Archive for 'This and That'

West Hollywood is an arty, progressive city, and, after six months of my courting, our marriage is sealed. The City Council’s meeting place, in the new, award-winning Library, is being donated for a TEDxWestHollywood daylong event, April 14.

Get on the mailing list to be kept informed about Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?, subtitled, Making the Quantum Leap, that I’m producing. TEDx events typically sell out — we only have 100  places — and we’ll let the list know when tickets go on sale. If you want to join our wonderful team, be in touch. And any potential speakers can look at guidelines on the site.

We’ll be dealing with our worldview, a central issue of our time. What is a worldview? Why does it matter? What is our worldview? Can we influence it? What would the world be like if our worldview changed? What’s happening now that models how things would be in the future we’d like to be in? These will be questions on the TEDxWestHollywood floor. The world needs a better game and we hope to ignite the passion of the attendees and of a worldwide internet audience to move us beyond where we are so violent with one another and so abusive to the planet.

We hope to spark a sense of community and to follow up with other gatherings. There were projects in Los Angeles for transformationally-minded people in the early 80s, but since then it’s been slim pickings. We hope to be playing together again.

Our TEDx event is a good fit with the work of Tiffany Shlain. She’s the founder of the Webby Awards and the daughter of Leonard Shlain, a renowned surgeon who authored books dear to my heart. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess deals with how we got on the track we need to divert from now.

In this groundbreaking book, Leonard Shlain, author of the bestselling Art & Physics, proposes that the process of learning alphabetic literacy rewired the human brain, with profound consequences for culture…It is a paradigm shattering work that will transform your view of history and mind. 

We’ve talked about an L.A. showing of her movie, CONNECTED, a tribute to her late dad framed in material about how we are all connected, which is what our TEDx program will deal with. Tiffany either will be live or presented in one of her recorded TED Talks. Perhaps a screening of CONNECTED at an event devoted to her will be the next thing we do.

I haven’t told you what Tiffany is doing with her films, through her Moxie Institute, that could matter a lot to the world.

The team’s latest project, Let it Ripple: Mobile Films for Global Change, employs a new type of filmmaking they pioneered called “Cloud Filmmaking,” which experiments with making films collaboratively with people all over the world, and then providing free customized versions of those films for organizations working to make the world better. Find out more by reading The Cloud Filmmaking Manifesto.

We started offering free, customized versions of our films for nonprofits and organizations all over the world. We work with them to craft a custom “call to action,” and we then replace   ours with theirs. They then can use their version of the film to help activate and inspire their base, spread their message, drive fundraising, and support other goals and initiatives. Because the films have been translated into many languages, its potential is limitless. In the first four months, we made 80 of these free versions of the films for organizations, and we now are up to 450. If you work with a nonprofit organization that strives to make the world a better place, we would love to make a version of one of our films for you.

Here’s the third, most recent one:

I feel inadequate in bringing you the marvel that is Tiffany Shlain. 
She could be a huge influence on us to get us to think differently. Please follow the links to read up on her and to get your socks knocked off by more of her work.  

Here’s Facing the Future, a two-minute film Moxie just put out to encourage us to behave as we would were our worldview based on our oneness rather than on our separation. I can feel the potency of it to create social change! 

If sponsorship of our TEDxWestHollywood event is your thing, or if you can send me to people who might donate money (we are allowed to raise $10,000 — and not allowed to make any money ourselves) or in-kind contributions of what we can use or give at our event, please let me know. And send good thoughts my way for TEDx ahead…

This gorgeous creature is Pennell Rock, my dear friend of several decades now, who lives in Marin, in Northern California, and is spending the holiday at my house. Read this beautiful piece he has written, which he read aloud at our Christmas dinner table and you might do in years to come, and you will gain insight into the universal meaning underlying the Christian celebration.

The Birth of Light

Gnosis is the fundamental existential truth of Being. This essential truth is not just some passive reservoir of esoteric knowledge. If one looks at the imagery of any great religion, there often is the good news that the essential has the force to come upon us in a revelatory manner. This is the symbolic meaning of the enlightened savior. Christians celebrate this arrival every year, just as the darkness of winter is threatening to envelop the world.

The imagery of the Christmas story expresses the luminous event, which can take place in any human heart. The birth of the holy child is the blossoming seed of Light. Gnosis has nothing to do with worldly grandeur, but is grounded in humility (the stable). It has everything to do with the grandeur of the spirit (the heavenly display and the angels). Because it lights up the essential, it brings a new order and thus threatens anarchy for the non-essential, which rules the world (King Herod), and which will go to any lengths to eliminate its luminous core (Herod’s order to slaughter the first born throughout the land).

The Light of true Being originates directly from the Source (the immaculate conception). It can come forth only when lovingly nurtured by humble and pure-hearted receptivity (the Virgin Mary), and cared for in the trust and protection of the ego, which, through loyal devotion, has surrendered and put away its doubts (Joseph). There is no place for this event in the comfort of accepted society (no room in the inn). The narrow confines of social acceptability cannot accommodate it (no sanctuary except in the stable with the animals). Even, and perhaps specially, it is the naïve outcasts from ordered society, in their innocence, who can recognize and receive it (the shepherds). The mind hungers for gnosis as its greatest potential. The wise will travel the world for it, and once they come upon it will lay before it their greatest treasures (the three kings and their gifts). Gnosis is the just rule of the Good (the King is born).

Joy to the world!

I’m the lead-off speaker for COSMIC REUNION 2012, a high-minded event “to assist in the awakening process,” on Thanksgiving weekend in Los Angeles. I’m glad to be first so I can set the context of the need for new worldview, and so I can encourage interaction among attendees. (Do you have suggestions for questions they can ask each other? Maybe I can instigate new questions being posed for time periods throughout the weekend, to help people have meaningful exchanges.)  

Here’s what’s on the event site about me and my talk:

Suzanne Taylor, Producer/Director of What On Earth? Inside the Crop Circle Mystery (http://CropCircleMovie.com), has been involved with films since she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from NYU. Having been an actress (http://imdb.com/name/nm0853220), she crossed over to the other side of the camera as the Executive Producer of the 2002 feature documentary, CROP CIRCLES: Quest for Truth. The new film, which was well-reviewed in The New York Times, won the Award for Best Feature Documentary at the UFO Congress Film Festival, where the first film got the Audience Award. What On Earth? also got the award for Excellence in Paranormal Filmmaking from the Paranormal Symposium and Film Festival, and it just had its TV premiere on CPT12, a Colorado PBS station. Suzanne is a crop circle authority on the Ancient Aliens television series on the History Channel. Recently she got a license to produce a TEDx West Hollywood event, and Making the Quantum Leap, or, Brother Can You Spare a Paradigm is in the planning stages.

As the founder of Mighty Companions, a non-profit dedicated to consciousness expansion, her Los Angeles home is a gathering place for forward-thinking activists. A fine arts post-impressionist painter, Suzanne had a one woman show. She is an accomplished chef, and author of The Anybody Can Make It, Everybody Will Love It Cookbook. She writes a blog, Making Sense of These Times (http://TheConversation.org), where posts about progressive ideas include considerations of how consciousness might evolve and how instrumental the crop circle phenomenon could be in that regard.

Topics:

A breakthrough in our collective consciousness, to where we come into a new worldview, is vital at this time in history. For the last few years I’ve mostly focused on the crop circle phenomenon as something that could bring that about. Being the “crop circle queen,” however, is a subset of being the consciousness lady.

I’ll talk about my colorful path through Hollywood as a queen of commercials, married to a multiple Emmy winning TV writer/producer/director. And then on to my immersion in the world of transformation and consciousness, and providing a gathering place in Los Angeles for forward thinking activists who want to make this a better world.

As I was producing events and projects to open people’s minds about what is outside the box of ordinary reality, it became my mission to inform the world about the circle phenomenon. Now, I am at the beginning of what I’ve written up as my new “Vital Mission” (http://theconversation.org/blog/vital-mission-will-you-join-me.org). My presentation will include an invitation to think together about what we could do. What moves could be made, for instance, to create a dialogue that could seed possibilities for humanity to shift its worldview?

We need to go from the outdated worldview we hold now, based on Newtonian physics of cause and effect, to what would be supported by science, which has moved on to validate us being in a quantum reality. Beyond space and time, we are interdependent and interconnected, and, if we understood our oneness has been established by science, it would impact the picture we hold and the story we tell of who we are and what we are doing here.