Marianne Williamson: America's GOOPiest Presidential Candidate!

A Wonksploration.

This week, whether we like it or not, we have been treated to the "Presidential Candidate Marianne Williamson Calls Vaccine Mandates 'Draconian' And Is Then Eventually Pushed To Say She Supports Vaccines During An Appearance On 'The View,' " news cycle. It was not a particularly compelling news cycle, given that there is pretty much no chance that Marianne Williams is going to be president and ridiculous people say ridiculous things about vaccines all the time.

Although my "this is gonna be some shit" senses tingled when I initially saw that Williamson, described as a "spiritual guru," had qualified for the first round of the Democratic primary debates, I did not fully delve in to what that actually meant until yesterday, when the combination of the vaccine nonsense and her answer to " What is your comfort food?" was that shedidn't have any was so kooky that I decided I needed to know more. As I suspected, this shit was just the tip of the iceberg.

Marianne Williamson, despite having been given the moniker "The Bitch For God," does not seem like a bad person. In fact, she has nice opinions on things like reparations and has done a lot of nice things for people living with HIV/AIDS and for the poor.

She was also apparently very popular among celebrities i n the early 1990s, even officiating Elizabeth Taylor's last marriage.

Williamson is also the latest mystical sensation in Hollywood, where many work assiduously to cultivate their souls, often with the same devotion they apply to their physiques. Anthony Perkins, Lesley Ann Warren, Tommy Tune, Cher and Roy Scheider go to her lectures. David Geffen and Sandy Gallin listen to her on tape and have sought her private counsel; she lunches with the likes of Barbra Streisand and Dawn Steel, and last summer she officiated at the wedding of Elizabeth Taylor and Larry Fortensky. "Her sense of spirituality triggered off my own," the bride said recently through a spokeswoman.

She's most well-known as Oprah's spiritual advisor, a thing we're not going to think too deeply on because we like Oprah and thus also like to studiously avoid delving too deeply into her woo-peddling. It's like with my relatives where we don't talk about the fact that I'm not Catholic. She has also been interviewed by Gwyneth Paltrow's site GOOP, because of course she has.

With all the attention her views on vaccines have gotten, people have somehow managed to gloss rightover the fact that she has pretty much built her entire career on the study and promotion of a book called  A Course In Miracles . She did not write this book. Though the 1,200 page tome was technically written in the 1970s by an "emotionally tortured" psychologist named Helen Schucman, Shucman claimed that it was actually dictated to her over the course of seven years by none other than Jesus Christ himself. This is very impressive given that Jesus Christ has been dead for over 2000 years.

According to the official A Course in Miracles (by Dead Jesus Christ) site:

Helen Schucman, Ph.D., was a clinical and research psychologist, who held the tenured position of Associate Professor of Medical Psychology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City.  A Course in Miracles  was "scribed" by Dr. Schucman between 1965 and 1972 through a process of inner dictation. She experienced the process as one of a distinct and clear dictation from an inner voice, which earlier had identified itself to her as Jesus. Dr. Schucman's scribing of  A Course in Miracles began with these words:  "This is a course in miracles, please take notes." 

Yeah.

Empirically, by my own rankings of batshittery, channelling is 1000% more ridiculous than not believing in vaccines. The only thing that outranks it is the belief that one is either an alien-human hybrid oneself or that one has given birth to alien-human hybrid babies that are now floating around in space doing God knows what. It is then followed by the belief that one has been a victim of either Satanic Ritual Abuse or of CIA sex slave mind-control programming (Or both! It's usually both).

I am not sure where the theory that the moon is a hologram fits in, as I only found out about that one the other day and I'm pretty sure it's just one guy, but it is definitely less weird than "channeling."

Have you seen someone do channeling before? IT IS SOME SHIT.

JZ Knight Ramtha Merv Grifin Show 1985    youtu.be 

Anyway, I managed to skim through this book that Jesus decided to dictate to a random lady back in the 1970s, and one of the things I found was a whole section on how illnesses are only in one's mind (unlike Jesus' voice, I guess?). This, I suppose, would explain Williamson's attitude about vaccines.

I also attempted to read the Wikipedia entry for the book. Tragically, my head exploded midway through and I am now dead.

The time-space level, or "perceptory" level, which is referred to as "the dream". A Course in Miracles states that this level was "made" by the "sleeping Son" as an attack on God. Furthermore, the "Son" is regarded as not just Jesus, but as all collective life. In this time-space dream, perception is continuously fueled by what it originated from: separation, judgment, and attack. This results in what the Course calls the "sin-guilt-fear" cycle: we sinned by rejecting God and making a universe of time-space (the Big Bang ); this results in guilt over our rejection of our Creator, and subsequent fear of God's wrath. The "sin-guilt-fear" is described as too horrendous to face, and therefore subsequently projected out, so that to Homo sapiens it seems that evil is everywhere except in himself. The world becomes a threatening place, in which we are born only to fear, fight, and die. The thought that keeps this process going is referred to as " ego ", or "the wrong mind". A Course in Miracles concludes that happiness cannot be found in earthly time-space life, and urges the reader not to commit suicide but rather to make a fundamental mind shift from "condemnation-out-of-fear" (mindlessness) to "forgiveness-out-of-love" ( mindfulness ), since our "right mind" is outside time-space and cannot be harmed by worldly attacks.

I have now read this paragraph 45 times and have come to the conclusion that I have simply not done enough drugs in my life to understand it. Either that or it's actually just one of those things where if you stare at it long enough, it becomes a sailboat.

Given her answer to the question about comfort foods, I first assumed that she must be some kind of breatharian. You know, the people who claim they don't need to eat because they get all of their nutrients from the air? Not true! She is, however, the author of a woo-tastic weight-loss book called  A Course In Weight Loss  (we see a trend in these titles!), in which she tells people to lose weight through building altars and suggests that being overweight is the result of not being spiritually intelligent or forgetting your divine perfection.

Via Barnes and Noble:  

A Course in Weight Loss addresses the true causal root of your weight-loss issues: a place within you where you have forgotten your divine perfection. This forgetfulness has confused not only your mind but also your body, making you reach for that which cannot sustain you . . . and reject that which does. As your mind reclaims its spiritual intelligence, your body will reclaim its natural intelligence as well. The 21 lessons in this book will take you on a deep, sacred journey. One step at a time, you will learn to shift your relationship with yourself-and your body-from one of fear to one of love.

I don't know what the hell that actually means, but it sounds rude AF.

The main A Course for Miracles site has a "daily lesson" that people are supposed to complete, in order to be deep or some shit. Today's daily lesson is to look around you and say:

 This table does not mean anything. 
 This chair does not mean anything. 
 This hand does not mean anything. 
 This foot does not mean anything. 
 This pen does not mean anything. 

And so on until you've decided that everything around you is meaningless. Remember to include the meaningless lamp and the meaningless paddle game! Alas, the main lesson I have learned from doing this is that I wish I had a few less scruples so that I, too, could make a stupid amount of money by telling people that nothing means anything and then run for president.

[ LA Times ]

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