Marianne Williamson: America Rising

in 1997 I wrote a book called healing the soul of America and it was my fourth book and my other books that I'd written were returned to love and a woman's worth and Illuminata and when I wrote my book healing the soul of America I was talking about spirituality and spiritual principles and American history and American politics and the spiritual crowd did not want to hear it they didn't want to hear that from me and it wasn't just that they didn't want to buy the book they wanted me to know how unspiritual it was for me to write a book like that and then the political crowd didn't want to hear about that from what they called a spiritual guru so as a friend of mine I said to me at that time the book would have been much more successful if they had been under a pseudonym because of how how that was was taken so life went on I was never sorry that I wrote the book but it was a while ago so after the last presidential election I started getting texts from Oprah Winfrey with screenshots of something in the book like a page of the book and she would say you were saying it then you should be published this book and then I wrote her back and I told her that was very sweet of her but the book was still in print so it was fine and then a little bit later and then a little bit later I got another screenshot you were saying it then you should be published this book and I thought you know apparently she doesn't understand what I'm trying to tell her that the you know and I thought well not only did I published it 20 years ago the stats are old etc the third time after she wrote me send me a screenshot the book that you were saying it's in this book you should be published at I said to myself you were turning down career advice from Oprah Winfrey this is a flaw in you so by that time I was already starting to write another book which I'm completing now called a politics of love handbook for a new American Revolution that I'm excited about because it speaks more to what is happening in contemporary American politics but I understand why the revision of healing the soil of America makes sense and what happened at that point was that I went back and read the book myself part of it for me why I wasn't that interested when when I got those texts was because your life was on you you haven't read a book in a long time and I had a lot of feelings when I went back and I read the book which I hadn't read in at least 10 or 15 years and it made me kind of sad because that book is all about wealth inequality racial injustice mass incarceration big pharma so many of the things corporate ah cracy corporate rule so many of the things that are now just the things we talked about and I said in that book something terrible is going to happen if these things are not addressed and a lot of people had said to me since the election more recently who read that book have said to me things like how did you know well I knew because as spiritual students as course amiracle students and whatever our interests are we are trained we are our minds or discipline to think in terms of cause and effect and we know that if there is a cause there will be an effect and the fact that it's only a little bit of cause is like saying there's a little bit of cancer and the the word inertia means the tendency of the object to move in whatever direction it's been moving so it's like Martin Luther King said when he talked about war and peace he said there are two kinds of peace he said there is outright peace where it is a conflict that everybody can see but that's negative peace he said negative positive peace can only be predicated on Brotherhood and justice and in the condition of negative peace there might not be an outright conflict but there is underlying tension and anxiety so what I saw in when I wrote that book what I saw was that although things were good for a lot of us everybody was going around at that time saying how good things were but as a metaphysical student and just as someone who cares I kept thinking to myself doesn't that depend on where you live doesn't that depend on the neighborhood you're living in doesn't that depend on what part of the world you're living in and anyone who is looking to the level of cause rather than just seeing the world on the level of effects knows that wherever there is enough despair something is going to blow large groups of desperate people I've been saying for many years large groups of people should be seen as a national security risk whether those large groups of people are of desperate people are in a corner of our cities or in a corner of the world because large groups of desperate people desperate people do desperate things damaged people do damaged things so large groups of desperate people are more vulnerable to ideological capture by genuinely psychotic forces we knew after world war one we knew that the desperation of the German people after World War one was exacerbated not only by their loss but by the fact that the Allies basically treated them as though reparations for that war was dortch mark till we tell you to stop and the suppression that the economic suppression in despair and damage of the German people after World War one formed a sociological petri dish and in that petri dish the sociopathic dysfunction of Hitler more easily emerged and interestingly enough it was our President Woodrow Wilson at the time who argued against that and very similarly after the Civil War had Lincoln not died Lincoln argued that there would be malice towards none and charity for all and that the South would be treated like a brother who had come home not like a vanquished enemy but Lincoln died soon thereafter and it was treated like a vanquished enemy and so racism actually dug down even more deeply in the American South after after the Civil War that situation exacerbated by the lack of compassion showed the South which then they extended through more than lack of compassion for former slaves denying them the 40 acres and the mule Ku Klux Klan by that time by the time the federal troops left the period of lynchings institutionalized white supremacy Jim Crow laws segregation and so forth which wasn't even addressed until the 1960s Barack Obama gave a talk the other night the other day in South Africa and he talked about how the elites had failed and how over the last few decades too many people have lived in ways that I would see is a kind of economic despair so many millions of Americans have lived in chronic economic despair for decades in this country and when people say that they don't understand where some of the dysfunction that has actually voted in support and continues to be in support of an authoritarian model of God it's not like this is the first time this is what happens you cannot just allow millions and millions of people to live in chronic economic despair and not think that some kind of radical dysfunction will emerge from this so it is with no pleasure that anybody who has been looking at American society over the last two years takes any kind of pride or anything like that and saying well as many people have things were not going well for a long time what we're going through in America today did not emerge from nowhere but since I've seen you I've been to Austria and to Israel and I visited a concentration camp called my housing in Austria and I had never been to a concentration the concentration camp before and I always felt it was something which I needed to do somehow it was wrong that I never had but for understandable reasons nobody's really excited about visiting a concentration camp and having visited it and having been impacted by a level a by bearing witness to a level of human cruelty institutionalized cruelty which is almost unimaginable changes you you know that there are crematoriums you know that there were gas chambers but that's different than walking through a door that says on top of it crematorium and walking into the room where the gas was released you know that the hue that the ovens existed where human remains were put you know it intellectually but to actually be in that room and see those ovens changes you to see all the photographs the Nazis took a lot of photographs it's very well recorded to see the photographs of all the people in there absolute terror to see what it looked like for people to just be rounded out of their homes the women told they have to take their clothes off the embarrassment and the terror being pushed into trains where many people would die during the days when the trains were taking them to the extermination camps or to the work camps because like a hundred people would be pushed into a boxcar and there was no sanitation men women children hardly they could breathe and many people died before they even got there and many people even once they got there many were sent to the work camps like my housing where if you were old you were just killed immediately if you were children you were just killed immediately but if you were old enough that they thought that you could work then they made you work and the work was basically the work at something called the stairway of death and the stairway of death was a hundred and eighty-six very tall steps that went from a rock quarry and every person had to work from the morning till night carrying a sixty pound block of rock on their back if you couldn't and you stumbled on the walk-up someone would whip you and if you by any chance made it to the top and no longer had the block on your shoulders they would kill you one of the things that made it so difficult is that there are very good archives of the Holocaust one of the reasons one of the main reasons they're such good archives of the Holocaust is Steven Spielberg who made it a life's work to record people as he did imagine if we could have had that kind of thing at the end of slavery for instance the kind of record that we might have had if such things existed at that time and what really takes it to your heart is not only seeing for instance the Children's Museum at Yad Vashem because anytime that any one such as Hitler is seeking to perpetrate genocide you want to kill the children first and the children would be hanged and the mothers would try to rush out to see to be present and little children would yell out mama don't look because they knew where they were going and then to read about who these people were like one person was a one person was a tailor's assistant another person worked in a Chocolate Factory another person taught shallow to children but you know this thing this experience even the Holocaust of the six million of Jews who were killed only 15% of the hundred and nineteen thousand who were killed at my house and were Jews there were people from 27 countries seven million people were killed by Hitler in addition to the six million Jews communists gypsies homosexuals any political opponents of the Nazis but at the same time when you visit my house and this is true when you visit any concentration camp not only do you bear witness to a horror there is almost beyond imagining you also see the plaques acknowledging the American soldiers who liberated that camp just as the Russians liberated Auschwitz all of the camps were liberated some by the English some by the Americans some by the by the Russians and so forth and you know when President Eisenhower liberated himself one of the camps one of the things that the American military did was they made sure that soldiers had cameras so that they could take pictures and his general eisenhower walked in to the camp he started saying to the soldiers take pictures take pictures take pictures make sure you take pictures because some sons of are gonna come around someday and try to say this never happened and indeed they have but at the same time that I was at my house there were these twelve boys who were trapped in a cave in Thailand and the whole world watch didn't we to see what could happen if they maybe they could save those boys we all watched we all read about it we all saw it on television and at the end of the rescue I saw an interview you probably saw it as well with the Thai army chief and he said we had very little hope but we knew that the oxygen was running out for them we knew that the water was rising and we knew we had to go with the little hope we had we knew that we had as much expertise together as was possible we had as much of a plan together as was possible we had to go on the little hope that we had and the whole world saw that it worked and afterwards we also learned how the soccer coach was himself a Buddhist monk and taught the boys meditation while they were in that cave and that K that meditation helped them to remain calm and that meditation helped them to use less oxygen so the rescue of those boys was in every sense of the word a holistic effort my point to you ladies and gentlemen is that as much as terrible things do happen those terrible things never get the final say as horrible as the Nazi regime was it was ultimately defeated now there is something that changes inside you you bear witness to what happened and what happened in the Holocaust what happened in slavery in the American South these things still happen there are hinga Ranga in Burma there's Jonas genocide going on there now these cities in Iraq and so forth these kinds of things are going on now and the United Nations says there are still six million people on this planet who are abject slaves you know we we know about sex slavery and some kinds of slavery that amount to slavery but there are people on this planet millions of people experiencing abject slavery the kind of which was perpetrated on millions and millions and millions of people here in the American South now a lot of people talk about what we are going through now and that's why I Oprah wrote and said you were talking about it and bla bla bla and when you know we we all know that we're living in difficult times but from a spiritual perspective whenever we are going through a crisis the issue is not the circumstances were going through only the issue is who we are during the space of the crisis that is the meaning of the time between the crucifixion and the resurrection the crucifixion the three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection denotes the time it takes it symbolizes the time it takes for the human circumstance to rise to the consciousness of the good but how long that three days takes depends on the consciousness of the people going through it we had slavery in this country but we also had abolition we had the denial of rights to women in this country we also have had waves of feminine and the suffragette movement we had institutionalized white supremacy and segregation in this country and then we had the civil it's movement we had the denial of rights to gay people in America but we have had improvement we've had had the Garrett the gay marriage movement and so forth marriage equality movement so the narrative of history both in this country and in the world is not that things never get terrible it's that they do sometimes get terrible but ultimately ultimately the narrative of American history is that we have self corrected we are going through a time right now which if it is not interrupted if we do not disrupt the political and social trajectory of this moment could result in the most devastating blow to American democracy as has ever occurred and what we are dealing with now is not just the circumstance what we're dealing with is who we have to be to change the circumstance this is a much bigger issue than winning the house in 18 it is a much bigger issue than coming up with a positive platform so you're not just anti Trump this is a much bigger issue than just knowing who we might put up to be a Democratic candidate or whatever in 2020 in order for us to prevail and by us to prevail what I mean is those people who are concerned that there is an assault going on right now on the basic foundations of American democracy and there is a march towards authoritarianism which is a genuine blow to the bulwarks of a democratic free society we are going to do more have to do more than simply address these things on the external level we are going to have to change on the inside if we want to have what it takes to bring forth the necessary fundamental changes on the outside and that's why Mahatma Gandhi said that in order for the Indian independence movement to work there had to be a purification of the Indian soul and that's why when Martin Luther King went to India and he struggled and he and he studied the principles of non-violence and the philosophy of non-violence in India and brought it back to apply to the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s the reason dr. King did that was because he knew that the powers of segregation and the powers of institutionalized white supremacy were so great that it would not be possible to defeat them unless there was as he said a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our circumstances and that from the perspective of non-violence when I wrote the book healing the soul of America I was talking about the circumstances but now more than ever 20 years later for me just as one person as one citizen but also when you look at any of the terrible things that have happened in human history the changes that were necessary in order for good to replace evil in order for those changes to occur there had to be a deepening and an expansion within people that went way beyond just our capacity to make changes on the external plane that's why when I hear people saying that they are so upset about what's going on one of the things I've been saying for a long time is that we have a crisis of adulthood in America too many boy men acting like boys too many women acting like girls we need desperately to wake up no one has time for you to finish your trauma work before you show up for your country [Applause] there this is not a time for us to coddle our wounds the people who had to fight World War two the people in the civil rights movement the suffer the women suffragettes the people who have pushed back on greater evils than any of us have ever seen in our own lives were not necessarily perfect people and they were not people who did not have wounds and they were not people who did not have anxiety they were not people who did not have trauma this entire society the entire civilization as we now live it is a chronic trauma it is a rolling trauma but this situation we were dealing with is because too many of us were not concerning ourselves with the economic trauma of so many millions of people and people in that state of economic trauma I met them I met them I travel all the time it's why on the night of Trump's election I was one of those people who is disappointed as I was I was not surprised because I had met too many people on my travels who said to me the equivalent of this I know I know he's a racist I know don't tell me he's a racist don't tell me he's a misogynist maybe he can help me maybe he can help me and so we are where we are and I agree with King and I agree with Mahatma Gandhi that we now need a spiritual purification if we are going to expand into the creation of a force field that is resonant enough and powerful enough to override the forces that are upon us we are not the first generation of Americans to ever have to deal with the assault on American democracy or the fundamental withdrawal of support from American democracy certainly the genocide of Native Americans was not who is not a democratic sir size slavery was not a democratic exercise certainly the denial of rights to women to gay people and so forth was not a democratic exercise and many of the things that we're going through today are not a democratic exercise the issue it's not that we're the first generation to have to deal with a serious problem let's just not be the first generation to wimp out on doing what it takes to handle the problem now that it's in our midst but in order for us to handle the problems that have in our myths we need to be serious thinkers and serious grownups and from a spiritual perspective we have to be people who are willing to face some very deep emotional and psychological and spiritual issues because without that level of spiritual purification miracles will not occur miracles occur in in naturally in the presence of love but we cannot get to that love if we have our own ambivalence about our country and a lot of our own ambivalence about our country is because of things that we know we are embarrassed by we know that we were some we are sometimes horrified by that we are sometimes ashamed of and we know that there are people who only want to talk about how great an exceptional America is and never want to look at the underbelly but there's some people these days who only want to talk about how bad we are in some ways and doesn't want don't want to have any recognition of the wonderful things that this country has done as well cynics will not help right now cynicism is just an excuse for not helping and political disengagement that is justified by a twisted version of spirituality should not be coddled by us and we shouldn't coddle it in our friends it's part of how we got here part of how we got here is that too many of the best and the brightest in America thought that politics would just be handled by some adi elves people saying things like i'm not political well like the french save you don't do politics politics will do you Plato said to philosophize and to do politics is the same thing all that politics is is our collective behavior and for those of us who had been trained weather as course in miracles' students or any other to understand that the world works through the level of cause and effect if there's a cause there will be an effect and if there's a collective cause there will be a collective effect you know buddha's path to enlightenment began when he crawled over climbed over the walls of the castle compound that his father had built and he saw death and age and sickness and suffering for the first time that's when his journey to enlightenment began whether it's that you visit a concentration camp or you really allow yourself to think about slavery and you allow yourself to think about what has happened with race in this country you allow yourself to think about what has happened with Native Americans in this country you allow yourself to think about the militarism in this country the outsize militarism allow yourself to really think about all those people who died needlessly in Vietnam to allow yourself to think about the people who died needlessly in Iraq and the the terrorist phenomenon that was needlessly created in large part by that war in Vienna rack and allow yourself to think about the 700 over 700 billion dollar military budget just even in this year when in fact our biggest security threats aren't even buy anything that is addressed by military equipment but is actually over the internet when you allow yourself to think about the fact that our Air Force has ordered 200 b21 bombers at five hundred and fifty million dollars each but each one of those 200 b21 bombers will carry both conventional and thermo nuke weapons so if you allow yourself to think about that whoa what's going on guys why do we need 200 planes that would carry nuclear bombs when in fact 10 of those drop and it's over this is the deal ladies and gentlemen you think about those things and it will horrify you it's like walking through a concentration camp you think about it and there will be times when your knees buckle you think about those things and it's so awful you cannot not cry you think about those things and you feel a rage inside you think about those things and you feel a level of shame and horror and concern such as you never know and you know what after enough thinking like that you change and you become someone and you become someone you didn't used to be because once you know you cannot not know once you think about it you cannot not think about it and then you know you have grown up then you know you will become the American and the global citizen that we have to be to change this thing and to say in our time this shit's not going to happen [Applause] [Applause] but but we have created a culture of avoidance we've created a culture of resistance to the horror we've created a culture of the cheap yellow smiley face be happy be happy eh Course in Miracles says that happiness is a decision we must make but there's a certain kind of happy that we cannot experience unless first we also know how to allow ourselves unhappiness this is why I've been going on for years now why I wrote my book tears to triumph and included in it this rage that I feel at a and industry making billions of dollars off a scam to convince women particularly women particularly that there is something wrong with them and they need to take a pill because they have a disorder you see that they are feeling so depressed when the fact you know it's like someone said to me on the internet the other day what do I do with this gut-wrenching feeling that I have over what's going on in our country today what do I do with this gut-wrenching feeling that I have and my response was remember that nature took millions of years of evolution to get to the point where you do feel a visceral gut wrench when you know something is wrong and that's why American women are depressed American women are depressed because we know something's not quite right here something's not quite right here this is not something to numb this is something to feel just like the body the physical body if I have a broken leg my brain registers pain because if my brain didn't register pain it's the wisdom of the body otherwise I wouldn't know that I have to reset the leg I cannot just take a painkiller after all I have to reset the leg and psychic pain is the same it is here for a reason when we have breakdowns when we have dark nights of the soul when life hurts is because we have to look at some things and some of the issues of depression that are so painful is that some of the things we have to look at are things that are so painful to look at because it was our part in the disaster that's what's so painful about it it's not just oh it's a painful breakup he left the pain is exacerbated by the fact that at some point you have to look at the things you did that contributed to his leaving or whatever it is if the pain is not just that you went bankrupt the pain is not just that you lost the job the issue is that at some point you have to look at the fact that you had something to do with that disaster and if you don't the Course in Miracles says if you don't take full ownership and take 100% responsibility for the things that have gone wrong in your life then the price you will pay is that you will not be able to change those things and that's true in this country as well so the fact that you are depressed by what's going on today the fact that when you look at it it's really deeply disturbing know that during times that are deeply disturbing the righteous place place to be within our hearts is deeply disturbed there's nothing holy about complacency and there's a difference between denial and transcendence so we don't have the luxury no generation does Pearl Harbor was not convenient but it happens and so much of what is happening in our country today is not convenient but it's happening a friend of mine wrote to me the other day and she said I'm still trying to figure out what to be when I grow up and I told her if you were a Course in Miracles student you would realize number one you are already grown-up and number two you don't figure it out you simply ask and that is where we go as spiritual seekers at a time like this we're taught in the courts in miracles every day to say where would you have me go and what would you have me do and what would you have me say into home but today it's a whole different order it's a whole different order of things because this is a kind of gorilla psychological assault this is stuff that's happening every day you have to keep up with it and even then if you do allow yourself to read what's going on to hear about what's going on you're not going to get an email that's going to say okay you do this okay you do that when you think of what some people went through think about think about people who were on the Underground Railroad think about abolitionists think about women's suffrage as think about people who were part of the French underground and all the underground movements in Europe during World War two they did not have faxes they did not have cell phones they did not have computers they did not have even phones necessarily certainly before World War two before of the phenomena after a certain point when when phones existed but they found a way they found a way people in history who have pushed back tides of terrible terrible darkness did what had to be done they could not avoid what was happening they could not pretend that what was happening was not happening you know a friend of mine when I was at my house and I had written something on my Instagram page about being there and a friend of mine a good friend of mine wrote to me he said you know did you know my two uncles died at my house and I said what are you talking about he's there oh yeah they were in some Jewish underground newspaper that's what are you talking about he said yeah there were my grandfather's brothers I said have you been he said no I should go someday I said you must go someday I will go with you you will not be the man you want to be until you go there so the fact that to look at some of the things that are going on today is disturbing does not mean that we don't have what it takes to push back to transform we need to do more than endure these times ladies and gentlemen you know I hear people talk about how can I endure this we have to do more than endure it we have to navigate it and we have to transform it and what knowing about history does whether it was slavery or the Holocaust you've heard me say this if you know my work you've heard me say this before so much of what goes down both blacks and Jews have this in common we know viscerally this should not new these kinds of things that are around that we are all going oh my goodness who knew this could happen any deep knowledge of history shows that they have been happening and the power of American democracy the power of the founding of this country it's not that we ever totally got it right but that we forged a force field where the possibility we lay claim to the possibility of getting it right we lay claim to the possibility of people being too able to live unshackled by the material plant chains of oppression we have never totally achieved it but we have taken the march towards it that's why Martin Luther King said we are here to cash a check not to ask for new rights but to ask for the rights that were promised in our Constitution that's what women's suffrage was based on well if all men are created equal this must mean us too that's what civil rights was based on if all men are created equal and all men are endowed by God with life liberty the pursuit happiness you can't have segregation you can't have institutionalize white supremacy but what those generations realize was that democracy and these freedoms were not just a right given to us these are also a responsibility that are placed in our hands at my house and like I said 27 people from 27 countries and they have these monuments from all these different countries all these different countries have monuments to the people who died there from their countries and to the part the soldiers from their countries played in ending the Nazi regime you know the Martin Luther King said we must have tender Minds tender hearts and tough minds and some people in America I have very tough minds but they lack turned their hearts and some people I know have very tender hearts but need to toughen up our minds and when we do have tender hearts sometimes it's very difficult and this moment is very difficult but this is what I know I wrote a book 20 years ago it was about these things that's just what I felt I should write about my father always said to us when we were kids beware the easy life kids beware the easy life my father had grown up in poverty when I was 12 years old my father took us to Saigon in the middle of write write with me in the Vietnam War he said I want you to know the smell of war and then the military-industrial complex will not eat my kid's brain I remember being in in Hungary it was in the 1960s after the Soviets had invaded Hungary and I think 1957 and I was a child but I remember as we were leaving the young man I think about he was probably like I was a kid he was probably like what late 20s or something he was probably only in his 20s but I remember seeing my father as gave his card very surreptitiously to this young man and I heard my father say you get yourself out of here I'll take care of you from there and I remember I didn't quite understand what might what it meant but I sort of knew what it meant and I remembered the gratitude in that man's eyes I saw a sign at Yad Vashem the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem where high and weitzman said in 1936 for six million Jews in Europe he said there are two categories of places in the world places they cannot live and places they cannot enter well ladies and gentlemen we now have on the planet today a refugee crisis which is worse than any sent World War two and there are over 60 million people on this planet whose lives are the lives of refugee because it's two different distinct categories of what they experience places they cannot live and places they cannot enter and any American who allows yourself to see that and allows yourself to think about that and allows yourself to realize how much of this refugee crisis is a product of American foreign policy and allows yourself to think about how few refugees we are now allowing to come through our shores your knees will buckle and you will feel shame and you will feel horror and you might cry but what I know in my life I know it in my personal life and I know it in relation to all of these other things as well when I've had the two periods of my life that were deep emotional pain that phenomenon that the world calls clinical depression it's real I'm not saying it's not real I'm not mocking or invalidating the experience but what I am saying is that the things I saw there and that the pain I went through there when think of when I was in my early 20s if people had been around to talk to me the way people talk to young people today who are simply going through the difficulties of growing up I would certainly not have the life that I have now life is hard sometimes life it's tough sometimes evolving is hard growing is hard transforming his heart and yet for us as Americans what we go through that is so hard as hard as it is is nothing compared to what people in history have gone through and what some people in the world are going through today I understand why Buddha did not begin his journey of enlightenment until he bore witness to suffering I understand the point being made in the Old Testament that God sent Moses to the Israelites because they were suffering they were suffering as slaves in Egypt and I understand why the suffering of Jesus on the cross is the proceeding to the experience of the Resurrection because this world has fallen this world is under the under the the spell of what the Course in Miracles calls the ego Minds the loveless mind and the Course in Miracles test tells us that the ego is suspicious at best and vicious at worst we talk her all the time about how drug addiction and alcoholism it doesn't want to just inconvenience you it wants to kill you the loveless mind is a death machine and it is a death machine whether in terms of our own individual lives or in terms of our collective experience but the Course in Miracles tells us that God has the answer to every problem the moment the problem occurs the only issue is that God cannot do for us what he cannot do through us so he says in the course of miracles I need your hands and I need your feet I need you to go where I tell you to go I need you to say what I tell you to say I need you to do what I ask you to do and the Course in Miracles says that even despite everything that I've talked about tonight let us remember that from A Course in Miracles perspective God has a plan and that plan is the plan of the teachers of God says who are the teachers of God the Course in Miracles says they come from all religions and from no religion they are those who have heard the call and that call goes out within every time unit of time and space every unit of time in that moment in every moment and the ego-mind will say who are you to be used by God that's not humility the Course in Miracles says that is the arrogance of the ego mind this entire universe is wired for electricity it doesn't matter the shape of the lamp or the size of the lamp or the color of the lamp or the age of the land what matters is that the lamp is turned on what matters is that the lamp is plugged in and that's what's happening right now but before you turn on the light you recognize that it's dark in here so we have to bear witness not only to the darkness that has been but to the darkness that's coming down the road if we don't turn on the lights right now and when I read that book and there's nothing special about my book my book is one of many many books they're written about these things but when I read it I felt kind of sick at how much was already obvious twenty years ago but Americans were partying Americans were playing Americans were disengaged and where we are now is where we are now when America democracy is not dead but it's on life support the red lights are blinking and we desperately need for the immune system to kick in and that's what we are now our organs might be failing but our immune system can kick in and each and every one of us who chooses to be an immune system what we are taught from A Course in Miracles perspective is that you will be told what you were to do and you'll be told what you're to do and you will be told what you are to do and you'll be told what you're to do and you'll be told what you were to do and I'll be told what I'm to do and I won't be told what you're supposed to do and you won't be told what I'm supposed to do and as the Dalai Lama said in order to save the world we must have a plan but no plan will work unless we meditate so we have to have as Martin King said that qualitative shift in our souls as well as a quantitative shift in our circumstances but if we do pray and we put aside childish things and we put aside meaningless things and we say I was a child long enough when I was a child I played with the things of childhood let us be children no longer and let us know that there is within us the potential in each and every one of us to rise to the occasion and I'm not going to be perfect and you're not going to be perfect and you're not going to be perfect but the great people in history we're not necessarily perfect but they showed up and you'll be good enough and you'll be good enough and you'll be good enough and you'll be good enough and I'll be good enough and that's how we metaphysically seemeth Armageddon some traditional Christians think Armageddon is some great that this whole thing is going to lead to this great global catastrophe and the way things are going right now it could and let us not kid ourselves there are people in high positions of US government who actually think that's what's supposed to happen but there's another way of looking at Armageddon Armageddon is your depression Armageddon was your recovery Armageddon was your cancer diagnosis Armageddon was your divorce Armageddon was what each and every one of us went through where we went down and we went low and it got dark and then we experienced some lights and on the other side of that we became wiser maybe we're not enlightened masters yet but we're pretty good certainly compared to who we used to be and maybe we're not all wise but we're a little bit wise maybe we're not all powerful but we're a little bit powerful maybe we're not all good but we're a little bit good maybe we're not all got it together but we sort of got it together and you take your sort of got it together and you take your sort of got it together and you take your sort of got it together and you a lot better than you used to be and you a lot better than you used to be and you a lot better than used to be a me a lot better than used to be and we multiply that by millions and we realize this is a global effort when I tweeted last night I hope the people of Iran do not think that the ravings and rantings of an unstable leader represent our heart a woman tweeted back I'm in a we feel the same about you when I said when I said on a tweet that about how so many Germans had been in a false-positive ISM that when people were asked where their neighbors disappeared some of them said oh let's just be positive and a woman wrote back from Poland on the internet from Poland to say and we're worried now because of an extreme white wing nationalist leader that's what they didn't have in those guys they didn't have social media they didn't have a chance for us to put it all together the way we can put it all together right now so that's what we're going to do that's what we're going to pull not that any of us could wait till we're perfect but that a little bit of perfect and a little bit of perfect in that a little bit of perfect coming together that's the perfection of God and we are going to through the grace of God prevail we are not going to let there be an authoritarian takeover in this country we are not going to let there be an all-out assault on American democracy because despite our problems and despite our shadows and despite the fact that we're not everything that we should be when we get it right we are a beautiful country and we stand for something that is beautiful even though sometimes we ourselves hypocritically transgress against the things that we stand for there's nothing going on right now that will determine what happens now what will determine right now what happens right now is who we choose to be right now and the lights are already blinking the red lights are already blinking the signs are already there but those people who think that they are pulling some wool over the American eyes who think that they are doing what has been done before in history that they think that they are going to be had the opportunity to do it again they haven't met yet what is the Met in history even though sometimes we get there late they haven't met the American at our best because what our best we are really damn good [Applause] that is what our spiritual practice gives us is the capacity to know that where God is all things are possible where love is miracles happen and everything that has happened in our lives so far both our successes and our failures where had been up and where we've been down where we've gotten it right where we haven't gotten it right all of that was just rehearsing there is no failure except what you fail to learn from we were born for this moment this is not a moment to say oh no this is a moment to say whoa things are rough thank God I'm here thank you very [Applause] thank you thank you it's so great being with you thank you all right every cell in the body is filled with natural intelligence through that natural intelligence they are led to not only go to the organ where they are assigned but also to collaborate with other cells in order to together they serve the healthy function of the whole and that is our assignment to receive through prayer to receive through meditation to receive through the powers unleashed when we atone for our own mistakes and forgive other people for theirs we will then experience and do experience the alchemical shifts they turn us into the people that God would have us be able to do what God would have us do we remind each other here that yes it's true that all of us have the answers within but what we are usually unpracticed at is deep listening to the voice for God the Course in Miracles tells us that the ego speaks first then the ego speaks loudest that's why if you wake up in the morning you go directly for the newspaper go directly for TV go directly for the computer of the phone we download the stress we download the craziness of the world and then that increases the probability you will experience yourself emotionally and psychologically at the effect of the chaos of the world so we want to ground ourselves we want to ground yourself and your prayer and your meditation if your course a miracle student that would mean doing the workbook exercises Buddhist meditation Kabbalistic meditation Transcendental Meditation whatever your practice is but it's so important that we go into this deeper place you gain power on the outer Plains when you know that your true identity is and of the outer Plains before you can build a big building you have to a big hole in the ground before you give birth to a child you're pregnant first so it's as though we get pregnant with the day every day and that becomes our practice so let's do that now the Course in Miracles says that an idea grows stronger when it is shared so that's why these congregational experiences like we're having here tonight matter when we're in a resonant field of other people who are doing it too so remember your your subconscious knows everything the Holy Spirit works so your subconscious also remember as we point out here a lot it's very difficult when you're in a room like we are tonight where we are praying together it's very difficult to lie to yourself so listen deeply to yourself listen deeply to yourself now as we move into this space and then throughout the evening as you increase your own communion with your own higher self alright let's take a deep breath as we close our outer eye we open to the light within we enter into the golden space of divine knowing that exists within us all and here in this place we come to meet our God God is as close to us as we will allow him to be closer to us than our very breath you needn't go anywhere or do anything he is here and now if even for just a moment surrender all lesser goals put aside all childish things and tell the God of your understanding you are ready to be used allow yourself to feel the hand of God as it comes upon you allow a divine elixir of light to fill every cell of your body feel every cell as it now drinks in the restorative power of God's love within you allowed to dissolve your weakens places allow to fall away your judgment and blame place in God's hands your remorse and regret bless all of those who have journeyed with you bless all of those who journey with you now and prepare to face the world reborn enter now into a field of knowing that all is gone except the love in your past the love you gave and the love you received will be shield and sword your blessing and protections to prepare you and support you to uplift you and redeem you and where you have been weak you shall now be strong where you have been blinded you shall now see where you have been frightened you shall now be courageous where you were grandiose you shall now be grand where you were narrow-minded you shall now have magnitude where you played at life you shall now have dignity where you have avoided important things you shall now be important for through the grace of God your inner eyes shall be opened and your inner ears shall be opened and your heart and mind shall be made new you will not be who you used to be you shall be who you really are and you will meet your mighty companions everyone who has been assigned to walk with you will appear on your path relationships will change relationships will heal new relationships will begin and the sick will heal and the dead will rise and as this new mourning is born within you you will be a bearer of the dawn your hands will take on a Healing Touch your words will take on a healing power your thoughts will take on a healing vibration your intelligence will expand your heart will expand through God's miracle you shall become the potential the actualized potential you carry as a seed within you waiting to blossom as who you can be in this world do not doubt God do not doubt his choices do not doubt what he can do through you receive with thanks receive with humility receive with awe before the power of God who shall do great things in you let us not be falsely modest receive and prepare to receive some more for God has such plans for you and through you for all the world hallelujah together we praise God and say Amen

Channel: Marianne Williamson

Views: 9,199

Rating: 4.7525773 out of 5

Keywords: Marianne Williamson, Marianne Williamson (author), A Course In Miracles, ACIM, Consciousness, Love, Happiness, Spirituality, Humanity, Our Deepest Fear, A Return to Love

Id: edgQtMqzDQU

Length: 67min 54sec (4074 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018