Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

The Course seemed to have a basic message: relax. I was confused to hear that because I had always associated relaxing with resigning. I had been waiting for someone to explain to me how to fight the fight, or to fight the fight for me, and now this book suggested that I surrender the fight completely.

We were taught that things like grades, being good enough, money, and doing things the right way, are more important than love.

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.

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.

It’s become popular these days to blame practically everything on our parents. We figure it’s because of them that our self-esteem is so low. If only they’d been different, we’d be brimming with self-love. But if you take a close look at how our parents treated us, whatever abuse they gave us was often mild compared to the way we abuse ourselves today. It’s true that your mother might have said repeatedly, “You’ll never be able to do that, dear.” But now you say to yourself, “You’re a jerk. You never do it right. You blew it. I hate you.” They might have been mean, but we’re vicious.

A certain amount of desperation is usually necessary before we’re ready for God. When it came to spiritual surrender, I didn’t get serious, not really, until I was down on my knees completely. The mess got so thick that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t make Marianne function again.

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. One day people love you; the next day you’re their target. One day a situation is running smoothly; the next day chaos reigns. One day you feel like you’re an okay person; the next day you feel like you’re an utter failure. 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.

Without love, our actions are hysterical. Without love, we have no wisdom.

To surrender to God means to let go and just love. By affirming that love is our priority in a situation, we actualize the power of God. This is not metaphor; it’s fact. We literally use our minds to co-create with Him. Through a mental decision—a conscious recognition of love’s importance and our willingness to experience it—we “call on a higher power.” We set aside our normal mental habit patterns and allow them to be superseded by a different, gentler mode of perception. That is what it means to let a power greater than we are direct our lives.

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. Very few people feel enough love in their lives because the world has become a rather loveless place. We can hardly even imagine a world in which all of us were in love, all the time, with everyone. There would be no wars because we wouldn’t fight. There would be no hunger because we would feed each other. There would be no environmental breakdown because we would love ourselves, our children and our planet too much to destroy it. There would be no prejudice, oppression or violence of any kind. There would be no sorrow. There would only be peace.

Fear is to love as darkness is to light.

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

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 th...

Freud defined neurosis as separation from self, and so it is. Our real self is the love within us. It’s the “child of God.” The fearful self is an impostor. The return to love is the great cosmic drama, the personal journey from pretense to self, from pain to inner peace.

“God, please help me. Heal my mind. Wherever my thoughts have strayed from love—if I’ve been controlling, manipulative, greedy, ambitious for myself—whatever it is, I’m willing to see this differently. Amen.”

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

So it is with you. 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.

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 word Christ is a psychological term. No religion has a monopoly on the truth. Christ refers to the common thread of divine love that is the core and essence of every human mind.

A Course in Miracles likens us to ‘sunbeams’ thinking we’re separate from the sun, or waves thinking we’re separate from the ocean.

“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.”

Sometimes, in fact, it was the people who loved us the most who felt it was their responsibility to train us to struggle.

The Holy Spirit was God’s answer to the ego. He is God’s “eternal communication link with His separated Sons,” a bridge back to gentle thoughts, “the great Transformer of Perception.” Often the Holy Spirit is referred to as the “Comforter.” God can’t force His way back into our thinking, because that would be violating our free will. But the Holy Spirit is a force of consciousness within us that “delivers us from Hell,” or fear, whenever we consciously ask Him to, working with us on the Causal level, transforming our thoughts from fear to love.

‘the Holy Spirit has a highly individualized curriculum for everyone.’

The Holocaust was not God’s will, nor is AIDS. Both of them are products of fear.

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

So many Christian terms have been used to create and perpetuate guilt, that many thinking people have decided to reject them entirely.

For many Christian children, on the other hand, these words were charged with guilt, punishment, and fear of hell.

By automatically rejecting Jesus, based on what some traditional Christians have done with and in his name, many people have thrown out the baby with the bath water.

They have fallen into a mental trap which in Alcoholics Anonymous is called “contempt prior to investigation.”

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.

We think we’re powerful because of what we’ve achieved rather than because of what we are. So we’re caught in a Catch-22: we feel powerless to achieve until we already have.

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.

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.

“God” means love, and “will” means thought. God’s will, then, is loving thought.

“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.”

Many people associate a spiritual life with a grade B movie, but 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.

But liberation isn’t about breaking out of anything; ‘it’s a gentle melting into who we really are.’

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.

We weren’t just randomly thrown onto a sea of rocks. We have a mission—to save the world through the power of love. The world needs healing desperately, like a bird with a broken wing. People know this, and millions have prayed. God heard us. He sent help. He sent you.

Since all minds are connected, then the correction of anyone’s perception is on some level a healing of the entire racial mind. The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world. Angry people cannot create a peaceful planet. It amuses me to think how angry I used to get when people wouldn’t sign my peace petitions.

The only way to heal the wounds of the past, ultimately, is to forgive them and let them go. The miracle worker sees that his purpose in life is to be used in the service of the forgiveness of mankind—to awaken us from our collective sleep.

If our vessel, our vehicle—our human channel—is not prepared properly through devotion and deep reverence for life, then the very power that is meant to save us begins to destroy us. Our creativity, rather than making us personally powerful, then makes us hysterical. That is why creative power—God within us—is experienced as a double-edged sword: if received with grace, it blesses us; if received without grace, it drives us insane. This is one of the reasons why so many creative people have turned to a destructive use of drugs: to actually dull the experience of the reception of God’s power rather than enhance it.

Our internal state determines our experience of our lives; our experiences do not determine our internal state.

We’re actually just buying time while the real transformation of global energies has a chance to kick in. The miracle worker’s purpose is spiritually grand, not personally grandiose.

Our perceptions of other people often become a battleground between the ego’s desire to judge and the Holy Spirit’s desire to accept people as they are.