I don’t talk about my day job on Thought Deli, because it is my belief that all day jobs are boring to those who are not performing them. To add some context here, I do want to share that I work in fraud prevention (analyzing online purchase activity and developing systems to catch it with minimal customer friction). This means I am quite literally paid to be skeptical and to distrust. However, it would be unfair to imply that this mindset of mine comes from my job, when it is a major cornerstone of my personality and upbringing. The career choice followed from a natural inclination and affinity for defense against loss, not the other way around.
In keeping with this attribute, I am deeply turned off by the approach to life that the internet has termed ‘toxic positivity’. It has never resonated with me. In stereotypical Capricorn fashion, I tend to go around anticipating problems from my past and imagining they will reappear in the future, such that I am constantly on the offensive, guarding against the chaotic shadows that my mind promises are just around the corner.
“You’re always stressed because you are always trying to get ahead,” my partner recently said to me. It has begun to dawn on me that there might be a difference between mere planning and anticipating problems. 2020 was an apt time to have this realization, as fear for the future, my own safety, and the safety of my fellow man was at all-time high. Like most worries that spiral into obsession, getting sick is not necessarily something I can control (outside of all the precautions I’ve been taking for nearly a year, which are now reflexive). Neither is vaccine rollout, or climate change, or whether a truck will hit me when I least expect it.
As regular readers know, I’ve developed a more-than-mild interest in Marianne Williamson, and have mentioned her here a few times in regards to the principle of manifestation theory, and also as a foil character to (absolute phony) Glennon Doyle. There are several aspects of Williamson as a figure that fascinate me:
1. The nature of her raw sincerity (I don’t know many other ‘spiritual leaders’ that actually buy what they’re selling the way she does).
2. Her intellectual prowess. She is scholarly, you can tell she has studied theology for decades by the depth of her analysis and de-compartmentalization of big picture theory.
3. Her reputation among those unfamiliar with her work, and her treatment by the media. Why did I believe the prevailing narrative about her before I read for myself her theory? (The answer to that is, in this order: my extreme skepticism for spirituality and religion, the use of pull-quotes and infographics to convey a bare minimum of theoretical thought, and internalized misogyny).
Seeking to understand, I chose ‘A Return to Love’ as the second book of my 2020 reading challenge and oh my, was it confronting. If you too discount spirituality as a crutch, I recommend reading it. For all my firmly held beliefs that the universe is sheer chaos and God does not exist, I maintain that it is a healthy psychological exercise to take in a dose of the opposite worldview from time to time.
If I had to condense the thesis of A Return to Love, I would say that Williamson posits the following:
Humans are born perfectly programmed to focus on love, so our childlike self is the deepest level of our being, it is who we really are and it never really leaves us. Throughout our lifetimes, because we are raised in a world (read: under capitalism) that prioritizes fear and scarcity over love, we lose that connection, forget the ultimate eternal truth of love, and become jaded.
The fear we have ultimately manifests in the real world (war, famine, violence, etc.). These collective fearful (and violent) thoughts have left us living inside of a mass hallucination, where we each think there is not enough to go around and so we must compete with each other for every drop of social, emotional, or financial capital we can get. What Williamson refers to as “miracle working” is simply a shift in perception - that instead of leading from a place of fear, we remember God’s love for us and practice abundant thinking. We act and behave as if there is more than enough of everything to go around (attention, time, money, respect, food, you name it). By acting from a place of love, we find happiness. The shift to loving thought from fearful thought is the miracle, per MW. What we give to others, we give to ourselves, what we withhold from ourselves, we withhold from others.
That’s the most reduced way as I can say it, but it’s worth just simply stating some other parts of her belief system and the ‘Course in Miracles’:
Our unhappiness is caused by us remembering perfect love from precognition. The door to this love always stays open, beckoning us to come back. Due to ego, most of us stay trapped in our worldly material struggles, thinking that what we really need to fix things is a new job, a new lover, a new house, etc.
Only love is real (a felt energy, for ex: the love in the room that you can feel at a wedding), everything else is a fabrication.
“When we think with love, we are literally co-creating with God. And when we’re not thinking with love, since only love is real, we’re not thinking, we are hallucinating. And that’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love . . . our craziness, fear, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.” - A Return to Love
Even though we may not realize it, most of us are emotionally violent people. We think fearful thoughts, and we self-flagellate and that’s the cause of the evil we see in the world.
For example, the non-believer (me) asks: how could God exist if things like genocide happen on Earth? MW would say that the Holocaust is not proof God doesn’t exist, the Holocaust is proof of the manifestation of fearful thoughts from humans (i.e. Nazi propaganda).
I’ll also throw it out there that Williamson was raised Jewish, I think it’s important to note. Now that we’ve got all that squared away, here’s my review:
The first thing I struggled with was the God language. Williamson mentions God a lot, but she asks that we use a nontraditional definition for God, simply put God = Love. In order to maximize my enjoyment of the book, I substituted mentally every mention of God with ‘the mysteries of the Universe,’ because I can’t engage with the word ‘God’, it’s too loaded. She acknowledges this is a stumbling block for many people, and was for her until she got to her rock bottom and was ready to admit that, maybe, there was a God (I guess I’m not there yet?). By reorienting this for myself, I was able to proceed. I tried to imagine the mysteries of the universe as the big bang, or evolution, or whatever led to our human bodies being on Earth. I just can’t call that God at this stage in my evolution as a person.
The next thing that called me right out was her takedown of modern psychology. Basically, she says my generation has an incredible propensity to blame everything on their parents, and to reverse engineer our personalities around some kind of parental failure or trauma (if you have a therapist, that little voice in your stomach should be rising up right now screaming ‘but I’m right, my mom is awful!” - just go with me for a second). This isn’t so much a personal attack as an attack on the foundation of modern psychology (i.e. Sigmund Freud).
Furthermore, Williamson says that while some awareness of one's own issues and foibles is required to progress spiritually, hyper-focusing on past trauma will only lead us down a path to further darkness. As anyone who has spent significant time in Western therapy knows, this process is far from painless, and when I am doing “the best” in therapy, I usually feel like I am self-cannibalizing.
Williamson says the second piece of healing is not just to be aware of these tendencies in our thinking, but to ask God (“the mysteries of the Universe”) to release you from them. This means, you put them back on the shelf. You self-examine enough to know what you need to know, and then you stop thinking about it and let the universe work it’s magic. That’s the Williamson approach. I’m trying to find a secular way to ingratiate this into my own life, because I am an obsessive compulsive with intrusive thoughts and I’d love nothing more than to hang them up for good.
The area of perhaps most interest to me was in her understanding of politics. A quote:
“I spent years as an angry left-winger before I realize that an angry generation can’t bring peace. Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it. What the ego doesn’t want us to see is the guns we need to get rid of first are the guns within our own heads”.
(That quote is a sick burn. I mean, is that not the American partisan situation in a nutshell? This book was published in ‘92.)
Williamson shares an anecdote where she goes to a cocktail party and is fighting with someone there about foreign policy, convinced she’s on the right side of the argument. She goes home and has a dream that she gets placed on a ‘cosmic roll-call’ as a hawk, not a dove. She fights back, what do you mean I’m a hawk? I’m all dove! I’m all about peace. The cosmic roll call man looks at a file on her and says, ‘well Marianne, you’re at war with Ronald Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, the CIA, in fact the entire American defense establishment. You’re definitely a hawk.’ And she realizes, ‘I have just as many missiles in my head as Reagan has in his.’
Is it some turn-the-other-cheek kind of Christian shit? Sort of, but the unique power here lies in the malleability of our minds to transcend any situation, rather than a random list of rules to live by. Williamson also states that the people that challenge us the most are the people we have the potential to learn the very most from. In short, she believes to self-actualize, you should be surrounding yourself with people who challenge you daily and finding ways to love them anyway. As she explains: “Accepting people as they are has the miraculous effect of helping them improve. Acceptance doesn’t prohibit growth, it fosters it.”
Lastly there’s what in my opinion is the section that falls the most flat, the chapter entitled ‘Body’. This is where Williamson loses me more than a little bit, and this chapter is where I can most clearly see the the seeds littered around that would eventually grow into her being categorized as ‘problematic’ by many. I was somewhat ideologically open to her approach until this chapter, which intuits that spreading love should also extend to diseases within the body. Logically from that point, Williamson believes that our negative thoughts can make us physically sick, and that approaching a condition from the approach of ‘it must be destroyed’ will also destroy the internal self.
What she does is present a sort of macro laddering effect: how can lovelessness be the reason someone that dies of environmentally-caused cancer? From Williamson’s point of view, this is because we, humans, have not given the planet love or respect. Instead we’ve focused on profiting off natural resources, and in doing so, we have created chemicals and impurities that cause cancer, which is a product of that lack of love. Scientific research, by the same token, can absolutely be imbued with love in her view.
I can’t accept this in a literal or intellectual way, but you can see how this (as a spiritual recommendation for peace she came up with while working with AIDs patients) can get taken out of context. Eventually through enough games of telephone, this would turn into the quick take that circulated the internet about Williamson - “She thinks you can cure illness by thinking,” or “She’s anti-vaccination,” both of which are an over-simplification. That said, I can’t pretend to be shocked that it wasn’t a popular sentiment, especially without the 100+ pages of theory preceding it.
Overall, I really liked it. Maybe you will too, if you feel like challenging some ideological limits.
On that note, I am making a big anti-fear move this week: I am finally getting a puppy with my partner, despite all my worries, reasons why I shouldn’t or can’t, and terror at the prospect of failing as a competent hound mom.
I’ll see you next week. We have an inauguration to get through. In the meantime, keep your mind open and the (loving) thoughts flowing.