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.