About Us
The Founders
Founded by Cody Johnson and Robin Haines Johnson
Robin Johnson
Robin Johnson is the co-founder of the Great Mystery initiative and has spent her life exploring the mysteries of consciousness and healing. Her path opened early through a near-death experience as a child, which sparked a lifelong curiosity about the unseen world. In the 1970s, she immersed herself in practices like Science of Mind, Transcendental Meditation, and Integral Yoga with Swami Satchidananda, living for a time at his ashram in Santa Cruz.
Drawn to wisdom traditions, Robin studied with Michael Harner of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and learned from medicine men and women across the Americas, Polynesia, and Siberia, as well as through work with plant medicines. These experiences deepened her sense of the interconnectedness of all life.
With her late husband, Gary Cody Johnson, Robin first worked in the music world, producing concerts in California and Hawaii with legendary artists such as Van Morrison, Phoebe Snow, Neil Young, Bob Marley, Herbie Hancock, and Ray Charles. Later, they created Great Mystery, bringing people such as Carlos Castaneda, Ram Dass, Gabrielle Roth, Deepak Chopra, Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and Joe Dispenza into dialogue about who we are and what it means to be human.
Alongside this, Robin has practiced bodywork, energy, and sound healing since the 1970s, weaving these modalities into her work with individuals and groups.
Today, she makes her home on the beautiful island of Mallorca, where she continues to create programs that inspire, connect, and invite people into a deeper experience of presence and wonder.
Gary ‘Cody’ Johnson
Gary “Cody” Johnson began life as an adventurer. Raised amid cowboy ranching and railroading, his early years echoed, in many ways, the restless spirit of Kerouac’s On the Road. Always an activist with heart, he joined others in founding a free school inspired by A. S. Neill’s Summerhill and helped raise funds that secured Angela Davis’s release from prison.
The evolution from producing concerts to creating retreats, conferences, and journeys to sacred sites gave birth to Great Mystery. Through these gatherings across North America, Europe, Asia, and South America, Cody and Robin brought together visionary scientists, spiritual teachers, indigenous elders, artists, and mystics in a shared exploration of consciousness, healing, and humanity’s evolving relationship with the universe.
Cody and Robin began their creative partnership producing concerts beginning in the late 1970s in Santa Cruz, California and then in the Hawaiian Islands. Many of these were benefit concerts to support groups like The United Farm Workers, SolarCal, The Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, the Red Cross, and homeless shelters, featuring artists including Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Jane Fonda, the Doobie Brothers, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea. The concerts were celebrations of the shift in consciousness taking place at that time.
An avid explorer, Cody immersed himself in the ideas of Alan Watts, Gurdjieff, and Krishnamurti. While living in Hawaii, he studied hoʻoponopono, the Polynesian philosophy of forgiveness, for many years with the respected kahuna lapaʻau Morrnah Nalamaku Simeona.
He transitioned from this world in December 2011. His vision continues through Great Mystery, whose growing archive of conversations, writings, and recordings invites new generations to explore the enduring questions that shaped his life: consciousness, beauty, wisdom, and the deeper mysteries of human existence.
Among Cody’s last words were:
“Our purpose is Higher Beauty.”