Search Results for: INSIDE THE INTELLIGENCE
Is Another Intelligence Interacting with Us?
IS THE WORLD ABOUT TO CHANGE IN A FUNDAMENTAL WAY?
“Could extraterrestrials help us save the Earth?”
“We’d have to be dead above the neck if we weren’t interested in this.”
This New York Magazine piece comes on the heels of a The New York Times article that let us know about government interest in UFOs. More and more stories that came from the fringe are all of a sudden popping up in mainstream media.
Brave and Bold for a Better Earth
Brave and Bold for a Better Earth
January 1, 2050
Today is the day I wrote about so many years ago. It marks a new year, a new decade, and the day by which I envisioned living on a healed, cooperative Earth.
I’m sitting in my moonlit study reflecting on how far the world has come. In 2024, the moon’s pale purity was a reprieve from the harsh realities throttling toward us. Now, it reflects the infinite light amidst shadow that characterizes our existence. We’ve gone from a world fueled by fear, antagonism, and ruthless “othering,” to a people fortified by hope and resilience who employ compassion, innovation, and transformation as their ultimate uniting recourses. So many leaders have been imperative to this change; I am grateful to be counted among them.
*****
Suzanne Taylor’s 2024 “Essay Contest” catalyzed my contribution to our changed world. She invited contestants to contemplate the future and recount how we contributed to Earth and humanity’s thriving. The competition combined many things I loved: considering consciousness evolution, creative writing, and a cash prize I could use toward my PhD tuition. Should be fun, I thought.
But as I began to write, the weight of the task struck me. This was not a mere creative exercise for funds meant to spur small insights. This was a personal reflection of cosmic importance, designed to push each entrant to fulfill a calling. The prompt urged us to ask our inner knowing what does the world need and what can I contribute?
At the time, I had convinced myself that I was doing enough. I had, after all, left behind my career in corporate law to pursue a PhD in consciousness studies to better understand how spiritual experiences impact our social and material lives. Alongside, I had accidentally discovered my own energy healing abilities, and I began facilitating small sessions of “Kundalini Activation,” a practice of energy transmissions that cleared people’s energetic systems and aligned them to their true essence. Yet with both my research and my energy work, I contented myself with a modest reach, happy to keep my “woo” in the shadows. I contributed my understanding about human potential, who we are, and our ability to heal on a person-to-person, if-and-when, one-at-a-time basis.
And then I answered Suzanne’s prompt.
I realized I had been hiding from the world. My research insights remained siloed within a confined academic community and my energy work within safe social parameters. While my proclaimed passion was to open people to their most authentic expression of existence, I myself was unwilling to put my cherished reputation as a “rational” person on the frontline. But as Suzanne wrote in Inside the Intelligence: Mapping the Path to Oneness, mankind’s progress required a few key people to align to a unified energy field and convey that “a pro-creative, happiness-inducing reality is joinable.” I had internally aligned; the missing piece was the courage to convey that reality to others.
What Did The World Need?
When I considered what humanity needed most, it mirrored our needs as individuals: to break old, stale patterns of being, to experience another way, and to feel safe to take a newly unveiled path. 2
Humanity needed to expand its schema of possibility and know that the emerging route would be sturdy and lead it to recovery, not cause it to flounder in a cosmic vortex of chaos. We all yearned for a reconnection to self, to others, and to something beyond.
If we were to become whole, then consciousness expansion and healing would have to become normalized, accessible, and commonplace – an essential pursuit for all. Spiritual experiences could no longer remain exclusive to those with the means to either ditch Western civilization for ashrams or invest in reclusive esoteric practices. These practices and ways of being had to be brought in both theory and experience to the masses.
My research on healthy spiritual transformations had taught me that on an individual and collective level we would need knowledge, experience, and guidance. With those three pillars, people could seek truth about our existence, experience something deeper that could bring them into alignment, and have the social support to see them comfortably through to a new reality. But the question remained: how could I contribute?
My Contributions
The realities of our world at the time meant that my particular positioning as an Ivy-League lawyer, consciousness PhD researcher, and energy healer could bring diverse parties together to learn about and experience deeper levels of consciousness. My contribution to humanity, I realized, would be to help bridge the practical and spiritual realms for as many people as possible. I could do so through (1) research, (2) disseminating information, (3) offering experience, and (4) providing guidance and community. I aimed to bring an integral approach to the study of consciousness to help people see that ascension and descension, transformation and grounding, and integrating spiritual experiences were all inevitable and imperative parts of the spiritual and human experience.
Research
I committed myself more deeply to my research. My PhD focused on how to integrate and navigate the aftermath of spiritual and mystical experiences. This research, which I continued and expanded upon beyond my degree, showcased the narratives and lived experiences of individuals who got a glimpse of something beyond our 3D realm during altered states of consciousness. The project created a map of a range of spiritually transformative experiences to help a rapidly awakening world navigate the human realities of the awakening process, such as how to maintain health, careers, social relationships, and a new sense of self. My research brought insights about both human flourishing and the Dark Night of the Soul (how to avoid it, what incited it, and tools to regain balance). After my PhD, I collaborated on research projects with various organizations to further our understanding of integrating all forms of spiritual experiences. I also partnered with subtle energy research organizations and became a leading expert on subtle energetics and ensuing transformations from energy experiences.
Dissemination
Pushing aside my impulse to hide my work, I published journal articles, presented at conferences, and teamed up with interdisciplinary research teams to further our understanding of the relationship between altered states and human flourishing. Importantly, I shared this widely beyond academic circles. I started a website and social media channels where I posted research insights and findings, and I began speaking on podcasts and doing presentations for various wellness platforms and 3
institutions. Eventually, I began my own limited video podcast series to discuss findings from my research and to share anecdotes as both a recipient and facilitator of energy work. I published a book on the findings from my dissertation, and I became known as an adamant advocate for gradual and safe spiritual emergence. My book mapped how people could retain the wonders of their old lives as they manageably and magically emerged into the new.
Inspired by the course I helped teach during my PhD called Spiritual Realities, I sought out guest lecturing opportunities at universities across the US and UK to normalize what had previously been an academically taboo topic. In the private sector, I sourced consulting opportunities in the psychedelic-assisted therapy and energy healing spaces to teach practices for safe, balanced, and thriving integration. I applied what I had learned from analyzing countless interviews about spiritual transformations, and I built and disseminated a model so people could fully embrace the path in a way that was grounded in our practical human experience with the eye-opening, objective, and mindful perspective that comes with a deepening of consciousness.
Offering Experience
As so many researchers before me had highlighted, knowledge means little without the corresponding personal experience. In my own case, I knew that to be true. I had gone from a materialist and atheist to a deeply spiritual person after my first Kundalini Activation session. No amount of reading or learning alone could have offered me that shift. The practice made me more planetarily conscious, more loving in word, thought and action, more discerning about what I put into my body, and more aligned in my vision and purpose. Because of the change I witnessed in myself and countless others, I knew the power of this practice to transform and reroute lives. If we could only popularize the practice, I knew we could create a profound ripple effect of unblocking, transcendence, and alignment.
Thus, I brought my industrious corporate skills to the mission. Employing many of the tactics from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, I began to both spread the practice and my research findings on its benefits with an aim to go viral. The outreach targets were mavens, salespeople, and connectors, as they comprised the three groups of people that, according to Gladwell and Pareto’s principle, made up the 20% who effected 80% of social change. I recruited the help of Kundalini Activation facilitators who had well-established social media followings. Together, we contacted influencers, media outlets, corporate organizations, people of influence, and celebrities from various countries and walks of life and offered an opportunity to experience the practice. Each facilitator resonated with a particular social group. I leveraged my reputation and background to draw in people who would otherwise be turned off by esotericism, like lawyers, lobbyists, adjudicators, academics, politicians, entrepreneurs, doctors, and other professionals from the public and private sectors. I satisfied their left-brain desires with the research and right-brain yearnings with experience, contributing to a more awake and open atmosphere in each of their professional sectors.
More researchers and energy workers from other practices caught wind of our mission and we joined forces to make energy healing scalable. We teamed up with researchers like Dr. William Bengston to develop lines of healing products and at-home trainings to empower people to strip back layers of inauthenticity so they could evolve their own energetic system and help the surrounding collective. It took time, but we achieved the tipping point. Energy work became as ubiquitous as yoga or meditation. 4
Providing Guidance and Community
When navigating any change in life, the presence and guidance of like-minded, encouraging people is essential to positive growth. For that reason, I maintained a list on my website of all the resources I and others had created on navigating spiritual transformations. Alongside, I provided links to spiritual support networks and organizations committed to consciousness exploration, like the Scientific and Medical Network, the Emergent Phenomena Research Consortium, and the Galileo Commission. And, as my career developed, I began to hold workshops, seminars, and networking events designed for continued education, experience, and support in spiritual emergence communities. Through these efforts, transformation could always be met with the right company.
*****
Suzanne’s prompt made me realize I hadn’t been living in my fullest, bravest, and most authentic power. What she said in Inside the Intelligence was right: I was the product; I had to serve who I was; and I had to honor and celebrate my own emergence. I had to let go of my small story and the plans and ideas I once had for myself. Something bigger was at play. I had to step back and see who I was and what pieces of the puzzle I had been given to help create a more whole world. And I had to do this as much for myself as for others and the world. Once I did, I watched as each action I took contributed to meaningful, lasting change and helped create the pro-creative, happiness-inducing reality we enjoy today.
We are mirrors for each other to reach self-understanding and take committed action. Through example, we remind each other of who we are, so that we may each realize our essence and give back from that place. For me, it started with the Essay Contest, which called for me to double down on my research, disseminate it freely, and spread transformative experience far and wide. In that way, I helped spread the understanding of human potential as broadly as possible, inspiring others to do the same. With the help of many people who worked beside me, I contributed to changing our world. Together, we forged a tipping point for expanded consciousness.
The process of awakening was and continues to be something that unites us all cross-culturally, as it reminds us that beneath our flesh we are part of the most impressive, magnificent field of consciousness. Watching that understanding permeate our collective systems, beliefs, and way of being on this planet has been the greatest gift of my lifetime.
And with that – Happy New Year! Here’s to all the change to come. 🙂
Italy speech, 10/17/98, “The Future of the New Age”
I want to start by reading to you the words of a recently departed sage, Lex Hixon, writing about what was being thought about at my house, in Los Angeles, before he left us:
“A coalition already exists in spirit. It is coming together now in the social context by the attraction of its unconventional intelligence and compassionate form of high-mindedness. This natural coalition is drawn together by the recognition that the elevation of consciousness is our fundamental life work. This is a genuinely democratic, self-organizing force, flowing through persons of all descriptions. This force does not flourish as any highly structured form. It is not an institution or a foundation or a non-profit company or anything conventionally named. This coalition is a living organism — natural, wild, free. It is made up of individuals devoted to serving the world and developing themselves as finely tuned instruments of service. They learn to gather in the energy of will-to-good, from which authentic goodwill flows out subtly to the entire world.”
This is where I stand, outside the bondage of followership, soul to soul, calling to mighty companions. This experience of ourselves as a One Life is the future of humanity. Let me introduce myself to you. It is my nature to be a 100% person. I once repeated half a year of a high school math course because I got only 89% on the final test. In high school, I got As in a wide variety of subjects from science to art to cooking and sewing, and I had so many credits for extra-curricular activities they didn’t fit on my yearbook page. Then, I graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, America’s highest honors, from NYU.
In what I call my first life, I gave 100% to being a wife and mother. I was the “director of delight” in my marriage to the head writer for the award-winning Dick van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore television show. I had parties for famous funny people like Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, Danny Thomas, and Danny’s daughter, Marlo. (My husband went on to create Marlo Thomas’s groundbreaking TV show, “That Girl.”) With my cooking prowess, I wrote The Anybody Can Make It Everybody Will Love It Cookbook. Then, I got unmarried, and the care I put into my immediate family evolved into care for the family of humanity.
I got serious about this new work after a romance ended. We had been writing a book together about how to have a perfect relationship, but it never had a last chapter. It was 1975, and everyone was searching for themselves. I met my man at Esalen Institute, where we all were searching hard. On the heels of the promising ’60s, when we started to look for a better way to relate, that people were still fearful of contact in the mid-’70s got me to change my life. I stopped acting, which had been my career while I was married, and painting post-impressionist portraits and still-lives good enough for a one-woman show, and looked for what to do to help the world.
I started my new life, in 1975, by becoming the coordinator of a new age conference. It was to explore “community,” among the people in Los Angeles who were at the forefront of the Human Potential Movement. Although everyone wanted closeness, the teachers and authors I spent several months working with planning the event were as entrenched in separation as my boyfriend had been. To counter that, I spent four years producing “ELF Enterprises Unlimiting.” The motto was, “Put the elf back in self,” and ELF stood for Enlightenment, Love and Fun.
It basically involved play as a way to bring people out of their shells. When you came onto the steps leading to my house, triumphant march music greeted you, a sign at the end waved “WELCOME,” lights blinked, a bird sang, a cow mooed, and a bubble machine blew soap bubbles at you. I still run into people who remember something that happened during those years as the best time of their lives. Since then, my home has been an oasis for teachers and teachings that bring us into the realization we are One. We’ve bent spoons in my living room with astronaut Brian O’Leary, done a purification ritual with Tibet’s Shartze Monks, and your speaker from last year, Carol Adrienne, sat at a round table looking for the meaning of life with other leaders of thought. I’ve given the floor to many well-known thinkers, like Peter Russell, Marilyn Ferguson, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Michael Murphy, Willis Harman, Marianne Williamson, and, most precious of all, Georgio Cerquetti, who invited me here after seeing my “house of all opportunities” in action.
This speaks to the need being addressed:
“Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric…”
-Edna St. Vincent Millay-
Mighty Companions is the name I’ve given to my endeavors. A Course in Miracles says that midway in the teacher’s path, he or she will “rest awhile, shed unnecessary things, and not go on from here alone, but will go on with mighty companions.” We meet at my house to discern our collective reality. Out of the public glare and eating my good cooking, we have meetings where people really meet, soul to soul, and oneness forges.
New ways of being can spring from small beginnings. Something that’s good catches on. Buckminster Fuller showed us the “trimtab,” a little mechanism that moves the rudder that turns a big vessel, to give us the idea of how focused energy can move the world. And Rupert Sheldrake discerned “morphogenetic fields,” where all of reality is in grids that are ignited by pattern-setting small beginnings.
A way to foresee what’s coming is to pay attention to quotes that turn up everywhere, where people get the idea of something before it actually comes into reality. For years we’ve been quoting Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Now, small groups where we are intimate and real with one another, from 12-step programs to living rooms of concerned citizens, are trimtabs that are flourishing in America.
That we are a One Life is the vision we need in order to break out of our deadening patterns of antagonism and indifference. When Edgar Mitchell showed us our planet from the moon, an image of Earth undivided got into our collective psyche. When Princess Di died, from the outpouring across all geographic borders and belief systems we got another new image — the possibility of a caring humanity has been burned into us now. Seeing ourselves as heart-filled, we can flesh out the territory of the soul. We stand at a gateway to the next great leg of the human adventure, where we master the environment of inner space. After a long history of worshiping what’s outside, we are landing inside.
New teachers are leading the way. We’ve had saviors, saints, priests, shamans, psychotherapists, gurus, human potential titans, channels, and instructions dictated by disincarnate entities. This new teacher-wave is of people being educated in India who have “awakened” to the universe of non-dualistic awareness, where all is one. I see this as the marriage of the East and the West. After a courtship that started when Vivekananda came from India in 1983 to make a speech introducing East to West at the World Parliament of Religions, in Chicago, the contemplative proclivity of the East is merging with the activity-prone nature of the West. You can see how we have become sensitized for this union. We’ve learned about “near-death experiences,” where people have come back to life from a realm that is so beautiful that they have no fear of dying. Psychedelics have shown even more people a universe of shimmering wholeness encompassing the realm of duality. Popular books and television programs that explore what is beyond our dimension abound. As if arranged by some god-like trickster, a powerful call to Self, wrongly attributed to Nelson Mandela, recently swept the world. These words, which were so widely reprinted, actually are from Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. You’re playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
L.A. has been cited — from a map in the Alice Bailey books to pop culture’s idea that every new wild thing comes from my hometown — as the place from which the change of heart in humanity will come. So, I feel safe taking a reading on L.A. for the temperature of the world. What is going on is that we are arriving at what we started moving toward in the ’70s. A community is emerging. There is a growing body of turned-on, tuned-in people. And once someone is in the vibration, others pick it up from them. We are igniting the morphogenetic field of deep and sure oneness.
I will see what I can do to tune you into this space of consciousness that is beyond most people’s perception. What’s primary is to head in the right direction. If you think life is about acquisition, you’ll go outward and never get where pay-dirt is, inside. What you need to head for is this landing in the awesomeness of what you are made of. We want to drop whatever we were clinging to that keeps us from this delicious discovery. Look at something. Anything. Who is looking? You? Who knows that? Some witness, yes, that is watching and can report that you are looking at something? How do you know there is such a witness? From a witness of that witness, who knows there is a witness watching you look at something? And so on.
Eventually, you will come to an empty place. Nowhere else to go. It’s the source of everything. That’s the eternal. It’s in you. You as a personality arise from here. So do all the faces of God. Something that is immovable and eternal, behind everything you can name, is what all of us are. Knowing that is fuel for your life. It defines a you that is not seeking. This one just expresses. It is pure peace. What is arising in the personality at any given moment may not be peaceful, but behind all the emotions peace always is there. You can see, as you work out this knowing of a deeper you, all ‘thingness’ as a smokescreen which challenges you to realize you are not any of it.
After you spend decades in homage or in practice, trying to rid yourself of wrong ideas, this IS where you will land … so why not just go direct? You can. It is a misleading story that there is any more to “awakening” than this. But it is an entrenched story that has us crystallized in its grip. As long as there is searching, you are playing hide and seek. How about realizing you’ve never been lost? See the lie that you are anything but sacred — break out of this box, and you are a baby again, wise beyond babyhood, but new to Life as the pattern of oneness allows it to be lived. All sages and seers have known this. Ride on their energy. Let yourself give in to it. Save yourself lifetimes. Why fight this? See how it is and just don’t prevent yourself from letting it inform your life.
Here is where the small group fits in. The steadying from the clear light in each other’s eyes counteracts lifetimes of different ideas. It doesn’t take much of the right stuff to topple the wrong; some dynamic of wholeness just needs to reverberate in our lives for the knowing to set itself, beyond our needing anyone’s support. I had two formative experiences that anchored this knowing in me. They were in the early ’80s, under the influence of magic mushrooms, and I have been guided ever since by what they revealed about my true nature.
Empress of the World: I was sitting cross-legged on my bed when all of a sudden everything was very calm. Unusually, surreally so. The future was up to me, and what I had to do was “let everything land in my lap.” I was to accept reality with no resistance or drama or story. Reality is what is so, regardless of any opinion about it, and I was to anchor myself in this primary perception. I sensed that if one person could practice total acceptance, it would be the trimtab that would allow humanity to get to a new place, and I was challenged to be her.
Cosmic Remorse: In a group experience, led by a guide, we were asked to go back and back and back to where we had come from. All of a sudden I sensed something beyond the beyond. I had sort of whooshed into this existence from there, and I was ‘that.’ I knew my small self lived in a larger one where everything was absolutely sacred. It culminated in a long stretch of wrenching sobbing “for ever having doubted myself.”
“The light of this time demands ripening of the human spirit,” said one of the teachers who recently was in L.A. Wholeness leaves no sides, where suffering occurs. No one makes you insecure without your permission. ‘Feeling’ picked on causes acne, not ‘being’ picked on. Let everything be — like the Empress, in a primal acceptance. From a world without sides, you will spring to right action. You are responsible for your identity; that doesn’t mean being in some blissed-out state, but it involves righting yourself whenever your vision clouds and you go into your small, oppositional, protective self.
It’s like there is an inner light that always is on. Nothing can turn it off. This is who you are. It is a pre-set pattern of wholeness. That realization calls off the search for your light, knowing that you don’t have anywhere to go. You are home, and you can give your all to decorating the place.
I was blazing with some light of inner awareness for a few months, in 1989, when I grabbed my pen early every morning. INSIDE THE INTELLIGENCE: Mapping the Path to Oneness, is what came out. Here is one paragraph from this small booklet that paints a picture for us all:
“Underneath everything — all forms, structures, visions for the whole, ideals, practices…whatever is named or labeled – is this raw possibility which is no thing that is the hope of the world. It is a movement of energy in the process of becoming one. It is creation flowing through the eye of a needle where all attachments cease and duality ends, entered by separate selves and exited as one humanity in the paradisiacal potential that our species has encoded in its genes. Come together to do this now, each separate unit opening to the ocean of the collective…letting itself blend…becoming instruments of gratitude and awe and total aliveness…bathing in love, only knowing love, refusing to depart love. Make each other very, very happy. You can be in Paradise. All it takes is knowing this. So be it.”
When we switch from a primary focus on outer reward, life will be very different. We will become more tribal, where child- rearing is communal and older people are looked to for wisdom. Employers will pay as much attention to the self-development of their employees as they do to profits. Science will expand its definition to include consciousness as causal and we will develop our minds to affect matter — I can bend spoons and can envision how thoughts could build pyramids. Of course, schools will be places to draw out what is in us instead of stuffing information in. The value of psychedelics will be understood, and shamanic methods will be used to help us see more clearly. Hard drug use will be viewed as a medical problem, with emphasis on treatment rather than on punishment. In a society built on principles of prevention, rather than retaliation, there will be very little crime, and what there is will be seen as sickness and treated medically. Art will be everywhere, like in Bali now, where they say, “We have no art; we do everything as well as we can.” Celebrations of the human spirit will abound, where we glory in the privilege of being alive.
I think we will have help with all of this. The press of anomalies is great — things that cannot be, but they are. Our curiosity is at fever pitch about ancient ruins, like the pyramids and the sphinx, and strange events that are happening in our day, like statues that weep, sacred symbols etched into crop fields, and UFOs. What is going on outside of this Earth plane? The questioning is reverberating so strongly that it perhaps foreshadows contact that’s about to be made with another dimension. Just the establishment that there is an intelligence other than ourselves will open everyone’s mind to allow a bigger picture to emerge, where each knows that we are one with the all.
I quoted Lex Hixon at the beginning, and I am going to return to him at the end. He knew all that I’m talking about. Ken Wilber, in the foreword to Lex’s seminal book, Coming Home, says Lex knew “the vulnerable, open, empty, illumined, and direct experience or realization of Spirit itself, standing free at the Heart, outshining the world, radiant to infinity.” In a letter to me shortly before he died, Lex said, “Suzanne, you have to write the book, Circles; we are your loving collaborators.” Lex concludes the introduction to Coming Home, saying, “Shared understanding moves deeper than private understanding, creating through words a kinship beyond words.” May each of you great beings look in each other’s eyes and see loving collaborators. This is the future for humanity, which will make for a new age. The route is through one another.
Saving the World
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 Hartmann, and in their posts and 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. 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. Nature will create tragic weather events. 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:
TIME MAGAZINE COVER STORY
How Suzanne Taylor, with no official position, became our oldest Person of the Year
By 2023, the year our country got on course, Suzanne Taylor had been injecting ideas related to consciousness into political discourses that were dealing with surface realities, where power prevailed, for a long time 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, where we-the-people needed a voice so as to be able to influence our dysfunctional government. The Wisdom Council we established 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 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 was 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, there was the Suggestion Box that Suzanne had proposed for offering the Council ideas, so we-the-people have had direct involvement in our forward motion.
The first serious deliberation the Council made was on Suzanne’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 versions of our 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 Coalition that’s larger now than the Democrats and Republicans combined, that commands a voice that can’t be denied in running our country’s affairs.
Here are some other things we can thank Suzanne for:
8-person CIRCLES OF TRUST everyone is in, that counteract the miseries of loneliness and where sympathetic listening reduces needs for therapy.
Thank Suzanne for political candidates no longer having highly produced TV commercials so they just talk to the camera, and they have conversations instead of debates so we get a real feel for who people are.
That we 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 have gone 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.
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 will 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 deal effectively with 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 kindness 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 released his followers. Trump ended up delivering 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 changes that got Suzanne Taylor on our cover. She demonstrated how an 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. Nor would 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, has hosted many invitational gatherings at her 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 situation comedies and 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 support for TEDx West Hollywood because 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.
At the beginning 2023, Suzanne started to post on Substack. Follow her there.
Subscribe to SUE Speaks mailing list: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/
Suzanne Taylor
suzanne@mightycompanions.org
A social catalyst of collective sanity
SUE Speaks Website
SUE Speaks Podcast
Crop Circle Movie
YouTube
Weaving the spiritual into the political
WISDOM OF THE SAGES
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