Marilyn Ferguson Interview

DR: You have spoken recently of the "Trojan heart." Would you tell that story again?

MARILYN FERGUSON: The idea of the "Trojan heart" comes from Richard Lang, a friend in Phoenix. Most of us know the story of the Trojan Horse. An invading army of Greeks wanted to enter the city gates of Troy, so they built a magnificent, several-story high wooden horse, and left it outside the city gates. The Trojans were so impressed that they took the horse inside. The Greeks had hidden inside the horse, and after dark they crawled out of it and conquered the city.

If you're going to storm the palace, if you're going to get through the gates, you do it by offering something attractive. I think we know by now, and the word is going out all over the world, that there's a better way to do battle than in the past. We must put our heart inside the gates of that walled city.

DR: How can we use this insight on a personal level?

MARILYN FERGUSON: My family tends to have allergies. They seem to be very much tied into concepts and states of mind, as well as past traumas. I was feeling very upset, because of my sensitivities, that the manufacturer had put formaldehyde in our new wool carpet to keep the moths out. It gradually does leave the carpet, but at at certain point I wondered ... what if I didn't hate that poison so much.

I felt myself yield up my resistance in anger toward the formaldehyde. I could feel my body going into a more giving, forgiving state. All of a sudden the allergic reaction was gone. I think you can do this with anything in the environment that seems to be assaulting you, whether it's a light or a sound or a person. The sounds will change. Your ears will change. You won't feel it the same way.

Our nervous systems are very malleable. We can be more creative in how we perceive, as well as what we do. Often we seem stymied by a situation, frustrated or upset. But , "The eye altering alters all," William Blake said. This is not an easy thing to remember.

DR: What event has surprised you most in the years since The Aquarian Conspiracy was published?

MARILYN FERGUSON: (long pause). Irangate.

DR: That such things would happen, or that they came to light?

MARILYN FERGUSON: Both. I had not realized the extent of the hubris of people in places of power in our government. I hadn't realized how far things had gone. When all of that came to light, I felt that it was the beginning of the end of that way of doing business. What Watergate showed and Irangate underscored that you can't do business that way.

The lesson is not to look outward toward the people who perpetrated unconstitutional acts and wrongdoings, but to look to ourselves. I'm not saying you must obey all laws, because some laws are unlawful. I certainly think that Thoreau and Gandhi and Martin Luther King were right in their nonviolent resistance. But in terms of your own conscience, this is what I'm talking about.. I'm talking about when you violate your own sense of right and wrong When you know what's right and wrong in your own light, and then do something that's just a little bit off, then you are participating in the old paradigm.

We have to be careful in the details of our lives. Somebody once said God is in the details. A lot of people who are interested in the new consciousness tend to be broadstroke thinkers, efficient thinkers. We have to anchor the big vision in our everyday acts and our little kindnesses.

DR: How do you manage to keep up with the incredible amount of information coming through the print and electronic media? Do you work 48-hour days?

MARILYN FERGUSON: My husband, Ray Gottleib, whose background is science, scans a publication called Current Contents, which covers the contents of 6000 science periodicals a year, and comes out once a week. We send for all the papers we think would be of interest. We have a staff of people who are working very hard to try to match the technology to our needs. To some extent we use computers, computer search function. We order around 300 scientific papers every month, which are reviewed by Ray, or my son Eric Ferguson, who is now writing for the Bulletin, or by me. We are looking for what I might call common sense science. We're looking for science people can use. Our readers are an imaginative bunch, in all different fields.

DR: Science shouldn't be for scientists only.

MARILYN FERGUSON: My feeling is that science has been in the academy for too long. I have a lot of admiration for scientists, and particularly the ones who make major breakthroughs. But they have to write their material in a certain form to communicate through the established system. It's not an ideal system, the communication system within science.

And there is no master plan. Our country has no vision of where we want the science to take us. Because there is no overview of where we want to go, the educators don't know what the brain researchers are finding, except in a very slow, trickle-down kind of way.

We need more people who can read and understand the research, and then communicate it clearly and interestingly. . . There's a need for armies of intermediaries who can make the translation, to be science journalists and interpreters. Preferably they should be creative people, even fiction writers. Journalists and fiction writers have a sense of pattern.

The very best scientists think like artists. There are now people who are saying that training in the arts actually makes great scientists. Most of the major scientists have either been artists, musicians, or poets, perhaps because an affinity to the arts will teach you to see patterns. We need the pattern seers. We've got all these millions of papers being published, and conferences and so forth, and people are bringing in their little bits and pieces of the puzzle. But nobody is putting the puzzle together.

DR: What are your thoughts about our educational system?

MARILYN FERGUSON: Most of the people I know feel that they learned most as apprentices or in the world. They learned relatively little academically. I think that one of my great advantages was that I didn't finish college, and therefore didn't attend graduate school. I was living in a small town in Colorado, and I got married very young, so it just didn't work out. After the first two years, I took just those courses I wanted to take, because I wasn't trying to participate in a degree program. When the people lectured I was actually listening to hear what they said, and the students taking the class for credit were frantically taking notes so they could do well on the tests.

We are not being educated for content, but for a degree. We've lost sight of the purpose. One of my good friends uses a question that brings you back to center: "What am I trying to achieve?" Whether you're going on an errand across town, or having a conversation with your child or whatever, the question is, what am I trying to achieve? We argue about how we're going to do things, and we forget what we were going to do, and why .

DR: Do you feel that we as a society are moving any closer to understanding the roots of the drug crisis? Is it a crisis? Is just saying no the solution?

MARILYN FERGUSON: First of all, people are vague about drugs. Are we talking about crack? Alka-Seltzer? Caffeine? Nicotine? Psychedelics?

I would say it's one of those areas where we have lacked subtlety. You have to ask why people are doing what they're doing. The Russians are now having to look at why people drink. Many say they're drinking for escape because they're bored! P>Young people in our country are often bored in school and have no meaningful work. The future seems bleak if they're poor.

As for psychedelics, they can be valuable in therapeutic settings, but only if the people have been working on themselves anyway, and if they're old enough. The drugs that have real power should be used as an initiation rite. It's too bad we don't have that in our society. But they are no substitute for hard work, and they're no shortcut. I am saying that there are certain organic-type drugs which have historically been used by human beings for spiritual purposes, and they have little to do with the present drug crisis in America.

About the drug crisis, it goes back to your own conscience. Whether it's alcohol or antihistamine, it's a question of asking your own intuition: What does your body want, and what does life want from you? Each person, in this sense, has to find his or her own road.

You may say, you don't go to doctors and you won't take any prescription drugs. Then all of a sudden you find yourself in a situation where conventional medicine is your best choice. I have a friend who was so completely into holistic medicine, and so afraid of going to the doctor, that she finally realized the lesson for her in her serious injury was not to condemn allopathic medicine.

DR: Drugs of all sorts seem to elicit such strong feelings and opinions among a great many people. What is going on here? How does this tie in with other problems we as a society face?

MARILYN FERGUSON: A number of recovered alcoholics have said they were on a spiritual path. They became misguided in their search, but they were looking for something. We have to create our society in such a way that it's hospitable to the spiritual search. Our abuse problems will probably disappear. Whether we're trying to prevent insider trading, or anything else that has negative consequences for the society, we have to get to the heart of it.

Why are people greedy? What are they looking for? I mean if somebody has a hundred million dollars and he wants two hundred million, you know he's not going to get what he wants with the extra hundred million.

Can we find a way to show him what he's looking for? I think that people are looking a sense of themselves as creative. A sense of personal impact. A sense of being able to solve their own problems, and to be listened to. We have to change our society in that way.

DR: Do you find that today's high school and college-age generation is less concerned about or engaged with the critical issues of the day than were their predecessors ten or twenty years ago.

MARILYN FERGUSON: All the studies show that they're more concerned about their survival. They can't look forward to the same financial future that people could twenty years ago. It's going to be difficult for young people to buy a house, or to do whatever. So this has caused them materialistic concern. But I think that underneath, they're idealistic.

In the Brain-Mind Bulletin , we did an article on the class of 1992, about an annual survey of the high school students. They're more anxious and concerned than they ever were. And they're tending to go into businesses or professions where they can make money. Unfortunately, too many going into law. But I think there will be a turnaround. They just need to be inspired.

DR: You have written that the time of spectators is coming to a close. You've also said that the best antidepressants are expression and action. Why aren't those remedies prescribed more often?

MARILYN FERGUSON: I guess we have to prescribe them for ourselves. I said in The Aquarian Conspiracy that we can't be looking to leaders to do these things for us. We're going to have to be our own leaders. Of course there will be leaders in particular situations. If your plane crashes in the desert somewhere, you're going to want somebody who knows something about airplanes or survival, to be the leader at that moment. We need specific leaders as appropriate, but if we want personal freedom, we really have to take personal responsibility.

If you say, I have a purpose, I need to be healthy for this purpose, I need to be powerful for this purpose, then you'll more often know what steps to take. You'll hear inside your head and heart, and from helpful people you meet.

And you don't have to worry about getting your act together first . . . You were never meant to have your act together forever. It's always going to keep changing. In other words, we put something together, and then it changes, and we change. It's only really in serving that we become healthy. It's only if we have a purpose that we become intelligent. A purpose organizes our intelligence and makes it meaningful. You have to take that step, and the step is actually to say to yourself, what can I do?

Daniel Redwood is a chiropractor, writer and musician who lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He is the author of A Time to Heal: How to Reap the Benefits of Holistic Health (A.R.E. Press), and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. He can be reached by e-mail at redwoods@infi.net.

©1989, 1995 Daniel Redwood, D.C.