SUE's Blog

These posts, made before Substack became the place for delivering things like these, are a treasure trove of food for thought that I keep sending people to from Substack. Now, you might grab a cup of consciousness, tour around here, and then subscribe to my Substack soapbox, Now What?, where I welcome conversation: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/about.

Brian Swimme, Evolutionary and Mathematical Cosmologist’s New Story of the Universe | Podcast Episode 9

By Suzanne Taylor

Please do yourself the favor of listening to my podcast with Brian Swimme. He has the map, from the origin of the universe till now, where humanity is the first species that could change Earth – for the better or for the worse. The Christian story, predominant in America, would be supplanted by the universe story for how to live our lives for the better.

A mathematician by training, Brian is a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, in San Francisco, where he’s a brilliant teacher of evolutionary cosmology in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program. By my lights, he’s the most valuable voice on the planet. He gives us a way to perceive the human situation so we see what we are doing here and what our destiny is. His understanding is so inspirational that if I got the world to tune into what Brian delivers I would feel like I had fulfilled my mission in life.

The Universe is a Green Dragon is his masterwork. Do you know anyone who has bought 1,000 copies of any book? That would be me, since 1989, when I shut myself into my bedroom for two days to finish reading it. And, Brian’s gifts as an author are matched by a personal style that makes him a candidate for being my favorite human I didn’t give birth to.

What a sweet surprise it was to discover this on Brian’s Wikipedia page: “Suzanne Taylor, founder of Mighty Companions, says Swimme is a charismatic person who seeks to place scientific technology in its context of the infancy of the earth community as it struggles for reconnection to its sacred source. She believes that he sweeps us into the grand picture of human beings as the current culmination of the still-evolving universe.”

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Russell Targ, Physicist and Researcher of ESP is a Pioneer in Remote Viewing | Podcast Episode 8

By Suzanne Taylor

It’s thrilling that 100,000 more viewers every month watch a TED talk about remote viewing that my friend, Russell Targ, did for me: click here to watch. It’s up to 5 million views as of this writing. It’s full of the “Ideas Worth Spreading” that TED presumably is all about, yet it caused TED to cancel the license they’d given me to produce TEDx West Hollywood so that I ultimately delivered my program, Brother Can You Spare a Paradigm?, or, Making the Quantum Leap, on my nickel.

You can learn a lot about remote viewing, a capacity we all have to “see” what exists in a distant place we’ve never been to, in Third Eye Spies, a documentary about his work that Russell finished this year and is streaming now on Amazon Prime. Tune in and find out about the lab Russell had at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), funded by the CIA to use remote viewing to spy on the Russians during the Cold War. The lab also had some victories that are beyond belief yet they occurred, like finding the trail to Patty Hearst after she was kidnapped and working with Uri Geller doing some “mind reading” that seemed impossible.

In my quest for what could shift our worldview to where we care about each other as much as we care about ourselves, remote viewing and the ESP that Geller is so adept at give evidence of how connected we are in one cosmic soup. Russell, a physicist of some renown who worked on developing the laser, helps us get beyond our cultural attachment to old Newtonian ideas of a universe running on cause and effect where separation is the name of the game.

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Kindness is coming into vogue

By Suzanne Taylor

The Los Angeles Times wrote an article on the “launch of the world’s first interdisciplinary research institute on kindness, which will explore, for instance, how and why being nice to others reduces depression and the risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease.” The team of UCLA researchers will examine three themes that are the foundation of the institute’s project: “the roots of kindness, how to promote it, and how to use it as a therapeutic intervention to improve mental and physical health…Research by UCLA scientists already has shown that mindfulness and kindness actually alter the behavior of genes, turning down those that promote inflammation, which can lead to heart disease or certain cancers, and turning up the activity of genes that protect against infections.”

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Greta Thunberg is a force of nature

By Suzanne Taylor

Greta Thunberg is a 16-year old environmental activist who advocates for climate change. In today’s U.N. Climate Action Summit she gave a rousing speech. The world is lucky she is in it. Testimony to a favorite quote by 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.”

Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit

National Public Radio, Inc. (NPR)

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Kristy Edmunds, Executive and Artistic Director for The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA | Podcast Episode 7

By Suzanne Taylor

As an artist, curator, and artistic director, Kristy Edmunds has headed up theater organizations starting in Portland, Oregon, then Melbourne, Australia, and then at the Armory at New York City. All those programs, when Kristy left, had been revolutionized. One piece written about her is titled, HOW KRISTY EDMUNDS HAS SHAKEN UP CONTEMPORARY ART!

At UCLA since the 2012-13 season, she’s created seasons like none other in Los Angeles. Where our respected institutions present productions that mostly are tried and true, with commercial success in mind, the seasons offered by UCLA at The Center for the Art of Performance, or CAP, is an explosion of originality and creativity. Some presentations are by well-known artists in a range of categories from theater, to dance, to music, to spoken word, and some are the product of years of Kristy working with artists she discovers. As she says about what she presents, “Artists disrupt our conscious and unconscious tendency to feel complacent about any number of things going on in society writ large…the organization that I run has to work within the same spirit of acting from the position of integrity, compassion, and the usefulness of disruption.”

Being as much a creator of performances as she is someone who books them, as well as being the shepherd of a large flock of donors where the warmth of her engaging personality makes us all feel like we are her friend, she also is a marvel in the talks she delivers to audiences before many of the performances. She settles people in, letting them know the value of the arts in general and readying them for whatever they need to know about what they are about to see.

This spring she was named the inaugural recipient of the Berresford Prize, a $25,000 annual award, founded by United States Artists, to honor a cultural practitioner who has significantly contributed to the advancement, wellbeing and care of artists in society. Kristy got it “for her work as a thoughtful and groundbreaking cultural producer and advocate for artists.”

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Jodie Evans, co-founder of Code Pink, is a warrior for peace | Podcast Episode 6

By Suzanne Taylor

Seeing what a big world it is out there, I’d understand people being skeptical about my evaluation of Jodie Evans, but that wouldn’t shake my conviction that if she wanted to she could become the president of the U.S. If America knew her, I bet they’d elect her. She would be the one we have been waiting for, who would get us off our primitive commitment to making war.

Peace is her game and she has all categories covered. A political activist, author, and documentary film producer, comfortable from board rooms to war zones, she’s smart, historically astute, well-informed, beautiful, gracious, and kind. Best if all, she doesn’t want power. I met Jodie in the early ‘90s when she was Jerry Brown’s campaign manager and I hosted breakfasts for this maverick politician who early on was preaching environmental awareness and campaign finance reform. Some 40 years later, on leaving his second round as Governor, he appointed Jodie to the California Arts Commission that she helped him found during his first term from her advocacy for art as what ennobles the human being. She’s most publicly known as a founder of CODE Pink, a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism that was started in an effort to prevent the US invasion of Iraq.

To know Jodie is to love her. She has a warmth that doesn’t stop. You can see it. She shines. She gives herself to so many causes that it doesn’t seem like one person could do all that. However, when a philanthropy organization we both belong to gave her a 3-year term as its president, she did the kind of job you’d have thought was her only one. She is our mother hen, hatching a new society where we radically reimagine and transform our relationships so they are defined by love, by care and compassion and sacredness, by the qualities that nourish our souls and enrich our humanity.

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