Marianne Williamson
Marianne Williamson
Marianne Deborah Williamson is an American spiritual teacher, author and lecturer. She has published eleven books, including four New York Times number one bestsellers. She is the founder of Project Angel Food, a meals-on-wheels program that serves homebound people with AIDS in the Los Angeles area, and the co-founder of The Peace Alliance, a grassroots campaign supporting legislation to establish a United States Department of Peace. She serves on the Board of Directors of the RESULTS organization, which works to...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSelf-Help Author
Date of Birth8 July 1952
CityHouston, TX
CountryUnited States of America
Any time we read a newspaper or take any look at the world around us, we are aware of the cruelty and violence that dominates our world.
The work of intimacy, of course, is to learn to both show your own illumination, and to see it in a way that the physical eyes cannot reveal. In a way that only the heart can reveal: the illumined beauty in another person.
The issue is that we, with our fears, our attacks, our judgments, our blame, and our constant emphasis on the realm of the body rather than the realm of love, eclipse the experience of true love.
When you are dealing with a serious compulsion or addictive pattern, then by definition self-will, self-discipline, and any other machinations of the conscious mind are not enough by themselves to handle the problem. It is like a breaker switch in your brain is simply flipped. Anybody who has had this kind of a problem knows that it doesn't matter how intelligent you are. Sigmund Freud said, "Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis."
I believe that the spirit of God enters into the details and if we ask for guidance we will be led to the places where we can learn most fully because we can be most joyful. If I'm in a place that's lonely, I think God has one or two things to say. Extend your hand in service so that you might meet people or go somewhere else - or both.
The ego mind both professes its desire for love and does everything possible to repel it, or if it gets here anyway, to sabotage it. That is why dealing with issues like control, anger, and neediness is the most important work in preparing ourselves for love.
Love is all around us all the time. Love is the ethers that we swim in. Love is the amniotic fluid of the soul.
You have to make a space in your heart, in your mind and in your life itself for authentic human connection.
A hero is someone who stands in the community and speaks their hopes and speaks their passion. That's almost an act of heroism nowadays because higher consciousness is so trivialized.
America is a great country, and we've done a lot of good in the world. But we are a collection of people, not saints. We have our own sins to atone for.
In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "No lie will last forever." We have to work at removing lies from our own hearts. And on the national level, we do this not because we blame our country, but because we love it.
Generation after generation can't just be loaded with more and more nuclear weapons and not ultimately dance to that music.
Individuals seem to have reached their walls and so has the entire human race. Whatever isn't working, isn't life-producing, isn't producing love for ourselves or others, is going to have to go now. Or, literally, there will be hell to pay.
I do think that every generation has its unique story.