Interview with Marianne Williamson
Marianne Williamson is an author and political activist.
Not A New Age Hippie
Contents
Max Raskin: Most people think of you as a New Age hippie, and I wonder — do you have any guilty pleasures that would surprise people?
Marianne Williamson: What would surprise some people apparently is to know that I'm neither a hippie nor New Age.
MR: Really? How would you describe yourself?
MW: I was very much a child of my generation — don't get me wrong — but I don't think that everybody who participated in the cultural, sexual, political revolution of the 1960s and 70s would call themselves a hippie. And anyone who visits my home, or has much to do with me, would not call me a hippie.
As far as New Age is concerned, that's just a marginalizing, derogatory comment that was made up by people who have not read my books and have not heard me speak but wanted to make sure I got off the debate stage as soon as possible. There’s this narrative that I'm a silly New Age hippie — anti-vax, anti-science.
I'm a Jewish woman who goes to the doctor, I assure you. I had a sister who died of breast cancer — the last thing I've ever told anyone, much less an AIDS patient, is that they shouldn't take their medicine.
MR: Well as a Grateful Dead fan, I didn’t mean hippie as a bad thing.
MW: Well, if you're talking about being a Deadhead, then absolutely count me in.
MR: You just called yourself Jewish — do you still consider yourself Jewish?
MW: You're born a Jew; you die a Jew. This idea that you consider yourself Jewish or you call yourself Jewish I find odd.
MR: What does your Jewish practice look like today? Do you do anything that is liturgically Jewish?
MW: First of all, the phrase “liturgically Jewish” I find interesting. I was raised as a conservative Jew, and I understand that mercy and humility in the pursuit of justice are everything. I understand that tikkun olam is the purpose of my life. My daughter was bat mitzvah-ed. I go to high holy days services.
MR: Will you fast on Yom Kippur?
MW: Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. My daughter and I were talking about that for this year; last year I didn't make it the whole day.
MR: What determines whether you're going to fast or not?
MW: Let me go back a little bit: Many years ago on Yom Kippur when I had first moved to Santa Barbara, I didn't have a synagogue yet, and the only one I could find was an Orthodox shul. So I went there, and sat upstairs with the women. I walked in with some preconceived beliefs about patriarchy as it applied to my religion. And as I sat there all day, I had probably the most moving experience I'd ever had in synagogue. When they blew the shofar, something profoundly moved within me. Before that I had neither understood not had ever experienced that this was God saying, “Okay, another year. I have reset, you have atoned sufficiently.” So that did not make me become an Orthodox Jew, but no Yom Kippur has ever been the same for me since. I get it now on a visceral level.
But I also understand that it's not the ritual, it's the level of atonement in my heart. And in my work, the idea of atonement has been extremely important for me, not only personally, but professionally. This has led me to such things as my feelings about reparations for slavery. You have to atone for your mistakes, whether you’re a person or a nation.
MR: What are things you atone for?
MW: Everything from overeating to an unkind remark…that’s the amazing thing about that day, you list everything.
But in my normal life it's that I could have been more careful with that person's feelings, or I shouldn't have wasted my time doing this or that when I could have been doing something more beneficial to myself and others.
MR: Do you think more people are turning on to traditional religion or do you think things are going to get worse before they get better? I have a half-baked theory that we are going to go through another Great Awakening.
MW: I think we are going through an awakening now. I think that God's Universe is built on the law of cause and effect. I think that we are going through a great reckoning. I think humanity is on a collision course with itself. In the freest, most abundant, wealthiest country in the world, we have been deeply irreverent and irresponsible with our power — how we have treated our democracy, how we have treated the planet, how we have treated other nations, how we have treated our poor, how we have treated animals. And yes, I believe that we have only just begun to reap what we have sown.
On the other hand, I believe in a merciful God, and I believe that that is the power of atonement. The level of sincerity by which we atone determines the results of our atonement. There are objective discernible laws of the spiritual life, just like there are objective discernible laws of the external world. The power of the atonement gives us the opportunity for a reset, if we atone sincerely in our hearts for what we know we’ve done wrong.
Och Vey!
MR: Have you changed any practices in your personal life based on these beliefs?
MW: Based on what?
MR: For instance, not using Instagram or something that you think society does that is spiritually unhealthy.
MW: Part of it is just getting older, seeking to live a more mature life, seeking to live a more responsible life. Recognizing as you get older that you don't have unlimited time left…why are you wasting your time on ultimately stupid things? That’s really the disease of modern culture — we are obsessed with ultimately unimportant things. And people realize this. Many have come to the recognition, for instance, that the smartphone is addictive.
I have this experience as much as anybody else of, “Oh my God, I just spent an hour looking at Instagram posts, what was I doing?” But that's not overtly spiritual, that's just coming to realize you can either have a deeply meaningful life or not, and if you choose to have a deeply meaningful life then there are lifestyle decisions that are involved in that.
MR: I noticed the background of your phone — is that your daughter?
MW: Yeah, who is more traditionally Jewish than I am. She said to me when she was 12 years preparing for her bat mitzvah, “Mommy, I'm more traditionally religious than you are.”
I have to tell you something — if I had had the Jewish education she had, I probably would've been a rabbi.
MR: Do you do Shabbat?
MW: Yeah, I light the candles, I get the challah. When my daughter married her non-Jewish husband in the Church of Scotland, the head of the Church gave permission for a rabbi to do a double ceremony, and my son-in-law wore a tartan yarmulke. It was quite beautiful.
MR: There’s apparently an officially approved Jewish tartan.
MW: That's amazing because this was his family tartan on his yarmulke. It was adorable.
Morning Meditation
MR: What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?
MW: I go into my living room where I have the Course in Miracles opened. I open to a lesson for the day. Blaise Pascal said that every problem in the world stems from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
In the Course in Miracles it says, "Five minutes spent with God in the morning will guarantee he will be in charge of your thought forms throughout the day." If I do my Course in Miracles lesson in the morning, I have a different nervous system and a different day. In Judaism — in every great religious system — there is an emphasis on the power of the morning. In the morning your mind downloads the consciousness that will dominate your day. So the modern American wakes up in the morning, goes directly for the phone, Twitter, email, news; you just download the stress of the world and then you're mystified why you’re depressed by noon.
MR: You really don’t look at your phone?
MW: If I go to my phone, it’s just to see if my daughter contacted me, but I won't allow myself to get into it.
MR: That’s very healthy. Do you eat a big breakfast?
MW: I drink coffee, have some fruit, sometimes have a piece of toast, but normally it's just coffee and fruit.
MR: Is there any food you get obsessive about — like any particular type of coffee or anything?
MW: No.
MR: You don't get nutso about anything?
MW: I'm a stickler for green grapes, but that's pretty much it.
MR: Do you eat them frozen? I like them frozen.
MW: If I feel low blood sugar coming on, green grapes and a few almonds. Works wonders for me. And also I take a lot of vitamins.
MR: What vitamins do you take?
MW: I take a lot. I take Dr. Amen's brain vitamins, I take vitamin D, B12, I take a bunch of things. I go to an integrative doctor. I do have osteoporosis, so I try to take care of my bones and take care of everything to the best of my ability.
They Can’t Take That Away from Me (Or You)
MR: Do you stay up late?
MW: Too late. I tend to be a night person.
MR: Do you watch TV?
MW: I watch some TV — some news, although more and more nothing you find in the mainstream.
MR: Do you have any guilty pleasures on TV? Do you watch The Real Housewives or anything?
MW: Oh no, never anything like that. But I enjoy The Gilded Age. People tell me about wonderful things, and I think I'm missing a lot of good TV.
MR: Do you binge watch ever?
MW: The Offer, which I thought was amazing.
MR: Were you a Sopranos fan?
MW: Not until the very end — I thought that last episode was amazing, and I hadn't even been watching it very long. I think I miss out on a lot of cultural trends that are really very good because I have this thing — I get there late. One of my weaknesses, but also it has led to some good things, is I get there late. When everybody's jumping up and down excited about something, it's too much for me. But it also had some negative repercussions as well — for instance, there are places I've lived that I didn't really appreciate until it was almost time to leave.
MR: Where is an example of that?
MW: Santa Barbara. Detroit.
MR: Oh, interesting. What about food? Will you go to a McDonald's?
MW: No, no, no, no, no, no.
MR: What was the last song you listened to?
MW: Gloria Gaynor “I Will Survive” this morning while I was putting on my makeup.
MR: Are there any musicians who have impacted your life?
MW: The two who affected my life more than any others were Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin.
MR: Have you listened to his Great American Songbook covers?
MW: No.
MR: It’s fantastic. The “Stardust” is a good place to start.
MW: Oh believe me, I will download that.
Speaking of being Jewish, I assume you know this, all the great American songwriters of that era were Jewish except for Cole Porter. They were the sons of immigrants, which led to their unique appreciation of the language. You hear phrases like “They can't take that away from me” — that’s what the Jewish parent would tell you: “Get an education. They can’t take that away from you.” Think about what that means.
MR: You'll still listen to that music?
MW: Oh, absolutely. And I used to sing that music.
MR: Did you used to sing it professionally or just for fun?
MW: I used to sing the way Bill Clinton played the saxophone. People used to put me down as a "former cabaret singer." But when I was young, I sang. I came to understand that I was better at the talking in between songs than I was at the singing.
William Kunstler and Zorba the Greek
MR: What were you like when you were younger? You said you were a child of the Sixties, but did you march to the beat of everyone else’s drum then?
MW: My father was extraordinary - and my mother was wonderful as well, but my father was a cross between William Kunstler and Zorba the Greek. My father took us to Vietnam in 1965 to show us what war was.
MR: You went to Vietnam in 1965?
MW: Yeah, to show us what war was, because he didn't want the military industrial complex to eat his children's brains.
MR: How did you get there?
MW: Well, it was early enough that you could fly into Saigon, it felt like the plane practically landed vertically. You couldn't go five miles outside of town, but the battle zone had not reached the city.
MR: Do you have any memories from that trip?
MW: Oh absolutely. My parents were world travelers, and they started taking us places when I was 10 years old. I was behind the Iron Curtain during the days when there was one.
If ever there was an independent thinker, it was my father. My father used to go around the house saying, "Beat the system, kids, beat the system."
MR: How would he describe himself politically?
MW: He was a Bernie Sanders clone.
MR: Would he call himself a communist?
MW: Well, the joke was that he had gone to a Communist Party meeting one night and was kicked out at the end of it for being too intellectual. He was kicked out with this other guy who was also considered too intellectual, so they went out and they got drunk together. My father said that he knew that night the guy would never amount to anything, and the guy's name was Tennessee Williams!
MR: Would he have loved Bernie?
MW: Absolutely.
MR: Do you love Bernie?
MW: Yes, I love Bernie. I am glad that my parents died when they did because it would've broken my father's heart to see what has happened to this country. My father was a left-wing immigration lawyer and my brother is an immigration lawyer as well.
MR: What was young Marianne Williamson doing during the Sixties?
MW: Well, the Seventies. We would read Alan Watts and Ram Dass in the morning and go to Vietnam anti-war protests in the afternoon. There was no split in those days, it was all one big revolution. It was sexual, it was musical, it was cultural, it was political.
MR: Did you take acid?
MW: Yeah, when I was 17 years old.
MR: What do you think about psychedelics?
MW: I think what's going on today is a positive thing.
MR: Do you smoke pot at all?
MW: No, but not because I have anything against it. It just doesn’t feel to me now like it felt to me then.
Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max
MR: Do you have golden era fallacy at all? Thinking that everything was better back then?
MW: No, but who thought we'd ever be nostalgic for the Seventies? It was easier then. It was easier to be young, it was easier to not have money. So I’m aware it wasn’t a golden age, but I look at young people today and I understand their frustration, I understand their rage. This is why I'm so politically convicted.
MR: And did you preach back then?
MW: I started reading the Course in Miracles when I was in my mid-20s, and I started lecturing in 1983.
MR: Did people take you seriously when you were preaching when you were younger?
MW: Society assumes that if you're younger, and particularly if you're a woman, you couldn't possibly have any wisdom. But the book I was talking about was very wise and people could feel that.
MR: So it was harder?
MW: It wasn’t harder, no. My career has been wonderful. When I started lecturing you had two choices: you could either become clergy, or you could become a professor of comparative religion. Neither of those paths felt true for me. My mother used to say, “We'll send you to rabbinical school." I was like, "No, mommy, I don't really see that." So I just thought I was going to keep talking about A Course in Miracles and it would always be a side gig. It never occurred to me in the early days that I would write a book, Oprah would love it, and so much else would follow. I would never have imagined it.
MR: Why didn’t something more traditional work for you?
MW: When I was 14 years old, I went to a summer school program where there was a class called Philosophical Approaches to the Question of God. I was in Heaven, I couldn't even believe it. I read Kierkegaard for the first time. I became obsessed from a very young age with anything spiritual — whether it was Eastern or Western, whether it was esoteric or exoteric, whether it was Jesus or the Kabbalah, whether it was Thomas Aquinas or the I Ching, whether it was astrology or Hegel, I just found it all incredible. But then when I read the Course in Miracles, things came together in a whole new way. The Course doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on truth, it’s based on universal spiritual themes. It isn’t a religion, it’s a psychological mind training on relinquishing a thought system of fear and replacing it was a thought system based on love. It showed me how to apply some of the principles I already believed in but didn’t know how to make practical in my everyday life.
MR: What did your dad think about that?
MW: Well at first my father said, “What happened to you? I raised you to wage the revolution…what happened to you?” And so I had to justify it to him by saying, "Daddy, I think love is the revolution, I think that is the biggest revolution."
When I started teaching the Course in Miracles, I explained to my parents what I was going to do. So this was my mother: “Let me get this straight… you're going to stay in California?" I said yeah. “And you're going to give lectures…. about Jesus?” I said yeah. "…to gentiles." And I said yeah. Then she got very quiet, and she said, "What will you wear?
Then I remember being at my Uncle Max's — we used to go to Uncle Max's on Sunday morning — and my father said he wanted to talk to me. He seemed very serious, and I was a little bit scared. We went into the library, he closed the door and he looked at me and he goes, "It's the same God, isn't it?" And I went, "Of course, Daddy, it's the same God."
"All right, well I don't want to hear it's some different God." And that was that!
A Farewell of Love
MW: Can I ask — is your wife Orthodox as well?
MR: Yeah.
It's interesting, I bet if I grew up in your era I would be into Alan Watts.
MW: I think you're really right, I think what you just said is true.
MR: But the problem with our generation is we don't have any structure, and so we might as well turn to the thing that's tried and true for thousands of years.
MW: I totally hear what you're saying. My entire life's work stems from how many people feel they threw away the baby with the bathwater. They turned away from religious institutions because they didn't want the doctrine, they didn't want the dogma, and then felt that they'd thrown away the baby with the bathwater. I think it's interesting how so many people, particularly on the Left, derided all the observance of the death of Queen Elizabeth. They don't get the profundity of it.
MR: Because they never read Joseph Campbell.
MR: People will look at archetypes and symbols like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and think it’s just psychedelic drug stuff, but there’s something profound going on.
MW: That's right, that's exactly right. The analysis on Left is often overly material, and you're right, too many people never read Joseph Campbell — I don't know a better way to put it. If you took acid and you took Joseph Campbell, you understand the Queen’s funeral was really an extraordinary farewell with love.