Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

The spiritual path, then, is simply the journey of living our lives.

These purified beings are called the Enlightened ones. Light means understanding. The enlightened “understand.”

What if we truly believed there is a God—a beneficent order to things, a force that’s holding things together without our conscious control?

The physical body is at work every moment, an array of mechanisms with a brilliance of design and efficiency our human efforts have never begun to match. Our hearts beat, our lungs breathe, our ears hear, our hair grows. And we don’t have to make them work—they just do.

To trust in the force that moves the universe is faith. Faith isn’t blind, it’s visionary. Faith is believing that the universe is on our side, and that the universe knows what it’s doing. Faith is a psychological awareness of an unfolding force for good, constantly at work in all dimensions.

It is important to respect the laws that rule the physical universe because violation of these laws threatens our survival. When we pollute the oceans or destroy plant life, we are destroying our support system and so are destroying ourselves.

Internally, the universe supports our survival as well—emotionally and psychologically. The internal equivalent to oxygen, what we need in order to survive, is love.

Faith is an aspect of consciousness. We either have faith in fear or we have faith in love,

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.

We’ve created a fight mentality. We’re always fighting for something:

feminization process, a quieting of the mind. It is the cultivation of personal magnetism.

our feminine consciounessness, which exerts its power through attraction rather than activity.

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.

We’re at rest while a power much greater than our own takes over, and it does a much better job than we could have done. We learn to trust that the power that holds galaxies together can handle the circumstances of our relatively little lives.

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.

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.

There’s a myth that some people are more faithful than others. A truer statement is that in some areas, some of us are more surrendered than others.

The truth is, of course, that the more important it is to us, the more important it is to surrender.

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. To keep it ourselves means to constantly grab and clutch and manipulate.

Surrender doesn’t obstruct our power; it enhances it. God is merely the love within us, so returning to Him is a return to ourselves.

They say that the mind should be like an empty rice bowl. If it’s already full, then the universe can’t fill it. If it’s empty, it has room to receive. This means that when we think we have things already figured out, we’re not teachable. Genuine insight can’t dawn on a mind that’s not open to receive it. Surrender is a process of emptying the mind.

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.’

To let go, to just love, is not to fade into the wallpaper. Quite the contrary, it’s when we truly become bright. We’re letting our own light shine.

Surrender means the decision to stop fighting the world, and to start loving it instead. It is a gentle liberation from pain. But liberation isn’t about breaking out of anything; ‘it’s a gentle melting into who we really are.’

‘we think that without the ego, all would be chaos, the opposite is true. Without the ego, all would be love.’

What He gives us in return for our openness to Him, is an outpouring of His power from deep within us. We are given His power to share with the world, to heal all wounds, to awaken all hearts.

This healing takes many forms. Sometimes a miracle is a change in material conditions, such as physical healing. At other times, it is a psychological or emotional change. It is a shift not so much in an objective situation—although that often occurs—as 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.

In asking for miracles, we are seeking a practical goal: a return to inner peace. We’re not asking for something outside us to change, but for something inside us to change. We’re looking for a softer orientation to life.

our greatest tool for changing the world is our capacity to ‘change our mind about the world.’

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.

God heard us. He sent help. He sent you. To become a miracle worker means to take part in a spiritual underground that’s revitalizing the world, participating in a revolution of the world’s values at the deepest possible level.

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.

This teaching has very little to do with verbal communication, and everything to do with a quality of human energy. “To teach is to demonstrate.”

As all of us are only too aware, the loud and frantic voices of the outer world easily drown out the small still loving voice within.

to constantly seek a greater capacity for love and forgiveness within ourselves.

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

The only point where eternity meets time is in the present. “The present is the only time there is.”

Forgiving the past is an important step in allowing ourselves the experience of miracles. The only meaning of anything in our past is that it got us here, and should be honored as such.

‘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.’

“Past, present and future are not continuous, unless you force continuity upon them.”

The world that the Holy Spirit reveals to us is a world that lies beyond this world, a world revealed to us through a different perception. We die to one world in order to be born into another. “To be born again is to let the past go, and look without condemnation upon the present.”