Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

Fear unchecked grows exponentially. Love poured forth has the power to remove it. Thus

Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here.

What happened to my generation is that we never grew up. The problem isn’t that we’re lost or apathetic, narcissistic or materialistic. The problem is we’re terrified.

There’s a biblical story where Jesus says we can build our house on sand or we can build it on rock. Our house is our emotional stability. When it is built on sand, then the winds and rain can tear it down. One disappointing phone call and we crumble; one storm and the house falls down. When our house is built on rock, then it is sturdy and strong and the storms can’t destroy it. We are not so vulnerable to life’s passing dramas. Our stability rests on something more enduring than the current weather, something permanent and strong. We’re depending on God.

To surrender to God means to let go and just love.

We set aside our normal mental habit patterns and allow them to be superseded by a different, gentler mode of perception. That is what it means to let a power greater than we are direct our lives.

Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.

Fear manufactures a kind of parallel universe where the unreal seems real, and the real seems unreal.

The only real problem is a lack of love. To

Thought is Cause; experience is Effect. If you don’t like the effects in your life, you have to change the nature of your thinking.

Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell.

“God, please help me. Heal my mind. Wherever my thoughts have strayed from love—if I’ve been controlling, manipulative, greedy, ambitious for myself—whatever it is, I’m willing to see this differently. Amen.

Eastern religions tell us that if we go for God, all that is not authentically ourselves will drop. Go for the light and darkness will disappear. Focus on Christ means focus on the goodness and power that lie latent within us, in order to invoke them into realization and expression. We get in life that which we focus on. Continual focus on darkness leads us, as individuals and as a society, further into darkness. Focus on the light brings us into the light.

The ego is quite literally a fearful thought.

It’s unbelievable how tenaciously we cling to what we’ve prayed to be released from.

Any situation that pushes our buttons is a situation where we don’t yet have the capacity to be unconditionally loving. It

Although we cannot guarantee that a Hitler will never again be born, we can in fact create a world in which, even if a Hitler appeared, there would be so much love that hardly anyone would listen or conspire with him.

thoughts and only love remains within their minds. These purified beings are called the Enlightened ones. Light

to take the bull by the horns. We’ve been taught that that’s our power. We think

The problem is that aggressive energy is what we’ve all been taught to respect.

Surrender means, by definition, giving up attachment to results. When we surrender to God, we let go of our attachment to how things happen on the outside and we become more concerned with what happens on the inside.

a mental decision to see love as the only real purpose and value in any situation. Until

Where we have an attachment to results, we tend to have a hard time giving up control.

our greatest tool for changing the world is our capacity to ‘change our mind about the world.

Our self-perception determines our behavior. If we think we’re small, limited, inadequate creatures, then we tend to behave that way, and the energy we radiate reflects those thoughts no matter what we do. If we think we’re magnificent creatures with an infinite abundance of love and power to give, then we tend to behave that way. Once again, the energy around us reflects our state of awareness.

As we relinquish the fears that block the love within us, we become God’s instruments. We become His miracle workers.

“To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past, and those that were given you. All the rest must be forgotten.

“To be born again is to let the past go, and look without condemnation upon the present.

The only way to heal the wounds of the past, ultimately, is to forgive them and let them go.

Our internal state determines our experience of our lives; our experiences do not determine our internal state.

Your career is certainly important, as is your money, your talent, your energy, and your personal relationships. But they’re important only to the extent that they are devoted to God to use for His purposes.

When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. As

As we demonstrate love towards others, we learn that we are lovable and we learn how to love more deeply. As we demonstrate fear or negativity, we learn self-condemnation and we learn to feel more frightened of life. We will always learn what we have chosen to teach.

Our perceptions of other people often become a battleground between the ego’s desire to judge and the Holy Spirit’s desire to accept people as they are. The ego is the great fault-finder. It seeks out the faults in ourselves and others. The Holy Spirit seeks out our innocence. He sees all of us as we really are, and since we are the perfect creations of God, He loves what He sees.