Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

The Course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance.”

A Return to Love is about the practice of love, as a strength and not a weakness, as a daily answer to the problems that confront us.

When we were born, we were programmed perfectly. We had a natural tendency to focus on love. Our imaginations were creative and flourishing, and we knew how to use them. We were connected to a world much richer than the one we connect to now, a world full of enchantment and a sense of the miraculous. So what happened? Why is it that we reached a certain age, looked around, and the enchantment was gone? Because we were taught to focus elsewhere. We were taught to think unnaturally. We were taught a very bad philosophy, a way of looking at the world that contradicts who we are.

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

Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose

To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.

When we attach value to things that aren’t love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, ...

Regardless of what it’s called, love requires a different kind of “seeing” than we’re used to—a different kind of knowing or thinking. Love is the intuitive knowledge of our hearts. It’s a “world beyond” that we all secretly long for. An ancient memory of this love haunts all of us all the time, and beckons us to return.

Fear is our shared lovelessness, our individual and collective hells. It’s a world that seems to press on us from within and without, giving constant false testimony to the meaninglessness of love. When fear is expressed, we recognize it as anger, abuse, disease, pain, greed, addiction, selfishness, obsession, corruption, violence, and war.

Avalon symbolizes a world beyond the world we see with our physical eyes. It represents a miraculous sense of things, the enchanted realm that we knew as children. Our childlike self is the deepest level of our being. It is who we really are and what is real doesn’t go away. The truth doesn’t stop being the truth just because we’re not looking at it. Love merely becomes clouded over, or surrounded by mental mists.

It’s easily retrieved, because perception is a choice.

And that’s what a miracle is: a parting of the mists, a shift in perception, a return to love.

Many of us know in our hearts that we never really grew up. The problem isn’t that we’re lost or apathetic, narcissistic or materialistic. The problem is we’re terrified.

Our oppression is internal.

We’re more afraid of life than we are of death.

You’d think we’d have some compassion for ourselves, bound up in emotional chains the way we are, but we don’t. We’re just disgusted with ourselves, because we think we should be better by now. Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking other people don’t have as much fear as we do, which only makes us more afraid. Maybe they know something we don’t know. Maybe we’re missing a chromosome.

And we’re always, even desperately, seeking a way out, through growth or through escape. Maybe this degree will do it, or this job, this seminar, this therapist, this relationship, this diet, or this project. But too often the medicine falls short of a cure, and the chains just keep getting thicker and tighter.

And there’s only one despair worse than “God, I blew it.”—and that’s, “God, I blew it again.”

In those days, it never occurred to me to ask for a miracle. For one thing, I wouldn’t have known what a miracle was. I put them in the pseudo-mystical-religious garbage category. I didn’t know, until reading A Course in Miracles, that a miracle is a reasonable thing to ask for. I didn’t know that a miracle is just a shift in perception.

You spend your whole life resisting the notion that there’s someone out there smarter than you are, and then all of a sudden you’re so relieved to know it’s true. All of a sudden, you’re not too proud to ask for help. That’s what it means to surrender to God.

What I learned from A Course in Miracles is that the change we’re really looking for is inside our heads. Events are always in flux.

These changes in life are always going to happen; they’re part of the human experience. What we can change, however, is how we perceive them. And that shift in our perception is a miracle.

Whether we “follow Him,” or think with love, is entirely up to us. When we choose to love, or to allow our minds to be one with God, then life is peaceful. When we turn away from love, the pain sets in.

And whether we love, or close our hearts to love, is a mental choice we make, every moment of every day.

“Love does not conquer all things, but it does set all things right.”

In order to love purely, we must surrender our old ways of thinking.

But spiritual surrender, although passive, is not weak. Actually, it is strong. It is a balance to our aggression. Although aggression is not bad—it is at the heart of creativity—it needs to be tempered by love in order to be an agent of harmony rather than violence.

The mind that’s separate from God has forgotten how to check in with love before it saunters out into the world.

To surrender to God means to let go and just love. By affirming that love is our priority in a situation,...

Once we get to the point where we realize that God is love, we understand that following God simply means following the dictates of love.

Love is energy. It’s not something we can perceive with our physical senses, but people can usually tell you when they feel it and when they don’t.

Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”

“The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.”

And when we’re not thinking with love, since only love is real, then we’re actually not thinking at all. We’re hallucinating. And that’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion.

Hindu - Maya?

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

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.

To say, “God, deliver me from hell,” means “God, Deliver me from my fearful thinking.” The altar to God is the human mind. To “desecrate the altar...

Closing our hearts destroys our peace because it’s alien to our nature. It warps us and turns us into people we’re not meant to be.

“Again—nothing you do or think or wish or make is necessary to establish your worth.”

When Michelangelo was asked how he created a piece of sculpture, he answered that the statue already existed within the marble. God Himself had created the Pieta, David, Moses. Michelangelo’s job, as he saw it, was to get rid of the excess marble that surrounded God’s creation.

The perfect you isn’t something you need to create, because God already created it. The perfect you is the love within you. Your job is to allow the Holy Spirit to remove the fearful thinking that surrounds your perfect self, just as excess marble surrounded Michelangelo’s perfect statue.

Love is changeless and therefore so are you. Nothing that you have ever done or will ever do can mar your perfection in the eyes of God. You’re deserving in His eyes because of what you are, not because of what you do. What you do or don’t do is not what determines your essential value—your growth perhaps, but not your value. That’s why God is totally approving and accepting of you, exactly as you are. What’s not to like? You were not created in sin; you were created in love.

The concept of a divine, or “Christ” mind, is the idea that, at our core, we are not just identical, but actually the same being. “There is only one begotten Son” doesn’t mean that someone else was it, and we’re not. It means we’re all it. There’s only one of us here.

The love in one of us is the love in all of us. ‘There’s actually no place where God stops and you start,’ and no place where you stop and I start. Love is energy, an infinite continuum. Your mind extends into mine and into everyone else’s. It doesn’t stay enclosed within your body.

Just as a sunbeam can’t separate itself from the sun, and a wave can’t separate itself from the ocean, we can’t separate ourselves from one another. We are all part of a vast sea of love, one indivisible divine mind.

We are all one, we are love itself. “Accepting the Christ” is merely a shift in self-perception. We awaken from the dream that we are finite, isolated creatures, and recognize that we are glorious, infinitely creative spirits. ‘We awaken from the dream that we are weak, and accept that the power of the universe is within us.’

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.

“I accept the Christ within” means, “I accept the beauty within me as who I really am. I am not my weakness. I am not my anger. I am not my small-mindedness. I am much, much more. And I am willing to be reminded of who I really am.

As children, we were taught to be “good” boys and girls, which of course implies we were not that already. We were taught we’re good if we clean up our room, or we’re good if we make good grades. Very few of us were taught that we’re essentially good.