"The brain's calculations do not require our conscious effort, only our attention and our openness to let the information through. Although the brain absorbs universes of information, little is admitted into normal consciousness"
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Ferguson is making consciousness feel less like a command center and more like a bouncer with a velvet rope. The provocation is that your best thinking is already happening offstage: the brain is “calculating” constantly, and the limiting factor isn’t horsepower, it’s admission. By framing insight as something that arrives when we stop trying so hard, she flatters the reader’s intuition while also issuing a subtle critique of modern overcontrol: the culture that treats cognition as willpower and productivity as virtue is, in her telling, actively jamming the signal.
The line works because it swaps agency for receptivity. “Only our attention and our openness” sounds gentle, almost spiritual, but it’s also a strategy for upgrading the self without the grimness of self-discipline. Attention becomes a moral technology: if you’re stuck, it’s not because you’re incapable, it’s because you’re closed off, distracted, armored. That’s an inviting diagnosis because it implies change without blame-heavy labor; you don’t have to become smarter, just more permeable.
Context matters here. Ferguson emerged as a key voice in late-20th-century “human potential” thinking, when neuroscience metaphors, meditation, and systems language mingled in a popular quest to legitimize intuition and altered states. “Universes of information” is classic New Age scale-talk: it’s expansive enough to awe you, vague enough to resist falsification. The subtext is a cultural permission slip to trust tacit knowledge - and a warning that “normal consciousness” may be a narrow, socially enforced setting, not the full range of what the mind can do.
The line works because it swaps agency for receptivity. “Only our attention and our openness” sounds gentle, almost spiritual, but it’s also a strategy for upgrading the self without the grimness of self-discipline. Attention becomes a moral technology: if you’re stuck, it’s not because you’re incapable, it’s because you’re closed off, distracted, armored. That’s an inviting diagnosis because it implies change without blame-heavy labor; you don’t have to become smarter, just more permeable.
Context matters here. Ferguson emerged as a key voice in late-20th-century “human potential” thinking, when neuroscience metaphors, meditation, and systems language mingled in a popular quest to legitimize intuition and altered states. “Universes of information” is classic New Age scale-talk: it’s expansive enough to awe you, vague enough to resist falsification. The subtext is a cultural permission slip to trust tacit knowledge - and a warning that “normal consciousness” may be a narrow, socially enforced setting, not the full range of what the mind can do.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
|---|---|
| Source | Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (1980). Passage on the brain's unconscious calculations and limited admission into normal consciousness is attributed to Ferguson in this work. |
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