Excerpt from Marianne Williamson's Lecture "Showing Up for Your Own Life"

In this transcribed excerpt from Marianne Williamson's lecture "Showing Up for Your Own Life!" Williamson tells us how we cannot and should not look outside of ourselves to be "saved."    This lecture was recorded live in Los Angeles as part of Williamson's weekly lecture series.

I’m sure that quite a few of you were here last week, and what we talked about last week was this idea that my salvation comes from me. And what the Course in Miracles was saying with this lesson, "My Salvation Comes from Me", is that it does not come from people or places outside myself. And that when we are thinking that if another person acted a certain way or a circumstance outside ourselves came together in a certain way, then everything would be good. That would complete us.
 
So what we talked about last week was the quite obvious trick of the mind involved here because if I think that my salvation lies in any other person or circumstance outside myself, then my core belief is that I am not okay already. I am not complete already. So if my core belief is that I am incomplete then I actually go into my relationship with that person or that situation. And the Course in Miracles says that every situation is a relationship. If my core belief is that I’m not enough already -- which I must have if I’m so attached to this being okay, right? The person or the experience. So my core belief is that I’m not okay, I’m not enough, I’m not quite complete.
 
Then I go into that situation with that core belief and I will therefore and thereby subconsciously set up this situation or that relationship to just reflect back to me more that I am not enough and I am incomplete.

Only a sense that I am complete will attract situations that actually prove to me I am complete. So when I feel that I am complete already, I go into situations carrying that mentality and everything we do is infused with the consciousness with which we do it. So we went into that quite deeply last week and we all got that, that there is nothing outside of us that is our salvation and the salvation, you know, is one of those traditional Christian terms, which is like so much in the Course in Miracles, described in such a nontraditional way, psychologically oriented way. And the notion of salvation here has to do with the fact that, as it says in the Course in Miracles, “in the bible it says Adam fell asleep and nowhere does it say that he woke up.”

So that human consciousness for a very, very, very long time has been dominated by a thought system based on fear. And it is a thought system, the Course in Miracles says, that is 180° away from the thinking of God. And it is that that we need to be rescued from on this planet, our own insanity. As Gandhi said, the problem with the world is that humanity is not in its right mind. So the only thing to be saved from is our own negative thinking, our own fear-based thinking, our own neuroses, etc. And it’s not a situation that will save us from that. In fact, it’s that situation, the neurosis itself is what makes us think we need that situation.

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