Aquarius Now -
Making it through the Confusion Gap

Marilyn Ferguson -- publisher and founder of Brain/Mind Bulletin and celebrated social historian [The Aquarian Conspiracy] -- added her voice to those calling for simultaneous, unified global meditation and prayer during the transition (that took place on January 23, 1997) to "the exceedingly rare and archetypally appropriate planetary alignment."

Included in a mailing from her was a reprint of an article that appeared recently in Brain/Mind Bulletin. In it, Ferguson outlines not just the historical significance of our times since the early '60s but adds insights that can buoy us in the coming years.

In the accompanying letter, she writes, "Celestial comings and goings played a big part in human history and prehistory. As science discovers more about resonance, we moderns aren't as quick to dismiss the pivotal beliefs of ancient cultures. Recent research found that groups have a strong collective influence at a distance. It's moving, isn't it, to be called to a tribal moment?"

February 3, 1962. A rare event in the constellation Aquarius, the first alignment of seven planets in eighty years. In the words of the song, "It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius" . . . "the time of the mind's true liberation."

Maybe the planets did put a spin on the forces of evolution. Soon enough a host of idealist causes were afoot -- the civil rights movement, the human potential movement, the anti-war movement. Classical spiritual teachings were resurrected, and people rediscovered William Blake and Hermann Hesse.

A kind of planetary counterculture emerged. Visionary people -- an untold number of free spirits of all ages -- thought for a moment that their time had come. People marched and protested and proclaimed, and then slowly the cameras grew weary. The music faded and died away.

Or so it seemed. Many of the values of the period had seeped into the mainstream. "The Sixties" ended before the turn of the decade, but the seeds of those who had been moved by first signs of a more sensible and beautiful world were maturing in political wisdom.

The next Aquarian wave, the "consciousness movement" of the Seventies, was a little more scientific, a little more serious. Spiritual paths and technologies were discussed, compared, and promoted. People meditated, bought biofeedback machines, went to seminars.

Consider those words: Consciousness. Movement. What William James called the "stream of consciousness" became a living metaphor as people noticed that the "state of mind" isn't static at all. It keeps changing, depending on events, time of day, breath and posture, humidity and temperature, food and drink, expectations, memories, visions and the company we keep. Even in the relative stillness of meditation, something is flowing and vibrating.

In the Eighties these discoveries, which came from paying attention to attention itself, led many people to look more broadly at the influences on consciousness. Whereas in the Seventies there had been many specialized threads -- bodywork, psychotherapy, spiritual paths, metaphysics -- now there was concern for putting it all together. At the same time social activists became more interested in inner work.

It became clear that the social and consciousness movements needed each other. The times called for both faith and work, both insight and outreach.

So even as it seemed that the materialistic paradigm was at its zenith, "consciousness workers" were pondering the need and means for radical reform. It became clear that our failing social institutions reflected the errors in our thinking. "Conventional wisdom" was found wanting.

The values that had powered the movements of the Sixties could not be institutionalized without a shift in cultural assumptions. As consciousness changes, the world changes. The agenda became clearer. "If you continue to do what you always did," someone said, "you're going to get what you always got."

If our basic understanding of health and disease is flawed, we can't solve our health problems by ensuring greater access to medical treatment. If we don't understand the origins of criminal behavior, we won't be able to deter crime with more severe punishments. If our teaching methods run counter to the way the brain learns, longer school hours and more homework won't produce more knowledge.

Groups became their own laboratories for change as they worked on social issues. People who had joined forces to save the world found that they first had to learn to be fair and flexible with each other. Alas, it was easier to know the right thing than to do the right thing. Organizations were formed, projects were dreamed up, projects fizzled, organizations dissolved and new hotbeds of activity sprang up. The vision of a new world was tempered by talk about practical issues like "burnout" and how to survive in a worldwide economic recession.

Something else happened, almost unexpectedly. Through newspapers, books, magazines, television and word of mouth, a new wave of people rediscovered the spiritual and called it the New Age. Surveys showed an extraordinary increase in reports of mystical and paranormal experiences. People talked about near-death experiences, left brains and right brains, and the many ways emotions make us sick.

Popular interest in consciousness was escalating, and so was the arms race. Rituals and celebrations were organized to invoke images of peace. The most global of these, dubbed, "the Harmonic Convergence," took place during an alignment of six planets on August 16-17, 1987.

In 1989 there was a crack in the wall, literally, as the Berlin Wall fell and new reality swept through. Miracles could happen. As a contagion of revolutions spread through Eastern Europe, the Cold War seemed all but over.

Waves of euphoria. Ah, but now we had to look at the consequences of the oldest war, the assault we had been waging on Earth herself. Global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, the vanishing rain forests, spreading deserts, toxic wastes, disappearing species, the poisoning of the food chain, overpopulation . . . odds for humanity's survival grew slimmer.

And we came face to face with the absurd proposition that we can't afford to save the Earth.

Nature launched the Nineties early with a few dramatic signs of her own. During 1989 and 1990 the sun wobbled out of the magnetic center of the solar system, a phenomenon that occurs every 170 years or so, typically setting off volcanic activity and a decade of weather extremes. There was a dazzling light show in the summer of 1991. The two largest solar flares ever recorded left black spots on the sun visible to the naked eye. Two days after the second flare, Mars, Jupiter and Venus converged in the night sky. Various celestial bodies arrayed themselves across the evening sky in late June. On July 11, a total eclipse.

The predicted earth changes were happening; great volcanic eruptions darkened the sky. And sea changes: the fall of Communism in Red Square, ensuing political and economic chaos, worldwide recession, rampant scandals in business and government . . . and a wave of reformers winning political office.

January 11, 1994. Seven years from the end of the Millennium, another rare event. Seven planets, the sun and the moon aligned in Capricorn. Was this another symbolic portal?

For centuries the prophecies of many cultures had looked to a change in consciousness as the unmistakable sign of a new age. This "new mind" would set in motion cultural forces that might bring about a true renaissance, an outer world that reflects inner harmony.

Spaceship Earth, Gaia, a New Atlantis, planetary tribe, partnership, community, holism . . . these are not just ideas whose time has come. These are visions that transcend time. The concepts emerging now have the potential to shape a planetary civilization.

And so here we are, verging on the midpoint of the last decade of the last century of the millennium. New discoveries about the brain and behavior have been translated into popular culture. We know more about ourselves. We analyze our feelings and we feel something about our thoughts. Having learned about multiple personalities, we begin to recognize our multiple selves. New mysteries arise, and we are trying to put it all together.

Quite suddenly, too, we are not afraid to talk about the soul. Wildly popular films and books address spiritual issues. The whispers of the soul grow louder.

At this historic moment, great numbers of "ordinary people" are expressing mystical beliefs and idealistic values. The same is true for many influential leaders in business, government, education and the arts, who would never have considered themselves "new age" or even innovative.

The director of a new age trade association reports a surprising development. For a long time, she says, she and others had predicted that the new age would "go mainstream." "Now it's as if the mainstream is going new age. The establishment is acting like they invented it."

And isn't that what Lao Tsu called true leadership -- when the people say, "We did it ourselves"? The mainstream is indeed moving in a new direction, the tide is turning and in fact the "establishment" is discovering what individuals in the movement had found so captivating -- the sense that somewhere, somehow, we knew all along.

After all, all our movements -- all our "new ages" -- are variations on the Perennial Philosophy, the core of wisdom that appears and reappears through human history. Even our current enthusiasm for traditional healing methods can be seen as a renewed respect for human intuition. Our lost arts seem to be returning.

Can we fail? On the surface it would certainly seem so, and it makes sense to acknowledge the most blatant dangers.

Just as there are weather extremes during this period, we are also experiencing extremes in our cultural climate. Outrageous wars and unprecedented truces, governments reforming and governments undone by scandal, economic optimism and homelessness. At one and the same moment we seem to be lifted toward a spiritual renaissance and dragged down by atrocities.

It's easy to get swept up in the polarized conflicts the media promote and dramatize. It's a more demanding task to see the good news. Sometimes the good news is subtle, sometimes it's disguised as calamity, but surely we don't want to be so busy looking for The Answer that we can't see the myriad answers all around us.

Many people who consider themselves spiritual insist that the new age is inevitable. "It's all happening anyway," they say. Such complacency is both naive and disempowering. Just as our political rights are only meaningful if we exercise them, a spiritual renaissance is an opportunity, not an end in itself. It becomes clear that awakening isn't a spectator sport. "There's no free lunch," we say, and there's no free ride to freedom.

If we're to be responsive to our age we can't really choose between a life of reflections and a life of action. Both are essential. We have to act and reflect almost simultaneously. We can't afford the luxury of Either-Or.

There are many ways to bring about a better world, and we can experiment. We don't have to understand everything we're doing so long as we're guided by our common sense -- that is, by tuning into all our senses, to see what they perceive in common. The more we follow this natural guide, this intuition, the livelier we will become.

In this turbulent time it helps to remember some of the powerful metaphors and models from science that were popularized in recent years, because they are newly relevant. For example, Ilya Prigogine's model of dissipative structure, the discovery that large perturbations of energy cause living systems to fall apart, then fall together again in a more elegant order.

Our present falling apart is like a problem faced by organizations; a management consultant calls it "Confusion Gap." Whenever a group tries something new there is an inevitable period of chaos, and many people, mistaking the turbulent transition for the change itself, decide that they prefer the bad old days. They lose faith and go back to the old.

When we do that, when we run counter to our gut knowing that change must come, we have to rationalize our cowardice. "Better the devil you know," we say, "than the devil you don't know." And so we cast out the world that might have been.

Maybe this passivity is itself the devil it fears. It pretends to be our ally, but it is really our tormentor. It withholds support we might have given to good causes. It says, "Wait and see," and it thinks itself clever to have known that so many high-minded social visions would fail. The timid part of ourselves fails to realize that more solutions would be found if more of us participated -- if we didn't "wait and see." Seeing and doing are joined at the bone.

The new world that's dancing now like a vision in the night can only be realized by us personally, in our interactions with others. It can't be designed, legislated or ordained by institutions.

The new age that has been hovering over us for a very long time has nothing to do with the calendar and everything to do with being awake, and we have heard it speaking all our lives: "Carpe diem, seize the day." "Go for broke." "Walk your talk." "Try your wings." "Do unto others . . . "

It's time.

Reprinted with permission from Brain/Mind. To subscribe to the bulletin at $45 per year, write to Box 42211, Los Angeles, CA 90042 or call (213) 223-2500 or (800) 553-MIND.

Marilyn Ferguson is publisher-founder of Brain/Mind, an international bulletin on neuroscience, culture and consciousness, founded in 1975. She is best known for The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980, 1987), a bestseller about personal and social transformation and now translated into 12 languages; her other books include The Brain Revolution and Pragmagic. In 1992, the American Society of Training and Development designated Marilyn as "Brain Trainer of the Year."

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