Marianne Williamson on America’s ‘Dark Psychic Force’
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Hey, this is Barry here real quick, just popping in to say that this episode was recorded before the school shooting in Texas. And yet the questions that my guest Marianne Williamson and I wrestle with here about the spiritual and social maladies facing America, ones that go deeper than our addiction to guns, I think remain even more relevant today than on the day we recorded. Thanks for listening and let us know what you think.

I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. And today, a quick question with Marianne Williamson. During the 2020 Democratic primaries, candidate Marianne Williamson, known by fans of her books like A Return to Love and A Politics of Love, but a total stranger to most Americans—

suddenly took center stage when she said this. We have communities, particularly communities of color and disadvantaged communities all over this country who are suffering from environmental injustice. I assure you, I lived in Grosse Pointe. What happened in Flint would not have happened in Grosse Pointe. This is part of the dark underbelly of American society.

That line instantly became a meme. Wow, Marianne Williamson, huh?

That was a powerful moment in the debate. I didn't know it was possible for a white woman to get that much attention from black people without calling the cops. That was amazing. She was fired. Did you see that? Surprising splash last night was self-help author and high priestess saying, "Bring me the child."

Marianne Williamson. And for many people, she was the winner of the debate. She came out, she said what she wanted to say, she didn't waste her time. This dark psychic force. This dark psychic force. This dark psychic force. And I think that that's because something about it felt honest and real on a stage full of wonkiness or rehearsed lines. I was one of the many people that Googled Marianne Williamson that night, and here's what I learned.

Long before she was a presidential candidate, Williamson was one of the most beloved self-improvement gurus in the world. She's written more than a dozen books, seven of which have been New York Times bestsellers. A lot of people talk about social justice these days, but it's not the case.

But Williamson has been devoted to real social justice. Just one example, when HIV and AIDS were ravaging the gay community in the 80s and 90s, a time when gay men were being discriminated against in horrendous ways at all levels of society, she was in the trenches fighting on their behalf, founding organizations that provided food to patients, driving them to medical appointments, paying for their medications, and much more.

During the 2020 election, Marianne was mocked for what she called her politics of love, for that reference to the dark psychic force in the presidential debate. But at this point, two years on, with the endless division, dysfunction, the endless ferocious culture wars we see playing out in this country, it seems to me that few would argue against the existence of a dark psychic force anymore. And so I wanted to ask Marianne more about what she meant when she said that,

where she sees the country going, and how she thinks we can correct course. Stay with us. Marianne Williamson, welcome to Honestly. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Marianne, this might be the deepest and most far-reaching quick question we've ever done on this show, but I would love for you to answer in the simplest way possible the following. What has made America spiritually sick?

Truth is simple, but life is complicated. So there's the simple answer and the complicated one. The simple answer is that we have stopped putting love first. We have stopped putting values first. We have stopped putting...

The idea that we're here to love each other, that we're here to walk in humility and loving mercy and doing justice. Those things which have traditionally been seen as the core of righteousness, right living, have become not only peripheralized but almost derided, pictured as quaint. We don't have to think about those things. So that's the simple answer.

But the complicated answer has to do with how that even happened. And I believe that once a kind of neoliberal politics and economics became such a core principle of governance in this society, more than democracy and certainly more than ethics or fairness,

we were all sort of drawn in to an economic worldview that is basically amoral. And that which is amoral will ultimately have immoral consequences. Economics starting about 40 years ago, trickle-down economics, the idea that basically the role of government was to give corporations whatever they wanted. The idea that allowing the private sector, the private,

primacy, almost the sanctity of property rights, actually began to replace democracy as the governing principle of our society. We were all drawn into the idea that basically

God is no longer love. God is stockholder value. And this perspective began to saturate every aspect of our society, putting the vast majority of people in a level of economic survival that has done everything from destroying families, destroying marriages,

making it very difficult for children to find a sense of meaning, it has shattered the moral universe. And the idea of what is the meaning of my life has been replaced by how can I get out of college and make a living that gets me health care. Do you think that capitalism itself is in opposition to a politics or a worldview of love? Is capitalism opposed to love?

Well, I think that that certainly is the most relevant question at this moment. I like to think that a capitalism that has swerved from its ethical core, an unfettered capitalism, an unregulated capitalism, is the problem here. Some people would say, and

these arguments rage. No, it's inherent to capitalism. But I look at the world and I see the most thriving and I think the most enlightened economies as hybrids of capitalism and socialism. I appreciate the way Richard Wolff says it's a transitional issue. It's a fluid issue. What's capitalism? You know, capitalism is not a light switch you turn off. But I think a lot of people fail to realize

What do you think the fire department is if not a socialist institution? What do you think the police department is if not a socialist institution? What do you think a public school system is really if not on a certain level a socialist institution? So the idea of these strict categories of what is socialism and what is capitalism and what needs to go, what needs to stay, I don't think is the most sophisticated or nuanced level of conversation we need to be having.

The way I think about it is that if earning and success and prestige and climbing the ladder is the only thing that a person is striving for, that to me is the issue.

Yes, of course that's the issue. However, many people argue, and I think correctly so, that unfettered, unregulated capitalism has forced the majority of people into that level of desperate survival mode. You can't blame people who have no health care, who do not make decent wages. You cannot blame them for poverty.

having to put those questions first. That's the point of money. The point of money is to not have to think about money so that you can think about the most important things in life. But if you have an economic structure backed by governmental power, which

forces and then locks the majority of people into such a survival mode that they have to be thinking about those questions all the time. Then yes, that's the problem, but you have to point out the cause of the problem, which is the economic system that is allowing that to happen. Well, whether people agree with that assessment or not, think that we need a broader social safety net or not,

I think regardless of what your economic worldview is, it's impossible not to look around and see evidence everywhere of our alienation, of our loneliness, and of our disconnection. Whether you're looking at rates of opioid abuse and overdose in this country, or youth anxiety and depression, or suicide, or youth suicide, or lack of sex, lack of marriage,

the amount of time we spend on our devices rather than spending with the people we love. I wonder if you see a common thread here. Do these have a common root? First of all, I want to go back to something you said. You referred to it as a social safety net. This isn't about a social safety net. This is about social justice and the lack thereof, which includes, by the way, economic justice. And the lack of those things is absolutely at the core

absolutely at the causal level of all the symptoms that you just described. Well, let's unpack what you mean when you say social justice, because a lot of that word to me, like a lot of words in our society, equity, anti-racism, they mean radically different things to different people. In my view, that word has been stretched beyond any meaningful definition. So when Marianne Williamson says social justice, what does she mean by that?

You, Barry, and I are successful white women. We know what it is to be in the club. And if you're in the club in this country, this is a wonderful place to be. What does that mean? That means that if we're in trouble today, there's probably someone we could call.

No matter what, we are held, we are supported in living our best lives. We can look around us in myriad ways and recognize the extraordinary privilege that we have. To me, social justice means that we, in order to form a more perfect union, do everything possible generation after generation to protect

make universal the opportunities to get into the club. The problem in America today is not that some people can't make money and have a wonderful life. The problem is that not enough people have the opportunity to create wealth and have a wonderful life. Too many people are locked out of the system.

That's what it means. You and I are Jews. We are to love justice, do justice. This is the precept of our lives. And when you have millions of children who go to school in the richest country in the world at schools that do not even have adequate school supplies to teach that child to read by the age of eight.

When we know statistically the chances of that child ever graduating from high school are drastically reduced, the chances of that child ending up incarcerated one day drastically increased. That child is locked out.

before they're even 10 years old. Social justice means that we make the effort for every child, no matter where they live in the United States, to have, for instance, an adequate education. We are the only country among advanced developed nations

where the majority of our funding for our public schools is based on property taxes. That means, and you can look at all the comparisons in terms of how our kids do compared to educationally, compared to other countries. And what you see is that in children who live in advantaged neighborhoods and go to public schools in advantaged neighborhoods, American kids are right up there with everyone else.

The best of the best. The problem is that people in less advantaged neighborhoods in the United States, the children are not given the resources, once again, which means they're locked out. To me, that is social injustice.

Here's why I want to really explain why I balk at the phrase at this point in time. It's not that I don't take the idea in the Jewish expression of the word tikkun olam, repairing the world seriously. It's not that I don't think of the famous phrase, tzedek tzedek tir dof, justice, justice you shall pursue. The problem is that when I hear tikkun

people who are held up as paragons of the social justice movement, let's just speak of the school example, saying that in the name of anti-racism, we need to dismantle

High school algebra or eighth grade algebra is in San Francisco. In the name of social justice, we need to get rid of the SAT. In the name of social justice, this is an example from the public charter school KIPP, work hard, be nice. We need to get rid of the work hard part of the slogan because that represents the false idea of the meritocracy. That is why I have sort of stopped using the phrase because I don't want to indicate to someone that I believe in nonsense like that.

I would agree with you. But I would also point out that every movement and every people has a shadow side. I don't care what view you're talking about. There's somebody who's going to be using it in ways that are extreme and ridiculous, particularly in America today. But I think that people such as yourself and myself, by the way, are...

should see as our lodestar the deeper inquiry and the bigger conversation. And so you're saying, let's leave out the word. I'm saying, let's reclaim the word and hold on to the word for what it actually should mean. One of the things that complicates this issue beyond wealth and income and opportunity is when you look at the big maladies facing this country, like suicide,

Opioid addiction, loneliness, polarization. These are not issues that are only affecting those that, as you put it, are outside the club. These issues are affecting Americans at every income level living in every single area code.

So how much of this comes back to one of the core themes that I see in your work, which is that we need meaning in our lives. And our society right now, as far as I can see, is lacking in resources for meaning making. You know, it's whether you want to look at people dropping out of religious life and religious community and ritual and religious practice or

Or you want to look at, you know, the disintegration of civic organizations like Rotary Clubs and, you know, obviously, of course, the famous book Bowling Alone. You know, do you see that disintegration of traditional structures of civic and religious organizations and institutions as being a big factor in what ails us? Well, absolutely, I do. On the other hand, it's important to recognize that in many cases it was the malfeasance, the corruption, and the lack of

genuine spiritual force at the center of some of these traditional religious institutions that caused the diminishment of interest on the part of people. You know, people didn't turn away from God. They turned away from traditional religious institutions. And

In many cases, and I know this because this has been my world for the last 40 years, people realized they had thrown away the baby with the bathwater. There's tremendous interest in spirituality in our society. There's just not interest as much in traditional religious institutions that are more about the dogma and the doctrine and the new building than about people really finding the presence of God in their lives in a deep and meaningful way.

On the other hand, there are a lot of people whose calling is to revitalize, spiritually revitalize what's going on inside those institutions as well. So that's a beautiful thing. You know, a lot of this started with the advent of the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century. When I was in college, I had these posters on my wall that were these huge angels that were painted by a Scottish painter named Edward Burne-Jones.

And I didn't know anything about him. I just knew that these tall angels were really cool. So years later, I was walking up Fifth Avenue in New York City, and I passed the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And they have these huge flags and banners outside that, you know, that announce the display of that month or whatever. And I saw these huge angels, Edward Byrne Jones, and I went, oh, this is so cool. So I went in, I wanted to see this exhibit, and I bought the little or rented the little thing where you have earphones and it explains things to you.

And what I learned, which was particularly fascinating to me at that time because I'd been writing a book called Healing the Soul of America, reading a lot about the transcendentalists, reading a lot about Emerson and Whitman and Thoreau and Melville and Poe and what was going on in the 1850s in Concord, Massachusetts and so much of what was happening there. And I had read how there were artists and philosophers in Britain and in the United States who

who recognized that with the advent of this mechanistic age, this mesmerization of the Western mind with these externalities of technology and machinery, that we were at risk of losing something important. And so what I heard in that exhibit was that Edward Burne-Jones said, every time they build a machine, I will paint an angel.

And that is so much what those artists and philosophers were doing. They were trying to warn the West, all of our attention is being drawn to that which is outside us. And the internal musculature is withering away. So yes, economics was at a causal level there. It's not any one thing. It doesn't matter whether you're rich or you're poor. If you think money is everything, your life will not be happy. But if you are...

Or you can't blame somebody for having to live from that place. And that's why when you were just talking about teen suicide, teen depression, some of the kids who are the greatest at risk come from affluent families. We have built a society where...

We act as though the things outside us have meaning, and the things outside us don't have meaning. Things inside us have meaning, our capacity to reach for one another. When you were talking about some of the traditional rites and rituals, I've been thinking a lot lately how society was so much better when everybody went to the local parade. Everybody knew their neighbors. But these things cannot be solved in broad stroke levels. Right.

They're healed one relationship at a time. And I do believe there is a yearning. Americans realize the sickness that has set in. I don't believe that Americans don't realize it. And I also think that we have the required masses of people who are trying in their own way to rebuild the fabric of this nation. I see it everywhere that I go. In the same way that the transcendentalists were a reaction to the Industrial Revolution,

You know, we're living through, I think you could argue, a transformation even as profound, maybe more so, which is the digital revolution. Do you think that we're due for another kind of revival like that? And if so, where do you see green shoots of it? We have all come to understand that that tablet is addictive. I know a lot of people, including myself, who know you've got to put that thing down.

On one hand, we all know the positive aspects of the Internet. I mean, incredible opportunities for good. But we also know

the toll that it's taking. You were talking earlier about a lack of sex. I mean, what it has done to so many of our internal juices, when you see kids, you know, not kids, even like, let's say people in their 20s, waiting before a movie starts, sitting next to each other, but instead of talking to each other, they're both on their phone, they're both on their tablet. The moment in my life that really impacted me this way was many years ago, I was at a

I remember where I was. I was at a restaurant in Houston, and there was a table next to me with about four or five adults, and there was a little baby, and the baby was still in a high chair. But the baby had this little screen.

I thought this is horrifying because this is the age where that baby's brain should be picking up cues and clues and what social interaction is. And even at that age, this baby was being trained to think the action of life was on the screen rather than the other people at the table. And if you multiply that enough times, you have a real dystopia on your hands.

But once again, if I may, when you said, where do I see the green shoots? The green shoots are in how many people are having this conversation and realize it. So they're having the conversation, but what are they doing to change their lives?

Look at everybody talking about mindfulness. Look at everybody talking about meditation. Look at everybody who is now, you know, the largest religious denomination is called the nuns, N-O-N-E, people who want to know about universal spiritual themes. The field that I've been in for 40 years proves this to me.

AA meetings, people recognizing what addiction is. And by the way, even when you were talking before about opioid addiction, let's not leave out Purdue Pharmacy. Let's not leave out the profit motive and the profit center that was built on all that human suffering, which had a lot to do, proven now, with the advent of the opioid addictive program.

So you can't disconnect economic factors from spiritual factors from every other factor. It's an all systems breakdown. It has had an all systems cause and it will take an all systems solution. It seems to me that even when people...

don't believe in God or say they don't believe in God. There's something in our human nature that needs to worship something. And there's this amazing David Foster Wallace quote where he talks about this. This is what he says. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There's no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual type thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you'll never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.

And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. So what do you say, Marianne, to the people who, for whatever reason, just can't get behind the supernatural beliefs that are built into a lot of religions or who got burned by the kind of religious structure they grew up in? In other words, what are the things worth worshiping if you can't get to God that won't eat you alive?

What David Foster Wallace described there was idolatry. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy might. That's number one. You're going to worship someone. Bob Dylan used to have a song, wrote a song years ago. You're going to have to serve somebody. It might be the devil. It might be the Lord. You're going to have to serve somebody. We are hardwired. We're going to see something as the source of our good, and we are going to lean into that.

And in a world that does not describe love, other people, right relationship as the source of our good, we are left feeling that we live in a random universe, which produces a tremendous hysteria. It's the mind weaponized against itself.

We're in this golden prison of our own making. And so we think, well, if I make my prison of this material world, the material world is all there is, then I just try to make the material world better. And as he said in that quote, you try to do that, it's only going to make your suffering more.

because you're trying to fortify that which is the problem. So you say, well, what about the people who have a problem with the otherworldly aspect of religion? What people should have a problem with is the worldly aspect of this material overattachment. That's what Buddha said. We are attached. We are grasping to this world. Ultimately, there is a reality here.

which is not of this world. You can deride it as supernatural, but the truth of the matter is a physicist will tell you that while all of the items in this room appear to be solid, they're actually not. So that which is sometimes described as otherworldly is actually just a deeper understanding of what the world actually is. So for the person that's listening and thinking this,

I don't love the way my life is going. I feel lost. I feel like I don't have meaning. I feel like I don't have community. I'm looking at my phone more than I want to. I'm playing video games more than I want to. I want to change it around. You're a person that people like that go to for guidance. What's kind of step one and two out of that? Step one, who have you not forgiven? Forgiveness is the essence of everything. We are living at a time where no matter where you are,

You can get on the internet and find a meditation class. It could be my books. It could be a million other people's books. And even before you go on the internet to find someplace, say in your heart, I'm willing. I don't know how to do this, but I am willing to open my heart. I'm willing to consider the possibility that there might be another way to live.

And just that invitation, that slightest invitation will open up worlds. Books will fall at your feet. A friend will say, I'm going to go to this meditation class. You want to go with me? Somebody will say, I'm going to go to this church service. You want to go with me? Things begin to happen when we are open to the possibility that there might be another way. I think the fact that people are depressed right now is a sign of mental health, not a sign of mental dysfunction.

If I have a broken leg, my brain registers pain. That's because my brain needs me to know there's something wrong and you need to reset that bone. Psychic pain is the same. It's the psyche telling you something's wrong. This is not something for you to numb. There's something wrong about how we're living our lives. I think where you and I might see this a little bit differently, I don't know. Tell me if I'm correct. Hmm.

I think that many, many people are having those conversations and are having those conversations within themselves. And, you know, there's a part in The Course in Miracles where it says,

At a certain point, you will not find yourself alone for you will be joined by mighty companions. Those who have that same light in their eyes will recognize the light in yours. And those who don't have their light in their eyes but will recognize it in you and wonder where you got it. I feel that with you, Barry. This recognition.

And that is going on today, this recognition of people. And that's one of the reasons the crisis of our democracy is so painful to witness, is because the problem is not with the people. The American people are good. You know, the American people, we're not this shadow element that has gained so much power and gets so much play and is doing so much damage, to be honest.

The average American, I believe, is a very decent, dignified person, no more or less than any other country.

But we have a political system that squashes and thwarts rather than invites and contains and channels the better angels of our nature. But the better angels of our nature are there. People are not stupid. People know that something is wrong. And people, I believe, do want very much to do what we can on individual levels to make them right.

More with Marianne Williamson on the self-help industry and whether or not she plans to primary President Joe Biden. Stay with us. Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

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There's a reason that a lot of people are turning to, I'm sure you blanch at the idea of them being alternative, but alternative things for meaning, right? You know, I think the easy dunk is to look at self-care and self-help and wellness and say, you know, it's a bunch of snake oil. What are they delivering? What are those alternative sources of meaning that

or however you would phrase it, delivering to people that they could not get in the church or the synagogue or the mosque? Well, first of all, this is not an age when organized institutional religion should be self-congratulating. I mean, you know, that's number one. Number two, the idea before about the 1980s, certainly here, it happened sooner in countries like Great Britain,

areas like Great Britain, we followed an allopathic model of medicine where you didn't give any real credence to the importance of nutrition or exercise. You just hoped you didn't get sick. And then if you got sick, you sought to eradicate or suppress the symptoms through external remedies. That was called allopathic medicine.

Then, I think largely because of the age crisis and people looking around for alternatives, there was the recognition that there is a – ultimately it was called at first alternative, then it was called complementary, now it's called integrative, which is what it should be. The idea that health has more to do, has to do with things other than just the level of the symptom.

that integrative medicine has to do with the body and the mind and the spirit. It has to do with psychological issues. It has to do with nutritional issues. It has to do with lifestyle issues. It has to do with prevention issues. It has to do with diet or exercise. Why is this called snake oil? We now have the most prestigious medical institutions in North America that have meditation classes.

that have, you know, the oncologist, if you said to an oncologist 30 years ago, maybe I should meditate, the oncologist would say, well, what medical school did your meditation teacher go to? Today, your oncologist is likely to be the first person to tell you to get yourself over to one of those spiritual support groups because we know that people who attend them

live on average longer. So it's no longer, you know, the people who say that snake oil, they're the ones living in 1985.

Today, people realize that medicine, excuse me, most illness comes from stress. People understand the value of medicine in stress reduction. You have someone like Dr. James Doty over this leading neurosurgeon over at Stanford Medical School whose work on compassion with the Dalai Lama.

is so much a part of his presentation about what even they're discovering within the human body, that there's more of a connection between the brain and the heart than people used to realize, that they're now seeing the partnership between the brain and the heart as a dual intelligence center within the body. This is not coming from me. This is coming from James Doty and neurosurgeons at places like at Stanford. So there's no snake oil to it.

Well, let me give you an example of what I mean when I talk about how – and it kind of connects to what we were saying before about how social justice is a bucket that can mean something really rich and thick and real or it can mean something thin and, in my view, not just at all.

You know, I'm the target audience of a tremendous amount of wellness ads. When I'm on Instagram, when I'm on Twitter, when I'm just on the internet, I am like a mark for extremely expensive juice cleanses, fasts.

Things that frame themselves as being about self-care and wellness, but are essentially just old-fashioned dieting. You know, and they tell me that I need to buy these moon juice supplements and it's going to change my life, or that I need to join the Peloton community to live my fullest life together with my virtual community members.

To me, this connects honestly to your critique of capitalism. Thank you, Perry. It's not about the wellness community. It's about capitalism. Why are we you could have the same conversation about all the operations that are performed medically in this country that that when you have a fraction of the cost for the same operation somewhere else, you could talk about the price of insulin. Why is the price of insulin so much higher here than it is in other countries when in other countries it's capped?

You could talk about terrible procedures, life-changing procedures that people are denied in this country because insurance companies will not pay for them. Then you're talking about what those capitalist monstrous thought forms are doing to actually kill people. Why are we just picking on the ridiculousness of some people in the wellness community? The reason I think this is important is because people need help.

wellness. They need self-care. And under the guise of those things, a lot of times we're being sold things that aren't really going to lead to that. How are we to distinguish what

Well, I hate to use this as a promotional opportunity for my own books, but I think somebody might want to pick up my book, A Return to Love, which is kind of the cliff notes, as it were, of a set of books called A Course in Miracles. And I think it's a great book.

A Course in Miracles is just one statement of universal spiritual truth. I think there is one truth with a capital T spoken in many different ways. Some of that languaging is within religious contexts, some within spiritual contexts.

but with no dogma or doctrine because it's not a religion. That would be the category of The Course in Miracles. And some is very secular. This is why people read, not just my books, books by people such as Eckhart Tolle, people such as Wayne Dyer.

And those books are popular because people find reading about living for a life exactly as you and I have been talking about is most meaningful. And that's what theoretically, that's what you get from any good minister. That's what you get from any good imam. That's what you get from any good rabbi. That's what you get at any monastery where you're talking about living for love, living, being good to people, putting right relationship first.

before the usury that is so endemic of our culture. People are being treated in our culture like we're throwaway. People don't have real relationships. People almost audition people for what can you do for me. Relationships have become transactional. We have forgotten about the meaning of forgiveness, the meaning of love. We've forgotten about the fact that waking up in the morning is not about what I'm going to get from something, but what I'm going to give today.

This is what the conversion is. It's not a religious conversion, but it is an attitudinal conversion to realizing that no matter what I achieve, no matter what I get, if I'm not the man or woman that God would have me be, then I'm on some level of moral failure. That's really the question. What is it to be a good person? Right. So, you know, I think about—I know he's not traditionally thought of this way, but I think about a guy like Jordan Peterson. Some people think he's controversial, but—

His book, 12 Rules for Life, you know, the kind of people that ended up reading that book or the kind of people that had testimonies like, I was, you know, lost. I didn't have a job. I read this book. You told me to clean up my room. You told me to stand up straight. You told me all of these practical advice that, you know, parents give to kids that are contained in this book.

And they changed my life. A lot of what you talk about is this, it's almost transcendental. It's about what's going on on the inside. What are the kind of behaviors that you suggest people change or adapt to?

to live in what you're calling, you know, right living or good living or purposeful living? First of all, every great religious and spiritual tradition emphasizes the morning, the hours of the morning. When you wake up in the morning is when your mind is most open to new impressions. We wake up in the morning, we take a shower, we take a bath, we brush our teeth. Why? Because you don't want yesterday's dirt to go with you into the day.

But you can cleanse your body. If you don't cleanse your mind of yesterday's stress, then you will not have the day you might want. So you wake up in the morning. If you immediately go to your phone, you immediately go to your computer, you immediately go to the newspaper, you immediately download the consciousness of a very stress-filled world today, then there is no mystery why you are depressed by noon. Yeah.

So, number one, whatever your practice is, whatever it could be, something, it could be the Bible, it could be the Course in Miracles, it could be daily inspirational reading from Unity Magazine, it could be whatever it is. It could be reading Rumi, it could be reading meditations by whomever, whatever, whatever your particular, that which you respond to, at least five minutes.

Blaise Pascal said that every problem in the world can be traced to man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. If you wake up in the morning and immediately surrender your nervous system to the cacophony of modern life, you will have no chance.

The other day, and I wrote about this on my Instagram and I sent out my substat because I really noticed this. I was sitting in my living room. It was the morning and I felt depressed. I went, why? Because usually I'm happy in the morning. What's going on? And I started to spiral. And I realized that I had picked up my phone in my bedroom. I was reading it on my way to get coffee. And then, you know, then you're off and running.

Normally, I walk into the living room, I have the Course in Miracles. And once again, the Course in Miracles is no better or worse. It has no monopoly on truth. It's a psychological system on surrendering a thought system based on fear that dominates this world and accepting instead a thought system based on love. Normally, I walk into the living room, I open the lesson of the workbook.

I take that in. I have at least five minutes before I get coffee, before I turn on the phone, anything like that. And I saw such a dramatic example. You know, at least when you take a bath, it's just your dirt. Maybe one other person. I don't know who you are. Maybe you got more than one person going on. I don't know. But with taking on the stress of the world, you're taking on the stress of everyone in Somalia, everybody in Yemen, everybody in Ukraine, and everybody in this country today. Yeah.

It's an assault on the nervous system. We must cultivate quiet.

We must cultivate moving back into the center of our being. And this is why we have the frayed adrenal systems that we have. You can't disconnect those spiritual issues from the physical issues. This is why everybody's on antidepressants. This is why everybody's on muscle relaxants. This is why everybody's trying to calm down and medicate. This is not snake oil.

to say that we have got to attend to these internal issues. But that's why yoga is so popular today. That's why meditation and mindfulness are so popular. This is a good thing that those things are mainstreamed, not a bad thing. Do you have the nutcases there just like you have the nutcases in social justice, just like you have the nutcases in every other area of anything? Of course you do.

And I think the function really, very of people like yourself and myself, is to seek to help people discern. What are the other things, Marianne, that you do in your own life, ritually, routines? You mentioned A Course in Miracles in the morning. What are the things you practically do to ground you? You know, when you go to the gym or you do yoga or whatever your practice is, you are working on your physical muscles.

And after a certain age, if you're not working on keeping those muscles up, gravity is pulling them down. There is attitudinal musculature as well. And after a certain amount of experience, if you're not working to keep those attitudinal muscles up,

Gravity, psychological gravity, emotional gravity will pull them down. This world will constantly be pulling you towards anger. It will be pulling you towards cynicism. It will be pulling you towards negativity. It will be pulling you towards judgmentalness and victimization. So through meditation, through prayer, through spiritual practice, you are working on your attitudinal muscles.

So at a certain point, your practice is internal in any given moment. Before you go somewhere, do you bless everybody before you go? Before I came in here, I silently blessed you guys. You did? Yeah, because it's a direction to your brain.

It's a direction to your brain. Before you go in somewhere, you prepare yourself. May I be a contributor to something good here? Whether you see it in religious, you know, I see it in spiritual terms. Not everybody uses the word God. But, you know, everybody's on a spiritual path, whether they consciously realize it or not. We're all being led by life, right?

To be more loving. You know, the Course in Miracles says, it's not up to you what you learn. It's merely up to you whether you learn through joy or through pain. So a well-considered life, you know, you say, what are the things you do? The activity that is the most important right now is within our minds. Let's talk a little bit more about politics and what's going on right now before we get to a lightning round I want to do with you. Where I want to start is what you mentioned before, the idea that

Families should be able to live in this country on a single income, and that shouldn't be radical. What I find interesting about the political realignment that we're living through right now is obviously you would imagine that being a progressive point of view. And yet you also have – you may or may not have heard of this guy. There's a guy running for Senate in Arizona.

called Blake Masters, who's running as a Republican on that platform, that people should be able to live on a, a family should be able to live on a single income. Tell me about that political realignment you're seeing. And, you know, if you yourself, as someone who is very much in this space, feel like you're bridging a previously unbridgeable divide to the right on this particular issue. Several months ago, I had dinner at your house.

You were the first person who introduced me to the concept of the horseshoe. And, you know, it's like sometimes you hear something and then it's all you hear about. Yes. And I get it. The left-right dichotomy is completely false. It's artificial. It's made up. The real dichotomy is not between left and right. The real dichotomy is the system versus the people.

And the worst aspects of the system, which is corporatism, which is allowing short-term profit motivation for corporations to basically displace democracy as our governing principle, that has taken root on both the left and the right. The Republican Party, it's become the total core of the Republican Party. It's become the dominant aspect of the Democratic Party. And

So at this point, people realize that no matter what their politics are, left or right, they're being screwed by the neoliberal order, which is placing huge corporate interests before their interests. You know, whether it is a Democratic or a Republican president who has supported trade deals, for instance, that actually –

allow for huge companies to get tax breaks for removing jobs from Americans. So that is a very hopeful thing that people are beginning to realize. I think in 2016, there was this huge populist fervor because that's what you're talking about here is populism, right? So there was an authoritarian populist named Donald Trump. And then there was a progressive populist named Bernie Sanders, right?

The woman who at that time was saying, let's just continue with the way things were. Hillary. Exactly. People are like, what are you talking about? I'm drowning here. I personally think Bernie Sanders would have won in 2016. But there was going to be a cry of populist despair and rage.

I also personally think that Trump was anything but the answer to that populist rage because he stoked the worst aspects of the human character. But that populist rage and despair is still there. Marianne, obviously you're not happy about the status quo in the Democratic Party. You think Biden's weak. You think Kamala's weak. Would you ever consider primarying Joe Biden? I will do whatever pleases.

is the best way that I can help interrupt the status quo. Because the status quo will not disrupt itself. We must go from a basic mindset of trying to alleviate people's distress. We must transition from that into fundamental economic reform. Because anything short of fundamental economic reform at this time only perpetuates patterns of distress. So I'll do whatever I feel appropriate

in whatever way I can best serve. Most people look at the bruising experience, not just that you had, but that anyone running for president has and thinks only a crazy person would do that.

How would you do that again? It's funny that you say that. A rabbi once said to me that mashuganah actually means brilliant and crazy. There's a fine line there. It is a very bruising experience. I know that from experience. I would say that running for president in my experience was 50% brutality and 50% exhilaration. And I think if I were to do it again, it would probably be even more of both of those experiences.

But at a certain point, when you really realize the depth of trouble that we're in in this country, personal discomfort seems like the least important consideration. Okay, one more quick break, and then we'll do a lightning round with Marianne Williamson. Stay with us. You may be an ambassador to England or France You may like to gamble, you might like to dance

You may be the heavyweight champion of the world. You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls. But you're going to have to serve somebody. Yes, indeed. You're going to have to serve somebody. Well, it may be, but you're going to have to serve somebody. Marianne, let's do a lightning round. Okay. What was it like being roommates with Laura Dern in the 1980s? She was fantastic.

I was 31 and she was 18 when I met her. Hi, I'm Laura Dern. She was fantastic then and she's fantastic now. Are kids overmedicated? Oh, absolutely. How did people start... Who are adults, by the way? How did people start misattributing your writing to Nelson Mandela?

I don't know. Nobody has ever come up to me and said, you know, I'm the one who said that that quote from Return to Love was Nelson Mandela. I have no idea. One of the top Google hits when I Google you is from the New Yorker's Daily Shouts humor column, in which you are fictionally quoted as saying, I'd like to reallocate the government money that we're spending on vaccinating children to something useful, like taking mediums underwater to ask eldritch spirits.

Who are we? Why are we all here? Why do you think so many people are invested in painting you as kooky? Well, that one's kind of funny. I love it. The reason they are invested in seeing me as kooky is for the following reason. After the second Democratic debate, I was the most Googled person in 49 states. At that point, the head of the DNC said, get that woman off the stage. Actually said that? Clearly. How do I know that? Because within three days...

You couldn't turn on your computer, you couldn't turn on television, you couldn't turn on the radio, you couldn't go anywhere that somebody wasn't saying these talking points: "She's dangerous, she's crazy, she's kooky, she's anti-vax, she's anti-science." That's strategized, Barry.

These days, they'd rather not kill you. There are different ways of trying to assassinate you. And making a joke out of you is one of the ways that they seek to keep somebody out of what is perceived to be the sophisticated conversation. These forces have a preselected agenda and a preselected group of people

that they deem qualified to present this agenda to the American people in order to perpetuate their system. And they will be vicious, if necessary, in removing someone from that conversation. That kind of joke, the way you just said it, was kind of cute and funny. But the overall idea that Marianne Williamson is a kook, therefore you shouldn't listen to her or couldn't go hear her, is not funny at all. Marianne, who's the most interesting person you've ever met?

Dracula and Onassis. Do you think that we could be living in a simulation? We could take hours on that one. We'd have to go deep into what the word simulation means. In a way, this is all simulated by our own thoughts. If it were to turn out that we were living in a simulation, how would that change what you believe and how you live? Not an iota.

Do you think that the UFOs that the Pentagon released footage of are likely to turn out to be intelligent life? If not them, then there are others. Should psychedelics be legalized? Yes, and appropriately regulated. If you could take back one thing you said during your presidential run, what would it be? Well, even when you mentioned dark psychic forces, if I had just said dysfunctional psychological forces—

You know, if I just, you know, I was nervous in that moment and dark, you know, dark psychic forces was definitely giving people ammunition. When I said, I'll meet you on a field of love. Once again, it was the first debate. I was nervous. It was ridiculous. Gave people ammunition, a girlfriend or so on. I think my point about how I would contact the...

Prime Minister of New Zealand who had said that she wanted New Zealand to be the best place to raise a child. The fact that I would be calling her soon in my presidency to say, no, the United States is going to, no country is going to be better than the United States as a place to raise a child. But I said it in a ridiculous way. And I have no one but myself to blame for that. New York or Texas? To love Texas, to live New York.

What's the greatest gift you've ever received? The birth of my daughter. What's the last thing you changed your mind about? The older I get and the more things unfold in our world, the more value I see in not having an opinion about every little thing. Marianne Williamson, thank you so much for coming on Honestly. Thank you. Thank you.

My thanks to Marianne Williamson, a true American original. There's a lot we didn't get to talk about, including the Middle East, so maybe we'll have her back on sometime soon. As always, we want to know what you think. Please send us an email at tips at honestlypod.com and feel free to leave us a review. See you next time.