. Jay Mendell, a business futurist, said in Planning Review. Millions of workers, having discovered new capacities through the psychotechnologies, are eager to develop their intuition and creativity on the job.

Much as the new paradigm of education sees in all of us the creative potential we once attributed only to geniuses, management trainers are beginning to look at all employees as potential self-managers who can begin to think like entrepreneurs.

THE NEW ENTREPRENEUR

In the communication to members of the Linkage network in the summer of 1979, Robert Theobald cited the many letters from those longing to move more strongly toward a new society. He asked:

What is holding us back in Linkage and throughout the society? I believe we are afraid of recognizing how fundamentally our lives would have to be changed if we should choose to work out of this vision. We are caught in old models, and most of us owe our survival to the fact that we straddle the "functioning" present world and the new universe which we should like to bring into existence.

The paradox is that the new world promises to be both personally and professionally more rewarding if we would take the leap of faith to embrace it.


For many, entrepreneurship — being in business for oneself — is a natural sequel to the transformative process. Armed with a greater sense of self and vocation, a new willingness to risk (and be poor for a time), emotional support from the network, a sturdier trust in their own creativity and will, they make their own work. These new enterprises are characterized by the Buddhist ideal of Right Livelihood: work that serves society and does not harm the environment.

Briarpatch, a Bay Area network of three hundred or so businesses, artists, and nonprofit organizations, is a mutual-help medium for entrepreneurs "trying to reveal and uncover principles that can help us reconnect with our community and society rather than exploit them." Dick Raymond, Briarpatch founder, described the stress of translating one's new philosophy into practice:

Crossing this river is difficult: it means leaving behind some of your old ideas about work and jobs Most of us (including myself) try to tiptoe around the pain, but it's important to talk about some of the agonies one is apt to confront. We're not talking about simply trading one job for another, or getting from one company into a more suitable one. When you start abandoning your old beliefs or values, some very primal circuits get ignited. . . . You may be stuck on the threshold for two or three years. Before moving on, you have to clear away all your cherished beliefs.

The people I know who have successfully made this transition are the most joyful, the most outgoing, the most well-rewarded people I know. As I meet more every day, their existence sustains my sanity.


Entrepreneurship fills many of the needs of transformation. Richard Gunther, a successful real-estate developer, described to a group of would-be entrepreneurs the confluence of work and enjoyment, socially constructive aims pursued in fellowship with congenial people, a sense of "conscious" and creative enterprise.

Training programs have been developed to prepare those setting out on their own. Based in part on his growing interest in the phenomenon and his weekend School for Entrepreneurs, Bob Schwartz, founder of Tarrytown (New York) Executive House, has characterized the new breed as catalysts who may transform the marketplace:

The emerging entrepreneur is a more truly thoughtful person who is changing products and services to fill the needs of a more thoughtful and caring audience than the world has previously known. . . . This is what the young are saying: Don't make me an adjunct to the process; make me inherent in it.

The new reality is that products are not going to be a major part of the American scene. Production is rapidly moving downhill as a factor in the American economy, and services are moving in.


Entrepreneurs, Schwartz said, are "the poets and packagers of new ideas, both visualizers and actualizes." Historically, in a time of cultural change, a new type of entrepreneur emerges to embody the vision with services and products.

He pointed to the burgeoning demand for human- development courses as an example of service needs little known a decade ago. The new entrepreneurs have moved from a manipulative I-it to an I-Thou philosophy, relating to both consumer and product in immediate, personal ways. They and their customers "are the most potent revolutionary force that America furnishes to the world. The entrepreneur is the new non-violent Change Agent."

The Renascence Project in Kansas City, a network of entrepreneurs, demonstrated that alternatives can be both cost effective and profitable. Among its activities: renovation of properties at a key Kansas City location into an eight-million dollar business complex, the establishment of learning networks, an educational program for the "whole person," a self-supporting alternative high school, restoration of a historic dance hall, restoration of a large house by a partnership of residents, and development of a master plan for Kansas City calling for block-by-block renovation of neighborhoods along an eleven-mile pedestrian mall.

In an article titled "The Coming Entrepreneurial Revolution," Norman McRae, the editor of the British publication The Economist, suggested that the creeping giantism in American industry has opened the door for the emergence of entrepreneurship patterns even within large industry. Small enclaves in big companies may be run by these "intrapreneurs." The article also predicted that big-business corporations, in their present form, may disappear by the year 2010.

The new entrepreneurs refuse to separate good-for-business from good-for-people. Mo Siegel, co-founder of the Celestial Tea Company in Boulder, Colorado, has articulated this view for his two hundred and thirty employees: "All department leaders will be held accountable for their people development as well as business results." Achievement, Siegel said, is just a by-product of living an ideal. "In this age of transition, we're learning to retain the good aspects of the culture while discarding negative ones."

THE RE-EVALUATION OF TECHNOLOGY

The problem with technology, Robert Pirsig observed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is its noncoalescence between reason and feeling. Technology has not been connected with matters of the spirit and of the heart, "and so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that."

In the emergent paradigm technology is not seen as negative, just abused and in need of rehumanization. Our technology promised us power but it became our master in too many areas of our lives. Little wonder many of the "new" political and economic perspectives look to the past in their preference for decentralization, their sensitivity to natural harmonies and concern for stewardship of the land, their desire for "creative simplicity," spiritual and cultural enrichment, the celebration of nonmaterial values.

A society's consciousness should be the context for its work and consumption; its technology, only the content: tools that create products and services the people value. E. F. Schumacher's original title for the book that became famous as Small Is Beautiful was Economics As If People Mattered. He particularly deplored the effects of big, unconscious applications of technology: centralization, urbanization, the depletion of resources, [6] the dehumanization of workers. Particularly in developing countries, turbines, dams, and earth-moving machines can disrupt social patterns to the detriment of both environment and people. Schumacher's Radical-Center response to applied science gone berserk was what he called "appropriate technology."

"Intermediate" or appropriate technology offers a third way: tools more advanced than a primitive shovel but more practical and human-scaled than a bulldozer. With superior but manageable tools people can improve their lot without going to urban factories.

"Before we choose our tools and techniques," said an editorial in Rain: The Journal of Appropriate Technology, "we must choose our dreams and values, for some technologies serve them, while others make them unobtainable."

Schumacher's ideas have had a worldwide influence. An article on appropriate technology in Foreign Affairs in late 1977 resulted in the biggest reprint request in that publication's history.

Many countries and some states have set up offices of appropriate technology. The United Nations is establishing a global network of institutions to further the idea. Appropriate technology has been endorsed by the International Labor Organization, the World Bank, the president of the Philippines, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. In the two years preceding his death Schumacher was the guest and advisor of presidents, prime ministers, and kings.

Schumacher's economic philosophy reflected intense spiritual values he discussed more fully in the posthumously published Guide for the Perplexed. Spiritual values, indeed, are at the base of much of the ecological concern in our time, a quickening sense of the whole earth, respect for the matrix of our evolution, the nature in which we are embedded. Fittingly, Lao-tse is quoted in the brochure of California's Office of Appropriate Technology: "These are my treasures. Guard them well."

THE VALUE OF CONSERVATION

Environmental concerns have a growing impact on lifestyle and consumption. A study conducted in the state of Washington in 1976, published in 1978, polled householders drawn randomly from the telephone directories of every community. The researchers found evidence of surprising adherence to "a new environmental paradigm."

A majority of those polled expressed concern about the abuse of the environment and uncontrolled population growth. They saw earth as a spaceship with limited room and resources. They favored a steady-state economy with control of industrial growth. They opposed the idea of human dominance over nature. In every particular, the general public supported the views of environmentalists in their state.

Behavior is not necessarily consistent with beliefs, the researchers noted, and conceded that many of the respondents might resist personal sacrifice.

. . . We nonetheless must stress what we believe to be the rather remarkable nature of our results. When we consider that just a few short years ago, concepts such as "limits to growth" and "spaceship earth" were virtually unheard of, the degree to which they have gained acceptance among the public is extremely surprising. This acceptance is all the more surprising when one realizes how dramatically the new environmental paradigm departs from our society's traditional worldview. . . . Indeed, in a society which has always taken abundance, growth, progress, etc., for granted, the rise of the new paradigm represents a revolutionary occurrence . . . we cannot help but be impressed by its rapid ascendance.


The shift to an environmental view involves vastly more than a concern for redwoods. Nowhere is the connectedness of all life more evident than in our awakened ecological conscience. Care of the planet joins economic, legal, political, spiritual, aesthetic, and medical issues. It extends to our purchases, choice of family size, recreation. The youngest school child is aware of the controversies — military defoliation, nuclear power, carcinogens, supersonic transports, dams flooding Indian burial grounds, population growth, propellant gases that may destroy the ozone layer. The young fear the slow death of Earth as a previous generation feared the atomic bomb.

Ecotopia, a novel by Ernest Callenbach, launched something of a cult, especially in the western United States. Originally issued by a small press, the book became an underground best-seller and was republished as a mass-market paperback in 1978. Ecotopia is a fictional new country created by the secession of Washington, western Oregon, and Northern California. Ecotopians employ alternative technology and are hyperconscious of environmental issues.

Ecotopia enthusiasts have designed a flag, created a magazine, named schools and streets after the book, and even celebrated Ecotopia Day in Eugene, Oregon. Callenbach was invited to Sacramento to confer with the California governor and his advisers. However far-fetched the premise of a new country — a new beginning — the book's mass appeal tells us something.

Sim Van der Ryn, first director of California's Office of Appropriate Technology and former state architect, insists that Ecotopian communities are possible right now, at least "the construction of some modest first examples." He urged enlightened entrepreneurs and politicians to commit themselves to an idea that could bring credit to business and government alike. "The seeds of ecological design are beginning to sprout, and many of the hardware components to create an ecologically stable urban community have already been developed and are working. What we have yet to do is bring together all the threads and weave them into a single coherent design for a new community."

A sound environmental approach will revitalize urban design, retaining the best of the high-technology culture "while renewing people's sense of place." It will translate the old linear understanding into systems thinking, an awareness of the complex interactions of people and environmental elements.

Another urbanologist called this "the age of recovery" for many American cities; a time of new understanding of urban amenities, a sense of historic continuity, the need for energy efficiency, and new insights on how people want to live, including more humanly scaled architecture. "We have begun to settle down, finally, to seek a sense of place."

Well-known architects surveyed in 1979 described a new paradigm of urban design: more human, with a richer mix of housing and community facilities, places to walk, heightened concern about public transportation, the creation of festive malls and squares, the planting of more trees, a sense of "the commons." An emergent technology will draw increasingly on wind, sun, tidal forces, natural lighting, and natural ventilation.


We may be on our way to regaining the intimate connection and awareness of our place in nature. This neo-medieval trend is evident in another phenomenon: environments of celebration — fairs, expositions, and festivals. In medieval Europe fairs were set up at crossroads, in neutral territory, so that warring people could drop their hostilities long enough to barter, juggle, mime, eat, drink, make music. They were one in celebration — playful, curious, unselfconscious. We are recreating spontaneous community in our tens of thousands of art and craft exhibits, music festivals, environmental and new-age "expos," and period celebrations like Renaissance fairs, medieval games, Dickensian bazaars.

People are improvising new ways to observe old holidays, like a July Fourth "Interdependence Day" celebrated by the Friends Meeting of Palo Alto, California. After sharing food, music, crafts, and games, they concluded by lighting candles and singing "Let There Be Peace on Earth." One participant said, "Celebrations like this come from ourselves. They need not be confined to traditional holidays. They can acknowledge other meaningful events in our lives .... What if we really gave ourselves the opportunity to explore our imaginations — if we let go of prefabricated forms of creativity?"

IMAGINATION AS A SOURCE OF WEALTH

Here and there are cheerful insurrections by citizens of the new commonwealth, early drafts of its constitutions, its declaration of interdependence. If you know what to look for, you can detect the architecture of invisible cathedrals and theaters and lending libraries, universities without walls, the society whose individuals are its institutions and whose awakening sense of fraternity is its highest law.

The true source of wealth, Eugen Loebl concluded while brooding about economics during his fifteen years as a political prisoner in Czechoslovakia, is not its productivity, its Gross National Product, its tangible assets. Creative intelligence is the wealth of a modern society. "If we see gain as a function of man's ability to think, and if we recognize the importance of the intellectual level on which the economy is based, then our prime interest will be oriented toward the development of this level. . . . We can change our reality toward the goals we desire."

On his historic visit to the United States, Tocqueville sailed down the Ohio River. On one hand was Ohio, a free state; on the other Kentucky, a slave state. On the Ohio side of the river he observed industrious activity, rich harvests, handsome homes. The Ohioan could enter any path fortune might open to him. He might become a sailor, a pioneer, an artisan, a laborer. On the Kentucky side Tocqueville saw only indolence. Not only were the slaves half-hearted in their labors, but the masters themselves were enslaved. They could not work their own land because that would demean their status. A few crossed over to Ohio to work, but most turned for excitement to "the passionate love of field sports and military exercises . . . violent bodily exertion, the use of arms "

We have passed into other cultural ages, each with its own forms of economic and psychological enslavement. For too long, like the Kentucky slaveholders, we have turned our best energies toward the pursuit of secondary excitement, hoping to find in such distractions the reward that comes only from vocation. But we have a choice; now we can emigrate to a freer state, finding there new heart, new enterprise, and values that match our deepest needs.

_______________

Notes:

1 Max Planck once said that he had started out as a student of economics:  finding it too difficult, he took up physics.
 
2 Immigrants to California established similar networks, according to sociologists. James Q. Wilson described a version of urban labor-swapping in California in the 1950s that foreshadowed today's extensive bartering: “The Southern California equivalent of the eastern uncle who could get it for you wholesale was the Los Angeles brother-in-law who would help you put on a new roof or paint the garage, or lend you (and show you how to use) his power saw. A vast, informally organized labor exchange permeated the region, with occasional trades of great complexity running through several intermediaries — the friend who would ask his brother, the plumber, to help you, if you would ask your uncle with the mixer to lay concrete in front of somebody's sister's home. Saturday saw people driving all over the county, carrying out these assignments."
 
3 Barter is also big business these days among trading corporations within the Soviet Union and among multi-national companies that trade raw materials for finished products.
 
 4 A three-year, one-million-dollar study of changing consumer values, released  by SRI in 1979, predicted a continuing shift away from conventional materialistic values by individuals across the economic spectrum.
 
5 One example of big business cooperating with social trends: Hofmann-LaRoche, the pharmaceutical company, began furnishing complimentary  tapes on holistic medicine to physicians in the early 1970s and more recently  sponsored symposia on such topics as alternatives to drug therapy. In 1979,  with increasing numbers of people turning to vitamins and nutrition rather  than drugs, Hofmann-LaRoche announced its plans to build an immense  Vitamin C plant.
 
 6 The United States, with 6 percent of the world's population, consumes more  than 30 percent of its energy resources.
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Re: The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson

Postby admin » Tue Apr 30, 2019 4:34 am

Part 1 of 2

CHAPTER 11: Spiritual Adventure: Connection to the Source

Behind the night . . . somewhere afar
Some white tremendous daybreak.

—RUPERT BROOKE


In its early stages, transformation may seem easy, even fun, not at all stressful or threatening. We may enjoy an intensified sense of connection, vocation, freedom, peace. We use the process as we might use a tape recorder. We visit altered states of awareness as we would drop into a health club for the Jacuzzi. Biofeedback cures our headaches, meditation eases tension. An imagery technique dissolves a learning block.

But all the transformative technologies also train our attention. Gradually there is a sense that we have been betraying some sort of harmonious inner universe by our attitudes, behavior, and beliefs. A realm of exquisite order, intelligence, and creative potential begins to reveal itself. Meditation is now doing us. Reality breaks through into larger, richer spaces. Now it is not just a matter of seeing things differently but of seeing different things. Language fails, symbols fail. This territory is too unlike anything we have known, too paradoxical, a dimension we may speak of as deep or high, as helpless as the Square in Flatland trying to describe the Third Dimension to his disbelieving countrymen. “One can only grasp it by experiencing," said Master Hakuin, a Zen sage, “as one feels for oneself cold and hot by drinking water. It is to melt all space in a wink and to look through all time, from past to future, in one thought."

Consciousness is not a tool . It is our being, the context of our lives — of life itself. Expanding consciousness is the riskiest enterprise on earth. We endanger the status quo. We endanger our comfort. And if we do not have the nerve to resolve the ensuing conflicts, we endanger our sanity. We may have been uncomfortable at earlier points in the transformative process, as when we took responsibility for our health, but this is much bigger: the transformation of the transformative process itself.

In Chapter 6, we explored scientific discoveries about the underlying unity of nature, the role of consciousness in constructing the world of appearances, the brain as an interpreter of patterns emerging from a primary reality, the transcendence of time and space, the thrust of evolution, the reordering of living systems at levels of ever greater intricacy and coherence.

Spiritual or mystical experience, the subject of this chapter, is the mirror image of science — a direct perception of nature's unity, the inside of the mysteries that science tries valiantly to know from the outside. This way of understanding predates science by thousands of years. Long before humankind had tools like quantum logic to describe events that ordinary reason could not grasp, individuals moved into the realm of paradox through a shift in consciousness. And there they know that what cannot be is. Millions living today have experienced transcendent aspects of reality and have incorporated this knowledge into their lives.

A mystical experience, however brief, is validating for those attracted to the spiritual search. The mind now knows what the heart had only hoped for. But the same experience can be deeply distressing to one unprepared for it, who must then try to fit it into an inadequate belief system.

Inexorably, direct experience of a larger reality demands that we change our lives. We can compromise for a time, but eventually we realize that ambivalence is like deciding to recognize the law of gravity only sometimes and in certain places. This transformation of transformation, with its acceleration of connections and insights, can be a frightening period. Eventually, in stages, there is action. We must make our lives congruent with our consciousness. "A condition of utmost simplicity," said T. S. Eliot, "costing not less than everything."

By radically altering one's values and perceptions of the world, mystical experience tends to create its own culture, one with wide membership and invisible borders. This parallel culture seems to threaten the status quo; as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said. Western society is outraged if an individual gives his soul as much daily attention as his grooming. The statements and behavior of those in the emergent culture are judged by a belief system as irrelevant to their experience as the warnings of the Flat Earthers were to Columbus. Critics call them narcissistic, not knowing the thoughtful nature of their inward search; self-annihilating, not knowing the spaciousness of the Self they join; elitist, not knowing how desperately they want to share what they have seen; irrational, not realizing how much further their new worldview goes toward resolving problems, how much more coherent it is with everyday experience.

THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning. At first this may be only a restless desire for something more. The prescient Tocqueville remarked on the coexistence in America of a strong religious spirit and material ambition. But perhaps, he said, this was a precarious balance. "If ever the faculties of the great majority of mankind were exclusively bent upon the pursuit of material objects, it might be anticipated that an amazing reaction would take place in the souls of some. I should be surprised if mysticism did not soon make some advance among a people solely engaged in promoting its own worldly welfare."

Indeed, our vigorous appetite for the material has led us to satiation. Zbigniew Brzezinski, chairman of the United States Security Council, spoke of an "increasing yearning for something spiritual" in advanced Western societies where materialism has proven unsatisfying. People are discovering, he said, that 5 percent per annum more goods is not the definition of happiness.

Traditional religion, he conceded, does not provide a substitute:

This is why there is a search for personal religion, for direct connection with the spiritual. . . . Ultimately, every human being, once he reaches the stage of self-consciousness, wants to feel that there is some inner and deeper meaning to his existence than just being and consuming, and once he begins to feel that way, he wants his social organization to correspond to that feeling This is happening on a world scale.


In a public poll conducted by Yankelovich, Skelly, and White, 80 percent of the respondents expressed a strong interest in “an inner search for meaning." In 1975 the National Opinion Research Corporation reported that more than 40 percent of the adults polled believed they had had a genuine mystical experience. These experiences were characterized by joy, peace, a need to contribute to others, the conviction that love is at the center of everything, emotional intensity, knowledge impossible to articulate, unity with others, and the imminence of a new world. A 1974 Roper poll found that 53 percent believed in the reality of psi, with stronger belief correlated with higher income and education. A 1976 Gallup poll reported that 12 percent were involved in a mystical discipline.

A Gallup poll released in February 1978 reported that ten million Americans were engaged in some aspect of Eastern religion, nine million in spiritual healing. Those involved in Eastern religions tended to be younger adults, college-educated, living on either of the two coasts, about equally men and women. Catholic and Protestant. “Although [they] are not as likely to be church-goers . . . they are just as likely to say that their religious beliefs are 'very important' in their lives."

Spiritual experience moved beyond the borders of the establishment so quietly that only the poll takers have measured the change. Addressing fellow scholars and historians in the field of religion, Jacob Needleman remarked ironically in 1977 that these ideas and practices are now — “without our prior permission, so to speak — entering the real lives of real people, causing trouble, having real effects on marriages, careers, politics, goals, friendships."

But the spiritual shift is not readily uncovered by sociological methods. It's an individual phenomenon, William McCready of National Opinion Research said. “If you try to gauge it by membership in groups, you won't see it. Because they aren't much for joining, the people involved in this inner search are hard to pin down statistically."

In early 1979 Ram Dass observed that his audiences had changed considerably. "For the most part it's the middle class these days, and the ages are broadening incredibly. Where I was working with a ten-year age span out of the alternative cultures five or six years ago. I'm now seeing a fifteen-year span out of the mainstream of society — what used to be called straight. Now there are hundreds of thousands for whom spiritual awakening is a reality. I can go to Omaha, Idaho City, Seattle, Buffalo, or Tuscaloosa, and everywhere thousands of people are ready to hear. They are growing spiritually in their daily lives, without putting on far-out clothes and wearing beads around their necks. Their spiritual awakening grows from within."

An Aquarian Conspirator at a famous think tank said, "There is a whole new tolerance for the search for transcendence. I'm surrounded by colleagues who are going in the same direction, who value the same kinds of explorations A person is no longer an oddball because he is known to be on a spiritual quest. And he's even envied a little, which is quite a change over the last fifteen years."

A Washington lobbyist for an organization promoting international peacemaking called the mutual recognition of these seekers "the small mysticism":

It was not sought or wanted but asserted itself in my life . . . something was growing, emerging. These little events added up; they began to fit together. I began to find God in others, then a sense of God in me, then a bit of myself in others with a sense of God, then others and myself in God — a mysterious and complex set of transactions. The curious side-effect was that there is recognition of this sort of unitarianism among the small mystics. We sense each other.

Even my political work . . . benefited. Small mystics in politics quickly "smell" my secret stance, and a certain fellowship occurs, scarcely ever explicit but nonetheless effective.

I do not know yet how common this sort of closet small mysticism is, but it seems to me to be easier in the last five years or so to confess with some expectations of recognition ....


Western psychologists like William James, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and Roberto Assagioli focused their mature powers on trying to understand transcendent needs and the irrepressible hunger for meaning. Jung compared the spiritual impulse to sexuality in its urgency.

Although there is reason to believe that we all have an innate capacity for mystical experience — direct connection — and although about half the population reports having had at least one spontaneous experience, never before has this capacity been explored by people in great numbers. Historically, even in those parts of the world where the most sophisticated techniques were available — India, Tibet, China, Japan — only a tiny minority undertook the systematic search for spiritual understanding.

Among the millions now engaged in this search, many, if not most, were drawn in almost unawares, like the good-natured Hobbits drawn into cosmic quests in J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Quite innocently they found themselves beyond their familiar haunts. Sy Safransky, the editor of a North Carolina literary magazine, described his departure from common-sense reality:

I'm a journalist whose ability to take notes and ask the right questions evaporated years ago on a sunny beach in Spain, when I suddenly became aware that the whole world was alive ... I saw the earth breathe, I felt its rhythms, and I discovered a missing part of myself. Finding corroboration neither in the New York Times or the New Republic but only in literature I'd hitherto shunned as religious (then an epithet) or plainly bizarre, I began the long, slow drift away from the radical mainstream towards shores for which I've yet to find a name.


Pianist Arthur Rubinstein struggled to define what he called "this thing in us, a metaphysical power that emanates from us." He had often felt it in his concerts, he said, this tangible energy reaching out into the audience. "It is something floating, something unknown that has no place to disappear to."

In his Nobel prize acceptance speech novelist Saul Bellow said, "The sense of our real powers, powers we seem to derive from the universe itself, also comes and goes We are reluctant to talk about this because there is nothing we can prove, because our language is inadequate, and because few people are willing to risk talking about it. They would have to say, 'There is a spirit,' and that is taboo."

The unnamed shores, the power, the spirit — these are the subject of this chapter. We will look at the spiritual experience in contemporary America, an experience that has little to do with religion as our culture has known it. It also has little to do with exotic cults and practices. The grass-roots movement is taking place quietly, manifesting itself in ways unique to this time and place. Most of its adherents are incognito to those looking for conventional symbols of religiousness.

FROM RELIGION TO SPIRITUALITY

The emergent spiritual tradition is not new in American history, according to Robert Ellwood, a scholar of Oriental religions at the University of Southern California. Rather, it is the revitalization of a stream “going back as far as Transcendentalism." Adherents prefer direct experience — what Ellwood calls “excursion" to an inner world whose vision then infuses all of life — to any form of organized religion.

With its periodic Great Awakenings, the United States has always attracted mystics and evangelists. Long before the spiritual revolution we see now, Eastern and Western mystics influenced mainstream American thought. Their ideas were daily bread to the American Transcendentalists and the "beat generation." Yet, as Ellwood pointed out, all these exports are filtered through the American psyche and experience. Zen, Swedenborgianism. Theosophy, or Vedanta in the United States are not what they were in Japan, eighteenth-century England, or nineteenth-century India. American adherents may sometimes use Eastern symbols, but their essential spiritual life is better understood through the American lineage of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, the Shakers, and others. "Down-home Zen" is the term Rick Fields used to describe the Zen center in the heart of the Wilshire business district of Los Angeles.

Needleman said Westerners were moving away from the form and trappings of Judaism and Christianity, "not because they had stopped searching for transcendental answers to the fundamental questions of human life but because that search has now intensified beyond measure." [1] They were looking to Eastern traditions to see what they might offer "our threatened society and our tormented religions."

We turn East for completion. Whitman called it "the voyage of the mind's return Passage to more than India." Hesse spoke of "the eternal strivings of the human spirit toward the East, toward Home." The East does not represent a culture or a religion so much as the methodology for achieving a larger, liberating vision. In that sense, the "East" has existed in Western mystical traditions.

In January 1978, McCall's magazine published a survey of sixty thousand readers showing an overwhelming skepticism about organized religion, even among churchgoers. A poll commissioned by Protestant and Catholic groups and released in June 1978 revealed what Gallup summarized as "a severe indictment of organized religion." Eighty-six percent of the "unchurched" and 76 percent of the churchgoers agreed that individuals should arrive at their beliefs outside organized religion. About 60 percent of the churchgoers agreed with the statement, "Most churches have lost the real spiritual part of religion."

Formal religion in the West has been shaken to its roots by defections, dissent, rebellions, loss of influence, diminishing financial support. Unlike the schools, churches are not mandated by law and their bureaucracies are not directly tax supported; they cannot pass bond issues or raise property taxes. If they cannot find new roles in a rapidly changing society, they may go the way of the railroads — without Amtrak.

A Catholic theologian, Anthony Padovano, remarked at a 1976 conference on meditation:

The religious response that has occurred in the Western world — a revolution that has made us more sensitive to the religions of the Orient — is an understanding that whatever answers there are must come from ourselves. The great turmoil in the religions is caused by the spirit demanding interiority. Faith is not dying in the West. It is merely moving inside.


That most authoritarian of religious institutions, the Catholic church, has suffered what historian John Tracy Ellis called "a shattering of its fixity," a trauma apparent in the new variety of doctrine and discipline among American Catholics. "No one group has full authority nor the ability to impose it on other groups," Ellis said. The American church is "shaken and uncertain in an anxious, uncertain time." Laypeople are urging reforms, evangelizing and participating in pentecostal and charismatic movements; by 1979 one-half million Catholics were estimated to have become charismatics, speaking in tongues and engaging in healing practices. The number of nuns and priests declined dramatically during the seventies, theologians were dissenting from papal authority, parochial school populations were declining. Similar rebellions have been taking place in nearly every organized religious body in the country.

A convocation of spiritual leaders read a statement to the United Nations in October 1975:

. . . The crises of our time are challenging the world religions to release a new spiritual force transcending religious, cultural, and national boundaries into a new consciousness of the oneness of the human community and so putting into effect a spiritual dynamic toward the solutions of the world's problems We affirm a new spirituality divested of insularity and directed toward planetary consciousness.


An increasing number of churches and synagogues have begun to enlarge their context to include support communities for personal growth, holistic health centers, healing services, meditation workshops, consciousness altering through music, even biofeedback training.

Cultural awakenings, as historian William McLoughlin noted, are preceded by a spiritual crisis, a change in the way human beings see themselves in relationship to each other and to the divine. During "great awakenings" there is a shift from a religion mediated by authorities to one of direct spiritual experience. Not unexpectedly, some religious groups see the emergent spiritual tradition as a fearful threat to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The fundamental Berkeley Christian Coalition, sponsor of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, devoted its August 1978 journal to this threat:

At this point in Western cultural history, it is an understatement to say that Eastern metaphysics and the New Consciousness have gained a significant following in our society. Just ten years ago the funky drug-based spirituality of the hippie and the mysticism of the Western yogi were restricted to the counterculture. Today, both have found their way into the mainstream of our cultural mentality. Science, the health professions, and the arts, not to mention psychology and religion, are all engaged in a fundamental reconstruction of their basic premises.


The coalition blames the rise of New Age spirituality on the timidity of the Christian church in America:

Eastern metaphysics and the New Consciousness, on the other hand, derive their popularity in part from the fact that they directly challenge the oppressive assumptions of technocratic Western mentality. They have not been afraid to charge our rationalist, materialist, mercantile culture with depleting the quality of human life. . . . Leaders of these movements have stepped into the vacancy created by the church's prophetic silence. They call plastic plastic and poison poison in a society whose economy is built on convincing people that both are good for them. Moreover the followers . . . are hard at work developing workable alternatives to the death-dealing culture they condemn.


The SCP expressed concern about the increasing legitimacy of the spiritual movement in the eyes of the medical establishment and its ability to draw on and consolidate support from many other groups: humanistic psychology, secular humanism. Eastern mysticism, authors like George Leonard, noted medical personalities like Jonas Salk. At every hand the Berkeley Christian Coalition detected the influence of non- Christian doctrine: the yin-yang symbol drawn by Salk at a San Diego conference, Ruth Carter Stapleton's friendly attitude toward meditation, references by physician-speakers to the Kabbalah and chakras.

The idea of a God within was particularly disturbing: The religious point of view embodied in the holistic health movement, said the coalition, "is an integral part of the mystical worldview that is making a coordinated thrust into every aspect of our cultural consciousness It is not a fad, it will not go away, and it is fundamentally hostile to Biblical Christianity."

Ironically, every organized religion has been based on the claims of direct experience of one or more persons, whose revelations are then handed down as articles of faith. Those who want direct knowledge, the mystics, have always been treated more or less as heretics, whether they were the medieval mystics within Christianity, the Sufis within the borders of Islam, or the Kabbalists within Judaism.

Now the heretics are gaining ground, doctrine is losing its authority, and knowing is superseding belief.
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Re: The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson

Postby admin » Tue Apr 30, 2019 4:34 am

Part 2 of 2

DIRECT KNOWING

"Mystical states," said William James, "seem to those who experience them to be states of knowledge. They are insights into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect."

The dictionary's first definition of mystical is "direct communion with ultimate reality." The second meaning: "vague or incomprehensible." Here is a central problem: Direct communion with ultimate reality is vague and incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it!

The word mystical derives from the Greek mystos, "keeping silence." Mystical experience reveals phenomena that are usually silent and inexplicable. This expanded consciousness, this whole-knowing, transcends our limited powers of description. Sensation, perception, and intuition seem to merge to create something that is none of these.

A Canadian psychologist, Herbert Koplowitz, has called this whole-knowing Unitary Operational Thinking, a stage that is two steps beyond the most advanced level of cognitive development in the theory of Jean Piaget. Piaget's stages — Sensori-Motor, Pre-Operational Thinking, Concrete Operational Thinking, Formal Operational Thinking — span the spectrum of human mental development from the diffuse world of the infant to the symbolic, abstract thought of an intellectually active young adult.

Beyond ordinary cognitive thought Koplowitz postulates a fifth stage. Systems Thinking, in which the individual understands that there are often simultaneous causes that cannot be separated. Conventional science assumes that cause and effect can be clearly separated and does not reach the level of Systems Thinking.

In the sixth stage — Unitary Operational Thought — we discover our own conditioning. We understand that the way we perceive the external world is only one of many possible constructs. "Opposites, which had been thought of as separate and distinct, are seen as interdependent. Causality, which had been thought of as linear, is now seen as pervading the universe, connecting all events with each other.” There is no dualism, no separation of mind and body, self and others.

Having achieved a cognitive state that empowers a more coherent understanding, the Unitary Thinker is to a Formal Operational adult as that adult is to a child. "Just as mysticism is not a rejection of science but a transcendence of it," Koplowitz said, "science is not a rejection of mysticism but a precursor of it."

Unitary thought is holistic. Because it goes beyond the further reaches of our rational tools, it can only be conveyed through paradoxes, meditation, experience. "Mystic traditions such as Taoism may offer the most thoroughly developed bodies of Unitary Operational Thought," Koplowitz said.

To experience the domain of Unitary Knowing we must get outside our old, limited way of perceiving. As psychologist Ron Browning put it, "To grasp that which is beyond the system, you need to transcend the system. You have to get out of 'lineness' into 'squareness,' out of linearity into planes, then shift or expand into three-dimensional space-time, then four-dimensional space Change at this level is a change in the very nature of change."

As a metaphor Browning suggested that we imagine a system called "asleep." The realm lying beyond that system is called "awake." "Inside 'asleep' we can have a sign representing awake, we can have the word awake, we can have symbols and images — everything but actually being awake. You can dream that you have awakened, but you cannot, within that system, actually wake up."

Direct knowing gets us out of the system. It is the awakening. It reveals the context that generates our lesser reality. The new perspective alters our experiences by changing our vision.

To Jung, for example, the transpersonal perspective, what he called "the raising of the level of consciousness," enabled some individuals to outgrow problems that destroyed others. "Some higher or wider interest arose on the person's horizon, and through this widening of his view the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded out in contrast to a new and stronger life- tendency. It was not repressed and made unconscious but merely appeared in a different light."

Transpersonal psychology, which draws from the world's spiritual disciplines, does not aim to reduce suffering to "normal" dimensions but to transcend suffering. "Getting in touch with one's feelings” is of little value if those dark feelings are not transformed. Anger, fear, despair, resentment, jealousy, greed — these can all be changed, not just identified, through the psychologies of direct knowing.

A shift from intellectual concept to direct knowing was described by one of the Aquarian Conspirators on a questionnaire:

One of my personal turning points came when I awoke one morning from a dream which I interpreted in a very discouraging way, and I seriously contemplated suicide. . . . The more I did that, the lower I got, until finally something somewhere somehow clicked. I'm not sure how else to describe it. The ideas I had written about conceptually four years before at an intellectual, left-brained level were now real at an experiential level. I realized that my choices were — as I had written, as others had written — limited only by me and my perceptions of reality.

That was rough but a great turning point toward consciousness and freedom. It was almost like I had to go through midnight to get to the dawn.


Brain scientist Karl Pribram tried to describe an even greater perceptual shift:

It isn't that the world of appearances is wrong; it isn't that there aren't objects out there, at one level of reality.

It's that if you penetrate through and look at the universe with a holographic system, you arrive at a different reality, one that can explain things that have hitherto remained scientifically inexplicable: paranormal phenomena .. . synchronicities, the apparently meaningful coincidence of events.


As a way of looking at consciousness, holographic theory is closer to mystical and Eastern thought than to our ordinary perception, he said. "It will take a while for people to become comfortable with the idea that there is an order of reality other than the world of appearances." But the discoveries of science have begun to make sense of mystical experiences people have been describing for millennia. They suggest that we can tap into that order of reality behind the world of appearances. Perhaps mystics have hit upon a mechanism that gives them entry to the implicate, or enfolded, order: "My best hunch is that access to those other domains is through attention . . . that the brain can somehow abrogate its ordinary constraints and gain access to the implicate order."

Such a shift, he said, might be mediated by the brain's connection between the frontal lobe and the older limbic region, the tie between the cortex and deep brain structures. This region is a major regulator of attention. "Perhaps we can eventually discover the rules for 'tuning in,' for leaping into the timeless, spaceless domain."

Physicist Fritjof Capra recounts such an experience in which he no longer merely believed in a dynamic universe, based on his intellectual understanding, but knew it to be so. He recalls that he was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves, feeling the rhythm of his breathing, when he suddenly experienced the whole environment as a cosmic dance — not just as a concept of physics but as an immediate, living experience:

I "saw" cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I "saw" the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I "heard" its sound, and at that moment I knew this was the Dance of Shiva ....


Spiritual disciplines are designed to attune the brain to that larger domain. Ordinarily the brain is unfocused and dyssynchronous. It is also busy filtering out a vast amount of information not needed for survival; otherwise we would be bombarded by awareness of electrical fields, slight temperature changes, cosmic radiation, internal physiological processes. Yet we can have access to a wider sensory realm and the mystical dimension by altering the brain's biochemistry. Meditation, breathing exercises, and fasting are among the common technologies for shifting brain function. [2]

For many people in many cultures, psychedelic drugs have offered a beginning trail if seldom a fully transformative path. Aldous Huxley, who had no illusion about drugs as permanent routes to enlightenment, pointed out that even temporary self-transcendence would shake the entire society to its rational roots. "Although these new mind-changers may start by being something of an embarrassment, they will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life of the communities "

Huxley believed that the long-predicted religious revival in the United States would start with drugs, not evangelists. "From being an activity concerned mainly with symbols religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition — an everyday mysticism."

He said that he himself had been electrified by understanding fully, under the influence of mescaline, the radical meaning of the phrase God is love. One of the Aquarian Conspirators said, "After many years in intellectual, left-brain pursuit of 'reality,' I learned horn LSD about alternative realities — and suddenly all bibles made sense." Others have said that they seemed to experience the nature of matter, the unity of all things, life as a splendid game we are playing, a story we are telling. One reported experiencing "dynamic present time — that the world is flow and uncertainty, not static as in the concepts of our culture."

Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who has guided over three thousand LSD sessions and has had access to eighteen hundred records of sessions conducted by his colleagues, sees psychedelics as catalysts or amplifiers of mental processes. There is no element of the LSD experience that does not have a non-drug counterpart. Psychedelics seem to facilitate access to the holographic domain described by Pribram and David Bohm, Grof said. [3] The individual may experience himself as a field of consciousness rather than as an isolated entity. Past, present, and future are juxtaposed. Space itself seems multidimensional, limitless. Matter is no longer perceived as tangible but disintegrates into patterns of energy. Subjects report direct experience of microcosm and macrocosm, vibrating molecules and spinning galaxies, archetypes and deities, the reliving of early experiences, even what seems to be their own birth or uterine existence. "In the experiences of consciousness of the Universal Mind and the Void, LSD subjects . . . find the very categories of time, space, matter, and physical laws of any kind to be arbitrary and ultimately meaningless categories.” The Cartesian-Newtonian worldview becomes philosophically untenable. It seems simplistic and arbitrary, useful for the practical purposes of everyday life but "unfit for the purpose of philosophical speculation and understanding. . . . The universe is [now] seen as a divine play and an infinite web of adventures in consciousness."

If it can be demonstrated that subjects in unusual states of consciousness have access to accurate information about the universe, if they experience it as portrayed by quantum-relativistic physics, "we might have to abandon the derogatory term 'altered states of consciousness."' At least some of these states might be seen as a valid source of information about the nature of the universe and the dimension of the human mind.

"The essential conflict," Grof said, "is no longer between science and mysticism." Rather it is between the emergent paradigm and a "coalition" paradigm: the joining of the old mechanical model of science and ordinary or "pedestrian" consciousness. In other words, the problem is not so much contradictory data as contradictory states of consciousness — a conflict Grof feels is resolved by the holographic view.

THE SPIRITUAL ADVENTURE

In his account of a Sufi apprenticeship. Reshad Feild said:

I suddenly understood that it is most certainly necessary to seek, to ask the question; rather than pushing away the answer by dashing after it, one must ask and listen at the same time At that moment I knew that I was being heard, that I was dissolving and becoming food for the great transformation process that was taking place in the universe. ... At the same time that I was dying I was being born. . . .


Hamid said, "The Soul is a knowing substance."

In the West religious issues are customarily supposed to be resolved by faith, but a teacher in the traditions of direct knowing encourages questions, even doubts. This spirituality asks the seeker to drop beliefs, not add to them.

Assorted dangers await the spiritual adventurer. We have discussed some obvious ones in an earlier chapter: regressive behavior, unsettling experiences, fanaticism, the passive surrender to an unworthy teacher, pendulum change.

But the disciplines themselves warn of other, subtler dangers. "The Way in this world is like the edge of a blade," says a Hasidic master, and, in the Katha Upanishad, the famous caveat: "The path is narrow . . . sharp as a razor's edge, most difficult to tread."

Whereas the outsider may perceive the spiritual seeker's transient loss of internal equilibrium as alarming, a teacher might consider it a necessary step. The greater danger, in the teacher's mind, is that the student may become certain of the answers, stop there, and never reach appropriate uncertainty.

Asked to name ideas they had given up as a result of the transformative process, several of those who responded to the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire said "conventional Christianity," "religious dogma" — and about an equal number said "atheism" or "agnosticism."

The Radical Center of spiritual experience seems to be knowing without doctrine.

One contemporary seeker described his own experience:

There were a number of times when I felt I really understood what it was all about. Then several years later I would have to say that was a stupid thing .... From a subsequent vantage point, I obviously hadn't understood a damned thing. I think this is fairly universal.

. . . Every time you enlarge that knowing — or acquire more of it — you see things in a different perspective. It isn't that it was really wrong before, but it's just seen quite differently, in a different light .... That's the essence of transformation, reaching the part of ourselves that knows, that doesn't feel threatened and doesn't fight the metamorphosis ....


Teachers and techniques in the spiritual disciplines must be considered together, for the teacher does not impart knowledge but technique. This is the "transmission" of knowledge by direct experience.

Doctrine, on the other hand, is second-hand knowledge, a danger. "Stand above, pass on, and be free" is the advice of Rinzai, the same sage who advised the seeker to kill the patriarchs or the Buddha if he should encounter them. "Do not get entangled in any teaching."

Disciples are supposed to find the teacher, not vice versa. The teacher's authority rests on personal liberation. One follows qualities, not people.

The path to direct knowing is beautifully illustrated in a series of paintings from twelfth-century China known as the ten ox-herding pictures. The ox represents "ultimate nature." At first ( Seeking the Ox) the searcher undertakes to look for something he only vaguely apprehends. Then (Finding the Tracks ) he sees in traces of his own consciousness the first evidence that there truly is an ox. After a time (First Glimpse) he has his first direct experience and knows now that the ox is omnipresent. Next (Catching the Ox) he undertakes advanced spiritual practices to help him deal with the wild strength of the ox. Gradually (Taming the Ox) he achieves a more subtle, intimate relationship with ultimate nature. In this phase, the seeker un learns many of the distinctions that were useful in earlier stages. "The Ox is a free companion now, not a tool for plowing the field of enlightenment," Lex Hixon, a meditation teacher, wrote in his sensitive commentary on the pictures.

In the stage of illumination (Riding the Ox Home) the former disciple, now a sage, realizes that disciplines were not necessary; enlightenment was always at hand. Afterward (Ox Forgotten, Self Alone and Ox and Self Forgotten) he comes even nearer to pure consciousness and discovers that there is no such person as an illuminated sage. There is no enlightenment. There is no holiness because everything is holy. The profane is sacred. Everyone is a sage waiting to happen.

In the penultimate phase (Return to the Source) the sage/seeker merges with the domain that generates the phenomenal world. A scene of mountains, pine trees, clouds, and waves emerges. "This waxing and waning of life is no phantom but a manifestation of the source," reads the caption. But there is a stage beyond this idyll.

The final picture (Entering the Marketplace with Helping Hands) evokes human compassion and action. The seeker is now shown as a cheerful peasant who wanders from village to village. "The gate of his cottage is closed, and even the wisest cannot find him." He has gone so deeply into human experience that he cannot be traced. Knowing now that all the sages are one, he does not follow great teachers. Seeing the intrinsic Buddha nature in all human beings, even innkeepers and fishmongers, he brings them to bloom.

These ideas are part of all traditions of direct knowing: the glimpse of the true nature of reality, the dangers of early experiences, the need to train attention, the eventual disassociation from ego or individual self, enlightenment, the discovery that the light was there all along, connection with the source that generates the world of appearances, reunion with all living things.

The methods for attaining liberation were likened by Buddha to a raft that takes you to the far shore. Once on the opposite bank, you have no need for the method. Similarly, the teacher is compared to a finger pointing to the moon. Once you see the moon — once you understand the process — there is no point in looking at the finger. Just as we need to become rich before we can discover we didn't need to be rich, we acquire techniques that teach us we didn't need techniques. The sacred takes us back to the profane, but we will never again know it as profane.

We need not still our passions, Blake said, but only “cultivate our understandings Everything that lives is holy."

FLOW AND WHOLENESS

Two key principles seem to emerge in all mystical experience. We might call them “flow" and “wholeness." The ancient Tibetan teacher Tilopa referred to them as “the principle of the nonabiding" and “the principle of nondistinction," and he warned against harming them. Our culture has indeed harmed these principles. We try to freeze the nonabiding, we try to imprison that which exists only in movement, freedom, relationship. And we betray wholeness, nondistinction, by breaking apart everything in sight so that we miss the underlying connection of everything in the universe.

In mystical experience there is the sense that “this is the way things are." Not how we wish them to be, not how we analyze them to be, not as we have been taught, but the nature of things — the Way.  

Flow and wholeness are seen as true principles, not just in relation to work, health, or psychological growth but throughout the fabric of life. The developer of a kind of psychological aikido for dealing with conflict remarked on the way the technique of flowing with an opponent causes a gradual change in the practitioner. “It may be subtle at first, but even the most mean-spirited of people begin to relinquish their grasp on their aggression, lose their anger, and reconnect with the living force."

These mystical experiences reflect, more than just the flowing wholeness inherent in living systems (as in the theory of dissipative structures), the flow of our world from another dimension and the tendency of the universe to create ever more complex wholes. On an everyday level this knowledge shifts our time frame from temporal to eternal; we accept impermanence and cease struggling to keep the same all that must change. We experience life's blows and blessings with greater equanimity.

Our futile effort at control impedes the flow we might otherwise have in our lives. Once we get out of our own way, we can become ourselves. “I set the rivers free for all mankind,” says that most ancient of mystical writings, the Rig Veda.

"The world is a spinning die,” according to an old Hasidic passage, ”. . .and all things turn and spin and change, for at the root all is one, and salvation inheres in the change and return of things.”

Just as we must trust ourselves to the buoyancy of water if we are to swim, we can relax into that flow, turn with the spinning die. The novices in Zen monasteries are called unsui, cloud-water. They are meant to move freely, to form and reform spontaneously, to seek a way around obstacles. In ancient traditions, consciousness itself is pictured as an emergent wave from the source, very much like the interference patterns postulated in the holographic theory described in Chapter 6.

The second principle of wholeness — non-distinction — represents the connectedness, the context, of everything. Just as science demonstrates a web of relationship underlying everything in the universe, a glittering network of events, so the mystical experience of wholeness encompasses all separation. "In free space there is neither right nor left,” says a Hasidic master. "All souls are one. Each is a spark from the original soul, and this soul is inherent in all souls.” Buddhism maintains that all human beings are Buddhas, but not all have awakened to their true nature. Yoga literally means "union.” Full enlightenment is a vow to save "all sentient beings.”

This wholeness encompasses self, others, ideas.

Love is felt as a dynamic state of consciousness rather than as an emotion. Just as fear is constricted and chaotic, love is wide and coherent — a creative flow, harmony, acceptance of human frailty imbedded in deep self-knowledge. It is defenseless power, communication, vanished boundaries, closure.

You are joined to a great Self: Tat tvam assi, "Thou art That." And because that Self is inclusive, you are joined to all others. In the mystical vision of William Blake:

Awake! awake o sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love . . .
Fibers of love from man to man . . .
Lo! we are One.


Or, as a contemporary mystic expressed it on a personalized license plate, IMU URI.

This wholeness unites opposites. This Radical Center, this healing of the separation of human beings from each other and from nature is described in all mystical traditions. Nicholas da Cusa called it the coincidentia oppositorium, the union of opposites. In the Hasidic writings it is "the union of qualities, twos which oppose each other like two colors . . . but seen with the true inner eye form one simple unity." In Buddhism it is madhya, the transcendent middle way. The Kogi Indians of Colombia speak of the Way of the Souls leading at once upward and downward, the joining of polarities, the black sun.

In these spiritual traditions there is neither good nor evil. There is only light and the absence of light . . . wholeness and brokenness . . . flow and struggle.

A young therapist said:

An image occurs to me: the ocean shore. An outcropping of rock extending into the sea, strong and narrow. Which, when I restrict my field of vision sufficiently, appears to split the water into two distinct and separate bodies. The action of the waves lapping up on either side makes it seem as though these two are ever straining toward one another, striving with each surge to overcome this rock which prevents their joining . . . when, by simply stepping back and seeing more, by taking an all-encompassing perspective, expanding consciousness, I see that the separation is only an illusion — that both waves are and always were part of the one ocean, separated only by choice of my perception and my notion of striving to be one ....

I see that I am already whole, that there is nothing to overcome. In those moments of emptiness, of letting be, of complete contact with another, I know that I am all I can be.


He is whole, "in place," awake to what Huxley called the "Allrightness" of the world, what Milton Mayerhoff described as knowing that "life is enough," the creative insight Rollo May called "this-is-the-way-things-are-meant-to-be." Home is not a place but an experience. The open secret of the spiritual disciplines is becoming whole, becoming oneself, going home. "The way home," said Colin Wilson in his study of mystics and artists, "is the way forward, more deeply into life." By definition, the Aquarian Conspiracy is in the world, like the "hidden yogis" of which Sri Ramakrishna spoke.

In this wholeness, oddly enough, virtues we might once have sought in vain through moral concepts now come spontaneously. It is easier to give, to be compassionate.

GOD WITHIN: THE OLDEST HERESY

In the emergent spiritual tradition God is not the personage of our Sunday-school mentality but more nearly the dimension described by William James:

The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely "understandable" world .... We belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong ....

I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of God.


God is experienced as flow, wholeness, the infinite kaleidoscope of life and death. Ultimate Cause, the ground of being, what Alan Watts called "the silence out of which all sound comes." God is the consciousness that manifests as lila, the play of the universe. God is the organizing matrix we can experience but not tell, that which enlivens matter.

In J. D. Salinger's short story, "Teddy," a spiritually precocious youngster recalls his experience of immanent God while watching his little sister drink her milk. "... All of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God...."

Once you have achieved the essence of religious experience, asked Meister Eckhart, what do you need with the form? "No one can know God who has not first known himself," he told his medieval followers. "Go to the depths of the soul, the secret place ... to the roots, to the heights; for all that God can do is focused there."

British theologian John Robinson writes of a "shot-silk universe, spirit and matter, inside and outside, divine and human, shimmering like aspects of one reality which cannot be separated or divided." To Alfred North Whitehead, whose influence has risen like a flood tide in recent years, God is "the mirror image to structure in the [material] world. The world is incomplete; in its very nature it requires an entity at the base of all things, to complete it. This entity is God, primordial nature."

Buckminster Fuller tried to capture the sense of God as process:

For God, to me, it seems
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art . . .
is loving,
not the abstraction of love . . .

Yes, God is a verb,
the most active, connoting the vast harmonic
reordering the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.


We need not postulate a purpose for this Ultimate Cause nor wonder who or what caused whatever Big Bang launched the visible universe. There is only the experience. To Kazantzakis, God was the sum total of consciousness in the universe, expanding through human evolution. In the mystical experience there is the felt presence of an all-encompassing love, compassion, power. Individuals revived after clinical death sometimes describe passage down a dark tunnel to an unearthly light that seems to emit love and understanding. It is as if the light itself is a manifestation of universal mind.

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 bums through the night. It is not the same flame over time, yet neither is it another flame.

A number of those filling out the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire commented that their experiences had forced them to give up their previous assumption that bodily death ends consciousness. Despite their disaffiliation with formal religion, 53 percent expressed strong belief in such survival and another 23 percent said they were “moderately sure,” a total of 75 percent. Only 5 percent were skeptical and 3 percent disbelieving.

The strongest believers were those who recounted brushes with death. Belief correlated strongly with the incidence of peak experiences and the pursuit of spiritual disciplines. A famous actress attributed her lifelong interest in the spiritual to a near-drowning when she was three: “Euphoria, music, and color surpassed anything known in the natural physical state."

Although he did not mention the incident in his 1927 account of his famous flight, Charles Lindbergh described in The Spirit of St. Louis (1953) an experience of disembodiment, the transcendence of space and time, loss of the fear of death, a sense of omniscience, remembrance of other lives, and a lasting shift in values.

Lindbergh wrote that in the eighteenth hour of his journey, he felt himself as "an awareness spreading through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance " The fuselage behind him filled with ghostly presences, “vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane." He “saw" them behind him “as though my skull was one great eye." They conversed with him, advised him on problems of his navigation, "giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life."

There was no weight to his body, no hardness to the stick. He felt more akin to the spirits, "on the borderline of life and a greater realm beyond, as though caught in the field of gravitation between two planets. . . He felt as if he were acted upon by forces too weak to be measured by normal means, "yet representing power incomparably stronger than I've ever known."

The presences seemed neither intruders nor strangers, more like a gathering of family and friends long separated, as though he had known them in some past incarnation.

"Death no longer seems the final end it used to be, but rather the entrance to a new and free existence," he wrote. The values of his twenty-five years — even the importance of the long-dreamed-of flight — altered sharply.

Fifty years later, when Lindbergh lay dying in his cottage in Hawaii, his wife asked him to share with her the experience of confronting the end. What was it like to face death? "There isn't anything to face," he said.

THE VISION: LIGHT AND THE COMING OF LIGHT

Contemporary mystical experiences from many individuals and many parts of the world have centered in recent years on a collective and intensifying vision, the sense of an impending transition in the human story: an evolution of consciousness as significant as any step in the long chain of our biological evolution. The consensual vision, whatever its variations, sees this transformation of consciousness as the moment anticipated by older prophecies in all the traditions of direct knowing — the death of one world and the birth of a new, an apocalypse, the “end of days" period in the Kabbalah, the awakening of increasing numbers of human beings to their godlike potential. “The seed of God is in us," Meister Eckhart said. “Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God seed into God."

The instruction booklet for Stargate, a contemporary symbolic game relating to consciousness, opens: "The turning-about is upon us, the turning of mind, the expansion of eyes . . . the light that shapes from within."

Always, the vision of evolution toward the light. Light is the oldest and most pervasive metaphor in spiritual experience. We speak of enlightenment, the city of light, the Light of the World, children of light, the "white-light experience."

"Light . . . light," wrote T. S. Eliot, "visible reminder of invisible light." To Honore de Balzac, it seemed that humankind was on the eve of a great struggle; the forces are there, he insisted: "I feel in myself a life so luminous that it might en- lighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral." In The Reflexive Universe Arthur Young, inventor of the Bell helicopter, offered in speculative scientific terms an idea as old as myth and Plato: We represent a "fall" into matter from light, and the lightward ascent has begun again.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote a poem about "Olbers' paradox," the observation of a learned astronomer that there were relatively few stars nearby; the farther away he looked, the more there were.

So that from this we can deduce
that in the infinite distances
there must be a place
there must be a place
where all is light
and that the light from that high place
where all is light
simply hasn't got here yet . . .


"Let the light penetrate the darkness until the darkness shines and there is no longer any division between the two," says a Hasidic passage. Before the soul enters the world, it is conducted through all the worlds and shown the first light so that it may forever yearn to attain it. The sadik in the Hasidic tradition, like the Bodhisattva of Buddhism, has allowed the light to enter him and shine out into the world again.

To the third-century mystic, Plotinus, it was "the clear light which is Itself." The Sufi dervish dancer does the "turn" with upraised right hand, symbolically bringing light onto the earth. The shaman achieves a state of perfect balance so that he might see a blinding light.

The dream of light and liberation is poetically expressed in an apocryphal contemporary Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ. For too long, it says, our temples have been the tombs of the hidden things of time. Our temples, crypts, and caves are dark. We have been unable to see the patterns. "In light there are no secret things There is no lonely pilgrim on the way to light. Men only gain the heights by helping others gain the heights. . . .

"We know that the light is coming over the hills. God speed the light."

_______________

Notes:

1 Although the Aquarian Conspirators are by no means representative, being  both more spiritually involved and more iconoclastic than most, their questionnaire responses show a pattern that may be a harbinger of more general  change. Ninety-five percent had some early religious background, however  token (55 percent Protestant, 20 percent Jewish, 18 percent Catholic, 2 percent  other, 5 percent "none"). Only 19 percent consider themselves active in that  tradition in any way, a percentage that includes several clergy, exclergy, and  theologians.  
 
2 Those surveyed in the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire revealed experience in a variety of spiritual and meditative disciplines, including Zen Buddhism (40 percent), yoga (40 percent), Christian mysticism (31 percent), Transcendental Meditation (21 percent), Sufism (19 percent), and the Kabbalah (10  percent), along with many dozens of other systems.

3 Compelling mystical experiences are by no means universal among  psychedelics users. These are dependent on many factors: dosage, prior experiences, introspectiveness, willingness to explore states of consciousness, prior  interest in spirituality, expectations, and an appropriate environment. Casual  recreational use often results in little more than sensory alterations and a  "high."
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Re: The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson

Postby admin » Wed May 01, 2019 11:00 pm

 CHAPTER 12: Human Connections: Relationships Changing

All real living is meeting.
 
—MARTIN BUBER


Each of us is responsible for everything to everyone else.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKI


The personal paradigm shift is like a sea-crossing to the New World. The immigrant, try as he might, cannot persuade all his friends and loved ones to make the journey. Those who stay behind cannot understand why the familiar did not hold the immigrant. Why did he abandon his accustomed homeland? Saddest of all, how could their affections not hold him?

And the immigrant learns that you cannot really restore the Old World on the new continent. New England is not England; Nova Scotia is not Scotland. Distance weakens the old reality, and communications become difficult, poignant. Letters to the Old World cannot evoke all the canyons and peaks that pulled the immigrant relentlessly across the unknown.

Ongoing personal transformation moves one away from the Old World — sometimes abruptly, more often over years. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, people change jobs, even vocations, in the wake of shifting perceptions. If the powerful interest in the transformative process and the search for meaning are not shared by one's marriage partner, the marriage is likely to suffer. Over time, differences may seem more and more pronounced, old schisms widen. Many old friendships and acquaintances fall away; new friendships, even a whole new support network, take their place. Based as they are on shared values and a shared journey, these new relationships are perhaps more intense.

Relatives, colleagues, friends, and marriage partners, understandably threatened by these changes, often exert pressure on the individual to drop the practices or friendships involved in the change. These pressures only widen the gap. You don't stop an immigrant by trying to revive his hopes for the Old World.

In this chapter we will look at changing personal relationships, the nature of transformative relationships, and the effect of the transformative process on life transitions or "passages.”

Relationships are the crucible of the transformative process. They are bound to alter, given the individual's greater willingness to risk, trust in intuition, sense of wider connection with others, recognition of cultural conditioning.

We are seeing the subtle power custom has wielded over our lives. Cultural norms and mores are the great unexamined assumptions that run our lives. We become accustomed to roles; they become customary and therefore unchallenged. Custom is like a buildup of smog. We only notice it when it has been swept away on a clear, clean day. We may fail to see the outlines of a new cultural development until its effects are pervasive.

Once-entrenched patterns of marriage, family, sexuality, and social institutions are being shaken by radically new, or radically old, alternatives. There are no formulas and there are many failures, but there are increasing numbers of individuals trying to see more clearly, love more honestly, and do less harm. Attitudes, not answers per se, are the key.

In early chapters we looked at the ways in which a new consensus is emerging in such collective institutions as government, medicine, education, and business. But "the family," "marriage," and social relationships in general cannot be rethought by a committee or reformed by a program. These are not true institutions but millions upon millions of relation- ships — connections — that can only be understood at the level of the individual, and then only as a dynamic process. Social custom is perhaps the deepest of cultural trances.

TRANSCENDING CULTURAL ROLES

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

In a sense our simultaneous effort toward autonomy and connection, contradictory as it seems, is an attempt to be real. We are stripping away the trappings and constraints of our culture: false machismo, false eyelashes, barriers, limits.  

Several men who filled out the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire noted that the women's movement was important in their own change — not only because it focused on the trampled potentials of half the human race but also because it questioned the supremacy of those masculine characteristics valued in the society: competition, manipulation, aggression, objectivity. One said, “Much of the transformation was catalyzed by relationships. Having loving women help me let go of sexist attitudes contributed greatly to the increased 'yin' nature I have acknowledged in myself, which has unified my life and work."

As women in transformation are discovering their sense of self and vocation, men are discovering the rewards of sensitive relationships. During these equalizing shifts, the basis for male-female interaction is being redefined. Men are becoming more feeling and intuitive; women, more autonomous and purposeful.

According to very old wisdom, self-discovery inevitably involves the awakening of the traits usually associated with the opposite sex. All of the gifts of the human mind are available to the conscious self: nurturance and independence, sensitivity and strength. If we complete such qualities within ourselves, we are not as dependent on others for them. Much of what has been labeled love in our culture is infatuation with, and the need for, our missing inner halves.

The transformed self breaks out of the compartments structured by cultural role assignments, not only by acknowledging aspects long suppressed but also by recognizing how the assigned traits can become distorted. Strength may become caricatured as machismo, aggression, taciturnity. Nurturance may be exaggerated into smothering. Whatever short-circuits our spontaneity, be it denial or exaggeration, contributes to unconsciousness and unreality.

Conventional terms of relationship — husband, wife, father, son, daughter, sister, in-law, lover, friend of the family — do not identify us as persons and, in fact, may mask our authentic selves if we keep trying to match our behavior and feelings to the "job description."

THE THREAT TO OLD RELATIONSHIPS
 
Personal transformation has a greater impact on relationships than on any other realm of life. It may be fairly said that the first impact is on relationships; they improve or deteriorate but rarely stay the same.

There are myriad changes: the ways we use power, openness to experience, capacity for intimacy, new values, lowered competition, greater autonomy in the face of social pressures. A formerly authoritarian person may no longer enjoy having power over others, and a passive person may become assertive.

In some cases these changes are welcomed. More often they are threatening. The game-playing inherent in most relationships cannot withstand the departure of one player. Just as the larger cultural trance is shattered in transformation, so is the trance of our miniculture, the relationship. We see that its habits and fences may have kept us from richer, more creative lives, from being ourselves. If one partner now feels that vocation and day-to-day living are more urgent than long-range goals, the partner who still supports the old agenda may feel angry and abandoned.

"Gus is gone, and he's not coming back," one woman said of her husband's new world. Their inability to share the transformative journey had created an ever-widening chasm, and she felt she could not find a bridge.

The most significant force in changing relationships is the transformation of fear. Beneath the surface, most intimate relationships pivot on fear: fear of the unknown, fear of rejection, fear of loss. In their most intimate bonds, many people seek not just sanctuary but a fortress. If, through whatever medium — meditation, a social movement, assertiveness training, quiet reflection, est — one partner breaks free of fear and conditioning, the relationship becomes unfamiliar territory.

Reassurances help very little. The threatened partner may show open disapproval, either through anger, mockery, or argument. People want us to change, but to meet their needs, not ours. And the partner who feels threatened cannot see why the other does not just change back (“If you loved me . . . “) — or hopes that this is a passing phase, like adolescent rebellion or midlife crisis.

But you can't quit a new reality the way you might resign from a job, the Democratic party, or the Presbyterian church. This new perspective defuses your fears, electrifies your awareness, links you to the human company, enlivens your days.

If the fearful partner cannot adjust or join, there will eventually be a rift, either actual or psychological. Those who stay in a relationship hostile to their new world have two choices: to be open about their interests, which may fuel the misunderstanding ... or to become clandestine. Either way, they can no longer explore, within the relationship , the most meaningful developments in their lives.

A New York artist whose husband belittles her spiritual search put it bluntly: “I lead a double life."

This anguish is the dearest price we pay for the New World, as we gradually concede that it cannot be explained, only seen. There is a deep sadness, not only for the loss of what might have been a shared journey but more intensely for what the companion seems to be rejecting: freedom, fulfillment, hope. Yet trying to argue someone into a paradigm shift, telling him to disregard old cynicism or limiting beliefs, is as futile as telling someone blinded by cataracts to open his eyes wider. Our fears, motives, and needs are idiosyncratic. We come to understandings in our own time and in our own ways. We remember that we ourselves initially rejected ideas that later became central to our lives — once we experienced them to be true.

Whatever the cost in personal relationships, we discover that our highest responsibility, finally, unavoidably is the stewardship of our potential — being all we can be. We betray this trust at the peril of mental and physical health. At bottom, Theodore Roszak observed, most of us are “sick with guilt at having lived below our authentic level."

If one partner develops a strong sense of vocation and the other has none, that commitment can become a source of jealousy and antagonism, creating, in effect, a triangle.

Relationships have a mathematics of their own, either enriching or destructive. As social critic Norbert Prefontaine described this phenomenon:

When one thing and one thing are added together, the result is two things, be those things oranges, pistons, or buildings. However, if one person is added to another person, the result is always more than two or less than two, but never merely two. That is, persons who genuinely meet and interact either strengthen each other so that they are stronger together than the sum of them separately or they damage each other so that they are weaker together than the sum of them together. [1]


Psychologist Dennis Jaffe pointed out that two people can be a source of growth, support, and health for each other or they can be what he calls “lethal dyads."

A closed relationship, like a closed system in nature, loses energy. A schoolteacher said, “The old conventional relationships, in their exclusivity and ego massage, isolated us even more than if we were alone. The only difference was now it was the two of us, an island."

The transformative process, while making ever more apparent the narrowing aspects of our relationships, also introduces us to new possibilities.

TRANSFORMATIVE RELATIONSHIPS

A transformative relationship is a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. It is synergistic, holistic. Like a dissipative structure, it is open to the world — a celebration and exploration, not a hiding place.

As we become more concerned with the essence of relationship and less with the form, the quality of human interaction changes. Experiences of unity, fullness, awakened senses, empathy and acceptance, flow — all of these open us to more possibilities for connection than we had before.

This is the union described by Martin Buber:

In a real conversation, a real lesson, a real embrace ... in all these, what is essential takes place between them in a dimension which is accessible only to them both. ... If I and another "happen" to one another, the sum does not exactly divide. There is a remainder somewhere, where the souls end and the world has not yet begun.


This dimension, "the between," the I-Thou, Buber also called "the secrecy without a secret." It is a conspiracy of two, a momentarily polarized circuit of consciousness, an electrified linking of minds. It neither asks nor answers; it simply connects. As Buber said, it may only be a look exchanged on a subway. And at its most complex and dynamic, it is the planet's brain, the accelerating awareness of brotherhood anticipated by Teilhard, Buber, Maslow, and others.

It is strangely impartial, turning frogs into princes, beasts into beauties. As more individuals open up to each other, expressing warmth and encouragement, love is a more available source of approval and energy. This can be a confusing phenomenon if seen through the lenses of the old paradigm.

One who believes in us, who encourages our transformation, whose growth interacts with and enhances our own, is what Milton Mayerhoff called "the appropriate other." Such caring relationships help us to become "in-place." We cannot find our growth alone, Teilhard said. He himself had intense friendships, many of them with women despite church strictures against even platonic closeness between priests and women. "Isolation is a blind alley. . . . Nothing on the planet grows except by convergence."

In his Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire, a politician wrote of "the transforming power of liberating love relationships — occasionally experiencing myself more openly, fully, deeply, innocently than I had heretofore any sense of."

A number of those who responded to the questionnaire commented on the importance of powerful friendships that guided them across new territory. One, herself a therapist, remarked on the importance of "always meeting an essential strong person in my life when I need them. Each takes me to a certain point, then there's a period of integration, and the next one appears. These meetings are always accompanied by a deep sense of recognition and intense 'soul' involvement."

The loving, transformative relationship is a compass to our potential. It frees, fulfills, awakens, empowers. You don't have to "work at it." With its curious blend of intensity, ease, and spiritual connection, the transformative relationship contrasts with all the less rewarding connections in our lives and becomes as vital as oxygen. Each such relationship is also a compass to another kind of society, a model of mutual enrichment that can be extended throughout the fabric of our lives. Yet it requires that we first redefine our terms.

"When you ask what love is," said Krishnamurti, "you may be too frightened to see the answer. . . . You may have to shatter the house you have built, you may never go back to the temple." Love is not fear, he said. It is not dependence, jealousy, possessiveness, domination, responsibility, duty, self-pity, or any of the other things that conventionally pass for love. "If you can eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes away the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower man hungers after."

The transformative relationship is more easily described in terms of what it does not include. Our cultural concept of love's possibilities has been so limited that we don't have the proper vocabulary for a holistic experience of love, one that encompasses feeling, knowing, sensing.

To have a transformative relationship you must be open and vulnerable. Most people meet only at their peripheries, Rajneesh, an Indian teacher, said. "To meet a person at his center is to pass through a revolution in yourself. If you want to meet someone at his center, you will have to allow him to reach your center also."

Transformative relationships are characterized by trust. The partners are defenseless, knowing that neither will take advantage or cause needless pain. Each can risk, explore, stumble. There is no pretense, no facade. All aspects of each partner are welcome, not just agreed-upon behaviors. "Love is more important than romance," a magazine editor asserted. "Acceptance is more important than approval."

Past the old conditioning of competition, the partners cooperate; they are more than two. They dare and challenge each other. They take pleasure in each other's capacity to surprise.

The transformative relationship is a shared journey toward meaning. The process itself is paramount and cannot be compromised. One is faithful to a vocation, not a person. [2] "Genuine love," Simone de Beauvoir said, "ought to be founded on the mutual recognition of two liberties; the lovers would then experience themselves both as self and the other; neither would give up transcendence, neither would be mutilated. Together they would manifest values and aims in the world."

Because there is a continuous change in a transformative relationship, there can be no taking for granted. Each partner is awake to the other. The relationship is always new, an experiment, free to become whatever it will. It rests on the security that comes from giving up absolute certainty.

The transformative relationship defines itself; it does not try to conform to what society says it should be but serves only the needs of the participants. There may be guiding principles, even flexible agreements, but no rules.

Love is a context, not a behavior. It is not a commodity, "won," "lost," "earned," "stolen," "forfeited." The relationship is not diminished by either partner's caring for others. One can easily have more than one transformative relationship at a time.

Both partners feel bonded to the whole, the community. There are new capacities to give and receive love, joy and sympathy for many. This intense communion with the world cannot be pressed into a narrow channel. A physician said, "It's as if you've been withholding your empathy with the world, and suddenly you lose your virginity. You feel as if you want to make love to the cosmos. Now, how are you going to explain that to anybody?"

THE TRANSFORMATION OF ROMANCE

At first we may try to fit this new cosmic caring into conventional structures, the kind of romantic expressions conditioned by our culture. We soon learn that the old forms of relationship are inappropriate to the demands of the transformative journey. One woman said of a brief remarriage after the end of a long marriage, "In retrospect, I realize that I was trying one last fling with the Old World, I was running away from my own spiritual drive."

A businessman said that for a time he tried to be more creative in his work and sought out sexual relationships "all trying to fill up the empty hole in the middle — the spiritual hunger. But once you recognize what you're doing, you stop. You can't keep doing it."

As transformative relationships evolve in our lives, we may find in them qualities that evoke the original meaning of romance, as it emerged in the nineteenth century. Romance referred then to the infinite and unfathomable, those forces in nature which are ever forming. Although it preferred the natural to the mechanistic, the Romantic movement was by no means anti-intellectual or anti-rational. Ironically, in their eagerness to probe the mysteries of nature, the Romantics generated the scientific curiosity that finally led to the glorification of reason. Romance was then reduced to a cosmetic and trivial role, representing all that is unreal, the gilt that hides the tarnish of life.

In its heyday the Romantic movement celebrated family, friendship, nature, art, music, literature, drawing on what one historian called "the mystery of the spirit, the larger self, the sense of quest." In a very real sense romance was identical with what we now call the spiritual. It trusted direct experience; it sought meaning.

Our cultural romance, however, is external, the product of conditioning: movies, television, commerce, custom. No wonder we become apostates from conventional romance! It's like second-hand God. And there is the same sense of loss and disillusionment as when we rebel against organized religion. We abandon the adventure; we say it is a sham. Yet the hunger is still there, the haunting suspicion that we are missing something central to life.

In the transformative process, romance — that numinous, spiritual, inward quality — is embodied in an adventure that evokes its own symbols and language, that feels like "the real thing," a dream from which you don't awaken. De Beauvoir conceded that certain forms of the sexual adventure would be lost as we became more real, "but this does not mean that love, happiness, poetry, dream will be banished Our lack of imagination always depopulates the future."

A Taoist meditation says, "Seek no contract, and you shall find union." One of the transformative shifts is an ebbing away of what the Eastern philosophies call "attachment." Non-attachment is a compassion that does not cling, love that accepts reality and is not needy. Non-attachment is the opposite of wishful thinking.

The old familiar emotions like jealousy, fear, insecurity, and guilt are unlikely to evaporate. But the overall patterns are changing. For some this means confronting and transcending internal contradictions, like the desire for freedom for oneself and fidelity in a partner. Coming to terms with such deep conflict is difficult, painful, and, for many, rewarding.

One woman said in her Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire, “I spent two years learning how to love without possessing. I decided that when I got married it would be that way for me, and it has been for thirteen years. I've learned that you can love more than one person, that you may be jealous, but you can never possess someone, only make desperate tries at it. We possess nothing, least of all each other."

Writing in a Quaker newsletter, one woman envisioned a near future in which everyone is more able to relate to others — husbands and wives not possessing each other, nor parents their children, in the old constricting ways.

We will recognize that each person needs to nourish and be nourished by many persons, and we will not seek to restrict them through fear. We will know that we can only keep that which we set free. . . . We recognize ourselves as members of the family of human beings. It is right, even necessary, to make yourselves available to one another in new loving, caring, and fulfilling ways — without the spectres of old guilts at loving widely.


In new-paradigm relationships, the emphasis is not so much on sexuality as intimacy. Intimacy is prized for its shared psychic intensity and transformative possibilities, of which sex is only a part — and often a latent part at that.

For many people, giving up the idea of exclusive relationships is the most difficult paradigm shift in their own transformation. Some choose to limit their sexual expression to a primary relationship. Others may give priority but not exclusivity to the primary relationship. The desirability of exclusive relationships is a deep cultural belief, despite contradictory evidence — and behavior. [3] For many people, giving up the old need for exclusivity was the most difficult paradigm shift of all, yet necessary if they were to be true to their own mores.

Trying to analyze the sexual revolution, contemporary sociologists have commented that the difference is in attitudes, not behavior. Our culture's traditional sexual mores have been widely violated in this society since the twenties, if not before. John Cuber, a sociologist at Ohio State University, found that, compared to their counterparts in 1939, young people in 1969 did not accept the old sexual rules. Even if they did not wish to engage in the once "forbidden” behavior, they challenged the validity of the law. Cuber said:

There is a profound difference between someone who breaks the rules and someone who does not accept the rules . One is a transgressor; the other is a revolutionary. No government trembles before the tax evader. But no government could brook a Boston Tea Party; that was revolution.

. . . Will the revolutionaries ever return to the fold, mend their ways, recant? I think not. It is a comfortable cliche among the middle-aged that the restive young when faced with responsibilities will settle into traditional viewpoints. That is not so for this generation. ... As long as the sinner acknowledges his guilt, there is a chance that he may reform and repent. But the key to this generation is precisely its freedom from guilt.


Others are challenging the very context of sexuality in our culture. We have been conditioned to approach all sexual relationships in terms of conquest, they say, and this precludes deep trust and intimacy. We are "turned on" to a surprising degree by that which our culture has programmed us to associate with sexuality. This programming also sets us up for rejection and frustration.

In workshops around the country Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad talk about a sexual paradigm shift — freeing sexuality from "the context of conquest.” Conditioned desires and stereotypes have to change, they say, if we are to appreciate the integrated person — a strong woman, a sensitive man. “Men are still sexually turned on to beauty and women to power in very deep ways. What is new is that people are no longer satisfied with this way of relating." The old paradigm automatically puts love and sexuality "out of kilter" with each other. People who are "good for you" are often not those who excite you sexually, they said.

What we are talking about is another way of looking at relationships and sexuality, in which the major interest is in exploring and growing together. We all hunger for solutions, but rather than defining or laying out a new way to be, we must be pioneers if we're going to create a new way to live together.

No real solution can come until both men and women truly see the nature of the problem, which lives in each of us. . . . Seeing the patterns changes you.

As long as men and women are hooked into romance, they can never meet each other totally. If we are to open opportunities to meet human beings, we must leave the whole context of conquest. It takes equals to create the possibility of mature love.


THE TRANSFORMATIVE FAMILY

The novel Anna Karenina begins, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Suddenly we aspire to a society in which we may be happy in different ways. As the old social structures break, millions have been cast loose from the conventional support systems of the past. The Carnegie Council on Children estimated in 1978 that as many as four of every ten youngsters born in the 1970s will spend part of their childhood in a one-parent family. Three out of five women polled recently by the Roper organization preferred divorce to staying with an unsatisfactory marriage. One urban study showed that 40 percent of the city's adults were totally without family ties. Only one of four families fits our stereotype of the breadwinner husband and homemaker mother.

It's ten o'clock, says the public service radio announcement. Do you know where your child is? A better question: It's late in the twentieth century. . . . Amidst experimentation, changing social structures, broken relationships, new relationships, demands for freedom, demands for security — do we know where our connections are?

The family can nurture the child so effectively, with warmth and stimulation, that we call the result giftedness. But if the family fails to nurture, if the emotional bonds are weak, the child will not thrive. Studies of infants in institutions have shown that the development of normal intelligence requires human interaction. Without love, without input and response from the world, we can make no sense of the world. Retardation is the result for babies who are fed but not played with, safe but not spoken to.

An atmosphere of trust, love, and humor can nourish extraordinary human capacity. One key is authenticity: parents acting as people, not as roles. The poet Adrienne Rich recalled one summer in Vermont when she and her three young sons lived spontaneously, without schedules. Late one night, driving home from a movie, she felt wide awake and elated. "We had broken together all the rules of bedtime, the night rules, rules I myself thought I had to observe in the city or become a 'bad mother.' We were conspirators, outlaws from the institution of motherhood. I felt enormously in charge of my life." She did not want her sons to act for her in the world. "I wanted to act, live, in myself and to love them for their separate selves."

Parents often pretend to endorse rules, institutions, and behavior because they trust authorities more than their own experience and intuitions. This perpetuates hypocrisy and the power of the institutions from generation to generation. Children, teenagers especially, tend to assume that their own feelings are unacceptable, and so they withdraw from their parents.

"Many, perhaps a majority, of young people are looking for deep, intimate relationships," said Ted Clark and Dennis Jaffe of their experiences counseling youths. "They need a supportive, understanding, and tolerant person for a guide. Nothing has to be 'done.' They just want a place where they can be themselves."

Like the transformative adult relationship, the transformative family is an open system, rich in friends and resources, giving and hospitable. It is flexible, adaptive to the realities of a changing world. It gives its members freedom and autonomy as well as a sense of group unity.

Long before the educational system exacts its psychological costs, the family has defined roles and expectations, teaching a benign, cooperative attitude toward the world or a competitive, paranoid one. The family rewards or punishes innovation. The family is a setting for self- disclosure, for intimacy — or for the repression of feelings, for hypocrisy. In its rigidity or flexibility, its exclusive or inclusive attitudes, the family patterns our later relationships.

The child develops self-esteem in an atmosphere of unconditional caring, mastery in an atmosphere of appropriate challenge.

Insecurity keeps many families from outside relationships that could change them. They are closed systems. Fearful families, said Hossain Danesh, a Canadian psychiatrist, “perceive the world in dichotomies: men and women, old and young, emotions and intellect, power and weakness, self and others." They discourage members from friendships with people different from themselves. The child gains approval only by conforming to the parent's wishes.

The power of parent-child relationships is tragically evident in a phenomenon called emotional dwarfism. A six year old with this syndrome may be the size of a three year old. Typically, when placed in a good foster home, such a child begins to grow normally but stops again if returned to the hostile biological family. Emotional dwarfism is relatively unusual, but a more common stunting of growth occurs in families all the time when children are thwarted in their unfolding as individuals.

Frederick Peris, the famous psychologist, once said that dissociation — the split between emotions and conscious thinking — begins with a parent's conditional love. Because many adults were betrayed as children — not rewarded for being themselves, always urged to "do better" however hard they tried — they find it difficult to trust that they are loved. The chain is perpetuated if they become parents because they may find it hard to accept their own children unconditionally. Not until we have discovered the extent of our own programmed fears can we forgive the imperfections and weaknesses of others. When we have touched the healthy center in ourselves, we know it exists in others, whatever their outward behavior. Consciousness enables us to care about them.

The transformative process is a second chance for many people to achieve the self-esteem they were denied as children. By reaching the center in themselves, the healthy self, they discover their own wholeness.

THE PLANETARY FAMILY

The wider paradigm of relationships and family transcends old group definitions. The discovery of our connection to all other men, women, and children joins us to another family. Indeed, seeing ourselves as a planetary family struggling to solve its problems, rather than as assorted people and nations assessing blame or exporting solutions, could be the ultimate shift in perspective.

If we consider that any child being abused is our child, the problem changes. When we see our culture, our social conditioning, or our class as an artifact rather than a universal yardstick, our kinship expands. We are no longer “ethnocentric," centered in our own culture.

A society in flux will have to create its families in new ways. The new family is emerging from networks and communities, experimental and intentional groups, friendships. The American Home Economics Association redefined the family in 1979 as “two or more persons who share resources, share responsibility for decisions, share values and goals, and have commitment to one another over time. The family is that climate that one 'comes home to,' and it is this network of sharing and commitments that most accurately describes the family unit, regardless of blood, legal ties, adoption, or marriage."

Human beings have a kind of optical illusion, Einstein once said. We think ourselves separate rather than part of the whole. This imprisons our affection to those few nearest us. “Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle to embrace all living creatures. . . . Nobody achieves this completely, but the striving itself is part of the liberation."

The “transcenders" Maslow studied, Einstein included, seemed sadder than the other healthy, self-actualizing persons; they saw more clearly the gap between potential and reality in human relationships. Any one of them could have written a workable recipe for social transformation in five minutes, Maslow said.

“I have seen the truth," Dostoevski said. “It is not as though I had invented it with my mind. I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul forever In one day, one hour, everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love.” He said he realized that this truth had been told and retold a billion times, yet it had never transformed human life.

Love and fraternity, once part of an ideal, have become crucial to our survival. Jesus enjoined his followers to love one another; Teilhard added, “or you perish." Without human affection, we become sick, frightened, hostile. Lovelessness is a broken circuit, loss of order. The worldwide quest for community typified by the networks of the Aquarian Conspiracy is an attempt to boost that attenuated power. To cohere. To kindle wider consciousness. When man reclaims this energy source, the sublimation of spiritual-sensual love, Teilhard once said, "for the second time he will have discovered fire."

During the second New York City blackout, while some people were looting, others were beaming their flashlights from apartment-building windows to the sidewalks, "moving" pedestrians from one building to the next, creating a path of light and safety. In this time of uncertainty, when all our old social forms are crumbling, when we cannot easily find our way, we can be lights to each other.

_______________  

Notes:

1 A management consultant, Ben Young, had a slightly different qualitative  metaphor: "In every relationship there are two ways of adding. One plus one  equals two — two independent individuals. But they can also make a whole —  one half plus one-half equals one. We all enjoy feeling part of a single whole,  but we need to allow each other to be separate individuals, too. The problem is  that most people try to take their 'half' out of the other person's 'one.'"

2 In a forthcoming book, The Couple's Journey, Susan Campbell reports on her  study of one hundred fifty couples, ranging in age from the twenties to the  seventies, “who were engaged in developing greater awareness in their relationships." She has identified several stages of growth through which a couple  pass en route to a transformative “co-creative" relationship. The preceding  stages are an illusory romance, a power struggle, stability, mutual commitment, and finally a commitment to help one another realize a creative vocation  in the world.
 
3 Many sociologists anticipate the “evolution" of monogamy. Marriage, they  say, must be transformed as an institution if it is to survive at all. In an article  titled "Is Monogamy Outdated?" Rustom and Della Roy said that "about half  of all marriages now existing will, and probably should, be terminated." If  monogamy is tied inextricably with the restriction of all sexual expression to  the spouse, they said, it will ultimately be monogamy that suffers." Instead it  should be tied to more basic concepts (fidelity, honesty, openness) which do  not necessarily exclude deep relationships with others, possibly including  various degrees of sexual intimacy."  In our highly eroticized environment, the Roys said, people are brought  together in all kinds of relationship-producing situations. Traditional  monogamy contravenes the growing sense "that the greatest good of human  existence is deep interpersonal relationships, as many of these as is compatible  with depth." They concede that most middle-class, educated Americans over  thirty-five" are so schooled into both exclusivity and possessiveness that very  few could accept any kind of structured non-exclusivity in marriage," but they  note that younger people are trying to devise and invent a form of marriage  appropriate to a new era.  
 
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Re: The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson

Postby admin » Thu May 02, 2019 1:09 am

CHAPTER 13: The Whole-Earth Conspiracy

When you come to be sensibly touched, the scales will fall from your eyes; and by the penetrating eyes of love you will discern that which your other eyes will never see.  

— FRANCOIS FENELON, 1651-1715


Victor Hugo prophesied that in the twentieth century war would die, frontier boundaries would die, dogma would die — and man would live. "He will possess something higher than these — a great country, the whole earth. . .and a great hope, the whole heaven."

Today there are millions of residents of that "great country, the whole earth." In their hearts and minds, war and boundaries and dogma have indeed already died. And they possess that large hope of which Hugo wrote.

They know each other as countrymen.

The Whole Earth is a borderless country, a paradigm of humanity with room enough for outsiders and traditionalists, for all our ways of human knowing, for all mysteries and all cultures. A family therapist says she urges her clients to discover not who is right or wrong but what they have as a family. We are beginning to make such an inventory of the Whole Earth. Every time one culture finds and appreciates the discovery of another, every time an individual relishes the talents or unique insights of another, every time we welcome the unexpected knowledge emerging from inside the self, we add to that inventory.

Rich as we are — together — we can do anything. We have it within our power to make peace within our torn selves and with each other, to heal our homeland, the Whole Earth.

We look around at all the reasons for saying No: the failed social schemes, the broken treaties, the lost chances. And yet there is the Yes, the same stubborn questing that brought us from the cave to the moon in a flicker of cosmic time.

A fresh generation grows up into a larger paradigm; thus it has always been. In many science-fiction tales the adults are barred from the transformation experienced by a new generation. Their children grow irrevocably beyond them, into a larger reality.

Those of us born into the “broken-earth” paradigm have two choices: We can go to our graves with the old view, like the generations of die-hard scientists who insisted there were no such things as meteorites, or germs, or brainwaves, or vitamins — or, we can consign our old beliefs unsentimentally to the past and take up the truer, stronger perspective.

We can be our own children.

NEW MIND, NEW WORLD

Not even the Renaissance has promised such a radical renewal; as we have seen, we are linked by our travels and technology, increasingly aware of each other, open to each other. In growing numbers we are finding how people can enrich and empower one another, we are more sensitive to our place in nature, we are learning how the brain transforms pain and conflict, and we have more respect for the wholeness of the self as the matrix of health. From science and from the spiritual experience of millions, we are discovering our capacity for endless awakenings in a universe of endless surprises.

At first glance, it may seem hopelessly utopian to imagine that the world can resolve its desperate problems. Each year fifteen million die in starvation and many more live in unrelenting hunger; every ninety seconds the nations of the world spend one million dollars on armaments; every peace is an uneasy peace; the planet has been plundered of many of its nonrenewable resources. Yet there have been remarkable advances as well. Just since the end of World War II, thirty-two countries with 40 percent of the world's population have overcome their problems of food scarcity; China is becoming essentially self-sufficient and has controlled its once-overwhelming population growth; there is a net gain in world literacy and in populist governments; concern for human rights has become a stubborn international issue.

We have had a profound paradigm shift about the Whole Earth. We know it now as a jewel in space, a fragile water planet. And we have seen that it has no natural borders. It is not the globe of our school days with its many-colored nations.

We have discovered our interdependence in other ways, too. An insurrection or crop failure in a distant country can signal change in our daily lives. The old ways are untenable. All countries are economically and ecologically involved with each other, politically enmeshed. The old gods of isolationism and nationalism are tumbling, artifacts like the stone deities of Easter Island.

We are learning to approach problems differently, knowing that most of the world's crises grew out of the old paradigm — the forms, structures, and beliefs of an obsolete understanding of reality. Now we can seek answers outside the old frameworks, ask new questions, synthesize, and imagine. Science has given us insights into wholes and systems, stress and transformation. We are learning to read tendencies, to recognize the early signs of another, more promising, paradigm.

We create alternative scenarios of the future. We communicate about the failures of old systems, forcing new frameworks for problem-solving in every area. Sensitive to our ecological crisis, we are cooperating across oceans and borders. Awake and alarmed, we are looking to each other for answers.

And this may be the most important paradigm shift of all. Individuals are learning to trust — and to communicate their change of mind. Our most viable hope for a new world lies in asking whether a new world is possible. Our very question, our anxiety, says that we care. If we care, we can infer that others care, too.

The greatest single obstacle to the resolution of great problems in the past was thinking they could not be solved — a conviction based on mutual distrust. Psychologists and sociologists have found that most of us are more highly motivated than we think each other to be! For instance, most Americans polled favor gun control but believe themselves in the minority. We are like David Riesman's college students, who all said they did not believe advertising but thought everyone else did. Research has shown that most people believe themselves more high-minded than "most people." Others are presumed to be less open and concerned, less willing to sacrifice, more rigid. Here is the supreme irony: our misreading of each other. Poet William Stafford wrote:

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world,
and following the wrong god home, we may miss our star.


Following the wrong god home, we have seen all of those we did not understand as alien, the enemy. Failing to comprehend each other's politics, cultures, and subcultures, which often are based on a different worldview, we questioned each other's motives . . . denied each other's humanity. We have failed to see the obvious: "Most people," whatever their philosophy about how to get there, want a warless society in which we are all fed, productive, fulfilled.

If we see each other as obstacles to progress, our assumption is the first and greatest obstacle. Mistrust is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our old-paradigm consciousness has guaranteed its own dark expectations; it is our collective negative self-image.

Now, as we are learning to communicate, as ever-increasing numbers of people are transforming their fear and finding their bonds with the rest of humanity, sensing our common yearnings, many of the planet's oldest, deepest problems show promise of breaking and yielding. The shift for which we have waited, a revolution of appropriate trust, is beginning. Instead of enemies, we are looking for allies everywhere.

When an international conference, "The Future of the West," convened at the University of Southern California, the authorities agreed firmly on one point: The conference had been misnamed. The West, they said, can have no future apart from the East. This awareness may signal what Martin Heidegger called "the still unspoken gathering of the whole of Western fate . . . the gathering from which alone the Occident can go forth to meet its coming decisions — to become, perhaps, and in a wholly other mode, a land of dawn, an Orient."

Beneath the trappings of culture, anthropologists have said, lies a whole other world. When we understand it, our view of human nature will change radically. Now we confront an array of possible ways to be. The global village is a reality. We are joined by satellite, supersonic travel, four thousand international meetings each year, tens of thousands of multinational companies, international organizations and newsletters and journals, even an emergent pan-culture of music, movies, art, humor. Lewis Thomas observed:

Effortlessly, without giving it a moment's thought, we are capable of changing our language, music, manners, morals, entertainment, even the way we dress, all around the earth in a year's turning. We seem to do this by general agreement, without voting or even polling. We simply think our way along, pass information around, exchange codes disguised as art, change our minds, transform ourselves.

. . . Joined together, the great mass of human minds around the earth seems to behave like a coherent living system.


The proliferating small groups and networks arising all over the world operate much like the coalitional networks in the human brain. Just as a few cells can set up a resonant effect in the brain, ordering the activity of the whole, these cooperating individuals can help create the coherence and order to crystallize a wider transformation.

Movements, networks, and publications are gathering people around the world in common cause, trafficking in transformative ideas, spreading messages of hope without the sanction of any government. Transformation has no country.

These self-organizing groups are very little like old political structures; they overlap, form coalitions, and support each other without generating a conventional power structure. There are environmental groups like Les Vertes in France and the Green Alliance in Great Britain, women's groups, peace groups, human rights groups, groups battling world hunger; thousands of centers and networks supporting “new consciousness," like Nexus in Stockholm; publications like Alterna in Denmark, New Humanities and New Life in Great Britain, linking many groups; symposia on consciousness in Finland, Brazil, South Africa, Iceland, Chile, Mexico, Rumania, Italy, Japan, the USSR.

The Future in Our Hands, a movement launched in Norway in 1974 and inspired by a book of that title by Erik Damman, now numbers twenty thousand of that country's total population of four million. The rapidly growing movement promotes "a new lifestyle and a fair distribution of the world's resources.” It emphasizes the need for industrialized nations to curb their consumption patterns and seeks ways to boost the living standard of Third World countries. According to a national survey, 50 percent of the Norwegian population supports the goals of the movement, 75 percent believe that their nation's standard of living is too high, and 80 percent fear that continued economic growth will lead to an increasingly stressful, materialistic lifestyle.

The movement is fueled by grass-roots power. Small local groups determine their own course in furthering the collective goals. A related movement started in Sweden in 1978 and another is now under way in Denmark.

These social movements transcend traditional national borders, with Germans joining French demonstrators to protest nuclear power plants. Johann Quanier, British publisher of The New Humanity journal, said, "The strands of free thinking within Europe are now being drawn together; despite the conflicts, the tension, and the differences, that territory is preeminently suitable for the emergence of the new political-spiritual framework.”

To Aurelio Peccei, founder of the Club of Rome, such groups represent "the yeast of change . . . scattered, myriad spontaneous groupings of people springing up here and there like antibodies in a sick organism." An organizer of a peace group remarked on his discovery of these networks and their sense of "imminent world transformation." Many brilliant, creative thinkers have affiliated internationally to help synthesize the intellectual support for an emergent vision for the planet. To them it is more than a mere scenario, one of many possible futures, but rather a responsibility; the alternatives seem to them to be unimaginable.

The Threshold Foundation, based in Switzerland, stated its intent to help ease the transition into a planetary culture, "foster a paradigm shift, a new model of the universe in which art, religion, philosophy, and science converge," and promote a wider understanding that "we exist in a cosmos whose many levels of reality form a single sacred whole."

FROM POWER TO PEACE

We are changing because we must.

Historically, peace efforts have been aimed at ending or preventing wars. Just as we have defined health in negative terms, as the absence of disease, we have defined peace as non-conflict. But peace is more fundamental than that. Peace is a state of mind, not a state of the nation. Without personal transformation, the people of the world will be forever locked in conflict.

If we limit ourselves to the old-paradigm concept of averting war, we are trying to overpower darkness rather than switching on the light. If we reframe the problem — if we think of fostering community, health, innovation, self-discovery, purpose — we are already engaged in waging peace. In a rich, creative, meaningful environment there is no room for hostility.

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.

The Vietnam War protests in the United States marked a critical turning point, a coming of age, as millions said, in effect, that you can't consign an autonomous people to a war they don't believe in. Other phenomena in recent years have been equally significant: fifteen thousand Germans marching in Cologne to oppose a new flicker of Nazism and to express their individual grief for the Holocaust . . . Catholics and Protestants risking their lives to embrace at a bridge in Northern Ireland, promising each other to work for peace . . . “Peace Now," the Israeli movement launched by combat soldiers asking, “Give peace a chance."

After a recent congress in Vienna on the role of women in world peace, Patricia Mische wrote of “the transformation already slowly in process among individuals and groups who, in a deep probing of their own humanness, are discovering the bonds they have with people everywhere."

Can the arms race be reversed? "A prior question," Mische said, "would be, 'Can people — and nations — change their hearts and minds?"' The Vienna participants seemed living testimony that the answer is Yes. At the close of the congress one participant asked, to tumultous applause, that at future conferences speakers not be required to identify themselves by nationality. "I am here as a planetary citizen," she said, “and these problems belong to all of us."

In The Whole Earth Papers, a series of monographs, James Baines described a “power paradigm" and a “peace paradigm." For millennia, he said, we have lived under the power paradigm, a belief system based on independence and domination. Yet it has always existed alongside the components for a peace paradigm: a society based on creativity, freedom, democracy, spirituality. To foster a global shift, Baines said, we can now create "a web of reinforcement": leadership comfortable with uncertainty, heightened public awareness of the contradictions in the power paradigm, exciting models of new lifestyles, appropriate technology, techniques for expanded consciousness and spiritual awakening. Once these ideas coalesce into a coherent new paradigm grounded in transformation, we will see that humanity is both a part of creation and its steward as well, "a product of evolution and an instrument of evolution."

We need not wait for a leadership. We can begin to effect change at any point in a complex system: a human life, a family, a nation. One person can create a transformative environment for others through trust and friendship. A warm family or community can make a stranger feel at ease. A society can encourage growth and renewal in its members.

We can begin anywhere — everywhere. "Let there be peace," says a bumper sticker, "and let it begin with me." Let there be health, learning, relationship, right uses of power, meaningful work Let there be transformation , and let it begin with me.

All beginnings are invisible, an inward movement, a revolution in consciousness. Because human choice remains sacrosanct and mysterious, none of us can guarantee a transformation of society. Yet there is reason to trust the process. Transformation is powerful, rewarding, natural. It promises what most people want.

Perhaps that is why the transformed society exists already as a premonition in the minds of millions. It is the "someday" of our myths. The word "new" so freely used (new medicine, new politics, new spirituality) does not refer so much to something modem as to something imminent and long awaited.

The new world is the old — transformed.

ENDING HUNGER— CREATING A PARADIGM SHIFT

Historically, movements for social change have all operated in much the same way. A paternal leadership has convinced people of the need for change, then recruited them for specific tasks, telling them what to do and when to do it. The new social movements operate on a different assumption of human potential: the belief that individuals, once they are deeply convinced of a need for change, can generate solutions from their own commitment and creativity. The larger movement inspires them, it supports their efforts and gives them information, but its structure cannot direct or contain their efforts.

The power of individuals to generate broad social change is the basis for the Hunger Project, an international charitable organization launched by est founder Werner Erhard in 1977 and headquartered in San Francisco. The Hunger Project's goal is to speed up a solution to the world hunger problem by acting as a catalyst. It is an intense, sophisticated large-scale effort to hurry a paradigm shift — to "make an idea's time come," as the project's organizers put it. The successes of the project and the ways in which it has been misunderstood are instructive.

The Hunger Project assumes that solutions do not reside in new programs or more programs. According to the best-informed authorities and agencies, the expertise to end hunger within two decades already exists. Hunger persists because of the old-paradigm assumption that it is not possible to feed the world's population.

In less than two years, seven hundred fifty thousand individuals in dozens of countries have pledged their personal commitment to help end world hunger by 1997; enrollment in the Hunger Project is increasing at the rate of more than sixty thousand per month. Three million dollars has been raised explicitly to increase public awareness of the tragic proportions of the problem, the available solutions, and the ways in which individuals and groups can accelerate an end to hunger and starvation. [1]

The Hunger Project does not compete with older hunger organizations; rather, it publicizes their activities and urges enrollees to support them. The project draws all concerned par- ties into its efforts. Just prior to the launching of the foundation, a delegation that included world food distribution experts met with India's prime minister. Advisers to the project represent many nations and existing hunger organizations; Arturo Tanco, president of the World Food Council, is one. Government data, like the National Academy of Sciences report on the means to end hunger, are promulgated.

To create a sense of urgency, the project draws on the power of the symbol and the metaphor, describing the toll of starvation as "a Hiroshima every three days." When a Hunger Project relay of more than one thousand runners carried a baton from Maine to the White House, they did not ask the government to solve the problem. Rather, their message spoke of their own commitment to help end hunger and starvation.

The project uses models from nature and scientific discoveries as metaphors; the hologram, for example, is "a whole within a whole." Everyone who enrolls is "the whole project." The project is "an alignment of wholes." Everyone who signs up is told to "create your own form of participation." Some fast and contribute to the project what they would have spent on food. Many businesses have donated a day's receipts. A team of forty runners generated pledges of six hundred twenty-five thousand dollars for running in the Boston Marathon in 1979, and twenty- three hundred spectators were enrolled along the way. Eighty-eight fifth graders in a California school sponsored a Skate-a-thon and raised six hundred dollars; when they designated their funds for "the boat people," the Hunger Project put them in touch with Food for the Hungry, an organization directly assisting the refugees.

Everyone who signs up is encouraged to enlist others. Enrollees are told how to capture the interest of clubs, school boards, lawmakers; how to direct letters; how to make public presentations. Each enrollee is asked to become a teacher. Seminars emphasize the power of a single committed person, like the man in New Rochelle, New York, who enrolled his mayor, school superintendent, city manager, governor, and lieutenant governor; and the Honolulu woman who signed up the entire congressional delegation, governor, and most of the state legislature. At her urging the governor proclaimed Hunger Week, and state legislators passed a resolution to encourage Hawaiian agricultural research to help alleviate world hunger. A Massachusetts couple enrolled fifty thousand.

Prisoners have been among the most dedicated supporters of the Hunger Project. A prisoner in the correctional facility at San Luis Obispo, California, enrolled fifteen hundred of the twenty-four hundred inmates. A Leavenworth prisoner not only became involved in the project; he and seven other inmates also pooled their money to sponsor two Vietnamese children through Save the Children. A long-term prisoner in a Virginia women's penitentiary said, "The women get bitter and critical in here, the walls close in. Each day grinds. Finally you give up and dose in on yourself. ... I realized the Hunger Project is a way out of the trap — by reaching out to help others.”

So long as we thought we couldn't do anything about the world's starving millions, most of us tried not to think about them; yet that denial has had its price. The Hunger Project emphasizes a key principle of transformation — the need to con- front painful knowledge:

We have numbed ourselves so that we do not feel the pain. We have to be asleep in order to protect ourselves from the horror of knowing that twenty-eight people, most of them young children, are dying this very minute — twenty-eight people no different from you or me or our children, except that we have food and they do not.

We have closed down our consciousness and aliveness to a level where it doesn't bother us. So if you wonder if it costs us anything to allow millions to starve, it does. It costs us our aliveness.


Within a year after the launching of the project, ninety committees had been organized in thirteen countries. Celebrities spoke out for the cause, sometimes without specific reference to the project, much as movie stars helped sell war bonds in the 1940s. Singer John Denver made a documentary film on world hunger. He told a newspaper interviewer, "We're at a point in this planet where we're going to have to make a specific shift in attitude, in how we lend ourselves to life. Up until now it's been, 'If this were the last cup of grain, my very survival depends on my keeping it for me and my own.' Now we're at a time when we will shift to 'My survival depends on my sharing this with you. If this isn't enough for me, my survival still depends on my sharing this with you.'"

Denver, now on the Presidential Commission on World Hunger, wrote "I Want to Live," the title song in a gold-record album, for the Hunger Project. Its theme: We are on the threshold of the end of war and starvation. "It is only an idea — but I know its time has come."

Comedian Dick Gregory gave the project one of its most dramatic images:

When people ask me, "Well, what do you think is going to happen with hungry folks?" I give them the kind of answer the fire marshal gives to the TV reporter when a forest fire is burning out of control: "It's out of our hands now. If we don't get a shift in the wind, we can't save it."

For a while it looked like we weren't going to make it unless we got a shift in the wind. But I left leeway for that which controls all winds to step in. . . . Our Hunger Project is that shift in the Wind.


A key point is made to those who sign up: A world in which hunger has ended will be not merely different or better but transformed. And those who take part will be transformed by their own participation — by telling friends, family, and co-workers of their own commitment, even if they feel self-conscious, and by searching for answers.

RE-CHOOSING

The Aquarian Conspiracy is also working to ease hunger — for meaning, connection, completion. And each of us is "the whole project," the nucleus of a critical mass, a steward of the world's transformation.

In this century we have seen into the heart of the atom. We transformed it — and history — forever. But we have also seen into the heart of the heart. We know the necessary conditions for the changing of minds. Now that we see the deep pathology of our past, we can make new patterns, new paradigms. "The sum of all our days is just our beginning ...."

Transformation is no longer lightning but electricity. We have captured a force more powerful than the atom, a worthy keeper of all our other powers.

We find our individual freedom, by choosing not a destination but a direction. You do not choose the transformative journey because you know where it will take you but because it is the only journey that makes sense.

This is the homecoming so long envisioned. "Condemn me and not the path," Tolstoi said. "If I know the road home, and if I go along it drunk and staggering, does that prove that the road is not the right one? If I stagger and wander, come to my help You are also human beings, and you are also going home."

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. After a history of separation and mistrust, we converge on the clearing.

Our metaphors of transcendence have spoken of us more truly than our wars: the clearing, 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.

Over the centuries those who envisioned a transformed society knew that relatively few shared their vision. Like Moses, they felt the breezes from a homeland they could see in the distance but not inhabit. Yet they urged others on to the possible future. Their dreams are our rich, unrealized history, the legacy that has always existed alongside our wars and folly.

In a wider state of consciousness one can sometimes vividly re-experience a past trauma and, in retrospect and with imagination, respond to it differently. By thus touching the source of old fears, we can exorcise them. We are not haunted so much by events as by our beliefs about them, the crippling self-image we take with us. We can transform the present and future by reawakening the powerful past, with its recurrent message of defeat. We can face the crossroads again. We can re-choose.

In a similar spirit, we can respond differently to the tragedies of modern history. Our past is not our potential. In any hour, with all the stubborn teachers and healers of history who called us to our best selves, we can liberate the future. One by one, we can re-choose — to awaken. To leave the prison of our conditioning, to love, to turn homeward. To conspire with and for each other.

Awakening brings its own assignments, unique to each of us, chosen by each of us. Whatever you may think about yourself and however long you may have thought it, you are not just you. You are a seed, a silent promise. You are the conspiracy.

_______________

Notes:

1 In response to media critics who charged that none of the money was buying  food, the project's administrators explained in a financial report, "If our one  million dollars can make the five billion spent annually on the development [of  food resources] just one percent more effective, we will have had a five thousand  percent return on our money."
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Re: The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson

Postby admin » Thu May 02, 2019 1:10 am

APPENDIX A: Summary of Questionnaire Responses

Of the 185 respondents, 131 were male and 54 female. Approximately 46 percent lived in California, 29 percent in the East, 9 percent in the Midwest, 6 percent in the West (excluding California), 6 percent in the South, and 4 percent outside the United States.

At the time of the survey, 101 (54.5 percent) of the respondents were married. Nearly half had been the only child or firstborn in their family. As noted in the text, they represented a wide range of vocations, but most were professionals.

Many preferred not to designate their positions on the political spectrum, saying that the old labels were no longer relevant. Of those who answered, 40 percent characterized themselves as liberal, 12 percent radical, 20 percent centrist, 7 percent conservative, 21 percent apolitical. Party affiliation: Independent, 47 percent; Democrat, 34 percent; Republican, 3 percent; other, 16 percent. Most (72 percent) saw government as less essential to problem solving than they had five years earlier; 28 percent, more essential. Decentralized government was favored by 89 percent, strong central government by 11 percent.

Fifty-eight percent said they had numerous contacts with individuals who shared their values and their interest in human potential; 42 percent, only a few.

They designated the institutions in transition they considered the most dynamic: medicine, 21 percent; psychology, 17 percent; religion, 13 percent; the family, 12 percent; business, 10 percent; media, 9 percent; education, 8 percent; the arts, 6 percent; and politics, 4 percent.

The greatest threat to social transformation: popular fear of change, 44 percent; conservative backlash, 20 percent; divisiveness among advocates for change, 18 percent; excessive claims by advocates for change, 18 percent. Fifty percent characterized their beliefs about humankind's future as optimistic, 38 percent as cautiously optimistic, 8 percent as uncertain, and 4 percent as pessimistic.

They each chose four instruments of social change they considered most important in terms of their own experience: personal example was checked off by 79 percent; support networks, 45 percent; electronic media, 39 percent; winning over influential persons, 38 percent; books, 38 percent; public education, 37 percent; conferences and seminars, 32 percent; newsletters and journals, 22 percent; professional education, 20 percent; pilot projects, 15 percent; funding sophistication, 12 percent; government programs, 9 percent.

Spiritual disciplines and growth modalities the respondents considered important in their own change: Zen, 40 percent; yoga, 40 percent; Christian mysticism, 31 percent; journals and dream journals, 31 percent; psychosynthesis, 29 percent; Jungian therapy, 23 percent; Tibetan Buddhism, 23 percent; Transcendental Meditation, 21 percent; Sufism, 19 percent; Transactional Analysis, 11 percent; est, 11 percent; the Kabbalah, 10 percent. Earlier religious background of the respondents: Protestant, 55 percent; Judaic, 20 percent; Catholic, 18 percent; other, 2 percent; none, 5 percent. Eighty-one percent were no longer active in the religion of their childhood.

Body therapies experienced by the respondents: T'ai Chi Ch'uan, 32 percent; Rolfing, 31 percent; Feldenkrais, 31 percent; the Alexander technique, 24 percent; and Reichian methods, 14 percent.

Many respondents chose not to answer the questions relating to former or present use of major psychedelic drugs. Thirty-nine percent of all respondents acknowledged that psychedelic experiences had been important in their own transformative process; 28 percent said they still used psychedelics on occasion; 16 percent said psychedelic experiences continued to be important to them.

Many respondents were engaged in aspects of science; the survey showed a high level of interest in the arts as well: 46 percent played a musical instrument, 43 percent engaged in arts or crafts on a regular basis, and 63 percent regularly read fiction and poetry.

Most respondents accepted psychic phenomena and the transpersonal dimension as a reality. Choosing from a spectrum of belief — strongly sure, moderately sure, unsure, skeptical, and disbelieving — they tended to believe (strongly or moderately sure) in telepathy (96 percent), psychic healing (94 percent), precognition (89 percent), clairvoyance (88 percent), synchronicity (84 percent), psychokinesis (82 percent), cosmic intelligence (86 percent), consciousness that survives bodily death (76 percent), and reincarnation (57 percent). A number protested the use of the word belief, saying that they had accepted these phenomena because of direct experiences.

Peak experiences were described as frequent by 48 percent of the respondents, occasional by 45 percent, rare by 5 percent, non-existent by 2 percent.

Major personal change was characterized by 35 percent as very stressful on occasion, by 22 percent as “really rough," by 21 percent as mildly stressful, and by 22 percent as relatively smooth.

Asked to designate which of a list of ideas had been important in their own thinking, they chose as follows: altered states of consciousness research, 74 percent; discoveries about the brain's specialized hemispheres, 57 percent; parapsychological research, 55 percent; Jung's archetypes, 53 percent; paradoxes in physics, 48 percent; holographic models of reality, 43 percent; Kuhn's paradigm-shift concept of scientific revolutions, 39 percent; Teilhard's concept of evolving consciousness, 35 percent; paradoxes in evolution, 25 percent; and paradoxes in mathematics, 14 percent.

When respondents were asked to name individuals whose ideas had influenced them, either through personal contact or through their writings, those most often named, in order of frequency, were Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, C. G. Jung, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Aldous Huxley, Roberto Assagioli, and J. Krishnamurti.

Others frequently mentioned: Paul Tillich, Hermann Hesse, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Buber, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Tarthang Tulku, Alan Watts, Sri Aurobindo, Swami Muktananda, D. T. Suzuki, Thomas Merton, Willis Harman, Kenneth Boulding, Elise Boulding, Erich Fromm, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Frederic Spiegelberg, Alfred Korzybski, Fleinz von Foerster, John Lilly, Werner Erhard, Oscar Ichazo, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Karl Pribram, Gardner Murphy, and Albert Einstein.
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Re: The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson

Postby admin » Thu May 02, 2019 1:12 am

APPENDIX B: Resources for Change

The networks, periodicals and directories listed below are only a few of hundreds of publications and literally thousands of social-action and mutual-help networks and organizations whose orientation is “new paradigm." Those included here have a relatively broad focus and are open to anyone. Some, like the Association for Humanistic Psychology, help foster the birth of special-interest national and international networks as well as the forming of small local groups.

Many of these groups and publications are stable and well established. Others represent the type of spontaneously self-organizing entity described in Chapter 7 as SPINs — created, expanded, transformed, renamed, and occasionally even dissolved with very little fanfare.

Note that many of the books listed under “References and Readings" are also lists of resources and networks. Books like Mindstyles, Lifestyles by Nathaniel Lande and the more recent Mind Therapies, Body Therapies by George Feiss are essentially consumer guides and catalogs, offering information on a variety of transformative techniques. Ram Dass's Journey of Awakening includes a 50-page list of centers that teach meditation.

A guide for group discussion of ideas encompassed by The Aquarian Conspiracy is being prepared as this book goes to press. For information write P. O. Box 42211, Los Angeles, Calif. 90042.

NETWORKS AND ORGANISATIONS

Aquarius Tapes
Carrington Cottage
Lincoln Road
Bassingham, Lines.
Free lending library of cassette tapes, including many conference proceedings. Catalogue available.

Association for Humanistic Psychology
325 Ninth St. San Francisco, Calif. 94103
(415) 626-2375
International organization; matrix for many networks and activities, local and regional conferences. Publishes newsletter for members; also bibliographies, lists of growth centers, educational programs. See also Journal of Humanistic Psychology under “Periodicals and Directories."

Association for Transpersonal Psychology
4615 Paradise Dr.
P.O. Box 3049
Stanford, Calif. 94305
(415) 327-2066
International organization. Publishes newsletter, lists of graduate programs in transpersonal psychology and transpersonal education. See also Journal of Transpersonal Psychology under "Periodicals and Directories."

Briarpatch
330 Ellis St.
San Francisco, Calif. 94102
(415) 771-6307
Network of businesses and professionals. Publishes Briarpatch Review newsletter about new-age entrepreneurship, $5 a year.

British Foundation for Natural Therapies
9 Zetland House
Marloes Road
London W8 5LB
Tel: 01-937 8405
Previously The Healing Research Trust. Research institute and information center for all types of natural therapy.

The Dartington Hall Trust
Elmhirst Centre
Dartington Hall
Totnes, Devon
Tel: Totnes (0803) 862224
Aims to make life in the countryside viable, through a wide range of activities including arts, education (Dartington Hall School), business and farming. Runs an annual one- week conference orientated towards personal growth and new values.

Ecology Party
(Gen. Sec. Paul Ekins)
42 Warriner Gardens
London SW11 4DU
Tel: 01-7202339
Offers political expression and action to those concerned with conservation, alternative technology, and planetary steward- ship.

Festival of Mind-Body-Spirit
159 George Street
London W1H5LB
Tel: 01-723 7256
Puts on the annual festival in Olympia, London, and other events including the Psychic's and Mystic's Fairs.

The Findhorn Foundation
The Park
Findhorn
Forres
Scotland IV36 OTZ
Community originally famed for its giant cabbages, now some 300 strong, and running various residential workshops and seminars. Seeks to integrate spiritual growth with an exemplary lifestyle. Also publishes bi-monthly journal One Earth Image.

Friends of the Earth
9 Poland Street
London W1V3DG
Tel: 01-434 1684
Aims to reduce environmental impact of human activities, promote energy conservation, protect wildlife and eliminate wasteful use of resources. Uses any legal methods from demonstrating to drafting legislation, leafleting to legal actions.

Futures Network
Marion Williamson
Deneswood, Wilmerhatch Lane
Epsom, Surrey
Phone: Epsom 25502
Write for information.

Future Studies Centre
15 Kelso Road
Leeds LS2 9PR
Tel: Leeds (0532) 459865
Volunteer run information center and library on alternative lifestyles. Open at all times. Also publishes bi-monthly newsletters.

Hanuman Foundation
2043 Francisco St.
Berkeley, Calif. 94709
Prison Yoga Project, counseling for the terminally ill networking in these areas.

Health for the New Age
1a Addison Crescent
London W14 8JP
Seeks to promote various forms of alternative medical treatment and to persuade government and other institutions to take them seriously.

Henry Doubleday Research Association
Convent Lane
Bocking
Braintree, Essex
Research and information on organic horticulture for amateur gardeners and small- holders.

Interface
63 Chapel St.
Newton, Mass. 02158
(617) 964-7140
Sponsors many activities relating to health, the physics of consciousness, transpersonal psychology and education, meditation, politics.

Institute of Noetic Sciences
530 Oak Grove Ave., #201
Menlo Park, Calif. 94025
(415) 332-5777
Funds research, symposia related to expanded states of awareness. Publishes newsletter.

Linkage
Box 2240
Wickenburg, Ariz. 85358
(602) 684-7861
International network started by Robert Theobald and Jeanne Scott to connect those interested in personal and social transformation. See Chapter 7 for fuller description.

New Age Access
P.O. Box 4
Hexham, Northumberland
Tel: Hexham (0434) 4809
Information service on wide range of topics concerning environment and conservation.

New Dimensions Foundation
267 State St.
San Francisco, Calif. 94114
(415) 621-1126
Produces radio programs, stages conferences and seminars for nonprofit organizations, publishes an “audio journal" of cassettes compiled from radio interviews of many of the individuals whose work is discussed in this book. Send for tape list, other information.

Nucleus
188 Old Street
London EC1
Tel: 01-250 1219 and 01-251 3733
Data bank on more than 6,000 "New Age" groups in the U.K.

Open Network
Box 18666
Denver, Colo. 80218
(303) 832-9264
Computerized network furnishes access to people, research, places.

Our Ultimate Investment
5615 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, Calif. 90019
(213) 935-4603
Program launched by Laura Huxley. Concerned with preparation for parenthood, health, pregnancy and childbirth, and optimum early environment — an "investment" in the children who will create the future. Various programs, network- ing. (Includes arranging for pre-adolescents to care for toddlers to introduce them to the serious responsibilities of bearing children.)

Phenomenon of Man Project
8932 Reseda Blvd.
Northridge, Calif. 91324
(213) 886-5260
Promotes and studies the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin regarding the evolution of human consciousness.

Planetary Citizens
777 United Nations Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10017
(212) 490-2766

Prison Ashram Project
Box 39
Nederland, Colo. 80466
Distributes tapes and literature to prisoners interested in personal transformation.

SAGE (Senior Actualization and Growth Exploration)
P.O. Box 4244
San Francisco, Calif. 94101
(415) 763-0965

Self Determination: A Personal/ Political Network
Box 126
Santa Clara, Calif. 98052
(408) 984-8134
Network described in Chapter 7. Although Self Determination is currently in hiatus as an organization, it is publishing Nexus, a directory of California resources for personal and social change.

Shanti Project
1137 Colusa St.
Berkeley, Calif. 94909
(415) 524-4370
Counselling of the terminally ill and the recently bereaved.

Teilhard Centre for the Future of Man
81 Cromwell Road
London, SW 7
Tel: 01-370-6660
Promotes and studies ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. Comprehensive library on Teilhard and related topics. Publishes The Teilhard Review.

Tranet
Box 567
Rangeley, Me. 04970
(207) 864-2252
“Transnational network" of those interested in appropriate and alternative technologies. Lists dozens of organizations in each issue of newsletter. Members in 124 countries.

Turning Point
Spring Cottage
9 New Road
Ironbridge
Shropshire TF8 7AU
Tel: Ironbridge (095 245) 2224
An international network of people covering many concerns but with the common feeling that humanity is at a turning point. Runs occasional conferences and publishes semi-annual newsletters linking groups and individuals.

World Future Society
P.O. Box 30369
Washington, D.C. 20014
(301) 656-8274
Promotes futurist thinking; publishes bi-monthly journal The Futurist and other bulletins and reviews.

Wrekin Trust
Dove House
Little Birch
Hereford HR2 8BB
Tel: Golden Valley (0981) 540224
Founded by Sir George Trevelyan, runs many conferences and meetings on subjects including healing, meditation, ESP, astrology and the new physics. Sees spiritual growth as fundamental to the New Age. Also sells cassette tapes of its conferences.

PERIODICALS AND DIRECTORIES

Brain/Mind Bulletin
Box 42211
Los Angeles, Calif. 90042
(213) 257-2500, 255-9841
Twice-monthly (after November 1980: every third week) newsletter edited and published by Marilyn Ferguson, $15 per year; $19 first-class; $22 foreign airmail.
At the end of each year all related articles on a particular topic are published in Theme Packs (learning, medicine, psychology, psychiatry, right and left brain, other subjects).
Send stamped, self-addressed business-size envelope for complimentary issue of Brain/Mind Bulletin and Theme Pack information.

See also Leading Edge, below.

Co-Evolution Quarterly
Box 428
Sausalito, Calif. 94965
(415) 332-1716
Quarterly, published by Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog, $12 per year.

Dromenon
P.O. Box 2244
New York, N.Y. 10001
(212) 675-3486
Bi-monthly, founded by Jean Houston and Robert Masters, focussing on holistic education and personal development, $6 per year.

East-West Journal
233 Harvard St.
Brookline, Mass. 02146
(617) 738-1760
Monthly coverage of new-age developments with part of each issue related to macrobiotics, $10 per year.

Future Studies Centre Newsletter
15 Kelso Road
Leeds LS2 9PR
Tel: Leeds (0532) 459865
Bi-monthly 15,000 word newsletter, packed with information keeping anyone interested in alternative options for the future up-to-date and in touch. Subscription £5.00. But free to helpers and those who exchange their own publications.

Interchange
(Editor, Guy Dauncey)
Holne Cross Cottage
Ashburton
S. Devon
Quarterly (or so) magazine in the vein of Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo and Carl Jung, dealing with personal transformation and planetary transformation.

International Cooperation Council Directory
7433 Madora Ave.
Canoga Park, Calif. 91306
(213) 398-6231
Directory published by Unity - in-Diversity Council (formerly International Cooperation Council), listing hundreds of organizations, $5.

Journal of Humanistic Psychology
325 Ninth St.
San Francisco, Calif. 94103
(415) 626-2375
Quarterly, $12 per year. See also Association for Humanistic Psychology under "Networks."

Journal of Transpersonal Psychology
P.O. Box 4437
Stanford, Calif. 94305
(415) 327-2066
Semiannual, $10 per year. See also Association for Transpersonal Psychology under "Networks."

Leading Edge: A Bulletin of Social Transformation
P.O. Box 42247
Los Angeles, Calif. 90042
Bulletin to be published by Marilyn Ferguson every third week beginning in late spring 1980. Format similar to Brain/ Mind Bulletin but focus on social aspects (politics, relationships, business, schools, law, arts, religion and other topics from The Aquarian Conspiracy not usually covered in B/MB). Subscriptions $15 per year, $19 first-class, $22 foreign airmail. Send stamped, self-addressed business-size envelope for sample.

New Age
32 Station St.
Brookline Village, Mass. 02146
(617) 734-3155
Monthly features on many of the topics covered in this book, $12 per year, $2 for single issue.

New Age Book Review
The Rainbow Cultural Foundation, Inc.
P.O. Box 324
Murray Hill Station
New York, N.Y. 10016
Monthly, $9 per year in the United States, $11 in Canada, $14 elsewhere.

New Humanity
(Editor, Johann Quanier)
51a, York Mansions
Prince of Wales Drive
London SW11
Bi-monthly magazine dealing with various "New Age 7 issues and seeking to integrate spiritual change with political change.

New Realities
680 Beach St.
San Francisco, Calif. 94109
(415) 776-2600
Slick bi-monthly, $9 per year, $1.50 for single issue.

Parabola: Myth and the Quest for Meaning
150 Fifth Ave.
New York, N.Y. 10011
Quarterly, $12 per year.

Re-Vision: A Journal of Knowledge and Consciousness
20 Longfellow Rd.
Cambridge, Mass. 02138
(617) 354-5827
Quarterly, $15 per year.

Resurgence
Ford House
Hartland
Bideford
Devon
Tel: Hartland (023 74) 293
Bi-monthly magazine concerned with personal growth and alternative lifestyles.

Soluna
159 George Street
London W1H 5LB
Bi-monthly magazine focussing on self-exploration, healing and expansion of consciousness, with diary of forthcoming events.

Self and Society
62 Southwark Bridge Road
London SE1 0AS
Bi-monthly journal of the European Association of Humanistic Psychology.

Time for Living
The Work and Leisure Society
Felin Faesog
Clynnog
Caernarvon
Gwynedd LL54 5DD
Tel: Clynnogfawr (028 686) 311
Quarterly magazine focussing at alternative options for the future and more relaxed lifestyles.

Trans Group News
188 Old Street
London EC1
Tel: 01-250 1219
Newsletter from "Nucleus" providing information on groups, publications and meetings, in England and around the world, which are focussing on a better future for the planet.
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Re: The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson

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Readings and References

This bibliography was designed to provide access to further exploration rather than for scholarly documentation. Most books are listed without detailed publishing information because they can be readily found through libraries, bookstores, and Books in Print. Many books are available in a number of different editions. For references more difficult to obtain, more detailed information is given.

These lists are by no means inclusive, as there are many valuable books available on most subjects covered. For the most part, those mentioned are in print, communicate clearly, and will lead the reader to further resources. Note that Appendix B lists supplementary resources: networks and periodicals.

In addition to technical scientific references cited for chapters 3, 6, 8, and 9, a major source was the author's newsletter, Brain/Mind Bulletin (interviews, summaries of papers delivered at conferences and published in scientific journals); listing all of the original citations would make for a voluminous bibliography, since material was drawn from ninety-six issues — four years of reporting. Those wishing to pursue a specific topic via Brain/Mind Bulletin "theme packs" can find further information in Appendix B.

The Aquarian Conspiracy Papers, a book of selected readings and excerpts from seminal writings, both published and privately circulated, will be released in early 1981.

CHAPTER 1. The Conspiracy

Sources of quoted material, other than those cited in the chapter, include Beatrice Bruteau's essay in Anima Spring 1977, Ilya Prigogine's lectures at the University of Texas, April 1978, The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan, The Transformations of Man by Lewis Mumford, An Experiment in Depth by P.W. Martin, and The Whole Earth Papers (see periodicals list in Appendix B).

CHAPTER 2. Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

In addition to the books named in the text, sources for quoted material include Saviors of God by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Growth of Civilization by Arnold Toynbee, The Hunger of Eve by Barbara Marx Hubbard, The New American Ideology by George Cabot Lodge, The Transformative Vision by Jose Arguelles, Survival of the Wisest by Jonas Salk, Between Man and Man by Martin Buber, Sources, edited by Theodore Roszak, a lecture by Roszak at the Claremont Colleges in 1976. Authors of The Changing Image of Man (Policy Research Report #4 of the Center for the Study of Public Policy, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California, prepared for the Charles F. Kettering Foundation) were Joseph Campbell, Duane Elgin, Willis Harman, Arthur Hastings, O. W. Markley, Floyd Matson, Brendan O'Regan, and Leslie Schneider.

CHAPTER 3. Transformation: Brains Changing, Minds Changing

Sources not identified in the text: Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, Choices by Frederic Flach, The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, My Belief: Essays on Life and Art by Hermann Hesse, Focusing by Eugene Gendlin, and various writings and lectures by Ernest Hilgard, including an article in Pain 1: 213-231. Meditation increasing blood flow to the brain was reported by Ron Jevning and co-workers at the University of California/ Irvine to the American Physiological Society annual meeting in 1979; the functional split-brain of psychosomatic patients in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 46: 220-244; the psychedelic effect of paying attention to one's awareness was reported in Archives of General Psychiatry 33: 867-876; theta bursts in the EEGs of long-term meditators in Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 42: 397-405. Data on meditation phenomena, shifts in states of consciousness, brain chemicals, and specialized functions of the left and right hemisphere were drawn from various issues of Brain I Mind Bulletin.

Books of related interest: The Language of Change by Paul Watzlawick, The Brilliant Function of Pain by Milton Ward, The Experience of Insight: A Natural Unfolding by Joseph Goldstein, The Natural Mind by Andrew Weil, The Brain Revolution by Marilyn Ferguson, The Stream of Consciousness , edited by Kenneth Pope and Jerome Singer, and Consciousness: Brain, States of Awareness, and Mysticism, edited by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson.

CHAPTER 4. Crossover: People Changing

Edward Hall's discussion of time appears in Beyond Culture and in an interview in Psychology Today, July 1976; Jonas Salk's remarks were made at the theory conference of the Association for Humanistic Psychology in 1975. On Waking Up by Marian Coe Brezic is published by Valkyrie Press, 2135 1st Ave. S., St. Petersburg, Florida 33712. Gabriel Saul Heilig's statement is in his afterword to Tenderness Is Strength, by Harold Lyons, Jr. Aldous Huxley's discussion of psychedelic drugs originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and is included in Collected Essays.

Related reading: On the over-all subject of personal transformation, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, Roberto Assagioli's Psychosynthesis, Abraham Maslow's Toward a Psychology of Being and The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, and C. G. Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul and The Development of Personality.

A variety of approaches to the transformative process: Halfway Through the Door by Alan Arkin, The Centered Skier by Denise McCluggage, The Ultimate Athlete by George Leonard, Open Secrets: A Western Guide to Tibetan Buddhism by Walt Anderson, The Gurdjieff Work by Kathleen Speeth, The Last Barrier by Reshad Feild, Mindways by Louis Savary and Margaret Ehlen-Miller, At a Journal Workshop by Ira Progroff, Awakening Intuition by Frances Vaughan, Meditation: Journey to the Self by Ardis Whitman, The Varieties of the Meditative Experience by Daniel Goleman, Journey of Awakening: A Meditator's Guidebook by Ram Dass, Freedom in Meditation by Patricia Carrington, The TM Technique by Peter Russell, Mind Therapies /Body Therapies by George Feiss, Giving in to Get Your Way by Terry Dobson and Victor Miller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, The Silva Mind Control Method by Jose Silva and Philip Miele, Getting There Without Drugs by Buryi Payne, Body Awareness in Action: A Study of the Alexander Technique by Frank Pierce Jones, The Roots of Consciousness by Jeffrey Mishlove, Books for Inner Development: The Yes! Guide, edited by Cris Popenoe; Mindstyles, Lifestyles by Nathaniel Lande; The Art of Seeing and The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley; Jacob Atabet by Michael Murphy, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, Est: 60 Hours That Transform Your Life by Adelaide Bry, Making Life Work by Robert Hargrove, Actualizations: Beyond Est by James Martin, and various books of Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan, Journey to Ixtlan, A Separate Reality, Tales of Power). See also listings under Chapter 11.

CHAPTER 5. The American Matrix for Transformation

American Transcendentalism 1830-1860: An Intellectual Inquiry by Paul F. Boiler, Jr.; Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform by William McLoughlin; California: The Vanishing Dream by Michael Davy; California: The New Society by Remi Nadeau; The California Revolution by Carey McWilliams; The Next Development in Man by Lancelot Law Whyte. George Leonard described his encounter with Michael Murphy in his foreword to Out in Inner Space by Dr. Stephen A. Applebaum; James Alan McPherson's statement in Atlantic, December 1978. Anthony F. C. Wallace's classic essay on revitalization movements was first published in American Anthropology 58: 264-281.

CHAPTER 6. Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science

Alfred Korzybski's ideas, set forth in Science and Sanity, have been explained in simpler terms by a number of authors, including Stuart Chase in Power of Words . Barbara Brown's views on the implications of biofeedback have been expressed in interviews, lectures, and three books (New Mind, New Body; Stress and the Art of Biofeedback, and the forthcoming Supermind.) See also Beyond Biofeedback by Elmer and Alyce Green.

The punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution was discussed by Stephen Jay Gould in Natural History, May 1977 and by Niles Eldredge at "New Horizons in Science," a 1978 meeting sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science. Evidence for multiple hominid ancestors of human beings was reviewed by Gould in Natural History, April 1976, in an article on Richard Leakey in Time, November 7, 1977, and in Leakey's book. People of the Lake. Szent-Gyorgyi's remarks on chance mutation appeared in The journal of Individual Psychology and in Synthesis Spring 1974. The report on intervening sequences in genetic material appeared in New Scientist May 1, 1978.

Ilya Prigogine's statements were taken from interviews, lectures, a special December 1977 edition of the Texas Times (published by the University of Texas system, Austin), an article on social dynamics in Chemical and Engineering News, April 16, 1979, and Thermodynamic Theory of Structure, Stability, and Fluctuations by P. Glandsdorff and Prigogine. Prigogine's somewhat technical book on the theory of dissipative structures. From Being to Becoming, will be published by W. H. Freeman Co. in 1980; his popular book, tentatively titled A Dialogue with Nature, will be published by Doubleday. The theory of dissipative structures is central to Erich Jantsch's The Self- Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution . (To receive the special issues of Brain/Mind Bulletin on Prigogine's theory, send a stamped, self-addressed business-size envelope to Box 42211, Los Angeles 90042.) The relationship of dissipative structure to brain function is discussed in Neurosciences Research Progress Bulletin, Volume 12, MIT Press, by A. K. Katchalsky et al.

A long technical article in Scientific American, November 1979, examines the evidence for Bell's theorem. The excerpts quoted from Jeremy Bernstein and Robert Jastrow appeared in essays in the Los Angeles Times. For current surveys and bibliographies of parapsychology: Advances in Parapsychological Research, Volume 1, Psychokinesis, and Volume 2, Extraserisory Perception , edited by Stanley Krippner (Plenum), and Brain, Mind, and Parapsychology, edited by Betty Shapin and Lisette Coly.

Karl Pribram's synthesis of his holographic brain model with David Bohm's view of the physical universe is in Consciousness and the Brain, edited by Gordon Globus et al. and Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing, edited by R. E. Shaw and J. Bransford. Pribram's remarks in the text were taken from lectures, conference proceedings, and interviews ( Human Behavior, May 1978, and Psychology Today, February 1979). David Bohm's theory of the implicate universe is in Quantum Theory and Beyond, edited by Ted Bastin; Foundations of Physics 1 (4), 3 (2), and 5 (1); Mind in Nature, no named author, published by University Press of America, and a long interview in Re-Visions (Summer/Fall 1978).

Other books of interest: Sensitive Chaos by Theodor Schwenk, Stalking the Wild Pendulum by Itzhak Bentov, Janus by Arthur Koestler, The Silent Pulse by George Leonard, On Aesthetics in Science, edited by Judith Weschler, The Reflexive Universe and The Bell Notes by Arthur Young, Grow or Die: The Unifying Principle of Transformation by George T. L. Land, The Intelligent Universe by David Foster, and Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi.

CHAPTER 7. Right Power

In addition to books and authors identified in the chapter. New American Ideology by George Cabot Lodge, Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill's essay, "On Liberty" and Henry David Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience"; Gandhi's Truth by Erik Erikson; Gandhi the Man by Eknath Easwaran is published by Nilgiri Press, Box 477, Petaluma, CA 94952; interviews with Jerry Rubin and his book. Growing (Up) at 37; article by Tom Hayden in the Los Angeles Times; John Platt's Step to Man; essay by Melvin Gurtov adapted from Making Changes: Humanist Politics for the New Age; Man for Himself and The Sane Society by Erich Fromm; On Personal Power by Carl Rogers; interview with James MacGregor Burns in Psychology Today, October 1978; An Incomplete Guide to the Future by Willis Harman; "The Pornography of Everyday Life," an essay by Warren Bennis in the New York Times; interview with John Vasconcellos in New Age, October 1978; Harold Baron's article in FocusIMidwest, Volume 11, No. 69; "Women and Power" monograph from Whole Earth Papers (see Appendix B, periodicals); After Reason by Arianna Stassinopoulos, scenarios of the future by Stahrl Edmunds in The Futurist, February 1979. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform by William McLoughiin, Beyond Culture by Edward Hall and interv ; ew with Hall in Psychology Today, July 1976.

Virginia Hine's description of SPINS, "The Basic Paradigm of a Future Sodo-Cultural System" first appeared originally in World Issues, April; May 1977, published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Hine and Luther Gerlach wrote People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation and Lifeway Leap: The Dynamics of Change in America. See also Gerlach's article on movements of revolutionary change in American Behavioral Scientist 14 (6): 812-835.

Related books of interest included Liberating Vision by John Vasconcellos, New Age Politics by Mark Satin, Many- Dimensional Man by James Ogilvy, and The Making of a Counter Culture, Where the Wasteland Ends, and PersonIPlanet by Theodore Roszak. Resource Manual for a Living Revolution by Virginia Coover et al. is available from Movement for a New Society (see Appendix B).

CHAPTER 8. Healing Ourselves

Richard Selzer's essay about Yeshi Donden, the Tibetan doctor, appeared in Harper's, January 1976 and Reader's Digest, August 1976. The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Health report #94-887 on humanistic medicine was issued May 14, 1976. Edward Carpenter's view of health as a governing harmony appears in his book, Civilization: Its Cause and Cure. The experiments on the role of the physician's belief in placebo effect were described in Persuasion and Healing by Jerome Frank. Rick Ingrasci on the placebo: New Age, May 1979. Kenneth Pelletier on stress: Medical Self-Care 5. The effect of confronting or avoiding: Psychophysiology 14: 517-521.

The role of the brain in the immune response. Science 191: 435-440, and Psychosomatic Medicine 37: 333-340; the new model of the immune system as a cognitive process, proposed by Francisco Varela of the University of Colorado Medical Center, Denver, and a Brazilian allergist, Nelson Paz, Medical Hypothesis and BrainIMind Bulletin February 6, 1978; the effect of bereavement on the immune system, Lancet, April 16, 1977; the link between heart and brain. Journal of the American Medical Association, 234: 9 and Science 199: 449-451; stress as a "co-carcinogen," Clinical Psychiatry News 5 (12): 40 and Science News 113 (3): 44—45. See also The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness by James J. Lynch; Getting Well Again: A Guide to Overcoming Cancer for Patients and Their Families by Carl and Stephanie Simonton; Imagery of Cancer by Jeanne Achterberg and Frank Lawlis.

On the body as pattern and process: Rolfing: The Integration of Human Structures by Ida Rolf; Wallace Ellerbroek's article on disease as process first appeared in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine: 16 (2): 240-262.

Anatomy of an Illness, a book by Norman Cousins, describes his treatment and recovery, based on the much-reprinted article from the New England Journal of Medicine; see also Saturday Review, May 28, 1977; George Engel's essay appeared in Science 196: 129-136. The new test for entry into medical college: the author's article, "Once and Future Physician," in Human Behavior February 1977. Maggie Kuhn's comments were made during a lecture in Los Angeles in 1977.

For further reading: Healing from Within by Dennis Jaffe, Bodymind by Ken Dychtwald, Free Yourself from Pain by David Bresler, The Mind/Body Effect by Herbert Benson, Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer by Kenneth Pelletier; Therapeutic Touch by Delores Krieger; Wellness, edited by Cris Popenoe (compendium of 1,500 books with publishers' addresses); Maggie Kuhn on Aging by Dieter Hessel; Your Second Life by Gay Gaer Luce (based on the SAGE program); Life's Second Half: The Dynamics of Aging by Jerome Ellison; Maternal-Infant Attachment by Marshall Klaus; The Competent Infant: Research and Commentary, edited by Joseph Stone et al.; an article on hospices. Science 193: 389-391.

CHAPTER 9. Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

Leslie Hart's article on ''brain-antagonistic schools," Phi Delta Kappan, February 1978; Hermann Hesse's essay on school from Beneath the Wheel; John Gowan on creativity from Journal of Creative Behavior, 2 (2); Edward Hall on culture from Psychology Today interview, July 1976; Synectics and Title I students, Psychiatric Annals special issue on creativity 8 (3); Joseph Meeker on "ambidextrous education" in North American Review, Summer 1975; Eskimo children, volume 4 of Children of Crisis by Robert Coles; expectations, Pygmalion in the Classroom by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson and Experimenter Effects in Behavioral Research by Rosenthal; "Miss A," Harvard Educational Review 48: 1-31; movement toward transpersonal education. Phi Delta Kappan, April 1977; over-obedience. Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram, Science News, August 20, 1977, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 1977; on "Why Johnny Can't Disobey" in The Humanist, September-October 1979. The Milwaukee Project has been described in a number of articles and book chapters; for a list of publications, send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Rehabilitation Research, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706. Material on brain-hemisphere specialization, non-verbal sensitivity, the facilitative behaviors movement, the value of reframing problems, and many other topics was drawn from Brain/Mind Bulletin, October 1975-November 1979.

Related reading: Education and the Brain, edited by Jeanne Chall and Allan Mirsky; Alternatives in Education: Schools and Programs by Allan Glatthorn; Beyond the Scientific, edited by Arthur Foshay and Irving Morrissett (published by Social Science Education Consortium, 855 Broadway, Boulder, Colorado 80302); Values in Education by Max Lemer; The Metaphoric Mind by Bob Samples; The Wholeschool Book by Robert Samples, Cheryl Charles, Dick Barnhart; Transpersonal Education: A Curriculum for Feeling and Being by Gay Hendricks and James Fadiman; The Centering Book by Hendricks and Russell Wills; The Second Centering Book by Hendricks and Thomas B. Roberts; Meditating with Children by Deborah Rozman; The New Games Book, by Andrew Fleugelman; The Brain Revolution by Marilyn Ferguson; The Brain Book by Peter Russell; Suggestology by Georgyi Lozanov; Superlearning, by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder; The Relevance of Education by Jerome S. Bruner; The Success Fearing Personality by Donnah Canavan-Gumpert et al.; Four Psychologies Applied to Education, edited by Thomas B. Roberts; Reversals (an account of dyslexia) by Eileen Simpson; Self-Fulfilling Prophecies by Russell A. Jones.

CHAPTER 10. The Transformation of Values and Vocation

In addition to books and other sources mentioned in the text: Willis Harman on values. Fields Within Fields 5 (1); Lawrence Peter on voluntary simplicity, Human Behavior, August 1978; L. R. Mobley's "Values Option Process," a paper delivered at the 1978 conference of the General Systems Research Association; On Caring by Milton Mayerhoff; study of high-achieving managers summarized in Training, February 1979; problems of productivity, Training, January 1979; information on voluntary simplicity report and VALS reports Center for the Study of Social Policy, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California. Right- and left-brain strategies of managers and planners. Psychophysiology 14: 385-392; McGill study, Brain/Mind Bulletin, August 2, 1976; intuition and inference in executive decision-making: Fortune, April 23, 1979; readiness of workers to learn intuitive methods: Planning Review, September 1978; interview with Sim Van der Ryn, New Age, March 1979; quote on "high intention" from Werner Erhard by William W. Bartley III; creative imagination as wealth from Humanomics by Eugen Loebl; danger of technology as master, Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum. A book by Bob Schwartz on the new entrepreneur will be published in 1980 by Simon and Schuster.

CHAPTER 11. Spiritual Adventure: Connection to the Source

Zbigniew Brzezinski's comments appeared in a James Reston interview for the New York Times syndicate, December 31, 1978; Sy Safransky's essay in The Sun, published in Durham, North Carolina; Robert Ellwood's historic view. Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America. Herbert Koplowitz's monograph on Unitary Operational Thinking was summarized in Brain/Mind Bulletin, October 2, 1978. Ron Browning's statement on transcending the system is from his 1978 dissertation, "Psychotherapeutic Change East and West: Buddhist Psychological Paradigm of Change with Reference to Psychoanalysis." Jung's comment on the transpersonal perspective is taken from his foreword and commentary in The Secret of the Golden Flower by Richard Wilhelm; Karl Pribram's speculation on mystical access to the implicate order. Psychology Today interview February 1979; Capra's "seeing" of cascades of energy. The Tao of Physics; psychedelics facilitating access to the holographic domain, Stanislav Grof's article in Re-Visions, Winter-Spring 1979 and his book, LSD Psychotherapy ; the image of the ocean and outcropping of rock in Karl Sperber's article in Journal of Humanistic Psychology 19 (1); William James's definition of God from The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Related reading: Forgotten Truths by Huston Smith; A Sense of the Cosmos: The Encounter of Modem Science and Ancient Truth by Jacob Needleman; The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck; Life After Life and Reflections on Life After Life, by Raymond Moody, Jr.; Meister Eckhart, translated by Raymond Blakney; The Way of a Pilgrim and The Cloud of Unknowing, authors unknown; Coming Home by Lex Hixon; Shamanic Voices by Joan Halifax; Ten Rungs by Martin Buber; Tales of the Dervish by Idries Shah; Reflections of Mind by Tarthang Tulku; Meditation in Action by Chogyam Trungpa; What Is Zen? and An Introduction to Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki; The Master Game by Robert S. de Ropp; Transpersonal Psychologies , edited by Charles Tart; The Rediscovery of Meaning by Owen Barfield; The Book (on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are), The Wisdom of Insecurity , The Joyous Cosmology and The Essence of Alan Watts (a posthumous anthology) by Alan Watts; Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition by John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Griffin; Toward Final Personality Integration by A. Reza Aresteh. See also listings under Chapter 4.

A scholarly selected bibliography, "Science and Parascience," relating to the integration of scientific and mystical views, has been com- piled under the auspices of the Program for the Study of New Religious Movements in America ($2 from the Graduate Theological Union Library, 2451 Ridge Road, Berkeley, California 94709).

CHAPTER 12. Human Connections: Relationships Changing

Martin Buber's "secrecy without a secret" passage is in Between Man and Man ; Krishnamurti on love from Freedom from the Known; John Cuber on the changing attitude toward "rules" and the views of Rustum and Della Roy on monogamy are in Intimate Life Styles: Marriage and Its Alternatives, edited by Jack and Joann DeLora; Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad on transforming sexuality, from New Age August 1978; Adrienne Rich account from Of Woman Born; Ted Clark and Dennis Jaffe in Grassroots, July 1973; Hossain Danesh's article on the authoritarian family and its adolescents, Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal 23: 479-485. See also Androgyny by June Singer.

CHAPTER 13. The Whole-Earth Conspiracy

Aurelio Peccei's reference to the groups that are the "yeast of change" appeared in The Futurist, December 1978; The Future in Our Hands movement, in New Age, October 1979; the efforts of Les Vertes in Co-Evolution Quarterly, Winter 1977-1978; Patricia Mische on women and power, Whole Earth Papers 1 (8) and James Baines on the peace paradigm, Whole Earth Papers 1 (1); some of the material about the Hunger Project was taken from various issues of the project's newspaper, A Shift in the Wind. The Tolstoi passage was published in The New Spirit, edited by Havelock Ellis.
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Name Index*

See Also Subject Index

*Many of the names and titles that appear in References and Readings are not
included in this index. See also alphabetical lists of networks and periodicals in
Appendix B.

Adams, John, 121
African Genesis, 161
Airliehouse, 261
Alcott, Bronson, 47
Alighieri, Dante (see Dante), 150
Alliance for Survival, 200
Alstad, Diana, 398-399
Alternative Birth Centers, 270-271
American Association for the
Advancement of Science, 147
American Association of Medical
Colleges, 267
American Council of Life
Insurance, 351
American Holistic Medical
Association, 265
American Home Economics
Association, 402
American Medical Association,
American Medical Students
Association, 264
American Productivity Center, 350
American Psychological Association, 221
American Society for Psychical
Research, 175k
Amnesty International, 240
Anna Karenina, 399
Another Place, 336
Appollinaire, Guillaume, 293
Arcosanti, 336
Ardrey, Robert, 161
Arguelles, Jose, 62, 214, 319-320
Amheim, Rudolf, 160k
Ashen, Ruth Ananda, 55
Assagioli, Roberto, 220, 365, 420
Association for Holistic Health, 262
Association for Humanistic Psychology, 39, 141k, 220, 236, 313
Aurobindo Ashram, 138
Aurobindo, Sri, 420
Auroville, 336
Avery, Oswald, 177

Bach, Richard, 115
Baines, James, 411-412
Baker, Russell, 33
Balzac, Honore de, 385
Barker, Eric, 117
Baron, Harold, 208
Bartley, William, 90k
Bates, William, 100
Bateson, Gregory, 59, 420
Bay Area Association for Alternatives
in Psychiatry, 274
de Beauvoir, Simone, 395-396
Belas, Ula, 179k
Bell, J., 171
Bellow, Saul, 107, 110, 366
Benedict, Ruth, 420
Bennis, Warren, 194
Benson, Herbert, 237
Bentov, Itzhak, 179k
Bergier, Jacques, 53-54, 152
Bergson, Henri, 167, 184
Berkeley Christian Coalition, 369-370
Bernstein, Jeremy, 170
Berry, Wendell, 336
Berryman, John, 99
Bhagavad Gita, 47
Birth Without Violence, 234
Blake, William, 46-47, 119, 379, 381
Bohm, David, 46, 180-181, 186, 321
Bohr, Niels, 151, 173
Book of Mirdad, 176
Boorstin, Daniel, 124
Borghese, G. A., 65
Borman, Leonard, 218
Boulding, Elise, 420
Boulding, Kenneth, 55k, 222, 305, 420
Boyle, Kay, 85
Bradbury, Ray, 92
Brave New World, 54
Brezic, Marian Coe, 114-115
Briarpatch, 220, 353-354
British Broadcasting Corporation, 218
Broder, David, 133
Brooke, Rupert, 361
Brown, Barbara, 153
Brown, Charlie (Peanuts), 310
Brown, Jerry, 216, 231, 235
Brown, Norman O., 137
Brown, Sam, 207
Browning, Ron, 372
Bruner, Jerome, 298, 310
Brunner, John, 88, 99
Bruteau, Beatrice, 26
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 363-364
Buber, Martin, 52, 80, 191, 244, 387,
392-393, 394, 420
Bucke, Richard, 48
Burbank, Luther, 175
Burns, James MacGregor, 121, 201-
202, 208, 227, 231, 266
Business Exchange, 333
Butler, Samuel, 73

California Commission on Crime
Control and Violence Prevention,
235
California: The Great Exception, 133
Callenbach, Ernest, 358
Campbell, Joseph, 58
Campbell, Susan, 394n
Cappa, Laurel, 265
Capra, Fritjof, 145, 149-150, 152, 172,
261n, 374
Carlson, Rick, 261, 261 m
Carlyle, Thomas, 47
Carnegie Council on Children, 399
Carnegie Foundation for the Ad-
vancement of Teaching, 305-306
Carpenter, Edward, 30-31, 48, 63, 69,
101, 105, 214, 248, 310
Carrel, Alexis, 175m
Carter, Jimmy, 231
Castaneda, Carlos, 59, 95, 97, 130,
137, 184, 291-292, 321
Catherine of Siena, Saint, 102
Cavafy, C. P„ 102, 189
Center for the Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences, 137, 178
Center for Attitudinal Healing, 272
Center for Integral Medicine, The, 262
Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions, 137
Central Intelligence Agency, 126 n
Challenge of California, 133
Changing Image of Man, The, 61, 342
Channon, Jim, 347
Chapin, Harry, 346, 347
Charge-a-Trade, 333
Chew, Geoffrey, 172
Childhood's End, 62, 157-158, 294
Clark, Barbara, 309
Clark, Ted, 400
Clarke, Arthur, 62, 157-158, 294
Cobbs, Price, 139
Coleridge, Samuel, 47
Commager, Henry Steele, 230
Committee for the Future, 57
Commonweal, 39
Communications Workers of America, 351
Continental Drift, 133
Cooperative College Community,
335-336
Copernicus, 27
Cori, Carl, 311
Corrigan, Mairead, 240
Cosmic Consciousness, 48
Couple's Journey, The, 394 n
Cousins, Norman, 264
Crossing Point, The, 60
Cuber, John, 398
cummings, e. e., 68

da Cusa, Nicholas, 381
Damman, Erik, 409
Dancing Wu Li Masters, The, 172
Danesh, Hossain, 401
Dante Alighieri, 150
Darwin, Charles, 53, 158
Daumal, Rene, 82
Davy, Michael, 134, 135
Death at an Early Age, 284
Demian, 49, 82
Democracy in America, 37-38
Denver Free University, 319
Denver, John, 113, 415
Dewey, John, 47
Dial, The, 123
Dickinson, Emily, 47
Dirac, Paul, 173
Divine Comedy, The, 150
Dolgoff, Eugene, 179m
Donne, John, 256
Doors of Perception, The, 105-106
Dorothy (Wizard of Oz), 85
Dostoevski, Fyodor, 387, 402
Dubos, Rene, 55 h
Durrell, Lawrence, 187

East/West Journal, 130
Easwaran, Eknath, 238-239, 335
Eccles, John, 152
Economics As If People Mattered, 356
Ecotopia, 358
Eddington, Arthur, 182
Edge of History, The, 317
Edison, Thomas, 175m
Edmunds, Stahrl, 238
Einstein, Albert, 27, 149, 150, 175m,
402, 420
Eldredge, Niles, 158
Eliade, Mircea, 55m
Eliot, T. S., 117, 184, 363, 385
Ellerbroek, Wallace, 257
Ellis, Havelock, 227-228
Ellis, John Tracy, 368-369
Ellison, Jerome, 273
Ellwood, Robert, 367
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 47, 122, 123,
135, 184, 367
Engel, George, 266
Erhard, Werner, 113, 261m, 351-352,
413, 420
Erikson, Erik, 200
Esalen Institute, 87, 98, 137-140
d'Espagnet, Bernard, 172
Eupsychean Network, 56
Executive Trade Club, 333

Family Hospital of Milwaukee, New
Life Center, 270-271
Fantini, Mario, 281
Fegley, Robert, 340
Fehmi, Leslie, 295
Feild, Reshad, 376
Feldenkrais, Moshe, 87, 255, 261m
Fenelon, Francois, 405
Ferguson, Charles, 121m
Ferguson, Tom, 268
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 385-386
Fields, Rick, 367
Findhorn, 336
Flach, Frederich, 73-74, 109-110
Flatland, 65-66, 69, 362
Flaubert, Gustave, 135-136
Fletcher, Jerry, 319
Floyd, Keith, 183
Foerster, Heinz von, 420
Forum for Correspondence and
Contact, 220
Foster, David, 182
Francis of Assisi, Saint, 180
Frank, Jerome, 299, 259, 275
Frankl, Viktor, 69, 87, 115, 220
Franklin, Benjamin, 121m
Free for All, 333
Free Speech Movement, 58, 111, 138
French Academy, 151, 249
Freud, Sigmund, 53, 229
Fromm, Erich, 55m, 57, 62, 113, 225,
420
Frost, Robert, 135, 241
Fuller, Buckminster, 108, 259, 284,
307, 383, 420
Fuller, Margaret, 47, 123
Fuller, Robert, 113
Future in Our Hands, 409-410
Future Shock, 302

Gabor, Dennis, 178, 179m
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 197
Galilei, Galileo, 27, 187, 292
Galyean, Beverly, 303-314
Gamesman, The, 342
Gandhi, Mohandas, 47, 199-201, 214,
216, 224, 228, 239
Gandhi the Man, 239
Garcia Lorca, Federico, 102
Gendlin, Eugene, 79-80, 92, 169, 297
Geranium on the Window Sill Just Died,
but Teacher You Went Right On, The,
311
Gerlach, Luther, 216, 217
Gift of Unknown Things, 321
Gilbert, Walter, 160
Glass Bead Game, The, 82
Goldenseal, 264-265
Goldstein, Joseph, 103
Gordon, William J.J., 304-305
Gottleib, Ray, 302
Gough, Harrison, 266-267
Gould, Steven Jay, 158, 159-160
Gowan, John, 302-303, 320
Grayson, C. Jackson, 350
Green Alliance, 409
Green, Edith, 286 n
Greening of America, The, 60
Gregg, Richard, 338
Gregory, Dick, 415-416
Grof, Stanislav, 375-376
Gross, Ronald, 317-318
Growing Up Gifted, 309
Guide for the Perplexed, 357
Guillemin, Roger, 155
Gunther, Richard, 354
Gurdjieff, G. I., 86
Gurtov, Melvin, 190, 191, 224

Haldane, J. B. S„ 148
Hall, Edward, 104, 229, 303
Hammarskjold, Dag, 109
Haney, Craig, 301
Harman, Willis, 61, 226, 230-231,
339-340, 420
Harris, Evan, 179m
Harris, Lou, 227
Hart, Leslie, 296
Hawking, Stephen, 174
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 47
Hayakawa, S. I., 139
Hayden, Tom, 208-210
Healy, Dorothy, 207
Heard, Gerald, 137
Heidegger, Martin, 408
Heilig, Gabriel Saul, 115
Heisenberg, Werner, 55n, 134-135,
151
Herbert, Nick, 172
Hesse, Hermann, 49, 76, 82, 116, 130,
301, 368, 420
Hiatt, Howard, 267, 268-269
Hilgard, Ernest, 75
Hine, Virginia, 216, 217
Hofmann-LaRoche, 340m
Flolism and Evolution, 48, 156
Holt, John, 58
Houston, James, 133
Houston, Jean, 152
Hubbard, Barbara Marx, 57, 113
Hugo, Victor, 405
Human Systems Management, 62
Hunger Project, 413-416
Hutschnecker, Arnold, 266
Huxley, Aldous, 50 m, 52, 54-55, 82,
105-106, 130, 136, 138, 190, 223,
271, 310, 327, 374-375, 381, 420
Huxley, Laura, 271
Huxley, T., 158

Ichazo, Oscar, 420
Illich, Ivan, 55 m
Illusions of Urban Man, 193
Ingrasd, Rick, 249-250
Inkeles, Alex, 124
Institute of Humanistic
Medicine, The, 262
International Trade Exchange, 333
Island, 54-55

Jacob Atabet, 45, 113
Jacobson, Lenore, 309
Jaffe, Dennis, 392, 400
James, Henry, 300
James, William, 48, 71, 87-88, 175m,
189, 347, 365, 371, 382
Jampolsky, Gerald, 272
Janet, Pierre, 175m
Jastrow, Robert, 173
Jeans, James, 182
Jeffers, Robinson, 135
Jefferson, Thomas, 120
Johnson, Lyndon, 138
Jonas, Hans, 272
Journey to Ixtlan, 97m
Jung, Carl, 49, 50m, 96, 99, 109, 130,
175m, 365, 372, 420
Justine, 187

Katdhalsky, Aharon, 167-168
Katz, Alfred, 215-216
Kazantzakis, Nikos, 49, 81m, 102,
Keller, Helen, 124
Kelly, Walt, 59
Kettering Foundation, 61
King, Martin Luther, 47, 138
Koestler, Arthur, 185, 220
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 310
Koplowitz, Herbert, 371-372
Korzybski, Alfred, 51, 149, 420
Kostelanetz, Andre, 105
Kozol, Jonathan, 284
Kramer, Joel, 398-399
Krieger, Dolores, 275-276
Krippner, Stanley, 306
Krishnamurti, J., 130, 395, 420
Krupnik, Lou, 207
Kuhn, Maggie, 273
Kuhn, Thomas, 26, 27, 28, 151, 178m,
197, 320
Kumarappa, J. C., 323

Lafayette, Marquis de, 121m
Laing, R. D., 274
Languages of the Brain, 178m
Lao-tse, 202, 357
Lashley, Karl, 177
Laurel's Cookbook, 335
Leadership and Management
Training, 237
Leakey, Louis, 161-162
Leboyer, Frederick, 234, 271
Leibniz, Gottfried W., 183
Leonard, George, 59, 136-140, passim,
370
Lerner, Max, 129-130, 286-287
Lerner, Michael, 39
Levin, Bernard, 39-40
Levy, Peter, 132
Lewis, C. S., 53
Lifeline, 313
Lilly, John, 420
Lindbergh, Charles, 81m, 124, 384
Lindner, Robert, 53
The Linkage, 218-219
Literature and Western Man, 54
Litwak, Leo, 139-140
Lives of a Cell, The, 62, 253
Locke, John, 326
Lockheed Corporation, 141m
Lodge, George Cabot, 61-62, 196
Loebl, Eugen, 360
Lonely Crowd, The, 52, 279
Longfellow, Layne, 353
Lord of the Rings, 366
Lucas Aerospace, 350
Lyell, Charles, 158

McCarthy, Sarah, 317
Maccoby, Michael, 342
McCready, William, 364
McGill University, 349
Mclnnis, Noel, 208, 284
McKenna, Dennis, 179m
McKenna, Terence, 179m
McLoughlin, William, 127, 128,
231-232, 369
McLuhan, Marshall, 35, 55, 78, 129,
189, 262m, 307, 420
McMaster University, 267
McPherson, James Alan, 142
McRae, Norman, 355
McWilliams, Carey, 133
Magical Child, 32l
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 420
Man Who Gave Thunder to the Earth,
The, 184-185
Marin, Peter, 90
Martin, P. W., 31-32
Maslow, Abraham, 50?!, 56, 91, 130,
137, 146, 220, 309, 365, 393, 402, 420
Master Hakuin, 362
Matteson, Jay, 237-238
May, Rollo, 137, 227, 381-382
May, Scott, 268
Mayerhoff, Milton, 55 n, 342, 381, 393
Mead, Margaret, 284, 420
Medved, Ron, 349-350
Meeker, Joseph, 305
Meister Eckhart, 46, 184, 382, 385
Melville, Herman, 47, 123
Memoirs of Hadrian, The, 145
Mendel, Gregor, 177
Mendell, Jay, 353
Menninger Foundation, 152, 350
Menninger, Karl, 274
Menninger, Roy, 260
Mental Radio, 175m
Merton, Thomas, 57, 420
Mesmer, Anton, 27, 299
Meyer, C. E., Jr., 340-341
Mid-Peninsula Conversion
Project, 221
Milgram, Stanley, 316-317
Mill, John Stuart, 197-198, 330
Miller, Henry, 51-52, 117
Milwaukee Project, 284n
Mind Parasites, The, 193
Mische, Patricia, 226, 411
Mr. Sammler's Planet, 107
Mitchell, Edgar, 108-109
Mobley, Louis, 327
Morning of the Magicians, The, 53-54,
152
Mott, Benjamin, 135
Mount Analog, 82
Movement for a New Society, 335
Muir, John, 135
Mumford, Lewis, 42, 55 n, 57
Murphy, Gardner, 53, 55n, 420
Murphy, Michael, 45, 94, 113, 137-
140, passim
Murray, W. H., 108
Murry, John Middleton, 81
Must We Conform? 53
Myrdal, Gunnar, 220

Nadeau, Remi, 132-133
NAPSAC (National Association of
Parents and Professionals for Safe
Alternatives in Childbirth), 271
Narcissus and Goldmund, 82
Nasafi, Aziz, 172-173
Nash, Paul, 321
National Academy of Sciences, 135
National Association for Humanistic
Gerontology, 273
National Commission on Drug and
Marijuana Abuse, 126m
National Endowment for the
Humanities, 306
National Humanities Center, 306
National Institute of Mental Health,
263
National Opinion Research, 365
National Training Laboratories, 87
Nazarea, Apolinario, 186n
Needleman, Carla, 346
Needleman, Jacob, 60-61, 140, 364,
367-368
Nelson, Ruben, 191, 193
New Dimensions Foundation,
130-131
New Earth Expo, 339
New Religions, The, 140
Newton, Isaac, 26, 149, 198
Nexus, 409
1984, 193
"Notes on the Tao of the Body
Politic," 207

Office of Technology Assessment,
191
Ogilvy, Jay, 224
On Waking Up, 114
O'Neill, Eugene, 117-118
Open Conspiracy: Blueprints for a World
Revolution, 49
Open Network News, 220
Oregon Urban-Rural Credit Union,
333
Origin of the Species, The, 158
Orwell, George, 193
Our Ultimate Investment, 271
Outcalt, Douglas, 265
Outsider, The, 56

Pacific Institute, The, 349
Padovano, Anthony, 368
Paine, Thomas, 119, 122
Paracelsus, 277
Pasteur, Louis, 27, 253
Pauli, Wolfgang, 175n
Pauling, Linus, 137
Pauwels, Louis, 53-54, 152
Peace People, 240
Pearce, Joseph Chilton, 321, 420
Peccei, Aurelio, 410
Pelletier, Kenneth, 251, 257
People Index, 221
Peris, Frederick, 139, 293, 401
Peter, Laurence, 338-339
Peter Principle, The, 338-339
Phenomenon of Man, The, 50-51
Piaget, Jean, 371
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 46,
70
Pietsch, Paul, 179
Pirsig, Robert, 106-107, 356
Planck, Max, 175k, 327m
Plato, 239
Platt, John, 56-57, 162, 215, 222, 240
Polanyi, Michael, 107, 177
Postman, Neil, 282-283
Prefontaine, Norbert, 391-392
Pribram, Karl, 152, 177-187, passim,
320-321, 373-374, 420
Price, Richard, 137
Priestley, J. B., 54
Prigogine, Ilya, 25, 163-169, passim,
173-174, 186, 327
Process and Reality, 49-50
Project Change, 313
Proust, Marcel, 117
Provender, 334
PUSH Program, 318

Quanier, Johann, 410

Radio and Television Belgium, 141
Ram Dass, 364-365
Ramagiri, 335
Raymond, Dick, 354
Razor's Edge, The, 138
Reflexive Universe, The, 385
Reich, Charles, 60
Renascence Project, 220, 355
Revel, Jean-Francois, 58, 125, 131
Revere, Paul, 121n
Revolution of Hope, 57
Rich, Adrienne, 227, 400
Richards, M. C., 60, 108
Richet, Charles, 151m, 175m
Riesman, David, 52-53, 279, 407-408
Rig Veda, 380
Rinzai, 377
Roberts, Tom, 308
Robertson, Laurel, 206
Robinson, John, 383
Rogers, Carl, 35, 57, 62, 130, 137,
233, 420
Rolf, Ida, 87, 255
Rolling Thunder, 276
Rosenthal, Robert, 309, 311
Rossman, Michael, 58, 59, 111-112,
207
Roszak, Theodore, 33-34, 36, 62, 99,
114, 130, 190, 213, 391
Rothman, Esther, 312
Rowland, Vernon, 168
Roy, Della, 397m-398m
Roy, Rustom, 397m-398m
Rubenstein, Arthur, 366
Rubin, Jerry, 206
Ruck, Frank, 350
Rumi, 88, 184
Rush, Benjamin, 121

Safransky, Sy, 366
de Saint-Exupery, Antoine, 108
St. Christopher's Hospice, London,
272
Salinger, J. D., 382
Salk, Jonas, 55m, 57, 109, 370
Satir, Virginia, 197
Saxon, David, 235
Schrodinger, Erwin, 151, 173, 175m
Schumacher, E. F„ 220, 325-326, 339,
356-357
Schutz, Will, 139
Schwartz, Bob, 354-355
Schwarz, Jack, 259, 276
Seeing Yourself See, 68
Self Determination, 62, 232
Seven Arrows, 308
Shanti Project, Berkeley, 272
Sherrington, Charles, 175m
Shimotsu, John, 321
Shockwave Rider, 88, 99, 113
Siddhartha, 82
Siegel, Mo, 355
Simon, Herbert, 327
Sinclair, Upton, 175m
Skinner, B. F„ 139, 229, 280
Sloan-Kettering Institute, 62
Small Is Beautiful, 356
Smith, Page, 136
Smuts, Jan Christian, 48-49, 156
Snow, C. P., 134, 147
Snyder, Gary, 135
Society for Physical Research, 175m
Soleri, Paolo, 220, 347
Solomon, Paul, 276
Solomon, Robert, 36
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 363
Spiegelberg, Frederic, 420
Spiritual Counterfeits Project, 369-
370
Sri Ramakrishna, 382
Stafford, William, 408
Stanford Research Institute, 61, 137,
338
Stapleton, Ruth Carter, 370
Stapp, Henry, 171
Stassinopoulos, Arianna, 39
Steiger, William, 243-244
Stein, Gertrude, 129
Stent, Gunther, 177
Step to Man, 222, 240
Steppenwolf, 82
Stemlight, David, 325
Stevens, Wallace, 23
Stokowski, Leopold, 105
Storm, Hyemoyohsts, 308
Stratton, George, 228
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The,
26, 178n
Strutt, J. W., 175m
Stulman, Julius, 326
Suzuki, D. T., 420
Swami Muktananda, 420
Swami Rama, 152
Swank, Calvin, 347
Swearingen, Robert, 276-277
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 46, 47
Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert, 161, 305

Tanco, Arturo, 413
Tao of Physics, The, 172
Taylor, Matt, 222
Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 282-
283
Teachings of Don Juan, The, 291-292
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 25, 43,
50-51, 68, 101, 113, 130, 184, 225,
243, 289, 294, 393, 402-403, 420
Theobald, Robert, 59, 191, 205, 218-
220, 224, 353
Thomas, Irving, 58
Thomas, Lewis, 62, 253, 407
Thompson, Francis, 279
Thompson, J. J., 175 n
Thompson, William Irwin, 135, 317
Thoreau, Henry, 47, 136, 198-199,
201, 206, 208, 339, 367
Threshold Foundation, 410
Thurber, James, 106
Tiller, William, 62, 179 m
Tillich, Paul, 137, 420
Tilopa, 379
de Tocqueville, Alexis C., 34, 37, 38,
190, 194-195, 225, 348, 360, 363, 416
Todd, Malcolm, 260-261
Toffler, Alvin, 302
Tolkien, J. R. R., 321, 366
Tolstoi, Leo, 416
Toynbee, Arnold, 51, 131, 137, 330
Trade-Americard, 333
Transformation, The, 59
Troubled Teachers, 312
Tulku, Tarthang, 241, 420

de Unamuno, Miguel, 142
Understanding Media, 55
Union of Experimenting Colleges and
Universities, 319
United Nations, 217, 369m
United States Department of Transportation, 163
University Without Walls, 319
Unsettling of America, The, 336
Upanishads, 103

Van der Ryn, Sim, 358-359
Vasconcellos, John, 233-235, 259
Les Vertes, 409
Von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, 52, 157, 220

Wadsworth, William, 98
Wallace, Anthony C. W., 127
Washington, George, 121m
Watson, Diane, 312
Watson, Lyall, 156, 178-179, 321
Watts, Alan, 137, 382, 420
Way of All Flesh, The, 73
Weiner, Norbert, 255
Weingartner, Charles, 282-283
Wells, H. G., 49, 213, 222
Wheeler, John, 173
Whitehead, Alfred North, 49-50, 167,
184, 383, 420
Whitman, Walt, 47, 117, 123, 132,
367-368
Whole Earth Catalog, 339
Whole Earth Papers, 39, 411
Whorf, Benjamin, 149
Whyte, Lancelot Law, 55m, 58
Wigner, Eugene, 152, 174
Will to Live, The, 266
Williams, Roger, 134
Williamson, John, 281
Wilson, Colin, 56, 162, 193, 382
Wilson, James Q., 133, 333m
Wisdom of the Heart, Tire, 51-52
Without Marx or Jesus, 58, 125
Wolf, Alvin, 217m
Wolfe, Tom, 90
Women and Power, 226
Wood, Grant, 254
Wood, Nancy, 184-185
Woodward, C. Vann, 131
Wordsworth, William, 98
World Future Society, 221
Worrall, Olga, 276

Young, Arthur, 385
Young, Ben, 392m
Yourcenar, Marguerite, 145

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 106-107, 356
Zimbardo, Philip, 301
Zukav, Gary, 172
Zumwalt, Elmo, 237

Subject Index

See Also Name Index

aging, 272-273
American dream, 119-225; and fourth
"great awakening," 127; and imagination, 142; see also United States
American Transcendentalists, 120-
123, 367
appropriate technology, see technology
Aquarian Conspiracy, 19-21, 23-43,
202-205, 220-221, 228, 238, 320,
346, 383-384, 377; and California,
136-141; and government, 235; and
medicine, 259-269; as network of
networks, 216-217; and paradigm
shifts, 151; see also Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire, networks
Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire,
20, 85-87, 115, 118, 141, 175, 230,
265, 280-281, 343, 367, 374, 383-
384, 418-420
attention, 68, 77-79, 87, 250-252, 295,
361
autarchy, 102; see also autonomy,
freedom
autonomy, 99, 120, 205, 225; in education, 292; in medicine, 241; and
others, 198; and personal relationships, 351; in workers, 348
awakening, capacity for, 406; as discovery of transformation, 97-98

barter, 333
Bell's theorem, 171-172, 275
bioenergetics, 102, 256
biofeedback, 86, 153-154, 206, 250,
258-259, 277
birth and bonding, 269-270
body, as pattern and process, 255-257
bodymind connection, 102, 142-143;
and health, 252-256; see also health
brain research, 77-81, 167-169, 179-
186, 295-300, 317
Buddha, eightfold path of, 190
business, transformation of, 340-342;
see also vocation

California, 132-141; center of spiritual
unrest, 60-61; conspiracy and cultural change in, 136-141; and
democratic experiment, 133; laboratory of change, 132-136; politics
of, 232-235
cancer, see immune system
center, transcendent, 32, 81-83; see
also Radical Center
change, 70-76, 112; avoidance of,
74-76; types of, 71-72
Cheyenne Medicine Wheel, 306-308
collective unconscious, 49, 96, 146
communication, 34-36, 408; and new
consciousness, 34; as social nervous system, 128-132
communities, 334-337; see also relationships, support systems
complementary, theory of, 173
connectedness, discovery of, 99-101
consciousness, 55, 58, 65-71, 75-83,
112, 153-156, 362, 375
conservation, 357-360
context, 297, 303-306; see also connection
cooperation, 187, 215; see also barter.
New Games, support networks,
synergy
cooperatives, 334-337
counterculture, 58-59, 126-128, 208
culture, 37-45; limits of, 104; transcendence of, 389, 390; and values,
389-390; see also counterculture,
cultural trance
cultural trance, freedom from, 103;
and social customs, 389; and trans-
formation, 390
curriculum, new, 314-317

decentralization, power of, 223; in
education, 317-320; see also paradigms: assumptions of old and new
deja vu, 185
democracy/ 194-196, 198; hidden
powers of, 226; and spirituality, 207
despair, 21, 36-37, 142
direct knowing, 371-376; stages of,
371-372; tradition of, 378
dissipative structures, 162-170, 223,
327; and learning, 291; and relationships, 392; and societies, 205,
327
dying, 272, 383-384
dyslexia, 299

ecology, see conservation
economics, 323-327; assumptions of
old and new paradigms, 328-330;
see also values
education, 279-282; and appropriate
stress, 291-292; beyond schools,
317-320; for context, 303-306; and
new society, 280; and “pedogenic
illness," 282-285; transpersonal,
287-288; see also learning, teaching
endorphins, 154-156; see also placebo
entrepreneurship, 353-356
euphenics, 307
evolution, 157-167; conscious, 69-71;
and dissipative structures, 25,
162-167; and genes, DNA, 160-161;
individual and collective, 70, 183,
385; of new species, 157; and trans-
formation, 161

failure, 118, 346
family, 399-403; planetary, 402-403
fear, of creative behavior, 274; of
heresy, 198; of higher potential, 91;
of knowing, 91, 146; and learning,
291-295; of mystical states, 274;
transformation of, 115-116
fear-of- success syndrome, 294
freedom, discovery of, 103; evolution
of, 142; see also autonomy

General Systems Theory, 52, 156-157
God, 370, 382-385
government, conspiracy in, 235-240;
and health, 259-260; as paternal
power, 193-196; see also politics,
power

healing, 275-277; and altered awareness, 250; and caring, 259; and electrical stimulation, 256; folk systems
of, 274-275; and imagination, 277;
models, 275; power, 275; and spiritual networks, 259; and will, 277; see
also health, psi
health, 241-277, 294-296; assumptions of old and new paradigm,
246-248; attention, 250-252; and belief systems, 248-250; and body-mind, 252-255; and health, 282-
284; and networks, 262; and transformation, 257-259; and wholeness, 242; see also healing, medicine
Hidden Observer, 75-76
high expectations, 308-310
"high intention,” 351-352
holism, 49, 156-157
holographic theory, 177-187; and
brain, 179-182; and Eastern philosophy, 373; and Hunger Project
analogy, 414; and medical model,
275
holomovement, 180-181
hope, 21, 36-37, 142
Hunger Project, 412-416

iatrogenic illness, 245
immune system, 253-254
Indian Medicine Wheel, see Cheyenne Medicine Wheel
integrity, 199-200
interdependence, 407
intuition, 267, 295-297, 353; collective, 225; discovery of and trust in,
107
I-Thou, 243-244

language, limits of, 66-67, 149
leadership, 205-210; transforming,
266
learning, 279-321; assumptions of old
and new paradigm, 286-291; and
brain specialization, 295-300, 305,
315, 317; and connection, 303-306;
and health, 282-284; and intuition,
296; role of metaphorical thinking,
305; and transformation, 291-295;
see also education, teaching
light, in spiritual experience, 385-386
logic, limitations of, 106; see also intuition
love, 392-395, 402-403; discovery of,
100; power of, 240; as state of consciousness, 380; and universal synthesis, 243

meaning, search for, 363-367; see also
transformation, discoveries of
media, 55; see also communication
meditation, 82, 86, 250, 258-259, 274;
see also spiritual disciplines
mind, 65-83; the body's, 252-255; and
disease, 260; healing power of, 54-
249; new, new world, 406-410; and
reality, 175; see also consciousness
monads, 183
mystical experience, 65-67; 362-366;
defined, 371; flow and wholeness,
379-382; see also direct knowing,
spiritual disciplines

nature, 145-146, 161, 171; see also science
Navy training program, 237
networks, 25, 39, 48, 62-63, 86, 234-
336, 421-427; SPINs, 216-217; sup-
port, discovery of, 112-115; tools
for social transformation, 213-221
New Age Caucus, 240
non-attachment, 104-105, 228, 396

Omega Point, 50
oxherding pictures, 378

paidea, 307, 317
pain, 74-76, 78; and learning, 291-
295, 308; in relationships, 387-392;
see also dissipative structures, placebo stress
paradigms and paradigm shifts,
26-30, 196-201, 286-291, 326-330;
assumptions of old and new paradigm of economics/ values, 328-
330; assumptions of old and new
paradigm of education/learning,
289-291; assumptions of old and
new paradigm of medicine/health,
246-248; peace, power paradigms,
410-412; assumptions of old and
new paradigm of politics/power,
210-212; “whole-earth paradigm,"
405
parapsychology, see psi
physics, 170-176; see also under Name
Index: Bohm, Bohr, Capra, Einstein, Heisenberg, Newton, Schrodinger
placebo effect, 249-250; see also endorphins
politics, 189-241; see also power
power, discovery of, 100; other
sources of, 221-226; of Radical Center, 192, 228-232; "right power,"
190; see also autonomy, freedom,
politics, responsibility
pravritti, 185
process, discovery of, 101-102; and
transformed life, 116-118; see also
learning, vocation, health, relationships
psi, 170-176, 275-276, 420
psychedelics, 89-90, 94-95, 106, 110-
111, 126, 374-376
psychiatry, new approaches, 274-275
psychology, see consciousness, mind,
psychotechnologies, transpersonal
psychology
psychotechnologies, 31, 97, 105; Actualizations, 37; Applied Kinesiology, 87, 255; Arica, 86; autogenic
training, 86; body disciplines, 87;
and brain synchrony, 79; Course in
Mirades, 87; dervish dancing, 87;
dream journal, 86; est, 87; Feldenkrais, 87, 255; Fischer-Hoffman
process, 87; focusing, 79, 169; Gestalt therapy, 87; guided imagery,
87; Gurdjieff work, 86; and healing,
259; hypnosis, 75-76, 86; improvisational theater, 86; and learning,
315; Lifespring, 86; Logotherapy,
87; music, 86; and nervous system,
88; Neurokinesthetics, 102, 255;
Primal Therapy, 87; psychotherapies, 87; psychosynthesis, 86;
Reichian therapy, 102; resistance
to, 88; Rolfing, 102, 253; Science of
Mind, 87; self-help, mutual-help
networks, 86; sensory isolation, 86;
Silva Mind Control, 86; sports, 87;
structural integration, 255; Sufi
stories, 86; Theosophy, 86; ultimate
placebo, 277; see also bioenergetics,
biofeedback, meditation, spiritual
disciplines
punctuationalism or punctuated equilibrium theory, 158-159

questions, new, 29, 76, 107, 116, 292,
376

Radical Center, 228-232, 287, 317,
381-382; see also center
re-choosing, 416-417
relationships, 387-403; changing
paradigm of, 397; transformative,
392 - 395; working, 348-351
religion, 361-385; see also spirituality
responsibility, discovery of, 110-112,
194; see also autonomy, freedom,
power
revolution, inwardness of, 206; "second American," 125-128; as a way
of life, 24
romance, defined, 396; transformation of, 395-399

Satyagraha, 199-201, 228, 273; see also
under Name Index: Gandhi
science, 145-187; model for social
change, 152; of transformation,
162-167; see also brain research, dissipative structures, evolution,
holographic theory, nature, psi,
physics
self, 99-101; see also autonomy
self-actualizers, as transcenders, 56,
402; and "new cops," 347; values
of, 285; see also under Name Index:
Maslow
self-fulfilling prophecy, 232, 272, 309
sex differences in perception, 229
sexuality, 397-399
social movements, 62, 126
society, see culture
spiritual experience and spirituality,
361-385; teachers, disciplines, 376-
379
stewardship, 225
stress, and health, 250-252; and learning, 291-295; and revolution, 126-
128; see also dissipative structures,
punctuationalism
success, 118, 346
Suggestology, 315
synchronidty, 108, 114, 174, 182
Synectics, 304-305
synergy, 156; and cooperation, 215; as
new wealth, 332 - 337; value of,
332-337
synthesis, defined, 156; and nature,
156
syntropy, 156, 161, 214

teaching, 292-295; see also education,
learning, spiritual experience
technology, 222, 356-359
time, 104, 115
transformation of brain and mind, 32,
63-67; and business and work,
340-342, 346-351; and critical mass,
62; defined, 68; discoveries of, 97-
116; fear of, avoidance of, 33, 74-76;
and medicine, 264-266; men and
women in, 389; and myths, 308;
personal, 24, 65-118; and political
crisis, 191; premonitions of, 43,
45-63; of quantity to quality, 176-
177; and relationships, 388-395;
science of, 162-167; stages of.
89-97; role of stress, crisis, paradox,
39, 73; and trust, 33; and values, 24,
323-324
transformative process, 65-118, 207;
and business, 353-354; and death-
birth, 389; and “the great learning,"
317-319; and relationships, 392-
395; see also psychotechnologies,
transformation
transformed life, qualities of, 116—118;
is the message, 118; and nature,
166; and social action, 192
transpersonal education, 287-288; see
also curriculum, education
transpersonal psychology, 372-373

uncertainty, discovery of, 105, 221,
248, 327, 375, 412
United States, 119-143, 367-368; see
also American dream, American
Transcendentalists
universe, 156, 182, 410

values, 323-360; of conservation,
357-360; "etherealization” of,
331-332; of knowing what you
want, 337-348; and paradigm shift,
197; of personal development,
351-353; transformation of, 24; see
also economics
vocation, 342-348; discovery of, 108-
110; as vehicle for transformation,
342
voluntary simplicity, 80, 338-339
walkabout, 307

wealth, sources of, 332-337, 360; see
also values
women, and power, 226-228

Zhabotinskii reaction, 165
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