Marianne Willamson Transcript - Buddha at the Gas Pump

Summary

Marianne Williamson examines the 2016 election as a crisis of political disengagement, economic injustice, and fear rather than simply a reflection of national consciousness. She argues that spiritual practice must lead to civic responsibility, moral accountability, and organized action for social change.

Questions This Interview Explores

How are spirituality and politics connected?
How should spiritual people respond to political injustice and social suffering?
Does a national crisis or political upheaval automatically lead to positive transformation?
How can individuals turn spiritual convictions into effective social and political action?

Key takeaways

Love does not replace responsibility; people must actively care for their democracy.
Political leaders can reflect deeper social problems without representing a nation's highest values.
A crisis becomes transformative only when people accept responsibility and make amends.
Spiritual practice should deepen courage, insight, cooperation, and public service.
Being against injustice is different from taking committed action to end it.
Hope requires resisting harmful forces while working toward a better alternative.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. There have been over 370 of them now, and if this is new to you, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the Past Interviews menu. You’ll see all the previous ones archived in four or five different ways.

This whole show, this program, is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners. So if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there is a donate button on every page of the site.

I’m really pleased to have as my guest today Marianne Williamson. Marianne is an internationally acclaimed spiritual author and lecturer. She has been a popular guest on TV programs such as Oprah, Larry King, Good Morning America, Charlie Rose, and Bill Maher. Seven of her twelve published books have been New York Times bestsellers, and four of those have been number one. I’ll be linking on her page on batgap.com to all of her books.

Marianne is a native of Houston, Texas. In 1989, she founded Project Angel Food, a Meals on Wheels program that serves homebound people with AIDS in the LA area. To date, Project Angel Food has served over 10

Taking responsibility for democracy

Marianne: First of all, I don’t think it’s going to ultimately be okay unless we ultimately make it okay. I think, you know, in A Course in Miracles it says, “God’s will has never not been done; love will ultimately prevail.” But we shouldn’t just rest on that, because it’s like the symbolic 40 days in the Old Testament between the suffering in Egypt and deliverance to the Promised Land, or the symbolic three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection. Those are very important factors, but how long that 40 years is, or how long that three days is, is completely up to us.

So to me, we don’t get to take a pass on activity here by just assuming that this is a healing crisis. I mean, these are just platitudes: “This is a healing crisis, and then it’s all brought up for review.” Yeah, but what happens when it’s brought up for review?

Certainly, what is occurring now, I do not see Donald Trump as a disease; I see him as a symptom of a deeper disease. And I think that this demagoguery that he represents, the ways that he has harnessed some of the darkest forces in the American psyche for political purposes in the most cynical, almost diabolical way, could not have occurred had we not become so disengaged from our own citizen responsibility.

If you have enough generations, enough decades, enough individuals who disengage from the process and don’t see it as our own responsibility to tend to our democracy—just like you tend to your car, you tend to your house, you tend to your things, you tend to your children, you tend to your marriage, you tend to those things which feed you, you feed them—if we only show up to feed our democracy once every four years, maybe once every two years, this is one of the things that occurs.

But there were also many factors that led to our disengagement, having to do with the corruption of the mainstream media, corporate-owned and controlled, so that ratings mattered more than a real, ethical journalistic perspective. The fact that we haven’t been teaching civics to our children, the fact that so many of us don’t even remember the civics that we learned, the fact that there’s so much meaningless preoccupation in the air to take our attention and sort of suck our life juice—you know, this is an all-systems breakdown. It’s a perfect storm that came from a lot of factors.

But the issue now, to me, is for us to become deeply aware not only of what those factors were, but also to become deeply aware of the places inside ourselves where we, even if we did not directly conspire with the forces that brought this about, can now see places where we indirectly, at least, acquiesced by just going on with our own lives.

And one of the things that, to me, is most disconcerting is this kind of faux, artificial spirituality, which is based on nothing of any fundamental theological or spiritual theme that would indicate that any of us get to take a pass on addressing the suffering of other sentient beings. In any serious spiritual path, there is the recognition that a life lived outside the circle of love and alignment with the divine is chaotic and is filled with fear. And that is not only true in our own individual lives, but it’s true collectively.

So what we have now is the fact that hate has spoken very loudly. Hate has spoken very loudly internationally, with the international terrorist threat and so forth, and hate has now spoken very loudly. Hate and fear have gotten a stronghold. You know, they have been used by a presidential candidate of a major party to create a kind of winning edge.

Now, I don’t think that everybody who voted for Trump is filled with hate or racism or misogyny or anything like that. But when you have only 80,000 votes in major states that separated Trump’s candidacy from anyone else’s, it is clear that some of these darkened forces of the American psyche were used for this political purpose.

From a spiritual perspective, hate could not have been so strong in this election had we not been whispering so much with love.

From a spiritual perspective, however, hate could not have been so strong in this election had we not been whispering so much with love. And this is what is so significant to me about a spiritual and metaphysical perspective.

Anywhere—and you know this; you’re living in Fairfield—you can look at any major area of our country. You can look at health, you can look at education, you can look at business, you can look at science. Anywhere where meditators and people from a higher-consciousness perspective have brought our paradigm, our shift, our perspective to bear, we have prevailed in causing a real, fundamental shift in worldview in that institutional area.

The one major area in America and in American civilization that has not been permeated, that has not yet been impacted by a real worldview shift that meditation and higher consciousness brings, is politics. And that’s only because we haven’t gone there.

Now, you’re writing from Fair—you’re in Fairfield. Certainly, John Hagelin did his part, and others of us have tried. But for me—and this is what I’ve been involved with, what you’re involved with, what many of us are involved in—we are saying to our community, “Hey, guys, no, it’s not enough to just say, ‘Oh, this is a healing crisis.’”

Yeah, it’s a healing crisis, but you could say that about any physical disease. You could say, “Well, I have the flu; it’s a healing crisis.” But still, the issue is, are you going to go outside in the snow while you have the flu? Because the healing crisis—you know what I’m saying? You’ve got to take care. You can’t just leave it at that.

So I think that this is—I have felt for a long time that those of us who are part of a more spiritual perspective and seekers, and you know, whatever you want to call our little tribe here, should be the biggest grown-ups in the room. We shouldn’t be those standing on the periphery, infantilized, and just thinking if we do our own individual spiritual practice, that that’s enough.

And that’s why, when you started talking this morning, you said you think spirituality is relevant to everything. I couldn’t agree with you more. I take it further: it is the issue in everything, because spirituality is the path of the heart. In your career, is it the path of the heart or not? Are your relationships the path of the heart or not? Is your health impacted by the path of the heart or not?

All that politics is, is our collective behavior. And if our collective behavior, just like our individual behavior, is not in alignment with the path of the heart, hello—karma, cause and effect—we will suffer. And if you’re not living the path of the heart individually, you’re going to suffer as an individual. And if we’re not living the path of the heart collectively, we will suffer collectively.

We shouldn’t be those standing on the periphery, infantilized, and just thinking if we do our own individual spiritual practice, that that’s enough.

In that sense, this is not mysterious. It’s more than the 11th hour. We’re kind of at midnight now. The issue is whether or not we will reset the clock.

Rick: Yeah, that triggers a number of questions. One thing is that I was rather surprised to see the number of decades-long meditators who were rooting for Trump. They had their yard signs out and so on, and they had all sorts of rationalizations. And there were others who were rooting for Bernie.

But, you know, I asked Hillary this when she came to town. We all get to talk to the candidates here. I said, “I have friends who are rooting for Bernie, and if you win the nomination, they’re not going to vote, or they’re not going to vote for you, because they feel that you are too centrist, or that you’re just moving left in order to placate the Bernie people and you’ll move right back to the center if you win the nomination.”

And her response was, you know, “There’s too much at stake here,” and I don’t know—she went on. It was a rather elaborate answer.

But it perplexes me that people—we tend to sort of correlate or associate our own perspective with spirituality if we’re spiritual people, and it’s a little outside my comfort zone. And there are other people who said things like, “I hope Trump wins, because then all hell will break loose, and out of the rubble a phoenix will arise, and we’ll have a new civilization. We’ve really got to let everything collapse before that can happen.”

Marianne: Well, there were people who said that in 1939. There were people who said that about why Germans should vote for Hitler. It is an immature, reckless, irresponsible perspective.

Rick: What do you think about the notion that Maharishi used to say—that the leader is a kind of reflection of the collective consciousness, and that, as such, he’s sort of an innocent mirror of the nation? I mean, that’s a little hard to understand if, as we move from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump, unless each of those leaders is reflecting—

Marianne: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Well, wait a minute.

Rick: Well, okay, go for it.

Marianne: This country voted for Al Gore.

Rick: Yes, it’s true.

Marianne: So you can’t say that Bush was a reflection of the consciousness of the nation in the year 2000. Gore won more votes, and because of the machinations of the Supreme Court, the presidency was given to Bush.

And even on this one, if you’re talking about the consciousness of the nation, almost three million more people voted for Hillary than voted for Trump. And even though I think, in concept, what the Maharishi said is correct, it only is true if you have free and fair elections.

Rick: Yeah.

Marianne: The crisis here is centered on our own electoral process, having to do, first of all, with how the elite Democratic establishment suppressed the candidacy of Bernie. I think that if Bernie had been the candidate, I think he would have trounced Trump personally.

And it has to do with all the things that happened after that: the terrible propaganda machine, not only from Russia but from Trump himself. Trump, metaphysically—this is why I think our crowd has the capacity for an understanding of what occurred here that some people don’t—he’s a black magician.

You know, this is a man who used to sleep with Hitler’s speeches next to his bed and did not deny that when the press asked him about it. His response was, “That doesn’t mean I read them.” He’s a metaphysician.

Rick: They just kept him company.

Marianne: And the mistake that Hillary made—you know, the divine message was given to Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.” Hillary clearly didn’t understand that. She followed the black magician into the devil’s lair. She went into the cave, and he’ll always eat you for lunch when you do that.

So what happened here, I don’t believe, is that the consciousness of the Americans was expressed. And I think that goes back to what I was saying before. I think the Americans are a good people. We are a decent people. But our decency, our conscience, our goodness—which I do believe is far greater, far greater than the aspect of the American psyche and character that is showing itself now—has not been harnessed for political purposes.

You know, when I was younger, the Democratic Party was a real container for conscience and soul. That’s what Bobby Kennedy said. He said, “This is the soul of the nation.” As soon as the Democratic Party started taking corporate donations back in the 1990s, I mean, you have one major political party that doesn’t even make any bones about the fact that they are outright handmaidens of a corporate order, which they honestly think is better for America. And then you have another one that plays footsies with them under the table enough to have corrupted its basic institutional functioning.

So what happened is not that the best of America doesn’t exist. It’s that the best of America was not given a chance here to live and to breathe in the political sphere. Now, I agree with Hillary: there was too much at stake. I pivoted once the primaries were over. Yes, she would have been, in some ways, more centrist than many of us like, but compared to Donald Trump, what are we even talking about?

But there are a lot of conversations around that. And, you know, nobody has a monopoly on truth. There are many aspects of reality there. However, I don’t think any of us should be naive enough to think, “Oh, all hell’s going to break loose now, so it’s going to be a really good thing.” It’s going to be a very painful thing. I think long term we’re going to be fine—in fact, better than ever. But short term and medium term, I grieve for my country and for the world, possibly.

Navigating a collective dark night

Rick: So just as some say that a person has to go through a dark night of the soul before coming out the other side into the light, do you feel that the world—or the country or the world—has to go through a dark night, which will manifest as all sorts of social and economic chaos? Or do you think that that can be mitigated or minimized, and we can still come out the other side without having had to feel it so strongly?

Marianne: Well, you mentioned before my book Tears to Triumph, and that’s about the dark nights of the soul. I think what we need to remember when you said everybody has to go through a dark night of the soul—well, first of all, I’m not sure everybody has to. But second of all, there is no guarantee you come out of it. Some people go into a dark night of the soul and they do not come out of it.

Once again, let’s all wake up here. Let’s not be naive. The dark night of the soul—the whole point of religious and spiritual understanding is coming to recognize how to navigate a dark night of the soul. But if you do not navigate a dark night of the soul through the lens of the light which lies beyond it, then it can take you down all the way. People go through dark nights of the soul and end up killing themselves. This is a bit of a suicide spiral the United States is in.

So no, there’s no guarantee that we’re coming out, and let’s forget the woo-woo spirituality. When we see this deeply, we understand how you have to navigate a dark night of the soul. First of all, you have to take responsibility for your part in getting you here and atoning for your own mistakes.

So a lot that’s coming up—things I mentioned before, such as all of us recognizing the extent to which we have disengaged from politics. Recognizing, you know, when Gandhi said that politics should be sacred, he meant that it should be an expression of our deeper, authentic selves.

Atoning for Racial Injustice and Economic Inequality

We need to get brutally honest with ourselves. We need to atone. We need to atone for our racial disparities. We need to atone for our racist past. We need to atone for slavery. We need to atone for police brutality. We need to atone for the racial disparities in our private prison system and our criminal justice system. We need to atone for what we’ve done to Native Americans. We need to atone for the ways in which, in the last few decades, we have systematically moved the major resources of our country into the hands of very, very few people.

We need to atone for the economic injustice that has become so prevalent that this election was a cry of the heart from the economically desperate. And that’s why I said this was either going to be a progressive populist revolution this year, or it was going to be an authoritarian one. And when the Democratic Party suppressed what could have been a populist candidacy, we see what happened.

So when you’re going individually through a dark night of the soul, I think it’s important spiritually to remember that what a nation goes through in terms of its psychological and moral development is no different from what an individual goes through, because the nation is just a collection of individuals.

So you have to atone for your own mistakes, you have to make amends, you have to get very serious, committing yourself to do better, and you have to forgive other people for their mistakes. And that’s what I think is happening now.

You know, we have an immune system. We have a social immune system, just like we have a physical, biological immune system. And now, as each of us really sees ourselves as immune cells, people are going, “What do we do? What do we do?”

The issue, from a spiritual perspective, is that you affect the horizontal plane by going deep into the vertical. As we all meditate, praise, do spiritual practice, deepen our commitment, deepen our devotion, and say, “Okay, love, use me; use me for the healing of my country, use me for the healing of the world,” then what begins to happen is your mind expands. You have greater insight, you have greater savvy, and you have greater synchronistic opportunity to collaborate and to meet with other people with whom to collaborate.

The issue is who are we going to be?

We know who Trump’s going to be this year. The issue is who are we going to be? And if we deepen in our spiritual practice, you know, one of the things that has always interested me is the psychological difference, a couple hundred years ago and a little bit less than that too, between being against slavery and actually being an abolitionist.

Being against slavery is that you’re like, “Oh, ain’t it awful?” To be an abolitionist means I do more than think it’s awful. I stand my ground, because it is intolerable to me, and I will do anything to resist it. And because of my spiritual faith, I believe that there is an alternative possibility.

This is why abolition came from the Quakers. This is why so many of the women’s suffragette movements were Quakers. Dr. King was a preacher. Those of us with a spiritual and religious perspective have historically, in the social justice movements and journeys of the United States, been extremely important.

We haven’t been those standing on the sidelines; we’ve been central to the mindset that is necessary both to resist that which is unacceptable and to invoke that which is preferable.

Rick: I listened to a talk you gave at Occupy—I guess it was Occupy Oakland—but, you know, at the time when the Occupy movement was happening. That was years ago now. And then there was a big upsurge of enthusiasm with Bernie, and that got quashed.

In fact, the public—you know, the mainstream media—gave 27 times more coverage to Trump than to Bernie during the primaries, even though Trump was among 17 candidates and Bernie was among two or three. And so people get discouraged. They think, “Well, we tried, you know; it flopped.” And so—and you’ve just been saying, “We should do this, we should do this, we should do this.”

I remember at the Democratic Convention about eight years ago, Dennis Kucinich giving a speech and literally jumping up and down on the stage, saying, “Wake up, America! Wake up, America!” And, of course, everybody was talking in the crowd; nobody was even listening to him.

So, you know, where do we get the leverage to actually affect change when the numbers are so small and the static is so loud?

Marianne: Okay, well, first of all, most people who say, “We tried”—what did you do? I mean, really, we tried? What, you went to a couple of Bernie rallies and sent him $27 a few times? Most people who say, “We tried”—really? Compare that to what abolitionists did. Compare that to what women suffragettes did. Compare that to what people in the civil rights movement did, and tell me you tried.

So we need to stop coddling. When we hear each other say this stuff, we need to laugh out loud: “We’ve tried.” Anybody who has any kind of political perspicacity knows that whether it was abolition, women’s suffrage, or the civil rights movement, it didn’t happen in an election cycle or two. These are huge movements for change.

So, first of all, number one, the fact that we didn’t get what we wanted—we’re a generation that’s so used to getting what we want when we want it, that when we didn’t get what we wanted when we wanted it, we moved into cynicism, which is our subconscious excuse for not helping and taking it to the next level.

No, it’s not going to be convenient, and it’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be fun, and it’s not going to be sexy. But we’re doing it because we are grown-ups now, and we know that it is meaningful to show up for your country and to show up for future generations.

So that’s number one. Number two, hey, listen, people who didn’t vote for Hillary in the general election—hey, I mean, a lot of people, including people in the spiritual community, have a lot to look at. You wanted this? You think this is going to be great because it’s going to be a healing crisis? Great, because let me tell you something: maybe the worst of it won’t impact your life, but it’s going to impact a lot of people’s lives, whether it’s yours or not. So good luck with all that healing-crisis stuff, right?

And secondly, there is plenty we can do. That’s why we are doing Sister Giant. Whether it’s Zephyr Teachout and Ari Berman, who will be there to talk about voter suppression and getting the money out of politics; Opal Tometi, an angel; Kyoto Williams, who is a Buddhist meditation teacher but talks about racial justice; Opal Tometi, who is one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter; Michael Weiss; Corinna Gore, talking about the environment; Bernie Sanders, one of the great new leaders, talking about going forward; or Pramila Jayapal, one of the great new congresswomen, a progressive from Washington—none of this is “nothing we can do” stuff.

That’s why we’re doing Sister Giant, whether it’s people who show up live in Washington or watch it by livestream. I’ve heard people say, and it’s an interesting psychological dynamic, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.” And then I’ll tell them, “You know, we’re going to do this great conference at Sister Giant.” I’m not saying it’s the only thing, but it’s one thing that will just light you up and give you information and give you a spiritual perspective on what we need to do on the outside and what we need to do on the inside.

And then the person will respond, “Yeah, but I just don’t know what to do.” I’m like, “I just told you something to do!”

We have to look within ourselves. This is not a time for whining. The abolitionists didn’t whine. The women suffragettes didn’t whine. The people in the civil rights movement did not whine when they were on that bridge. They were not whining.

I think we need to grow up and toughen up and become far more serious about our devotion to love. When you look at terrorists, they are not kind of, sort of, sometimes-when-it’s-convenient committed. Those who are committed to hate, unfortunately, have a perverse kind of courage.

Too many of us are kind of, sort of, when it’s convenient, committed to love, and we are obsessed with talking about love in our own personal lives. But when you’re talking about politics from a spiritual perspective—and Gandhi and King were talking about love as it impacts our economic relationships, our social relationships, and our political relationships, like you were saying—the spiritual path is relevant to everything.

So we should be leaders in this. We should be the leaders in this, the biggest grown-ups in the room. I think Sister Giant, coming two weeks after the inauguration, will be an extremely important thing.

I meet so many people in the spiritual community who have never even been to Washington. We believe in the effect of molecules. Put your molecules there if you can, or at least watch the livestream, because of that field, that resonant field, and how A Course in Miracles says an idea grows stronger when it’s shared.

Whether you’re hearing from Robert Thurman about Buddhism, or you’re hearing about meditation, or you’re hearing Jim Houston, whether we’re talking about the internal or moving the next day into the external, we have to love hard, pray hard, and kick ass, and not even indulge the silliness of, “We’ve tried so hard already.”

We have elections two years from now, and there is much to be done in these next two years. We must not be silent. We must not be passive. There is much to do to resist this man.

We must grow up and toughen up and become far more serious about our devotion to love.

In my opinion, we have a mentally unfit, unstable human being. Whether it’s drugs—I don’t know—or whether it’s just some narcissistic personality disorder, I don’t know. But I think any rational person has reason to doubt not only the competency but the mental fitness of the man who is about to be given the greatest political power to wield in the world.

This is not a time to sit on the sidelines and just kind of wring our hands, to whine, or to say it’s so wonderful because it’s a healing crisis. And it is a healing crisis, but the issue is, therefore, what are we called to?

Rick: Right. I think that Trump’s unfitness is going to become more apparent as he’s confronted with the actual presidency. They say that the presidency is like drinking from a fire hose. There’s so much coming at you, and we’ve seen how he handles stuff coming at him. Even some movie star making some kind of comment—he has to respond to it at three in the morning.

It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out and how the people who voted for him feel four years from now.

Marianne: I think people—I think, you know, just even on what you just said—that is more than a lack of impulse control.

Rick: Yeah. You know, one thing about—it reminded me just now, when you were talking about terrorists being really committed: love is more subtle than violence.

It’s like yesterday in the Fort Lauderdale airport, somebody shot up the baggage-claim area. Now, that makes big news. If I had been there, and that guy wasn’t there, and I had just sat in the baggage-claim area and felt infinite love for everyone in the room, I don’t think anyone would have noticed it, and it wouldn’t have made the news. And yet, it would have been having an influence.

And yet, it doesn’t seem adequate to just emit love on a transcendental level, on a subtle level. You often say, “God cannot do for us what he cannot do through us.” And so it seems like we have to resist the temptation to just love from the abstract and make the effort, if it takes effort, to translate that into something more concrete, more explicit.

Marianne: Well, I think it’s both and. I think if we taught enough children in the world to meditate, that would be enough.

Rick: It could be, yeah.

Marianne: Yeah, I mean, if we did have enough meditators on the planet, and enough people in serious prayer, meditation, and emitting love on the planet, then I do think that would be enough.

But right now, I’m reminded of Deepak Chopra’s line when he said, “If I want to cultivate health, I will take the Ayurvedic path. But if I’m in a car accident—a bad car accident—somebody please get me to a Western hospital emergency room as soon as possible.”

So right now, we’ve been in this car crash, so we do need the political activism. What Martin Luther King said about that is, we need a qualitative shift in our souls and a quantitative shift in our circumstances.

Martin Luther King said that the desegregation of the American South was the political externalization of the goal of the Civil Rights Movement, but that the ultimate goal was the establishment of the beloved community.

So the way I see it, it’s both and. It’s extremely important that I meditate in the morning. It’s extremely important that I atone for my errors. It’s extremely important that I seek to answer the call to rise to the occasion in my own life and my own relationships, to monitor myself, to course-correct when I’m off, to forgive others for their mistakes, to atone for my own, and to be politically active.

There are a lot of hours in the day. It’s the yin and the yang of mature, responsible living.

Rick: Yeah, and we see what happens when people are just out on the street in anger without having established deep peace within themselves. What actually are they contributing through that emotion?

Internal Purification and Nonviolent Change

That’s why Gandhi said—and it’s a basic tenet of nonviolent philosophy—that the end is inherent in the means. That’s why at Sister Giant we’re talking about the internal purification as well as the external transformation, because of what you just said.

Marianne: That’s why Gandhi said—and it’s a basic tenet of nonviolent philosophy—that the end is inherent in the means. That’s why at Sister Giant we’re talking about the internal purification as well as the external transformation, because of what you just said.

Everything we do is infused with the consciousness with which we do it. So if we don’t work on ourselves, as Martin Luther King said, there’s a great line: “You have very little morally persuasive power with people who can feel your underlying contempt.”

Rick: Good point. So, to summarize what you’ve just been saying, it would seem that you would recommend doing some sort of inner work, whatever you find to be effective, and doing it with dedication and regularity. At the same time, express the results of that in some form of service, some form of activity that suits your temperament and your capabilities, right? Would that be a good summary?

Marianne: That’s not enough.

Rick: Okay, more.

Marianne: Times ten, times a hundred, because we’ve all been saying that. It’s a little too easy, it’s a little too light. I would add to what you were saying, to include in that, that this is an urgent moment in the history of the world, that we now have, holding the levers of power in the most powerful country in the world, someone whose mindset does not seem to promote a sustainable option, necessarily, even for life on Earth.

Therefore, we must realize, particularly those of us who are Americans, that we are, as citizens, empowered to influence, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, one of the most potent factors in deciding which way the world will go. For the sake of our country, the sake of our world, and the sake of the future of life on Earth, we must dedicate ourselves. We must go deep into the vertical, pray every day in whatever way is true for us—“Use me”—and include in that effort you were talking about the public sphere.

Too many in the spiritual community make it about private issues, and we must expand our thinking to the collective and the public issues. That’s what politics is. I don’t care what the political issue is: if it’s a public issue, it will make its way to your private door.

You might think you’ve got the food thing down because of your green juice and all the stuff that you’re doing, but if they’re poisoning the air and they’re poisoning the food supply, it’s going to get to you. So there’s no putting yourself in some little bubble where, because you’re handling sustainable options in your own personal life, you will be able to escape the worst ravages of what would happen, God forbid, if the shit could hit the fan. And with this man at the helm, that is a possibility.

If you’re spiritual and the house is burning down, you yell, “Fire!”

If you’re spiritual and the house is burning down, you yell, “Fire!” You don’t just say your mantra five times and trust the outcome to God. God needs to be able to trust the outcome to us. The issue is not just what God can do for us. He’s doing it all the time. He’s doing it right in this moment. He’s providing each and every one of us with collaborative opportunities.

You and I, for example, in this moment are doing our best to take advantage of the collaborative opportunity we’ve been given. But for the rest of your day, for the rest of my day, for the rest of the day of everybody watching this, there are collaborative opportunities to work with others in uplifting the consciousness of the human race, but particularly at a time like this, to be part of the great resistance of 2017.

If you were reading the newspaper, if you were looking at what’s going on—which is a revolutionary act in the world today—things are happening every single day that call us to sign up in our own way for the job of being part of the great resistance.

Overcoming political helplessness

Rick: Yeah, so I can hear a lot of people saying, “Yeah, but—” I know what you’re going to say to this part, but, “Easy for her to say. She dedicates her life to this stuff, it’s her profession, she makes a lot of money writing books about it. I’m busy, I have three kids, I have a job, I’m exhausted at the end of the day, I have a two-hour commute, and I don’t have time to do anything else.” So, I mean, what would you—

Marianne: Okay, may I say something even to that already? This is not what I make a living doing. This is what I lose a lot of money doing. Sister Giant is—

Rick: But you have the liberty to do it because you have a passive—you have an income stream.

Marianne: Well, just ask how much money I’ve lost on all my crazy political desires. If you talk to my accountant about that, she would say, “This is crazy she’s doing this.” So that’s actually not—it is simply not the case. People can say that, but in my case, it is simply not the case.

But I will tell you this: What we need to understand is that the fact that people are too busy to have time, and too stressed to have time, to involve themselves in politics is exactly what, quote unquote, “they” wanted to happen. That’s exactly what the ploy is here. Get what’s happened here, guys.

When you do not have universal health care, that causes a lot of stress in people’s lives. When you have the absolutely immoral burden of all these college loan debts that so many of our young people carry, when you have educational costs, when you have the economic disparity that we have in so many cases, so many people trapped in a kind of permanent underclass economically in this country, of course people are too tired to get involved. That’s the game.

When you don’t teach people civics so people don’t feel that they have the tools, when you have all these efforts, state by state, to suppress the vote, that’s the game. That force of consciousness has systematically, step by step, created and maintained a situation where you’ve got the majority of people being screwed by the system, too tired and too stressed to express their outrage. Hello—see that for what it is.

When you see that for what it is, something rises up in you and you realize, “My God, they’re not going to get me like that.” So, yes, I am—even though, believe me, as I said to you before, my political activism certainly does not make me money, and I think clearly loses me money, given how many people say, “That’s it, I’m not going to read her books anymore,” or whatever.

Even more than that, it is true that a free-market economy has been very, very good to me, and that’s part of why I am so outraged that not enough people can get into the game these days. When you get into the game—if you can make it into the game in America—this is an incredible country, and it’s a very forgiving system. Once you’ve had some kind of financial success, once you’ve made it in, the system is good to itself.

But you’ve got too many Americans today who can’t get into the game, particularly young people. And the American dream is that you can play the game, that you can get in there. I realize that because of a good public-school education that I got, the love I got from my parents, and just a more giving and forgiving society that I grew up in, I had a shot at it.

Whereas I see too many young people today—what do you expect them to do? What do you expect them to do? They’re stuck, where the best they could do is that. I don’t know if you saw the film made by John Fugelsang on the American dream.

I think that the fact that the system has been good to me is part of why I feel that moral outrage is not born of anger; it’s born of love. I realize everybody’s child is as important as my child and should have the same opportunities to be in there.

You see all these young people with these college debts. They’d love to be entrepreneurs, they’d love to be capitalists, they’d love to have $2,500 in discretionary income that they could use to build their own website and go out and make it happen. But there are too many ways in which people can’t get in.

You want to make your economy thrive? Help more people be in it, get into it. The fact that I have a taste of what America does right only increases my hunger to do my part, which I think every generation owes every future generation: to maintain what we’ve got, what we do right, as well as course-correct where we’ve gotten it wrong.

Rick: So if millions of people in this country—let’s say everybody who voted for Bernie or Hillary—were to say, “All right, I will do whatever Marianne tells me to do. She’s the boss. I don’t know what to do. I’ll take her advice and guidance,” what would you tell them?

Marianne: The first thing I’d say is, “Don’t—please don’t even think that way about me or anyone else: ‘I will do whatever Marianne tells me to do.’”

Rick: Well, I know that sounded funny, like you’re some kind of—

Marianne: No, I mean, I can’t let that stand. You know, first of all, I don’t think anybody who is a serious reader of my books—or, you know, that’s just—we can’t even joke about it. No, no, no, no, no. I don’t want that about me or about Trump or anybody.

But the answer to that question is that I hope people will look at SisterGiant.com. Sister Giant, you know, I don’t have a Messiah complex. There’s no one person, or one project, or one conference, or one issue that’s going to fix all this. It’s a multidimensional problem, and each of us will be led by our hearts.

I would say that for those of you who want a two-and-a-half-day conference where you’re in Washington, laying down your molecules in the ethos there, or on livestream, where you are listening to people and participating in a resonant field of people who are considering what is happening now through a spiritual lens as well as a political one, who want to heal all this from an integrative approach—mind, body, and spirit—who want to bring to the political challenges of this moment an integrative, holistic response, then I would hope that you will look at SisterGiant.com and ask in your heart if you belong there.

You won’t feel when you leave that Marianne has told you what to do, but you will feel that Marianne has, along with others, placed before you a plethora of options and ideas and insights. My goal is simply that people leave there just lit up, whether they saw it on livestream or were there. Then what you do after that is your business. That natural intelligence is inside all of us; we just need to turn it on.

Rick: Yeah, that last sentence kind of corrects the lameness of my question, which is obviously—I don’t think everybody should do what you would tell them to do. But I think you would agree that we all have an inner resource, and in a sense we’re all millionaires in a spiritual sense, and yet we’re walking around like paupers, not realizing we have this bank account. If we could start dipping into the bank account, we’ll find, hopefully, good ways to spend the money—the spiritual money.

Marianne: That’s just hopefully—

Rick: Yeah, it will. It will. My cup runneth over. It just—

Marianne: Yeah, the natural order of things.

Rick: So, I mean, the reason I asked that kind of question is that there’s a sort of frustration that I feel people are feeling—a feeling of hopelessness. Again, the power brokers seem to be so powerful: the corporations, the people who run the politics, the media, everything else.

There’s a little bit of a—I think a lot of people just feel like it’s hopeless. What can little old me do? But there’s strength in numbers. You know that. Do you happen to remember that Margaret Mead quote about small—how does that go?

Marianne: Yeah, we should never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has. The majority did not wake up one day and say, “Let’s free the slaves,” and the majority didn’t wake up one day and say, “Let’s give women the right to vote.” The majority didn’t wake up one day and say, “Let’s end segregation.”

What happened was that a small group of people—once again, enough people, a critical mass of people—you know this as meditators know this. I mean, it’s a law, a spiritual law, that if you have enough people going into the deep ethers, the quantum field of infinite possibility, that shifts the system. Whether it’s the 11%, you know, what is that critical mass? I think we have the critical mass; we just need to activate it.

Hope is born of participation in hopeful solutions.

Participation as an Antidote to Hopelessness

So, this hopeless thing—I feel hope is born of participation in hopeful solutions. During the AIDS crisis, I was very involved in the AIDS crisis. I didn’t feel hopeless. When you’re involved in “We’re going to fix this,” you can’t be involved in “We’re going to fix this” and feel hopeless at the same time. You don’t have time for hopelessness.

So, this hopeless thing—I feel hope is born of participation in hopeful solutions. During the AIDS crisis, I was very involved in the AIDS crisis. I didn’t feel hopeless. When you’re involved in “We’re going to fix this,” you can’t be involved in “We’re going to fix this” and feel hopeless at the same time. You don’t have time for hopelessness.

It’s like if the house is burning, you’re just thinking about getting everybody out of the rooms to safety. You don’t take it—one of the things that has always interested me is that I’m fascinated by really great athletes, not only because of their athletic abilities but because of their emotional and psychological discipline. If they make a mistake on the court, they can’t afford the 0.001 percent of a second to go, “Oh, damn.” They can’t. You just have to keep going.

Rick: Unless they’re John McEnroe.

Marianne: Yeah, right. There are a few who would indulge, and that’s if you’re so great. But I think even that hopelessness that people are expressing, which really is an excuse for not helping and is kind of a self-indulgence and a whininess and a childishness, also isn’t realistic.

We have an election two years from now. We have an election where, as Abraham Lincoln said, there’s not that much damage—oh no, he said evil. There’s not that much evil any of our governments could ever perpetrate as long as the people remain vigilant. What he was referring to is the fact that every two years we can kick out all of the members of the House of Representatives.

Right now, that’s very difficult because of gerrymandering, but gerrymandering is one of the things we need to address. Right now, you know, the other day, when the Republicans’ first official act was to scuttle the independent Office of Ethics, there was such a public outcry—and I think a lot of it came from Republicans on the right—that they stopped.

I mean, these are responsive. If you were knowledgeable enough about civics, you know you can just say in your mind, “I will do something proactively to annoy him every single day.” You know?

Rick: Yeah.

Use your voice. When you are out there working it, it’s almost like it’s not about hopelessness. It’s about dying knowing—someday dying knowing—that you did your best.

Marianne: Use your voice. When you are out there working it, it’s almost like it’s not about hopelessness. It’s about dying knowing—someday dying knowing—that you did your best.

Susan B. Anthony did not live to see the passage of the 19th Amendment, but I feel like every time a woman votes, her soul must tingle. We need to grow up, and the spiritual among us should be the leaders of this. You’re serving the ages. Whether you get it—

One of the things I’ve always been fascinated by is the building of the great cathedrals of Europe, and even St. John the Divine here. It took hundreds of years to build these things. So every artist knew, “I will not live to see this completed.” That’s not what’s driving me. Right?

Rick: And Newton stood on the shoulders of giants.

Marianne: Exactly, exactly. So I think that’s where we need to be in our spiritual conversation, and not indulge ourselves, and not indulge each other, as much as this has become a mental and emotional habit among us.

Rick: Yeah. And, you know, actually I don’t feel that way, but I’m trying to give voice to people who I—

Marianne: I know you don’t. I know your work. I have great admiration for you.

Hope amid historical change

Rick: Thank you. You know, one thing I often wonder—see what you think about this—is that… Well, let me preface this by saying that I saw an article yesterday that said “99 Things to Be Optimistic About.” It was a really cool list of all sorts of things in all sorts of areas—technology, environment, economics, hunger, disease—where things are really starting to turn around in many respects. Or at least very positive things are beginning to spring up.

There are something like 10,000 solar panels being installed every day, and there are many diseases which are down a lot, and reading is way up. I mean, some form of basic education is way up now, worldwide. You don’t often see this stuff in the news, and it is a little easy to get discouraged when you just read about all the crap that’s happening in Washington and all the bombings and the shootings and all this stuff. This other stuff is a little bit more under the radar.

So there’s that. Maybe you should comment on that point before I bring out my next point that I had in mind.

Marianne: Well, first of all, I’d love to see that list.

Rick: I’ll send it to you.

Marianne: But I believe that list already. I believe it every time I see a small child or a baby. I see how God is saying, “You can start all over.” I see forgiveness. I see love. I see things to be hopeful and optimistic about every day.

I don’t look at politics because I think that it is the channel of transformation. I think politics is important because, if we are not careful, it will be a vessel of destruction before we get a chance to fully manifest all these marvelous opportunities.

People are good. I believe in people. I just feel that the great institutional, political, economic, and institutional vessels of power have been corrupted by some of the worst aspects of human consciousness. And this represents a serious crisis for the human race. It’s not like I don’t think good things would happen if that stuff would just get out of the way. All the more reason.

Rick: Yeah. I think that, looking back historically, it’s interesting to consider that people living in the Roman Empire probably thought that was going to go on forever. People living in the Soviet Union probably thought that was going to go on forever. And then these things just sometimes suddenly collapsed. So big changes can take place when we’re really not anticipating them. That’s encouraging, perhaps. Go ahead, you want to comment on that?

Marianne: Well, I think one of the problems is that too many Americans did just assume we were guaranteed this.

Rick: Yeah.

Marianne: It was a very immature view because anyone with perspective on history knows that great empires fall, and we have been behaving like an empire. And we’re behaving like an empire now. If we continue to behave this way, we will fall.

And I think if anything Trump’s presidency represents, it’s the end of empire behavioral patterns, and that’s why we must resist it.

Rick: Another thing that often occurs to me is that we waltzed into a continent that was incredibly rich and abundant in all sorts of resources, having been confined—most of us in Europe—which had been densely populated for hundreds and hundreds of years. All of a sudden, it was like this huge, vast resource, which, obviously, we handled in a rather brutal way, with the genocide of the Native Americans and all. But it enabled us to become very wealthy—just this tremendous resource.

There’s this attitude—you see it in agriculture, for instance—that the soil is just going to last forever. But there’s been this tremendous reduction in the topsoil. So I think, on a larger scale, there’s this attitude that whatever has made America great is going to last forever. But we may have depleted the resources to a significant extent now.

Marianne: Well, the things that you talked about have made us materially rich but spiritually poor. As Mother Teresa said, and also as JFK said, we cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.

I do think there’s a critical mass of people in the United States who realize that, and who realize not only the way we treat the planet—including the topsoil and everything having to do with fossil fuel companies, big agriculture, chemical companies, pesticides, Monsanto, Roundup, all that stuff—we understand that.

I think that how we treated the native nations—the indigenous American nation, the original peoples of the United States—is such a tragedy, not only to them personally, but also because the marriage of European prowess and the native, indigenous philosophical and spiritual outlook could have been such an extraordinary gift to the planet. We did not take that option.

But I think that was then and this is now. You look at something like Standing Rock. Once again, I think Bernie would have won, and I think that if the Democratic establishment had not suppressed his candidacy, there’s a very good chance he would have won the nomination, and I think he would have trounced her.

So let’s be clear here: even with all that, she won by almost three million votes.

Rick: And if you listen to Greg Palast, she won the Electoral College, too. There was so much hanky-panky going on.

Marianne: Greg Palast—I listen to everything he says. So there’s a lot of conversation here, and even when it leads you to pull your hair out, it doesn’t lead you to hopelessness.

Rick: No.

Marianne: It just leads you to, “Oh my, okay, let’s get in there.” If you look at the great—look at World War II. The Allies didn’t win every battle, and the first people on the beach on D-Day died. But they still took that beach. So let’s have some real perspicacity and perspective here that backs up courage.

I think we’re spending, to be honest, Rick, too much time being the devil’s advocate. For me, when you say, “Well, what do you say to people who are depressed?” I don’t take my—They are. They’re not the people that we need to be in conversation with.

It’s more like, “Okay, what do we talk about among those of us who are ready to do whatever it takes?” That’s what Sister Giant is about. If you haven’t woken up enough to know that you should be the grown-up—you know, people say it’s sad when somebody misses their childhood. It’s sad when somebody misses their adulthood, too.

We should spend less time coddling that and more time talking among ourselves: “Okay, what are we going to do?” And that, to me, is what Sister Giant is about.

Rick: That’s great. And thank you for continuing to come back to that. I don’t mean to be skirting away from it. It’s good that we—

Marianne: That’s part of your job here, I understand.

Rick: I’m just asking lots of questions that come to mind. Another thing that I’ve wondered for years and years and years, and I’d like to get your perspective on it, is—and we’ve kind of touched upon this, but maybe not directly—that there are so many things that are just so firmly ensconced: economic systems, companies, various things that seem very powerful and that don’t, to my understanding, actually have a place in an enlightened world. They’d have no place. I mean, liquor companies, for one thing, or the fossil fuel industry, and many, many, many things that you wouldn’t expect a society of relatively enlightened people to patronize or be interested in or want to have continue to exist.

So I’m just wondering about if we actually—and I guess you’re saying it’s not a done deal, it’s not a given—but if we are actually headed toward a kind of enlightened society, to whatever degree it arrives, I wonder what the transition will be like. I wonder what will happen to, and how these sort of huge, powerful entities—I mean, Enron, look what happened to that: just poof, disappeared—I’m interested in how smooth or how tumultuous that will be.

Money’s Influence on American Politics

Marianne: Well, as I’ve been saying, and as many people have been saying for years, there is a cancer that underlies that cancer, and that is the undue influence of money on our political functioning.

So when you look at this huge behemoth multinational corporate matrix, whether it has to do with fossil fuel companies, health insurance companies, chemical companies, or all of the huge corporate influences that really are answerable to no one country’s laws, they’re answerable to the short-term economic gain for their own shareholders, which is a very small portion of the world’s population. They are able to have the kind of power that they have in the United States and on the functioning of the American government for one reason, and that is money.

And that has been true for a while, but became particularly true with the Citizens United decision. Which right there was a reason to vote for Hillary, because with Hillary, who stated herself that she wanted the overturning of Citizens United, the people that she would have appointed to the Supreme Court—

We now have, with Trump as president, a zero percent chance that we’re going to be able to bring that to the court and have the court override Citizens United. However, there are still ways, and that has to do with a constitutional amendment to establish public funding of federal campaigns.

This is why Lawrence Lessig—I’m a big fan of his, a Harvard professor who’s a leader in this—he is in Rwanda right now, so he couldn’t be at Sister Giant, but we’re going to have Ari Berman and we’re going to have Zephyr Teachout, both of whom are leaders in this.

The greatest moral challenge of our generation is to get the money out of our politics.

That’s once again, let’s get together, let’s discuss it, let’s learn. So the greatest moral challenge of our generation is to get the money out of our politics. Until we do, these multinational corporate forces will be able to run roughshod over the peoples of the planet and the planet itself.

So, you know, when you have a new Secretary of State who’s the CEO of Exxon, I mean, what do you even say to this? What you have to say is: What we need, and that is the point, what we need to say in response. So once again, we do have means.

You know, what did you think the abolitionists looked at slavery and thought it was going to be easy? I mean, come on. Yeah, get out there, get in here, and get out there.

Rick: That’s great. Ari Berman also grew up in Fairfield, as you probably know. I used to go over to his parents’ house and fix his mother’s computer while he’d be, like, playing on the floor, fighting with his sister.

Marianne: He’s excellent, so that’s so cool, and he’ll be there.

Rick: I know, he’s great.

Marianne: That’s what Sister Giant brings together: people who have the inside scoop and the outside scoop.

Tears to Triumph and the meaning of suffering

Rick: Yeah. Do you want to talk about Tears of Triumph a little bit?

Marianne: Thank you so much.

Rick: Tell us about that. Yeah, I have a lot of notes from the book, but why don’t you just introduce it?

Marianne: Well, I think that there—you know, when I wrote that book, Trump had not been elected president, but there was still a lot of despair. And by the way, when I say that, I understand a lot of people who are watching right now are very excited about his presidency. There’s nothing about which I’ve so wanted to be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. I hope I’m totally wrong about what he brings. So I just want to say that.

And I respect democracy, you know, so I respect that we don’t all have to agree with each other, so if I’ve been a little lazy in my communication.

In terms of Tears to Triumph, though, there’s so much despair and so much depression. And what has happened, talking about this huge multinational corporate behemoth, the pharmaceutical companies have done a real number and they have absconded with the word “depression” and they have medicalized it.

Now, from a spiritual perspective, life lived outside a circle of love and dedication to the divine is a life lived outside a cosmically ordered universe. If your consciousness is not aligned with the higher laws of love and truth, by whatever name you give them, then you are cast into a psychically disordered, fractured universe where chaos and despair are inevitable.

We need to stop making sad bad.

This is not a medical issue; this is a spiritual issue. People say they have an anxiety disorder. Who doesn’t? This entire—the way we order our civilization is anxiety-producing, because it trains us to think the thoughts that make despair and depression inevitable. These thoughts focus on our individual pain, our individual circumstances, as opposed to our unity, which is the only plane of existence where inner peace resides.

So, hundreds of years ago, if people were upset, they needed comfort, they needed inspiration, they looked to religion. Now that baton was passed, in large part because of malfeasance on the part of those religious institutions, but it was passed to modern psychotherapy.

But modern psychotherapy has failed in that too often the prevailing paradigm has focused on the individual sufferer and the travails and the circumstances of their individual suffering, as opposed to a larger realization that I’m suffering from the same thing you’re suffering from. And it’s not about you or about me; it’s about a whole cultural order which makes your economic stress, your upset, something that is inevitable, and we should be addressing it together.

So basically, because of its over-secularization and its overly individualistic approach, modern psychotherapy has failed to provide, on a mass level, the comfort and hope and inspiration that people have wanted.

What’s happened over the last few decades is that the baton has been passed again, and this happened so quickly. It’s like you turned your head, you came back, and everybody’s on meds. And you’ve got the—everybody, masses and masses of people. One in four American women are diagnosed as clinically depressed.

And I remind you, clinically depressed—what does it mean? There’s no blood test for this. There’s no blood test like for diabetes. It means that somebody in a clinic said, “You’re depressed.”

Well, hello, if you’re into something like A Course in Miracles, or any kind of spiritual path, of course you are. We live our lives in fear of each other and through a mental lens which fosters depression.

So then you have what we have today, which is this unbelievable prevalence of the use of antidepressants. Now, I’m not talking here about schizophrenia, I’m not talking about bipolar disease; that’s outside the purview of my expertise.

Spiritual Despair Versus Clinical Depression

But what I am saying, which is a spiritual issue, not a medical issue, is that there is a spectrum of normal human despair: someone that you love died, you’re depressed about this; you lost your job, you’re depressed about this; you went bankrupt, you’re depressed about this; you got a divorce, you’re depressed about this.

But that sadness and that despair and that depression is not a mental illness. And the fact that it’s being treated as a mental illness, in far too many cases, including these antidepressants given by doctors who are general practitioners, even gynecologists—people who do not even claim to have any expertise on mental illness—means that what happens is, not only are multibillions of dollars being made, going back to the corporate behemoth and the matrix, not only does that mean billions of dollars being made by the pharmaceuticals, but it means that at a time when we need to be—if ever there was a time we need to be awake, if ever there was a time we need to be on alert—too many of us are at this kind of flat affect.

And this flat affect is desensitizing you to your own suffering, but it’s also desensitizing you to the suffering of others, and it’s desensitizing you to some of the alarms that you need to be hearing that are going off.

So this is a crisis. This is a crisis for us individually and collectively. And the only thing—and so what I wanted to talk about in this book is: What does Buddhism say about suffering? What does the Old Testament say about suffering? What does the New Testament say about suffering?

Whether it is the suffering that Buddha saw, which was a precursor to his journey to enlightenment; whether it is the suffering of the Israelites when they were slaves in Egypt; or the suffering of Jesus on the cross—all the great religious perspectives point to the human suffering and animal suffering that is absolutely inevitable when lived outside the context of holiness, or wholeness, wholeness of mind.

And what is that transformation, whether you’re talking about enlightenment, self-actualization, deliverance to the Promised Land, resurrection, or inner peace? They are all the same thing. And so I wanted to talk about, well, what do the spiritual traditions have to say?

And the one last thing I want to say about that, and why I also felt particularly strongly that I wanted to write this book: the FDA has issued a black-box warning—and, you know, they don’t exactly have a high bar anymore, a low bar anymore—well, yeah, the opposite. For people 25 years old and younger, antidepressant use actually increases—it does not decrease, but increases—the risk of suicidal ideation.

There’s a woman named Kelly Brogan who’s written about this, wrote a book called Own Your Mind. A lot of these people, including the shooters in these mass school shootings—you look deep into the use of meds—a lot of these famous celebrities who have hanged themselves, a lot of the suicides.

I love it when they come out and the paper will say things like, “They weren’t—the autopsy shows they weren’t on drugs except for mental health treatment.” Hello, this is drugs.

So this is one of America’s deep, dirty little secrets. And so I wanted to talk about, you know, when people say things—two things. One is when people say, “Well, they need to take the meds just to take the edge off while they’re doing the work.” First of all, being with the edge is the work. And second of all, if you take the edge off, they don’t even necessarily really know the deeper work is to be done.

And there was one other thing I was going to say about it, but I don’t remember.

Rick: It will come to mind. To my way of understanding, the proliferation of pharmaceuticals, the widespread use of them, is sort of symptomatic of really the materialistic paradigm that governs our culture. We think of ourselves, or the scientific paradigm thinks of us, as biological robots in a meaningless universe, and it’s all neurochemistry. And we can change our neurochemistry and kind of engineer a better state of mind chemically.

But, as you say in your book, “Your human self may be in hell right now, but your Divine Self is literally untouched by your suffering, and your Divine Self is who you are.” And you mentioned enlightenment being the only true antidote to suffering. All the religious traditions talk about the kingdom of heaven within, Sat-Chit-Ananda. We have this tremendous reservoir of happiness within us.

So it would seem that depression is a failure to connect clearly enough with that reservoir. And you’re not going to connect more clearly with it by doping yourself up with whatever these people are taking. You’re just probably going to muck up the wiring even more.

Marianne: That’s right. I agree with you 100 percent. And some people say, “Oh yeah, we tried all the spiritual stuff.” Like, yeah, they looked into a candle a couple of times. We tried that.

Rick: Right.

Marianne: That’s kind of the same thing that people do politically: “Oh, we tried.” Really? Because I want to know what you did, exactly, that was your deep trying. And people would hear what you’re saying, what I’m saying, and say, “How dare you?”

Rick: Well, we dare. I mean, it’s our own experience, right? And I think we both—you write in your book very candidly about going through very deep depression. And I can’t honestly say that I have, although my life was not all peaches and cream, especially when I was growing up with an alcoholic father and all that.

But boy, I’ve always felt, in my direct experience—not a belief—that meditation gives you access to tremendous inner happiness. And if you just keep dipping in like that, it grows and grows and grows and becomes very stable.

Marianne: I agree.

Rick: And you yourself have been meditating, I guess, TM, since the 1960s or ’70s or something?

Marianne: Well, I got my mantra in the ’70s. I’m a student of A Course in Miracles.

Rick: Yeah.

Marianne: And the Course in Miracles workbook is my more everyday practice, no matter what. TM—I would not be honest and truthful if I said it’s my twice-a-day practice, no matter what, every day, but several times a week, absolutely. And I know that my life is better when it’s that twice a day.

Rick: Yeah, and I was a TM teacher for 25 years, but these days I’m very eclectic. Whatever floats your boat, whatever works for people, I’m all for it.

So, before we wrap it up, is there anything else you’d like to say about this book that we haven’t really touched upon?

Marianne: I think that one of the things that the book does talk about, which relates to so much else that we’ve been talking about today, is how so much of our depression and our anxiety is collective. Even recognizing that, and knowing the ways in which it’s true, does lift us above and beyond the narrow concerns—why I’m depressed, what happened in my life.

The realm of the human story is not only not the realm of the real cause of our despair, but it’s also not the realm of the solution to our despair. So, for those who are seeking a deeper understanding of where our despair and our anxiety and our depression come from, and what they represent, but most importantly, how to navigate them, what the spiritual tools are, and what the inner dimensions of the light of Buddha, the light of Moses, and the light of Jesus are, I hope that it provides some light for people.

We all go through our rough times in life, and part of our problem is that we have taken a cheap, yellow smiley face in our society and put it over everything—happy, happy, happy—as though there’s something wrong with a sad day. And there’s nothing wrong with a sad day. Sometimes it is what we need to go through, just as we’ve been talking about with this country. This is a pregnant moment, with much to see.

So, we need to stop making sad bad. The body would not survive and thrive were we not imbued with an immune system that enables the body to take quite a hit, quite a lot of assault and injury. But that’s true psychically as well. We have a psychic immune system. It’s amazing how much assault and injury we can take and have been taking for many thousands of years before Big Pharma came along, and grief is a bulwark of that.

So, if you’re in grief because someone you love died, or you’re in grief because you got divorced, or you’re in grief because you lost all that money or made those decisions you regret, there’s a way to honor that experience, not just try to buffer yourself from it. Go deep into it in order to learn from it, and that is the key to moving out of it.

And in that sense, I think everything you and I have talked about politically, and this conversation spiritually and personally, is the same conversation: how to dwell within the darkness in such a way as to bring forth greater light on the other side.

Rick: And to reiterate the point you were just making about the psychic immune system: what we know is that the physical immune system heals us. I mean, if we get a cut, then the white blood cells go there and start fighting the infection, and the thing heals.

The mind, the psyche, has the same kind of function, and we need to do everything we can to assist it and not thwart it. A lot of the stuff—all the drugs, I mean—they kind of put a Band-Aid over it, but they don’t actually go to the cause. In effect, they can probably make things worse in the long run.

Marianne: And that’s why prayer and meditation and forgiveness and atonement, which are all the things that I talk about in the book, make all the difference in the world.

Choosing the world we want to create

Rick: Yeah. And just to conclude back on the sort of national-global perspective, for some reason, as you were talking, I started thinking about It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart, and how he was shown what a difference one man’s life—one person’s life—can make, and the really nice community versus Pottersville, which is what we would have had if he hadn’t lived.

So, if you and I are fortunate enough to live, let’s say, another 35 years or something, do you think we’re going to see a nice Jimmy Stewart town with nice housing for people and all that, or are we going to see a Pottersville? Or is it really up to us now to determine which way it’s going to go?

Marianne: It’s up to us to determine which way it’s going to go. I saw that movie again this year in a movie theater. What a profound film.

Rick: Yeah, it is.

Marianne: What a profound film that is. And you’re right, that is our choice before us now, just as the director of that film—I think it was Frank Capra—knew. Do you want to live in Pottersville, or do you want to live in the world that we all know is possible, in which love is the bottom line rather than short-term economic gain?

We don’t make short-term economic gain the bottom line in any area of our life. We make love the bottom line in every area of our life. And we can do this collectively too.

So, it’s all about expanding our consciousness to embrace that possibility, to stand with conviction within that possibility, to make ourselves available to the possibility—to do it in a deep way, not just a kind of sometimes-when-it’s-convenient way.

There’s a prayer in the Course in Miracles that we’re to say every day: “Where would you have me go? What would you have me do? What would you have me say and to whom?”

And I’m no enlightened master. I’m not a 24/7 got-it-right girl. But I’m certainly better than I used to be, and I certainly see the differences that it makes in my life and in the lives of those around me when I seek to live in this place.

We want love to be able to use us, and that will make all the difference.

And like you said, it makes us happier, but it also makes us more of use. We want love to be able to use us, and that will make all the difference.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting. When I was listening to a lot of your talks, very often there were so many different sentences where I thought, “Okay, this is the concluding point because this is so profound,” but then you’d say another one.

So we could probably go on like that all day with this interview, and you’d keep saying things and I would think there’s nothing more I can squeeze out of this, and then you would come up with something more. But I think I’ll let you go and wrap it up. Thank you very much for taking the time to do this.

Marianne: Thank you. Thank you very much. You’re great. You know, you are one of those sites that—I know that you had the “Kali Takes America” article up. When I read that article, I called her, and she will be speaking at Sister Giant.

Rick: I noticed that, yeah. Vera.

Marianne: Yeah, so I see that with the work that you do. We’re definitely allies in the field, and I salute you from the bottom of my heart.

Rick: Well, thank you so much. Maybe a few years from now, when we’ll see what has happened to the world, we’ll have another conversation in retrospect.

Marianne: Or sooner than that.

Rick: Or sooner than that. Great.

Marianne: Thank you.

Rick: Yeah. Let me just make a couple of concluding remarks. So, I’ve been talking with Marianne Williamson, and this is an ongoing series of interviews. If you’d like to be notified of each new one, there’s a place on batgap.com to sign up to receive an email about once a week.

This also exists as an audio podcast. There’s a link for subscribing to that. And I always just say, explore the menus, because there’s a bunch of stuff and we’re always adding things. Just poke around in the site and see what you find.

So, thanks for listening or watching. Next week—or next time—I’m going to have J. P. Sears, who’s a very funny guy, sort of a satirist. He talks about being ultra-spiritual. Have you ever seen J. P. Sears, Marianne?

Marianne: No. Sounds good, though.

Rick: You’d like him. He has long red hair, wears a kind of bandana around his head, and usually has a flower in it. And he gets into this—

Marianne: Is it Sears or Spears? How do you spell it?

Rick: It’s Sears, like Sears-Roebuck.

Marianne: Okay. I’m going to look it up. I could use some laughing.

Rick: J. P. Sears, yeah. Watch a few of his videos.

Marianne: Okay.

Rick: You’ll like him.

Marianne: Like the yoga guy video that was so funny?

Rick: Yeah, he did one like that. He had one about how to take Instagram photos of yourself doing yoga poses, and he goes on and on. He comes up with some real clever stuff. Yeah, watch his Christmas message if you get a chance.

All right, so thank you, everybody. Thanks, Marianne, and we’ll see you next time.

Marianne: God bless you, honey. Bye.

Rick: You too. Bye-bye. [Music]