Marianne Williamson's A Return to Love

A Return to Love
by Marianne Williamson

I read Marianne's book A Women's Worth seven years ago while camping alone on a beautiful pond. Some people find her words too strong. I like words that inspire me to agree or disagree. I like people who take the chance to say what they believe without apology. Her words have been a major influence in my life.

The following quotations are some of my favorite of hers from A Return to Love, another powerful book.

We were taught to think thoughts like competition, struggle, sickness, finite resources, limitation, guilt, bad, scarcity and loss. We began to think these things, and so we began to know them. We began to think that things like grades, being good enough, money, and doing things the right way, are more important than love. We were taught that we’re separate from other people, that we have to compete to get ahead, that we’re not quite good enough the way we are. We were taught to see the world the way that others had come to see it. It’s as though, as soon as we got here, we were given a sleeping pill. The thinking of the world, which is not based on love, began pounding in our ears the moment we hit the shore.

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 in to 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.

People are crashing into walls today—socially, biologically, psychologically and emotionally. But this isn’t bad news. In a way it is 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 are just playing. The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.

Love taken seriously is a radical outlook, a major departure from the psychological orientations that rule the world. It is threatening not because it is a small idea, but because it is so huge.


In order to love purely, we must surrender our old ways of thinking. For most of us, surrendering anything is difficult. We still think of surrender as failure, as something you do when you’ve lost the war. 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. The mind that’s separate from God has forgotten how to check in with love before it saunters out into the world. Without love, our actions are hysterical. Without love, we have no wisdom.


And that’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an allusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety, and trauma are literally imagined. That is not to say they don’t exist for us as human beings. They do. But our fear is not our ultimate reality and it does not replace the truth of who we really are. Our love, which is our real self, doesn’t die, but merely goes underground.


Love casts out sin or fear the way light cast out darkness. 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. To address the world’s problems on any other level is a temporary palliative—a fix but not a healing, a treatment of the symptoms but not the cure.


As children, we were taught to be “good” boys and girls, which of course implies we were not that already. We were taught we’re good if we clean up our room, or we’re good if we make good grades. Very few of us were taught that we’re essentially good. Very few of us were given the sense of unconditional approval, a feeling that we’re precious because of what we are, not what we do. And that is not because we were raised by monsters. We were raised by people who were raised the same way we were. Sometimes in fact, it was the people who loved us most who felt it was their responsibility to train us to struggle.
Why? Because the world as it is is tough, and they wanted us to make good. We had to become crazy as the world is, or we would never fit in.


Having been taught since we were children that we were separate, finite beings, we have a very hard time when it comes to love. Love feels like a void that threatened to overwhelm us, and that is because, in a certain sense, it is and it does. It overwhelms our small self, our lonely sense of separateness. Since that sense of separateness is who we think we are, we feel like we will die without it. What’s dying is the frightened mind, so the love inside us can get a chance to breath.


The ego has a pseudo-life of it’s own, and like all life forms, fights hard for survival. As uncomfortable as our life might be, as painful or even desperate at times, the life we are living is the life we know, and we cling to the old rather than try something new. Most of us are so sick of ourselves, in one way or another. It’s unbelievable how tenaciously we cling to what we’ve prayed to be released from.


The ego is like a gravitational force-field, built up over eons of fearful thinking, which draws us away from the love in our hearts. The ego is mental power turned against ourselves. It is clever, like we are, and smooth-talking, like we are, and manipulative, like we are. Remember all the talk about the silver-tongued devil? The ego doesn’t come up to us and say, “ Hi, I’m your self-loathing.” It’s not stupid, because we’re not. Rather, it says thing like, “Hi, I’m your adult, mature, rational self. I’ll help you look out for number one.” Then it proceeds to counsel us to look out for ourselves, at the expense of others. It teaches us selfishness, greed, judgment, and small-mindedness. But remember there is only one of us here: What we give to others, we give to ourselves. What we withhold from others, we withhold from ourselves. In any moment when we choose fear instead of love, we deny ourselves the experience of paradise. To the extent that we abandon love, we will feel it has abandoned us.

Our comfort zones are the limited areas in which we find it easy to love. … We’re not at the mountaintop until any zone is comfortable. Love isn’t love until it is unconditional.


According to the laws of evolution, a species develops in a certain direction until that development is no longer well adapted for survival. At the point , a mutation occurs, Although the mutation doesn’t represent the majority of the species, it represent the line of evolution better adapted for the species survival. The descendents of the mutation are then the ones to survive.
Our species is in trouble because we fight too much. We fight ourselves, each other, our planet, and God. Our fear-ridden ways are threatening our survival. A thoroughly loving person is like an evolutionary mutation, manifesting a being that puts love first and thus creates the context in which miracles occur. Ultimately, that is the only smart thing to do. It is the only orientation in life which will support our survival.
The mutations, the enlightened ones, show the rest of us our evolutionary potential.


To trust in the force that moves the universe is faith. Faith isn’t blind, its’ visionary. Faith is believing that the universe is on our side, and that the universe knows what it is doing. Faith is the awareness of an unfolding force for good, constantly at work in all dimensions. Our attempts to direct this force only interfere with it. Our willingness to relax into it allows it to work on our behalf. Without faith, we’re frantically trying to control what is not our business to control, and fix what it is not in our power to fix. What we’re trying to control is much better without us, and what we’re trying to fix can’t be fixed without us anyway. Without faith, we’re wasting time.

Passive energy has its own kind of strength. Personal power results form a balance of masculine and feminine forces. Passive energy without active becomes lazy, but active energy without passive energy becomes tyrannous. An overdose of aggressive energy is macho, controlling, unbalanced, and unnatural. The problem is that aggressive energy is what we’ve been taught to respect. We’ve been taught that life was made for quarterbacks so we exalt our masculine consciousness, which, when untempered by the feminine, is hard. Therefore, so are we— all of us, men and women. We’ve created a fight mentality. We’re always fighting for something: for the job, the money, the relationship, to get out of the relationship, to lose weight, to get sober, to get them to understand, to get them to stay, to get them to leave, and on and on . We never put away our swords.
The feminine, surrendered place in us is passive. It doesn’t do anything. The spiritualization process—in men and women—is a feminization process, a quieting of the mind.
If you have a pile of iron shaving and you want to arrange them in beautiful patterns, you can do on one two things. You can use your fingers and try to arrange the tiny pieces into beautiful gossamer lines—or you can buy a magnet. The magnet will attract the iron shavings. It symbolizes our feminine consciousness, which exerts power through attraction rather than activity.
This attractive receptive, feminine aspect of our consciousness is the space of mental surrender. …Surrender is not weakness or loss. It is powerful nonresistance. Through openness and receptivity on the part of the human consciousness, spirit is allowed to infuse our lives, to give them meaning and direction.


Surrender means the decision to stop fighting the world, and to start loving 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 are simply asked to shift focus and to take one a more gentle perception. That’s all God needs. Just one sincere surrendered moment, when love matters more than anything, and we know that nothing else matters at all. What He gives us in return for our openness to Him, is an outpouring of His powers from deep within us. We are given His power to share with the world, to heal wounds, to awaken hearts.