Editors From The United States

"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. p. 362"

"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. p. 386"

"Zbigniew Brzezinski, ...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. p. 364"

"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?"

"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!"

"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."

"In literature there is a trusted device known as the Black Moment, the point where all seems lost just before the final rescue. Its counterpart in tragedy is the White Moment — a sudden rush of hope, a saving chance, just before the inevitable disaster. Some might speculate that the Aquarian Conspiracy, with its promise of last-minute turnabout, is only a White Moment in Earth's story; a brave, desperate try that will be eclipsed by tragedy — ecological, totalitarian, nuclear. Exeunt humankind. Curtain."

"We stand on the brink of a new age, Lewis Mumford said, the age of an open world, a time of renewal when a fresh release of spiritual energy in the world culture may unleash new possibilities. “The sum of all our days is just our beginning." Seen with new eyes, our lives can be transformed from accidents into adventures. We can transcend the old conditioning, the dirt-poor expectations. We have new ways to be born, humane and symbolic ways to die, different ways to be rich."

"The emergence of the Aquarian Conspiracy in the late twentieth century is rooted in the myths and metaphors, the prophecy and poetry, of the past. Throughout history there were lone individuals here and there, or small bands at the fringes of science or religion, who, based on their own experiences, believed that people might someday transcend narrow “normal" consciousness and reverse the brutality and alienation of the human condition."

"The premonition was recorded, from time to time, that a minority of individuals would someday be yeast enough to leaven a whole society. Serving as a magnet culture, they would attract order around them, transforming the whole. The central idea was always the same: Only through a new mind can humanity remake itself, and the potential for such a new mind is natural."

"The spirit of our age is fraught with paradox. It is at the same time pragmatic and transcendental. It values both enlightenment and mystery... power and humility ... interdependence and individuality. It is simultaneously political and apolitical. Its movers and shakers include individuals who are impeccably Establishment allied with one-time sign-carrying radicals."

"These courageous few have been history's radar, a Distant Early Warning System for the planet. As we will see, some of them expressed their insights in a romantic vein, others as intellectual concepts, but all were pointing to a larger view. "Open your eyes," they were saying, "there is more." More depth, height, dimension, perspectives, choices than we had imagined. They celebrated the freedom found in the larger context and warned of the dangerous blindness of the prevailing view. Long before global war, ecological stress, and nuclear crisis struck, they feared for the future of a people without a context."

"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."

"The crisis is evident in the chronic nature of unemployment and underemployment: the technological obsolescence that has overtaken millions of specialized skilled workers, increasing numbers of the highly educated vying for too few white-collar jobs, increasing numbers of teenagers and women trying to enter the work force."

"Our best hope now is to pay attention, to recognize the ways in which our lives and livelihood have been influenced, even run, by outmoded structures. Our ideas about work, money, and management grew out of an old stable social order irrelevant to present flux and were based on a view of humankind and nature long since transcended in science. The real world turns on different principles than those imposed by our partial economic philosophies."

"Rather than debating whether capitalism is right in its emphasis on opportunities for the individual or socialism in its concern for the collective, we should reframe the question: Is a materialistic society suited to human needs? Both capitalism and socialism, as we know them, pivot on material values. They are inadequate philosophies for a transformed society."

"There are illusions of rescue by technology, by the reshuffling of moneys and resources. But our temporary easing of this chronic illness—scarcities, dislocated markets, unemployment, obsolescence—is as dangerous as the medical treatment of symptoms when the cause of disease is unknown. Our intervention in the body economic, like intervention by drugs and surgery, often leads to severe side effects requiring further and deeper intervention."

"Just as health is vastly more than medicine, just as learning transcends education, so a system of values is the context for the workings of any economy. Whatever our priorities—self aggrandizement, efficiency, status, health, security, recreation, human relationships, competition, cooperation, craftsmanship, material goods—they are reflected in the workings of the economy. p. 326"

"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. p. 360"

"In synthesis may be our salvation—the path between right and left Aldous Huxley called "decentralism and cooperative enterprise, an economic and political system most natural to spirituality.""

"Spending is an opiate to many people, a balm to disappointments, frustrations, emptiness. If the individual transforms that inner distress, there is less need for drugs and distractions."

"Inner listening makes clearer to us what we really want, as distinct from what we have been talked into, and it might not have a price tag. We may also discover that "ownership" is in some sense an illusion, that holding on to things can keep us from freely enjoying them. Greater awareness may give us new appreciation for simple things."

"Making a life, not just a living, is essential to one seeking wholeness. Our hunger turns out to be for something different, not something more. p. 323"

"Buying, selling, owning, saving, sharing, keeping, investing, giving—these are outward expressions of inward needs. When those needs change, as in personal transformation, economic patterns change."

"If work becomes rewarding, not just obligatory, that also reorders values and priorities. We will look at the evidence for a new paradigm, based on values, which transcends the old paradigm of economics, with its emphasis on growth, control, manipulation."

"A junior-high student, John Shimotsu of Los Angeles, tried his hand at interpreting for his fellow eighth graders the holographic model of reality proposed by Pribram and physicist David Bohm. In conclusion, he said: Why can't you perform actions that we consider paranormal? I think it is because you do not think you can. You may say you wish to, or may sincerely want to, but that will not change what you subconsciously think. Our culture says that those actions would not be possible, so that is what you think is real. To change your reality, you would have to alter your innermost thoughts. The holographic idea is fascinating. What is theory today may be fact tomorrow."

"All over the world, children and young people are being exposed, via the communications revolution, to such ideas. They are not limited to the parochial beliefs of a single culture. p. 321"

"The shift to the values paradigm is reflected in changing patterns of work, career choice, consumption... evolving lifestyles that take advantage of synergy, sharing, barter, cooperation, and creativity. . . the transformation of the workplace, in business, industry, professions, the arts... innovations in management and worker participation, including the decentralization of power . . . the rise of a new breed of entrepreneurs . . . the search for "appropriate technology" . . . the call for an economics congruent with nature rather than the mechanistic views that have propelled us into our present crises."

"In the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill saw past the early materialist promises of the Industrial Age: No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in their mode of thought. In the 1930s historian Arnold Toynbee spoke of "etherealization"—the development of higher, intangible riches as the ultimate growth of a civilization. There seems to be growing sympathy, if not a mandate, for reversing the materialist trend. p. 330"

"If education cannot be mended, perhaps it can metamorphose. As someone pointed out, trying to explain the difference between reform and transformation, we have been trying to attach wings to a caterpillar. Our interventions in the learning process to date have been almost that crude. It is high time we freed ourselves of attachment to old forms and eased the flight of the unfettered human mind. p. 321"

"If we are not learning and teaching we are not awake and alive. Learning is not only like health, it is health. p. 282"

"Long before Thomas Kuhn observed that new ideas may have to wait for a new generation's acceptance, folk wisdom made this bittersweet point. A Hebrew proverb warns, Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. Karl Pribram once commented that a new generation will learn about paradox in the early grades and will grow up understanding concepts of primary and secondary levels of reality. p. 321"

"Because the economy is such a political issue it is propagandized, rationalized, lied about. Because our beliefs about the economy affect it, as in the "confidence index," business and government try to buffer the reaction of investors and consumers to unnerving economic news. And because divergent viewpoints are loudly argued, you can choose whom to believe"

"Of the Aquarian Conspirators surveyed, more were involved in education than in any other single category of work. They were teachers, administrators, policymakers, educational psychologists. Their consensus: Education is one of the least dynamic of institutions, lagging far behind medicine, psychology, politics, the media, and other elements of our society."

"There are heroes in education, as there have always been heroes, trying to transcend the limits of the old structure; but their efforts are too often thwarted by peers, administrators, parents. Mario Fantini, former Ford consultant on education, now at the State University of New York, said bluntly, The psychology of becoming has to be smuggled into the schools."

"Schools are entrenched bureaucracies whose practitioners do not compete for business, do not need to get re-elected or to attract patients, customers, clients. Those educators who would like to innovate have relatively little authority to change their style."

"Yet there are reasons for optimism. Our error has been in assuming that we had to start with the schools. Schools are an effect of the way we think—and we can change the way we think."

"We begin to see the unease and disease of our adult lives as elaborate patterns that emerged from a system that taught us young how to be still, look backward, look to authority, construct certainties. The fear of learning—and transformation—is the inevitable product of such a system."

"You can only have a new society, the visionaries have said, if you change the education of the younger generation. Yet the new society itself is the necessary force for change in education."

"Another strong force for change: crisis. All the failures of education, like a fever, signal a deep struggle for health."

"It's like the old dilemma: You can't get a job without experience, but you can't get experience because no one will give you a job."

"Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found it was ourselves."

"The hope for real social transformation need not rest on circumstantial evidence. One major arena, health care, has already begun to experience wrenching change. The impending transformation of medicine is a window to the transformation of all our institutions. Here we can see what happens when consumers begin to withdraw legitimacy from an authoritarian institution. We see the rise of the autonomous health seeker, the transformation of a profession by its leadership, the impact of the new models from science, the way decentralized networks are effecting wide geographic change."

"The autonomy so evident in social movements is hitting the old assumptions of medicine hard. The search for self becomes a search for health, for wholeness—the cache of sanity search for health, for wholeness—the cache of sanity and wisdom that once seemed beyond our conscious reach. p. 241"

"If our memories are as absorbent as research has demonstrated, our awareness as wide, our brains and bodies as sensitive; if we can will changes in our physiology at the level of a single cell; if we are heirs to such evolutionary virtuosity—how can we be performing and learning at such mediocre levels? If we're so rich, why aren't we smart? p. 279"

"The business of the Aquarian Conspiracy is calm diagnosis of that illness—to make it clear that synthesis is needed—paradigm change rather than pendulum change."

"We have been alienated by costs that soared beyond the means of all but the well-insured or wealthy; by specialization and the cold, quantifying approach that brushes past human concerns, and by the growing despair that comes from spending without regaining health. p. 244"

"This chapter is about learning in its broadest sense. It's about our surprising capacities, new sources of knowledge, mastery, creativity. It's about the learner within, waiting to be free. And it's about how the learner came to be unfree... about our culture's great learning disability, an educational system that emphasizes being "right" at the expense of being open. p. 280"

"Within a few short years, without a shot's being fired, the concept of holistic health has been legitimized by federal and state programs, endorsed by politicians, urged and underwritten by insurance companies, co-opted in terminology (if not always in practice) by many physicians, and adopted by medical students. Consumers demand "holistic health," a whole new assortment of entrepreneurs promise it, and medical groups look for speakers to explain it. p. 242"

"Gandhi carried the concept of the powerful committed minority into the twentieth century, first gaining recognition of the rights of Indians living in South Africa and then achieving India's independence from British domination. "It is a superstitious and ungodly thing to believe that an act of a majority binds a minority," he said. "It is not numbers that count but quality.... I do not regard the force of numbers as necessary in a just cause.""