The Future of the New Age: We Get There Through One Another
by Suzanne Taylor


I want to start by reading to you the words of a recently departed sage, Lex Hixon, writing about what was going on at my house, in Los Angeles, a couple of years ago.

"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 a half a year of a math course because I got only 89% on the final test. In high school, I got all A's in a wide variety of subjects from science to art to cooking and sewing, and my achievements and involvements didn't fit on the page of my high school yearbook. I graduated from college with highest honors.

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 made parties for famous funny people like Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar and Danny Thomas, and Danny's daughter, Marlo. (My husband went on to create Marlo Thomas's television show, That Girl.) I drew on my cooking prowess to write 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 Michael Murphy's Esalen Institute, where we were all searching hard. On the heels of the promising sixties, when we started to look for a better way to relate, the fact that people were still fearful of contact in the mid-seventies got me to change my life. I stopped acting (which had been a side career to marriage, doing mostly television commercials because they only took one day to make) and painting (post-impressionist portraits and still-lifes good enough for a one-woman show). With people being too scared to love, I decided to give my life to improving that situation.

I started my new life in 1975, by becoming the coordinator of a new age conference. It was to explore a new idea, "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 were as entrenched in separation as my boyfriend had been. So, I created ELF Enterprises Unlimiting. The motto was, "Put the elf back in self," and ELF stood for Enlightenment, Love and Fun. It used play as a way to bring people out of their shells. When you entered the gate and came to the top of the steps to my house, triumphant march music greeted you, a sign at the bottom waved "WELCOME," lights blinked, a bird sang, a cow mooed, and a bubble machine blew soap bubbles at you as you descended. I still run into people who remember something that happened during those four years as the best time of their life.

Since then, my home has been an oasis for teachers and teachings that bring us into the realization that all is 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, has sat at a round table looking for the meaning of life with other leaders of thought. I've given the floor to many other 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.

These Edna St. Vincent Millay lines speak to the need that is 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..."
Mighty Companions is the name I've given to my endeavors. It comes from A Course in Miracles, which says that midway in the teacher's path, he "rests a while," and "when he is ready to go on, he goes with mighty companions beside him." 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.

We do this aware that new ways of being spring from small beginnings. Something that's good catches on. Buckminster Fuller pointed to the "trimtab," a little mechanism that moves the rudder that turns a big ship, to give us the idea of how focused energy can move the world. And Rupert Sheldrake discerned "morphogenetic fields," where new and better realities await in grids that are ignited by pattern-setting small beginnings. What we do in my home and in your home can change the world. 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 deadening patterns of antagonism and indifference. When Edgar Mitchell showed us our planet from the moon, an image of Earth undivided burned into our collective psyche. When Princess Di died, we got another new image from the outpouring across all geographic borders and belief systems -- that humanity is a caring body has been impressed on us now. Seeing ourselves as heart-filled, we are in 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. When the students are ready, the teachers appear! We've had saviors, saints, priests, shamans, psychotherapists, gurus, human potential titans, channels, and instructions dictated by disincarnate entities. This new wave of teachers, who mostly have been educated in India, have "awakened" to the universe of non-dualistic awareness, where all is one. After a courtship which started at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, when Vivekenanda came from India and made a speech introducing East to West, the marriage of the passive East and the active West is being sealed by these teachers and teachings, producing realized beings who are very much in the world of affairs.

You can see how we Westerners have become sensitized to the reality of an inner life, making possible this union. We've learned about "near death experiences," where people have come back from a realm so beautiful that they have no more fear of dying. Psychedelics have shown even more people a universe of shimmering oneness. Popular books and television programs explore what is beyond our dimension.

Los Angeles has been cited as the place from which the change of heart in humanity will come -- from a map that the Alice Bailey books provide in the Wisdom tradition, to pop culture's idea that every new wild thing comes from my home town. 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 were moving toward in the seventies. A community at last 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.

The 100 percenter in me wants to take you to this dimension, right here, right now. I will see what I can do to tune you in to this space of consciousness that is beyond most of the world'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 to 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 are 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. You will never run out of witnesses. Now, entertain a curiosity about where all that witnessing comes from. If you let yourself see to the end, you will come to an empty place. 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 in all of us. An ocean of awareness precedes all form. It is where all wisdom comes from, and all love and all compassion. Underneath all concepts and all practices is this raw nothingness of a One Life. When we discover it, we land where we started from, knowing this place for the first time.

After you spend decades in homage or in practice, trying to rid yourself of wrong ideas, this IS where you will end up... 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 in its grip. Instead of searching, how about realizing you've never been lost? See the lie that you are anything but sacred. Look to the sages of the ages. They knew. 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. Think morphogenetic fields and trimtabs here.

I had two formative experiences that anchored this knowing in me. They were both in the early eighties, and I have been guided ever since then 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 even one person could practice total acceptance, it would be the trimtab that would allow humanity to get to a new place.

Cosmic Remorse: A group experience, led by a guide, culminated in what seemed to be hours of me sobbing "for ever having doubted myself." I had been asked to go back and back and back to where I had come from, when all of a sudden I sensed an opening to something beyond the beyond. I was "that." I knew that my small self lived in a larger existence, where everything, including me, was sacred.

 "The light of this time demands ripening of the human spirit," said one of the teachers who recently came to 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. This was well put in a powerful call to Self, which, thanks to being wrongly attributed to Nelson Mandela, recently swept the world. These stirring words, 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. Your 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."

It's like there is an inner light which always is on. Nothing can turn it off. This is who you are. Realizing that calls off the search for your light. 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 a 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 which 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 having our 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. The value of psychedelics will be understood, and shamanic methods will be used to help us see ourselves 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 in fact 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 did we come from, and what is going on outside of this causal 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 ours will open everyone's mind, which will allow a bigger picture to emerge in which 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.




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