EP 143: The Power of Love for Social Change | Marianne Williamson

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul. And in this episode I had a wonderful conversation with Marianne Williamson, the best selling author.

You may know her from her many.

Best selling books or you may know her from her run for the presidential nomination for the Democratic Party and being part of those debates last time around. So we had a great conversation really about the power of love to transform the world as a force for healing and justice in the world. We talked about while the heart is equally as important as an intelligence center for our human lives, equally important as the brain, and how turning towards discomfort and standing up for justice and responsibility is critical for all of us and how we can really resolve the deep fractures and fault lines in our currently very divisive political and social culture. And she brings forth really a true message of the power of love and justice in the Kingian sense of it. And we had a great conversation with the very well known Marianne Williamson.

Welcome, Marianne.

Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, it's a pleasure to have you here. I'm going to share a bit of your bio. I know our audience probably knows you very well, but I'm going to share it anyway and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Okay. Marianne Williamson is a best selling author, political activist and spiritual thought leader. For over three decades, Marianne has been a leader in spiritual and religiously progressive circles. She is the author of 14 books, four of which have been number one New York Times bestsellers, A quote from mega bestseller A Return to Love. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful. Beyond measure is considered an anthem for a contemporary generation of seekers. Williamson founded Project Angel Food, a nonprofit that has delivered more than 13 million meals to ill and dying homebound patients since 1989. The group was created to help people suffering from the ravages of HIV aids. She has also worked throughout her career on poverty, anti hunger and racial reconciliation issues. In 2004, she co founded the Peace alliance and supports the creation of a US Department of Peace. She ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 and in 2021, she lost. Mariannewilliamson substack.com Again, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Today is the day on our 10 day summit that is focused on Spirituality and consciousness, the spiritual journey. So maybe we could charge us. What do those words mean to you? In the simplest terms, Spirituality and consciousness.

The spiritual journey is simply the path of the heart. But the dominant thought system on the planet is a thought system based on fear, because it is based on mind devoid of heart. The human species has lost our brain, heart connection. Even though we're learning more and more in science that the heart is as much an intelligence center for the body as is the brain. So we have desacralized the world and this has caused thought and behavior which is deeply destructive. This having taken us to the point now where humanity is on a perilous journey that could even threaten our very existence and the habitable nature of the planet itself. Higher consciousness is the opposite of lower consciousness. Lower consciousness is consciousness and mental habit patterns that derive from the false belief that we are separate from each other, that bases its sense of reality only on the physical senses and doesn't recognize this higher level of reality, this higher order of nature, which is based on love and unity. So the spiritual path is the path we walk in terms of our thought and behavior, which basically makes the world work. And right now what's very important is that it not only makes the world work, but it repairs the world when it's not working. The idea here is that the universe is both self organizing and self correcting. Much like a gps. If you take the wrong turn and humanity has clearly taken a wrong turn, the GPS automatically recalibrates. And that's what's happening right now, a great recalibration. And we must do it quickly. People can feel that we must do it quickly. We don't have a lot of time left.

Could you point to some of the signals when you do that and your GPS in your car starts rerouting, right, and you start getting some new information about the route to take to get back on track. So where are those signals coming from.

Today of how to do it correctly and how to repair and regenerate? Everywhere. It's coming from hundreds of thousands of people in the street in Glasgow demanding that the leaders of the world take seriously our need to stop fossil fuel extraction. It's people who are standing up against the US war machine. It's people who are recognizing that we can do regenerative agriculture. All the ways in which people are standing up against the tyrannous effects of the corporate matrix of big insurance companies and big pharmaceutical companies, which diminish our access to health care, big agricultural companies, big chemical companies and fossil fuel companies, which Continue to toxify and poison the earth. People who are standing up for common sense gun control. People who are standing up in ways that are building peace measures rather than feeding the military industrial complex. You know, what's important for us to remember. And I think this is true in our country, but it's also true around the world. The vast majority of people on the planet are not insane. The vast majority of people on the planet know that this is insane. What's happening. The vast majority of people on the planet, I believe, are good, decent people. The problem certainly in this country and in many countries as well, is that the power centers economically, technologically, to a great extent, technologically and governmentally, are held in the hands of those who are centered within a very regressive mindset. Regressive in that its bottom line is short term profit maximization for the very forces that are causing the problems. And when you put for government, for instance, politically, if your bottom line is increasing short term profit maximization for people who cause the problem, how much can you be a conduit for the solution? And that's where so much of the nihilism and fear and depression and frustration and anger comes today. People don't know where to look for the answer. Because the people we should be looking to for the answers in terms of governmental realities, et cetera, are the people who in many cases are conspiring with the problem.

Well, I'd like to return to talking about how spirituality and love can inform a saner politics and the kind of political activism we need today. But first I'd like to explore a little more the spiritual journey. I think a lot of our participants would like to deepen their spiritual journey. Maybe for some of our summit participants, that's an area of their life they haven't given that much attention to yet. So what are some of the markers? How do we know if we are developing or evolving spiritually or are, you know, how do we recognize the signposts on the journey?

One of the biggest signposts is how other people react to you.

People know everything. They don't know it consciously. If you are a kind and generous and compassionate presence in someone's life, they can feel it. They will tend to like you more if you show up not just thinking about yourself, but thinking about others. And the greater whole people will like you more. They will want to hire you more, they will want to work with you more. I mean, it's not rocket science when we all. When the spiritual journey, when I say it's the path of the heart. It's the path of the heart. Moment after moment after moment. It's all in relationship. Relationship with employees, relationship with employers, relationship with colleagues, relationship with your parents, relationship with your children, relationship with your friends, relationship with the earth. Every single. You know one of the lines in the Course in Miracles that I appreciate most? It says, each of us has a highly individualized curriculum. What that means is every single person, every single circumstance, and every encounter in our lives is an opportunity. It's an invitation. You want to be your best self. You want to where you've done it right before, do it even better. You want to in those places where you haven't maybe done it right. Maybe do it a little better this time. Or are you going to speak from your wound, act from your wound, make it all about you only, see what you can get rather than what you can give. Phone it in. Come on. I mean, at this point, we all know the difference between me when I'm centered in love and our ego default positions when we're not. And the spiritual path is about taking very, very seriously that every moment. You know, in the Course of Miracles, it says, all thought creates form on some level. So you really begin to realize not only that life is a tapestry, but that you are weaving it moment after moment after moment. We're the ones who sew in this thing. And you can either use golden threads, the golden threads that come from love, or you can.

Fail to do that. But I also love how the Course in Miracles says it is not up to you what you learn. It is merely up to you, whether you learn through joy or through pain. And the entire species is in that place right now. We are going to become a species which is centered on humanitarian values, brotherly love as our guiding principle of human civilization. We are going to get there. We're either going to get there because we become wise and each of us rises to the level of that wisdom and plays the part that nature assigns to us. Or because we are going to.

Call forth apocalyptic global catastrophe. It's going to be one or the other. If we call forth global apocalyptic catastrophe, one of two things will happen. Either humanity will basically be shoved off the earth for a few hundred thousand years.

Or a few people will be left. But if a few people are left, I assure you they'll look at each other and say, let's do it differently this time.

Well, I'd like to explore more your book, A Return to Love and the teachings from the Course in Miracles, which have been foundational in your work from What I understand, you know, what I hear you saying, sometimes we associate the spiritual with the transcendent. And maybe that's the archetypically male version, as opposed to the more grounded earth religion, embodied feminine heart approach.

Could you talk a bit about.

That difference and how the course of miracles frames the spiritual journey for us? And I know you laid that out in your book, but perhaps that could be a starting point.

Well, you used the word transcendent. And the issue here is there is a difference between transcendence and denial. You know, in the Lord's Prayer we say, on earth as it is in heaven, in the Bible it says, heaven and earth shall be as one. The idea here is that as I mentioned before, the dominant thought system on the planet is based on fear. All that the Earth's circumstances are are a projection of our thoughts. So we need to evolve beyond a state in which the Earth is mainly a screen reflecting back to us, our fear in the form of deep poverty, in the form of endless war, in the form of all manner of pain and suffering and societal as well as personal dysfunction. We want to close that breach. We want to close the gap between.

The essence of who we are and the conditions on the earth. We do that by dismantling the thought system based on fear that now dominates the world and substituting for that the thought system based on love, which is a reflection of our true spiritual essence. Now, we can't do this in a broad stroke for the earth. We do this within ourselves. So each of us being on the spiritual journey, have.

These opportunities, as I mentioned before, to dismantle an old way of thinking and being that we were trained into by the huge ego mind which sits within all of us. It is. You know, in the Bible, Satan is called the father of lies. It starts with the lie that we have no higher source, that all we are is bodies, that we're separate from each other, that it's a random universe and that you have very little power. Well, from that place, how powerful can you feel? How at home can you feel in the universe? How meaningful can you feel your life is? And how do you reach other people?

But if instead you convert, it's just like you convert, you know, in a plug. The spiritual conversion is, oh my God, I'm not separate from you. There's really no place where my spirit stops and your star to actually won. Oh my God, I'm not just my body, as the course says. Physical birth was not the beginning, but a continuation. Death is not the end, but a continuation. Oh my God, I was here before I was born and I'll be here even after I die.

Whoa.

I mean, it's such a radically different way of looking at the world. Oh, my goodness. I used to think I was in any situation to see what I could get out of it because there are only so many pieces of the pie.

Wow.

I now get that there are an infinite number of pieces of the pie. I only get what I give. Oh. I used to think you were just someone. I had to figure out whether or not you were worthy of my approval. Now I realize, oh, my gosh, unless I love you, I won't even understand you. But you're as much of a child of God as I am of unlimited power and magnificence. And my only job is to try to see that and to join with you to create something more beautiful than we could do alone. It's a radical departure from an old way of looking at the world that is killing us all if we don't change.

So it's another frame for where you're talking about individualism and being relational. It sounds like the spiritual journey as described in the Course of Miracles is inherently relational. And I guess that's what I was pointing to before that sometimes I think.

We might have a mistaken view of transcendence where we're transcending the small self ego into just some greater vaster mind self, as opposed to actually transcending it into relationship into the relational field. So is it safe to say that.

Yeah, oh, absolutely. And what you point out is so important because a misunderstanding of the point of transcendence makes some people go, well, it's all an illusion anyway. This three dimensional plane is just an illusion anyway. So I don't have to address it. I don't have to address suffering, starving children. I don't have to address endless war because I'm too spiritual. I've risen above all that. That's not transcendence, that's denial.

The Course in Miracles talks about the difference between negative denial and positive denial. It's negative denial. It's not transcendence to say, oh, well, I don't do toxic things. Transcendence is. No, I see that this is happening, but I see through it to the possibility on the other side. I deny the power of this illusion to affect me. On my watch it will dissolve because in the presence of light, darkness disappears. In the presence of love, in the presence of someone who is in this situation holding a higher consciousness of another way of being and doing that which is not based on Love will fall. And that's why we're here.

Well, it's become ever more clear how we've gone astray. And in our work, Heart Mind Institute, which is one of the co producers of this summit, we talk about, you know, our amazing cognitive abilities have somehow gotten disconnected and divorced from the body, from the heart and from the earth and thus become, you know, a lot of collateral damage we're creating. So our work is about becoming more deeply embodied, more heart centered, more connected, and at the same time, you know, where we've gotten to or this whole journey we've been on. And in some ways this is part of the journey, isn't it? I mean, isn't this the human condition? And this is kind of the challenge and a pathway and the hero's journey of how we are going to awaken. I mean, it would be nice we could have gotten there without all this pain and suffering, with all that's gone on. And it's not justifying anything, but somehow is there some quality of needing to embrace where we are and the humanity of that so we can actually transform it and move forward together?

Well, once again you bring up something very interesting. But we should not underestimate the severity of the risk and the peril of this moment. On one hand we have free will. So yes, that's the journey. You're going to keep doing it a certain way until you realize this really isn't working and you change. But at this point, when you look at the collective, getting it wrong doesn't mean oops. Getting it wrong means death. It's much like, I think the better analogy is the alcoholic or the drug addict. If you continue, you will die. You can say, well, it was part of my journey, yeah, but at certain point somebody intervenes and says, yeah, no, you continue like this, you will die. There's never been a time on the earth where our technological advances.

Were so far ahead of our spiritual and moral advances. Particularly given the fact that we have nuclear bombs in our hands. The nuclear bombs that exist on the planet today, the smallest one, makes the bombs that dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima look like pinpricks. The United states alone has 7,000 of these. Whether it has to do with the pandemic, whether it has to do with environmentalism or anything else, we are being shown how inept, how reckless, how careless, how really genuinely sociopathic some of the forces of economic and political power on the planet are. It behooves us to remember those are the same folks who have nuclear bombs in their hands.

So this is not a moment to think, oh, it's all part of the journey. We had to get this bad. You know, we have this idea, we have this magical thinking about the world today that I think we need to evolve beyond. Enough of us have seen people who actually died of their alcoholism. We have enough of us seen people who actually OD'd and died. There is no guarantee of survival for someone who is an addict and drinks too much. There is no guarantee of survival for someone who takes drugs too much. And there is no guarantee of survival of our democracy or even of the survivability of the human race on this earth. So, yeah, I mean, is the story the hero's journey that you deviate and then come back? Yeah, unless you don't come back. And that's our choice at this time. And spirituality should not be used in any way to undercut our recognition of the deep urgency of this moment. Sometimes people will say to me, oh, Marianne, it's really going to be okay. Because the worst thing that could happen is that humanity is just going to be thrown off the planet for several hundred thousand years. Well, then you have to allow yourself to imagine the horror of the scenario that makes that occur. The immeasurable, unimaginable amount of human and other species suffering. I'll give you an example. Apparently Jeff Bezos said sometime in the last few days to Russian TV.

That the Earth is not going to become habitable for the vast numbers of people, that it will remain as kind of a spa type place. That's why he and other multibillionaire friends are figuring out a way to get out of here. Well, who do you think is going to get out of here? Who do you think is going to get out of here? Those who can afford it.

And how do you think that this thinning out of the human race is going to happen through unbelievable pain and suffering? This is a very serious moment, and those of us who are into spiritual issues should be the biggest grownups in the room. Our spiritual understanding should inform our activism, not our complacency.

Well, we're clearly at an intervention moment. There's absolutely no question about that. It's become abundant and clear. And I appreciate the strength of your calling that out. Well, let's go ahead and go further with that. And then I'm going to come back to a question because I want to talk about your book, the gift of spiritual guidance for living your best life, just because it's so in alignment with this summit. But let's explore some of the continue to explore some of the shadow aspects of spirituality and the spiritual, bypassing spiritual materialism, spiritual appropriation, all these kinds of things. And, you know, the darker side of life, of spiritual distress, loneliness, alienation, loss, grieving, which has just become endemic at this time. And, you know, our journey through.

The pandemic and your book Tears to Triumph seems to speak to this as well. So how do we, you know.

Is there some way in the midst of this intervention point that we can.

Still find a way to feel good about ourselves and our humanity and our vulnerability and somehow by embracing that, find our way back into love and back into connection and into relationship. At this time.

Our sense of alienation, our sense of pain and loneliness and isolation emerges from a great spiritual misunderstanding. We are taught that we are separate. We are taught that we are our bodies. That's the ego's thought system. When we realize that we're not, our minds are corrected and we begin, as you said, to live for each other. Now.

We are living in a moment where our work is to repair the world. The world has been desacralized because it reflects our misunderstanding of who we are and why we are here. It is our job now to re sacralize the world.

Your hope is born of participation in hopeful solutions. Our joy comes from being part of the solution. They say in aa, get into the solution. You don't wait till you're happy again to show up to save the world. You get about the business of trying to save the world and you find yourself happy again. We have become too precious.

We have got to stop coddling this in ourselves and in each other. I'm traumatized. I'm too traumatized. Do you think the people who walked across that bridge at Selma were not traumatized?

Do you think those women suffragettes who were thrown into prison and were force fed when they went on a hunger strike in order to express the terrible conditions in the prison, you think they weren't anxious? Come on, everybody. We have had it so easy, and Americans particularly have had it so easy that in a way, the problem is not that these are traumatizing times. The trauma itself is a signal. You know, the brain. If you have a broken leg, okay, the brain expresses, the brain blinks. Pain. If you didn't feel pain, you wouldn't know you have to reset the bone. That's part of how the immune system operates. The same is true with psychic pain. The fact that we're anxious, the fact that we're depressed is a sign of mental health. It's not the presence of Mental health. It's a sign of mental health. It's a sign. You've got to reset your thinking. Anybody who's looking at the condition of the world today and is not depressed, I've been saying this for 10, 15 years. What's wrong with you? Only a sociopath doesn't feel empathy. Only a sociopath doesn't feel regret or remorse. The fact that we feel, whoa, what have we done? Oh, my God. What have we allowed to happen to our democracy? Oh, my God. What have we allowed to happen to our planet? The pain and the horror is functional. It is not dysfunctional. But it's our time to be adults. Do you have children?

I had a son, yes. So sadly lost him last year.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry.

Thank you. Thank you.

And I'm sure I speak for everyone who is listening.

Yeah. As parents, feel complete joy in my life. But, yes, I had that journey with children, and my wife has two boys who are great. So children and young people have been part of my life.

So we are the grownups on the planet now. And grownups, you simply don't have the luxury of falling apart when the kid's in trouble.

You just don't do that. You just don't do that. If, God forbid, your child is diagnosed with cancer and you go to the doctor and the doctor explains to you, you don't say, well, this is just too toxic and negative. I can't handle it. No, you should have. Doctor. Okay, what's the situation and what are we going to do? And that's where we have to be right now. And there is an exhilaration in it as well. You know, there's a line in the course of miracles that says, from this point forward, you will not be alone, for you will be joined by mighty companions. It's very exciting right now, actually, meeting people who, you know, are on that same.

Plane of, okay, planet's in trouble. We got to fix it. Okay, you're going to do this, and I'm going to do that, and you're going to do that, and we're going to do this together. And you do this while I'm doing. And the fact that these are revolutionary times is the good news. As JFK said, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. So, listen, this is the moment we're living in. You've got to honor your incarnation. It wouldn't have been easy to be an abolitionist either, but they did it. It wouldn't have been easy to be a woman suffragette either, but they did. It wouldn't have been easy to be a part of the civil rights movement, but they did it. And they didn't wimp out on what needed to be done. And it's important that we don't wimp out on what needs to be done, particularly using some false justification of it's just too upsetting. You know, we're all wounded. We're all wounded. But you make a choice in life whether to act from the wound. And you also come to understand that everything that happens is an opportunity to heal it. You don't heal your wound in the past. You heal your past wounds by living fully in the present. Because nature organizes it so that the opportunity to do that is given you.

Well, you somewhat spoke to this or you are speaking to this. All the great spiritual traditions point to our illusion of separateness as being the source of suffering and disconnection and everything you're speaking about and you spoke about, you know, we need to re sacralize to recognize that life is sacred. And I think we do that in relationality. But more specifically, even at an individual level, how do we begin that process of re sacralizing a world when we've developed a global culture of disconnection? So as individuals, how do we begin to re sacralize our own lives, our communities, our relationships, and start building a new culture of sacredness and connection rather than this culture of disconnection.

It begins in the morning. I've never known any serious spiritual or religious path that does not emphasize the power of the morning. The morning is when you first download the consciousness that will dominate your thought forms throughout the day. If the first thing you do is go to the newspaper, go to your phone, go to the computer, take in the consciousness of ain't and awful, it's going to be very difficult to rise above that. That's why you meditate in the morning. One of the exercises in the course in miracles is to say every morning, where would you have me go? What would you have me do? What would you have me say? And to whom? You wake up in the morning knowing that an unfettered, unregulated capitalism, capitalism that has gone way off center from its ethical course is now a scourge on the planet. That it has.

Created this sense of disconnection and competition that is contrary to our nature. This has taken us to a point that is literally perilous for survival.

Many people have registered this and in our own ways prayed for help. God has sent help. He sent you. So every single morning you say, dear God, use me. Now. It could be that you're Hindu, it could be you're a Buddhist, could be your Jew, could be your Muslim, could be you're Christian, could be your agnostic, could be you see all this in secular terms. It doesn't matter.

The path is there's one truth with a capital T spoken in many different ways and you give yourself to it. And it's much like physical exercise. If you work your physical muscles so that you become strong and you can move, you work your spiritual muscles in order to learn how to be still non reactive, fully available to each moment. Most people that I know, and probably most people who would be watching this program are already there.

What I see and have seen for many several years now and have been saying to myself and others is we just have to step it up.

Well, I think what you're pointing to possibly there is.

What sometimes we call engaged spirituality or socially engaged spirituality, which requires that we keep doing that work, to deepening, to deepen our resilience, to deepen our resources. But in time, at this time of intervention, this clearly precipitous time in our, in our human experience, that we do need to engage, we need to engage with a spiritual focus. But it can't be the individualistic spiritual journey. It needs to be some kind of collective, engaged spirituality, an individualistic.

And not only do I agree with it, but an individualistic spiritual journey is not the spiritual journey. The spiritual journey is relational, as you said. If the course says heaven is entered two by two.

There is no serious spiritual or religious path that gives anyone a pass on addressing the suffering of other sentient beings. So a spiritual path that only concerns you is not the spiritual path. It's a lot of things, but it's not the spiritual path. So let's stop pretending that it's a spiritual path. Jesus did not arrive on the earth to say love yourself. He arrived on the earth to say love one another.

And also there's, you know, people talk about, do I work on myself or do you work on the world? First of all, they're interlaced. It's all the same. Because if I'm really working on myself, part of the work is don't be so selfish, don't be so self centered. And if you're working in the world, part of it's going to be how do you get along with those people? Do they want you on their committee? How do they react to you? Do they want to work with you? So it's all interlaced, all the time also, there are a lot of hours in the day. You meditate in the morning and you kick ass in the afternoon. It's all of the above. It's not either or. Yeah.

That formula seems to work very well, and I'm very grateful that my wife Sophie and I, we spend our morning beginning with considerable time at meditation and just, you know, taking. Creating that foundation for the morning. Then we both get out there and engage and do our best to kick ass.

You said my mother's name was Sophie.

Oh, really? Yeah. Wisdom.

Yeah.

So in 2019, the same year that you announced and ran for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, you came out with a book, a Politics of Love Handbook for a New American Revolution. And, you know, as tough a sell as it is, you know, we have to get love back into our political landscape and political language. And I really. I was quite intrigued by your candidacy, and I saw your debate performances, which I found very intriguing and inspiring. And it was sad. I mean, expected, but sad that even some of the commentary, we all use that love language, as if that has no place in our political system or our social discourse. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how we bring principles of love and kindness, compassion, human dignity into our political landscape and whether also.

I would assume, you resonate with how Martin Luther King is often quoted as saying, power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. So you seem to be someone, through your political activism and your voice on love and a return to love and your work with the course in miracles you seem to be working with, bringing those two together. So I wonder if you could speak more to that and this idea of a spiritually informed political activism, or maybe spiritually, maybe the two are synonymous, as I think you're pointing to.

That is, of course. And if I believe that if I were a man, it would not have been made fun of. Cory Booker talks about love.

There are quotes of Martin Luther King, including the one that you just gave. The one you just gave is a rather famous one. But there are those of his who perhaps that are not as famous, and there are people who, if they heard it and didn't know if it was him, would make fun of it. But if they knew it was him, they would not make fun of it.

John F. Kennedy said, we cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor. Now, my brother, my own brother did say to me during the campaign, and I wish that he had said it sooner, he said, you know, Marianne, I've hung around with guy friends who totally agree with you politically. We're all on the same, you know, we get it, we agree with you, he said. But Samari men have a hard time with the conversations about love. Can't you just use another word? So on one hand, I think that.

Maybe the word itself had served to.

Served as a gift to those who wish to marginalize my candidacy. But the truth remains that when you looked at my website on issues, when you looked at the things I actually talked about, the idea that my political discussion was less sophisticated or less issues oriented than the Amy Klobucharans of the world, attendants of the world world, it's just absurd. I don't think they could ever would have done that to me if I were a man. And I also think that there is this illusion. It's not an illusion, it's a canard, a kind of political class in America, which is very much not how the, the founders intended it. Where they think they, their club kind of owns things and who are you to enter?

Who let you in? So we're supposed to look at people and go. Those who have had years of experience in the mindset, consciousness and skill set that drove us into this ditch for the last 40 years are the only people we should possibly consider qualified to lead us out of the ditch. And that is where we are stuck. The powers that be, in terms of the political and media industrial complex. I wanted to marginalize my candidacy.

Did not actually do so because they thought I was silly. They did it because they knew I was very serious. So they created the image of me as silly kooky crystal lady to kind of throw dust in people's eyes so that people would naturally come hear me. Once people actually came to hear me, they may or may not agree with me, but certainly realized that my conversation about love and politics.

Was neither silly nor unsophisticated.

Well, how do we change that in our culture? You know, it's not just in a political world, but in the business, even though the whole social landscape really. I mean, unless you're talking about romantic love and people's fascination with romantic love. But other than that, if you bring love into the conversation, you're almost immediately marginalized as some kind of soft Christianity or some kind of New age thing or something. It's very hard.

That we've developed this cultural cynicism and somehow we have to break that apart and develop a culture of love and a politics of love.

Well, I actually think that change is happening. You have more and more. You have business conferences where they have meditation sessions. You have educational conferences where they talk about educating the whole child.

I think the change is happening. It needs to happen more quickly. But a lot has changed. There's a lot more conversation about the whole person, about compassion. Actually, I think that change is happening. I think politics was that one last bastion where, oh, you can't go there. That's lightweight thinking. Ask any CEO. And the CEO knows it's not lightweight thinking because it has a lot to do with business relationships, how we treat each other, et cetera. So I actually think the culture is changing. It's just that in politics, able to retain, for their own purposes of power, they've been able to retain this attachment to old language as a kind of a way of holding to their own territory. But I think a lot has happened. Even since the.

Presidential race of 2020, so much has happened between the pandemic, between the environmental crisis, the. Between the obvious way in which the war machine has now so spectacularly lost in Afghanistan, in Iraq. People's eyes are opening. So I actually think people. You know, I always felt when I was running with voters, there was not the problem. It's the media and the political establishment that mocks the conversation. Because if you take love seriously, you're kind of not okay with 13 million hungry children in America. If you take love seriously, you're not okay with mass incarceration and 2.3 million people in jail compared to 300,000 when I was in college. If you take love seriously, you don't spend 780 billion a year on your defense establishment, but you won't even raise the minimum wage. If you take love seriously, you take it pretty seriously. The chemical companies are putting toxins and pesticides that we know harm a developing child's brain. The issue about love, they want you to think, oh, that's lightweight. That's not serious. Oh, it's very serious. And that's what Martin Luther King made very clear. It's what Gandhi made very clear. And I think it's our job now to make it clear once more.

Well, I see if we could bring that. That Gandhian, Kingian spirit into our activism today. Because I think, unfortunately, a lot of activism seems to give in to fear and anger and blame and shaming. And I'm not. I mean, it's the prophetic voice. We all need to hear it. Maybe we need to get our cages rattled by people with technology, with strategies, or maybe could be part of the problem. But nonetheless, it seems like I'M just fascinated by this word love because it seems like we have to rehabilitate it because even in the business world, you're right, mindfulness is moving into the fortune.

Mindfulness is like a euphemism. So great, let's use mindfulness. I don't care what word we use. Mindfulness is this big euphemism. So you don't have to say meditation, you don't have to say prayer, you don't say love. Fine, fine.

Yeah, it is a euphemism. And I hear from my colleagues, I'm.

Fine with it though.

Yeah, well, I hear from my colleagues that even, you know, the part of the mindfulness and certainly the kind of Buddhist antecedents of that part of it is really embedded with compassion. Not just mindfulness, but compassion. And they tend not to lead with compassion in the corporate work either. And compassion is not even as loaded of a word as love. And I'm wondering if, you know, the word love got so associated with the idealization of romantic love in Hollywood and so forth. And it does seem like we could use any word. We could use loving, kindness, compassion. We can use mindfulness. But it does seem that there would be some power in rehabilitating just the word love because it seems to have been used powerfully in the past by people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Well, yes, and I used it a lot in my presidential campaign and perhaps I would have been better off not using that word so much. Words are not what matters. What matters is that.

The words, at best the course in miracle says, are but symbols.

When some business person talks about compassion, we have to do more than just have the business person talk about compassion. We have to talk about how the business ethos, namely unfettered, unregulated capitalism, is by definition, to the extent to which it makes its bottom line, short term profit maximization for its stockholders at the expense of concern, care and compassion for other stakeholders such as the workers, the community, the environment and so forth. It is by definition lacking in compassion. It is by definition lacking in empathy. It is by definition lacking in love. And I don't think the word we use is so important, as is the recognition that the systems that now govern our society are undemocratic and unloving.

Well, I think that in some ways is the point because everything I hear you saying we need radical change and we need a peaceful revolution, but it is. Things are radically upside down and language is powerful. That's why I'm just. Language can so easily be co opted as well, so that's why I'm just saying, what's the leverage thing that will really catch new conversations of fire? You know, another word that I, in my own tradition, my own teacher, continually spoke about the importance of recognizing our own innate goodness, the innate goodness of others, innate goodness of the world in life, that he called it basic goodness. And by that he didn't mean good versus bad. He meant this profound, primordial, unconditional goodness. And I've often felt that's a word that needs to be rehabilitated to be able to have conversations about goodness again.

Well, as someone who writes books, I think every writer and every speaker decides for themselves the words that work. And also a lot of the words that work for them have to do with the audience they're speaking to. As a student of the course in miracles, I don't have a problem using the word Christ, using the words Buddha, mind using the word Shekinah. Other people wouldn't like the religiously charged concepts and would talk about basic goodness. There shouldn't be one agreement by which we all use the same words. I don't think that's very cool. I think each of us should say the words that speak from our heart, speak our truth. There's a man named Arnold Patton who wrote a book that I just loved. He said, if you genuinely have something to say, there's someone out there who genuinely needs to hear it. I think you speak from your heart. Now, I had had a long career talking about love and not getting slapped in the face of for it. So I went into the political environment unprepared for the mockery and the derision that came my way because of it. In looking back, had I realized that, I probably would have used a little less of the word love, not because it was unaligned with the policies, but because my using the word love made a lot of people stop listening before they even would hear my policies.

So you said everybody should say it the way they want to say it. It's all the same thing. Whether you're talking about basic goodness, basic decency, or the Christ or the Buddha, it's all the same thing. And I don't think it's a matter of all of us trying to agree on what words we should use.

Yeah, it is. No, I don't think so at all. And I work a lot in the criminal justice space, and we're very careful about the language we bring in there because we don't want people to stop listening. We don't want to turn people off we want them to be accepting. And I just think there's some give and take there between being skillful about the use of language to be able to access these systems and cultural frameworks. And then there's the danger of being co opted if we're not willing to take a stand around whatever word we use for it. But the principles involved, I so agree with you.

And also I think sometimes people.

Underestimate how far the society has advanced. I think that these principles, like I said in politics, they're still like ew, but in most. You know, one of the things that I that surprised me was I've been talking about these things with big corporate environments, et cetera, for a long time. Maybe not using the more religiously charged words, but the concepts, the values. In this, as in so many areas in America, the people are ahead of the politicians. This is already happening, particularly if you talk to a younger generation, the really younger ones, man, they get this. They grew up reading the kinds of books that we all write and talk about. So the society is moving. It's simply a matter of the economic and political systems that are trying to hold on to an old way of being.

Well, this has been incredibly rich and we could keep going, but I would like to come, before we come back to your book, a gift of spiritual guidance for living your best life. Because that just feels so in alignment with our summit. And I think today this idea of, of making this year the best year of your life, which is about not giving up on life, not giving up on ourselves. And certainly I think today we have to given not only the inflection point, but the intervention point, as you said, that we're at. We have to think of that best year of our lives collectively. But I'm wondering if you could talk about the methods of that book a little bit and what kind of this idea of aspiring to our best life, both individually and collectively.

First of all, you've said a couple of times we're at an intervention point. Unfortunately, I don't think we're yet at the intervention point. We are at the inflection point. What we need to do is to build a critical mass of people who go, we have to have an intervention here. Because that means you have to get over the illusion that it's like an aa. You have to give up on the thought that you can manage this. We keep saying, can the Republicans manage it? Can the Democrats manage it? Neither one. It's become unmanageable. This is out of control here. We have to have an intervention I don't think enough people have actually gotten to that point. I hope that our conversation will help more of us get there. Then you surrender your life and ask to be part of that nonviolent, creative intervention. I went to live in the Midwest many years ago, and I was working in a place where I was trying to create some changes. And people kept saying to me, marian, people don't like change. And I thought, wow, people are scared of change. Everybody keeps telling me people are scared of change. I've always been scared of not changing. Nature changes. You know, I live in an apartment that has all these trees outside the window, and it's November, and every morning, oh, my gosh, it's so gorgeous. Every morning, wow, that tree is now red on top. And then there was more red, and now it turned to orange. And the ones on top no longer have the leaves. And it's, you know, or I'm a. You know, I'm no longer a young woman. I'm watching the changes in my body. I mean, there are. This is. Life changes. Now. The course in miracles says some people would rather die than change their mind. So what's happening? Look at the COP conference in Glasgow.

What are these people thinking?

What are they thinking with their continued fracking, with their continued fossil fuel extraction? They don't want to change.

Yeah. I couldn't believe they're arguing over that language around coal, that maybe we'll lower coal instead of eliminate coal use in India. It's just like, yeah, so what are.

They going to do? They're going to also so that you know what that crowd's thinking. They're going to go to another planet with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. This is insane. This is insane. So we need to not only be open to change right now, we need to be insistent upon it. I believe strongly in the idea of honoring our incarnation. We're here now, and we must be ushering in a change. We are either a minute before extinction or a minute before a miracle. We are living in two simultaneous realms. One, the archetype of the fall of Rome. One, the archetype of the Renaissance. Both. And we have to be both death doulas and birth doulas. We have to be tender.

Guides and accompaniments to that which needs to die. And we need to be tender and enthusiastic accompaniments to that which is struggling to be born. Either way, change is in the air and the change will not stop. They used to say when we were younger, they used to say, if you're not part of a solution. You're part of the problem. There is no such thing as a neutral thought. We're either headed up or we're headed down. There's no this is one thing we do know. Things will not remain the way they are. So take your choice. You want to go down or you want to go up. Now, the way of the ego is it's just to spiral down. So for those of us who want to see spiral up, it'll only happen if we give of our own lives. And that's where the personal journey is. And all of us will be guided inwardly to not only think and act, but also to display the behavior with others that collectively makes the changes that we need to have happen.

Wow. Thank you so much. Marianne Williamson, author of the Return, A Return to Love and many other spiritual classics, and a political activist and I hope again a candidate one of these days because we need to get this voice into our political landscape. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. It was an honor speaking with you.

It is Ryan Seacrest here. There was a recent social media trend which consisted of flying on a plane with no music, no movies, no entertainment. But a better trend would be going to chumbacasino.com it's like having a mini social casino in your pocket. Chumba Casino has over a hundred online casino style games, all absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus now@chumbacasino.com sponsored by Chumba Casino.

No purchase necessary vgw group void we're prohibited by law 21 + terms and conditions apply.