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Marianne Williamson
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Excerpt from Marianne Williamson's Lecture "Relationships and Spiritual Adulthood"

Cover-MW_Relationships_Spirit_Adulthood1600_mediumCheck out this transcribed excerpt from Marianne Williamson's lecture "Relationships and Spiritual Adulthood."  Williamson imparts wisdom that we all need to be reminded of from time to time.  This important lecture was recorded live in April 2011 in Los Angeles as part of Williamson's weekly lecture series.

This idea that it is not our job, but to possess a person -- which is what the ego would do in sly and subtle ways.  Rather, it is our job to affirm a person. You extrapolate from that. It’s not our job to change a person. It’s our job to celebrate a person. It’s not our job to imprison a person. It is our job to free a person. You know, there is a saying in the twelve-step programs that alcoholics don’t have relationships, they hold hostages. And that’s the kind of thing that we’re talking about here. The ways that we sometimes, in the name of love, pretending to ourselves, “I put this lasso around you because I love you.” Right? “I’m trying to get you to do this or do that because I love you.”
 
And so in the Course in Miracles it says, “You think you have many different problems, but you really only have one and that is your separation from God.” Our job on this earth, our mission on this earth is to learn to love other people the way God loves us. To learn to think the way that God thinks. So that’s why our practice, that’s why our attitudinal practice and exercise, as it were, is always based on honing our minds and our attitudes in such a way that we can exercise the attitudinal musculature to stand in the world and look at the world exactly the way that God would look at the world.


 
And that, of course, is with unconditional love. God affirms. He created of course. But He also celebrates and He allows our free will. God does not force us. God is a space in which we dwell. And when we are in a space, when we are dwelling in a space of this kind of divine love… but this kind of divine love is at its most beautiful when it is expressed through the mind and through the behavior of another human being. What happens when we are in the space of that love is we heal, we get better. In the presence of unlimited compassion and non-judgment we become our best.
 
So what the ego would have us do is always monitor other people’s process and then tell them how they are doing. And this, of course, is not only a way to make sure that we don’t get what we want, it’s an act of self-sabotage in the extreme. But it’s also a way, of course, to repel the person. So what we want to talk about tonight is the art of love in that sense. The way to dwell in relationship with other people in such a way that they are attracted. That’s really the essence of what it attracted rather than repelled, and sometimes -- we’ve all been there -- we find ourselves repelling the people that we would most like to attract.

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