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

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Weaving the spiritual into the political 

 

Joe Biden goes to war…

When I saw this piece about bombing Syria, I wondered where the outrage is: It didn’t take long for this new president to play Commander in Chief. Poor, poor, poor us, who don’t get it yet that we need to care about each other as much as we care about ourselves, and that might makes right isn’t on that agenda.

Could it be that the most fundamental thing to do to shift a worldview based on self-interest to where humanitarian concerns are paramount would be something like UBI, where everyone on earth gets enough sustenance — food, shelter, education, health care – to be brought out of poverty? Then, we’d have a playing field where we could change everything instead of being imploded in the status quo of the ever-widening split between the haves and have nots.

Impact Investing is in the wind now. The logic of impact ideas is one thing, but, since they fight with the status quo, what I focus on is how to change the underlying belief system that holds the status quo in place. I got a helpful insight years ago when I was with two people who had taken MDMA. It riveted them in present time, with no past and no future, and all that was there was love. It wasn’t getting to love; it was coming from love. Peel away the veils and walls we have erected, agonizing over what came before and worrying about what is looming,  when you just are open and receptive in the present moment, what’s there is love. It’s basic. I don’t hear people saying that and I think it’s really informative about our nature and what we aiming to get in tune with.

How about an inspired leader, such as we haven’t had for a long time? We don’t have any Gandhis or Mandalas, let alone a courageous American President. There’s no one principled in the limelight — except Greta Thunberg who got massive attention on global warming. It takes too long to take our time to fix things and someone who jump starts what’s new maybe could do it. I wonder about a revered figure, like Oprah, following up on Greta. She’d go on TV. She’d tells everybody the time is now to create a cooperative world. We have to work together. And she’d just make it happen. Oprah’s got enough money to do it herself. Whatever it takes. She’d become the Greta of action. You couldn’t deny her. She’d get us working out how everyone can get food, shelter, education, health care. She’d be the next Time Magazine Person of the Year. Everyone would listen to Oprah. Beyoncé could be her opening act. Make it wonderful. Everyone would be so happy to be in a world that is dedicated to making things better.

I actually don’t get how the rich part of the world can ignore the poor part. We’re all in this leaky boat together. It isn’t even charitable thoughts that need to lead the way — practical ones will do. Like give money to the poor and they spend it. That’s what we need. Such a giant wake-up is in order, and hopes are dashed that Covid would produce it. Not so far. If nature could talk, she would be telling us she has to make it worse so we wake up to make it better. Arghhhhh.

We need a broader conversation that recognizes how relatively unconscious humanity was. Take the U.S. with the Indians. They were savages so we could kill them. Then blacks were savages. Understanding all people are human comes first. And that is such a revolutionary thing that at least we can recognize that it is logical for it to take a very long time to work its way out to where we won’t have vestiges of it. But, we are on the way, where building on a foundation that is truthful, where we accept how misguided we have been is not an act of cowardice but of the courage to accept what has been because it has been, and to use the error of our ways as our springboard from which to leap into the better world to come.

IMAGINING IF

I preoccupy myself imagining if. First, it’s imagining being in a paradise on Earth where we care about each other as much as we care about ourselves. Then, it’s imagining getting there. It wouldn’t require a big leap. We are on the cusp of a shift of worldview, and, if we bend in the right direction, evolution’s proclivity to evolve toward higher states of consciousness will do the rest.

With heaven’s wind in our sails, maybe a little trimtab action that mortals could get behind would steer our course toward sensing humanity as one entity. I imagine having the pulpit. Like Greta riveting people to how dire our situation is, I get everyone focused on coming up with what to do.

To get us over the danger we’re in, where the extinction of humanity is a real prospect, imagine if we gave everyone on Earth food, shelter, education, and health care. Then, with survival handled, so humanity could work together on how to be in the world, imagine a worldwide campaign that encourages kindness: school programs for little kids, billboards, Saturday Night Live sketches, reminders everywhere to make the whole world a sweeter place.

“When we start seeing ourselves as one united human species, there’s no telling where we will go.” I got that somewhere recently. Yes! I can imagine us creating the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible and all it would take would be for us to come to our senses! I am devoted to doing what I can to help that occur.