#Marianne Williamson #Awaken#Spirituality In this episode of the Commune Podcast, Jeff sits down with Marianne Williamson for a wide-ranging conversation on Jesus, not as a figure of dogma or doctrine, but as a guide to inner transformation. Marianne reframes the story of Jesus as a psychological and spiritual map of human awakening.
From the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection as inner archetypes, to the idea of Christ consciousness as a latent potential within us all, she invites listeners to reconsider what these teachings were originally pointing toward.
Together, Jeff and Marianne explore why this reinterpretation feels especially urgent now — as traditional institutions falter, collective suffering intensifies, and more people search for meaning beyond rigid belief systems. The conversation weaves together spirituality, politics, trauma, and moral responsibility, offering a vision of inner work as the foundation for collective healing.
Welcome to the Commune Podcast. My name is Jeff Krasnow. Today, we are revisiting a conversation
I had with my old friend, Marianne Williamson, centered around her book, The Mystic Jesus.
Marianne's work has helped millions of people re-examine spiritual teachings through a modern
and psychological lens. In this dialogue, she opens up a way of seeing Jesus not through dogma
or institutional religion, but through inner transformation as a guide to healing and renewal
and remembering who we truly are. In this conversation, we explore the Gnostic and
mystical threads of the Jesus story, the inner kingdom, and how these archetypes mirror our
own lives, the struggles, the ego's resistance, and the moments of resurrection that we all move
through. I am resurfacing this episode because the themes feel so especially relevant today.
So many of us are grappling with uncertainty, and Marianne offers a reminder that transformation
begins within with willingness, honesty, and the quiet work of returning to our own right minds.
So, settle in. Here's my conversation with the great Marianne Williamson.
Marianne.
Jeff.
Great to see you.
Always good to see you. Thank you.
I know. We always have some of our most animated conversations off camera.
Yes. It's a lifetime thing with you and me.
You put me down a Jesus wormhole.
Oh, yes.
I learned more about Jesus over the last few days than I think I knew in my whole life.
Well, good.
It was good.
I'm glad I did.
It was eye-opening. I went in with a little skepticism, and I've come out a saved man.
Well, that was really the purpose of the book. I think there is so much
reticence to even go into that conversation among those of us in the higher consciousness community,
and I have come to understand that people who were raised Christian and who have come to have
some problem with the dogma and doctrine of the ecclesiastical church, the exclusivity of it,
and so forth, have gone like this. But a lot of people feel that they threw away the baby with
the bathwater and have found in books like The Course in Miracles and in other Gnostic-type
teachings a whole other realization of what those words mean from a sort of psychotherapeutic
perspective. My book took me there, and I'm happy.
Yeah, and also some of the original intention. Like, for example,
one of the places you pushed me, which you kind of hint at in the book, but is the Gospel of Mary,
which is now, I think, associated more with the Gnostic Gospels, right? How Mary Magdalene was
really the first person, right, to witness Christ on the resurrection. She goes to his tomb, and
the stone is removed, or what have you, and she recounts that meeting in her Gospel, which,
of course, is not in the typical Christian ecclesiastical Gospel canon, but is then in
the Gnostic Gospels, in which she is pointing to, in her Gospel, what Jesus told her was that every
man, every woman, should be looking for the Jesus inside of them, that this was about an
internal transformation. It wasn't about the worship of some external patriarchal bogey in
the sky. It's interesting. Well, when he said, my kingdom is not of this world,
that was thousands of years before Sigmund Freud would be born. It's not as though there was no
conversation of the inner life, but there was no conversation of an actual inner domain on the
planet yet. And now that we know that there is an inner domain, every bit as real as the external
world, our thoughts, our feelings, what we go through emotionally, then the idea of Jesus,
of the inner world, and Roman's renewal of the mind, we're looking at all of that very differently.
In the Course in Miracles, it says that at their highest place, religion and psychotherapy become
one. It's binding back your thoughts, your minds to the truth in which we were created, but which
this world trains you to forget. When you look at this psychological, psychotherapeutic dimension
of the teachings of Christ or of any religious or spiritual scripture, you see code. And you see
code to not only someone else's journey thousands of years ago, but to your own journey. The birth
of Christ being the birth of our own better self, our own higher evolutionary possibility,
mothered by our humanness, fathered by God. The idea of Mary as the divine feminine,
Joseph as the divine masculine, get her out of town, bring her back, navigate the material world
so this precious part of you can survive. The fact that the three kings get off their horses
and bow, meaning that the world will bow to your most vulnerable self. If you find that place,
you will attract the powers of the world, the ministry, which is our lives. And if you need
more, the loaves will turn into fishes as long as you're on task, on purpose, and you'll be able to
heal the sick, which hello, you'll be able to raise the dead in places in each other. Yes, Herod,
that ego minds after you, wants to kill that in you. The ego will ultimately crucify you.
We will all go through it. Now, it's like St. John said of the dark night of the soul, it's
not if, it's when. And your consciousness, whether your crucifixion was getting sober,
going through cancer, going through a divorce, going bankrupt, losing someone you love,
we go into that painful place, but our consciousness while on that cross determines
what will happen after and what will happen after the time in the tomb and the grief and
the working on it and the pain of it all and the heartbreak and what we learn from it and atoning
and growing and forgiving, we come out in a resurrected state, which is the return to your
right mind. And one of the things I love there is how the women who came to reclaim the body were
told, he's not there, he's risen. And I think that's so meaningful. We're not even the same
people when we go through these hardships in our lives from a place of willingness to inhabit
the space in a mature, in a soulful way. Your molecular foundation shifts. And I think we're
all, I think that's so relevant to what's happening now, because I don't know anybody
who's not experiencing something. Jeff, it's a difficult moment. People are all having to eat
their piece of it, you know, like in the Eastern religions with Kali and stuff. She ate, she eats
up the darkness. Well, I'm going to eat some really bitter fruit right now, right? We will
be nourished by this bitter fruit. I think that's the good news, as it were.
And I think what we've experienced culturally, the failings of kind of traditional institutions
underwrite this feeling of separateness and hyper-individualism. So this idea that we feel
like a separate self locked up in a ever-sagging bag of skin, separate from the external world
around us, and in competition with it, and in competition with nature, et cetera. You know,
you look at like the rise, for example, in plant medicine right now, right? So one of the things
that plant medicine provides for you is one of the things that traditional institutional
religions seem not to provide, which is an experience, a transformation from experiencing
yourself as separate to the sensation of feeling integrated in the world around you.
And if you look at it, I mean, the Eastern traditions point more to that concept of mysticism,
that mystical experience from that transformation from separateness to interconnection. Traditional
Abrahamic religions seem to fall short in that regard.
Well, even the traditional Abrahamic religions, though, have their mystical place. In Judaism,
it's the Kabbalah. In Islam, it's Sufism. In Christianity, it is those Gnostic and
mystical traditions. So I don't think the West lacks those things. They're just being rediscovered.
We're living at a time of a profound rethink. Repulse, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is
at hand. The kingdom of a much greater, more expanded awareness of our oneness,
that which lies beyond our separateness. So people are rethinking everything. We're
rethinking religion. We're rethinking politics. We're rethinking food. We're
rethinking agriculture. We're rethinking energy. We're rethinking our relationship to nature. We're
rethinking sex and sexuality. We're rethinking ourselves. And we're rethinking our relationship
to the divine. So I see it as all of one piece that the old institutional realities, which,
as you said, have been underlying and underpinning and perpetuating and maintaining
these very disconnected, ultimately malfunctional attitudes and patterns of behavior,
are crumbling. And we are in a place which species come to sometimes. If a species is
displaying behavioral patterns that are malfunctional, maladaptive for the survival
of that species, that species will, one of two things will happen. It will either evolve,
it will take a leap forward into a new place, or it will go extinct.
You know, I was reading the other day when the Secretary General of the United Nations
saying, we're on an unsustainable path here. I mean, I've always felt the word unsustainable
isn't quite ugly enough. It sounds like it might be pretty. It's not. It means we die.
And if you don't, your grandkids do. The civilization will ultimately not be able to
absorb these repeated episodes of explosive malfunction on the planet. So what are the
religious figures, whether it's Jesus or any other? They represent the mutation. They represent the
member of the species that is demonstrating a different kind of thinking, a different kind
of behavior. And then the question is, will we then go into that next evolutionary level?
In the Course in Miracles, Jesus is called an elder brother. And he says in the Course,
I don't have anything you don't have. I just don't have anything else. I'm in a state which is only
potential in you. And so that's the idea, the idea of a psychological guide that can help us
request. Because if we don't request, it's a violation of our free will. And also, there's
nothing here about an exclusive Jesus. This is one name on the door, but we have to enter that
door. There's that portal there. And if we don't, we will remain stuck. And we're already in a
downward spiral as a human civilization. So the idea is that having actualized divine potential,
the idea is that he was then authorized by God. Should we request it? And only if we request it,
because otherwise nobody's forcing anything here. That he said, my mind joined with your mind can
shine away the ego. And I think that's where so many of us are just at that point of willingness.
We don't know how to do it different, but we're willing to do it different. And at that point in
your life, something appears, something will appear. I think it's a very difficult time for
so many of us because we are having to face, having to confront some of the darkness, whether
in ourselves or in the world. And I think this is a moment when the mission, the task before us has
to do with developing the characterological capacity to endure this moment and to transform
this moment. This is huge. I mean, I think we're living in, yes, it's a moment of peril. Absolutely.
It's these simultaneous realities, one world crumbling and the other that Arundhati Roy
quote about a new world struggling to be born. We have to be death-doers and we have to be
birth-doers. And we have to, you know, that's what I felt in my presidential campaign that,
you know, we're going to have to transition from dirty economy to clean economy. We're going to
have to transition from a war economy to a peace economy, but we need to do it soberly and wisely
and nonviolently and harmlessly because otherwise the chaos will overwhelm us.
I think in retrospect, in 20 years, you'll be seen as that midwife that was
slightly before her time or at least creating the footsteps in the sand.
Well, thank you. I like to think that we planted some seeds, especially with younger people. Yeah.
Totally. 100%. Thank you. And I think it is, I mean, we've had these conversations
before about spiritual leadership inside of politics. And if you look at like the great,
great movements of the 20th century, they've largely been punctuated by
spiritual leaders that then made huge political change. And, you know, as you say, we're kind of
in this very awkward moment right now where, you know, the institutions that have been far from
perfect, but they've largely served us, you know, liberal democracy and all of its, the coterie of
institutions that go along with liberal democracy, whether that's the media or science or our
institutions of higher learning, et cetera, they now are crumbling. And there is a group of people
dedicated to patching the leaky hull of liberal democracy, right? Then there's another group of
people that are like, no, we're just going to burn it down. We don't know. We don't have an
answer of what's coming next. We're just going to burn it down. And then what I keep looking for
is, no, no, no. What you said is a both sober yet spiritual calling that someone's going to
walk to the top of the mountain and give that sermon. You know, that there is a vision that we
can follow that is the next chapter. And I know that that's really what you were attempting to do,
and I think you brought a lot of us along on that ride, but I just see, I've yet to see where that's
going to happen. I mean, kind of Trump has played that role in terms of motivator-in-chief for this
kind of false populism, if you want to call it. We don't necessarily have to go in this direction.
But what I'm trying to find is like, where is that greater calling going to come from?
I think there's something very sacred. When Gandhi said politics should be sacred,
he wasn't talking about religion. He wasn't talking about dogma. He wasn't talking about
doctrine. Think of the place that we go to in therapy, in an intimate conversation with
the lover, our children, our friends. You and I trying to have a real conversation right here,
right now. A support group. One of the things you were talking to me about before when you had young
Palestinians and Israelis together. That place where we get real and we get true with one another.
When you have groups that go to that place, just as miracles happen in personal relationships,
therapy and so forth when you go to that place. Something equally miraculous happens when you
have a group that goes to that place. And I've been there. And I've seen it. And I have 40 years
of experience with it, which is really why I ran. I feel having run and having run twice,
that the American people are ready for this. The American people are ripe for it. And whether they
know it or not, they yearn for it. The problem is not where it's going to come from. It comes
from deep within us. It comes from the very foundational ideology, all men are created
equal. Jefferson said the only safe repository for power in this country is in the hands of the
people. There's something so radical about that. Then in that place where it doesn't matter if
you're rich or poor, doesn't matter any of that theoretically. If you had a free press,
give you the facts, public education to train you into critical thought, which seems to have failed,
and you have freedom of assembly that you can get together and talk about it,
that more often than not, a wisdom, more often than not, they weren't stupid. The founders
didn't think it was always going to work 100%, but that more often than not, this group conscience
would guide the destiny of a great nation. I don't feel, having been out there, Jeff,
I don't feel that we're any less capable. Remember, as I said all the time, this country elected
Lincoln twice. What we have, however, is you could look at this group conscience
of the electorate as the train. The political system should be the tracks, but the political
system, namely parties, which should be the conduit for the emergence of this,
actually work to obstruct it, to manipulate it, to confuse it. They have become almost an opponent
to the highest expression of representative democracy, and I've been right in the center
of that. I know wherever I speak. Yeah. I think that there is, yeah, there's obviously a political
inertia. We've created these systems now that are so fueled by money, misaligned incentives,
and backroom deals. I don't know where the new movement is going to emerge from, if it's going
to have to come from outside, because right now there seems to be just a stalemate.
Well, they don't want anyone outside. They only want a member of their club,
and if somebody comes from the outside and says, well, actually, those of you who drove us into
the stitch are probably not the ones who know how to drive us out of it. What that crowd
considers qualification is qualification to perpetuate the machinery that's already
destroying the fabric of this country, and there's a viciousness there if you seek to enter
into that. But as long as they're Citizens United, until we have repealed that, overturned that,
we have to be as intentional about overturning Citizens United as some people in this country
were intentional about overturning Roe v. Wade. And ultimately also, and I think this will probably
be a generation younger, we're going to have to have a constitutional amendment establishing
public funding for federal campaigns. Even with those external changes, there has to be
a reclamation of the deeper meaning of citizenship, and also the ethical requirements of that.
We're living in such a mean moment. Oh my God, people are so mean. People jump to judgment.
Nobody gives anyone a benefit of the doubt. This cancel culture nonsense, it's not just
where it's going to come from. It's also where it's going to come from within us.
I don't think it's going to come from that machine. I do think it's going to be those
of us who are saying, you know what, this is really, no. But it also has to be a place within
us. And that's real basic to the philosophy of nonviolence, the purification of your own
heart. Because if those of us who are hating on each other and thinking that people owe it to us
to agree with us and think that our way is the only way that's right, and that any group has
monopoly on truth. I was at a dinner the other night, and it was interesting. It was in New York.
It was a Rosh Hashanah dinner. They weren't MAGA people, but I think most of the people at the
table leaned right. That was clear. But it was a very fun dinner party, and we were all yelling
at each other. But it was good yelling at each other. Like, no, no. It was great, actually.
And at one point, this climax of yelling, this guy says, yeah, well, which of us is right?
I said, both of us. Both of us. Nobody owns this country. Nobody owes it to you to agree with you.
You know, even Eisenhower said the American mind at its best is both liberal and conservative.
There are high-minded liberal principles, high-minded conservative principles. I don't care
if it comes from the left or the right, but this idea that it has to be our way, it has to be the
way we say it, that's authoritarianism on the left, whether it's on the left or the right.
That's not the way.
This has been a very big problem on the left, is that if you don't adhere to a particular orthodoxy,
then find yourself at another table.
Believe me, I have seen it.
But I think what you just pointed to is that that sort of political conviviality
can exist at a dinner table, cannot really exist within the sandbox of Twitter or Facebook.
No, it can't exist on Twitter.
is that mean-spiritedness, scandal, salaciousness, vitriol scale, scale very, very quickly.
But that kind of work that we're talking about, that deep trauma-informed
therapeutic work, that doesn't scale very well.
One of the answers to what we're experiencing is being able to equip people with the means of
internal transformation. I'm very into the meditation-mindfulness world. It's, again,
a difficult message to scale, but I see right from A Course in Miracles,
the memory of God comes to the quiet mind, right?
So why did you write this book now, for this moment?
I didn't write it now. My publisher had called me, the editor called and said,
we keep hearing from booksellers that people are coming into stores and saying,
do you have any books about Jesus that aren't Christian?
So, you know, The Course in Miracles is not a religion. It's a psychological mind training
in the relinquishment of fear and the acceptance of love into our hearts.
So my editor asked if I might be interested in doing that, because that's really what the book
is. It's Jesus within the context of A Course in Miracles. The Course is not a religion. It is
based on universal spiritual themes. And then when I ran for president, I asked my publisher if this
book could be delayed, the publication could be delayed. They were more than glad not to be
publishing this book at a time when I was running for president. So now, that was then and this is
now.
Obviously, there's a book ending with this book, with A Return to Love. I mean,
I'm sure you will write another book, knowing you that you'll write probably a dozen more.
But there does seem to be a full circle in some ways with this book and A Return to Love.
Is that how you feel?
Well, I think this book, in a way, is a sequel to A Return to Love. In A Return to Love,
I mentioned Jesus, but you know, The Course in Miracles makes it very clear. That's why
there's no author on the front. You can believe that this book comes from him. You cannot believe
that this book comes from him. The issue is whether or not you practice its principles.
You know, The Course in Miracles says belief is meaningless. Experience is everything. A
universal belief is not possible. A universal experience is both possible and necessary.
I'm Jewish. When I first picked up The Course in Miracles, I saw that Christian language.
It was like, I had studied a lot of Christian theology in college, but this was my, you know,
my regular personal life. And it was like, oh, I guess it's just a Christian book, so
I don't read that. And then I saw it again a year later. I was in such pain.
I wasn't even thinking about the language. And then you learn very quickly, this is not
a religious text. These are words, traditional concepts, used in very psychotherapeutic ways.
And what I found, because I had not been taught anything, you know, my mother had just said,
my parents would say, honey, we read, they read that Bible, we read this one.
The only thing I ever remember my mother saying about Jesus, and I think about this, I can't,
she used to say, I think he was very...
She would say, I think he was very polite. Where did she get this? I don't know. Not
from reading the book, I'll tell you. But anyway...
I think he was probably quite polite.
Well, he had some moments. He had some moments.
He was a salesperson, but sort of a humble salesperson.
Yeah, but he like kicked over those tables and, you know, he at some point said,
but that's called the masculine, you know, why do we make it bad? But in all of us, by the way,
people I knew who had been brought up Christian, much like what you were mentioning before,
that's where I witnessed people like, I don't know, I don't know, I'm not going there.
So I just was learning new principles, and it was kind of exciting to me,
because I had nothing on them. But a lot of people who come to the Course in Miracles from
certain Christian contexts have to unlearn old things in order to then learn new. So I always
say there's something there to offend just about everybody. It pushes everybody's buttons,
no matter what your buttons were.
Yeah, for me, it was actually interesting to go back and relearn some of the actual history,
kind of the prophecies that were in kind of Isaiah and the book of Micah, my daughter's
named Micah, so, or saw or presaged the birth of Christ or the birth in Bethlehem, you know,
a lot of the other prophecies that, you know, that he would go to Egypt, and that, you know,
he would walk through the desert for 40 days, which sort of represented the 40 years of the
Israelis or the Jews in the Sinai Peninsula with Moses, all these kinds of really interesting
things. The King Herod sort of massacre of the innocents, I didn't even remember that story,
and how essentially that King Herod had sort of made nice with the Romans, and so they let him
rule Judea, and he was a Jew, but then he felt threatened by this prophecy that there was going
to be this savior that was going to be born, the King of the Jews, and so I think what he did,
and you'll help me here, is that he said, okay, we're going to kill all of the Jewish babies,
and did kill many Jewish babies. So, this is very similar actually to the story in Ancient
Egyptian, where the brother of Isis is out to get the baby Horus, so these are basic archetypal
themes. However, more importantly, and this is true whether it's Egyptian religion or any other
religious or spiritual text, just like when people say to you, every character in your dream is you,
every character in these stories is you, you are Mary sleeping, told to go up onto the roof,
being told by an angel, a thought of God, higher thoughts, higher minds, when you're meditating,
when you're walking through nature, when you're praying, whatsoever, whatever, that something new
is going to be born in you, mothered by your humanity, fathered by God, and Herod is the
ego mind that says, well, I'm going to nip that in the bud. These thoughts close to God, i.e.,
Jewish babies, you think that's going to survive? No, no, no, no, no, and then Herod has sons,
and they're all going to come after you, but the divine masculine in you will intuitively know,
better get her out of town, he's coming, bring her back, and you see all the story, and that's
what the book is about, how the story is your story, it's not just the story, the historical
tale of one man 2,000 years ago, it's the journey of all of our lives, but this is true also the
story of Buddha, it's the story of the Old Testament, the story of Moses, this is no
different in that sense from all great religious stories, oh my God, that's you, Kali, she eats
the darkness, you're going to have to eat that, you're going to have to experience that, you're
ultimately going to be nourished by it. Do you have any sense of, you know, I've heard
people make this case that during these lost years, kind of between, I guess when he was 12
and 30, I mean, a long time, right? There is some argument that he went East and got open to some
of these Eastern philosophies. I mean, it feels like that could be a possibility given many of
the things that he goes on to say. I'm just fascinated by everybody. I remember when I was
in college, they even talk of his coming to the Americas there, which weren't called the Americas
yet. Listen, we know his mother saw him at the temple after his Bar Mitzvah, and the next thing
you know, it's all those years later in his beginning his ministry. So, it's one of the
great mysteries and I don't know any more than anybody else does, I just have the same fascination
with the question that everybody else does. I was joking with Wellington here, because he loves
to work out and he always asks me what kind of protocol I'm on. So, I said, I'm on the Jesus
protocol. He's like, what does that mean? I call it Jehovah's Fitness. You know, so it's 40 days
of Zone 2 and a lot of fasting, and then I come back on a Friday, I do some CrossFit and I eat
some fish. This is true, really? No, I'm joking. By Saturday, I'm dead. By Sunday, I'm back alive
again. That's very funny, actually. That's my Jesus protocol. What's going on next for you?
Well, I've had to spend some time healing, processing, and now I'm back. I'm talking
about this book. I'm writing articles on my Substack. I wrote an article that I called
Integrated Politics the other day. I wrote a book about what's happening in Israel and Palestine,
and I'm talking about this book. You know, some people, when I was in college, I think that you
can relate to this. You're younger than me, but we still have the same general time. So, in the
morning, we would read Ram Dass and Alan Watts, and in the afternoon, we would go to Vietnam
anti-war protests. People weren't yet saying, stay in your lane. We're multidimensional beings. You
don't have to choose a lane. You're human. The countercultural revolution at that time was
everything. It was politics. It was music. It was sex. It was culture. It was everything. When I read,
this is why Gandhi's always fascinated me, and King. So, Dr. King said that in order to create
the beloved community, we need external changes in our circumstances, but also internal shifts in
our souls. So, for me, whether I'm talking about the metaphysical Jesus on one hand, or talking
about what has to happen in terms of political change on the other, these, to me, are not
separate quarters that never the twain shall meet. I think quite the opposite. I think we need to do
in politics what we've done in medicine, and ultimately arrived at an integrative model.
What they do in politics now, it's like the old-fashioned allopathic model of medicine,
where you didn't take responsibility for diet, or exercise, or lifestyle. You just hoped you
didn't get sick. Then, if you did get sick, you sought some external remedy to eradicate or
suppress the symptom. Well, we moved from that. Complementary medicine, alternative medicine,
finally ending up with integrative model of medicine. Now, functional, right? Energy medicine.
The idea that all dimensions of body, and mind, and spirit are involved. Another important aspect
of that is that sickness is the absence of health. Health is not the absence of sickness.
You have to proactively create health. We have to look at the sickness of our society in the same
way. When Martin Luther King said, there's negative peace and positive peace,
negative peace is where there's no outright violence, but there's underlying tension and
anxiety. Positive peace, he said, can only be predicated on brotherhood and justice.
Now, we have a very allopathic model of politics. Just treat the symptom. Don't worry about
proactively creating justice. Don't think about proactively creating fairness, or health,
or brotherhood. Don't think about taking care of people. Then, when these inevitable societal
dysfunctions arise, seek to suppress them through enough bombs or enough prisons.
We need an entirely different integrative model of political change. The one thing I'll say about
that also has to do with young people. You probably see this with your kids. Gen Z,
these people were not even born in the 20th century. They don't have that mechanistic,
Newtonian mindset, where you just tweak the pieces of the machine. They are much more holistic.
When I'm speaking at colleges, they'll ask you a question about depression. Then, the next question
is about drone warfare in Syria. They don't see anything weird about the combination. Well,
neither do I. I'm home. People used to say, at dinner, we're not going to talk about religion
or politics. I'm like, well, that leaves me out at dinner. I think that we're coming on a time
where people realize this is all part of who we are. We have to change on the level of our being
and on the level of our doing, and that the level of being precedes that level of doing.
That's the nonviolent aspect, because mean people aren't going to bring this forth.
If you don't think ethics matters, and if you think you're the only one who knows the truth,
you can't be a conduit for this new energy. We have to seek to purify our hearts if we're going
to purify our society. I was reading your book. It was just pushing me in a lot of different
directions. It was very provocative. I'm like, okay, well, now I'm going to go down the Kabbalah
wormhole, and I'm going to learn about the emanations and the sefirot and all this. That
was very fascinating. Then I came across this concept of tikkun olam. You're familiar with it.
To repair the world. It's our mission to repair the world. That marvelous rabbinical saying,
you are not expected to complete the task, but neither are you permitted to abandon it.
You are here to try to repair the world, which in Christianity is the ministry of Jesus.
When I landed on that phrase, I thought to myself, this epitomizes Marianne in your work.
Oh, thank you. Thank you.
When you're reading something and thinking about what you're going to talk about,
it's a process where you're like, oh, that's interesting, but maybe that's not germane to
the conversation. Then every once in a while, you land on something that feels so honest and true
to the person that you're going to talk to. When I landed on that particular concept,
I was like, that's it.
If you're raised in a Jewish home, at least most Jewish homes, the idea of that being
an apolitical stance, your relationship to God. When I grew up and met all these people,
oh, religion should have nothing to do with politics. We're not talking about separation
of church and state here. We're talking about the passion of your heart. I've never read
about any religious or spiritual path that gives any of us a pass on addressing the suffering of
other sentient beings. How can you love God and not concern yourself with 12,000 children starving
on the planet every day when there's no dearth of food? I don't know if it's I'm Jewish. I think a
large part of it is that I'm Jewish. Okay, Marianne. Thanks so much.
Thank you so much.
Always enjoy it and to be continued.
I love you, Jeff. Thank you.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. For more of my weekly musings, along with
ad-free episodes and live stream conversations, head over to my Substack at jeffkrasno.substack.com.
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