Quote:At its peak in the 1980s the publication had a worldwide base of some 10,000 subscribers, ranging from academics and intellectuals to schoolteachers and storekeepers, and helped to popularize the ideas of such notables as Prigogine, neuroscientists Karl Pribram and Candace Pert, physicists Fritjof Capra and David Bohm, psychologist Jean Houston and many others.

Ferguson was a founding member of the Association of Humanistic Psychology, earned numerous honorary degrees, and served on the board of directors of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Among those influenced by her was senator and vice-president Al Gore, who was partially inspired by Ferguson in the creation of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future and later met with her in the White House in 1993.
Marilyn Ferguson

Quote:In the early 1970s, Ferguson, by this point living in Los Angeles, began exploring burgeoning research into Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) and parapsychology. Her findings resulted in a book-length report on the field, the 1973 The Brain Revolution: The Frontier of Mind Research (“Just how vast is the potential of the human brain?” asked a full-page ad for the book that ran in the New York Times). She also began editing the Brain/Mind Bulletin, a journal about neuroscience and human behavior that developed a small but passionate following.

In 1977, Ferguson polled 210 diverse respondents on their feelings about a broad set of spiritual and consciousness-based trends that went beyond the established bounds of science. The results surprised her. She found that 96% of her respondents expressed belief in telepathy, 94% in psychic healing, 89% in precognition, 88% in clairvoyance, and 76% in consciousness surviving bodily death.

Ferguson showed the findings to Jeremy Tarcher, a maverick Los Angeles publisher who had once written for the original Star Trek television series and was known for publishing books on yoga and neuroscience.

Tarcher later recounted to the New York Times his initial astonishment at seeing the results: “I called Mrs. Ferguson because I was interested in her Brain/Mind Bulletin newsletter, and we went to lunch. She gave me a folder of material. I started to read it and I started to cry. It expressed all the things most important to my heart.”

Ferguson and Tarcher set to work synthesizing her findings and the most compelling information from Brain/Mind to create a paean to an emerging “New Age.”

Ferguson argued that the growing pains of contemporary America–militarism, class divisions, consumerism – were peeling away amid the new focus on the spiritual she chronicled through Brain/Mind and her survey. “The symbolic power of the pervasive dream in our culture: that after a dark, violent age, the Piscean, we are entering a millennium of love and light – in the words of the popular song, ‘The Age of Aquarius,’ the time of the mind’s true liberation,” Ferguson wrote.

Ferguson was particularly excited about the effect of New Age communications methods – more honest dialogue about emotions, more space for awe, more openness about the potential to use technology to foster connection between professionals and social acquaintances alike. Much of the book was a breathless and enthusiastic survey of the research Ferguson’s colleagues had conducted in communication and consciousness studies.

The book not only covered the emergent transition from the Piscean Age to the so-called Aquarian Age of the New Wave, but also wove an ambitious historical web that suggested the paradigm shift was long in coming. Ferguson linked the Transcendentalists, John Muir’s environmentalism, and concepts from figures as diverse as Gandhi, Buckminster Fuller, and Saul Bellow to the arrival of her heralded Aquarian Age.

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LaRouche’s contention was that Ferguson’s book was actually a government-backed psyop, orchestrated through a labyrinthine web of think tanks led by England’s Tavistock Institute, NATO, and Stanford’s powerful Social Research Institute (SRI). LaRouche even contended that SRI’s well-connected director, Willis Harman, had effectively fed the text to Ferguson.

While fellow Futurists saw Ferguson as too rosy and spiritual, Carl A. Raschke, a University of Denver Religious Studies professor, argued that The Aquarian Conspiracy was chipping away at traditional American values. Raschke, interviewed for a 1986 New York Times piece exploring broader New Age criticism, said, “I think it’s as much a political movement as a religious movement, and it’s spreading into business management theory and a lot of other areas. If you look at it carefully you see it represents a complete rejection of Judeo-Christian and bedrock American values.”

Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy and the New Age Era

Quote:In 1968 the U.S. Office of Education commissioned Stanford Research Institute (later called SRI) to have a look into the future and report what they’d found there. SRI took it one step further and spelled out what “changes in the conceptual premises underlying Western society would lead to a desirable future.” (Changing Images of Man, xvii)

The results were made into a book called “Changing Images of Man”, edited by O.W. Markley and Willis W. Harman. You can download a copy of the 1982 reprint here, courtesy of Skilluminati Research. This book is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. It is nothing less than a blueprint for a vast social engineering project undertaken by the very highest levels of the military/industrial complex. The project, as we’ll see, was already well underway by the time this study was commissioned, but in the late sixties and early seventies, thanks in part to this project, SRI was at the hub of just about every major development in the evolving “New Age” community.

Conspiracy theorists within the Christian right see this book, now almost mythical in status, as evidence of a very longrunning project, indeed, comprised of a Satanic plot to rule the world. But we, especially those on the political left who would completely ignore such theories, will need learn to step out of our own ivory towers from which we scorn those “ignorant fundies” and re-examine how the elites in our society operate.

Quote:Sir John Whitmore also wrote the foreword to and is extensively quoted in a book called Nine: Briefing from Deep Space which was published in 2005. The book is based upon interviews with extraterrestrial beings which a group of people including Whitmore, as well as Phyllis Schlemmer and Uri Geller, claimed to have had over a number of years. The book and Whitmore himself have been quoted and spoken about on a number of websites which explore such claims. During the 1970s, Whitmore commissioned Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry to write a script for a movie that he was intending to fund called The Nine, but the deal fell through.