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The Inner Path of Transformation with Marianne Williamson

Dec 25, 202541 min
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Summary

This episode features Marianne Williamson discussing "The Mystic Jesus," reframing Jesus not as a figure of dogma, but as an archetype for inner awakening and personal evolution. She explores how biblical narratives mirror our struggles and potential for resurrection, urging a profound societal rethink. The conversation weaves together spirituality, politics, and moral responsibility, highlighting inner work as the foundation for collective healing in an era of crumbling institutions.

Episode description

In this episode of the Commune Podcast, Jeff sits down with Marianne Williamson for a wide-ranging conversation on Jesus, not as a figure of dogma or doctrine, but as a guide to inner transformation.

Marianne reframes the story of Jesus as a psychological and spiritual map of human awakening. From the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection as inner archetypes, to the idea of Christ consciousness as a latent potential within us all, she invites listeners to reconsider what these teachings were originally pointing toward.

Together, Jeff and Marianne explore why this reinterpretation feels especially urgent now — as traditional institutions falter, collective suffering intensifies, and more people search for meaning beyond rigid belief systems. The conversation weaves together spirituality, politics, trauma, and moral responsibility, offering a vision of inner work as the foundation for collective healing.


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Transcript

Reframing Jesus: Inner Transformation

Welcome to the Commune Podcast. My name is Jeff Krasnow. Today, we are revisiting a conversation I had with my old friend, Marianne Williamson, centered around her book, The Mystic Jesus.

Marianne's work has helped millions of people re-examine spiritual teachings through a modern and psychological lens. In this dialogue, she opens up a way of seeing Jesus not through dogma or institutional religion, but through inner transformation as a guide to healing and renewal and remembering who we truly are.

In this conversation, we explore the Gnostic and mystical threads of the Jesus story, the inner kingdom, and how these archetypes mirror our own lives, the struggles, the ego's resistance. and the moments of resurrection that we all move through. I am resurfacing this episode because the themes feel so especially relevant today. So many of us are grappling.

with uncertainty. And Marianne offers a reminder that transformation begins within with willingness, honesty, and the quiet work of returning to our own right minds. So settle in. Here's my conversation with great Marianne Williamson. Marianne. Jeff. Great to see you. Always good to see you. Thank you. I know. We always have some of our most animated conversations off camera. Yes. It's a lifetime thing with you and me.

You put me down a Jesus wormhole. Oh, yes. I learned more about Jesus over the last few days than I think I knew him my whole life. Well, good. It was good. Good. I'm glad I did. It was eye-opening. I went in with a little skepticism. Uh-huh.

Gnostic Wisdom and Inner Kingdom

And I've come out a saved man. Well, that was really the purpose of the book. I think there is so much reticence to even go into that conversation among those of us in the higher consciousness community. And I have come to understand that people who were raised Christian and who have come to have some problem with the dogma and doctrine of the ecclesiastical church.

The exclusivity of it and so forth have gone like this. But a lot of people feel that they threw away the baby with the bathwater and have found in books like The Course in Miracles and in other Gnostic-type teachings. a whole other realization of what those words mean from a sort of psychotherapeutic perspective. Yeah. And also some of the original intention, like, for example, one of the places you pushed me.

which you kind of hint at in the book, but is the Gospel of Mary, which is now, I think, associated more with the Gnostic Gospels, right? How Mary Magdalene was really the first person, right, to... witness christ on the resurrection she goes to his tomb and the stone is removed or what have you and she recounts that meeting in her gospel which of course is not

in the typical Christian ecclesiastical canon, but is then in the Gnostic Gospels, and what she is pointing to in her gospel, what Jesus told her. was that every man, every woman should be looking for the Jesus inside of them, that this was about an internal transformation. It was about the worship of some external... uh patriarchal bogey in the sky well when he said my kingdom is not of this world

That was thousands of years before Sigmund Freud would be born. It's not as though there was no conversation of the inner life, but there was no conversation of an actual inner domain on the planet yet. And now that we know that there is an inner domain. Every bit as real as the external world, our thoughts, our feelings, what we go through emotionally.

Then the idea of Jesus of the inner world and Romans' renewal of the mind, we're looking at all of that very differently. In The Course in Miracles, it says that at their highest place, religion and psychotherapy become one.

Christ's Journey as Personal Archetype

It's binding back your thoughts, your minds to the truth in which we were created, but which this world trains you to forget. When you look at... this psychological, psychotherapeutic dimension of the teachings of Christ or of any religious or spiritual scripture, you see code. And you see a code to... not only someone else's journey thousands of years ago, but to your own journey.

The birth of Christ being the birth of our own better self, our own higher evolutionary possibility, mothered by our humanness, fathered by God. The idea of Mary as the divine feminine, Joseph as the divine masculine, get her out of town, bring her back, navigate the material world so this precious part of you can survive. The fact that the three kings...

Get off their horses and bow, meaning that the world will bow to your most vulnerable self. If you find that place, you will attract the powers of the world, the ministry, which is our lives. And if you need more, the loaves will turn into fishes as long as you're on task, on purpose, and you'll be able to heal the sick, which, hello, you'll be able to raise the dead in places in each other.

Yes, Herod, that ego mind after you wants to kill that in you. The ego will ultimately crucify you. We will all go through it. No, it's like. saint john said of the uh dark night of the soul it's not if it's when and your consciousness whether your crucifixion was getting sober going through cancer going through a divorce going bankrupt losing someone you love We go into that painful place, but our consciousness wallops.

on that cross determines what will happen after and what will happen after the time in the tomb and the grief and the working on it and the pain of it all and the heartbreak and what we learn from it and atoning and growing and forgiving.

Resurrection: Return to Right Mind

we come out in a resurrected state, which is the return to your right mind. And one of the things I love there is how... The women who came to reclaim the body were told, he's not there, he's risen. And I think that's so meaningful. We're not even the same people when we go through.

these hardships in our lives from a place of willingness to inhabit the space in a mature, in a soulful way. Your molecular... foundation shifts and I think we're all I think that's so relevant to what's happening now because I don't know anybody who's not experiencing something Jeff it's a difficult moment people

We're all having to eat their piece of it, you know, like in the Eastern religions with Kali and stuff. She ate. She eats up the darkness. We're all having to eat some really bitter fruit right now, right? We will be nourished by this bitter fruit. I think that's... That's the good news, as it were. And I think what we've experienced culturally, the failings of kind of traditional institutions and, you know, underwrite.

this feeling of separateness and hyper individualism so this idea that we feel like a separate self locked up in a ever sagging bag of skin separate from the external world around us and in competition with it and in competition with nature etc you know you look at like the rise for example in plant medicine right now right so of the things that plant medicine provides for you is one of the things that traditional institutional religions seem not to provide which is an experience

a transformation from experiencing yourself as separate to the sensation of feeling integrated in the world around you. And if you look at it, I mean, the Eastern traditions... Point more to that concept of mysticism, that mystical experience from that transformation from separateness to interconnection.

A Global Rethink and Evolution

Abrahamic religions seem to fall short in that regard. Well, even the traditional Abrahamic religions, though, have their mystical place. In Judaism, it's the Kabbalah. In Islam, it's Sufism. In Christianity... it is those Gnostic and mystical traditions. So I don't think the West lacks those things. They're just being rediscovered. We're living at a time of a profound rethink.

Repense, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom of a much greater, more expanded awareness of our oneness, that which lies beyond our separateness. So people are rethinking everything. We're rethinking religion.

We're rethinking politics. We're rethinking food. We're rethinking agriculture. We're rethinking energy. We're rethinking our relationship to nature. We're rethinking sex and sexuality. We're rethinking ourselves. And we're rethinking our relationship to the divine. So I see it as all of one. piece that the old institutional realities, which as you said, have been underlying and underpinning and perpetuating and maintaining these very disconnected.

ultimately malfunctional attitudes and patterns of behavior are crumbling. And we are in a place which species come to sometimes. If a species is displaying behavioral patterns that are malfunctional, maladaptive for the survival of that species, that species will, one of two things will happen. It will either evolve.

It will take a leap forward into a new place, or it will go extinct. You know, I was reading the other day when the Secretary General of the United Nations saying, we're on an unsustainable path here. I mean, I've always felt the word unsustainable isn't quite ugly enough. It sounds like it might be pretty. It means we die. And if you don't, your grandkids do. The civilization will ultimately not be able to absorb these repeated episodes of explosive malfunction on the planet.

What are the religious figures, whether it's Jesus or any other? They represent the mutation. They represent the member of the species that is demonstrating a different kind of thinking, a different kind of behavior. And then the question is, will we then go into that next evolutionary level? In the Course in Miracles, Jesus is called an elder brother. And he says in the Course, I don't have anything you don't have.

I just don't have anything else. I'm in a state which is only potential in you. And so that's the idea, the idea of a psychological guide that can help us should we request. Because if we don't request... It's a violation of our free will. And also there's nothing here about an exclusive Jesus. This is one name on the door, but we have to enter that door. There's that portal there.

And if we don't, we will remain stuck and we're already in a downward spiral as a human civilization. So the idea is that having actualized divine potential. The idea is that he was then authorized by God. Should we request it? And only if we request it, because otherwise nobody's forcing anything here, that he said, my mind joined with your mind can shine away the ego.

And I think that's where so many of us are, just at that point of willingness. We don't know how to do it different, but we're willing to do it different. And at that point in your life, something appears. Something will appear. I think it's a very difficult time for so many of us because we are having to face, having to confront some of the darkness, whether in ourselves or in the world. And I think this is a moment when the...

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Navigating Societal Crumbling and Rebirth

This is huge. I mean, I think we're living in, yes, it's a moment of peril, absolutely. It's these simultaneous realities, one world crumbling and the other that Arundhati Roy... quote about a new world struggling to be born. We have to be death doulas and we have to be birth doulas. And we have to, you know, that's what I felt in my presidential campaign that, you know, we're going to have to transition from...

dirty economy to clean economy. We're going to have to transition from a war economy to a peace economy, but we need to do it soberly and wisely and non-violently and harmlessly because otherwise the chaos will.

overwhelm us i think he in in retrospect in 20 years you'll be seen as that midwife that was oh that was slightly before her time or at least creating the footsteps in the sand well thank you i like to think that we planted some seeds especially with younger people yeah totally 100 thank you and i think it is um i mean we've had these conversations

before about spiritual leadership inside of politics and if you look at like the great great movements of the 20th century they've largely been punctuated by spiritual leaders that then made huge political change and you know as you say we're kind of in this very awkward moment right now where you know the institutions that have

been far from perfect but they've largely served us you know liberal democracy and all of its the coterie of institutions that go along with liberal democracy whether that's the the media or science, or our institutions of higher learning, etc., they now are crumbling. And there is a group of people...

dedicated to patching the leaky hall of liberal democracy, right? Then there's another group of people that are like, no, we're just going to burn it down. We don't know. We don't have an answer to what's coming next. We're just going to burn it down. And then what I keep looking for is, no, no, no, what you said is a both sober yet spiritual calling that someone's going to walk to the top of the mountain and give that sermon.

you know that there is a vision that we can follow that is the next chapter and i know that that's really what you were attempting to do. And I think you brought a lot of us along on that ride. But I just see, I've yet to see where that's going to happen. I mean, kind of Trump has played that role in terms of motivator in chief.

Sacred Politics and American Ideals

for this kind of false populism if you want to call it we don't necessarily have to go in this direction but what i'm trying to find is like where is that greater calling going to come from i think there's something very Sacred? When Gandhi said politics should be sacred, he wasn't talking about religion, he wasn't talking about dogma, he wasn't talking about doctrine. Think of the place that we go to in therapy, in an intimate conversation with...

The lover, our children, our friends, you and I trying to have a real conversation right here, right now. A support group. One of the things you were talking to me about before when you had young Palestinians and Israelis together. That place where we get real. And we get true with one another. When you have groups that go to that place, just as miracles happen in personal relationships, therapy and so forth, when you go to that place, something equally miraculous happens when you have a group.

that goes to that place and i've been there and i've seen it and i have 40 years of experience with it which is really why i ran I feel, having run and having run twice, that the American people are ready for this. The American people are ripe for it. And whether they know it or not, they yearn for it. The problem is not where it's going to come from. It comes from deep within us. It comes from the very foundational ideology.

All men are created equal. Jefferson said the only safe repository for power in this country is in the hands of the people. There's something so radical about that. Then in that place where it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, it doesn't matter any of that. Theoretically, if you had a free press, give you the facts, public education to train you into critical thought, which seems to have failed, and you have freedom of assembly that you can get together and talk about it.

that more often than not a wisdom more often than not they weren't stupid the founders didn't think it was always going to work 100 but that more often than not this group conscience would guide the destiny of a great nation. I don't feel, having been out there, Jeff, I don't feel that we're any less capable. And remember, as I say to people all the time, this country elected Lincoln twice. What we have, however, is you could look at this group conscience of the electorate as the train.

The political system should be the tracks, but the political system, namely parties, which should be the conduit for the emergence of this, actually work to obstruct it. to manipulate it, to confuse it. They have become almost an opponent to the highest expression of representative democracy. And I've been...

Overcoming Political Obstruction

Right in the center of that, I know where I speak. Yeah, I think that there is, yeah, there's obviously a political inertia. We've created these systems now that are so fueled by money. misaligned incentives and backroom deals. I don't know where the new... movement is going to emerge from if it's going to have to come from outside. Because right now there seems to be just a stalemate. Well, they don't want anyone outside. They only want a member of their club.

And if somebody comes from the outside and says, well, actually, those of you who drove us into this ditch are probably not the ones who know how to drive us out of it. Almost what that crowd considers qualification is qualification to perpetuate the machinery that's already destroying the fabric of this country. And there's a viciousness there if you... seek to enter into that. But as long as they're citizens united, until we have...

repeal that, overturn that. We have to be as intentional about overturning Citizens United as some people in this country were intentional about overturning Roe v. Wade. And ultimately also, and I think this will probably be a generation younger, we're going to have to have a constitutional amendment, establishing public funding for federal campaigns. Even with those external changes, there has to be a reclamation of the... deeper meaning of citizenship and also the

ethical requirements of that. We're living in such a mean moment. Oh my God, people are so mean. People jump to judgment. Nobody gives anyone a benefit of the doubt. This cancel culture nonsense. It's not just where it's going to come from. It's also where it's going to come from within us. I don't think it's going to come from that machine. I do think it's going to be those of us who are saying, you know what? This is really, this is, no.

But it also has to be a place within us. And that's real basic to the philosophy of nonviolence, the purification of your own. heart because if you know those of us who are hating on each other and thinking that people owe it to us to agree with us and think that our way is the only way that's right and that any group has a monopoly on truth you know i was at a i was at a dinner the other night

And it was interesting. It was in New York. It was a Rosh Hashanah dinner. They weren't MAGA people, but I think most of the people at the table leaned right. That was clear. And there was this one, but it was a very fun dinner party and we were all yelling at each other. But it was like good yelling at each other. Like, no, no, you know. It was great, actually. And at one point, this climax of yelling, this guy says, yeah, well, which of us is right? I said.

Both of us. Both of us. Nobody owns this country. Nobody owes it to you to agree with you. You know, even Eisenhower said the American mind at its best. is both liberal and conservative. There are high-minded liberal principles, high-minded conservative principles. I don't care if it comes from the left or the right, but this idea that it has to be our way, and it has to be the way we say it.

That's authoritarianism on the left, whether it's on the left or the right. That's not the way. Well, this has been a very big problem on the left is that if you don't adhere to a particular orthodoxy, then... and find yourself another table. Believe me, I have seen it. But I think what you just pointed to is that that sort of political conviviality can exist at a dinner table, cannot really exist within the sandbox of Twitter.

or Facebook. And this is the problem with algorithmically preferenced platforms is that mean-spiritedness, scandal, salaciousness, vitriol, scale.

Jesus, Miracles, and Universal Truths

scale very very quickly but that kind of work that we're talking about that deep trauma-informed therapeutic work that doesn't scale very well one of the answers to what we're experiencing is being able to equip people with the means of internal transformation. I'm very into the meditation mindfulness world. You know, it's, again... a difficult message to scale, but I see right from A Course in Miracles, the memory of God comes to the quiet mind, right? So...

Why did you write this book now for this moment? Well, I didn't write it now. My publisher had called me, the editor called and said, we keep hearing from booksellers that people are coming into stores and saying, Do you have any books about Jesus that aren't Christian? So, you know, The Course in Miracles is not a religion. It's a psychological mind training in the relinquishment of fear and the acceptance of love into our hearts.

So my editor asked if I might be interested in doing that because that's really what the book is. It's Jesus within the context of A Course in Miracles. The Course is not a religion. It is based on universal spiritual themes. And then when I ran for president, I asked my publisher if this book could be delayed, the publication could be delayed. They were more than glad not to be publishing this book at a time when I was running for president. So now.

That was then and this is now. Obviously, there's a book ending with this book with A Return to Love. I mean, I'm sure you will write another book knowing you that you'll... write probably a dozen more. But there does seem to be a full circle in some ways with this book and A Return to Love.

Is that how you feel about it? Well, I think this book in a way is a sequel to A Return to Love. In A Return to Love, I mentioned Jesus, but you know, The Course in Miracles makes it very clear. That's why there's no author on the front. You can believe that this book comes from him. You cannot believe that this book comes from him.

The issue is whether or not you practice its principles. You know, The Course in Miracles says belief is meaningless. Experience is everything. A universal belief is not... possible a universal experience is both possible and necessary i'm jewish when i first picked up the course in miracles i saw that christian language it was like i had studied a lot of christian theology in college but this was my

you know, my regular personal life. And it was like, oh, I guess that's just a Christian book, so I don't read that. And then I saw it again a year later. I was in such pain. I wasn't even thinking about the language. And then you learn very quickly this is not a religious text. These are...

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Archetypal Narratives and Personal Story

And what I found, because I had not been taught anything, you know, my mother had just said, my parents would say, honey, they read that Bible and we read this one. The only thing I ever remember my mother saying about Jesus, and I think about this, I can't, she used to say. I think he was very polite. Where did she get this? I don't know. Not from reading the book, I'll tell you. But anyway.

I think he was probably quite polite. Well, he had some moments. He had some moments. He was a salesperson, but sort of a humble. Yeah, but he like kicked over those tables and, you know, he at some point said, I'm not talking to you, several people. So, but that's called the masculine, you know, why do we make it bad? But, and all of us, by the way, people I knew who had been brought up Christian, much like what you were mentioning before, that's where I witnessed people like, I don't know.

I don't know. I'm not going there. So I just was learning new principles and it was kind of exciting to me because I had nothing on them. But a lot of people who come to The Course in Miracles from certain... Christian contexts have to unlearn old things in order to then learn new. So I always say there's something there to offend just about everybody.

It pushes and pushes everybody's buttons, no matter what your buttons were. Yeah, for me it was actually interesting to go back and relearn some of the actual history, kind of the prophecies that were in.

kind of Isaiah and the book of Micah, my daughter's named Micah, so, or saw or presaged the birth of Christ or the birth... in Bethlehem, you know, a lot of the other prophecies that, you know, that he would go to Egypt and that, you know, he would walk through the desert for 40 days, which sort of represented the...

the 40 years of the Israelis or the Jews in the Sinai Peninsula with Moses. All these kinds of really interesting things. The King Herod's sort of massacre of the innocents. I didn't even remember that story.

how essentially that King Herod had sort of made nice with the Romans, and so they let him rule Judea, and he was a Jew. But then he felt threatened by this prophecy that there was going to be this... savior that was going to be born king of the jews the king of the jews and so i think what he did and you'll help me here is that he said okay we're going to kill all of the jewish babies the jewish babies and and did kill many jewish babies so

This is very similar, actually, to the story in Ancient Egyptian, where the brother of Isis is out to get the baby Horus. So these are basic archetypal themes. However, more importantly, and this is true whether it's Egyptian... religion or any other religious or spiritual text. Just like when people say to you, every character in your dream is you.

Every character in these stories is you. You are Mary sleeping, told to go up onto the roof, being told by an angel a thought of God, higher thought, higher minds when you're meditating, when you're walking through nature, when you're praying whatsoever. whatever, that something new is going to be born in you, mothered by your humanity, fathered by God. And Herod is the ego mind. It says, well, I'm going to nip that in the bud. Right. These like thoughts close to God, i.e. Jewish babies.

You think that's going to survive? No, no, no, no, no. And then Herod has sons, and they're all going to come after you. But the divine masculine in you will intuitively know, better get her out of town. He's coming, bring her back. And you see all the story. And that's really what the book is about, how the story is your story. It's not just the story, the historical tale of one man 2,000 years ago. It's the journey of all of our lives.

But this is true also the story of Buddha. It's a story in the Old Testament, the story of Moses. This is no different in that sense from all great religious stories. Oh, my God, that's you.

Macali, she eats the darkness. You're going to have to eat that. You're going to have to experience that. You're going to have to digest it. And ultimately, you will be nourished by it. Do you have any sense of... you know i've heard the the people make this case that during these lost years kind of between i guess when he between when he was 12 and 30 i mean a long time right um there is

Some argument that he went East and got open to some of these Eastern philosophies. I mean, it feels like that could be a possibility given many of the things that he goes on to say, but... I'm just fascinated by everybody. I remember when I was in college, they even talk of his coming to the Americas, which weren't called the Americas yet. Listen, we know his mother saw him at the temple after his bar mitzvah, and the next thing you know, it's all this year.

later uh in his uh beginning his ministry so it's one of the great mysteries and i don't know any more than anybody else does i just have the same fascination with the question that everybody else does i was joking with wellington here because we he loves to work out and he always asked me what kind of protocol i'm on so i said i'm on the jesus protocol

He's like, what does that mean? I call it Jehovah's fitness. You know, so it's 40 days of zone two and a lot of fasting. And then I come back on a Friday. I do some CrossFit and I eat some fish. This is true? Really? No, I'm joking. By Saturday, I'm dead. By Sunday, I'm back alive again. I'm good. That's very funny, actually. That was my Jesus protocol.

Integrating Spirituality into Action

What's going on next for you? Well, I've had to spend some time healing, processing. And now I'm back. I'm talking about this book. I'm writing articles on my Substack. I wrote an article about... that I called Integrated Politics the other day, wrote a book about what's happening in Israel and Palestine, and I'm talking about this book. You know, some people, when I was in college, and I think that you can relate to this, you're younger than me, but I don't.

We're still that same general type. So in the morning, we would read Ram Dass and Alan Watts, and in the afternoon, we would go to Vietnam anti-war protests. People weren't yet saying, stay in your lane. We're multidimensional beings. You don't have to choose a lane. You're human. The countercultural revolution at that time was everything. It was politics. It was music. It was sex. It was culture. It was everything.

When I read, this is why Gandhi has always fascinated me, and King, so Dr. King said that in order to create the beloved community, We need external changes in our circumstances, but also internal shifts in our souls. So for me, whether I'm talking about metaphysical Jesus on one hand or talking about, you know, what has to happen in terms of political change on the other.

to me, are not separate quarters that never the twain shall meet. I think quite the opposite. I think we need to do in politics what we've done in medicine and ultimately arrived at an integrative model. What they do in politics now, it's like... like the old-fashioned allopathic model of medicine, where you didn't take responsibility for diet or exercise or lifestyle. You just hoped you didn't get sick.

And then if you did get sick, you sought some external remedy to eradicate or suppress the symptom. Well, we moved from that. Complementary medicine, alternative medicine, finally ending up with integrative model of medicine. functional right energy medicine the idea that all dimensions of body and mind and spirit are involved and another important aspect of that is that

Sickness is the absence of health. Health is not the absence of sickness. So you have to proactively create health. So we have to look at the sickness of our society in the same way. You know, when Martin Luther King said there's negative peace and positive peace.

Negative pieces where there's no outright violence, but there's underlying tension and anxiety. Positive pieces that can only be predicated on brotherhood and justice. So now we have a very allopathic model of politics. Just treat the symptom. Don't worry about proactively creating justice. Don't think about proactively creating fairness or health.

Or brotherhood, don't think about taking care of people. And then when these inevitable societal dysfunctions arise, seek to suppress them through enough bombs or enough prisons. So we need an entirely different integrative model of political change. change. And the one thing I'll say about that also has to do with young people. And you probably see this with your kids. Gen Z, these

People were not even born in the 20th century. They don't have that mechanistic Newtonian mindset where you just tweak the pieces of the machine. They are much more holistic. And I, you know, when I'm speaking at colleges...

They'll ask you a question about depression, and then the next question is about drone warfare in Syria, and they don't see anything weird about... the combination well neither do i you know what i mean i'm home you know people used to say we're not going to talk about at dinner we're not going to talk about um

religion or politics and i'm like well that leaves me out at dinner so i think that we're coming on a time where people realize this is all part of who we are we have to change on the level of our being and on the level of our doing and at the level of of being precedes that level of doing. That's the nonviolent aspect because mean people are going to bring this forth. If you don't think ethics matters and if you think you're only one who knows the truth.

Tikkun Olam: Our Mission to Repair

You can't be a conduit for this new energy. We have to seek to purify our hearts if we're going to purify our society. I was reading your book. It was just pushing me in a lot of different directions. So it was very provocative. I'm like, okay, well now I'm going to go down the...

Kabbalah wormhole, you know, and I'm going to learn about the emanations and the sefirot and all this. And that was very fascinating. And then I came across this concept of tikkun olam. You're familiar with it. To repair the world. Yeah. It's our mission to repair. the world and that marvelous rabbinical saying you are not expected to complete the task but neither are you permitted to abandon it you are here to try to repair the world which in

Christianity is the ministry of Jesus. When I landed on that phrase, I thought to myself, this epitomizes Marianne in your work. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Thank you. When you're reading something and thinking about what you're going to talk about, it's a process where you're like, oh, that's interesting, but maybe that's not germane to the conversation. And then every once in a while, you land on something that feels so...

honest and true to the person that you're going to talk to. And so when I landed on that particular concept and I was like, that's it. Well, you know, if you're raised in a Jewish home, at least most Jewish homes. The idea of that being an apolitical stance, your relationship to God, when I grew up and met all these people, oh, religion should have nothing to do with politics. We're not talking about separation of church and state here. We're talking about...

the passion of your heart. You know, I've never read about any religious or spiritual path that gives any of us a pass on addressing the suffering of other sentient beings. How can you love God? and not concern yourself with 12,000 children starving on the planet every day when there's no dearth of food. And I don't know if it's Jewish. I think a large part of it is that I'm Jewish, actually.

Okay, Marianne, thanks so much. Thank you so much. Always enjoy it and to be continued. I love you, Jeff. Thank you. Thank you for listening to today's episode. For more of my weekly musings along with ad-free episodes and live stream conversations, head over to my Substack at jeffkrasnow.substack.com. I also want to let you know about our course platform over on Commune, which contains over 3000 lessons and practices from the world's leading integrative medicine doctors, health experts.

and yoga, fitness, and mindfulness teachers. It's a living library for holistic well-being and you can try it for free for 14 days at onecommune.com forward slash trycommune. As a reminder, the audio version of my new book, Good Stress, is available on Audible, and you can listen to it for free as part of your premium Spotify membership. And if you prefer the old school analog option, well, you can pick up a dusty old scroll at goodstress.com and get over $900 worth of bonus courses.

from some of my biggest influences, including Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Zach Bush, and Dr. Gabor Mate. As always, feel free to reach out to me with comments, questions, or... criticism of the constructive variety at jeffk at onecommune.com. Okay, that's all from the Commune for today. My name is Jeff Krasnow, and I am here for you.

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