Williamson - Healing the Soul of America

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A LSO BY M ARIANNE W ILLIAMSON

Enchanted Love

Illuminated Prayers

A Return to Love

A Womans Worth

Illuminata

Emma and Mommy Talk to God

Tears to Triumph

The Law of Divine Compensation

A Year of Miracles

The Gift of Change

The Age of Miracles

Everyday Grace

A Course in Weight Loss

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Copyright 1997, 2000, 2018 by Marianne Williamson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-0156-5

ISBN 978-1-4391-2894-7 (ebook)

For Matthew Albracht

New friends may be poems but old friends are alphabets. Dont forget the alphabets because you will need them to read the poems.

W ILLIAM S HAKESPEARE

S ince this book was first published twenty years ago, much has happened. Particularly now, the United States is experiencing a political crisis the likes of which we have never seen.

I felt that updating the statistics in the original version of this book should remain a stand-alone project, and have chosen to write elsewhere about our current political situation. Healing the Soul of America is a treatise on the larger arc of American politics, hopefully providing some broader insight into what truly ails us and what it will take for us to heal.

This country is larger than any one chapter of our history, and it is as important to understand the big picture as it is to understand any particular moment in which we find ourselves. In fact, the former enlightens the latter. Hopefully, the updated edition of Healing the Soul of America will contribute to a more heartfelt, informed approach to navigating the times in which we live.

M any people are going around today saying, In any situation, I just ask myself, What would Buddha, or Jesus, do? What would the Torah tell me to do, or the Koran, or the New Testament? Thinking about such things is a perfect test, reading the news today. Would Jesus, if he were a citizen of the richest nation on earth, choose to feed the poor or fatten the rich? Its certainly an interesting question.

All of us are better off when contemplation of holy principles is at the center of our lives. But it is in actually applying those principles that we forge the marriage between heaven and earth, whereas merely dwelling on principle falls short of the human effort needed to carry out Gods will. Just as we need the light of the sun yet looking straight into it can blind us, looking straight into the inner light can begin to blind us as well.

There is a point in everyones spiritual journey where, if we are not careful, the search for self-awareness can turn into self-preoccupation. There is a fine line at times between self-exploration and narcissism. One way to see how were doing is to measure the fun factor: spiritual growth thats too much fun all the time usually isnt growth at all. Anything that has become too comfortable cannot ultimately be comforting. The universe is invested in our healing, and healing is a fierce, transformative fire. It is the product of human willingness to change, and change is often hard.

For years, I thought I only had to heal myself, and the world would take care of itself. Clearly we must work on healing our own neuroses in order to become effective healers. But then, having worked on our own issues a while, another question begs for an answer: how healed can we ultimately become while the social systems in which we live and move, and have our earthly being, remain sick?

Years ago, we realized that peoples psychology is intimately bound up with the psychology of their family units. Today, it is very clear that the family, too, dwells within a larger psychological and sociological system. Its not just our childhoods or families whose dysfunctions influence us; our education system, government, and business structures are often dysfunctional as well, and in a manner that affects us all. None of us lives in isolation anymore, from anyone or anything.

The principles that apply to our personal healing apply as well to the healing of the larger world. First, all healing principles are universal because they come from God. And second, there actually is no objective outer world, for whats out there is merely a projection of whats in our minds. The laws of consciousness apply to everything. Anything, when truly seen for what it is and surrendered to the higher mind, begins to self-correct, but what is not looked at is doomed to eternal re-enactment, for an individual or for a nation.

Politics, ideally, is a context for the care of the public good. The word politics comes from an ancient Greek root politeia , meaning not of the government, but rather gathering of citizens. The source of power in America is not the government; the source of power is us . And millions of us, citizens of the United States, have begun to see life in a less mechanistic, more enlightened way. The consciousness revolution has already transformed both mainstream medicine and business: Harvard Medical School has hosted symposiums on the role of spirituality and healing in medicine, and highly paid corporate consultants call on business executives to turn their workplaces into sanctuaries for the soul. Politics is the only major corner of America that doesnt yet seem to have heard that the world has unalterably changed.

There are new ideas on the worlds horizon, as different from the twentieth-century worldview as the twentieth century was different from the nineteenth century. We are ready to apply principles of healing and recovery, not just to our bodies, not just to our relationships, but to every aspect of life.