Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

We came here to co-create with God by extending love. Life spent with any other purpose in mind is meaningless, contrary to our nature, and ultimately painful.

When fear is expressed, we recognize it as anger, abuse, disease, pain, greed, addiction, selfishness, obsession, corruption, violence, and war.

Love is within us. It cannot be destroyed, but can only be hidden.

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.

“There is no time, no place, no state where God is absent.”

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

The shift from fear to love is a miracle.

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. A shift in how we think about life produces a shift in how we experience it.

When Michelangelo was asked how he created a piece of sculpture, he answered that the statue already existed within the marble. God Himself had created the Pieta, David, Moses. Michelangelo’s job, as he saw it, was to get rid of the excess marble that surrounded God’s creation.

Psychologist Carl Jung posited the notion of the “collective unconscious,” an innate mental structure encompassing the universal thought forms of all humanity.

Very few of us were taught that we’re essentially good.

The word sin means loveless perception. It is an archery term. It means “you missed the mark.” So God isn’t angry at our sins because they’re not really happening. He doesn’t see sins, but only errors in perception. He doesn’t want to punish us, but to heal us. The way He heals us is through a force of conciousness called the Holy Spirit.

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

Surrender means the decision to stop fighting the world, and to start loving it instead.

“Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance, and limits of any kind.”

Forgiveness is “selective remembering”—a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go.

The decision to let go our grievances against other people is the decision to see ourselves as we truly are, because any darkness we let blind us to another’s perfection also blinds us to our own.

The ego seeks intimacy through control and guilt. The Holy Spirit seeks intimacy through acceptance and release.

“Do I want him to be at peace, or do I want him to call?”

In any given season, a blossom might fall off. But if the plant is well nourished, then the season will come around again, and new blossoms appear.

How a person seems to show up for us is intimately connected to how we choose to show up for them.

“Well, a lot of women my age are finding it very hard to find really loving, committable, available men.” Her answer rang through my head like church bells. “When a woman says that to me,” she said, “what we usually find when we look closely enough is a contempt for men.”