[00:00:01] Luke: Marianne, how would you feel about starting us off with a little prayer to set the tone.

[00:00:05] Marianne: That's so funny you say that because I told you that I did Rick Rubin's podcast yesterday and he said, could we start with a meditation or something? So that's apparently something you have in common. Sure. Do you want going to do that?

[00:00:19] Luke: Yeah.

[00:00:23] Marianne: Dear God, thank you for bringing us together, and we pool our resources. Luke and I pool our resources of talent, intelligence, expertise, insight, anyone involved with producing this. And we enter here with our hearts, and anyone listening as well, may we join in heartfelt conversation, heartfelt listening, depth of openness, that in some way, what we are doing here might serve. May the Spirit of all that is, the God of our understanding, be upon us. May love and love only unfold. And so it is. Amen.

[00:01:28] Luke: And so it is. Thank you. I would like to start every podcast with something like that. Sometimes I just sit down and then I just start talking and I get speedy, I get ahead of myself. So I've been getting in the habit, at least of myself, even if I'm talking to someone who's not so inclined, I'll just take a moment and remember, many of the things that you just said, the intentionality behind the conversation.

[00:01:51] What are we really doing here? What's this about? How can we steer it towards serving the highest good for all creation? And then out of that is born beautiful spontaneity. Speaking of spontaneity and synchronicity and all things magic, you and I share a friend in Jeff Kober, who's been a great teacher for me, as we were talking about earlier.

[00:02:15] So I was so excited you were coming over today. I texted my friend Doyle Bramhall. He's originally from Texas, but I met him in LA. Fantastic musician. And he's also friends with Jeff. I said, oh, I'm so stoked. Marianne just walked in. We're going to do a podcast. And he goes, wow, that's really funny. Did you see Jeff's email? Jeff sends out a daily email for years now. And I said, no, I didn't see it. So Doyle texted me the email, and it starts like this.

[00:02:40] So Doyle texted me the email, and it starts like this. Just like a sunbeam can't separate itself from the sun and a wave can't separate itself from the ocean. We can't separate ourselves from one another. We are all part of a vast sea of love, one indivisible divine mind, Marianne Williamson. I mean, come on.

[00:03:02] Marianne: That concept, of course, comes from the Course in Miracles. It says we are like sunbeams to the sun, thinking we are separate from other sunbeams. We're like waves in the ocean, thinking we are separate. And how you think about that makes all the difference. If I am in the ocean, and I think I'm just one wave separate from all the others, how can I not live in constant terror that I will be annihilated by the power of the ocean? It's going to overwhelm me at any moment.

[00:03:32] But, on the other hand, if I think of myself as one with every other wave, then I'm identifying with the power of the ocean. I'm safe here. I'm indivisible. It moves. I move. So the difference between self-identifying with the separate self versus identifying with the totality is huge, emotionally, psychologically. There's a line in the Course in Miracles that says religion and psychotherapy are the same thing. Not religion as in dogma or doctrine, but spirituality.

[00:04:09] It's all the healing of the mind. The word religio comes from the Latin root to bond back. We are tethered to an insane view of things, a fear-based view of things that dominates the planet. So we're all in this process of profound unlearning and untethering from fear in order to receive the deeper truth, which is the only way we can be happy and the only way we can actually save this world from the profound destructiveness that is the part trajectory of history.

[00:04:45] Luke: Yeah. I think that's why I've always inherently related to the Vedic perspective, there's only one thing. Which sounds almost too simple to be meaningful. There's a great quote by Ramana Maharshi where someone asked him, how do you relate to other people? And he said--

[00:05:04] Marianne: What other people?

[00:05:05] Luke: There are no other people. In one lifetime, if you could just get that, you won. You won the game.

[00:05:12] Marianne: Well, everybody is in your own head. There's no place where you stop and other people start. That's all an illusion of separation. I also love the one about the guru on his deathbed. Oh, please don't go. Please don't go. He said, what do you mean? Where would I go? Where do you think I'm going? There's no going.

[00:05:29] Luke: Right.

[00:05:30] Marianne: I'm dropping a suit of clothes. I'm not going anywhere.

[00:05:32] Luke: Yeah. That's beautiful. The funny thing, when I started this podcast back in 2016, of course you set goals. So I wrote down probably 50 dream guests, people that I wanted to talk to. And it was very aspirational at that point because I'm just a guy in my apartment in LA with a microphone and a Zoom connection and had no idea how I was going to get in touch with anyone. And you're on that list to this day.

[00:05:57] Marianne: Thank you. It took us a while.

[00:05:58] Luke: It took eight years, but I've whittled my way down, and so many people, speaking of just intention setting and just believing in the fact that life is miraculous when you let it be so, so many people like you have been sitting here having a conversation with, and I'm just slapping myself going, wow, there were years that I would go see you speak in LA and see you speak in New York City. We even spoke together at an event called Lead With Love out in Aspen a few years ago.

[00:06:33] I was like, oh, maybe I'll run into her and I'll ask her to be on the podcast. And our paths didn't cross at that time, but it's been really incredible to just finally-- Rick Rubin was another one, for example. Man, I've known him for a few years and it's like, oh, maybe someday he'll do my podcast.

[00:06:51] But I was afraid to ask. I asked and he's like, yeah, I thought you'd never ask. And there we are sitting on a cliff in Malibu and I'm sitting there having a really deep and meaningful, beautiful conversation about creativity with one of the creative masters of our time. It's just so fulfilling for me. So thank you for taking the time to be here.

[00:07:09] Marianne: Oh, thank you. Thank you.

[00:07:11] Luke: Yeah, it means a lot. So man, there are so many, so many, so many things that I want to talk about. First thing I find interesting about you that I just learned doing my research is that you're originally from Houston, Texas.

[00:07:23] Marianne: Absolutely. Born and raised. My mother was born and raised in Houston, so I'm a Texan going way back.

[00:07:30] Luke: Wow. How has it changed?

[00:07:33] Marianne: Well, Houston when I was growing up was a small city, and it was in the 1970s I think that it just burst into big city metropolis dom. So it's changed. And Austin where I spent some time with much funkier. Was the days of the Armadillo World Headquarters. I was living in Austin, had a few people at dinner. My friend Nikki called me and said, you have to come down to the Armadillo World Headquarters like right now. I said, I can't. I have people here at dinner.

[00:08:14] No, no, no, no, she said. You don't understand. There's this man. He's singing. You have to come right now. And I don't care if you're at dinner. I don't care if you're in the middle of dinner. Bring your friend. You have to come right now. He is this incredible. You have to come hear this guy right now. I said, I'm sorry, Nikki. I can't. I have people to dinner. It was Bruce Springsteen at the Armadillo World Headquarters. Do you even know what the Armadillo World Headquarters was?

[00:08:40] Luke: No.

[00:08:41] Marianne: I see that blank look in your eyes.

[00:08:43] Luke: Yeah, I'm trying to track it.

[00:08:44] Marianne: That's how much time has passed. Well, look it up. It was one of the original music-- a young beginning Bruce Springsteen would be singing there.

[00:08:57] Luke: Right, right.

[00:08:58] Marianne: And course I think Willie--

[00:09:03] Luke: Nelson.

[00:09:04] Marianne: He still has his July 4th picnic, right?

[00:09:06] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[00:09:08] Marianne: Well, that's how long ago. I was going to Willie Nelson's [Inaudible].

[00:09:11] Luke: So this would have been the era when the town motto of Austin was keep Austin weird.

[00:09:16] Marianne: No. Everybody claims that. Portland claims it too, I notice.

[00:09:20] Luke: Really?

[00:09:20] Marianne: Yeah, yeah. Several places claim that. So that's okay. I guess more than one city can do that. But it's certainly not weird anymore.

[00:09:26] Luke: To me, coming from Hollywood, I don't find Austin to be that weird.

[00:09:31] Marianne: It's not weird anymore. That's the problem. It wasn't kept weird. But I don't want to be stuck in the past either. Every generation brings its own layer of understanding, its own aesthetic, its own combination of things. So I'm not someone on something like that living in, ah, used to be better. Just used to be different.

[00:09:53] Luke: Yeah. One thing I really enjoy here is the cultural mixing pot. It's a really interesting place in America in that you have a lot of progressive and liberal ideas in downtown. So you have great food and you have great culture, and then you have the outskirts in much of the remainder of Texas that are people that are really fans of the constitution and the 2nd Amendment.

[00:10:19] And you have like this blending of conservative and liberal ideals and culture. And I think that is appealing to me because my parents were on both sides of that spectrum. And so I grew up with an understanding of the middle way, and I find in our community here in Austin, at least the people that I spend time with, are very open minded, and not necessarily siloed or tribal about the way they view the world and the way they operate in the world. And I find that to be really healthy.

[00:10:53] Marianne: The way I hear that, you're leaving something out.

[00:10:56] Luke: What's that?

[00:10:57] Marianne: What goes on in that capital here in Austin. Some of the most regressive, destructive forces in this country are headquartered in part there. They do not represent a middle way. They represent an assault, I believe, on everything that we think of as democratic. Look at some of the stuff that your governor, Greg Abbott, is trying to do here. So I can't go along with how nice the mix is.

[00:11:23] Luke: To be honest, I don't pay that much attention.

[00:11:25] Marianne: Well, that's my point.

[00:11:26] Luke: Yeah. What I'm feeling and observing here is just dealing with real people on a day-to-day basis.

[00:11:32] Marianne: They are real people doing real things.

[00:11:33] Luke: Where I go out in the country and interact with someone, a farmer, a rancher, or something like that, with whom I wouldn't consider to be my culture, but I find that we meet on certain things.

[00:11:45] Marianne: Oh, I agree with that. That's just America. Nobody owns this country. Nobody has a monopoly on truth. Nobody owes it to you to agree with you. I talked to people who voted for Trump, and I find them very nice people, and we have wonderful conversations. That I agree with you totally about. I'm talking about what actually goes on in the Capitol and that if you're talking about the mix in Austin, hello, it's there.

[00:12:09] And if you look at some of the laws that he is trying at times to-- maybe even look at abortion itself. That's part of the mix. And we're living in la la land if we pretend that it's not. If you look at what's happened in Arizona for instance, what is it, a law about abortion from 1864 where women cannot get an abortion under any circumstances? That, to me, is not the middle way.

[00:12:36] When you were talking about the middle way, I agree with you. Eisenhower said the American mind at its best is both liberal and conservative. There are high-minded conservative principles. There are high-minded liberal. And as Martin Luther King said, you have very little morally persuasive power with people who can feel your underlying contempt.

[00:12:56] So I see it as a spiritual practice to get into neutral and find that sweet spot before I speak to anyone about politics. Absolutely. However, there is something else going on in this country. And by the way, some of what most concerns me, the smugness, the self-righteousness, I see on the left as well as the right, so I'm not saying it's only on the right.

[00:13:22] But you were mentioning Austin and that building. If you just start looking at what some of the forces-- I was seeing something on the television this morning, a woman here in Texas arguing for library freedom. We're living in a time where librarians are having to argue for their right to choose the books? That's real too.

[00:13:49] Luke: Yeah, it is. One of the things you emphasize in your work that resonates with me deeply based on my own experience is the importance of morning practice. Can you speak to that? I think of it in my own life as an indispensable, non-negotiable tuning of my consciousness instrument so that I can be responsive and not reactive and bring the best possible version of myself to the world. And if I don't do that, my nervous system is not going to just self-regulate at 4:00 PM.

[00:14:22] Marianne: Well, what you just said is exactly what I say. You can get up in the morning, you take a shower, a bath, brush your teeth. You don't want to take yesterday's dirt into the new day. But if you don't meditate, pray, reflect, do everything you just said, set your intention, take care of your nervous system, prepare the vessel, your body might be clean, but your mind is filled with toxicity.

[00:14:47] The Course in Miracles says miracles are everyone's right, but purification is necessary first. The miracle is a moment of pure love, but we have to purify it of the judgment, attack, fear, and so forth, that the world has taught us. So when we wake up in the morning is when we are most open to receive.

[00:15:09] So if the first thing you do is go to Instagram or to a news site or to Twitter, good luck. You're depressed by noon. There's no mystery that you're depressed by noon. And like you said, and I think what you said is so important, it's not like if you prepare yourself in the morning-- and for me as well, it's non-negotiable-- you are absolutely sure never to fall off the spiritual wagon throughout the day.

[00:15:34] But what I do find is that it's much easier to get back on. It's much easier to recognize, oh, what did I just do? I went through an experience yesterday at an airport that was an example of that. But at least I was able to see it right away.

[00:15:49] But you're right. If you don't prepare yourself in the morning, the world has its grip on you. When Jesus talks about your house, in the Bible, it's your sense of self. If you don't fill it with light or higher understanding in the morning, darkness sets in.

[00:16:07] Darkness is the absence of light. Every thought is going to go somewhere. It's either going to go out extended in love or it's going to go inward, and it's going to be a projection of fear and attack and judgment onto you or others. I think that so much of spirituality, you're talking not about opinion. You're talking about how consciousness operates.

[00:16:33] There are objective discernible laws that rule the inner planes, just like there are objective discernible laws that rule the outer plane. But the fact that I know that if I drop that glass, it will fall on the floor, I simply know there's gravity. It's not like I have so much faith in gravity.

[00:16:50] No, I just know that's how it works. And I think that that's what people are realizing now. It's not like you should prepare your nervous system in the morning. It's just, if you do, you'll have one day, and if you don't, you'll have another day. Just thought you might like to know.

[00:17:04] Luke: You're so right with the having the fortitude and awareness to course correct when you do become of the world during the day. I don't have to tell you. You're someone that's involved in politics. I don't even know how you do that. But even just being a standard civilian person, trying to do good things in the world and hoping for the best and making whatever contribution I can, it's very tempting to fall into the fear around the shadow side of humanity.

[00:17:42] What I'm trying to say is we're in a point of such polarity where you have this incredible awakening and masses of people becoming interested in consciousness and spirituality and meditation to the point where it's almost become a trend, which is probably a positive trend, but it has its faults.

[00:17:59] So I see on one side, if I wake up in the morning, I go, wow, this is incredible. Tens of thousands of people listen to conversations like the one we're having. And maybe some years ago it would have been a fringe little group of meditators or new agers or whatever. But at the same time, you have abject evil that is just revving its engines and it's pushing and pushing and pushing against the betterment of the world and of humanity. It's just crazy.

[00:18:32] So I find if I set the template in the morning, then I have much more resilience where I can face the realities of the world and not put my head in the sand and play a spiritual bypassing ostrich, but also be able to contextualize it in a way that is much more broad and expansive and imbued with less fear.

[00:18:51] I'm able to operate in the world and think, wow, it's all going to work out. Just from my vantage point right now, it seems pretty dark. But if you go back throughout history, it also seemed pretty dark when slavery was legal. And you couldn't see past that. And we go, wow. Okay. Well, that was true. That was awful. But there was also a point at which we moved out of that. But we wouldn't have known it then. We would have been just like, wow, this is horrific.

[00:19:15] Marianne: Well, I think for us to check out the characterological facets of the personalities of the abolitionists, the women's suffragists, the early labor organizers, the civil rights workers. What did they do? They had to endure and yet commit to transforming. Some very dark times.

[00:19:39] What concerns me sometimes with our time is that people who consider themselves healers don't want to really delve into the wound. An abolitionist could not deny the reality of slavery. The women suffragists did not deny the reality of the institutionalized oppression of women.

[00:19:58] And there's a difference between denial and transcendence. So I think that we're living at a time, it's interesting because most people in our society today have become very sophisticated about drugs and alcohol. If most people, certainly in the higher consciousness community, we've all had the experience now of either making the phone call or having someone call us to say the following, did you see her?

[00:20:28] Did you see her? Did you see her drive away with the kids completely drunk? Did you see her the other day? Or you saw him fall down the stairs. You saw him fall down the stairs, and we all know what it means. Has it gone too far? And that is followed by the sentence, do you think we ought to do something? And conscious people say, yeah, I think we should.

[00:20:46] Who knows an interventionist? Where are we going to do it? Whose house? How are we going to get them there? Are we going to buy the ticket and get them to rehab that day? Everybody has become very sophisticated that things can go so far. Because the word inertia means the tendency of the object to move in whatever direction it's been moving.

[00:21:07] It's like they say about addiction, that it's a progressive disease. It's not going to stop if there's not a counterforce in a real addict. So people understand there are situations where if we love that person, we intervene. But you have to get down and into it to do that.

[00:21:28] Somebody's got to plan the intervention. Somebody's got to decide, okay, we're all going to be there for, so and so is going to drive them over. And so that to me is what abolition was. It was an intervention. The women's suffragist movement was an intervention. Labor organizing was an intervention.

[00:21:48] Civil rights movement was an intervention. They were times of collective intervention. And of course it was traumatizing for them. They weren't perfect people. It was a horrifying thing they had to endure and transform. And they did prevail, but if you go to the doctor and you have a terrible gash on your hand, the doctor doesn't say, ew, that looks gross. Let's look at your knee instead.

[00:22:19] I think the next step for the wellness community is to address the sickness of the society. If you had all of the blood in the body go into the one arm, that would be a very sick body. Blood has to circulate. In a democratic society, wealth has to circulate.

[00:22:43] Wealth creation opportunities has to circulate. We have an ever-shrinking group of Americans with easy access to healthcare, quality healthcare, easy access to higher education and so forth. That's no different than sickness in the body. So I always feel like the people who have a grounding in spiritually and wellness are the last people who should be sitting out the process of collective healing.

[00:23:12] Because if you know what heals one life, you're the one who knows what would best heal the society. Instead, we don't want anything to do with it. Going back to not mentioning that capital over there and that stuff going on in there, which is some seriously dark stuff. So if we don't get in there, look who's running it.

[00:23:34] They're not healers of society, many of them. I mean, there's some wonderful people, obviously, in politics, but there are forces at work who represent diseased conditions for society, for the majority of people. So I think that's a next step. We can't wait. Well, I still have some healing to do.

[00:24:02] They weren't perfect either, but they showed up for their times. And the other thing is something that you and I and your wife were talking about earlier, which is, oh, we discovered capitalism, didn't we? Which is great. I've had bestsellers too. I love it too. Your podcast is successful.

[00:24:20] It's wonderful. There is such a thing as righteous profit. But also, there's a trick there. Because the system doesn't mind if you have a successful podcast. It doesn't mind if you have a successful book. Good on you. Anything you want to do in the private sector, but leave the public sector alone. Anytime you really try to get your hands on levers of power that could change things for people who are not as fortunate as you, they're coming after you.

[00:24:47] Luke: Yeah, like George Carlin. It's one big club, and you ain't in it.

[00:24:51] Marianne: That's right.

[00:24:52] Luke: Well, you raise something interesting that I don't want to say I struggle with it, but it's something that I contemplate. And that is, I see all of the issues in culture and in politics as downstream from consciousness.

[00:25:06] To me, the elevation of consciousness for each individual raises the tide that raises all ships. And so I know, as I've recovered from addiction and worked so much on healing myself, I have a healing impact on the world, regardless of whether I'm involved in activism or not.

[00:25:33] Marianne: Some of the greatest philosophers in the world came from Germany. Rudolf Steiner was in Germany. They still led Jews into the ovens. If you look at the visual, at the symbolism of a Jewish star of David or of a Christian cross, they represent the intersection. Visually, it's the horizontal and the vertical axis.

[00:25:52] It's not one or the other. And I think it's like building a lasagna. You have to deal with the cheese, you have to deal with the pasta, and you have to deal with the sauce. And at one point you put them all together.

[00:26:03] Luke: Right.

[00:26:10] Marianne: And so, yes, you're living in that inquiry. I'm glad to hear that you're living in that inquiry because I believe that one of the most important things that could happen in America today is for people like you to live in that inquiry.

[00:26:16] Luke: Yeah. It's like there's also a social phenomenon that I observe of well-meaning people that become involved in activism as a way to evade doing the work on themselves.

[00:26:33] Marianne: Absolutely. It’s both and, sure.

[00:26:34] Luke: There's a bypass option there for people too.

[00:26:37] Marianne: I couldn't agree more. And that's why the philosophy of non-violence speaks to that. That's what Gandhi and Dr. King were about. What Gandhi said is the end is inherent in the means. Or as I always say, everything you do is infused with the consciousness with which you do it.

[00:26:54] You even say well-meaning. I'm going to even search for well-meaning. I consider myself on the left of the political spectrum, but I've seen the same smugness, self-righteousness, arrogance. You're absolutely right. In order to transform the world today, it must be a deep, deep inner and outer work. Martin Luther King said, we need quantitative change in our circumstances, and we need qualitative shifts in our souls.

[00:27:30] It's both and. If you're going to do political activism, going back to what you said before about working in the morning on otherwise, the temptation to unethical behavior, mean-spiritedness, let me tell you, it's a gangster culture out there. So I'm not saying let's all do it. It's fun. I'm saying let's all do it because if we don't--

[00:27:56] Luke: We're hitting as we have many times.

[00:27:57] Marianne: We're hitting bottom.

[00:28:00] Luke: When you hit bottom, there's first the reconciliation of that fact, the awareness, the acknowledgement coming out of denial. And then there's an intervention that there are actions that need to take place in order to create something new out of that bottom and to rise up. You can't just sit down there going, yeah, it really sucks. Society is doomed. I'm doomed. Let's just all be here in self-loathing and self-pity. There has to be some activation up to levels of creating something different.

[00:28:37] Marianne: You take what you just said, and the question becomes, how do we do that? Because at what point do you intervene? I'm going back to Germany, leading people into the camps and people dying in ovens. Okay. Ultimately, the allies intervened. They did. It was what World War II was.

[00:28:52] Ultimately, they intervened. They won. But millions of people had died first. So at this point, there's an urgency. In the Course in Miracles, it says God's will has never not been done. Ultimately, ultimately.

[00:29:06] Even if nature has to throw this predatory species of humanity off the planet for a few hundred thousand years, ultimately, everything is going to be fine. The issue is how much human suffering and other species suffering has to take place first. That's the part that's under our control.

[00:29:22] Luke: Right. The raising of the bottom, what we're willing to tolerate.

[00:29:27] Marianne: My concern exactly. So that goes back to what we were talking about before. The society has set it up for some of the best and the brightest who should be the most active. They've created a way for it to be comfortable enough for us. It's a trick of the mind. We become emotionally buffered too easily.

[00:29:47] That's what I see living in Washington, DC. They say it's a bubble. It's more than a bubble. It's like a walled city energetically. And something happens to people who get part of that system and they become, many of them, not all of them, forget the raw pain of so many people.

[00:30:11] I'll tell you a story. A friend of mine, she'd worked on the Obama campaign in, I think, '08. So she got a job in the White House. I gave her a job in the White House after that, and she was in a meeting with some very high-level economic advisors to the president, and one of them said, well, if we do that policy, it'll save the average American maybe $300 a month.

[00:30:35] But I mean, what's $300 a month? Now, to you it might not be all that big a deal. To you might not be all that big a deal, to the majority of Americans, that anybody working in government would even think that way.

[00:30:52] Luke: I remember a time very vividly where $300 a month was meaningful in my life.

[00:30:58] Marianne: And true of millions of people in America. And when it was true for you, you were younger. You didn't have a wife. You didn't have a family. You already had the goods that were the seeds of-- so I think the issue is who do we have to be not just to be successful in this world? Not just who do we have to be to be happy in this world, but who do we have to be to help change this world?

[00:31:34] And I think manifesting our own well-being is very, very important, and becoming happy. The Course in Miracles says the purpose of life is to be happy. And there's a line in the course that says, as you grow closer-- I don't know what the words are to enlightenment or something. It says, you grow closer to your natural talent of protecting your brothers.

[00:32:00] Luke: Nice.

[00:32:01] Marianne: It's like the bodhisattva. The closer you get to enlightenment, the more you care about suffering. There's no serious spiritual or religious journey that gives any of us a pass concerning ourselves with the suffering of other sentient beings.

[00:32:18] And that's the part that I feel is the next step for the higher consciousness community and for the wellness community. I see not as much as what I would wish to see in terms of how we're going to end the suffering of others.

[00:32:32] When my career began, and you were talking about Jeff Kober, AIDS was right there. So I never got to skip that step. Not only was it right there, right after I started, but it gave me my career. Those young men who were dying gave me my career.

[00:32:51] So I was imprinted with something. And when I see people doing the spiritual work, then I think, oh, I hope this will be a next step for-- I know when I first ran for president, people would act like I had left the spiritual.

[00:33:11] No. To me, it's the next step extending, not specifically necessarily electoral politics. Even when you look at how much money is now made within this world of wellness and spirituality, this is power. Look at the Catholics. Look at the Jews. Look at the Christians. Look at the Muslims. They found universities. They found hospitals. They found foundations.

[00:33:38] It's supposed to happen that when you gain a level of power as a person or in a society, you do something? I find that lacking. That's the conversation that I think is so-- but too often, I'm sorry, I've seen it in my own campaign. People are so into protecting their brands, Luke.

[00:34:01] Oh, I don't want to support a political candidate because, or I don't want to talk about politics. It'll turn off some of my-- we all have to look at our own shadows as we go along.

[00:34:14] Luke: Yeah. That's one thing that's been really great vehicle for growth for me, especially over the past four years, is feeling like I've been forced to speak out about some things that I formerly would have been like, oh, I don't want to speak out of turn. I don't really understand that stuff. It's not really my lane.

[00:34:32] And it's like, because of some of the overreach and just censorship and just the totalitarian nature of the system, I don't know if it's become emboldened or just more obvious. Maybe both.

[00:34:45] Marianne: People are afraid to speak up. People are afraid to get on Twitter.

[00:34:49] Luke: Early in 2020, I realized that I was at a turning point. I was either going to play mainstream podcast host guy and just teach people about spirituality and wellness and keep going like I was, but it's not in my nature to not speak my truth.

[00:35:06] So as I started to observe things that just were incongruent to me, to say the least, I remember going, this might really hurt my brand, might hurt my career, and just talking to myself, Luke, if you step over this precipice, there's going to be no turning back because content lives forever.

[00:35:23] You can't say something on your podcast or feature a controversial guest on the podcast and then take that back. It's out there. It's the nature of the Internet and how we do media now. And it wasn't a very long inquiry, for me at least, and I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but it's just, I'm not going to be on my deathbed going, oh, I'm glad I just kept quiet and played it safe and didn't speak my mind.

[00:35:49] There is no way I'm going to be on my deathbed going, man, you chickened out. You had your shot. You had an opportunity in your own little micro ecosystem that you built to at least make some change and have the courage to speak out. And not to the degree that you've experienced going into politics, but there was definitely some censorship and people getting pissed off.

[00:36:10] And I wouldn't say I was canceled, but objectively, you could say it hurt my brand. But what I've experienced really more than anything is that standing my ground to the best of my ability has actually created more loyalty from the people that I serve.

[00:36:22] I've gained much more respect, even if I lost a few people that thought I was going a bit off the rails. It's like now the community around this podcast and people who follow this type of work, there's much more cohesiveness and much more support.

[00:36:47] And I'm so glad that I made those decisions, even if I might've made less money or I'm sure lost out in certain ways, but I know that I can sleep at night, that I had the courage to have Bobby Kennedy on my show or different people that were controversial saying controversial things at that time. And it's like, I feel great about it, whether or not it hurt me in some way or not.

[00:37:09] Marianne: I decided a long time ago that in my work, if I were sitting on the back row, would I be impressed?

[00:37:16] Luke: Oh, nice. Yeah.

[00:37:17] Marianne: I think ultimately the person whose respect I'm looking for is my own when I look in the mirror. And you're right. If you really stand for something, you're going to lose some people. But there are a whole lot more people on the other side of the river who have been waiting for you to arrive.

[00:37:33] And what you're saying, you're speaking to something so important. We're becoming this disgustingly homogenized culture. Because everybody's so afraid to speak anything that has any eccentricity, any color, any rawness, any authenticity. And I think that's just getting worse and worse today. It's subtle control.

[00:37:56] Luke: It is. That's the insidious nature of it. It's the self-censoring. It's like being censored by a social media platform or news outlets or whatever is one thing. But then I think what happens is we observe how people are vilified and we duck and go, I'm not putting myself in front of that arrow.

[00:38:15] Marianne: It's been extraordinary, by the book character assassination. And if you're not toying the corporatist bottom line, they don't want anybody to listen to you. They'll say whatever they have to say, create whatever narrative, whatever hit pieces, whatever they want to do to make people think, oh, there's nothing to see there.

[00:38:36] So then people who might support you go, well, she's radioactive, so I'm afraid if I support her, I'll be radioactive too. The truth is the opposite, actually. The truth is if two or three people would stand up and say, actually, I know her and she's not crazy, or I agree with that, actually, then the whole system would change. But everybody cowering in fear.

[00:39:01] Luke: There's also an annihilation of civil discourse in our culture too.

[00:39:05] Marianne: Even though, like you said about the ranchers, I saw-- the other day I was at an airport and this woman was so nice and she said-- there was a little cafe near the gate and the tables were all free. I was looking for a place to sit. She was about to sit. She said, you want to come sit with me? Which I thought was a little bit of an odd request, but I thought, well, sure. It's nice.

[00:39:28] So I sat down. We ended up talking. She was the nicest lady. She described herself as very conservative. She'd voted for Trump. She was just this lovely lady. She was just very nice. And what was interesting to me was, and I had a similar experience with an Uber driver yesterday, I can't tell you that I can understand exactly how she leans into Trump.

[00:40:01] She was one of those people, she calls herself very religious Christian, which I don't doubt that she is of course. And when I asked her, doesn't that bother you, certain things about him? She says, well, I don't think he believes that stuff. He doesn't mean that stuff, whatever.

[00:40:16] So I can't totally explain how she was able to lean into Trump, but what was very clear to me was how the Democrats have failed at reaching her. And yesterday, the Uber driver, we agreed on everything, everything he was complaining about in terms of how the society is working and money and all that, 100% in line with me.

[00:40:44] And I told him that, and he said, yeah, I love you. I see you. Well, he voted for Trump. And I said, but Trump is not the answer to that law. But I just thought, wow, we've really failed at making him think there's an alternative. Gandhi said-- oh, I'm sorry.

[00:41:05] Luke: No, go ahead. You go ahead.

[00:41:06] Marianne: Well, Gandhi, when they asked him who is the leader of the Indian Independence Movement, he said the small still voice within. So I think each of us has to ask inside, how can I best serve? Whether it's a podcast, whether it's a book, whatever it is.

[00:41:24] But I do think that politics is a collective assignment. Living in a society like this, I think all of us need to see ourselves as responsible for that. And that has to mean, at a time like this, more than just voting every two years. Because the system that's the problem is represented by corporate lobbyists who are in the offices of those people every hour of every day.

[00:41:52] Luke: Yeah. One big club. Going back to the piece that you were mentioning earlier about having a desire to alleviate suffering in the world, which I would say is pretty, if not the main point of what I do in my life, definitely a huge part of it. And I don't think because I'm necessarily wired to be altruistic. It's because I've suffered a lot like many of us have in my life.

[00:42:18] Marianne: I think suffering gives you x ray vision into the suffering of others.

[00:42:21] Luke: There's no way I can ignore the suffering of people in the world because I've been there. There's a certain depth of empathy that I feel for humanity collectively and just individuals that I meet. I can see pain in people's eyes in a way that maybe someone who hasn't gone through some of the things I've gone through has.

[00:42:37] Marianne: That's why you have x ray vision. Once you've suffered, you have x ray vision. However, I think it's also true you were born to be altruistic. You look at little children, little babies, little children, they are altruistic. So I think it's both and. I remember something that happened when my daughter was really little.

[00:42:57] She was playing with this little girl named Isabella, and it was a board game. And I don't know how old they were. Maybe they were five. We moved to Santa Barbara when she was four, maybe five, and Isabella was a little younger. And my daughter won. Wait, no. Isabella won. I said, Isabella, honey, you won. And so you get to take all of Emmy's stuff.

[00:43:28] And she went, no, no. And I tried to give her Emmy's little things. No, no, Emmy. You can have them back. You can have them back. But she had not learned yet. She'd not taken it in that for her to win, someone else would lose.

[00:43:44] She was like, no. No, that's terrible. I thought, oh my God, this is so amazing to witness, that she has to be taught, no, it's okay. You get to win the stuff. She was in total win-win consciousness, which is where we should all be.

[00:44:02] Luke: Yeah, absolutely. So finding motivation from my suffering has been a huge gift to the point where I wouldn't change any of it, really. And some of it was pretty bad. Some self-inflicted, some victimization.

[00:44:21] In your life, which has been obviously very committed to not only your own spiritual paths, but in sharing that information with people, what was the impetus for you to become serious in your commitment to knowing God? What led you to A Course in Miracles or the beginning of your faith?

[00:44:41] Marianne: Even when I was a little girl, my prayers were a big thing for me at night. When I was a little girl, my parents had a friend who had open heart surgery. And this was back in the '60s where obviously it would have been a far more precarious event than it is now. And I had it all planned that I was going to pray for him the night before his surgery. And I had a child's perception of-- and I forgot to pray for him, and he died.

[00:45:19] And I had this child's-- obviously making myself far too important in the mix, but I remember how traumatized I was that I'd forgotten to pray for him. You've got to be really little to be thinking that way. So that would have been either the late '50s or the early '60s. But my feeling of relationship with God was baked into the cake for me.

[00:45:45] Luke: What was it like discovering A Course in Miracles, which is, I don't know how obviously rooted in Christianity or the message of Jesus as your new book. Was there any conflict there when you started to identify with that work as growing up Jewish?

[00:46:02] Marianne: I'm Jewish. You're born Jewish. You die Jewish. There's no you growing up Jewish. I am Jewish. When I first saw the book and I saw all the Christian language, I had taken Christian theological classes. I had read St. Augustine. I had read Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure.

[00:46:22] As a matter of fact, one summer at University of Texas here in Austin, I took a class in medieval philosophy that was absolutely amazing and really formative for me. So I had done a lot of academic study, but when I first saw the Course in Miracles and it wasn't in a classroom and I saw all the Christian terminology in the book, I did put it down thinking, oh, that's not for me.

[00:46:48] A year later, I was in such pain in my life, I would read anything. And it becomes very clear this is not the Christian religion. People from all religions and no religion. It has never made me feel I'm supposed to change my religion. It has only given me a deeper understanding of it as a matter of fact.

[00:47:06] Because the course is a psychological mind training based on universal spiritual themes. So even though it uses those terms, it uses them in decidedly non-traditional psychotherapeutic ways. It's about psychology. The Course in Miracles says religion and psychotherapy at their peak are the same thing. So the path of the mystic is the path of the heart, not a path of dogma or doctrine.

[00:47:36] Luke: Cutting my teeth as I did early in life on the 12 steps--and I wasn't raised religious in any capacity. No one was spiritual. No one was religious. It was just a non-sequitur. And then when I reached a time in my life where I hit bottom and was like, wow, all of my resources have failed. I have to go somewhere else, and I couldn't go to another person. So I had to go to essentially a God that I had zero understanding of or belief in.

[00:48:04] And then I was very grateful that the spiritual teachings that I was introduced to, although had origins in Christianity, let you pick your own God, a God of your understanding. And I think that was such a brilliant model that was created to make it inclusive. And even within that, I remember someone turning me onto an Emmett Fox book.

[00:48:27] Marianne: Ah, Emmett Fox is great.

[00:48:27] Luke: Yeah. Sermon on the Mount, which was hugely influential in my life. And I remember reading it and really identifying it, a couple of pages in and it's like, and then Jesus said, Christ, dah, dah, dah. And I was like, whoa, I didn't even know that the term Sermon on the Mount was from the Bible because I'd never read the Bible.

[00:48:45] I just thought it was some great new thought movement book, like a Napoleon Hill or something, in that context. And it was really helpful to me though, because as you're describing, and later I got the same from A Course in Miracles, is it's not about who said it. It's about what was said and how it can impact your life if you resonate with it and you apply it to your life.

[00:49:05] And so now I don't care if it comes from Buddha, Krishna, whatever. If it's a truth and it hits my heart, great, all is welcome. And it's been really helpful for me to let go of any resistance and--

[00:49:17] Marianne: Right. I think there's one truth with a capital T, and it's spoken in many different ways. But there are universal themes that are at the heart of all the great religious and spiritual systems. And we're living at a time when people are realizing that whether it's Buddha or Krishna or Jesus or Moses, wherever it came from, or your great Aunt Becky or your therapist, truth is true. But you know it's true because it dovetails with every other thing that you know is true.

[00:49:48] Luke: Right. You start to see correlations and then that helps validate it.

[00:49:52] Marianne: Right. Which I think is fascinating. I wrote a book called Tears to Triumph about spirituality and depression. And I talked about Buddha and Jesus and Moses in terms of the transition in life from periods of darkness into periods of light, and how they all speak, whether you're talking about the crucifixion to the resurrection, you're talking about the movement out of slavery in Egypt into the promised land, or you're talking about Buddha as the Prince Siddhartha who went over the walls of his father's castle and saw suffering for the first time and how that began his journey to enlightenment.

[00:50:35] That issue of journey from darkness to light, from confusion to understanding, and from pain to peace is the essence of every great religious and spiritual journey.

[00:50:48] Luke: So let's talk about your new book, The Mystic Jesus: The Mind of Love, which will launch May 7th, 2024, which will be around the time this podcast comes out. Now, to be honest, I've read your other books, many of them, but this one, I just got a couple of days ago, the PDF, the galley version. I'm speed reading it, trying to get certain points. So I'm looking forward to the printed version of the book.

[00:51:13] Marianne: Me too. I haven't seen the printed version yet, but I hear that one is waiting for me.

[00:51:17] Luke: Oh, cool.

[00:51:18] Marianne: I'll see it tonight.

[00:51:19] Luke: Cool, cool. So as someone who's written a number of successful and highly influential books in the spiritual space, what was the impetus for this particular topic?

[00:51:29] Marianne: The publisher came to me with this one.

[00:51:31] Luke: Oh, wow.

[00:51:32] Marianne: The largest growing religious denomination now is unaffiliated. It's called unchurched. And people are looking for spiritual food. They don't want to throw away the baby with the bathwater. They're interested in God, but they're not interested in dogma and doctrine and organized institutional realities that they experience to be more constrictive than expansive.

[00:52:09] And particularly, the publisher said, we get requests for books about Jesus. People want to know about Jesus, but they don't want to be limited to the filter of organized Christian denominations that they don't relate to. So the publisher said, isn't Jesus part of the Course in Miracles? I said, well, absolutely. But I was very intimidated. You don't want to get that one wrong.

[00:52:43] Luke: I'm not signing up to write that book. Yeah.

[00:52:46] Marianne: So it was an honor to be asked. It was a privilege to write it. And I hope I did. I know that the editor who originally brought me in, who is no longer at HarperOne, he was pleased with that, and his opinion means a lot to me. So I hope it will be a contribution to people's understanding and inner peace.

[00:53:11] Luke: In my research of the book, there were a number of great quotes. One of them as follows, the mystic Jesus is a universal Jesus, an aspect of nature itself. I experience the sun, but no one owns the sun. I experience the breeze, but no one owns the breeze. I experience love, but no one owns love. Natural forces can neither be contained nor propertied, and Jesus is a natural force.

[00:53:40] And I think that really speaks to what you just shared. And what so many of us are yearning for, whether we were raised in or outside of religion, we know there's something there. We get signs if we're paying attention. And so it seems that humans want to be able to attribute that thing that we feel and know to a person, to a system, to theology, to a book.

[00:54:05] And I think it's really healthy what you're doing with this new book, is going, hey, there's something here for you that just might've happened to come through an embodied human being at a certain point in history, but it's something that's available to all. And I think that's, from what I understand, part of the core message. It's wildly inclusive.

[00:54:27] Marianne: A lot of people say, I'm totally into Jesus. He was a great teacher. This goes beyond that. This does move into the realm unattached, as you said, to the constrictions or the filter of organized Christianity with the belief that no one has a monopoly on something as profound as Jesus.

[00:54:56] But it does move beyond this, oh, he was a great teacher. Oh, he was a great prophet. To the notion of a portal of energy. Now, the Course in Miracles says he was not the only one, but it's like a room and it's got many names on the door. He is one name. And if he is your portal, you know it. And there's nothing in the Course in Miracles that says he should. So it doesn't have any of that exclusive stuff.

[00:55:28] But if he is, he is someone who, according to the course, lived on the earth, but thought only the thoughts of heaven. Heaven is our awareness of oneness. So even though he lived here as a man and had all the physical senses, no perception was limited to the false evidence of the world. He was completely purified of any belief in separation, any belief in judgment, any belief in attack.

[00:56:02] He had reached that point. They did not exist in his consciousness. As a consequence of that, as a result of that, in that space of pure love, miracles occurred naturally because miracles do occur naturally in the presence of love, the loaves of fishes, the water into wine, the healing. Because he is at that place.

[00:56:24] The idea is that that is the highest actualization of human being. Once again, we're not saying he's the only one to achieve that. He is one, however, who has achieved that. And having achieved it has now been, according to the course, given the authority to help you get there and to help me get there, should we request it.

[00:56:46] If we don't request it, it would be a violation of our free will. So the idea is, you're being nice to me, so it's easy to feel love and kindness and centeredness. But let's say you weren't. You were being condescending, mean. I realize this is a trap. Oh my God, it's going to be on--

[00:57:06] Luke: It's a hate piece.

[00:57:06] Marianne: Uh-huh. Well, you're talking to somebody who's run for president, I remind you.

[00:57:12] Luke: I can imagine.

[00:57:12] Marianne: It might be very difficult for me to find that place within myself. Okay, it's just a call for love. What's not love is a call for love. Whether you call it the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Course in Miracles says, and I think this is pretty traditional, connecting link between the consciousness of God and the consciousness of humanity that's within our minds, within our consciousness.

[00:57:35] Because Jesus is someone who has risen to the point, the idea here is that there are two parts of the mind, that which is one with God, every perception is love, and that which is the ego, the separated mind, every perception is fear.

[00:57:51] You and I straddle two worlds, because even though we were born to be only love from the minute we got here, we started being taught and trained by the thinking of the world, which is based on fear. Enlightenment is the unlearning.

[00:58:04] There are times where we can say to ourselves, I know this person. I know they're innocent, but my worldly experience is just too much for me right now. But if you can help me, please. Because it says he has the power.

[00:58:25] He says, my mind joined with your mind can shine away the ego. I will lend you if you invite me in. It's free will. You're totally free. But if you wish, I will join with yours and we'll get past this hump. That's a little more than a great teacher.

[00:58:50] Luke: Right. What it makes me think of is the nature of eternity outside of our limited perspective of time and space. But you and I know, I think, that there is no now. There's no past. There's no future. There's just an eternity that we can't possibly comprehend.

[00:59:06] Marianne: But the only place where eternity intersects with linear time is the present moment.

[00:59:10] Luke: Right, right. But from that context, say Jesus was a human being that for some reason, like others before, and maybe even after him that we're unaware of, was chosen by God or was given the gift and ability to embody that level of consciousness and still remain in physical form. And so if we think, oh, well he existed X amount of years ago, therefore we're praying to someone who is dead. But in the eternal space--

[00:59:42] Marianne: There is no past, present, or future. And there is no death.

[00:59:43] Luke: So the imprint that he left as an embodied master avatar, however you want to frame Jesus, it's not that, oh, he left some ripples in the water and some books came out after that and some people followed him. It's like, no, he, it, consciousness, God, is still actually right here.

[01:00:01] Marianne: Yeah. It's not what he left. He is right now.

[01:00:03] Luke: It's here.

[01:00:04] Marianne: The Course in Miracles says, the second coming, and then it puts in parentheses, when he shall be perceived, he's here right now. And once again, there's nothing in the course or in my perception that says it has to be the name Jesus. The course does not say that.

[01:00:25] But to the extent to which he is the portal for you, the perception is he's in you. He's right here right now. He's right here in me. He's right here in you. That it's not something that was. It was historically, but it's an is, if we are recognizing the perfection in one another.

[01:00:54] Luke: In the most, by far, profound spiritual experience I ever had in my life two years ago, to call it supernatural would be an understatement. It's having this experience, and it was unlike anything I could have ever imagined taking place.

[01:01:15] And it begged the question, of course, what is this? What is happening? And not a voice, but a knowing revealed itself and said, this is Christ consciousness. And I've never read the Bible. I don't even know what that means. You know what I'm saying?

[01:01:33] Marianne: How long were you in that space?

[01:01:35] Luke: Oh, I was working with 5-MeO-DMT, which normally is a very short experience, but profound experience. Nature just led me into a particular experience at this day, wherein it was an extended thing for a few hours. And so this was just one of the points where the totality of consciousness opened up in a way that I just could never even imagine it. It's ineffable.

[01:02:07] And so as I started to reemerge into the persona and get my bearings, it was like, what is this? And it just went, it's this. And it wasn't that I had to become a Christian. I didn't have to become a devotee of Jesus Christ even. It was just a knowing that, oh, wow, there is a field of love of which the entire known universe is comprised. And it's always here. It will always be here. And my only job is to just remember that despite appearances and despite--

[01:02:42] Marianne: It's not something you learn. It's something you realize.

[01:02:46] Luke: Yeah. And I'm so grateful for that moment because, I don't know, even though I didn't per se become a Christian in a traditional sense--

[01:02:54] Marianne: No, it's not about becoming a Christian. That's the whole point.

[01:02:56] Luke: But it did give me a more tangible-- sometimes I do pray to Jesus now as someone who is, I wouldn't say even religious at all, but that imprinted me in such a way that there was no rationalizing and there was no coming back from that going, ah, I was just imagining things where it was some hallucination.

[01:03:15] It's in my DNA now in a way that is irreversible, thankfully. Not that I don't forget many times each day, but it created a true north for me that I don't even care what I call this thing, but that's where I'm going. It's not even I'm going. That's where I have to remember or I'm invited to remember that I already am.

[01:03:36] Marianne: And in any moment that I choose.

[01:03:36] Luke: Yeah. And so if I'm not feeling that, then where did I go? God didn't go anywhere. That's the thing. One of my teachers in my early recovery, I was like, I don't know. I don't feel this God thing. I pray, and I don't think anything's happening. God will be with me and then he seems to be gone. And my teacher at the time said, Luke, when you can't find God, guess who moved.

[01:04:01] Marianne: Yeah.

[01:04:01] Luke: I've separated myself. It's not that I've been abandoned or forsaken by God. It's that through my own intellect, ego, instincts, drive, whatever, I've separated myself.

[01:04:13] Marianne: And you separate yourself from God by separating yourself from people. We can't look for God except through people. I had that time in my life, and I think we all do, where I'd be looking at you Luke, but really, please, move out of the way. I'm looking for God. There's that line in Les Mis, to love another person is to see the face of God.

[01:04:35] And that's what the Course in Miracles gave me, the realization that the key is other people. Heaven is entered two by two, the Course in Miracles says. Heaven being the awareness of our oneness. I cannot feel one with God if I do not feel one with you.

[01:04:52] The course would say if you feel you can't find God, ask yourself, who am I not forgiving? Who am I holding a judgmental thought towards? Who am I not forgiving? That is the shadow in front of the light. Your judgmental thought about anyone is the shadow, is eclipsing your view of God himself.

[01:05:15] Luke: In regard to that, unconditional love, unconditional forgiveness, the idea that ultimately everyone is innocent, that kind of thing, and just being able to see, I don't know, when I look in someone's eyes, even if it's someone who is objectively dysfunctional or what we might call in today's language, toxic or unconscious or whatever, I have a really unique ability for which I'm really grateful that I can see people for who they really are. I see what's behind their eyes.

[01:05:50] But at times, my lesson has been in not losing my discernment and losing my ability to create loving boundaries with people. It's like being so open hearted that there's a naivete and a vulnerability in that that doesn't serve either party. Would you speak to having unconditional love and forgiveness and also applying boundaries when necessary?

[01:06:16] Marianne: More than boundaries. They are, absolutely, the essence of who we are. Course in Miracle it says, some people become temporarily inaccessible to the power of the atonement. When I look, for instance, at my experience of my presidential campaign, there were people working for that campaign who should never have been near it. What was I thinking?

[01:06:46] What was I thinking was they were just so nice. And I could see the innocence. And I feel shame within myself that I didn't demand a lot more than boundaries, a lot more investigation and research before I even hired them. So I think in life sometimes the boundary has to be whether you even get-- so it is boundaries, but do we even get close to this?

[01:07:20] Luke: It's like the degree of boundaries and how close or far they exist.

[01:07:25] Marianne: Yeah. Allowing those people to work for the campaign was a betrayal of millions of people, really, who stood for the possibilities there. We're living in politics where one of the things they do is they infiltrate campaigns.

[01:07:46] When you run for president, the FBI calls you in and they talk to you about something and they say, we're going to tell every campaign this. And they talk about some of the tricks to expect. And they say the three main actors are, Iran, Russia, or China.

[01:08:05] And all of the tricks that they told me about, I experienced too late, but they didn't come from Russia, China, or Iran. They came from right here, forces right here. I'm sitting with that because I saw things-- I come from the wellness, the higher consciousness community. Yeah, some people don't work with that person, whatever.

[01:08:31] But it's so small compared to the opportunities and the fact that we're basically nice people. Once you've seen what I've seen, you can't unsee it. And part of me, it's like we were discussing this earlier, just wants to scramble, get back as quickly as possible. I just want to be here with you guys.

[01:08:51] And I don't want to ever go there again because they're really mean people. And they're a gangster culture, and they're liars and thieves. But there's something bigger than that, if nothing else, and that people really need to know.

[01:09:03] But people really need to know, not from a place of, I want to increase people's cynicism. Because cynicism becomes just an excuse for not helping. But hopefully increase people's sense of the urgency and importance of this hour.

[01:09:20] Luke: What comes to mind is wisdom. And going back to Emmett Fox, one of my favorite of his teachings is he says wisdom is the perfect blend of intelligence and love. And I think that speaks to my inquiry of, wow, how can you be unconditionally loving and not see other as other, yet also not be stupid? Not be so loving that you're abandoning yourself in your unconsciousness or your unwillingness to look at possible shadows or someone's neuroses or how safe they may or may not be.

[01:09:56] Marianne: Not only that. Okay, I'll give you an example. I turned on television one day, I think it was a CNBC or one of those. It was mainstream business. There was a man who was a CEO of a big food company, and he was talking about the fact-- this is the term he used, we have to meet people where they are.

[01:10:39] And he was saying, since so many people are feeding their families breakfast cereal for dinner, I just want them to know that Kellogg has a wide variety of opportunity. You realize what this man is saying. 39% of Americans now report that they regularly skip meals in order to pay their rent. This man, and I looked him up, his salary is over 4 million a year, CEO of Kellogg.

[01:10:55] He comes on television, referring to people who cannot afford a regular meal for their children at night-- some PR genius I've hired said, well, contextualize it as meeting people where they are and saying, well, we just want people to know how many Kellogg pieces we have, Kellogg cereals. Now, I'm sure he's a nice man.

[01:11:20] I'm sure he's nice with family. I'm sure he'd be charming at dinner. What he represents is a system that is so wrong. He should be on television saying, given that there is so much hunger in America today, that should not exist in the richest country in the world, I and four other CEOs of major food companies in America are here to announce that for the next year, there will be no empty shelf on any food pantry in America.

[01:11:49] But he's tied to a system that puts his stockholder value before the safety, health and wellbeing of the people. This has to do with ingredients of these food companies. This is more than dysfunctional. This is more than toxic. This is more than traumatizing. This is really dark stuff here. We have carcinogens in our food. Now, I'm not connecting this to this.

[01:12:16] Luke: When you said cornflakes, I imagine a bowl of glyphosate. It's not only that you can only afford a bowl of cereal for you kids

[01:12:27] Marianne: It's what's in that cereal.

[01:12:28] Luke: It's what's in it.

[01:12:29] Marianne: Exactly. Exactly my point. We have carcinogens in our food in this country that are not allowed in other countries. Because what the food companies have found, for instance, is that there are ingredients that will increase the shelf life of certain goods, thus increasing stockholder value, but they're also carcinogenic.

[01:12:50] They're not allowed in other countries. That went viral a few weeks ago, this thing. It was a bottle of ketchup in the United States versus a bottle of ketchup in Canada. And the ingredients that aren't allowed there. There are companies, food companies from literally all of the world, who cannot produce what they want to produce in their own country, so they come and buy companies here.

[01:13:13] Now, the fact that he's a nice man, we really have to grow up here. And we have to get very serious here. I'm sorry, there's no amount of money you could spend. You could say, I'm only going to shop at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. Don't kid yourself. You cannot today bubble yourself, gate yourself, or make enough money to protect you and your children.

[01:13:36] Whether it has to do with the ingredients in food, toxins in the air, 46% of urban water wells that are filled with PFAS. People say, well, I only buy bottled water and people go, well, that's pretty funny. Have you ever looked at all the plastic, what's going on in that? Do you even know where that water came from?

[01:13:54] We have got to understand that we have got to intervene here. It's with the food. It's with the health. It's with the environment. It's with medicine. It's with everything. And we can't just play whack a mole and try to fix a little here and a fix it there. We need a whole systems transition, but we need to do it wisely, and we need to do it responsibly, and we need to do it with justice for people, thousands of people who make their living at least indirectly off fossil fuel extraction or off the defense industry.

[01:14:25] So we've got to move from a war economy to a peace economy. We've got to move from a dirty economy to a clean economy. We've got to move from a model of medicine that's pharmaceutically dominated to the allowance and get rid of corporate capture. But we have to be serious adults in order to pull this off.

[01:14:43] And it's going to take at least 10 years. I think it's probably a 20-year phase transition. But we must get started. We must recognize the urgency of this moment. People are dying. 68,000 Americans die every year from lack of health care. 18 million Americans cannot afford their prescriptions that their doctors give them.

[01:15:06] 1.3 million Americans ration their insulin? You don't have that in any other advanced democracy. And you only have it here because of the institutionalized greed of the insurance companies. This isn't going to change. If we don't intervene, the system will not disrupt itself. And those forces own Washington, DC.

[01:15:25] And so Washington, DC's idea of qualified to lead politically, someone qualified to perpetuate the system as it is, it will not disrupt itself. This is a big a swerve, dangerous swerve from anything democracy should stand for, slavery, oppression of women, segregation. Because it's not a specific institution. Now, it's just an economic paradigm that in issue after issue after issue puts corporate profits before safety, health, and wellbeing of the people.

[01:16:00] And then it says to people like you and me, what are you complaining about? What are you complaining about? You made it. Because it needs enough of us, and it picks us out. It sometimes picks us out. Oh, because you'll help actually run the system. It's really deep. You know what I mean? It's like, whoa.

[01:16:28] One of the things about running for president that's hard is there's no do over. And so working with the would have, should have, could haves is hard. People who run the system now, I wouldn't have anything to do with. I would come to someone like you, not just for support, but how are we going to design this?

[01:16:52] Luke: Honestly, I can't imagine getting in that den of vipers that is Washington, DC. Someone's got to do it, but it's like, wow, I'm glad that I don't seem to have been chosen for a role like that.

[01:17:07] Marianne: Well, like I said, though, Luke, because Rick Rubin said something like that too, I think politics is a collective assignment. I think we all, like every cell in the body, you to the pancreas, you to the lungs you to the heart, same way, you to wellness, you to the arts, you to healing. But then there's the immune system.

[01:17:32] And I think we all have to think of ourselves as cells in the immune system right now. And so World War II, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, people who were artists didn't get to say, I'm an artist. Sorry.

[01:17:53] Luke: Yeah. You're off to bootcamp. Going back to A Course in Miracles, you've been working with that teaching, what, 40, 50 years or something at this point?

[01:18:02] Marianne: Yeah. I'm 71 years old. I started reading the course about, what, 45 years ago, and my career began 40 years ago.

[01:18:15] Luke: So I find it interesting that that teaching has held enough depth for you to continue on with it.

[01:18:25] Marianne: Oh my God. You can't outgrow God.

[01:18:26] Luke: Yeah. But thinking about many of our journeys, we discover a certain teacher, a book.

[01:18:33] Marianne: Yeah, but not the serious source material.

[01:18:34] Luke: We got into Wayne Dyer or this or that. The only one I think for me that I just can go back to, and I'm still like, you still don't have it, Luke, is the work of David Hawkins. That work, I think, oh, I get the model. I'm integrating this, and I get it.

[01:18:52] And then I'll take some time off and I'll go listen to one of his lectures. And I'm like, oh, I wasn't even scratching the surface. I got to dig back in. And I think of A Course in Miracles is very much the same way. You're never going to graduate certain levels of teaching.

[01:19:02] Marianne: You don't outgrow A Course in Miracles. You don't outgrow Jesus. You don't outgrow Moses. You don't outgrow Buddha. You don't outgrow Hinduism. You don't outgrow the big book. Serious source material you don't outgrow. You can't outgrow Dostoevsky. You don't outgrow The Grapes of Wrath. You don't outgrow Anna Karenina. Anything that hits the center of things.

[01:19:28] You don't outgrow looking at a fire. You don't outgrow looking at the stars at night. You don't outgrow the awe we feel in front of the trees outside your window. You don't outgrow looking at the Mona Lisa or David or the Pieta. You don't outgrow Michelangelo. You just don't. You don't outgrow greatness.

[01:19:50] Luke: I think sometimes as spiritual seekers, many of us are prone to a shiny thing syndrome, where we dig into A Course in Miracles and we're like, okay, I went through the year. I've done the workbook, whatever it is. And you think, okay, onto the next thing, onto the next thing, onto the next thing, onto the next thing.

[01:20:07] When oftentimes they're core teachings, like many of which you've just described that it's like, everything was there. Why do you need it to be said by 50 other people? It's like, it's the thing.

[01:20:19] Marianne: There was a book many years ago that Ram Dass, I think, wrote called Grist for the Mill. And he did talk about spiritual dilettantism. People who pick up the course anywhere and they've quoted it and they think they've done it, you're right. And I do think there is a tendency with any serious path, you get to the point where it makes you confront yourself too much, so you pick up the next one.

[01:20:46] But I think once you've picked up anything, you never want to stop growing and learning from the reflections that you might get from something else. You can be a serious student of the Course in Miracles and still get a lot out of reading Autobiography of a Yogi.

[01:21:05] Luke: Right, right, right. Well, sometimes your understanding is also strengthened when you do go outside of your safety zone and you find correlations and corroboration and you go, oh, this is the thing that I know from the thing. I think that can be very affirming in our faith and our quest for faith.

[01:21:25] Something interesting, and I don't know much about the origins of A Course in Miracles, but I learned about it from David Hawkins. I think I learned about him from Wayne Dyer talking about him.

[01:21:36] Marianne: I knew Wayne quite well.

[01:21:38] Luke: Yeah, I bet. I bet. And so because the 12 steps were the core teaching of my life at that point, I learned from Wayne Dyer that David Hawkins made a lot of correlations and why the 12 steps are so powerful in his book, Power vs. Force.

[01:21:56] So I started following him and that's how I found out about A Course in Miracles. But one of the most compelling things about how he would talk about A Course in Miracles and how it was really instrumental in his later work was that he had these groups of spiritual students.

[01:22:11] And they were doing muscle testing, kinesiology, where they'd hold a little vial of pesticides up to their chest and then they would go weak. And so he was starting to play with that modality and he had a faction of his students that were students of A Course in Miracles that were going through the course, and they failed to go weak to negative stimuli like the pesticides, the fluorescent lights.

[01:22:33] And that was why David Hawkins discovered that you could use muscle testing for non-local phenomenon. That it wasn't just limited to me going, is this soda good for me? Ooh, I'm going weak. I won't drink the soda.

[01:22:47] Marianne: Doesn't surprise me at all.

[01:22:48] Luke: Fascinating. So I was like, well, if these students of A Course in Miracles are now impervious to negative stimuli, what's in there? And that was my first clue.

[01:22:59] Marianne: I'll tell you what's in there. This is the way the course puts it. You are heir to the laws that prevail within the world you identify with. And spirituality and growth and miracle mindedness, whatever you want to call it, is about shifting your sense of self-perception from the small limited physical self, with a small s, to the large infinite spiritual self, the entirety of the ocean. So within this world, you're vulnerable to the laws that rule here.

[01:23:33] Now that doesn't mean I can jump off a cliff and not die if it's thousands of feet. That's not what it's about. But in terms of the world as we know it, if my identity, to the extent to which my identity is beyond this world, I'm not limited by the false beliefs of this world.

[01:23:58] Luke: So perhaps those students were tapping into that level of understanding.

[01:24:02] Marianne: Well, by being students of the course, by doing the workbook, they were training their internal-- we have attitudinal muscles. We have internal musculature, just like we have external musculature. You're rebuilding. You're training your inner body. You're training your inner self. Just like when you go to the gym, you are training your physical muscles, your attitudinal muscles remaining above the fray.

[01:24:26] And it's really interesting because sometimes in the physical world, you're strengthening yourself so you can run. With the inner musculature, you're training yourself to remain still and not be thrown off by the lower energies of the world. A lot easier said than done, but that's the training.

[01:24:46] Luke: Yeah. Well, it brings to mind something I've always been fascinated by, and that is the bridge between the natural world of known and the supernatural world of unknown as demonstrated by various, for example, Indian mystics over the ages that have been able to perform these cities or these miracles where they bilocate and they're in two places at once, and there are witnesses to confirm that.

[01:25:07] These stories since I was a kid have fascinated me. Or manifesting Vibhuti out of the palm of your hand. And a lot of them can be turned into a pile of tricks, and I'm sure there have been a lot of fakery along the way, but there are some very validated stories of this kind and people levitating and things like that.

[01:25:26] I know one man who has levitated, and I haven't seen it happen, but I fully believe that he's telling the truth, and it's just not a big deal to him, and it speaks to that. The varying levels of reality that we can experience and what we believe in and what we don't believe in makes the miraculous commonplace for certain people.

[01:25:48] Marianne: One of the reasons I enjoy any effort to release and to free Jesus from this calcified, it's like a fossil in a museum to this spontaneous reality. Augustine talking about Jesus said, ever modern, ever new, is because you look very differently at the fact, as you just said. He turned the loaves into fishes. He turned the water into wine. It was the same stuff.

[01:26:15] Luke: Right. right.

[01:26:17] Marianne: I had an experience when I was a little girl. I used to skip and then I would stay in the air for a long time before I landed. And when I was, I don't know how old I was, either like late teens or mid-teens or something, I did it in front of people who looked at me almost scared like that was weird and I could never do it again.

[01:26:47] And it made me think of witches with their broomsticks and that image. Yeah, that's the witch and the broomstick. Yeah, I would skip, and then I would go from here to there. And somebody looked at me like that was weird. And I went, yeah, that's weird. And I could never--

[01:27:05] Luke: Shut it down. That's wild. Yeah, I've always been fascinated by that phenomenon where certain humans train themselves or they're imbued with a gift where they're able to make what we perceive to be reality and its limitations malleable.

[01:27:20] It's just fascinating to me. There's another great story, not exactly a miracle, but something that for some reason has always stuck in my awareness where, when Ram Dass went to his guru, Neem Karoli Baba in India and gave him a bunch of LSD and nothing happened. He was just completely sober.

[01:27:36] Marianne: He was already in that place. Yeah, yeah.

[01:27:39] Luke: And then he thought he had tricked him. So he went back on another trip and then his guru asked him, he said, do you have any of that yogi medicine? He said, yeah, I do. And he said, let me have some again. Because of course his guru knew that he thought he had faked it, that Ram Dass thought he'd faked it. So he said, he watched him put whatever, nine hits of acid or something on his tongue. He watched him swallow it. He's sitting there waiting. And again, nothing happened

[01:28:03] Marianne: He was already in that place.

[01:28:04] Luke: Yeah, exactly. You can't get high if you're already high. You've already set the benchmark. I find stories like that, particularly the ones from India for some reason seem to really fascinate me because I guess there's just such an abundance of them.

[01:28:16] Marianne: Well, so much of that has been leached out of Western traditions.

[01:28:20] Luke: Ah, right. Like you mentioned, we don't think of that kind of mysticism attributed to Jesus, because--

[01:28:28] Marianne: Look at his story. And he walked through the walls, and he showed up after he died. Hello. That's why you want to free him from the way the institutionalized religion is pictured. You free him, and you look at like, hello, he appeared in that room. Nobody knows how he got in there. And then he walked through that wall, and then he appeared to her on the road, and then he appeared after he died. Hello.

[01:28:53] Luke: He was the king of cities. Yeah, yeah.

[01:28:56] Marianne: Hello. That's why I wrote the book.

[01:28:58] Luke: That's cool. That's cool. I like that idea, taking things into a different context and then opening up for different people,

[01:29:07] Marianne: Well, the Western mind and Western institutions became very demystified. It was all about demystification, which had its good aspect, but philosophically had its limitations.

[01:29:24] Luke: Tell us about your platform called Healing Root Causes: Solutions for Individual & Collective Repair.

[01:29:31] Marianne: Okay. So every century has a dominant mindset. And the dominant mindset of the 20th century was very mechanistic. It was a product of Newtonian physics. And it's all the world is a big machine. And if you had a problem, you just tweak the pieces of the machine.

[01:29:53] When I was in college, we had these big, I don't know-- I doubt the kids do this today, but we had these art posters on our wall, and I had these paintings, art posters of these huge angels and Edward Burne-Jones, but I didn't know he was just written down there, and I love these angels.

[01:30:17] So years later, I'm walking down Fifth Avenue in New York City and I pass the Metropolitan Museum and they had these huge flags out front with pictures of the main exhibit that they have at the time. And I saw those big angels at the Edward Burne-Jones exhibit. I went, oh my God, those are those angels that were hanging on my wall when I was in college.

[01:30:42] At that time, I was writing a book called Healing the Soul of America, and I was reading, and writing, researching about the Transcendentalists, and Emerson, and Whitman, and Thoreau, and Alcott, and Melville, and Poe, all those guys, and how they were part of a movement. in England and the United States that was rejecting the industrialization that was occurring with the Industrial Revolution.

[01:31:10] And they were recognizing that the Western mind was being called to the external levels of things to such an extent that it was at the expense of the inner life. So I had no idea that Edward Burne-Jones was part of that school of philosophers and artists in Europe and here. And when I went in to watch the exhibit, there's little machines and then you can hear people telling you about it.

[01:31:40] And I learned, not only were those angels painted in response to what was going on at the time, telling people, no, you're going to lose the inner life. There was a line from him where he said, every time they build a machine, I will paint an angel.

[01:31:59] Luke: Oh, wow.

[01:32:01] Marianne: And every time they build a machine, I'll paint an angel to remind people of what's happening. Well, by the end of the 20th century, we know the imbalance that has occurred. And the 21st century, there was a British physicist named James Jeans, and he said that it turns out that the world is not one big machine. The world is one big thought.

[01:32:23] So in the 21st century, it's a different mindset. It's far more holistic and integrative and whole person. And that's why Gen Z is such an interesting generation. They're not 20th century people. Most of them were not even born in the 20th century. If they were, they just were there to learn to walk. They have a natural tendency. So in the 21st century, if you just look at symptoms-- it's like what has happened in medicine.

[01:32:54] Back in the '80s, we went from complementary medicine to-- no, it started with alternative medicine, complementary medicine. It landed at integrative. That's what the wellness world is all about, body, mind, and spirit. We need integrative political leaders. We need to heal society with an integrative approach.

[01:33:11] It's not just symptoms. What was the root cause? What was the root cause? So in running for president, I don't want to just talk the stuff of a political system, which is rooted in 20th century thinking. The politics of today, sort of circa 1994. There's no integrative approach.

[01:33:40] There's no realization-- as Martin Luther King said there's negative peace and positive peace, he said. Negative peace is where, he said, there's no outright violence, expression of violence, but there's an underlying tension and anxiety. Positive peace can only be predicated on the presence of justice and brotherhood.

[01:34:01] When people go to Marianne 2024 and look at the issues, whether it has to do with my whole health plan or anything else, it's a holistic perspective. It talks about root causes. For instance, in healthcare, I think we absolutely should have universal medicine, which absolutely should have improved Medicare for all. Absolutely. Everybody.

[01:34:26] Whether that's with your eyeglasses or your dental or your hearing aids or your mental health, whatever allopathic remedy you feel it's necessary to be covered. But also, we have to deal with the fact we have the highest level of chronic illness of any other advanced democracy.

[01:34:42] We have to deal with things like the toxins in our food, our air, etc. And we have to deal with all the ways in which the way we live in this country. Disease producing. Even economic hardship is disease producing. The main cause of disease is stress. So in issue after issue, I talked about root causes.

[01:35:05] It was interesting. I sent that entire platform of Root Cause Solutions to many people in our field and I asked them if they would have a Instagram live with me to discuss it. Deepak said yes. Gabor Mate said yes. Mindy Peltz said yes.

[01:35:30] Luke: I'm sensing there's a few missing. I'm guessing that's not because they disagreed with the fundamental ideas you're trying to bring forth, but it has to do with the association and covering--

[01:35:43] Marianne: Brand protection.

[01:35:44] Luke: Wow. Man, that's a bummer.

[01:35:47] Marianne: Even though it was an articulation of these things from our perspective.

[01:35:51] Luke: Right. All right. I'm going to just preface my next line of questioning--

[01:35:55] Marianne: You weren't on that list by the way because I didn't know you. If you'd been on that list, I wouldn't have mentioned the story.

[01:36:00] Luke: Let me know next time. And you might change your mind after the statement I'm about to make. Admittedly, I don't have a deep understanding of politics, but I am someone who's very interested in root causes when I see there's a problem.

[01:36:13] I know that treating a symptom, just like if you're an alcoholic and you quit drinking, that's a great start, but why did you drink in the first place? There's a pain underneath that that needs to be dealt with. So it's just an analogy, but when I look at the politics in this country and around the world, we're just speaking for the United States of America, around 1871, when the 14th Amendment was ratified, you had a faction of people in the country that wanted to keep slavery and a faction that didn't.

[01:36:40] And so there seemed to be a compromise wherein they said, hey, we can all come to an agreement that we're going to create essentially a federal citizen we're going to call a US citizen that has limited rights as compared to state nationals that would have existed before that.

[01:36:58] So we're going to free the slaves under the guise of freeing them, but they're not going to have the universal rights that all Americans have celebrated before them. And hey, while we're at it, let's just apply this particular category of citizenship to everyone, not just the freed slaves with limited rights.

[01:37:16] At the same time, around the same time, the corporation called the United States, capital U, capital S, was formed. And there was this different corporate system of government that was super imposed over the formerly existing government.

[01:37:34] And I think many people now don't realize that when we vote for a president, or when we think about what is the United States, that it is a privately held corporation with the Duns and Bradstreet number, and then there's the original United States of America that's just dormant under there and no one really knows it's there, how to access it, and the rights that it held.

[01:37:56] And then in 1913, we had the Federal Reserve Act, which created taxation without representation and all the issues around that. 1933, the Emergency Banking Act where all of the gold and silver was taken away and so on. There's these punctuation marks where the system that we see now and all of its symptoms seem to be at the root cause. Have you ever looked into any of those particular issues?

[01:38:19] Marianne: Yeah. A lot of what you just said is really serious right wing propaganda stuff, actually. But there's some truth in it, but none of that truth changes the underlying big principles of what the United States is. Yeah. That's some of the stuff you find in Austin, actually.

[01:38:38] Luke: But do you think some of the rot that we find in the way the system is is as a result of having-- you speak of corporate interests. If the government itself as we know it is a corporation and--

[01:38:57] Marianne: The government itself being a corporation is not the issue. The issue is we have a matrix of corporate powers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, big food companies, big agricultural companies, big chemical companies, big food manufacturers, big oil and defense contractors. They are a matrix of corporate powers.

[01:39:18] What has happened is, especially 14 years ago, they were already given some corporate personhood by the Supreme Court. That was bad enough. But 14 years ago, the Supreme Court passed a decision which I think will one day be seen as the worst that's ever happened. Maybe not the worst, Plessy versus Ferguson and all of those that happened.

[01:39:41] But saying that they now have unlimited power to basically flood our electoral system, unnamed, it's called dark money, to the point where they have turned Washington into a system of legalized bribery. They've turned Washington so that Washington, for instance, the political parties-- George Washington in his farewell address warned us about political parties.

[01:40:08] They're not mentioned in the constitution. And he said that they could form factions of men more concerned with their party, more loyal to their party than to their country. And John Adams also said that he felt the political parties were the greatest threat to democracy.

[01:40:25] So what's happened is now these political parties, because of those corporate powers and the corporate money that they exert, too often, our elected representatives pass laws that do more to serve the short-term profit-making goals of their donors, their corporate donors, than to serve the safety, health, and wellbeing of the American people.

[01:40:47] That's why you have what's called corporate capture of too many of these agencies that are run by people who actually represent corporate interests rather than personal interests. The role of the government should be to form a balance, to broker between individual liberty and concern for the common good.

[01:41:07] And that individual liberty should include financial liberty. You should be able to do your podcast. You should be able to write your book and all of that. But there should be a place where if you were doing something that hurt the common good, that the government would say you can't do that.

[01:41:25] But now the government is so beholden to this matrix of corporate powers and this matrix of corporate powers now has injected its tentacles into every corner of American society. So it's about corporations now.

[01:41:41] It's not about what actually happened with a particular something. And even when you were talking about the AUS, that was never made part of the constitution or anything like that. Slavery was abolished as an institution and so forth.

[01:41:54] But what is happening right now is that these corporations have the power that they have. Now, if you look at a president like Franklin Roosevelt, he called those interests economic royalists, because they stand for a basically aristocratic system. Now, this country was founded to repute an aristocratic system.

[01:42:12] In an aristocratic system, it was the social agreement that some people were entitled to the land, some people were entitled to the wealth creation opportunities, some people were entitled to the wealth, and everybody else had to serve them.

[01:42:25] At the founding of this country, the idea was that all people are created equal, all people have inalienable rights, that the government should secure those rights, and that if government's not doing its job, it's the right of the people to alter it or to abolish it.

[01:42:41] Now, 56 very brave men signed that document, the Declaration of Independence. And I say they were brave because if the British had won the war, they would've all been hanged. And by signing that document, they impacted the ethers, the spiritual, the moral ethers. The idea that all men are created equal is profound from a spiritual perspective.

[01:43:03] We are all one. It emerges from we are all one. That's what makes us all equal. They opened up a field of possibility that had never existed on the planet before. However, what's the irony, the struggle of the American story is that 46 of those signers were slave owners. No, 41. 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners.

[01:43:33] That's the DNA of the American story. We're both and. We've always been both and. So there has been in every generation those who totally get the profundity of this, not only the rights that it gives us, but the responsibility in the hands of every generation to protect it, those ideals, to seek to manifest those ideals, to expand, to give them more universal application, and to leave it better than we found it.

[01:44:03] But every generation has reiterated that story, some more dramatically than others. So slavery was obviously a transgression against the idea of all men are created equal because it represented, as those forces still do today, people who, for their own ideological and or financial purposes, have no intention of seeing those principles made actualized and have proven time and time again that they would do whatever it took to make sure that they were not.

[01:44:30] Every generation repeats this, some more dramatically than others. Now, what's interesting is to see how it's played out over time. We had slavery. We had a generation that rose up with abolition and abolished it. We had the institutionalized suppression of women. We had a generation that rose up with the women's suffragist movement, the passage of the 19th Amendment, and repudiated that.

[01:44:56] Same with the Gilded Age. The first Gilded Age was repudiated by a generation that rose up with the original labor organizers. Then we had segregation, institutionalized oppression of black people in the American South. A generation rose up with the Civil Rights Movement, dismantled segregation, passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. It's our turn now.

[01:45:16] But today it's not a specific institution. It's an economic paradigm that is embodied by the institutional greed of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies, big food companies, big agricultural companies, gun manufacturers, big oil and defense contractors, and the government, which we should see as that which advocates for the people against overreach by these forces, does more to enable those forces.

[01:45:51] Luke: They're almost one in the same at this point.

[01:46:55] Marianne: You're so right. And as a candidate, I used to think that the political parties just chopped wood and carried water for those corporate forces. Now I realize they are corporate forces. They are a business empire.

[01:46:13] Luke: When you look about the executive boards of these corporations, then being put into high level positions in the administration, there really is very little separation.

[01:46:22] Marianne: Absolutely.

[01:46:23] Luke: It's crazy.

[01:46:23] Marianne: It's a political, media, industrial complex. And I speak to you from the belly of that beast. And it really makes you say, wow, they've got it locked up. But other generations had similarly locked up situations and they unlocked it. And also, abolition came from the abolitionist party. Women's suffrage came from the women's party. Social security came from the socialist party.

[01:46:50] So people have got to stop this codependent relationship where we have this naive belief that the political parties are going to be the conduit of repair. I learned very painfully that they are so in the pockets of a corporatist's perspective, they represent the forces that will do whatever it takes to get you out of the conversation if you plan to actually put the levers of power back in the hands of the people.

[01:47:29] Remember, after the battle at Gettysburg, which was the decisive battle, after which it was clear that the Union would win, Abraham Lincoln, that was when he went to the battlefield. He wrote and delivered the Gettysburg Address. And he said that the men who died for the Union-- because abolition of slavery, the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, that was the moral basis of the Civil War.

[01:47:57] That was Lincoln's thing. Now, he wrote in the Gettysburg Address, that the men who died for the Union had died so that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the earth. And the reason I've run for president, the reason I'm even saying this is because we need to really get it's perishing now. We are not functionally a government--

[01:48:26] Luke: One might argue that it's already perished.

[01:48:26] Marianne: Exactly. We are functionally a government of the corporations by the corporations and for the corporations.

[01:48:36] Luke: 1,000%.

[01:48:36] Marianne: And do we really want to be the generation that wimps out on doing what it takes to put this country back in check?

[01:48:42] Luke: So if the peak of that pyramid is everyone that we're speaking about that are in control without a concern for the wellbeing of us all, then it seems maybe that the power and change is really more of a grassroots bottom up.

[01:49:02] Marianne: It's got to be both and, because you can't leave out electoral politics. You can have all the grassroots stuff you want, but still, the fact that a million Iraqis were killed in the Iraq war was because of who the American president was. Outside, inside. It's got to be both. But when you're talking about something like the fact that we don't have Medicare for all, and the fact that 68,000 people die every year from lack of healthcare, the fact that over a million people ration their insulin--

[01:49:36] Luke: Let me think about how many people die because of healthcare.

[01:49:38] Marianne: Well, exactly. But that's both. But even that is electoral power, because who the hell is running the FDA except these pharmaceutical companies? That was a little simplistic what I just said, but way too much influence. So that's what I mean though. We have to get in there. A doctor has got to be willing to hit the wound.

[01:50:00] That's my point to you. We've got to get in there. There's just so much we can do from the outside. And I'm not in any way minimizing what we're doing from the outside. You and I started this talk. You were talking about how-- and I was there at the beginning.

[01:50:15] It was a small subculture. It's become mainstream. It's great. But then we also have to recognize what can happen there. Now we have to have the gravitas to know now that we have this power. Now that we have this power. What are we going to do with it? And I have a lot of thoughts about that because I feel I've been deep into both worlds.

[01:50:39] Luke: You definitely walk in the bridge between the two.

[01:50:41] Marianne: We have to build that bridge, honey.

[01:50:42] Luke: Yeah, it's fascinating to talk to you about all these things. It's such a comprehensive conversation, and you have a unique perspective as someone who, for lack of a better term, left the reservation of just where we're all over here in the love and the light, going to spiritual seminars, writing spiritual books, doing our thing, to walking into that fire. So you obviously practice what you preach, and I commend you for that. That's not a path that many people would probably endeavor to take as well-meaning as they might be.

[01:51:12] Marianne: And doing good work. I just think there comes a point where we say, well, we have all this power. Should we have a collective conversation? And I think if you keep it all apolitical, just like I think spirituality-- you know what? I heard Deepak say something once. Deepak had a patient who was very, very sick and he gave them massive amounts of antibiotics and saved the patient, intravenous antibiotics.

[01:51:46] And somebody said to him, oh, how great that the antibiotics saved him. And he said, no, no, no, no. The antibiotics didn't save him. The antibiotics kept him alive long enough for nature to heal him. That's how I look at politics. Politics is not the fundamental repair. Spirituality is a fundamental repair. But politics, it's going to kill us all before we have a chance. Do you know what I'm saying? Do you know what I'm saying?

[01:52:17] Luke: Yeah. What do you think about this movement toward the intentional therapeutic use of psychedelics as someone who was around in the '60s and '70s?

[01:52:31] Marianne: I was born in 1952. What do you think I think? I think it's hilarious that they put down the hippies We had it right about everything. We had it right about facing down the war and psychedelics. I remember one young man said to me one day, Ms. Williamson, you're just an ex-hippie. You're just well about sex drugs and rock and roll. And I looked at him and I went, that was just part of the day.

[01:52:50] I said, the rest of the day, we stop the war. What have you done? You were talking about your experience. I knew what you were talking about. And I remember that when you were talking about the Christ consciousness. I remember LSD. I'm 17 years old. I remember looking at my boyfriend and saying, if Nixon did this, there would be no war.

[01:53:08] Luke: Totally. That just gave me chills because I sometimes half naively, maybe not so much naively, in those experiences, when I just look at the depth of healing that I've had and the capacity that I have for compassion and love and my care for all sentient beings, my relationship with God, I've said so many profound experiences. Every damn time I'm like, we need to get every CEO of every corporation to do that. But it's happening.

[01:53:39] Marianne: It's true.

[01:53:40] Luke: Because of that saying, there are downsides. There are risks involved, but when you're talking about the future that we're discussing--

[01:53:47] Marianne: Listen, one of my core things is ending the drug war. And then you regulate these things correctly. I would not have had the career I have had I not had those experiences.

[01:53:55] Luke: Look at what happens if we don't wake up. So it's like if there's some collateral damage from some teenagers getting a hold of some ecstasy from the therapist, whatever. Compared to where we're going--

[01:54:064] Marianne: Wait, wait, wait, wait, You and I do need to be careful here though, for a second, because you do have an audience. We can't minimize the danger, for instance, of fentanyl. So this is an example of a transition that has to be very careful and very wise and very responsible.

[01:54:24] Luke: I appreciate that. I'm speaking more specifically--

[01:54:26] Marianne: I understand what you're saying. I'm just saying there's an audience here.

[01:54:28] Luke: To psychedelics, right?

[01:54:29] Marianne: Yes.

[01:54:32] Luke: And I always say this when I talk about this topic on the show, is like, not for everyone, not safe for everyone, not advised for everyone. But that said, to me it's like we're one of those cartoons where there's a little canoe that's about to go off the waterfall. It's a Hail Mary, and we got to do something.

[01:54:51] Marianne: Well, my generation knew that. But also with what you're saying, look at what's happening with veterans. And then you look at the pharmaceutical remedy. Hello.

[01:55:03] Luke: Great example. Yeah.

[01:55:07] Marianne: Compared to this. So I'm more for it. And you have really great minds like Michael Pollan and Rick Doblin and in the hands of very serious, responsible people like that who are leading the charge of the conversation. I think it's really good, because it is everything that you just said. We are about to go off the cliff, and we need a massive dose of love.

[01:55:25] Luke: Yeah. So I see that movement, although it has its faults and all of that, of course, and its risk, but I see it as largely positive. I have friends that are facilitators, for example, and some of them work on a donation basis, and it's not about money, and some of them do that and also serve extremely wealthy, powerful people. And they have sliding scale rates where to sit with someone in a session might be $20,000 for one person, $200, or no dollars for the other person.

[01:55:57] Marianne: Buddha was big on talking to wealthy people.

[01:55:59] Luke: But the friends that I have in the space are intentionally leaning into people that have money and power because of the way it's going to influence the way they do business, the way they legislate, the way they interface with the world, speaking of grassroots versus top down, and you said it's both and.

[01:56:17] Marianne: Well, there are a couple of things about that. First of all, as I said, Buddha talked to wealthy people and said exactly what you just said. Secondly, let's not kid ourselves. If you're going to do a session with somebody who's going to do a 20,000 versus 200, of course it's nice to have a justification, even though it's true. It's just nice to note that.

[01:56:37] And third, even though I am for the movement, absolutely, and for all the reasons you say, there's another conversation there, that whole story of Lucy in the Sky with Nazis. Have you heard that one.

[01:56:48] Luke: I'm not familiar with that.

[01:56:49] Marianne: Yeah, there have been some situations where people saw not what you would want them to see. But yes, I am a yes for the general. And for all the reasons you said, I'm in full agreement with you.

[01:57:03] Luke: Yeah. And thankfully there are some very legitimate scientists and people that aren't just kooks in the space now, doing research, and there's quantitative data to support. And you mentioned the vets. I've personally met quite a few vets that were at the end, like, can't go on anymore and we're given--

[01:57:25] Marianne: Just been thrown the antidepressants at the pharmaceutical companies.

[01:57:25] Luke: Yeah. Exactly, exactly. Who have been able to transform. And if they're the head of a family, for example, it's obviously then they're going to have kids that aren't traumatized and grown up with PTSD and then become addicts or whatever. It's like each of us that's been through a war that doesn't heal then creates a war of our life and they're going to respond to that.

[01:57:45] Marianne: And the family unit. The sins of the father are handed down. The mistakes, the woundings. I agree with you entirely.

[01:57:53] Luke: How would you contextualize ego? And I'm asking the question because there's a school of thought in the spiritual realm that it's something that we have to get rid of. It's bad. If you want enlightenment, you have to smash it, this kind of thing.

[01:58:08] And then there's another thought that I lean more into of learning how to build a relationship with it and integrate it into life. At your level of understanding and based on A Course in Miracles--

[01:58:17] Marianne: Course in Miracles is neither one of those. It's simply a false belief. There's nothing to fight. It's just a shadow that's there because the light is not. It's just a moment of forgetfulness. It's a moment when the Son of God forgot to laugh. It's a moment where for whatever reason, I couldn't feel-- I'll give you an example of my ego yesterday, this perfect example of it.

[01:58:42] It's a moment when you don't see how to give love and get your needs met. So I had to go to the airport. I had to come here. I had left my suitcases at the hotel because I did the Rick Doblin in LA. I go back to get my suitcases.

[01:58:56] I get almost to the car, realize I have the wrong suitcase. I go back and I say, you gave me the wrong suitcase. Now, I'm already stressed. It's a matter of, you gave me the wrong suitcase. You gave me the wrong suitcase. And I'm thinking, oh my God, the time. And then they said, well, let's go in the back room. And I said, my suitcase isn't here. My suitcase is not here.

[01:59:17] And I go into a place of, you guys gave my suitcase to someone. You guys gave my suitcase to someone. I wasn't total bitch, but I was not calm and gracious. The way the story turned out, it was there. It was there. And in my frenetic state, I didn't see it. So yes, they had given me the wrong bag, but then I was wrong and I was ego filled to not be more calm, find it, etc.

[01:59:42] So that's a perfect expression to me of a moment when I went into a place where I, in my subconscious, didn't see how I could just be loving and gracious and get my needs met. The truth of the matter is that's how I would have gotten my needs met, because I would have been calm and I would have seen, oh, that's mine.

[01:59:59] And so the Course says, there's nothing to fight. It's just a false belief. Now, I look back at that moment, and this is where I made my error from A Course in Miracles perspective. The moment I realized it wasn't my suitcase, I should have said, God help me here. Jesus help me here, whatever. Even with A Course in Miracles, we call it a holy instant.

[02:00:28] If I'd had even one moment to say, oh, I'm going to be tempted to go off the rails here-- it's forgetfulness. You don't fight forgetfulness. You don't fight the dark. You turn on the light. Ego isn't a thing. It's the absence of a thing.

[02:00:44] Luke: Ah, that's good.

[02:00:46] Marianne: It's a moment that's an absence of remembrance and connection to who you are. But if you can't hit the darkness with a baseball bat, you turn on the light. I should have been praying for that man. I should have been practicing namaste. He's Jesus in drag. Everyone is. And if he had been nice to me, it would have been easy for me to say, sir, could you please help me with my bag? I'd be so grateful.

[02:01:13] But in this moment, I was tempted because I didn't have my bag and I was on a rest. And that's what life's lessons are. And I even wrote our friend Rick and told him about that, because I thought it was such an example of keeping it real. Even if you don't keep it real, the universe is going to keep real. Just did a podcast about Jesus, right?

[02:01:33] Luke: Yeah. I love opportunities where my own silliness is revealed to me like that. It's like having the ability to laugh at yourself and your humanity and not take yourself too seriously. I find that to be so healthy.

[02:01:48] Marianne: And also forgive yourself. But it's not like I see my ego as something to build a partnership with. My ego does not wish me well when I'm in that place.

[02:01:56] Luke: Well, I think what maybe I'm trying to get out with that is that because our soul is embodied and in order for the body to stay alive, it's fortified with certain instincts, the avoidance of pain, the pursuit of pleasure, all the things.

[02:02:11] We don't want to lose our stuff because our safety is threatened. So there's this mechanism within the persona that some may be referred to as ego that is trying to do its best job to keep the body alive. Do you not look at it like that?

[02:02:25] Marianne: No, that's just the masculine, the divine masculine. That's Joseph in the Bible. Mary is the divine feminine. Joseph is the divine masculine. Get her out of Egypt. Get her to Egypt. Take her away. They're going to kill the baby, blah, blah, blah. That to me, the part of the psyche which wants to take care of the world, the mortal world, make sure everything-- that's the masculine. That's the divine masculine. We talked about the divine feminine. There's also a divine masculine.

[02:02:56] Luke: Could you speak more to that? I think that's largely out of the conversation right now.

[02:03:00] Marianne: Yeah, men are just trashed in the main spirituality.

[02:03:03] Luke: I understand the pendulum swing. Thousands of years of oppression and abuse. Okay. The masculine is going to take a hit.

[02:03:10] Marianne: Yeah, but the divine masculine is important. Disrespecting men is not the way home. I always say they carry our suitcases. We carry their issues. I think that a heterosexual man is majoring in masculine, minoring in feminine this lifetime. The woman, the heterosexual woman anyway, is majoring in feminine, minoring in masculine.

[02:03:34] These principles are the same whether we're gay or straight. We all have the masculine and feminine within us. And some of this is semantic too, but from something like the Course in Miracles, it's not my ego that's making the plain reservations.

[02:03:55] Luke: What's being called forth, say, if the body feels threatened? Where I may overreact and--

[02:04:02] Marianne: But that's actually the opposite, because if I had remained loving and gracious, the fact that I went into the back of the room and didn't see my suitcase, even though I kept looking for it, I think there's a good chance if I had been calmer and more-- I jumped immediately into, you gave my suitcase to someone else.

[02:04:24] No, they hadn't. I had jumped to that. It was there. So actually, I think it could be argued that I would have gotten my suitcase back sooner. By the way, this is an interesting example. Did you see the Japanese airline caught on fire landing a few weeks ago? Did you see that story?

[02:04:46] Luke: No.

[02:04:46] Marianne: Okay. Japan Airlines, a very fine airline, for a reason that I haven't read up on, so I don't know what happened, it landed in Tokyo or somewhere, I don't know. Caught on fire. 365 people all got off and were saved in 90 seconds. Now, somebody had it on their phone. Politeness is so ingrained into their culture that one row went, the other row went. Second row was very polite. Second row was very polite.

[02:05:24] They were all polite. They all got out safe. In America, think how many people would have been killed because it would have been a stampede to the beginning, to the front of the plane. It would have been a stampede. I'm got to get out. I got to get out. I could not believe, seeing this fire come up around them, they were all so polite getting off the plane, and they all survived.

[02:05:42] Luke: That is so interesting.

[02:05:43] Marianne: Love is actually the functional way of being. Love doesn't mean, oh, I'm going to do something stupid now. Love sometimes says no. Love sometimes sets boundaries. The Course in Miracles says love restores reason and not the other way around.

[02:06:04] So no, you actually don't need the ego as the course defines it, which is the idea of a separated self. The ego is the personality, the set of thoughts and behavior that emerge from that when for whatever reason I'm cut off from love.

[02:06:19] Luke: So maybe in my understanding, I'm erroneously coupling the ego with the body's instincts. It seems to me that it's an outgrowth of the body's instincts. And therefore I've been able to just kind of make friends with ego and not take it so seriously because I feel like that element of myself is actually trying to protect me and be helpful.

[02:06:43] Marianne: Well, that's just a different use of the word. The Course in Miracles says words are symbols at best. I had a therapist who talked about positive ego and negative ego. I was just talking about it the way the course uses it. The Course in Miracles would talk about your body instincts and it would say, the body is a beautiful lesson in communion until communion is.

[02:07:05] Luke: Oh, wow.

[02:07:06] Marianne: So my body, you caress. You hold a baby. You caress a lover. You have sex with someone you love. The body is a beautiful lesson in communion until communion is. The Course in Miracles says that nothing in the world, including the body, is holy or unholy except as is determined by the purpose ascribed to it by the mind. So the body can be a very holy vessel too, as we all know.

[02:07:34] Luke: How would you define enlightenment?

[02:07:37] Marianne: The Course in Miracles says light is understanding. So an enlightened moment is a moment when I actually get. The only thing going on here is love given and love received. Like you described, that moment you got Christ consciousness, it's a moment when we realize everything else, not only is meaningless, but doesn't even really exist.

[02:08:05] Luke: Oh, that's so good. Yeah. Because in those moments that some of us are fortunate enough to experience at least once in life, many people probably don't, it's so apparent that this is all that is real right now. I don't know. And sometimes for me in those moments, there's a grasping to wanting to keep that, and then it becomes fleeting. And then there's that, where did it go? Where did that understanding go? Where did that awareness go? And that's what keeps life interesting.

[02:08:36] Marianne: Well, it's also what you said. If we do our practice in the morning, we have more of a chance of getting there and staying there, but we all fall off the wagon. But the course says you're not perfect or you would not have been born here, but it is your mission to become perfect here.

[02:08:54] I stayed for a long time in as known of-- well, I'm hardly like Jesus yet, but I'm a lot better than I used to be. And I think something has changed for me as I've gotten older. No, come on, Marianne, get this right before you die. Really try to get this right.

[02:09:13] I think it has to do with that and also maybe the urgency of this moment. There are a lot of us who are pretty high up there in terms of what we've achieved and yet the state of the world is such that clearly that's not quite enough. So that gap still exists.

[02:09:36] Luke: I wonder if there's a critical mass of consciousness like the 100th monkey theory where when you have enough human beings on the planet at one given time of a high enough level of consciousness that changes will become automatic.

[02:09:53] Marianne: This is what kills me having run for president twice. And I was asked last time, but this was even more true this time, what was your experience? And I would say the system is even more corrupt than I feared. People are even more wonderful than I hoped. So I want to say something to you. I have traveled all over the country.

[02:10:16] Now, I have a 40-year career, so I had already done this in terms of the wellness and the spirituality and the higher consciousness. But running for president, and I saw this this time even more than last time, the American people are appropriately concerned. The American people are appropriately decent.

[02:10:42] The American people are appropriately intelligent, including those two Trump voters that I mentioned. The American people are hardwired to do great things. No one's calling us to do anything great. We're like wilted flowers. We're living at a time when it's all about just you getting yours and you getting yours.

[02:11:01] The greatness of America is when we have stood up and made changes. The American people are open to being called to something noble, but the political system doesn't call people to something noble. So that question that you just asked is my-- and then I see that the system, which should be the vessel for harnessing all that for good, the vessels are so corrupted.

[02:11:29] So what's going to be that moment? Far more people love than hate, but people who hate hate with conviction, and conviction is a force multiplier. So if you have 10 people who hate with conviction, 24 hours a day, they will do whatever it takes to effectuate their worldview. And those of us who love, including the best, I'm thinking of something you said. I'm thinking of something Rick said. Yeah, but politics isn't my thing.

[02:11:56] Those who love or who say, I'm available for that Tuesdays and Thursdays, then the people who hate are going to win. Because of their manifestation that goes beyond into their conviction. So what gives me hope is I think about how the Berlin Wall fell. No one can actually tell you what happened that night.

[02:12:17] Somebody called somebody who called somebody else at a certain gate. And then the guy at the gate heard the wrong stuff. And so he opened something, so somebody went through. It's weird.

[02:12:28] Luke: Really?

[02:12:28] Marianne: Uh-huh. It's just that so many people were pushing on that wall. And so where it actually happens, is it going to be somebody getting elected president? We don't know. It's going to be that there are enough podcasts, that there are enough books, that there are enough-- we are, but I also think we need to multiply our effort. Most of the people that I know and see, we're not good. We're ready. We just need to step it up.

[02:13:06] Luke: So there is a critical mass and a tipping point, but we also can exert some level of influence on when that happens.

[02:13:13] Marianne: Each of us. There's only one of us here. We all own the whole thing. And that's what's happened. I remind people in my campaign. I would say you own America. We've been trained to give up our critical thought process, processes to some political elite. That's not what this country was supposed to be.

[02:13:34] Nobody has a monopoly on truth. Everybody gets to own it. But we have a diminished sense of what it means to be a citizen. We have a sense of powerlessness that is over once you pierce the illusion of powerlessness. You realize we all have power. And so that's why there's a spiritual psychological element to this political transformational journey.

[02:13:56] If you look at it only on the level of the symptom, they've got it locked up. We have to unlock it, and we unlock it through the miracles that you and I have been discussing.

[02:14:08] Luke: Beautiful. Last question for you. And I probably know the answer, at least one third of the answer, but who have been three teachers or teachings in your life, maybe the people aren't familiar with, such as A Course in Miracles, that have really influenced who you are?

[02:14:25] Marianne: Lovers. Because I think that love is the hardest spiritual challenge of all. And my father. My father and the men in my life.

[02:14:39] Luke: Wow. Cool. That's a new one.

[02:14:42] Marianne: Not to most people.

[02:14:43] Luke: I love how quickly that came too.

[02:14:45] Marianne: It's simply true.

[02:14:46] Luke: It is.

[02:14:47] Marianne: That didn't bring you down a notch. I know.

[02:14:50] Luke: It's been true for me. It's interesting, I've observed in my life how just childhood shit that needed to get worked out that I didn't have the capacity to even identify and if I did, I didn't know how to work it out, that I've called people, partners into my life that have been the perfect vehicle for that change and transformation.

[02:15:11] Marianne: But also the opposite as well.

[02:15:12] Luke: Oh, yeah. Well, now I'm in a different experience of that too.

[02:15:14] Marianne: That want to make you know that you are worthy and that you're a loved and encouraged you.

[02:15:20] Luke: 100%. Yeah.

[02:15:20] Marianne: And sometimes they were the same people.

[02:15:24] Luke: It took more of the former type of teaching toget me to the type of teaching that we know.

[02:15:28] Marianne: The course says it's not up to you what you learn. It's merely up to you whether you learn through joy or through pain. You're still learning in your merits. You're just learning through joy now.

[02:15:36] Luke: 100%.

[02:15:37] Marianne: You don't have to learn through pain anymore. You told me you had earned each other.

[02:15:41] Luke: Yeah.

[02:15:42] Marianne: You're still learning, learning through joy.

[02:15:45] Luke: Well, thank you so much for joining me. Like I said, in the beginning, it's been an aspiration of mine to have you on for so long. And it's just funny texting a couple of homies. I text my friend Elliot back in LA. We used to go see your talks all the time down on Wilshire, I forget the name of the theater.

[02:16:00] And I would gather all of our little sober buddies and we'd go down to Marianne's talk. So I texted him and just said, wow, she's just knocked on my door. This is weird. You just never know where life is going to take you. Actually, I wanted to just tell you one thing too.

[02:16:16] One of the things that I used to really enjoy about your talks is, I don't know. I wouldn't contextualize them as interventions, but I guess you could say the Q&A section. Because you would give these beautiful prayers and these sermons. I'd be like, this is great. This is great. I'm here for that. Even if it was just this, I'd still come.

[02:16:33] But then when we would get to the Q&A and people would ask questions and I could see the spirit move through you in spontaneity, where there was no way you could have memorized whatever, it's just a dynamic interaction with someone who says, hey, I'm suffering with addiction or a divorce or this or that. And you would just like, boom, blast them. I used to love that. If it was just all that for four hours, I really enjoy that gift you have.

[02:16:59] Marianne: You know what? I did give one political talk on the campaign here in Austin. I wish you'd been because--

[02:17:08] Luke: You did a lot of that?

[02:17:09] Marianne: It's the same thing.

[02:17:11] Luke: Oh, wow. Wow.

[02:17:12] Marianne: I think we're at a point where they're molded. And also with Gen Z, Gen Z, like I said, they're not 20th century people. Gen Z will ask you a question about Syria and then the next question about depression. They don't see them as separate lanes. I grew up in a generation you read Ram Dass and Alan Watts in the morning and you go to Vietnam anti-war protest in the afternoon. This lane business is ridiculous. We're multidimensional beings. And Gen Z is ready for that again.

[02:17:44] Luke: That's funny. That's true.

[02:17:46] Marianne: And it's beautiful when you apply this to the transformation of a society.

[02:17:50] Luke: That's cool.

[02:17:52] Marianne: I'll have to come back to Austin and give a talk.

[02:17:53] Luke: I'll be there.

[02:17:53] Marianne: Thank you.

[02:17:54] Luke: Yeah, I'll be there. Absolutely. I love that.

[02:17:57] Marianne: If I may.

[02:17:58] Luke: Yeah, go ahead.

[02:17:59] Marianne: This was something that actually helped me decide to run this time, whether I should see that as a good thing or a bad thing. It was at South by Southwest here in Austin. I guess it was two years ago, probably. And I was here to be on a panel and somebody said, will you give a talk?

[02:18:19] And we set up at some outdoor-- it was a coffee house or cafe or something, and they had a big patio. And I noticed that the social justice progressive types went on one side of the patio and the personal growth spiritual people were on the other side of the patio. I don't know how that became so obvious to me, but it was clear to me there were two separate worlds there.

[02:18:46] Luke: Probably the blue hair versus the big Berne man hats.

[02:18:49] Marianne: It was very interesting. So I thought, well, I don't know how this is going to go. And then, after I talked, there was a microphone set up, and people came up to the microphone to ask me questions. And I noticed something. Because I've had years where people in the political world were, I like her. That God stuff she has, I just can't stand that God stuff.

[02:19:13] People in the spiritual world, I really like her, but I just hate that political stuff she gets into. Something's starting to change. People are starting to understand. And what I saw that night was really impactful for me. This is what happened. When there was a question about the spiritual, I noticed that the political people were leaning in.

[02:19:34] They weren't like, oh, she's talking about that. They were leaning in to hear the answer. Because they're in therapy. They're going through stuff. When the political question came, I saw a lot of the spiritual people leaning in to hear the answer from a place of, I should start knowing more about that.

[02:19:59] Luke: That's cool.

[02:19:59] Marianne: Mm-hmm.

[02:20:00] Luke: That's cool. Did you find more of that unique to Austin, or was that--

[02:20:05] Marianne: No, that was just one experience I had that made me feel I should do this. No, now I see it. Something's blended now. We have so much opportunity. And that's what makes me sad about how the DN--, MSNBC blacklisted me. CNN blacklisted me. They invisibilized me.

[02:20:31] They erased me. They infiltrated the campaign. They see a serious threat in anyone who doesn't toe the line. Character assassination. And I do feel that if we had been able to have exposure on the mass level that any political presidential candidate is due, who's qualified and FEC- registered, then I think it would have been a leap into a whole new time and possibility.

[02:21:04] So the people are ready. The problem is not the people. The problem is all the ways that the collective ego is seeking to obstruct. But we are planting seeds. That's what your podcast does. That's what we're all doing. We plant seeds. And a lot of people think religion and spirituality have nothing to do with political change and social justice.

[02:21:29] In the abolitionist movement, it was black Americans and white Americans. Among white Americans, the abolitionist movement emerged from the early evangelical churches in New Hampshire. Among the women who were leaders of the women's suffragist movement, most of them were religious Quakers.

[02:21:46] Luke: Oh, really?

[02:21:47] Marianne: Yes. Because the idea of the equal light within us all led them to this realization. And Dr. King, of course, was a Baptist preacher.

[02:21:56] Luke: Right, right. We forget that. When we think about some of these leaders--

[02:22:00] Marianne: How long? Because they would have you forget it. The spiritual grounding gives you faith in that which is as yet unseen. The fact that my body's eyes can't see it doesn't mean I don't think it's possible. Because it's in the mind of all that is good, true, and holy, therefore, I know it is inevitable, and I'm driven by that. That's our power in any situation. And ultimately, it will be our power politically, just like it was the power of our ancestors who did those great things before us.

[02:22:31] Luke: Epic. Well, thank you so much for coming back to your homeland, Texas.

[02:22:34] Marianne: Thank you, Luke.

[02:22:36] Luke: Yeah, it's been great. Thank you.

[02:22:37] Marianne: Thank you so much.