SUESpeaks

Searching for Unity in Everything

SUE's Blog

These blog posts form a collection. They are a treasure trove of food for thought to spark conversation. So, grab a cup of consciousness, tour around, chew on some tasty transformation, and let’s talk!

An urban green-man who tunes you into going nature’s way | Podcast Episode 2

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James Wanless created the Voyager Tarot. You might think of his style as wizard-like and hardly able to have been predicted from having a Columbia University Ph.D. in Political Science and being a Professor at the American University in Cairo. James would be on easy street if he’d taken a different route – he was president of his college fraternity, captain and quarterback of his ranked football team, and could have gone on to climb corporate ladders. But he stopped playing recognizable games in favor of following his bliss, moved more by his attunement to nature and life purpose than by chasing the dollar. You enter a universe with James, whom I’ve known for decades and with whom I’ve had great adventures. The most dramatic moment I had with him was in Hawaii when everyone had to draw a card and act it out and I got DEATH. It was a peak experience for me. His readings with the Voyager deck are highly recommended! He does them online or in person at my house in West Hollywood, where he’s living these days. In the 2019 L.A. fast lane, he’s an anachronism – a renewable and high-spirited soul with a passionate heart and electric body. If you want to love life more, tune into him. Listen to this episode for inspiration to “green-up” your life.

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A mystic who talks to you from the inside | Podcast Episode 1

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Mary Reed has been both blessed and challenged by what got her invited to do our podcast. The challenge was the struggle with what made her so different that no one could help her understand what was going on with her involuntary visions and insights into divine realms. We talk on the podcast about how valuable she has become in communicating from pure knowing – she opens her mouth and the universe speaks about how much more we are than we know and act from. Lest there be eyebrows raised, hearken to what happened at the start of our program: when an audience got seated to watch us do the podcast (there’s video Q&A with them from afterwards), Mary went around the room and called some 25 people by the first names she memorized as each person arrived. She exudes an energy I’d love to live with – just hanging with her is transformational. She’s just moved to the States after spending most of the last few years in virtual silence in a Buddhist nunnery in India, and, although I’d like her to base here, she’s in the DC area when she isn’t touring around memorizing names. Her book, Unwitting Mystic, starts with a meticulous attempt to kill herself, which she was able to plot from her knowledge as a health company executive who knew how to carefully time the ingestion of 97 prescription pills with alcohol so an exit would be painless and effective – except she inexplicably woke up a few days later.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST EPISODE

How to make Los Angeles a friendlier city

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Making L.A. a Friendlier City is a wonderful project of mine that would be done as a pilot in L.A. and could be taken up by cities everywhere to really affect the vibe to make us into friendlier people. It’s a submission for an initiative that LA2050 does every year, where they give away ten 100K chunks to improve things in Los Angeles. To find out more about this project: http://bit.ly/MakingLAFriendlier. Voting is over, and we are waiting for results to be announced on June 4th, 2019.

Here’s the website design for the project

WEHOville, the great West Hollywood online newspaper,
interviewed Suzanne Taylor for Making L.A. a Friendlier City

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Nature’s Challenge to Capitalism

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There’s a territory we must learn to live in where we’re committed to the good of the whole. When I engage with a person who’s on this wavelength, or I read something well-written that’s coming from this understanding, or a movie or a play has that ring of being right-on about it, I get excited. There’s something deeply satisfying, kind of like hitting a bullseye, when I meet a compatriot in this pay-dirt for humanity.

I was reading THE CLEAN MONEY REVOLUTION: Reinventing Power, Purpose, and Capitalism (a great book by Joel Solomon that I bought because I know Joel and to know him is to admire him), and came to a one-page statement by Rex Weyler that’s one of those spot-on deliveries of core truth that stirs my heart. I’ve been an admirer of Rex’s, one of the founders of Greenpeace, for a long time. Over the years, having passed along several things he’s written, my enthusiasm got me an in-person visit when Rex came to L.A. a while back.

When I sent Rex’s piece to fellow participants in an Elders Action Network webinar series about our worldview, the moderator said, “It is the most succinct statement I’ve read about the situation, the natural ecological process and the solution for the evolution of consciousness.” The better we understand what got us where we are the better we can grapple with where we need to go, and this piece of Rex’s is stunningly informative on that front:

Humanity is in a state of ecological overshoot, which occurs with every successful species. Nature teaches species how to grow and flourish, but does not teach species how to stop—so everything over-grows its habitat capacity. Everything. Plants in the garden, wolves in a watershed, algae in a lake. Humans have been so successful (ecologically) that we have now overshot the productive capacity of our ecosystem. That is normal and it is the fundamental ecological challenge. Now, all genuine solutions to overshoot involve contraction — plants crowd each other out, wolves die off until the prey recover, algae dies off until nutrients are restored. That’s pretty much a law or pattern of nature. No escape. Technology and efficiency don’t buy us a pass.

Starvation, disease and predators are some of nature’s default “solutions” to ecological overshoot. We can add our own contribution of warfare. But as intelligent, ingenious creatures, we want to devise better ways to contract, and create a mature, stable culture as opposed to simply growing bigger. That is our challenge. But our economic system — capitalism — is fundamentally based on growth, and few governments (outside of Bhutan, perhaps) are willing to discuss the end of growth capitalism. Few environmentalists are willing to discuss it. So we’re in a deep dilemma. We have to learn to talk about it in adult conversation, without freaking out, and then we have to actually act on this knowledge.

How to contract as a species and reduce consumption to suit our finite habitat on Earth—how to do this creatively, intelligently, minimizing suffering as we do so— is the work that lies ahead.

I’d love you to comment on this blogpost, especially to talk about the need for a different mind-set or worldview where we get it that we sink or swim together whereby we need to create a stable, sustainable world instead of simply growing bigger. Do you have an evolutionary idea about this? (Here are some ideas that have been submitted.) If humanity thinks differently we will act differently, and creating the understanding that we are in it together, where, in the words of Charles Eisenstein, “What’s more for you is more for me,” is our challenge. The whole SUESpeaks website is devoted to that work. Please get involved!

Find out more about Rex Weyler, Joel Solomon and Charles Eisenstein in our Heroes Gallery.

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Brian Swimme Lights Up L.A.

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Brian Swimme is Director of the Center for the Story of the Universe and a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he teaches evolutionary cosmology and philosophy to graduate students. He lectures widely and has presented at many conferences. He co-wrote and hosted the 60 minute film​, ​Journey of the Universe, broadcast on PBS television stations nationwide.

Brian has been my main philosophical squeeze since the late 80s when I read his book, The Universe is a Green Dragon. It’s a “cosmic creation story” of our billions of years of evolution with humanity at the leading edge of the known universe. As good as Brian’s book is, I’m equally enamored with its wonderful author who inspires everyone in his presence with the majesty of the universe and the privilege of being part of it. We did a memorable evening with him at my house a lot of years ago, and when he came to L.A. a few weeks ago to be on a panel and to give a keynote address at a local event I had the pleasure of having him at my house again.

We turned the camera on at a brunch with a few good friends who each read Brian a favorite passage from Green Dragon to spark our conversation:

Here are excerpts from his keynote address and his panel at an event leading up to the 2018 Global Parliament of the World’s Religions: