SAVING THE WORLD

(work in progress — not public)

I’ve been doing a lot of complaining about how commentators with their lights on are gadflies and that we don’t have a unified voice. I am an active contributor to Robert Reich and Chris Hedges and Michael Moore and Thom Hartman, and in the many comments they get on their critiques of our misguided country nobody is saying what I say. I’m talking about what can get us beyond where there’s lots of woe-is-me and little that moves us forward. I was thinking about how I want to move us forward when a light bulb went off – I am just a gadfly, too. Maybe the idea that we need to become a force is for me to act on.  

I got marching orders for that more than 30 years ago. Addressed to me, the document is called Inside the Intelligence. I’ve been working at following its directives, gadfly that I have been, but is it time I accept its cheerleading for me to turn the world around? 

I can taste how the world could be. All it will take will be a collective “aha” to throw humanity’s switch from selfish to cooperative. If everybody cooperated we humans are so damn smart that if it was a fair world, where people could work their way up and we helped each other, by and large everyone could be having a  good time. With death in the mix, there always will be pain. Disease still will create misery. But we won’t suffer at the hands of each other.

Looking to stimulate thinking about how to create the collective voice we need, I’m declaring a “What if” challenge. What if it’s a future time and mutuality prevails? Starting with yourself, what story can you make up about how we got there? I’ll give $1,000 to each person who sends me a roadmap that inspires me or educates me on things that could be done to get us where we could be going! Put on your thinking caps, imagine the world you’d like to be in, and tell me how we got there.  

Here’s my what if story:

COVER STORY

How Suzanne Taylor, with no official position, became our oldest Person of the Year

By 2022, the year our country got on course, ST had, for a long time, been injecting ideas related to consciousness and enlightenment into political discourses that were dealing with surface realities where power prevailed. Everyone was trying to fix this and that without attention to the belief system that sustained all the ills that plagued us. Suzanne deluged popular gadflies who were speaking truth to power with calls for them to turn their attention to what would allow a force for the good to emerge, and she spoke so intelligently about the need for system change that she woke everyone up to the things we implemented that got us out of the implosion we were in.   

We put into play the most basic idea she’d been promoting, that we-the-people needed a voice so as to be able to influence our dysfunctional government, by establishing our Wisdom Council. It was able to do the end-run around legislators from both political parties who answered to funders over constituents, who had to listen to the overwhelming force that good people had become. Suzanne even had come up with the egalitarian methodology that was used for creating the Council and had hit paydirt getting Marianne Williamson, the only Presidential candidate who has understood the primacy of our mutuality, to start it. Marianne picked Tim Shriver (who Suzanne persuaded to overcome his resistance to being a Presidential candidate), the two of them picked the third, the three picked the fourth, and so  on until the most respected people in the U.S. were on board. When they deliberated on what to do, everyone listened. Plus, we got the Suggestion Box that Suzanne proposed, for offering ideas and dialogue about the ideas to the Council, so we-the-people have had direct involvement in our forward motion – true democracy in action.    

The first serious deliberation the Council made was on ST’s suggestion to address the primary issue keeping the country in such jeopardy, the grotesque split between the haves and the have-nots. When everyone got enough money for food, shelter, education, and health care to come out of the preoccupation so many had with survival, we were a working democracy again, able to progress. And that’s when other countries, picking up on our success, created the versions of Universal Basic Income that are in play now for all civilized people around the globe. That was the game-changer that moved all of humanity out of a focus on self-interest to where caring about each other as much as we care about ourselves has become our ground of being.  

It was another of Suzanne’s suggestions that the Council create our Human Survival Party that’s larger now than the Democrats and Republicans combined, and that commands the voice that can’t be denied voice in running our country’s affairs. 

Here are some other things we can thank Suzanne for:   

The 8-person CIRCLES OF TRUST everyone is in, that counteract the miseries of loneliness and that reduce needs for therapy by having sympathetic others listening to them. 

Thank Suzanne for political candidates no longer having highly produced TV commercials, so they just talk to the camera and we get a real feel for who they are. 

That Americans are no longer subjected to commercials for diseases most of us don’t have was another of Suzanne’s advocacies. 

Suzanne started our FIRESIDE CHATS, a la Roosevelt, that go viral on YouTube, where celebrities and other distinguished people make such attractive appeals for unity that billionaires have gotten in huddles to be helpful and there are CEOs who no longer hold shareholder value as their only objective.   

People also are loving WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT THE WORLD? where they just turn on a camera and speak from their hearts, helping our human family to feel connected. 

We restructured our prison system to emulate Norway’s after Suzanne educated a populace that didn’t know how compassionate treatment of prisoners serves the greater good. With Norway’s recidivism rate at 20% and ours at 78%, the benefit to us of stressing rehabilitation over punishment can be validated after enough time goes by to have measurable results. 

And thank you to Japan for having a system where there are no mass shootings and to Suzanne for popularizing what they do for gun control that educated us to where we were able to resolve an issue that had been tearing us apart.  

Pre-school and kindergarten programs teaching our children about kindness spread like wildfire after Suzanne spotlighted a few that were in play. With a kind world being a loving world, where love is the bedrock we want to rest in, Suzanne has been greatly responsible for a kind way of being catching hold as the new standard for how we behave. 

Perhaps Suzanne’s main contribution, when we were imploded in factions and our democracy was threatened at its core, was showing us how we could become a united country.  Suzanne predicted that offering Donald Trump total immunity from all prosecutions, civil and criminal, where he’d stay out of jail and remain rich, would get him to do what turned out to be his stunning mea culpa about the coup and the steal that would release his followers — that in Trump fashion he turned into a great service to the country in creating the unified America we have become. That echoed the lesson we learned from Norway’s prison system, about how serving the greater good beats vengeance, a principle we regularly employ now as the gentler, more unified peoples we have become.  

Living inside a giant idea, where end-stage capitalism had hit the wall, we were due for the massive change that got Suzanne Taylor on our cover.  She demonstrated how any ordinary person could contribute to humanity moving toward the beautiful civilization we now are well on our way to becoming. For alerting us to the danger we were in, Greta Thunberg became our youngest Person of the Year, and Suzanne Taylor, our oldest Person of the Year, has been chosen this year for helping us get out of it. 

 

Submitted to L.A. Times Opinion 5/17/22 

Memo from the Intelligence to Humanity
Dictated to Suzanne Taylor 

You are floundering now, stuck in the unworkability of the world, with regressive forces preventing forward motion. People need an orientation to progress. Try this. Put Utopia as the endpoint. It’s where humanity is working together, each person a caring part of the whole. It’s all creation, no destruction.  

The shame you humans feel about what you did in your past and the proclivity you have to deny that, like removing information from school curriculums, would be ameliorated by everyone understanding how your remarkable species has been evolving, fleshing out its potential. That’s the story to be aware of. Humanity is working its way towards what it can be. As Marianne Williamson said about the Declaration of Independence, “Out of the 56 signers, 41 of them were slaveowners; even, of course, the Declaration’s author. So, from the very beginning, ensconced in our national DNA, there has been a deep dichotomy between who we are and who we say we are. It has been with us from the beginning; that as a people we are dedicated to the most enlightened principles yet imbued with forces that are more than willing to transgress against them.”  

You could say, “have been willing” to transgress against them because it’s time now to supersede your ignorance, and you need all the wisdom you can muster to love your Constitution for its ideals and not be held back by its inability to totally guide you in how to express them. 

Massive moves have been made on the way to the realization of your potential. You don’t own people anymore. Or think it’s heroic to exterminate Indians. Rather than denying your past, acknowledge you come from more primitive understandings in the evolutionary process humanity is in. There wasn’t even electricity when your Constitution was written, and you can’t pin your actions now on all its literal contents.  

Rather than your Star-Spangled Banner, which sings your praises, how about an anthem that would express your hopes? Here’s what Suzanne suggests, from “Paint Your Wagon,” a show she loved years ago when she saw it on Broadway: 

Where am I goin’?
I don’t know
Where am I headin’?
I ain’t certain
All I know
Is I am on my way 

When will I be there?
I don’t know
When will I get there?
I ain’t certain
All that I know
Is I am on my way  

 Gotta dream boy
Gotta song
Paint your wagon
And come along 

 

BIO:

Suzanne Taylor, a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of NYU, produces events, projects, and experiences that challenge the status quo and inspire us to realize that caring about each other is as important as caring about ourselves.  

Suzanne’s non-profit, Mighty Companions, hosts invitational gatherings at her beautiful West Hollywood home that’s a showcase for her post-impressionist paintings – she had a one-woman show. And Suzanne wrote The Anybody Can Make It, Everybody Will Love It Cookbook, so the food is delicious. 

In the 1960s and ‘70s, as Sue Taylor Suzanne acted in top situation comedies and in many TV commercials. Then, she turned to what she could do to encourage humanity to take a big leap in consciousness. A highlight was her award-winning documentary, What On Earth? Inside the Crop Circle Mystery, about the possibility of not being the only intelligence in the universe. Then, as a TED producer, when TED withdrew their support for TEDx West Hollywood because some speakers challenged our scientific materialist worldview, she became even bolder in working to bring about a consciousness shift. From TED Talks she segued to SUE Speaks, where SUE stands for Searching for Unity in Everything, and https://SUESpeaks.org is her platform for a blog, a podcast, and more.  

Subscribe to SUE Speaks mailing list: https://tinyurl.com/y7u6o6uk. 

 Suzanne Taylor
Producer, Filmmaker, Speaker, Author
suzanne@mightycompanions.org

A social catalyst of collective sanity

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Weaving the spiritual into the political

 

WISDOM OF THE SAGES 

Another stab at what podcast guests could do together.

I asked all you podcast guests for a mission statement. Here’s mine, delivered to me in Inside the Intelligence, a document you can read about here.

“Nothing that goes on in the world is worth spending your time on without there first being a primal understanding. Humanity needs an organizing idea. Endless pushing and pulling, tugging and scraping, cajoling and screaming, a hubbub of irrelevancy will go on forever until there is a call to STOP. Call, Suzanne, call. Be clear. Get everyone’s attention. No more settling. Wake the world up”.

Since 1989, Inside the Intelligence has emboldened me. When I was urged to do a podcast and wondered why the world might need another one, I did it because it was a way to realize this mission of mine.  

You are an outstanding bunch, where each of you moves the world in the direction it needs to go. If we did a live event, a la what TED does, I trust it would make waves.

For my variation, in a much easier delivery system, I think all of you responding to the same request could lead to something. How about getting out your iPhones and making a one-line statement about the reason, in the evolutionary scheme of things, you think that humans were created.

Hoping to hear yours…

It’s time to reinvent the world. We are so unraveled that we’re in position to start over.

What’s primary is to move into a worldview where caring about each other is as important as caring about ourselves. Without that, it’s moving deck chairs on the Titanic. A humanitarian world succeeding an economic one will best position us to address all that ails us. 

What’s also primary is to bring everyone in the world up from poverty. A declaration we’d go to the moon was what mobilized that effort. A declaration now would be that it be a fundamental right to get sustenance: health care, housing, food, education. For everyone, everywhere. In Grunch of Giants, in 1983, Bucky Fuller wrote, “I do know that technologically humanity now has the opportunity, for the first time in its history, to operate our planet in such a manner as to support and accommodate all humanity at a substantially more advanced standard of living than any humans have ever experienced.” 

These are not long-range goals. They are necessities NOW. Global warming is not a political issue and even COVID could be child’s play by comparison to it.

How can we make these things happen? We need government to take people out of poverty, but changing our worldview can come from the private sector. We need to be creative.

It’s time to reinvent the world. We are so unraveled that we’re in position to start over.

What’s primary is to move into a worldview where caring about each other is as important as caring about ourselves. Without that, it’s moving deck chairs on the Titanic. A humanitarian world succeeding an economic one will best position us to address all that ails us. 

What’s also primary is to bring everyone in the world up from poverty. A declaration we’d go to the moon was what mobilized that effort. A declaration now would be that it be a fundamental right to get sustenance: health care, housing, food, education. For everyone, everywhere. In Grunch of Giants, in 1983, Bucky Fuller wrote, “I do know that technologically humanity now has the opportunity, for the first time in its history, to operate our planet in such a manner as to support and accommodate all humanity at a substantially more advanced standard of living than any humans have ever experienced.” 

These are not long-range goals. They are necessities NOW. Global warming is not a political issue and even COVID could be child’s play by comparison to it.

How can we make these things happen? We need government to take people out of poverty, but changing our worldview can come from the private sector. We need to be creative.

These are two things we could do: HUMANITY’S PARTY OR THE TEAM OF HUMANITY and FOCUS FOR HUMANITY – THE MINUTE OF SILENCE

Musings on My Mission

All I want to do is to make the world a better place.

I was gifted with a good mind, and I bet it was my daddy asking about the other two points when I’d come home with a 98 that got me my proclivity for perfection.

Another thing I’ve been blessed with is comfort. Since I love sugar and butter and I think of exercise as a dirty word, without deserving it I’ve always been healthy. And, I’ve never struggled with money, either from not having enough or from having so much that life is about minding it. The universe has taken care of me. All I’ve had to do was come up with ideas.

In the first third of my life, I did well at traditional things. I was a star at New York University (Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude), a cooking fool (I wrote The Anybody Can Make It, Everybody Will Love It Cookbook), a post-impressionist painter (I had a one-woman show), a wife of a major comedy writer, a mom of three girls, and a working actress. In 1970, after being Mrs. Him for 14 years, I got unmarried and started my second life, looking for me.

I’d had babies instead of social conscience in the ‘60s, but in the ‘70s, when all of us were in consciousness kindergarten and I was out of my marriage, I got steeped in the Human Potential Movement where I traveled on mind-expanding avenues and landed in whatever gave rise to everything. Then, I used my new smarts producing projects and events where people chewed on how it will be when human beings care about each other as much as they care about themselves.

I made up games for grownup children, from dealing with the new technologies of transformation that were part of the Association of Humanistic Psychology, to my Challenge for Champions “happenings” where people of the new persuasion got to socialize, to salons at my home where speakers told us what life’s all about, to taking to the streets for guerilla theater. These were projects and events where self-aware individuals had opportunities to meet and to further the consciousness shift that was sweeping through humanity. Then, I was “discovered” and I was primed for speaking on the guru circuit by 36 episodes of The Cosmic Fuel Pump that were on a local TV station.

Nineteen years into that rabble rousing, I got another gift when I grabbed my pen every morning for a few months to write what a voice that called itself the Intelligence had to say. I put it in a booklet and Inside the Intelligence: Mapping the Path to Oneness has been a guide for me ever since, wising me up about how to create a healing rather than a hurting world. In 1989, when I put up my first website, I tuned into the Intelligence and this is what it said:

There is a logic to human existence. This is an intelligence speaking. It is the wisdom of the circle.

Dialogue is the necessary activity now to save the earth. Everyone sees glimmers of a peril looming; all must attend. Reordering must come. It will not result from legislation or from mediating between warring factions. Any imposition will just create more war. No, this needs to BE an otherness that births inside the womb of now.

This is the voice of humanity’s soul. Snap to attention. Come off the meditation cushion. The family needs to forge. The mother is overblown with pregnancy. A creature must emerge.

We have stripped ourselves, prayed ourselves, and meditated ourselves into readiness for evolving together. Who knows where we can go? Into other dimensions, or other solar systems, or able to read each other’s minds? What are glimmers in our eyes perhaps can ignite, but first oneness has to be our way. Recognizing Spirit as what we are expressing and not what we are looking for is the alchemy that transforms. I am devoted to helping that occur.

On my homepage, www.SUESpeaks.org, you’ll see my podcast, Searching for Unity in Everything, where I talk to thought leaders about what they would do if they ruled the world. And, you’ll also see how I’ve been adding good cheer to people’s lives at this challenging time by supplying A DELIGHT A DAY.

Actually, nothing makes me happier than making other people happy, so come along and join me on my wild ride to the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

I pledge allegiance to myself,
Which is also all of you
And to the grand idea
Of which we are all a part,
One consciousness,
One intelligence,
Indivisible,
With truth as reality for all.