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.

love requires a different kind of “seeing” than we’re used to—a different kind of knowing or thinking. Love is the intuitive knowledge of our hearts.

Fear is our shared lovelessness, our individual and collective hells.

The truth doesn’t stop being the truth just because we’re not looking at it. Love merely becomes clouded over, or surrounded by mental mists.

And that’s what a miracle is: a parting of the mists, a shift in perception, a return to love.

The problem is we’re terrified.

We’re not being stopped by something on the outside, but by something on the inside. Our oppression is internal.

We’re more afraid of life than we are of death.

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.

They might have been mean, but we’re vicious.

We begin to realize that we ourselves are somehow the problem, but we don’t know what to do about it. We’re not powerful enough to overrule ourselves. We sabotage, abort everything: our careers, our relationships, even our children. We drink. We do drugs. We control. We obsess. We code-pend. We overeat. We hide. We attack. The form of the dysfunction is irrelevant. We can find a lot of different ways to express how much we hate ourselves.

I didn’t know that a miracle is just a shift in perception.

I was an artist at finding my own jugular. It was as though I was addicted to my own pain.

I hadn’t emotionally developed the way I should have, and I knew it. Somehow, somewhere, it was as though wires deep inside my brain had gotten crossed.

Like emotional stroke victims, we need to go back a few steps in order to go forward. We need someone to teach us the basics.

When it came to spiritual surrender, I didn’t get serious, not really, until I was down on my knees completely.

Nervous breakdowns can be highly underrated methods of spiritual transformation.

More people have felt their heads crack open in some way, than have admitted it to their friends. These days it’s not an uncommon phenomenon. People are crashing into walls today—socially, biologically, psychologically and emotionally. But this isn’t bad news. In a way, it’s good. 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.

For many people, things have to get very bad before there’s a shift. When you truly bottom out, there comes an exhilarating release. You recognize there’s a power in the universe bigger than you are, who can do for you what you can’t do for yourself. All of a sudden, your last resort sounds like a very good idea.

Our house is our emotional stability.

I had never realized that depending on God meant depending on love.

When we turn away from love, the pain sets in.

“Love does not conquer all things, but it does set all things right.”

which means that we are extensions of His love.

I certainly don’t pretend to consistently achieve a loving perspective of every situation in my own life. One thing I’m very clear about, however, is that when I do, life works beautifully. And when I don’t, things stay stuck.

We still think of surrender as failure, as something you do when you’ve lost the war. But spiritual surrender, although passive, is not weak. Actually, it is strong. It is a balance to our aggression. Although aggression is not bad—it is at the heart of creativity—it needs to be tempered by love in order to be an agent of harmony rather than violence.

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.

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

Our love, which is our real self, doesn’t die, but merely goes underground.

The shift from fear to love is a miracle. It doesn’t fix things on the earth plane; it addresses the real source of our problems, which is always on the level of consciousness. The only real problem is a lack of love.

all I needed was a miracle, ‘a shift in perception’.

Why don’t we stay in the realm of the answer, rather than always returning to the realm of the problem? Why not seek some level of awareness where we don’t create these problems for ourselves all the time? Let’s not just ask for a new job, a new relationship, or a new body. Let’s ask for a new world. Let’s ask for a new life.

The return to love is not the end of life’s adventure, but the beginning. It’s the return to who you really are.

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

Your mind extends into mine and into everyone else’s. It doesn’t stay enclosed within your body.

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

What’s strange is that we didn’t learn discipline from that perspective, so much as a weird displacement of 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.

In the absence of love, we began slowly but surely to fall apart.

is called the ego. 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.

The ego is our self-love turned into self-hatred.

It teaches us selfishness, greed, judgment, and small-mindedness. But remember, there’s only one of us here: What we give to others, we give to ourselves. What we withhold from others, we withhold from ourselves.

He couldn’t force us back to love, because love doesn’t force. It does, however, create alternatives. The Holy Spirit is God’s alternative to fear.

Something within us always longs to go home, and He is that something.

Hierath (?) longing for home - from my starseed tarot deck

Atonement. 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.

What we give to God, He gives back to us renewed through the vision of the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes people think that calling on God means inviting a force into our lives that will make everything rosy. The truth is, it means inviting everything into our lives that will force us to grow—and growth can be messy.

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.

‘fear as a call for love.’

He could never have done what he did without the help of thousands of people who, although they did not share his evil vision, did not have the moral fiber to say no to it.