About Us
The Founders
Robin Johnson & Cody Johnson
Robin Johnson
For as long as she can remember, Robin Johnson has been drawn toward the mystery of being alive—what lies beyond what we can see, how consciousness moves through us, and what becomes possible when we meet life with an open heart.
Her journey began with a near-death experience in childhood, opening a lifelong curiosity about the unseen and the unknown. In the 1970s, that curiosity led her into Science of Mind, Transcendental Meditation, and Integral Yoga with Swami Satchidananda, with whom she lived for a time at his ashram in Santa Cruz. Over the years, she studied with Michael Harner of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and learned from medicine men and women across the Americas, Polynesia, and Siberia. Her explorations have also included bodywork, energy and sound healing, and plant medicines.
Along the way, Robin’s life has moved through many worlds. For 17 years, with her late husband, Gary Cody Johnson, she produced concerts in California and Hawaii, bringing extraordinary musicians and artists to audiences in settings ranging from intimate concert halls with Van Morrison and Ray Charles to Honolulu’s 50,000-seat Aloha Stadium with Willie Nelson. In time, the impulse to bring people together around powerful experiences grew beyond music and became Great Mystery.
In the mid-1990s, Robin and Cody created Great Mystery. Over the years, they brought together an extraordinary range of voices to explore consciousness, healing, spirituality, creativity, and the deeper questions of what it means to be human.
Today, Robin continues Great Mystery as an evolving library of ideas and conversations. From her home in Mallorca, she creates spaces for curiosity, connection, beauty, and wonder—following the questions that have accompanied her throughout her life, and inviting others to explore them with her.
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.”