Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

‘There are only two emotions: love and fear.’ We can interpret fear as a call for love.

If we judge another person, then they’ll judge us back—and even if they don’t, we’ll feel like they did! Living in this world has taught us to instinctively respond from an unnatural space, always jumping to anger, or paranoia, or defensiveness, or some other form of fear. Unnatural thinking feels natural to us, and natural thinking feels unnatural.

What is psychologically unsound is spiritually unsound. Denial or suppression of emotions is unsound.

We aren’t victims of the world outside us. As hard as it is to believe sometimes, we’re always responsible for how we see things. There would be no savior if there were no need for one. Of course things happen in this world that make it almost impossible to love—cruel, horrible things—but the Holy Spirit is within us to do the impossible. He does for us what we can’t do for ourselves. He will lend us His strength, and when His mind is joined with ours, ego thinking is cast out.

“He cannot shine away what you keep hidden, for you have not offered it to Him and he cannot take it from you.” It would be violating our free will for the Holy Spirit to change our mental patterns unasked. But when we ask Him to change them, He will.

The Holy Spirit had pointed me to the information that would melt my heart. Now I saw her differently. That was the miracle: Her behavior hadn’t changed, but I had.

“Therefore, the plan includes very specific contacts to be made for every teacher of God.” Relationships are assignments. They are part of a vast plan for our enlightenment, the Holy Spirit’s blueprint by which each individual soul is led to greater awareness and expanded love. Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which He brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth. He appraises who can learn most from whom at any given time, and then assigns them to each other. Like a giant universal computer, He knows exactly what combination of energies, in exactly what context, would do the most to further God’s plan for salvation. No meetings are accidental. “Those who are to meet will meet, because together they have the potential for a holy relationship.” The Course says that there are ‘three levels of teaching’ in relationship. The first level is what we think of as a casual encounter, such as two strangers meeting in an elevator or students who “happen” to walk home from school together. The second level is a “more sustained relationship, in which, for a time, two people enter into a fairly intense teaching-learning situation and then appear to separate.” The third level of teaching is a relationship which, once formed, lasts all our lives. At this level, “each person is given a chosen learning partner who presents him with unlimited opportunities for learning.”

It is mostly in casual encounters that we are given a chance to practice the fine art of chiseling away the hard edges of our personalities. Whatever personal weaknesses are evident in our casual interactions will inevitably appear magnified in more intense relationships. If we’re crabby with the bank teller, it will be harder to be gentle with the people we love the most.

During their time together, they will go through whatever experiences provide them with their next lessons to be learned. When physical proximity no longer supports the highest level of teaching and learning between them, the assignment will call for physical separation. What then appears to be the end of the relationship however, is not really an end. Relationships are eternal. They are of the mind, not the body, since people are energy, not physical

Third-level, life-long relationships are generally few because “their existence implies that those involved have reached a stage simultaneously in which the teaching-learning balance is actually perfect.”

People who have the most to teach us are often the ones who reflect back to us the limits to our own capacity to love, those who consciously or unconsciously challenge our fearful positions. They show us our walls. Our walls are our wounds—the places where we feel we can’t love any more, can’t connect any more deeply, can’t forgive past a certain point. We are in each other’s lives in order to help us see where we most need healing, and in order to help us heal.

God created only one begotten Son’ and He loves all of us as one. To Him, no one is different or special because no one is actually separate from anyone else. Since our peace lies in loving as God loves, we must strive to love everyone. Our desire to find one “special person,” one part of the Sonship who will complete us, is hurtful because it is delusional. It means we’re seeking salvation in separation rather than in oneness. The only love that completes us is the love of God, and the love of God is the love of everyone. That doesn’t mean that the form of our relationships is the same with everyone, but it means that we are seeking the same content in every relationship: a quality of brotherly love and friendship that goes beyond the changes of form and bodies.

After the separation, we began to feel a huge gaping hole within us, and most of us still feel it. The only antidote for this is the Atonement, or return to God, because the pain we feel is actually our own denial of love. The ego, however, tells us differently. It argues that the love we need must come from someone else, and that there’s one special person out there who can fill up that hole. Since the desire for that person actually stems from our belief that we’re separate from God, then the desire itself symbolizes the separation and the guilt we feel because of it. Our search then carries the energy of the separation. It becomes about guilt. This is why so much anger is often aroused in our closest relationships. We’re projecting onto someone else the rage we feel against ourselves for cutting off our own love.

The special relationship makes other people—their behavior, their choices, their opinions of us—too important. It makes us think we need another person, when in fact we are complete and whole as we are.

Under the Holy Spirit’s guidance, we come together to share joy. Under the ego’s direction, we come together to share desperation.

The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather for two complete people to join together for the greater glory of God.

Based on a belief in internal emptiness, it is always asking, “What can I get?”, whereas the Holy Spirit asks, “What can I give?” The ego seeks to use other people to fulfill our needs as we define them.

The ego had told her to reject the man because she was ready for a relationship, but what it was really doing was to make sure she wouldn’t have one. The ego isn’t looking for someone to love; it’s looking for someone to attack. Its dictate in love is “Seek, and do not find.” It looks for a reflection of itself, another mask that hides the face of Christ.

In the special relationship, the ego guides our thinking and we meet in fear, mask to mask. In the holy relationship, the Holy Spirit has changed our minds about the purpose of love and we meet heart to heart.

“For an unholy relationship is based on differences, where each one thinks the other has what he has not. They come together, each to complete himself and rob the other. They stay until they think that there is nothing left to steal, and then move on. And so they wander through a world of strangers, unlike themselves, living with their bodies perhaps under a common roof that shelters neither; in the same room and yet a world apart. A holy relationship starts from a different premise. Each one has looked within and seen no lack. Accepting his completion, he would extend it by joining with another, whole as himself.”

We’re not interested in our brother for what he can do for us. We’re interested in our brother, period.

How do we find a holy relationship? Not by asking God to change our partners, but by asking God to change our minds. We don’t run away from someone we’re attracted to because we’re afraid of specialness. Anytime there’s a potential for love, there’s a potential for specialness.

Spiritual progress is like a detoxification. Things have to come up in order to be released.

A relationship that is used by the Holy Spirit becomes a place where our blocks to love are not suppressed or denied, but rather brought into our conscious awareness. We never get crazy like we do around the people we’re really attracted to. Then we can see our dysfunctions clearly, and when we’re ready, ask God to show us another way.

Our fearful places have to be revealed before they can be healed. A Course in Miracles teaches that ‘darkness is to be brought to light, and not the other way around.’ If a relationship allows us to merely avoid our unhealed places, then we’re hiding there, not growing. The universe will not support that.

God’s idea of a “good relationship” and the ego’s idea of one are completely different. To the ego, a good relationship is one in which another person basically behaves the way we want them to and never presses our buttons, never violates our comfort zones. But if a relationship exists to support our growth, then in many ways it exists to do just those things; force us out of our limited tolerance and inability to love unconditionally.

We’re not aligned with the Holy Spirit until people can behave in any way they choose to, and our own inner peace isn’t shaken.

We love purely when we release other people to be who they are. The ego seeks intimacy through control and guilt. The Holy Spirit seeks intimacy through acceptance and release.

It is our failure to accept people exactly as they are that gives us pain in a relationship.

Our ego is merely our fear. We all have egos, that doesn’t make us bad people. Our egos are not where we are bad but where we are wounded.

When we dig deeply enough into our real nature, we do not find darkness. We find endless light. That is what the ego doesn’t want us to see; that our safety actually lies in letting down our mask.

A holy relationship is this: “a common state of mind, where both give errors gladly to correction, that both may happily be healed as one.”

Pure love of another person is the restoration of our heartline. The ego, therefore, is marshaled against it. It will do everything it can to block the experience of love in any form.

Instead of realizing that spiritual perfection and physical, material imperfection exist simultaneously, we start looking for material, physical perfection. We think someone’s spiritual perfection isn’t enough. They have to have perfect clothes as well. They have to be hip. They have to dazzle. And so no one gets to be a human being anymore. We idealize one another, and when someone doesn’t live up to the ideal, we’re disappointed.

Our soul mates are human beings, just like we are, going through the normal processes of growth. No one is ever “finished.” The top of one mountain is always the bottom of another, and even if someone meets us when we feel “on top” of things, the chances are good that very soon we’ll be going through something that challenges us.

A Course in Miracles says it is ‘not our job to seek for love, but to seek for all the barriers we hold against its coming.’ Thinking that there is some special person out there who is going to save us is a barrier to pure love. It is a large gun in the ego’s arsenal. It is a way the ego tries to keep us away from love, although it doesn’t want us to see that.

If your heart’s desire is for an intimate partner, the Holy Spirit might send someone who isn’t the ultimate intimate partner for you, but rather something better: someone with whom you are given the opportunity to work through the places in yourself that need to be healed before you’re ready for the deepest intimacy.

We sometimes fail to work on ourselves in the relationships that are right in front of us, thinking that “real life” begins when they get here. This is just a ploy of the ego once again, making sure that we’ll seek but not find. The problem with not taking relationships seriously if they don’t feel like “Mr. Right” is this: Every once in a while, Mr. Right gets here—he sometimes even appears as Mr. Wrong transformed—but we blow it because we’re not in practice. He’s here, but we’re not ready. We haven’t been working on ourselves. We were waiting for Mr. Right.

A Course in Miracles says that one day we will realize that nothing occurs outside our minds. How a person seems to show up for us is intimately connected to how we choose to show up for them.

None of us are really objectively attractive or unattractive. There is no such thing. There are people who manifest the potential for sparkle that we all share, and those who don’t.

Love is to people what water is to plants.

healing doesn’t occur in the past. It occurs in the present.

What the ego doesn’t want us to see is that our pain doesn’t come from the love we weren’t given in the past, but from the love we ourselves aren’t giving in the present.

I used to worry too much about whether or not I was supported, and not enough about whether or not I was actively supporting others.

What this signifies is the miraculous power of love to create a context in which people naturally blossom into their highest potential.

When we choose to join with them, through approval and unconditional love, the miracle kicks in for both parties. This is the primary key, the ultimate miracle, in relationships.

Anger is often a result of a series of uncommunicated feelings building up inside of us and ultimately exploding.

Anger is a hot topic for spiritual seekers. Many people, for instance, have an issue with Jesus’s anger with the money-changers. If Jesus was so pure, they ask, then how could he have gotten angry? But no Jew or Italian would have a problem with that scene. The removal of ego is not the removal of personality. What we call Jesus’s anger was energy. An outburst of emotion doesn’t have to be so quickly labeled anger. It’s a release of energy and doesn’t have to be thought of as a negative or “unspiritual” emotion.

We must face our own ugliness. We often must become painfully aware of the unworkability of a pattern before we’re willing to give it up. It often seems, in fact, that our lives get worse rather than better when we begin to work deeply on ourselves. Life doesn’t actually get worse; it’s just that we feel our own transgressions more because we’re no longer anesthetized by unconsciousness.

This process can be so painful that we are tempted to go backwards. It takes courage—this is often called the path of the spiritual warrior—to endure the sharp pains of self-discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.