Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here. The spiritual journey is the relinquishment—or unlearning—of fear and the acceptance of love back into our hearts. Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.

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.

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

We set aside our normal mental habit patterns and allow them to be superseded by a different, gentler mode of perception.

our fear is not our ultimate reality, and it does not replace the truth of who we really are. Our love, which is our real self, doesn’t die, but merely goes underground.

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.

you do or think or wish or make is necessary to establish your worth.”

What you do or don’t do is not what determines your essential value—your growth perhaps, but not your value.

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.

Taking responsibility for our lives, then, means taking responsibility for our thoughts. And praying to God to “save” our lives, means praying for Him to save us from our own negative thoughts.

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. In order to escape the illusion and find inner peace, remember that only love in a situation is real. Everything else is a mistake and does not exist. It must be forgotten. We must consciously be willing to let it go.

We give up our own interpretations and opinions, and ask that they be replaced by His. When in pain, we pray, “Dear God, I am willing to see this differently.” Surrendering a situation to God means surrendering to Him our thoughts about it.

We’re taking the ultimate responsibility for a situation by being responsible for our thoughts about it.

the place where we go into anger instead of love, is our wall. Any situation that pushes our buttons is a situation where we don’t yet have the capacity to be unconditionally loving.

Love isn’t love until it’s unconditional.

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.

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.

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.

The experience of love is a choice we make, a mental decision to see love as the only real purpose and value in any situation. Until we make that choice, we keep striving for results that we think would make us happy.

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.

Our only job in every situation is to merely let go of our resistance to love.

“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.”

When we go into a situation not knowing, there is something inside us which does. With our conscious mind, ‘we step back in order that a higher power within us can step forward and lead the way.’

it is a shift in how we perceive a situation. What changes, primarily, is how we hold an experience in our minds—how we experience the experience.

Thought that is no longer limited, brings experience that is no longer limited.

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.

Something that’s important to know about spiritual wisdom is that, when spoken at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or to the wrong person, the one who speaks sounds more like a fool than a wise one.

We do this through a “selective remembering,” a conscious decision to remember only loving thoughts and let go of any fearful ones.

It is our function to see through the illusion of guilt, to the innocence that lies beyond. “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.”

We are asked to extend our perception beyond the errors that our physical perceptions reveal to us—what someone did, what someone said—to the holiness within them that only our heart reveals.

It is the arrogance of someone who sees themselves as better than someone else, or perhaps equally as sinful, which is still a misperception and the arrogance of the ego.

A radical forgiveness is a complete letting go of the past, in any personal relationship, as well as in any collective drama.

A miracle is a shift in thinking from what we might have done in the past or should be doing in the future, to what we feel free to do right here, right now.

The Holy Spirit returns our minds to total faith and trust, that should we live with fully open hearts today, tomorrow will take care of itself.

‘The ego bases its perception of reality on what has happened in the past, carries those perceptions into the present and thus creates a future like the past.’ If we felt that we were lacking in our past, our thoughts about the future are based on those perceptions. We then enter the present in an effort to compensate for the past.

We relinquish any thoughts of judgment, of anyone or anything, that hold us to the past. We relinquish any thoughts of attachment that keep us grasping at the future.

Every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity, perfectly planned by the Holy Spirit, to teach love instead of fear.

It’s never really a circumstance that needs to change—it’s we who need to change. The prayer isn’t for God to change our lives, but rather for Him to change us.

Sometimes it is only in retrospect that we can see that we were given another chance at life, a new relationship or whatever, but because we were too busy reacting to the past, we missed the opportunity at something radically new.

Until we’re healed of our internal demons, our fearful mental habits, we will turn every situation into the same painful drama as the one before.

our goal in any situation becomes inner peace. Our internal state determines our experience of our lives; our experiences do not determine our internal state.

Everything in the physical universe becomes part of the journey into fear, or the journey back to love, depending on how it’s used by the mind.

we recognize that the real transformation of the world comes not from what we’re doing, but from the consciousness with which we’re doing it.

Every problem, inside and out, is due to separation from love on someone’s part.

We will learn to love one another, but whether we learn it painfully or peacefully is entirely up to us.

There is really only one drama going on in life: our walk away from God, and our walk back. We simply reenact the one drama in different ways.

The past is over. It doesn’t matter who we are, where we came from, what Mommy said, what Daddy did, what mistakes we made, what diseases we have, or how depressed we feel. The future can be reprogrammed in this moment. We don’t need another seminar, another degree, another lifetime, or anyone’s approval in order for this to happen. All we have to do is ask for a miracle and allow it to happen, not resist it.

We will always learn what we have chosen to teach.

If I choose to bless another person, I will always end up feeling more blessed. If I project guilt onto another person, I will always end up feeling more guilty.