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.