How will we save the world?

We are thinking

Feb 27, 2024

This is an Essay Contest check in. Submitting is over; evaluating is on.

Reading reading reading away, so impressed by the imagination and the intelligence in almost 200 essays.

At one point I closed my eyes, just to go inward for a moment, and I started to cry. My reaction surprised me. I thought about how an actor who is doing a good job pretending to feel emotions can impress me, but how an actor reliving some emotional experience will make me cry, and when people break down in news reports I choke up. I think that’s what essays, that are so deep and so profound, do to me. Soul to soul is a moving place.

There’s that adage that when god wants to punish you he answers your prayers. Who am I to judge what’s best from such rich submissions? And then, what to do with all this content? How to get it to the world? Please share any thoughts.

Cash prizes must be the secret sauce for getting so many entries. How fitting. Money money money destroys us and it saves us. Omg, get the billionaires to give prizes to people submitting big-ticket ways to save the world. Isn’t that a terrific idea? Get artists making beauty, doctor’s finding cures, engineers doing whatever they do, on and on. Get the best out of everyone by giving cash prizes!

It has been very surprising to get so much appreciation for putting this challenge out. It’s like it awakened people who are numbed and stupefied and got them to start thinking. Although that was my objective, in a world where I can be met by silence it’s been a little astonishing and very pleasing to have done something that has moved a lot of people to get engaged.

As I’ve been reading, I’ve done some cutting-and-pasting, in the order I read them, to give you a taste of what I’ve been getting. Some are quotes from the essays and some are messages to me.

Suzanne Taylor’s 2024 “Essay Contest” catalyzed our planet’s wholeness. She invited contestants to contemplate the future and recount how we contributed to Earth and humanity’s thriving. The competition combined many things I loved: considering consciousness evolution, creative writing, and a cash prize I could use toward my PhD tuition. Should be fun, I thought. But as I began to write, the magnitude and weight of the task struck me. This was not a mere creative exercise for funds meant to spur small insights. This was a personal reflection of cosmic importance, designed to push each entrant to fulfill a calling. The prompt urged us to ask our inner knowing what does the world need, what can I do and what is standing in my way?
Martin Luther King said, “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”
I submitted an essay for the contest and think it's wonderful work you are doing on behalf of the world.
The motto taken from Extinction Rebellion: System Change NOT Climate Change.
Your Ripple Effect with this stands a good chance of being a sea change and even a tidal lift to humanity. BRAVO!!
It was time for ordinary people to make a stand. However, what exactly could they do?
His new view of the earth as a natural heaven that was suffering a cancer called “humanity” is what further nudged me to my 2024 actions.
I have to say how grateful I am that you're facilitating this essay contest. I was so inspired last week that I assigned the essay as a writing assignment in my 11th grade classes at Ivy Academy Chattanooga.
I dream of the times when people like da Vinci had patrons, and that's something I've been thinking about a lot - why do these relationships no longer exist? Have we been so completely enfolded in capitalist principle that we no longer even have relationships with people that are beyond obvious transactions? I like this idea that there's a mutuality in the relationship with a patron, both parties receive something.
It's been a hugely valuable and challenging exercise and I hope it throws up very many 'clever things that can be done to get us on a better track'.
In the blink of an epochal eye money had infused itself into our very being. We were fish and money was our water. We’d allowed its logics to become a stronger determinant of behavior than our genes.
The Covid virus had other ideas. It felt like we’d got a fire lit right before the rain came.
How do we save the world? He said we needed to stop thinking in terms of production and consumption. And instead start acting from the basis of care and freedom for all.
Thank you for this opportunity! I felt hopeful and empowered while writing this.
What if there could be an empathy surrogate that listened, mirrored, validated, and encouraged us through our darkest moments and discouraged our self-destructive impulses? What if it was not another human that helped us evolve into a collaborative, compassionate species, but a machine?
The days of asking your neighbor for sugar were over.
You cannot imagine the ridiculousness of the process and effects of dividing Gaia up into what we knew as countries.
Using TikTok, I created a viral sensation – the Please Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Humanity drifted into an age of self-destruction, which today we call the Great Perversion.
When climate denial finally fizzled, the national mood sped right past hope and crash-landed in despair, taking me with it.
Hope is not wishful thinking or empty optimism. Hope is a renewable resource, best tended in community. Hope is a necessary ingredient for effective action…nobody could be certain of the outcome. Especially since all of us were still mired in and complicit with the very systems we so desperately wanted to change.
This exercise has been deeply meaningful for me, and I'm grateful that you offered it (regardless of the outcome)!
The inner knowing of the interconnectedness of humanity and universe is what the world needs today. We need to challenge the corruption that has embodied our governments and religious institutions. This paper was inspired by the Presidential campaign of Marianne Williamson and the yogic teachings of Sri Paramahamsa Yogananda.
I couldn’t be the one to build the technology to reverse climate change, but I could help inspire and cultivate a spirit of care within the people who could.
I really appreciate all the work you do to inspire big conversations around how we can collectively save our planet and humanity. Thank you for all you’re doing.
It wasn’t cars or money that was being stolen. It was people’s souls. Corporate culture was diminishing souls, all over America. How to fight back?
We moved forward as though the teleology of the universe was consciousness aspiring to more consciousness.
Our seed germinated two decades ago when Suzanne Taylor’s essay contest challenged us world-changing wannabes to do something…We didn’t take action; we watched action shows…Aliko and I believed our crisis ran deeper than broken systems. The deepest blocks to change were the barriers within our own hearts.
Nothing else could happen until the deep structures of the western psyche really began to unravel…We weren’t hearing a story created in disembodied human minds or received as divine revelation direct from God from some non-place outside of the world as we would have previously implicitly assumed…the emerging consciousness not only of the universe’s unfolding creativity, and not only of our inherence within the universe, but also of the fact that we are aspects of the universe participating in its own creation…We are the universe emerging into conscious relationship with itself.
“Listen to us or we’ll nuke you,” is not a neighborly way to behave. “Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself” goes a lot farther.
We thought that the meme a life-affirming culture was a useful contrast to economic growth as a defining goal for our time.
First and foremost, thank you for thinking of this contest. It's a fantastic idea. I am so loving this, different older women (myself included) fiercely trying to protect our precious freedom. So much more precious than I ever knew, in so many different ways. Thank you BIG time for putting yourself out there in the world in the way that you have.
This essay is a SHADOW of what I'd have liked to say. Ever since I saw your idea, I thought, HOW BRILLIANT! I LOVE IT! and in between writing my book on HOAs, I kept trying to think of ideas. Then it hit me. I WAS being an activist--first by recognizing and resisting a bad system, and now, by writing this book (which hopefully will show in real time how people easily slide into authoritarianism).
When I passed, we had no idea that God was even feminine. The God I knew was a remote, judgmental male.
The Age of Helpfulness
Luckily for the world, Marianne Williamson was elected President of the United States and things kept getting better from there. The drug war ended and people could return to health-promoting plant medicines. And Suzanne Taylor continued her lifelong quest to get people thinking and committed to doing right things to shift the world toward a sustainable future. Amen.
I'm so grateful that you decided to get all of us thinking about this subject, which is becoming more important by the day. You have already made a change in all of our worlds as a result of our participation in your writing challenge.
Indeed, we “got our story straight” as Swimme and Berry long advocated and inspiring social activist Suzanne Taylor expounded. The latter’s activism provided the long-missing ingredient that created the necessary traction to gain the attention of the world at large: money. An essay contest for Changing the World gained public attention and further engaged the lay public, spreading awareness beyond academia.
Your prompt was very useful to me because it made me clarify to myself exactly what kind of a world I myself would like to live in.
Enough, for all, forever: four words that heal our Earth.
February of 2024 was when I experienced the inner shift away from disempowered chasing to empowered movement…an opportunity for which I, too, felt very grateful – an essay contest.
I don't even know anyone now who does something just to make money, the way a lot of people did back then. (I use the old fashioned term "money," but of course we don't have currency anymore.)
The engines behind the endless drums of fear began to fade as more drummers chose to transition from making noise to listening.
Thanks again for doing this. Great fun — and maybe epochal change!
Thank you for organizing this competition. I enjoyed writing the essay. Huge respect for putting your own money behind it.
Up until now, we tended to look at the various social and ecological challenges as something that we needed to fix “out there”. In reality, the “fix” (or better, the shift) needed to begin with something “in here”. We needed an expanded understanding of our place the cosmos and our true potential and the opportunities that it makes possible. I realized that we as a species and society were at an inflection-point — poised either to continue on a downward path or to make an evolutionary leap in consciousness.
I love that you are getting people together to work on solving immediate issues in our current society.
Collective human consciousness can produce historical events as the moon landing…The challenge was to transform our ways of conceiving human relations that was based on little more than utility, greed, and competition to one based on felt connection and cultural continuity. Humanity saw the dire need to transform a greedy populace into an altruistic one.

So, cheers from cloud nine – to many new subscribers, too, where I’m so glad to be connecting to more and more thoughtful people. May we be a creative family and a hope of the world!

Suzanne Taylor’s Now What?

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