Donna Quesada: Hi Marianne. It is so nice to meet you!Marianne Williamson: Well, thank you. It’s so nice to meet you! Where are you?

Donna: Thank you. I’m in LA. And you’re in DC? Well, I know your time is valuable and so I hit record and we can we can get right to it, but I just thank you so much for your time. You’re someone who has been dedicated to bringing an awakened perspective to the world through all of the facets of the work that you do from your writing and your speaking and, and even in politics. And we’re just grateful for you and grateful to have you.

Marianne: Well, thank you. Thank you so much grateful to be here. It’s an honor.

Donna: And if you don’t mind, we’ll start with that very question. What is awakening to your, Marianne?

Marianne: Well, there’s a line in the Course of Miracles, where it says in the Bible… it says that Adam fell asleep. And nowhere does it say that he woke up. From a metaphysical perspective, this entire world that we live in… three dimensions and separate bodies, and as glorious as this world can be at times… from a spiritual perspective, it’s a bit of a dream, that ultimate reality, according to the great metaphysical, spiritual religious systems… ultimate reality is love.

And the world that we live in, where there is violence and hatred and pain and all of the sorrow that comes from the sense that we’re separate from one another, is a kind of moral dream state. Now, sometimes this world of bodies can be a happy dream. It can be a world that works, it can be a world in which our relationships work and we’re living on the earth in a sustainable way. But what has happened instead, is that because of the lovelessness that dominates the planet, it’s not a happy dream. In fact, it’s a world which for millions and millions of people is a rather nightmarish condition.

So, our awakening is awakening to the fact that love is what is ultimately real. Love is our ultimate identity. And love is our purpose on this planet. Obviously, that reality, that perspective is 180 degrees away from the way we’re living now. But I think what’s happening on the planet is that we are realizing more and more every day, more and more people are realizing every day that we are on a trajectory of self-destruction, that humanity itself is on a collision course with itself. And so, in a very real sense, awakening is our only possibility for survival.

Donna: So, awakening is really to realize that we’re here to give love, to be love, to realize that we are interconnected by love? But we’re somehow blinded by the material reality and we’ve turned it into a kind of nightmarish state of affairs?

Marianne: You know, it’s really quite practical when you think about all the times in most of our lives… we’ve been doing something, saying something, behaving in a certain way, and a friend will say to you “wake up! What are you thinking! Wake up!” it’s that, multiplied exponentially. “What are you doing destroying the planet? Wake up scientists are telling us. We’re going to have an unlivable planet within decades. Wake up. “What are you doing being so irresponsible with nuclear bombs?”

Donna: Wake up.

Marianne: “What are you doing, using your powers of technology and finance and government to create a good life for a few people at the expense of the majority of the people? What are you doing? Wake up!” So, I think that we should remember this is all really very practical. We’re not talking about some theological theory. We’re talking about the abstract applications of principles that have to do with ultimate reality but they have application to our physical material reality living right here. That’s why when you look at either the Star of David or of the Christian cross, notice both symbols are the intersection, the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical of the material and the spiritual.

 So metaphysics is greater than the physics. That’s what metaphysics means, but it’s not a filter or perspective. Or an inquiry that in any way ignores our material reality. It enlivens our material reality, and it makes it holy. You know, the Course of Miracles says there’s nothing in the mortal material world that’s holy or unholy, except as determined by the purpose we ascribe to it. So the idea of enlightenment is not the idea of making the material world bad. It’s just recognizing that there’s an aspect of the mind, which would use our experience… living here, to create together, to love one another, to produce beautiful things. And we’ve all had those moments. And we all see those examples where that’s what we’re doing on this planet. But we’ve also seen war and poverty and all kinds of unnecessary suffering that comes from a misuse of the mind. That leads us to thought and behavior that makes the material world a place of pain.

Donna: You know, that’s an interesting thing. We are creating a world that is becoming uninhabitable…You’ve done so much for women’s issues, and I’d like to kind of drill down into that a bit and ask you, do you think that we have done that… created this kind of damage by way of the imbalance of feminine and masculine energies on this planet?

Marianne: Well, I don’t think there’s any question about that. My mother, when I was young, my mother used to say that a woman’s role was to take care of her children and her home. And I, when I was young, I thought my mother was very regressive to say that and I wanted to go out into the world and do something more important than just that. It took me decades to realize I was wrong and my mother was right. It’s just that women have come to the point, and I think my mother herself would see it…that when we think about the Divine Feminine, she is mainly concerned with taking care of her children and taking care of her home. It’s just that we have evolved to realizing that it’s everybody’s child, and that the Earth itself is our home. So yes, care of children, care of home, meaning all of the children of the world and the planet itself. The absence of that focus has taken us to where we are.

Donna: I love that. It’s surprising and different than what I expected. But it’s quite lovely. And it brings us into that notion of interconnectedness. You know, that all of the mystical traditions speak of, from Buddhism to Christianity… we all are children of the planet. So, it’s not necessarily old fashioned to say that our home is the planet, and it’s not wrong to take care of our home. You know, it’s kind of an interesting twist on that… what your mother used to say.

Marianne: No, I mean, Hello, the planet is our home. That’s the only home that we have and every child within it is precious, and of course, to God, we’re all the children of God. So, at this point, we have not only forgotten who we are, we have forgotten our purpose on this earth. Now, it was only recently in world history and even now, only in a portion of the world’s population, that women have the right in the public sphere, to express our deepest feelings and our deepest intentions and goals for the planet. So, in a world where women do not have a voice outside their own home and sometimes hardly even inside their own home, the collateral damage is not only to women, but also to children, and also to the environment in which we live. And that’s the world we live in now. So, of course, it is a product of a terrible imbalance.

Donna: What will it take to bring balance back? And I know you’re doing so much by stepping into the political realm. Do you believe… I guess my question is twofold. Do you believe in democracy still, and what will it take to make it work?

Marianne: Of course, I believe in democracy. The idea of a democratic society is not only a political step forward for the human race, it’s a moral and spiritual step forward for the human race. It’s the very idea that people, all people, should have the right to self-actualize, should have the right to spread their wings, should have the right to soar, should have the right to create, should have the right to actualize whatever God given potential they have within them, and that the wisdom that accrues to them just from the human experience, regardless of where they come from, regardless of any of the outer facets that have there… there was a wisdom there, and that wisdom can be represented. And in that representative democracy, that wisdom that accrues from all those people would be the guiding force in a society.

Worse, I believe, and the attacks on both in our country and around the world are very, very frightening. Because an authoritarian model is the opposite of that. The authoritarian model is the idea that not everyone should have the right to spread their wings. Now we have never in our country fully actualized that ideal. From the very beginning, we had 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, who imbued our founding document with that ideal, but out of 56 of the signers, 41 of them were slave owners. So, that dichotomy between the principles on which we purport to stand on,  principles which within every generation had not only inheritance, but people willing to struggle, sacrifice and even die for those principles.

At the same time, we have always had in every generation of forces, which use, for their own economic purposes, such as slave owners, had no intention whatsoever to see those principles actualized and would institutionally resist it, and return that, has been the story of the American mind…. that struggle is baked into the cake. And every generation really lives and what we’re living through in our time is really the same thing. It’s a reiteration of the same, of the same struggle. Unfortunately, the stakes for the entire human race are so high now. If you have, for instance, fossil fuel extraction. Yes, all companies, fossil fuel companies, and people who derive wealth from that have done and continue to do very, very well. On the other hand, we’re literally killing ourselves, right? That’s right now, at this point, the survival of the human race is at stake. Should we continue to put profit making powers before safety and security? And  before the wellbeing of people and animals and the planet?

Donna: And I thank you for mentioning animals, you know, so often left out of the equation,

Marianne: And we’re not the only species here. Right. And so…

Donna: Stepping into this arena, you felt… going back to the idea of democracy… the threat, you know, of these corruptive forces. What will it take to make it work properly?

Marianne: Well, I think that we have to recognize the urgency of this moment. That’s the most important thing right now. We have been raised in a generation where we were under the delusion that we could basically farm out our citizenship. You know, there are other people handling that… they’ll handle that, and we don’t have to worry, it will show up and we’ll vote every two years… maybe, definitely vote every four years and you know, they’re a bunch of jerks, but our institutions are strong, we’ll be okay. Conscious people have realized, we’re not okay. If you just speak to your representatives every two years, every four years… there are corporate lobbyists speaking to them literally every hour of every workday… then who’s going to be swaying and influencing policy?

So, what’s happened now is our political system has become basically a system of legalized bribery at this point. I think more and more people are realizing that you can’t bubble yourself off from that…there is no amount of money that any of us could make, to really protect ourselves and our children from the horrors that could erupt on this planet. If we continue on the trajectory, we’re on. A lot of people in the higher consciousness and spiritual world had just seen the whole toxicity of a political system over the last few decades. I don’t want anything to do with it because it’s so toxic, but look at what has happened. If you leave a field because it’s toxic, the more people who are the more forward thinking citizens have nothing to do with this.

What’s going to happen except that it becomes more and more toxic. That’s right. Well, I think a lot of people are realizing this is no joke now. This is our democracy. At stake was six inches on the cliff in the state of our democracy. We’re six inches from the cliff and the state of our environment was six inches from nuclear, in the state of international relations, even perils of nuclear war. Once you know… I have always felt and I’ve talked about it for years, that the people who are the most spiritually aware are the last people who should be setting out the great social and economic and political questions of our day. Because if you know what changes one heart, you’re the one who knows what would change the world.

All that a nation is, is a group of people. And also, if you look at the greatest social justice movements in the United States history, they did arise from spiritual or religious circles, abolition emerged from the early evangelical churches in New Hampshire, many of the women who were the head leaders of the women’s suffragette movement, were Quakers and of course, Dr. King was a Baptist preacher.

 So traditionally, those who are coming from a sense of doing the right thing… doing that which is most loving, that which is most… just that which is most merciful, had been the drivers of political expansion and change and improvement.

So, I think it’s been to the detriment of our country over the last few years, that there has developed within the purview of those most interested in higher consciousness, a disconnection from politics. At the same time that the political system has been so corrupted by corporate forces putting their money and their profit making before everything else. People realize it, it’s time to not only wake up, wake up quickly, and I think the important thing here is, you can’t just wake up for yourself. It can’t just be an individual, solitary… Well, I got mine. That’s the problem. That’s not the answer.

Donna: Well, you bring up a wonderful point, this question of our individual awakening, as well as our collective awakening, and perhaps that’s the answer to the question… what needs to happen. We can’t just awaken on an individual level, there has to be a kind of collective awakening. And it’s almost as if we’re afraid to bring that spiritual language into the political sphere. There’s a divide, you know, there’s a disjunct between what  is spiritual and what is political, but perhaps that’s a misguided division.

Marianne: You know, I ran for president. I didn’t, you know, that’s just simply not true. What could be more spiritual than talking about nursing? What could be more spiritual than talking about justice? What could be more spiritual than talking about feeding the poor? What could be more spiritual than talking about a sustainable world? That’s the language. No, it’s not religious language. We have a, you know, we are a religiously pluralistic society. And we honor that. So, we do have a public conversation around politics… it’s days away from any kind of religious denomination or language and I support that, myself. But that’s not what spiritual is… spiritual is let’s treat people right. Spiritual is Let’s try to create peace rather than just wage war. Spiritual is Let’s protect the home and protect the children and protect the animals and protect the winters and protect the sea. That, to me, is spiritual.

Donna: Absolutely. Yeah.

Marianne: In terms of individual as well as collective change, Martin Luther King said that we must have quantitative shifts in our circumstances, as well as qualitative shifts in our souls. We have some big institutional corruptions; we have systemic racism and economic inequality that is baked into the cake of how our economy operates. All those kinds of things, and they must be addressed, but the philosophy of non-violence, as articulated by Gandhi, and then brought over to the United States by Martin Luther King, for application to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, married the two because Gandhi said that the end is inherent in the means… who we are, is what will ultimately determine the fruits of our actions. Everything we do, is infused with the consciousness with which we do it.

So, for instance, given what’s happening on the planet today, even in our country, there’s a meanness in the air. People are cynical, people are angry, and we all see these things within ourselves. It’s very easy right now, to get desperate, to be angry, to be cynical, to be all of that. We can’t be that and change this world the way we want to change it.

This is what Gandhi said, we must be the change so that you meditate in the morning, you know, the Dalai Lama said, to change the world, we must have a plan, but no plan will work unless we meditate.So in the morning particularly, meditation, mindfulness, yoga, prayer, all of those things affect our nervous system.

You know, the world as we see it today is a product of the people we have been. The people we have been, is then reflected in the thoughts we think, and the behavior that  we carry out into the planet… Today, we must have different nervous systems, different thoughts, our hearts and minds must change. Then our energy changes, then our ideas change, then our behavior changes, and then we save the world.

Read and Watch Part 2 Here: Awaken Interviews Marianne Williamson – Take Care of Your Inner Self,  So You Can Really Contribute to the External  World

Read and Watch Part 3 Here:  Awaken Interviews Marianne Williamson Pt 3 – When You Are Loving, Good Things Are Going To Happen