How does one write a book about a worldwide revolution that is never named in the newspapers, has no figurehead, no doctrine, no hierarchy?

Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy is an encyclopedia of evidence that such a revolution exists, an occurrence as immense as the discovery of a third eye, opened at the moment when limits long assumed to be absolute fall apart. A “paradigm shift” is what it’s called, “a distinctly new way of thinking about old problems.”

This may sound ordinary, even commonplace; after all, it’s how we got to where we are. But the speed of such shifts has accelerated; in our global village a critical mass has been reached. The Aquarian Conspiracy quotes everybody from economist John Kenneth Galbraith to SUN editor Sy Safransky on what the consequences are. As Lewis Mumford says, this age is one that would “make the Renaissance look like a still-birth.”

When Marilyn Ferguson’s first book, The Brain Revolution, was published in 1973, it became a bestseller, and she became “an unofficial clearinghouse for researchers who saw the implications of their findings.” In late 1975, she began publishing a twice-monthly newsletter, Brain/Mind Bulletin [PO Box 42211, Los Angeles, CA 90042], which reported unusual research in consciousness, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, health, and related subjects.

“The newsletter was a lightning rod for energy I had greatly underestimated. The immediate response — an avalanche of articles, correspondence, and calls — confirmed that rapidly growing numbers of people were exploring new territory, both in radical science and radical experience . . . The social activism of the 1960s and the ‘consciousness revolution’ of the early 1970s seemed to be moving toward a historic synthesis: social transformation resulting from personal transformation — change from the inside out.”

In the late 70s, Ferguson’s desire to describe this transformation led her to mail 200 questionnaires to people she regarded as leading participants in it. Many of them were well-known public figures, authorities in their fields, others were involved at the grassroots level. One hundred and eighty-five people responded; this became the psychic core of The Aquarian Conspiracy.

The book lacks artistry but has a raw power that surfaces often in the hundreds of excerpts from books, speeches, personal interviews and correspondence, crammed into 420 pages. I was exhilarated by the time I’d finished the book, but fed up with the language. Ferguson did an excellent job of reporting and organizing a formidably large amount of material, but she overused the same words everyone else does as they fumble to describe the magic of our times: Transformation. Paradigm shifts. Flow. Process. Wholeness. (Zzzzzzzz.)

The strain to do the topic justice is understandable; so is the desire not to sensationalize, which is spelled out in the introduction, but the title alone does both. To the average person, an Aquarian Conspirator sounds like a student of the occult with a subversive plot up his sleeve. But, as the author points out, the word “conspiracy” literally means, “to breathe together.” And she chose the word Aquarian because “Aquarius, the waterbearer in the ancient zodiac, symbolizing flow and the quenching of an ancient thirst, is an appropriate symbol.”

Despite its flaws, The Aquarian Conspiracy is the first attempt of its kind to report a “personal and social transformation” to an audience that may not necessarily feel a part of it. For those who do, the book is an obvious classic, and an excellent resource.

— Elizabeth Campbell

 

Excerpt From The Aquarian Conspiracy

The difference between transformation by accident and transformation by a system is like the difference between lightning and a lamp. Both give illumination, but one is dangerous and unreliable, while the other is relatively safe, directed, available.

The intentional triggers of transformative experiences are numberless, yet they have a common quality. They focus awareness on awareness — a critical shift. For all their surface variation, most focus on something too strange, complex, diffuse, or monotonous to be handled by the brain’s analytical, intellectual half: on breathing, repetitious physical movement, music, water, a flame, a meaningless sound, a blank wall, a koan, a paradox. The intellectual brain can only dominate awareness by affixing itself to something definite and bounded. If it is captured by a diffuse, monotonous focus, the signals from the other side of the mind can be heard.

Among the triggers of such experiences reported by the individuals who responded to the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire:

  • Sensory isolation and sensory overload, because sharply altered input causes a shift in consciousness.
  • Biofeedback — the use of machines that feed back tones or visual readouts of body processes like brainwave activity, muscle activity, skin temperature — because learning to control these processes requires an unusually relaxed and alert state.
  • Autogenic training, an approach that originated in Europe more than fifty years ago — self-suggestions that the body is becoming relaxed, “breathing itself.”
  • Music (sometimes in combination with imagery or meditation), because of the brain’s sensitivity to tone and tempo and because music engages the right hemisphere. Chanting. Painting, sculpting, pottery, and similar activities that give the creator a chance to become lost in the creation.
  • Improvisational theatre, with its requirement of both total attention and spontaneity. Psychodrama, because it forces an awareness of roles and role playing. Contemplation of nature and other aesthetically overwhelming experiences.
  • The “consciousness-raising” strategies of various social movements that call attention to old assumptions.
  • Self-help and mutual-help networks — for example, Alcoholics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, and their counterparts, whose twelve rules include paying attention to one’s conscious processes and to change, acknowledging that one can choose behavior, and cooperating with “higher forces” by looking inward.
  • Hypnosis and self-hypnosis.
  • Meditation of every description: Zen, Tibetan Buddhist, chaotic, Transcendental, Christian, Kabbalist, kundalini, raja yoga, tantric yoga, etc. Psychosynthesis, a system that combines imagery and a meditative state.
  • Sufi stories, koans, and dervish dancing. Various shamanic and magical techniques, which focus attention.
  • Seminars like est, Silva Mind Control, Actualizations, and Lifespring, which attempt to break the cultural trance and open the individual to new choices.
  • Dream journals, because dreams are the most available medium for information beyond the range of ordinary consciousness.
  • Arica, Theosophy, and Gurdjieffian systems, which synthesize many different mystical traditions and teach techniques for altering awareness.
  • Contemporary psychotherapies, like Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy, which involves a search for meaning and the use of “paradoxical intention,” the direct confrontation of the source of fear. Primal Therapy and its spin-offs, which summon up experiences of early childhood pain. The Fischer-Hoffman process, a similar reentry into childhood anxieties, followed by an intense use of imagery for reconciliation with and forgiveness of one’s parents for any negative early experiences. Gestalt therapy, the gentle forcing through patterns of recognition, or paradigm shifts.
  • Science of Mind, an approach to healing and self-healing.
  • A Course in Miracles, an unorthodox contemporary approach to Christianity based on a profound shift in perception.
  • Countless body disciplines and therapies: hatha yoga, Reichian, the Bates system for vision improvement, T’ai Chi Ch’uan, aikido, karate, running, dance, Rolfing, bioenergetics, Feldenkrais, Alexander, Applied Kinesiology.
  • Intense experiences of personal and collective change at Esalen in Big Sur, sensitivity groups at Washington’s National Training Laboratories, encounter groups, informal groups of supportive friends.
  • Sports, mountain-climbing, river-running, and similar physically exhilarating activities, which cause a qualitative shift in the sense of being alive. Wilderness retreats or solitary flying or sailing, which foster self-discovery and a sense of timelessness.

All of these approaches might be called psychotechnologies — systems for a deliberate change in consciousness. Individuals may independently discover a new way of paying attention and may learn to induce such states by methods of their own devising. Anything can work.

As William James noted three-quarters of a century ago, the key to expanded awareness is surrender. As the struggle is abandoned, it is won. “To go faster, you must slow down,” said the hero of Shockwave Rider, John Brunner’s novel of the future. A biofeedback researcher, chief of psychiatry at a famous medical center, told his colleagues, “You can only win these races by taking your foot off the accelerator.”

Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be unlocked from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another. . . .

No system promises a shift from ordinary human fragmentation to twenty-four-hours-a-day clarity. Transformation is a journey without a final destination. But there are stages in the journey, and they are surprisingly mappable, based on thousands of historical accounts and the proliferating reports of contemporary seekers.

The first stage is preliminary, almost happenstance: an entry point. In most cases, the entry point can only be identified in retrospect. Entry can be triggered by anything that shakes up the old understanding of the world, the old priorities.

For a great many, the trigger has been a spontaneous mystical or psychic experience, as hard to explain as it is to deny. Or the intense alternative reality generated by a psychedelic drug.

It is impossible to overestimate the historic role of psychedelics as an entry point drawing people into other transformative technologies. For tens of thousands of “left-brained” engineers, chemists, psychologists, and medical students who never before understood their more spontaneous, imaginative right-brained brethren, the drugs were a pass to Xanadu, especially in the 1960s.

The changes in brain chemistry triggered by psychedelics cause the familiar world to metamorphose. It gives way to rapid imagery, unaccustomed depths of visual perception and hearing, a flood of “new” knowledge that seems at once very old, a poignant primal memory. Unlike the mental states produced by dreaming or drinking, psychedelic awareness is not fuzzy but many times more intense than normal waking consciousness. Only through this intensely altered state did some become fully aware of the role of consciousness in creating their everyday reality.

For whatever glories the mushrooms and saturated sugar cubes contained, they were only a glimpse — coming attractions, but not the main feature.

The entry-point experience hints that there is a brighter, richer, more meaningful dimension to life. Some are haunted by that glimpse and drawn to see more. Others, less serious, stay near the entry point, playing with the occult, drugs, consciousness-altering games. Some are afraid to go on at all. Confronting the nonrational is unnerving. Here the unfettered mind suffers a kind of agoraphobia, a fear of its own awesome spaces. Those with a strong need to control may be frightened by touching a realm of multiple realities, multiple ways of seeing. They would rather keep to their right/wrong, black/white version of the world. They repress insights that contradict the old belief system.

Some hesitate because they don’t know where to turn next. Fear of criticism stops others. They might look foolish, pretentious, even crazy, to family, friends, co-workers. They worry that the journey inward will seem narcissistic or escapist. Indeed those who persist past the entry point have to overcome a pervasive culture bias against introspection. The search for self-knowledge is often equated with self-importance, with a concern for one’s own psyche at the expense of social responsibility. The popular criticism of psychotechnologies is typified by the term “the new narcissism,” from a Harper’s article by Peter Marin, and the “Me Decade,” a pejorative introduced by Tom Wolfe in New York magazine.

The isolation of those new to the transformative process is deepened by their inability to explain how they feel and why they are going on. If they try to describe the discovery of a kind of inner “all-rightness” — a potentially whole and healthy self waiting to be liberated — they are afraid of sounding egotistical.

There is a fear of being jilted. The knowledge from these experiences is often elusive, hard to reconstruct. What if these insights were only phantoms . . . illusions? In the past we have believed promises that were broken. We have seen mirages of fresh hope dissolve as we reach for them. The memory of these betrayals, large and small, says, “Don’t trust. . . .”

Even more common, as Abraham Maslow noted, is the fear of our own higher potentialities. “We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these same possibilities.” An apparent lack of curiosity is often a defense. “Fear of knowing is very deeply a fear of doing,” Maslow said. Knowledge carries responsibility.

There is a fear of the self, an unwillingness to trust our deeper needs. We worry that an impulsive aspect might take over. Suppose we find that what we really want of life is dangerously different from what we have. And there is a related fear that we will be sucked into a maelstrom of unusual experiences and, worse yet, that we might like them. Or we might become committed to some demanding discipline; if we were to take up meditation, we might start getting up at five in the morning or become vegetarian.

Man is afraid of things that cannot harm him, says a Hasidic scripture, and craves things that cannot help him. “But actually it is something within him that he is afraid of, and it is something within him that he craves.” We fear and crave becoming truly ourselves.

The second stage, for those who go on, is exploration — the Yes after the final No. Warily or enthusiastically, having sensed that there is something worth finding, the individual sets out to look for it. The first serious step, however small, is empowering and significant. The quest, as one spiritual teacher put it, is the transformation.

This exploration is the “deliberate letting” psychologist Eugene Gendlin describes. This letting permits the inner knowledge to come forward. It is an intentional release, as when we deliberately relax our grip on something. The grip is the contraction of our consciousness, our psychic spasm, which must be loosened before anything can change.

The psychotechnologies are designed to free that tight hold so that we might become buoyant, the way a lifeguard detaches the panicky grip of a drowning person so that he might be rescued.

Ironically, we go after transformative experiences in the only way we know how: as consumers, competitors, still operating from the values of the old paradigm. We may compare our experiences to others, wonder if we’re “doing it right,” getting there fast enough, making progress. We may be trying to replicate one particularly rewarding or moving experience. During this phase some individuals try many techniques and teachers, like comparison shoppers. In an age of supersonic travel and satellite communication, we tend to expect instant gratification, instant feedback, instant news. The process of transformation may be simmering underground like a geyser, but we cannot see it and are impatient for action.

Some fall at first into pendulum change. The initial method, e.g., Transcendental Meditation, running, est, Rolfing, is seen as the panacea for the world’s ills. All other systems are dismissed.

In this false dawn of certainty, there is often eager proselytizing. The would-be evangelists quickly learn that no single system works for everyone. And the methods themselves — by repeated focusing of awareness — eventually lead to the realization that there will be no ultimate answers.

As science fiction writer Ray Bradbury said, “We all go on the same Search, looking to solve the old Mystery. We will not, of course, ever solve it. We will climb all over it. We will, finally, inhabit the Mystery. . . .”

 

In the third stage, integration, the mystery is inhabited. Although there may be favorite methods or teachers, the individual trusts an inner “guru.”

During the earlier stages there was probably some dissonance, sharp conflict between new beliefs and old patterns. Like the troubled society struggling to remake itself with old tools and structures, the individual tries at first to improve the situation rather than change it, to reform rather than transform.

Now there may be oscillation between exhilaration and loneliness because fear centers on the disruptive effect the transformative process may be having on the old itinerary: career direction, relationships, goals, and values. . . . There is a new self in an old culture. But there are new friends, new rewards, new possibilities.

A different kind of work is undertaken in this period — more reflective than the busy seeking of the exploration stage. Just as a paradigm shift in science is followed by a mopping-up operation, a pulling together of loose strands into the new framework, so those who undergo personal transformation have a left-brain need to know. Intuition has leaped ahead of understanding. What really happened? The individual experiments, refines, tests ideas, shakes them down, sharpens, expands.

Many explore subjects they had no former interest in or aptitude for in an attempt to learn something about shifts in conscious experience. They may look into philosophy, quantum physics, music, semantics, brain research, psychology. From time to time, the neophyte “scientist” draws back for a period of assimilation. The opening has been immense. Everything matters.

Ironically, while there is less need now for external validation or justification, self-questioning may reach the level of inquisition. Usually the individual emerges from such reevaluation with a new strength and sureness, grounded in purpose.

 

Now in the fourth stage, conspiracy, he discovers other sources of power, and ways to use it for fulfillment and in service to others. Not only does the new paradigm work in his own life, but it seems to work for others. If the mind can heal and transform, why can’t minds join to heal and transform society?

Earlier, when he was attempting to communicate the ideas of transformation, it was mostly to explain himself or to draw friends and family into the process. Now the great social implications become apparent.

This is a conspiracy to enable transformation — not to impose it on those who are neither ripe nor interested, but to make it possible for those who are hungry for it. Michael Murphy, co-founder of Esalen, suggested that the disciplines themselves conspire for renewal. “Let’s make that conspiracy apparent! We can turn our daily common life into the dance the world is meant for.”

Paradoxically, there may be a hiatus in social activism during this period while the individual assesses responsibilities, roles, direction. After all, if he has the power to change society, even in some small way, he had better pay attention. The whole idea of leadership, power, and hierarchy is rethought. There is the fear of destroying the great chance for social transformation by falling into old behavior — defensiveness, egotism, or timidity.

. . . the self turns out to be not the dark, impulsive secret we had been warned about, but a strong, sane center.

No narrative of a transformative process can be fairly described as typical, since each is as unique as a fingerprint. But the movement from stage to stage is a story frequently recounted. . . .

. . . Paradoxically, if we give up the need for certainty in terms of control and fixed answers, we are compensated by a different kind of certainty — a direction, not a fact. We begin to trust intuition, whole-brain knowing, what scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowing.” As we become attuned to the inner signals, they seem stronger.

One who becomes involved in the psychotechnologies realizes that those inner urgings and “hunches” do not contradict reason but represent transcendent reasoning, the brain’s capacity for simultaneous analysis we cannot consciously track and comprehend. . . . Intuition, that “natural knowledge,” becomes a trusted partner in everyday life, available to guide even minor decisions, generating an ever more pervasive sense of flow and rightness.

 

Closely tied to intuition is vocation — literally, a “calling” . . .

Vocation is the process of making one’s way toward something. It is a direction more than a goal. Following a peak experience, one of the conspirators, a housewife who later became a filmmaker, said, “I felt as if I’d been called to serve on somebody’s plan for mankind.” The conspirators typically say they feel as if they are cooperating with events rather than controlling them or suffering them, much as an aikido master augments his strength by aligning himself with existing forces, even those in opposition.

The individual discovers a new kind of flexible will that helps in the vocation. This will has sometimes been called “intention.” It is the opposite of accident, it represents a certain deliberateness, but it doesn’t have the iron quality we usually associate with the will.

To Buckminster Fuller, the commitment is “kind of mystical. The minute you begin to do what you want to do, it’s really a different kind of life.”

Vocation is a curious blend of the voluntary and the involuntary — choice and surrender. People remark that they feel strongly drawn in a particular direction or to certain tasks, and simultaneously convinced that they were somehow “supposed” to take just those steps.

Former astronaut Edgar Mitchell became deeply interested in promoting the study of states of consciousness after his moon flight, and he launched an organization to raise funds for this purpose. At one point he remarked to a friend, “I feel almost as if I’m operating under orders. . . . Just when I think all is lost, I put my foot down over an abyss — and something comes up to hit it, just in time.”

For some there is a conscious moment of choice. For others the commitment is recognized only in retrospect. Dag Hammarskjold described the shift of his own life from the ordinary to the meaningful:

I don’t know who — or what — put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer to someone or something, and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life in self-surrender had a goal.

Jonas Salk, discoverer of the first polio vaccine, also committed to an evolutionary model of social transformation, once said, “I have frequently felt that I have not so much chosen but that I have been chosen. And sometimes I wished to hell I could have disengaged!” He added that even so, those things he felt compelled to do despite his rationalizations proved immensely rewarding.

Speaking of his own experience, Jung said, “Vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape.” The creative person is overpowered, captive of and driven by a demon. Unless one assents to the power of the inner voice, the personality cannot evolve. Although we often mistreat those who listen to that voice, he said, still “they become our legendary heroes.”

 

A belated discovery, one that causes considerable anguish, is that no one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be unlocked from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal.

At some point early in our lives, we decide just how conscious we wish to be. We establish a threshold of awareness. We choose how stark a truth we are willing to admit into consciousness, how readily we will examine contradictions in our lives and beliefs, how deeply we wish to penetrate. Our brains can censor what we see and hear, we can filter reality to suit our level of courage. At every crossroads we make the choice again for greater or lesser awareness.

Those who cannot communicate their own liberating discoveries may feel polarized at times from those closest to them. Eventually and reluctantly they accept the inviolate nature of individual choice. If, for whatever reasons, another person has chosen a life strategy of denial, which has its own heavy costs, we cannot reverse that decision; nor can we alleviate for another the chronic uneasiness that comes from a life of censored reality.

 

But there is a compensating discovery. Little by little, those who undertake the transformative process discern the existence of a vast support network.

The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe, Teilhard once said. Barbara Marx Hubbard called the intense affinity “supra-sex” — an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have the larger vision. Psychologist Jean Houston wryly called it “swarming,” and one conspirator spoke of “the network as fraternity.”

The sense of community, the affirmation of mutual discoveries, gird the individual for an otherwise lonely enterprise. The network, as Roszak said, is a vehicle of self-discovery. “We turn to the company of those who share our most intimate and forbidden identity, and there we begin to find ourselves as persons.”

Brief meetings are enough for recognition. Those who responded to the survey gave assorted accounts of how they found their allies:

  • Through the grapevine, friends of friends: “When you’re in such-and-such, look up so-and-so.”
  • Through synchronicity or “guidance”: “They seemed to show up when I needed them.”
  • By making their interests known. Many are active in lecturing, writing, organizing, or running centers, but even those who are low-profile are usually not secretive.
  • Most easily, at conferences, seminars, and other sites where those of similar interests are likely to congregate.
  • “Everywhere!” In elevators and supermarkets, on airplanes, at parties, in offices. Some conspirators said they sometimes relate an anecdote among co-workers or strangers and watch for a reaction, for understanding. Like the primitive Christians, the Federalists, like a resistance movement, individuals band together, following the Buddhist dictum, “Seek out the brotherhood.”

There is a strong sense of family — a family whose bond, as novelist Richard Bach expressed it, is not blood but respect and joy in each other’s lives: “Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.” Community lends joy and sustenance to the adventure.

As the Parallel Cultures group says in its handbook, “We need support as our values change, and for that we have each other.”

 

The most subtle discovery is the transformation of fear.

The fear of being fooled or even looking foolish is transformed by the sudden recognition that not changing, not exploring, is a far more real and frightening possibility.

Fear of giving up any part of our current life inventory vanishes as we realize that all change is by choice. We only drop what we no longer want. Fear of self-inquiry is overcome because the self turns out to be not the dark, impulsive secret we had been warned about but a strong, sane center.

 

We’re grateful to Marilyn Ferguson for permission to print the excerpt from The Aquarian Conspiracy.

— Ed.

Excerpted from The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s, ©1980 by Marilyn Ferguson, published by J.P. Tarcher, Inc. (To order direct from publisher send $15 plus $1.25 postage and handling to 9110 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069. Also available in softcover after November 1, 1981, $7.95.) Used by permission.