Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

As we begin to understand more deeply why love is such a necessary element in the healing of the world, a shift will occur in how we live our lives within and without.

“There is no place for hell in a world whose loveliness can yet be so intense and so inclusive it is but a step from there to Heaven.”

We’re not being stopped by something on the outside, but by something on the inside.

Our oppression is internal.

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.

My negativity was as destructive to me as alcohol is to the alcoholic.

My fear finally became so great, that I wasn’t too hip to say “God, please help me.

you keep trying all your old tricks, the ones that never did work but that you keep thinking might work this time.

Until your knees finally hit the floor, you’re just playing at life, and on some level you’re scared because you know you’re just playing. The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.

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.

Whether we “follow Him,” or think with love, is entirely up to us.

LOVE IS GOD

For many people, God is a frightening concept. Asking God for help doesn’t seem very comforting if we think of Him as something outside ourselves, or capricious or judgmental. But God is love. We were created in His image, or mind, which means that we are extensions of His love. This is why we are called the Sons of God.

we have arrogantly thought that we could create ourselves, and then create God. Because we are angry and judgmental, we have projected those characteristics onto Him. We have made up a God in our image. But God remains who He is and always has been: the energy, the thought of unconditional love.

Without love, we have no wisdom.

By affirming that love is our priority in a situation, we actualize the power of God.

We have been brought up in a world that does not put love first, and where love is absent, fear sets in. Fear is to love as darkness is to light.

“God is not the author of fear. You are.”

When we think with love, we are literally co-creating with God.

The only real problem is a lack of love. To address the world’s problems on any other level is a temporary palliative—a fix but not a healing, a treatment of the symptom but not a cure.

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.

Our real self is the love within us. It’s the “child of God.” The fearful self is an impostor.

The perfect you isn’t something you need to create, because God already created it.

You’re deserving in His eyes because of what you are, not because of what you do.

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.

We had to become as crazy as the world is, or we would never fit in here.

our sense of power away from ourselves and onto external sources. 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.

What’s dying is the frightened mind, so the love inside us can get a chance to breathe.

In Course terminology, our entire network of fearful perceptions, all stemming from that first false belief in our separation from God and one another, is called the ego.

The only thing lacking in any situation is our own awareness of love.

In asking the Holy Spirit to help us, we are expressing our willingness to perceive a situation differently.

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

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.

Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don’t know it.

Everything we do in our lives will be used, or interpreted, by the ego or the Holy Spirit. The ego uses everything to lead us further into anxiety. The Holy Spirit uses everything to lead us into inner peace.

“Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all.”

In all religions, there are stories of saints or prophets who worked miracles. That is because, when the mind returns to God, it becomes a vessel for His power.

The mutations, the enlightened ones, show the rest of us our evolutionary potential.

Faith isn’t blind, it’s visionary.

Without faith, we’re frantically trying to control what it is not our business to control, and fix what it is not in our power to fix.

Without faith, we’re wasting time.

‘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.

We’ve basically been taught that it’s our job as responsible adults to be active, to be masculine in nature—to go out and get the job, to take control of our lives, to take the bull by the horns. We’ve been taught that that’s our power. We think we’re powerful because of what we’ve achieved rather than because of what we are.

macho, controlling, unbalanced, and unnatural. The problem is that aggressive energy is what we’ve all been taught to respect. We’ve been taught that life was made for quarterbacks so we exalt our masculine consciousness, which, when untempered by the feminine, is hard. Therefore, so are we—all of us, men and women. We’ve created a fight mentality. We’re always fighting for something: for the job, the money, the relationship, to get out of the relationship, to lose weight, to get sober, to get them to understand, to get them to stay, to get them to leave, and on and on. We never put away our swords.

The feminine, surrendered place in us is passive. It doesn’t do anything. The spiritualization process—in men as well as women—is a feminization process, a quieting of the mind.

In Taoist philosophy, “yin” is the feminine principle, representing the forces of the earth, while “yang” is the masculine principle, representing spirit. When God is referred to as “He,” then all mankind becomes “She.” This isn’t a man-woman issue. Reference to God as masculine principle in no way impinges on feminist conviction. Our feminine self is just as important as our masculine.

Mary symbolizes the feminine within us, which is impregnated by God. The female allows this process and is fulfilled by surrendering into it. This is not weakness on her part; it is strength. 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.

When we love, we are automatically placing ourselves within an attitudinal and behavioral context that leads to an unfoldment of events at the highest level of good for everyone involved.

The truth is, of course, that the more important it is to us, the more important it is to surrender. That which is surrendered is taken care of best. To place something in the hands of God is to give it over, mentally, to the protection and care of the beneficence of the universe.