DR: What event has surprised you most in the years since The Aquarian Conspiracy was published?

MARILYN FERGUSON: (long pause). Irangate.

DR: That such things would happen, or that they came to light?

MARILYN FERGUSON: Both. I had not realized the extent of the hubris of people in places of power in our government. I hadn't realized how far things had gone. When all of that came to light, I felt that it was the beginning of the end of that way of doing business. What Watergate showed and Irangate underscored that you can't do business that way.

The lesson is not to look outward toward the people who perpetrated unconstitutional acts and wrongdoings, but to look to ourselves. I'm not saying you must obey all laws, because some laws are unlawful. I certainly think that Thoreau and Gandhi and Martin Luther King were right in their nonviolent resistance. But in terms of your own conscience, this is what I'm talking about.. I'm talking about when you violate your own sense of right and wrong When you know what's right and wrong in your own light, and then do something that's just a little bit off, then you are participating in the old paradigm.

We have to be careful in the details of our lives. Somebody once said God is in the details. A lot of people who are interested in the new consciousness tend to be broadstroke thinkers, efficient thinkers. We have to anchor the big vision in our everyday acts and our little kindnesses.

DR: How do you manage to keep up with the incredible amount of information coming through the print and electronic media? Do you work 48-hour days?

MARILYN FERGUSON: My husband, Ray Gottleib, whose background is science, scans a publication called Current Contents, which covers the contents of 6000 science periodicals a year, and comes out once a week. We send for all the papers we think would be of interest. We have a staff of people who are working very hard to try to match the technology to our needs. To some extent we use computers, computer search function. We order around 300 scientific papers every month, which are reviewed by Ray, or my son Eric Ferguson, who is now writing for the Bulletin, or by me. We are looking for what I might call common sense science. We're looking for science people can use. Our readers are an imaginative bunch, in all different fields.

DR: Science shouldn't be for scientists only.

MARILYN FERGUSON: My feeling is that science has been in the academy for too long. I have a lot of admiration for scientists, and particularly the ones who make major breakthroughs. But they have to write their material in a certain form to communicate through the established system. It's not an ideal system, the communication system within science.

And there is no master plan. Our country has no vision of where we want the science to take us. Because there is no overview of where we want to go, the educators don't know what the brain researchers are finding, except in a very slow, trickle-down kind of way.

We need more people who can read and understand the research, and then communicate it clearly and interestingly. . . There's a need for armies of intermediaries who can make the translation, to be science journalists and interpreters. Preferably they should be creative people, even fiction writers. Journalists and fiction writers have a sense of pattern.