Marianne Williamson on Deepening Recognition

Ray: How has your relationship to God, and perspective about God, changed and matured as you’ve entered midlife and faced midlife issues?

Marianne: I don’t think it’s changed, but the more mature we are, the more receptive we are. It’s like every year you go to the same Easter service, or every year you go to the same Passover seder. The story of Easter doesn’t change, and the story of the Passover doesn’t change, but you go year after year because you change.

If you allow yourself to deepen with midlife, your experience of everything deepens, including your experience of God.

The same truths that you understood and that affected you last year, you can receive at a deeper level this year because you’ve experienced more life. That’s how it has been for me: The religious stories, the religious truths, the spiritual principles—obviously, they don’t change. But as you get older and you experience more, you recognize the applicability, the profundity, and the fundamental truths of spiritual principles in ways that you couldn’t when you simply were living a less dimensional life.

Ray: Has it gotten any easier? Or do you still grapple with spiritual understandings?

Marianne: I don’t think of spiritual principle as a struggle. I think of life lived without spiritual principles as a struggle.

As you get older, life gets harder if you’re not applying spiritual truths. Also, as you get older, you have more and more layers of experience to forgive, more layers of heartbreak, more layers of what you might think of as failure. Once you get to your forties or fifties in this society, very few people haven’t had at least one body blow—financial, bankruptcy, divorce, relationship disaster, addiction, trouble with a child, trouble with a parent. Most people take some blow.

So, living in this world, under the dominance of the ego mind, is difficult. That’s the struggle. But the point of life is not who falls down. The point is who gets up and how you do it.

To me, that’s the important issue about spiritual principle: that you recognize it as both that which saves you from the self-sabotaging mind and that which heals you and lifts you up when you succumb to it and attract whatever personal disaster you attract.

I’ve posted a variety of number of interview excerpts with Marianne Williamson (along with many other teachers) on this blog, and I invite you to explore some of my favorites:

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Thank you very much for visiting and for your interest. I truly appreciate it.