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The Course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance.”
There’s only one truth, spoken different ways, and the Course is just one path to it out of many. If it’s your path, however, you know it. For me, the Course was a breakthrough experience intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically. It freed me from a terrible emotional pain.
A Return to Love is based on what I have learned from A Course in Miracles.
Metaphysicians call it the Third Eye, esoteric Christians call it the vision of the Holy Spirit, and others call it the Higher Self. Regardless of what it’s called, love requires a different kind of “seeing” than we’re used to—a different kind of knowing or thinking.
Love isn’t material. It’s energy.
We experience it as kindness, giving, mercy, compassion, peace, joy, acceptance, non-judgment, joining, and intimacy.
The mists of Avalon are a mythical allusion to the tales of King Arthur. Avalon is a magical island that is hidden behind huge impenetrable mists. Unless the mists part, there is no way to navigate your way to the island. But unless you believe the island is there, the mists won’t part.
Avalon symbolizes a world beyond the world we see with our physical eyes. It represents a miraculous sense of things, the enchanted realm that we knew as children.
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.
Avalon is the world we knew when we were still connected to our softness, our innocence, our spirit. It’s actually the same world we see now, but informed by love, interpreted gently, with hope and faith and a sense of wonder.
It’s easily retrieved, because perception is a choice. The mists part when we believe t...
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And that’s what a miracle is: a parting of the mists, a shift in percept...
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1. THE DARKNESS
We’re more afraid of life than we are of death.
Many of us have slipped into a barely camouflaged vortex of self-loathing. And we’re always, even desperately, seeking a way out, through growth or through escape.
The form of the dysfunction is irrelevant. We can find a lot of different ways to express how much we hate ourselves.
But express it we will. Emotional energy has got to go somewhere, and self-loathing is a powerful emotion. Turned inward, it becomes our personal hells: addiction, obsession, compulsion, depression, violent relationships, illness. Projected outward, it becomes our collective hells: violence, war, crime, oppression. But it’s all the same thing: hell has many mansions, too.
My painful thoughts were my demons. Demons are insidious.
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.
2. THE LIGHT
all of a sudden you’re so relieved to know it’s true. All of a sudden, you’re not too proud to ask for help.
That’s what it means to surrender to God.
CHAPTER 2 God
1. GOD IS THE ROCK
“There is no time, no place, no state where God is absent.”
There have been times in my life—and they still happen today, though they’re more the exception now than the rule—when I have felt as though sadness would overwhelm me.
Life in those moments can be difficult to bear, and the mind begins an endless search for its escape from pain.
What I learned from A Course in Miracles is that the change we’re really looking for is inside our heads.
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.
I had never realized that depending on God meant depending on love.
2. LOVE IS GOD
To surrender to God means to let go and just love.
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.
3. ONLY LOVE IS REAL
The altar to God is the human mind. To “desecrate the altar” is to fill it with non-loving thoughts.
Adam and Eve were happy until she “ate of the knowledge of good and evil.” What that means is that everything was perfect until they learned to close their hearts, to say, “I love you if you do this, but not if you do that,” or, “I accept this part of you, but not that part.”
CHAPTER 3 You
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.
