VISIONARY BEHAVIOR AND THE NEXT GREAT MIGRATION
by Marilyn Ferguson

The great American psychologist and philosopher William James once said, "I have no doubt that most people live-physically, intellectually, and morally-in a very restricted circle of their potential being .... We all have reservoirs of life, to draw upon, of which we do not dream."

Throughout the past 25 years, alerting people to their restrictions and awakening them to their inner reservoir has been the primary objective of the human potential movement, the consciousness movement, and the new age movement. The name changes, but the agenda is ever-more urgent: widespread personal awakening. Now, in the 1990s, without individual effort, the collective is paralyzed.

And without a vision, as the prophet Isaiah said, "the people perish." Our overlapping crises point to a meta-crisis: a worldwide "drought" of visionary behavior. Our survival depends in large part on the activity of the awakened social visionary -- the person compassionate enough to look out for the larger good, observant enough to spot problems, creative enough to sense solutions, and tough enough to work hard until the war is won. In the 1990s, with a rising social conscience and a new spirit of voluntarism, what once seemed "high-minded' looks more and more like common sense.

Human history is filled with mass migrations. Periodically, whole tribes or villages -- threatened, endangered, or bored -- have left behind the familiar and ventured into new territory. Often, they were threatened by external problems -- limited space, dwindling resources, violent neighbors. Sometimes a people emigrated en masse because scouts and travelers carried them tales of a distant land where the natives were friendly, the climate temperate, food and resources plentiful, and the human spirit free of oppression.

Today, we are threatened as never before. No shift in longitude nor latitude would offer us a paradise. Our next great migration cannot be to a new place, but to a new understanding. This new understanding is not going to emerge from established institutions. Most "experts" are sitting at a distance from the arena where social transformation can occur. Most "leaders" are not looking beyond the next election or quarterly profit-and-loss statement. And our media are too busy polishing image ("production values") to face hard truths.

Nor will this new migration likely be led by our schools. At a time when each of us needs a vivid, constructive sense of the future, our schools hold on to counter-intuitive teaching strategies. Yet another generation of students must break free of restrictive thinking patterns, redeveloping visionary traits which ought to come naturally.

The navigators and guides of this migration will emerge from those individuals who are living what Robert Lindner, in the 1950s, called "the way of positive rebellion, the path of creative protest." Creative people don't choose their work. Their work chooses them. A vocation, literally, is something we feel called to do. The visionary looks far, looks wide, looks back, looks ahead, looks within-and moves.

For the social visionary, a flash of insight turns into an abiding sense of mission. Attuned to the collective good, we engage in an open-ended inquiry into what to do next. In a spirit of discovery, we reach for imaginative solutions. Our intuition hands us our next assignment. Awareness breeds responsibility. When "I know" yields to "I do," our passion and commitment sustain us and carry us forward.

Excellence is not an achievement or a luxury; it is oxygen to a drowning soul. The notion of a status quo is an illusion. As individuals and as societies, we are either healing or degenerating, either moving toward life or toward death.

Folk wisdom has a lot to say about the value of working our way through difficulty, of taking on more than we think we can handle. We talk about someone having undergone "a trial by fire," of being tempered, of "the school of hard knocks." Or, in the Chinese idiom, "Embrace tiger."

From childhood on we have all heard, and often resented, the counsel that our greatest learning comes from difficulty. Most of us keep hoping that understanding will come easily, later, when we "have our act together."

But modern research demonstrates that challenge is the brain's wake-up call. If something doesn't seize our attention, our brains tend to operate in an indifferent way. It becomes ever more evident that so-called giftedness is actually a talent for using one's abilities.

Interestingly, the gift of being gifted the talent for identifying and using our talents -- seems to derive from first developing a single ability to its edge. Developing one ability very often leads to an experimental attitude. Once you have mastered the knack of mastering yourself -- of applying yourself, persisting, and re-inspiring yourself -- you can master many things, much as multi-lingual people report that each new language acquired makes the new one easier. We can "bootstrap" our way to visionary behavior.

After all, once you have overcome a specific obstacle, all obstacles become less threatening. Once you have endured great pain to reach a goal, all pain becomes more endurable.

Our dreams are our realities-in-exile. To bring them to life, we will have to become spiritual athletes. We will have to "rise to the occasion", stretch to the full use of our powers. Perhaps, if enough of us exercise our native visionary behavior, we will move the whole culture. We will make the next great migration.

Adapted from The New Common Sense: Secrets of the Visionary Life.

Marilyn Ferguson is author of the 1980 best-seller, The Aquarian Conspiracy and the forthcoming New Common Sense. Ms. Ferguson is publisher and editor of Brain/Mind Bulletin, a monthly newsletter exploring the latest developments in research and theory in learning, health, psychology, and states of consciousness.

Brain/Mind Bulletin is $35 a year: P.O. Box 42211, Los Angeles, CA 90042, or call 1(800) 553-MIND.

Copyright © 1996. The Light Party.