"...the Aquarian Conspiracy is a different kind of
revolution, with different revolutionaries. It looks to the turnabout in the
consciousness of a critical number of individuals, enough to bring about
a renewal of society...."[p.26]
"The Paradigm Shift. New perspectives give birth
to new historic ages. Humankind has had many dramatic revolutions of understanding
--great leaps sudden liberation from old limit. We discovered the uses of fire and the
wheel, language and writing.... Each of these discoveries is properly described as a
'paradigm shift,' a term introduced by Thomas Kuhn, a science historian and
philosopher, in his landmark 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions. Kuhn's ideas are enormously helpful, not only because they
help us understand how a new perspective remerges but also how and why such
new views are invariably resisted for a time."[p.26]
"A paradigm is a framework of
thought (from the Greek paradigm, "pattern")... a scheme for understanding
and explaining certain aspects of reality.... A paradigm shift is a
distinctly new way of thinking about old problems."[p.26]
"Given the superior power and scope of the new idea,
we might expect it to prevail rather quickly, but that almost never happens. The
problem is that you can't embrace the new paradigm unless you let go of the old. You
can't be half, hearted making the change bit by bit. 'Like the gestalt
switch,'
Kuhn said, 'it must occur all at once.' The new paradigm is not 'figured out' but
suddenly seen." [p.27]
"Real progress in understanding nature is rarely
incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, a new
way of seeing."[p.28]
"By naming a sharply recognizable phenomenon, Kuhn
made us conscious of the ways of revolution and resistance. Now that we are
beginning to understand the dynamics of revolutionary insights, we can learn
to foster our own healthy change and we can cooperate to ease the collective
change of mind without waiting for the fever of crisis. We can do this by
asking questions in a new way - by challenging our old assumptions.
These assumptions are the air we breather, our familiar furniture. They are
part of the culture. We are all but blind to them, yet they must give way."[p. 28]
"For the
first time in history, humankind has come upon the control panel of change
-- an understanding of how transformation occurs. We are living in the
change of change, the time in which we can intentionally align ourselves
with nature for rapid remaking of ourselves and our collapsing
institutions."[p.29]
"Human nature is neither good nor bad but open to
continuous transformation and transcendence. It has only to discover itself."[p.29]
"Recall the model of the paradigm shift introduced by
Thomas Kuhn: Every important new idea in science sounds strange at first. As
the physicist Niels Bohr put it, great innovations inevitably appear
muddled, confusing, and incomplete..."[p.151]
"A political paradigm shift
might be said to occur
when the new values are assimilated by the dominant society. These values then become
social dogma to members of a new generation, who marvel that anyone could ever have
believed otherwise."[p.197]
"If we are to
break out of this pattern, if we are to be liberated from our personal and collective
history, we must learn to identify it -- to see the ways of discovery and innovation, to
overcome our discomfort with and resistance to the new, and to recognize the rewards
of cooperating with change. Thomas Kuhn was by no means the first to
point out this pattern."[p.197]
"The intense
intellectual and spiritual sharing of the Aquarian conspiracy, the joint expeditions
into new territory, the pooling of the wealth, create the kind of mutual inspiration
John Gowan described. The almost sexual interplay of ideas, yin and yang, old and new,
East and West, results in a kind of collective synthesis: a creative community,
hospitable to risk and imagination."
Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian
Conspiracy (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), page
289-290.
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