Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

What we lost was a sense of our own power. And what we learned was fear, fear that we weren’t good enough, just the way we are.

Fear does not promote learning. It warps us. It stunts us. It makes us neurotic.

Since every thought creates experience, there’s no worse place it could possibly be. While it’s true there isn’t an actual devil out there grabbing for our souls, there is a tendency in our minds, which can be amazingly strong, to perceive without love.

Love feels like a void that threatens to overwhelm us, and that’s because, in a certain sense, it is and it does. It overwhelms our small self, our lonely sense of separateness. Since that sense of separateness is who we think we are, we feel like we’ll die without it. What’s dying is the frightened mind, so the love inside us can get a chance to breathe.

The word ego is used differently here than the way in which it is often used in modern psychology. It is being used as the ancient Greeks used it—as the notion of a small, separated self. It is a false belief about ourselves, a lie about who and what we really are. Even though that lie is our neurosis, and living that lie is a terrible anxiety, it’s amazing how resistant we are to healing the split.

The ego has a pseudo-life of its own, and like all life forms, fights hard for its survival. As uncomfortable as our life might be, as painful or even desperate at times, the life we’re living is the life we know, and we cling to the old rather than try something new. Most of us are so sick of ourselves, in one way or another. It’s unbelievable how tenaciously we cling to what we’ve prayed to be released from.

The ego is like a virus in the computer that attacks the core system. It seems to show us a dark parallel universe, a realm of fear and pain that doesn’t actually exist but certainly seems to. Lucifer was the most beautiful angel in Heaven before he fell. The ego is our self-love turned into self-hatred.

Remember all the talk about a silver-tongued devil? The ego doesn’t come up to us and say, “Hi, I’m your self-loathing.” It’s not stupid, because we’re not. Rather, it says things like, “Hi, I’m your adult, mature, rational self. I’ll help you look out for number one.” Then it proceeds to counsel us to look out for ourselves, at the expense of others. It teaches us selfishness, greed, judgment, and small-mindedness.

What we give to others, we give to ourselves. What we withhold from others, we withhold from ourselves. In any moment when we choose fear instead of love, we deny ourselves the experience of Paradise.

The power of the mind is itself neutral. It is the power given to us freely by God. ‘We have the free will to think whatever we want to think, but no thoughts are neutral. There is no such thing as an idle thought. All thought creates form on some level.’

Taking responsibility for our lives, then, means taking responsibility for our thoughts.

So God isn’t angry at our sins because they’re not really happening. He doesn’t see sins, but only errors in perception. He doesn’t want to punish us, but to heal us. The way He heals us is through a force of conciousness called the Holy Spirit.

He reminds us that, in every situation, the love you’ve given is real, and the love you have received is real. Nothing else exists. Anything other than love is an illusion.

We’re taking the ultimate responsibility for a situation by being responsible for our thoughts about it. We’re responsible enough to know that, when left to our own mental devices, we will instinctively respond from fear. We’re responsible enough to ask for help.

Our comfort zones are the limited areas in which we find it easy to love. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job not to respect those comfort zones, but to bust them. We’re not at the mountaintop until any zone is comfortable. Love isn’t love until it’s unconditional.

Holy Spirit is a force in our minds that knows us in our perfectly loving, natural state—which we’ve forgotten—but enters into the world of fear and illusion with us, and uses our experiences here to remind us who we are. He does this by showing us the possibility of a loving purpose in everything we think and do. He revolutionizes our sense of why we are on the earth. He teaches us to see love as our only function.

The ego uses everything to lead us further into anxiety. The Holy Spirit uses everything to lead us into inner peace.

The Christ-mind is merely the perspective of unconditional love. You and I have the Christ-mind in us as much as Jesus does. The difference between him and us is that we are tempted to deny it.

The unconditional love, or Christ within him, is ‘the truth that sets us free,’ because it’s the perspective that saves us from our own fearful thoughts.

Jesus lived within this world of fear, and perceived only love. Every action, every word, every thought was guided by the Holy Spirit instead of the ego.

The physical body is at work every moment, an array of mechanisms with a brilliance of design and efficiency our human efforts have never begun to match. Our hearts beat, our lungs breathe, our ears hear, our hair grows. And we don’t have to make them work—they just do.

Their movement is built into a natural system. You and I are integral parts of that system, too. We can let our lives be directed by the same force that makes flowers grow—or we can do it ourselves.

Tao

To trust in the force that moves the universe is faith. Faith isn’t blind, it’s visionary. Faith is believing that the universe is on our side, and that the universe knows what it’s doing.

Our attempts to direct this force only interferes with it. Our willingness to relax into it allows it to work on our behalf.

What we’re trying to control is much better off without us, and what we’re trying to fix can’t be fixed by us anyway.

The internal equivalent to oxygen, what we need in order to survive, is love. Human relationships exist to produce love. When we pollute our relationships with unloving thoughts, or destroy or abort them with unloving attitudes, we are threatening our emotional survival.

So the laws of the universe merely describe the way things are. These laws aren’t invented; they’re discovered. They are not dependent on our faith. Faith in them merely shows we understand what they are.

We respect the laws of nature in order to survive. And what is the highest internal law? That we love one another. Because if we don’t, we will all die. As surely as a lack ...

A Course in Miracles tells us that ‘there is no such thing as a faithless person.’ Faith is an aspect of consciousness. We either have faith in fear or we have faith in love, faith in the power of the world or faith in the power of God.

Passive energy has its own kind of strength. Personal power results from a balance of masculine and feminine forces. Passive energy without active energy becomes lazy, but active energy without passive energy becomes tyrannous. An overdose of male, aggressive energy is macho, controlling, unbalanced, and unnatural.

The Christ on earth is fathered by God, and mothered by our humanness. Through a mystical connection between the human and divine, we give birth to our higher Self.

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.

This external searching—looking to anything other than love to complete us and to be the source of our happiness—is the meaning of idolatry. Money, sex, power, or any other worldly satisfaction offers just temporary relief for minor existential pain.

Kinda buddhist/Eastern. Shit is temporary, the divine self is forever.

“God” means love, and “will” means thought. God’s will, then, is loving thought. If God is the source of all good, then the love within us is the source of all good.

Where we have an attachment to results, we tend to have a hard time giving up control. But how can we know what result to try to achieve in a situation when we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow? What do we ask for? Instead of, “Dear God, please let us fall in love, or please give me this job,” we say, “Dear God, my desire, my priority is inner peace. I want the experience of love. I don’t know what would bring that to me. I leave the results of this situation in your hands. I trust your will. May your will be done. Amen.”

I finally realized that God is not capricious, but is rather an impersonal love for all life. My life is no more or less precious to Him than is anyone else’s. To surrender to God is to accept the fact that He loves us and provides for us, because he loves and provides for all life. Surrender doesn’t obstruct our power; it enhances it. God is merely the love within us, so returning to Him is a return to ourselves.

In Zen Buddhism, there’s a concept called “zen mind,” or “beginner’s mind.” They say that the mind should be like an empty rice bowl. If it’s already full, then the universe can’t fill it. If it’s empty, it has room to receive. This means that when we think we have things already figured out, we’re not teachable. Genuine insight can’t dawn on a mind that’s not open to receive it. Surrender is a process of emptying the mind.

In the Christic tradition, this is the meaning of “becoming as a little child.” Little children don’t think they know what things mean. In fact, they know they don’t know. They ask someone older and wiser to explain things to them. We’re like children who don’t know, but think we do.

We need less posturing and more genuine charisma. Charisma was originally a religious term, meaning “of the spirit,” or “inspired.” It’s about letting God’s light shine through us. It’s about a sparkle in people that money can’t buy. It’s an invisible energy with visible effects. To let go, to just love, is not to fade into the wallpaper. Quite the contrary, it’s when we truly become bright. We’re letting our own light shine.

Love is a win-mode, a successful and attractive vibration. We think that success is difficult, and so, for us, it is. Success in life doesn’t have to involve negative tension. We don’t have to be struggling all the time.

God doesn’t get rid of all the drama in our lives. He just gets rid of the cheap drama. There is no higher drama than true personal growth.

Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. The world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.

Surrender means the decision to stop fighting the world, and to start loving it instead. It is a gentle liberation from pain. But liberation isn’t about breaking out of anything; ‘it’s a gentle melting into who we really are.’ We let down our armor, and discover the strength of our Christ self.

‘we think that without the ego, all would be chaos, the opposite is true. Without the...

In asking for miracles, we are seeking a practical goal: a return to inner peace. We’re not asking for something outside us to change, but for something inside us to change. We’re looking for a softer orientation to life.

Thus, as A Course in Miracles says, our greatest tool for changing the world is our capacity to ‘change our mind about the world.’

Because thought is the creative level of things, changing our minds is the ultimate personal empowerment.

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.

Our job as a teacher of God, should we choose to accept it, is to constantly seek a greater capacity for love and forgiveness within ourselves. We do this through a “selective remembering,” a conscious decision to remember only loving thoughts and let go of any fearful ones.

Traditionally, we think of forgiveness as something we are to do when we see guilt in someone. In the Course, however, we’re taught that it’s our function to remember that there is no guilt in anyone, because only love is real. It is our function to see through the illusion of guilt, to the innocence that lies beyond.