Reagan was on the rise, the anti-war movement had sunk to a low ebb, and the New Age was barely christened when The Aquarian Conspiracy appeared in 1980. Overnight Marilyn Ferguson’s book became famous and sold in the millions. I was a young doctor who had just learned to meditate when I picked up a dog-eared paperback copy at a Catskill spiritual retreat. Ferguson’s message shot through me like electricity: a “benign conspiracy” was bringing about the greatest shift in consciousness in the twentieth century. In one stroke Ferguson unified a movement that seemed like small, isolated outposts on the fringes of respectable society.
When she died this October at age 70, Ferguson could take satisfaction that a watershed had been crossed. For all the multitudes of people for whom Dick Cheney is more familiar than the I Ching, George Bush than the Bhagavad-Gita, her “leaderless revolution” has grown steadily around the world. Ferguson helped make possible a new style of politician like Barack Obama and ecological activists like Al Gore. She was a one-woman movement for hope. She promised every voice in the wilderness that there were a thousand other voices like theirs.
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