Marianne Williamson? Inexperienced? Not at all.
In fact, she does have a ton of experience… in New Age, on-stage pseudotherapy, where she solves the problems of the troubled with memorized lines from A Course in Miracles. She’s been doing these sessions at workshops and retreats for decades, and the schtick is always the same: if only the person would change their minds about their problem, the world would be healed.
While this may fly on the workshop circuit, if you listen carefully you’ll hear that she gives the same answer on the stump.
It comes through most clearly when she’s pressed on questions of strategy. She will instantly pivot to talking about the spirit and the soul. The effect is a disarming oscillation between the political and the personal. Are we talking about defeating fascists? No, no, that’s too worldly! We’re talking about opening our hearts. And if that feels good during a politically tense exchange, it’s because she changed the subject.
To see how this sleight-of-hand works, Matthew examines two classic Williamson encounters to show that the answers she gives on the stump aren’t much different from the answers she gives on her New Age retreats.
Show Notes
That Time Byron Katie Gaslit a Follower about Trump | by Matthew Remski
I'm Afraid of Trump—The Work of Byron Katie
Being Rejected for Your Spiritual Beliefs | Q&A With Marianne Williamson
Mindfulness can make you selfish: A pioneering new study examines the social effects of mindfulness
Marianne Williamson with TYT's John Iadarola & Francesca Fiorentini
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello everybody, my name is Matthew Remsky and I'm here with a conspirituality brief called Marianne Williamson's Spiritual Therapy Schtick.
Just one bit of housekeeping.
Please pre-order our book through the link at the bottom of the show notes for this episode.
And here's an endorsement from Julian Field, co-host of QAnon Anonymous.
Intelligent and compassionate, Conspirituality is full of insight rooted in direct experience and rigorous analysis.
Beres, Remski, and Walker are deeply familiar with and curious about their subject.
An essential and unique book that captures both the yearning for and devastating effects of Conspirituality as a phenomenon and way of life.
Okay, so this brief report and analysis is part of what I'm sure will be an ongoing series about the sheer oddness of Marianne Williamson running for president.
Now, my basic position is that if you're a Democrat sincerely considering voting for Williamson because you appreciate her policy positions, that's totally understandable.
I hold most of the values that she does, or says she does.
And I think it's great that she's out there every day talking about Medicare for All, environmental destruction, slavery reparations, and trans rights.
But I also know, and I think you should know too, that the only reason she's on the world's radar at all, the only reason she is able to run for this nomination, is that she has promoted, taught from, and profited off of a book and a spiritual philosophy that is the very definition of narcissistic neoliberal toxicity.
That book is A Course in Miracles.
It's her Bible.
And it is a dumpster fire of victim-blaming responsibilism presented through the smug voice of a channeled, new-age asshole Jesus who offers wisdom like, your body isn't real, and all conflict is in the mind, and getting sick means you are defending yourself against God.
It really is that bad.
Now I don't think that loving this book is her fault or it makes her a bad person.
She just picked it up in 1977.
She got course-pilled and she went all in.
And she's been rewarded for championing this book for decades.
This book has formed her public persona just as much as she has popularized it.
And she's racked up way too many sunken costs now to backpedal.
And Williamson has not placed a hold on this Course in Miracles part of her career while running her campaign.
Every morning, subscribers can wake up to a new lecture on video by Williamson focusing on the daily lesson of the course.
Many alt-spirituality and alt-health sites host and sell her lectures and workshops, including Commune, where the dialogue I'll be analyzing today comes from.
Now you could argue that this is just like any other business person maintaining their interests and passive income while making a political run with all of its inherent time sacrifices.
But let's say that that business person was selling crypto in the morning while championing wealth distribution in the afternoon.
Or if they were selling SUVs in the morning while arguing for a reduction in fossil fuel consumption in the afternoon.
What Williamson is doing is just as incoherent, though less visible because it's conceptual.
Now speaking personally, because my colleagues on the podcast might have a different angle here, I'm in favor of progressives leaning on spiritual support in the form of a tested social gospel, as we see with the Catholic worker movement in the 1930s, or black churches through the civil rights movement through to today.
Religious institutions can be powerful sites of organization and class solidarity, but A Course in Miracles cannot provide that because it is less of an institution than a lifestyle brand used by a mainly white demographic to lend gravitas to spiritual bypassing and wellness pseudoscience.
Its central focus is on getting the individual to believe that they can transform the ephemeral world by meditating on how holy they really are and how illusory all conflict really is.
On a similar point, networks matter.
The commune platform that hosts the dialogue I'll look at and the course that it comes from
is a real quality and values grab bag where social justice and mindfulness influencers
are cross-marketed with COVID contrarians like Charles Eisenstein and Michael Beckwith,
with shitpost demagogues like Russell Brand, COVID minimizer, Zach Bush,
and then also the two biggest stuffed shirts in the Anglo-Indian world, Deepak Chopra and Sadhguru.
Now, full disclosure here, we've been guests on the podcast of Jeff Krasnow,
the CEO of Commune.
This was early on in our project and he took an interest in our study of pseudoscience and spiritual bypassing in New Age and wellness cultures.
And he was particularly concerned about wellness people jumping on the QAnon train.
So we're not quite sure about where those concerns went.
Currently, Williamson is being featured in a Commune Wellness Summit, along with some of the guys that I've mentioned.
It would be unfair to assume that Williamson overtly endorses any of these people, especially because on the surface level, her politics would reject all of them.
But at the same time, cross-marketing is a form of soft endorsement, rooted in mutual monetization.
It's just the way money is made in the new age and wellness worlds.
And Williamson has to know that in politics, you are the company that you keep.
Now, we've covered just how dumb A Course in Miracles is in episode 148, which is called Marianne Williamson and Asshole Jesus.
I've done other writing on this as well, and I'll link to all of that.
That episode gave some attention to the decades of reports that suggest that Marianne Williamson isn't really a very nice person, given what her former colleagues and staffers have to say about her temper and condescension.
But what I wanna focus on today is related to that theme of interpersonal dynamics.
And I'll do it by examining one of the mainstays of her public discourse in spiritual circles, which is the onstage intrusive pseudo-therapy session, in which some fawning follower gets up in front of a group to discuss a life difficulty or trauma, and the spiritual influencer plays at being a kind of therapist.
While using the follower to sell a spiritual product.
In the following dialogue, you're going to hear a lot of toxic, reductive, and intrusive ideas.
But beyond that Course in Miracles content, I hope to make clear just how grandiose, presumptuous, dominating, and simply misinformed Williamson has to be, at least when playing this role, to pull this off.
It's one thing to analyze the cursed book that a charismatic is devoted to, and I've done that probably too many times, but I'll concede that that argument only goes so far because you can't really prove the extent of what a person believes because of a book they've read.
Even though with Williamson it's pretty clear she's in lockstep with the course program,
when it comes out that she's suggesting that visualization can redirect hurricanes,
that it can cool down nuclear reactors, or that meditation can prevent COVID.
But there's something deeper on display when you see how this book encourages
Williamson to relate to people directly.
So, in the following dialogue, you'll hear her quote the book by chapter and verse as she doles out not only advice but a magic ritual presumed to solve the problem of an earnest but fawning follower.
And I believe it's an important dynamic to consider because it gives a sense of how Williamson problem solves.
How she would lecture those she considers less enlightened.
And on a deeper level, it shows the bright side of the interpersonal temper tantrums she reportedly throws.
Because whether she's commanding people to realize that only love is real, or she's bossing people around on the campaign trail, There is a kind of dominance at play, concealed within a spiritual message and an affable social respectability.
Now, before I start rolling the clips, I also want to make clear that the setup and the premises of this dialogue are in no way unique.
It's a kind of pseudo-therapeutic power play that has a long history in workshop and encounter group culture.
And it might be inspired by a Bedine root.
Because after all, the ancient teaching texts of religions like Hinduism and Buddhism are often delivered in dialogue form where the aspirant comes to the foot of the master and asks for guidance.
The word Upanishad, the name for a genre of Indian spiritual dialogues, actually translates to sitting at the feet of.
Now I'm not sure who innovated its global north, its modern, more aggressive forms.
I mean it might go back to Blavatsky, it might be there in Edgar Cayce, Gurdjieff might be doing it, I don't know.
but we definitely see it depicted in the brilliant film, The Master,
starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as L. Ron Hubbard and Joaquin Phoenix playing Freddie Quell
who becomes Hubbard's public test subject.
And there are these long scenes where Hubbard just abuses him in public for apparent spiritual benefit.
So this is in the 1950s.
And then in the 1960s, Charles Diederich founded the Synanon Substance Recovery
Cult in Santa Monica, California.
And its central ritual was something he called the game, a form of attack therapy,
where a group member would be singled out for a hot seat session and mercilessly criticized
for moral and spiritual failings.
Bye.
Complete humiliation was a sign of growth.
Now with the advent of a more feminized cultic landscape in 1980s and 1990s wellness culture, we see a softer iteration of the dynamic emerge, led by the archetype of the charismatic yoga teacher leading impromptu group therapy in the midst of a training or workshop, often singling out individuals for particular attention.
Now the vast majority of these teachers aren't trained in any clinical discipline, but somehow the vibe of the yoga career has given them an overweening confidence.
In the cult of Anna Forrest Yoga, where my colleague Julian learned a lot of skills but also how to stay the fuck away from charismatics, she would single people out on the studio floor and explain to them how their tortured souls were visible through their suboptimal postures.
Of course, it's not only women who are doing this performative domination counseling.
Tony Robbins makes the dyadic spiritual confrontation a centerpiece of his arena shows.
In all of these oppressive duets, the power dynamics are obvious.
The leader is granted ultimate interpretive authority over the follower in a public scenario in which the incentives to go along with it are very high.
The follower is always rewarded for accepting the interpretation of the leader, despite the fact that this might be the first time that they are meeting with each other.
The scene looks like therapy or counseling, and the leader can cosplay a kind of therapeutic care.
But it's actually the opposite, because while the follower thinks they are there for help, what they're really there for is to prove the brilliant compassion of the teacher.
One of the most famous practitioners of this public spiritual hazing is Byron Katie, also a featured presenter on Commune.
Katie is the innovator of something she calls The Work, which is a series of cognitive hacks designed to make you believe that you're not suffering from actual negative circumstances, but from your thoughts about your negative circumstances.
Therefore, she argues, if you can talk yourself out of your thoughts, the world and your place in it changes.
In a famous tweet from 2012, she went farther.
There's never a mistake in the universe.
So if your partner is angry, good.
If there are things about him that you consider flaws, good.
Because these flaws are your own.
You're projecting them, and you can write them down, inquire, and set yourself free.
People go to India to find a guru, but you don't have to.
You're living with one.
Your partner will give you everything you need for your own freedom.
Now in one out-of-print book, she went so far as to say that even if her baby was torn from her arms in the lineup to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, she would still not be disturbed because she would have the power to change her thoughts.
Now, to bring this into concrete terms, I've got an example of how one of her encounters opens.
And this is recorded in 2017 at a public event where a middle-aged woman who is looking very disturbed and describes her feelings about the American political landscape is on stage with Katie.
The video was actually released on the day of Trump's inauguration.
Now when the cameras pan back, we see that this is on a stage in front of several hundred silent people who are soaking it all in.
Let's hear what you've written.
I am frightened of Donald Trump because he could create concentration camps.
He could start a nuclear war.
You're not afraid of him because he could.
When you're writing these worksheets, you know, he could.
I'm afraid he will.
Yeah, I'm afraid he will.
I'm afraid he will start a nuclear war.
I'm afraid he will ruin the environment for my son and future generations.
So hopefully you notice something important that right off the bat,
Katie changes the woman's actual words from could to will.
Now this seems small, but it's crucial because at the heart of these exchanges
is a kind of domination that hinges on making the participant look naive or baffled or clueless.
And in this instance, Katie encourages her to take a more extreme
and therefore less defensible position than she actually has.
She makes her say, I am afraid he will build concentration camps, which is a paranoid statement and it's easy to reality check.
I'm afraid he could build concentration camps is actually a feeling state but Katie doesn't allow
her to have that because it won't work with the formula that follows and this goes on for 37
minutes. I will link to it so that you can see it in its full form.
But all you really have to know is that by the end, Katie has pressured the woman to recognize that it's her own fears about Trump that are creating the reality he might bring.
And that she will find peace if she realizes her fears are ignorant, and if she just gives him a chance.
Now, of course, this didn't age well, and it's a tribute to Katie's earnestness or stubbornness that she's left it posted to YouTube.
In that same exchange, by the way, a very racist aspect of this conservatism becomes visible because Katie shuts down a black woman who gets up to raise the point that 53% of white women voted for Trump.
And she then implies that Katie's technique is helping those white women feel better about it.
Now Katie interrupts her to assert that the expectations of black women for justice are actually the problem.
She conflates the woman's statistic with belief and then even throws in a sweetheart in her speech and the woman smiles, apparently disarmed, and so a concrete reality of oppression is absorbed and neutralized by the technique.
I want to be really clear that to my knowledge, Williamson never goes as far with the implications of the philosophy that overlaps with that of Byron Katie.
But the structure and mechanics of her interventions are the same.
So here are the steps, and they become very predictable once you see it in action.
So first of all, The basic premise of this interaction that we'll look at is that everyone has gathered to partake of the wisdom of the leader, and that wisdom, everyone knows, will be useful to everyone.
Secondly, the follower approaches that seat of wisdom with a tender question.
Then, the leader presumes a penetrating knowledge of the follower.
Fourth, because there are no real boundaries, intrusive questions followed by vague diagnoses and bromide solutions are the norm.
And then finally, the follower shows their understanding and gratitude, and this just adds to the gratification of the leader and the group.
Okay, so I think that might be enough setup to listen to this exchange between Williamson and a participant in her seminar course, which is called A Spiritual Makeover, which was published on Commune on February 16th, just one week before she announced her run.
Now this is a minor point, but I want to make clear just how overlapped her political life is with her spiritual life, and the fact that what she's doing every day on the stump is really an amplification of this kind of counseling.
Okay, so the setup for this dialogue is a retreat center conference room with zen-ish decor and wood paneling.
Williamson sits beside a woman in her 30s, there's a coffee table between them, the woman's name is Peyton, and she opens by disclosing her situation.
So I was raised pastor's kid in a church, and as I seek to realign my thinking and reorient my experience of the world in a way that feels vibrationally true, I find myself in struggle around how to boundary myself or protect myself so that I can grow in the way I want to grow without alienating my family that's very deep in their conviction that I'm going the wrong way because it's not the way that I was raised.
So just a note to start that if the language sounds odd, it's totally natural in new age wellness spaces to speak about normal events and changes in terms of realignment and vibrations and to use the passive voice like I find myself in struggle.
So I'm not making fun of this, but rather I want to point out that the phrasing of the question telegraphs an acceptance of an individualistic spiritual answer to a relational conflict.
Later in the exchange, Peyton describes herself as the catalyst for change within her family, or the family's kind of enlightened leader.
And this is also typical for New Age encounter sessions, where absent family members are openly spoken about as being kind of spiritual drags.
So, here's how Marianne responds.
When I first saw The Course in Miracles, I'm Jewish.
So, when I first picked up The Course in Miracles, I was intrigued because there was no author on the front of the book, which, in those days, you never saw.
No author was mentioned.
The first, in the introduction, it says, this is a required course.
And you come to understand it doesn't mean this particular form, but that the spiritual path is We're all on it, whether we know it or not.
Then I opened it.
I was so intrigued.
I opened it up and I saw all these Christian terms.
Now, I had studied a lot of comparative religion in school, but this was not school.
And I thought, oh, you know, I can't read that.
A year later, because I'm Jewish, and this is obviously a Christian book, I thought to myself, A year later, I picked it up again.
I was in such pain, I wasn't even noticing the language.
You read it, like a few pages, it becomes clear.
This is not the Christian religion.
And it's like, oh cool, these are psychotherapeutically oriented terms.
And I had never been taught anything about those terms at all.
So, Williamson begins with a relatable anecdote about being in a similar trans-religious situation as a young person, and begins to make the argument that A Course in Miracles is not religious, but universal, because the language is psychological.
I mean, never mind that it's dictated from Jesus.
And then, without asking any other question, without finding out how they spend their time together or whether Peyton really feels safe when they do, Williamson cruises from talking about herself right into her first bit of advice, which doesn't come from her, but from Jesus, which is to change the subject when she's with her family.
To not use her newfound interest in A Course in Miracles to create more tension within the family.
And Williamson does also empathize with the painful alienation, and so far it's going okay.
Nothing too intrusive.
But then she also says, you don't need to protect yourself.
And this begins to point to a core A Course in Miracles belief, which is that you're never really being attacked by anyone.
It's a misunderstanding, a misplacement of love.
Williamson lays out the thesis at minute six.
So, hear me on this, okay?
Only love is real.
Nothing else exists.
They love you.
And remember, the reason they want you to know that if you don't do Jesus their way that you will go to hell is because they really believe it and they fear for you.
It's true.
It's because they love you.
They've been trained into that thinking and they really love you.
The Course in Miracles says that all behavior is to be perceived in one of two ways.
So first of all, in their mind, it's not even loveless behavior.
In their mind, it's loving behavior.
They're trying to save you from hell.
They really believe that.
So in their mind, they're very upset because, oh my God, she's going to hell, right?
The Course in Miracles says, interpret all behavior one of two ways.
See it as either love or a call for love.
I know you love me, thank you so much.
That's what that email, I know you love me, thank you so much.
Don't defend against them.
The Course in Miracles says, in my defenselessness, my safety lies.
I know, to find that place within yourself, all they're really saying is how much they love you.
And you say it's rejection, they don't want to meet with you, so that's their choice.
But if you can take it into your heart with the knowledge, they love you.
They just, there's the scales in front of their eyes as we see it.
Nothing to protect yourself against, nothing to set a boundary of sorts, except I know that you love me.
Okay, so did you get that?
There's only two ways of interpreting behavior, and both of them are about love.
This is straight out of A Course in Miracles, as she keeps saying.
The idea is that you are safe to the extent that you become defenseless.
Now, maybe Williamson has in the moment, in the context of this workshop or seminar, however long it is, maybe they're there together for a weekend and she knows something more about Peyton and she's made the intuitive assessment that her troubles are within the zone where they can be safely philosophized away and that she isn't in any kind of danger that makes boundary setting essential.
But she can't know for sure and unfortunately there's nothing in the structure of this encounter that allows anyone to really ask whether Williamson has enough of the story to claim that these family members really do love her or what that means if they are not supporting her.
So one would hope that if Peyton was describing hateful conduct at home because she had come out as being gay or trans that Williamson's message would be different and that the question of whether a trans kid's transphobic parents really love them would just be beyond the point because what does love mean when it's disconnected from support?
So, Williamson's willingness to just pontificate about what's necessary here to a stranger indicates that she really only has one tool to use, and that's completely consistent with a core message of A Course in Miracles, which is that forgiveness, in all instances, is the only real path to peace.
Now Peyton goes on to describe some of the difficult impacts of the alienation and also how her husband is now allying with her in the family conflict.
But listen carefully to the Course in Miracles comment that comes next from Williamson.
Well, the Course in Miracles would just remind you that they are innocent children of God, you are an innocent child of God, and all of that is on the level of the mind.
All of that is on the level of a worldly illusion.
Whom God has brought together, no one and nothing can put us under, and we do not want theology to put us asunder.
So this is as much, you know, the Course in Miracles says, only what you are not given can be lacking in any situation.
So it's easy to say they're not giving you approval, but it only hurts you if it makes you close your heart to them.
We always feel like, I am hurt because you closed your heart to me.
The real pain can only come about if I close my heart to you.
Does that make sense?
So this is just saying more love is needed.
Your ego would say, they should love me no matter what I think.
And actually the spirit would say, well are you loving them totally no matter what they think?
On the level of content, I just don't buy this advice because it takes a universalist message of commonality to the absurd conclusion that it makes no difference how others regard you.
We are all equally blessed.
And the only conflict that arises is on the level of the mind, on the level of illusion.
And perhaps that's why Williamson thinks that group meditation can change the path of a hurricane, or that visualizing your body filling with light will protect you from COVID, or that her love can transform Trump and his America.
But there's something else here that's a little bit more grave because it's one thing to believe this stuff and to take comfort in it and even share it around with friends like whatever gets you through the day.
But it's something else entirely to work up the grandiosity it takes to counsel strangers this way on stage in front of a camera and for money.
Group therapy is a thing, and many people benefit from it, but it's licensed, it's not performative, it doesn't happen to gratify or aggrandize the leader, and it doesn't give cookie-cutter answers to the complex issues of strangers who then feel compelled to submit to the leader's interpretation because that's why the group has gathered, that's what they've paid for.
If you're a Democrat thinking about giving Williamson money or voting for her in the primary, think of the acutely high regard you would have to hold yourself in to publicly dominate a stranger with your spiritual worldview.
Not in a general sense of, this is how the world works, but in the particular and personal sense of, I know that this is what you should do.
Do you really think that it's her instinct to ask people about what they need and then provide it, even if it doesn't accord with her personal values?
The whole premise of this dialogue, and all of the dialogues that it echoes, is narcissistic.
And I would argue that Williamson is doing the same thing on the stump.
That there's a parallel on one hand between providing untrained performative spiritual counsel for a group and on the other hand affecting the persona of a trained politician offering overly simplistic solutions.
Now, at least in her political life, the solutions sound progressive.
But if her personal advice and problem-solving is so misattuned, so tone-deaf and overconfident, how exactly does that scale up?
Because when it comes down to it, this is Williamson's real experience in the world.
This is her proven habit and track record.
On previous episodes, Julian has spoken about how he used to go to her Saturday morning Course in Miracles sessions in LA in the 1990s, and he reports the exact same scenarios.
Participants sitting in the healing hot seat, deferring to her intrusive wisdom.
Now this session ends with Williamson leading the group in a meditation in which they visualize Peyton and her family reconciling through beams of brilliant light.
It's very beautiful.
And it follows the same basic logic of the hurricane and COVID meditations.
And when everyone opens their eyes, this is how she rounds it up.
Okay, now let's talk about this a little bit.
We literally went into a brain synapse that had not been there before.
Because you have been taught a vision of the world in which what's real is their opinion of you, your opinion of them, how they see Jesus, how you see Jesus, all of that.
That is the realm of suffering.
To them, the only way out of this conflict is for you to change your mind.
I just want to flag the pseudoscience nod there.
So obviously brain synapses form and change regularly, but it really sounds like Williamson is making a medical claim here.
To you, the only way out of this conflict is for them to change theirs, at least about you.
We went to that place, you know the roomy line?
Beyond all good and bad, beyond all right or wrong, there is a field I'll meet you there.
We went there.
Beyond belief, we went there.
She quoted that same Rumi line in the 2019 primary debates, where she fantasized about meeting Trump in Rumi's field.
That's what prayer does.
The Course in Miracles says prayer is a medium of miracles.
So in prayer, we allow the Holy Spirit to take us to a place that our intellectual mind, I could say it to you, But it remains an abstract thought.
But when we went into it, in that actual space, so that we went there, that is now a place in your consciousness that, having been given to you by the Holy Spirit, cannot be removed.
So, total word salad here that really hinges on the habit that Course in Miracles teachers have of using multiple, undefined terms.
So, it'll be little things.
It'll be places where you'll say to your husband, You know what, I can't believe I'm not triggered by this email, but somehow I'm not triggered by it.
It'll be little things, like when I said things to you, like, thank you, thank you so much, I know you love me, I really appreciate it, whatever I had said before.
I could see you having, before we said the prayer, done it as a behavioral thing.
But you're gonna find, you know what?
So this is the deal.
You have homework.
Pray for their happiness five minutes every day.
And I mean, and this is literal, guys, okay?
Pray for their happiness five minutes.
It's a lot of time.
You're probably going to have to build up to it, right?
Whatever images come in your mind, might be Jesus, whatever images come, honor what your mind is coming up with in terms of images, okay?
Pray for their happiness five minutes every day.
In 30 days, this will be your miracle.
Either, and remember all minds are joined, so when you're praying for their happiness, they're going to feel it.
They're not going to know it consciously.
In 30 days, one of two things is going to happen.
Either their behavior will change a bit, or you won't care.
So Marianne Williamson's practice of prayer, according to her, will yield miraculous and literal results.
But with the escape hatch, that may be the real miraculous change will be that Peyton no longer cares about her family's opinions.
She will have risen above the battlefield.
Now, most New Age and wellness teachings have these shifting goalposts and get out of jail cards.
If the spell doesn't materially work, it spiritually works.
And that might be better, because as we know, the material world is on the level of illusion, and healing only really happens on the spiritual level.
This is a culture, by the way, that loves to talk about levels and which level you should be on or imagine yourself on.
So if during the pandemic you heard Christiane Northrup or the channelers like Lori Ladd or Elizabeth April talk about the necessity of ascending to 5D consciousness, that's the same idea.
Politics and viruses are just so 3D, dudes, and our real task is to lift ourselves up into the place where troubles simply vanish.
Williamson is firm about brushing aside what she characterizes as distortions of her character as a crystal and aura healer because she doesn't talk about crystals and auras.
But I think she protests too much because crystal and aura healers rely on exactly what Williamson told Peyton in this dialogue.
They will say that if the quantum properties of the crystal don't literally heal your cancer, they will shift your vibrations.
And Williamson builds similar but implicit backdoors into her other claims about prayers and intentions.
If meditation and visualization does not boost the immune system and help prevent COVID, it is still beneficial because it calms us and creates a sense of shared bonds.
That sounds like common sense, but then there's actually some good research that suggests that meditation can just as easily make a person more selfish, less interested in working with others.
And certainly what we have seen over our careers in the wellness world and in the research for our podcast, A Course in Miracles is a central fixture in a subculture that, when not chronically politically disengaged, is vulnerable to right-wing or libertarian social movements.
So I think it's useful to consider this dialogue with Peyton as an analogy for Williamson's political technique and her theory of change.
She's effective on the stump because she is able to deliver universalist messages with compelling certainty that describe an equitable and peaceful vision of the future.
She has chapters and verses of progressive scripture committed to memory, and she is able to retrieve and recite them with the same dexterity that characterizes her teaching of A Course in Miracles.
And in some ways, this makes her sound like she's echoing a long line of spiritually inspired progressive politicians.
But she is in a different category because she has shown that she believes, through A Course in Miracles, that the incantation of wishes is the mechanism of change.
She's not using her Bible as a source of moral support, but as a compendium of psychospiritual spells.
When we're talking about Williamson's lack of political experience, we're pointing at something important, but perhaps arguably ungenerous.
Because after all, she could learn on the job.
She could suddenly change her theory of change.
She could give up on the axiom that forgiveness solves every problem, because that doesn't work with fascists.
Miracles happen, as she would say.
But this would take overcoming decades of practiced and repetitive and lucrative experience in disarming people by telling them how they should feel according to her intuitions inspired by a channeled Jesus.
That's how she made millions.
That's how she has been told she is successful and beloved.
That is her wheelhouse.
It's a shtick that goes back over a long time.
It is a spirituality that has never supported progressive values because it has always been about telling privileged people that they can solve their own problems.
As an interpersonal technique, it is both presumptuous and incurious in a way that no progressive politician can afford to be.
Okay, I'm going to round up by addressing the argument of, doesn't she know the difference between these two lanes?
Isn't it unfair to assume that she'll ride this workshop shtick to public office?
And to respond to this, I've got a clip of Marianne being interviewed by Francesca Fiorentini on the left-leaning Damage Report show, which is part of the Young Turks Network.
Now, Fiorentini's colleagues at TYT have taken a shine to Williamson's platform, but my criticism would be that I don't think they have a solid background in her record.
Here's the exchange.
I have a question, Marianne, about how you defeat the right in this country when they are so clearly, they believe themselves to be spiritually superior.
They believe themselves to be abiding by, I don't know, whatever God told them to make women second class citizens take away the abortion rights.
Demonize LGBTQ plus people, demonize things like drag shows.
Pretend like you're helping children when in fact you're just dooming them even further.
We've got a pretty spiritually bankrupt opposition in this country.
How do you deal with a party that clearly was just never hugged enough as a child?
As a political strategy, like what do you do?
Well, to be honest, you don't say some of the things that you just said.
First of all, I'm not thinking in terms of defeating the right.
I'm just going to pause here for a moment to note that Williamson is on a political show.
Francesca's co-host, John Iadarola, had just asked a strategy question about dealing with Democratic congressional roadblockers like Manchin and Sinema.
And Williamson punted that question, saying that if she didn't have congressional power, she'd use executive orders and the bully pulpit.
So Francesca brings a second, a little bit more frustrated strategy question, which is basically, how do you defeat misogynist fascists?
And Williamson offers one bit of communication strategy, but then the rest of the answer turns the attention to her wheelhouse, to model non-defensiveness and non-aggression, and to scold the naively reactive and emotional younger woman across from her.
Maybe this sounds familiar.
And by the way, if you look at Lincoln's second inaugural, that issue of what God wants us to do was absolutely at the core of the abolition and slavery conversation back in the 1800s.
Both of them said, the Bible says I'm right.
That was core to that whole thing.
But obviously, as Lincoln said in his second inaugural, we can't both be right.
So at this point, I think that it's very difficult to wage an argument based on moral or spiritual principles when you yourself act like you're too cool to have that conversation.
And I think that's been a problem on the left now for decades.
Maybe you can hear the covert shaming creeping in here.
I mean, it's not entirely clear that Williamson's you is Francesca, in this instance, the one who's being too cool to be spiritually reflective.
But you can hear there's a personal edge to it, because Williamson knows about William Barber's Poor People's Coalition.
She knows Cornel West.
She's heard Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in Nashville.
So who else could Williamson really be talking about?
But hold on for a moment, because remember when Williamson said this thing to Peyton?
You know, the Course in Miracles says only what you are not giving can be lacking in any situation.
So it's easy to say they're not giving you approval, but it only hurts you if it makes you close your heart to them.
We always feel like I am hurt because you closed your heart to me.
The real pain can only come about if I close my heart to you.
Does that make sense?
So this is just saying more love is needed.
Your ego would say, they should love me no matter what I think.
And actually the spirit would say, well are you loving them totally no matter what they think?
So what's good for the commune video is good for the damage report.
Because Williamson makes the very same pivot with Francesca.
Just as changing the dynamic with her family is all on Peyton, Changing the political landscape is all on Francesca and her attitude, her capacity to be open-hearted.
Francesca is only really disturbed and hurt by what's going on because she's closed her heart.
And this is a disarming thought.
But it's brought about by a sleight of hand.
A rapid switch between the personal and the political.
So you never quite know what Williamson is talking about.
Are we talking about defeating fascists?
No, no.
That's too worldly.
So let's talk about becoming enlightened.
On a broader level, Williamson is suggesting that what's really wrong with politics is that people are not behaving in politics the way they would if they were in a video on Commune.
The problem is the lack of love and regard that everyone is bringing to the Commune retreat.
And the left is just as responsible as the right.
Actually, no.
They're completely responsible.
Because it's Francesca's ego that is demanding that people change their hateful ways.
The spirit would challenge Francesca to love the MAGA movement totally, no matter what they think of her or the marginalized.
Francesca shouldn't be so smug, Williamson implies, because- None of us has a monopoly on truth.
I'd like to help forge a new conversation.
I'm unabashedly progressive on my issues.
There's no doubt about that.
But we need to have a new American conversation, not just a new left conversation or a new right conversation.
People don't like to feel that you're trying to defeat them, but people like to feel you're trying to inspire them.
And in my experience, I'm more open to differences of opinion than you might think.
Notice how far away from strategy we are here.
This is now a lecture on tone policing, and the bet is that changing the subject will provide a kind of cognitive and emotional relief that the audience will associate with good leadership.
Cue Martin Luther King.
You know, Martin Luther King said, you have very little morally persuasive power with people who can feel your underlying contempt.
So all of us on both left and right need to clear ourselves of some of our self-righteousness and error, all that stuff that we all know so well, to find that place where we can talk to people.
And then when people feel heard and respected, it's amazing how far you can go.
Sure, I'll start doing that when they start respecting gay people and women.
But I hear you on everything else.
If I may say so, hold on a second.
If we wait until then, we'll never get there.
You know that on a political level, I agree with you.
But I go back to the Martin Luther King comment, and I've experienced it a lot in my life.
Start from a place of just listening.
It's amazing what can happen, and you can mount a conversation.
On a political level, absolutely.
On a political level, we've got to get in there and make clear, that's why I'm running.
On a political level, what you do is just achieve the levers of power.
But on the level of the conversation that we need to have in this country, in order to get to that point, we're all going to have to try a different tactic in our minds and in our own hearts.
So it's tricky, because Williamson always does throw in reality-based phrases like, on the political level, you have to achieve the levers of power.
But that's part of the oscillation between categories I mentioned.
It sounds good, but she won't stay on the levers of power part, because that's not what she can elaborate on.
The question of power and strategy will fade into the backdrop.
Because it's secondary to her expertise and instinct.
What she can elaborate on is how if younger people like Francesca were less angry, if Francesca only worked on herself more, if she only leaned into the holy truth that only love was real, the world would miraculously change because the world is a mirror of her mind.
So in dialogue with Francesca or Peyton or with anyone else who goes on stage with her to ask for her wisdom over the past 40 years, the tried and true technique, Williamson's bread and butter, is to disarm the tension by changing the subject, by telling you that you are thinking about it all wrong, that your feelings betray you, as the Jedi would say.
And if that moment of redirection provides cognitive and emotional relief, it's not because she answered your question.
