OceanofPDF .comA Return to Love
Reﬂections on the Principles of A COURSE IN
MIRACLES
Marianne Williamson
“Be not afraid, but let your world be lit by miracles.”
—A Course in Miracles
 
OceanofPDF .com 
 
 
 
 
For both my fathers , 
who art in Heaven . OceanofPDF .comCONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Foreword to the New Edition
Preface
Introduction
Part I. Principles
1. Hell
2. God
3. You
4. Surrender
5. Miracles
Part II. Practice
6. Relationships
7. Work8. Body
9. Heaven
Endnotes
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
OceanofPDF .comA C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
This new edition of A Return to L ove is possible because of
the book’s popularity since 1992. F or that, my deepest
thanks to Oprah W infrey. Her enthusiasm and gener osity
have given the book, and me, an audience we would never
otherwise have had. Many thanks as well to my literary agent, Al L owman. Because of him I started the book, and because of him I
ﬁnished it. Andr ea Cagan also did much to help bring this
book to completion. Her contribution was enor mous. Thanks
to Car ol Cohen, A drian Zackheim, Mitchell Ivers, and all the
others at HarperCollins who helped pr oduce this new
edition. F or my friends Rich Cooper, Nor ma F erarra, David
Kessler, and V ictoria P earman, my gratitude is deep and
abiding. Thanks to every person who has attended my lectur es
since I began giving them. Thanks to my par ents for all they’ve given me, and to my
daughter for bringing a sweetness to my life that soars way
beyond wor ds.And most of all, thanks to all the many people who have
read A Return to L ove since it was ﬁrst published and shar ed
with me such powerful testimony of its value their lives. Their support for my eﬀorts means mor e to me than I can
express on this page. OceanofPDF .comFORWORD TO THE NEW EDITION
A Return of L ove has had a life of its own, as does any book. An author is lik e a mother who brings a child into the world
and then watches it live its own life story . This particular book has had a wonderful life so far, and I
have been priviledged to r eceive countless testimonials to
its positive eﬀect on r eaders. Because I am not the author of
A Course in Miracles  but mer ely an interpr eter of its
principles, I cannot tak e credit for the best things about
Return to L ove. The ideas in the Course had, and continue to
have, a miraculous eﬀect on my own life, and thus I
understand the e xcitement that others feel upon coming
across “miracles” for the ﬁrst time. I’m the older than I was when I wr ote this book, and in
some ways I am less innocent. I have tasted mor e of love’s
oppositions. Y et having seen as much as I have now seen of
the world’s r esistance to the ways of love, I r ealize mor e
deeply than ever the r esponsibility which each of us has to
embrace it mor e fully and e xpress it eﬀectively . Hatr ed is
the spiritual malignancy of our species and, lik e any other
form of cancer, does its most ter rible work not outwar dly
but within us. The fear behind it literally eats us alive,
destr oying minds, bodies, cultur es, nations. Exter nalremedies can manage its eﬀects, but only love has the
power to undo it. Undo it we must. F rom for eign wars to domestic
catastr ophes, our work is the work of casting fear fr om the
world. W e do this not only to serve ourselves but, most
important, to serve our childr en. They shall inherit what we
bequeath to them, and ther e is no gr eater gif t to futur e
generations than that we do the work God has ask ed us to
do: love one another, that the world might be made right. Fear uncheck ed gr ows e xponentially . Love pour ed forth
has the power to r emove it. Thus is the power of God in our
lives. If A Return to L ove mak es one iota of diﬀer ence in
anyone’s ability to e xperience that power, then I am
exceedingly glad I wr ote it. I wish you miracles. I wish you
love. Marianne W illiamson  
January 1996
OceanofPDF .comP R E F A C E
I grew up in a middle-class Jewish family, laced with the
magical overtones of an eccentric father . When I was
thirteen, in 1965, he took me to Saigon to show me what
war was. The V ietnam W ar was beginning to r ev up and he
wanted me to see bullet holes ﬁrsthand. He didn’t want the
military -industrial comple x to eat my brain and convince me
war was ok ay. My grandfather was very r eligious and sometimes I would
go to synagogue with him on Satur day mor nings. When the
ark was opened during the service, he would bow and begin
to cry . I would cry too, but I don’t know whether I was crying
out of a budding r eligious fervor, or simply because he was. When I went to high school, I took my ﬁrst philosophy
class and decided God was a crutch I didn’t need. What kind
of God would let childr en starve, I ar gued, or people get
cancer, or the Holocaust happen? The innocent faith of a
child met the pseudointellectualism of a high school
sophomor e head on. I wr ote a Dear John letter to God. I was
depressed as I wr ote it, but it was something I felt I had to
do because I was too well-r ead now to believe in God.During college, a lot of what I lear ned fr om pr ofessors
was deﬁnitely e xtra-cur ricular . I lef t school to gr ow
vegetables, but I don’t r emember ever gr owing any . Ther e
are a lot of things fr om those years I can’t r emember . Like a
lot of people at that time—late sixties, early seventies—I
was pr etty wild. Every door mark ed “no” by conventional
standar ds seemed to hold the k ey to some lascivious
pleasur e I had to have. Whatever sounded outrageous, I
wanted to do . And usually, I did. I didn’t know what to do with my life, though I r emember
my par ents k ept begging me to do something . I went fr om
relationship to r elationship, job to job, city to city, looking
for some sense of identity or purpose, some feeling that my
life had ﬁnally kick ed in. I knew I had talent, but I didn’t
know at what. I knew I had intelligence, but I was too frantic
to apply it to my own cir cumstances. I went into therapy
several times, but it rar ely made an impact. I sank deeper
and deeper into my own neur otic patter ns, seeking r elief in
food, drugs, people, or whatever else I could ﬁnd to distract
me fr om myself . I was always trying to mak e something
happen in my life, but nothing much happened e xcept all
the drama I cr eated ar ound things not happening. There was some huge r ock of self -loathing sitting in the
middle of my stomach during those years, and it got worse
with every phase I went thr ough. As my pain deepened, so
did my inter est in philosophy : Easter n, Wester n, academic,
esoteric. Kierk egaar d, the I Ching, e xistentialism, radical
death- of-God Christian theology, Buddhism, and mor e. I
always sensed ther e was some mysterious cosmic or der to
things, but I could never ﬁgur e out how it applied to my own
life. One day I was sitting ar ound smoking marijuana with my
brother, and he told me that everybody thought I was weir d.“It’s lik e you have some kind of virus,” he said. I r emember
thinking I was going to shoot out of my body in that
moment. I felt lik e an alien. I had of ten felt as though life
was a private club and everybody had r eceived the
passwor d except me. Now was one of those times. I felt
other people knew a secr et that I didn’t know, but I didn’t
want to ask them about it because I didn’t want them to
know I didn’t know . By my mid-twenties, I was a total mess. I believed other people wer e dying inside too, just lik e
me, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about it. I kept
thinking ther e was something very important that no one
was discussing. I didn’t have the wor ds myself, but I was
sure that something was fundamentally oﬀ in the world. How could everybody think that this stupid game of
“making it in the world”—which I was actually embar rassed I
didn’t know how to play—could be all ther e is to our being
here? One day in 1977, I saw a set of blue books with gold
lettering sitting on someone’s coﬀee table in New Y ork City . I
opened to the intr oduction. It r ead,
“This is  A Course in Miracles. It is a r equir ed
course. Only the time you tak e it is voluntary . Free will does not mean that you can establish
the cur riculum. It means only that you can elect
what you want to tak e at a given time. The
Course does not aim at teaching the meaning of
love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It
does aim, however, at r emoving the blocks to
the awar eness of love’s pr esence, which is your
natural inheritance .”I remember thinking that sounded rather intriguing, if not
arrogant. R eading further, however, I noticed Christian
terminology thr oughout the books. This made me nervous. Although I had studied Christian theology in school, I had
kept it at an intellectual distance. Now I felt the thr eat of a
more personal signiﬁcance. I put the books back on the
table. It took another year befor e I pick ed them up again—
another year, and another year’s misery . Then I was r eady. This time I was so depr essed I didn’t even notice the
language. This time, I knew immediately that the Course
had something very important to teach me. It used
traditional Christian ter ms, but in decidedly nontraditional,
nonreligious ways. I was struck, as most people ar e, by the
profound authority of its voice. It answer ed questions I had
begun to think wer e unanswerable. It talk ed about God in
brilliant psychological ter ms, challenging my intelligence
and never insulting it. It’s a bit cliché to say this, but I felt
like I had come home. The Course seemed to have a basic message: relax. I
was confused to hear that because I had always associated
relaxing with r esigning. I had been waiting for someone to
explain to me how to ﬁght the ﬁght, or to ﬁght the ﬁght for
me, and now this book suggested that I sur render the ﬁght
completely . I was surprised but so r elieved. I had long
suspected I wasn’t made for worldly combat. For me, this was not just another book. This was my
personal teacher, my path out of hell. As I began r eading
the Course and following its W orkbook e xercises, I could feel
almost immediately that the changes it pr oduced inside of
me wer e positive. I felt happy . I felt lik e I was beginning to
calm down. I began to understand myself, to get some hook
on why my r elationships had been so painful, why I couldnever stay with anything, why I hated my body . Most
importantly, I began to have some sense that I could
change. Studying the Course unleashed huge amounts of
hopeful ener gy inside me, ener gy that had been tur ning
darker and mor e self -destructive every day . The Course, a self -study pr ogram of spiritual
psychotherapy contained in thr ee books, claims no
monopoly on God. It is a statement of universal spiritual
themes. Ther e’s only one truth, spok en diﬀer ent ways, and
the Course is just one path to it out of many . If it’s your
path, however, you know it. F or me, the Course was a
breakthr ough e xperience intellectually, emotionally, and
psychologically . It freed me fr om a ter rible emotional pain. I wanted that “awar eness of love’s pr esence” that I had
read about, and over the ne xt ﬁve years I studied the
Course passionately . As my mother said at the time, I “ read
it like a menu.” In 1983, I began sharing my understanding
of the Course with a small gathering of people in L os
Angeles. The gr oup began to gr ow. Since then, my lectur e
audiences have gr own signiﬁcantly her e and abr oad. I have
had the opportunity to see how r elevant this material is to
people thr oughout the world. A Return to L ove is based on what I have lear ned fr om A
Course in Miracles . It is about some of the Course’s basic
principles as I understand them and r elate them to various
issues that aﬀect our daily lives. A Return to L ove is about the practice of love, as a
strength and not a weakness, as a daily answer to the
problems that confr ont us. How is love a practical solution? This book is written as a guide to the miraculous application
of love as a balm on every wound. Whether our psychic painis in the ar ea of r elationships, health, car eer, or elsewher e,
love is a potent for ce, the cur e, the Answer . Americans ar e not that big on philosophy . We’re very big
on action, however, once we understand the r eason for it. As we begin to understand mor e deeply why love is such a
necessary element in the healing of the world, a shif t will
occur in how we live our lives within and without. My prayer is that this book might help someone. I have
written it with an open heart. I hope you’ll r ead it with an
open mind. Marianne W illiamson  
Los Angeles, CA
OceanofPDF .comI N T R O D U C T I O N
When we wer e bor n, we wer e programmed perfectly . We
had a natural tendency to focus on love. Our imaginations
were creative and ﬂourishing, and we knew how to use
them. W e wer e connected to a world much richer than the
one we connect to now, a world full of enchantment and a
sense of the miraculous. So what happened? Why is it that we r eached a certain
age, look ed ar ound, and the enchantment was gone? Because we wer e taught to focus elsewher e. We wer e
taught to think unnaturally . We wer e taught a very bad
philosophy, a way of looking at the world that contradicts
who we ar e.
We wer e taught to think thoughts lik e competition,
struggle, sickness, ﬁnite r esour ces, limitation, guilt, bad,
death, scar city, and loss. W e began to think these things,
and so we began to know them. W e wer e taught that things
like grades, being good enough, money, and doing things
the right way, ar e mor e important than love. W e wer e
taught that we’r e separate fr om other people, that we have
to compete to get ahead, that we’r e not quite good enough
the way we ar e. We wer e taught to see the world the waythat others had come to see it. It’s as though, as soon as we
got her e, we wer e given a sleeping pill. The thinking of the
world, which is not based on love, began pounding in our
ears the moment we hit shor e.
Love is what we wer e bor n with. F ear is what we have
learned her e. The spiritual jour ney is the r elinquishment—or
unlear ning—of fear and the acceptance of love back into our
hearts. L ove is the essential e xistential fact. It is our
ultimate r eality and our purpose on earth. T o be consciously
awar e of it, to e xperience love in ourselves and others, is
the meaning of life. Meaning doesn’t lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When
we attach value to things that ar en’t love—the money, the
car, the house, the pr estige—we ar e loving things that can’t
love us back. W e are sear ching for meaning in the
meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material
things, of themselves, mean nothing. It’s not that they’r e
bad. It’s that they’r e nothing. We came her e to co -create with God by e xtending love. Life spent with any other purpose in mind is meaningless,
contrary to our natur e, and ultimately painful. It’s as though
we’ve been lost in a dark, parallel universe wher e things ar e
loved mor e than people. W e overvalue what we per ceive
with our physical senses, and undervalue what we know to
be true in our hearts. Love isn’t seen with the physical eyes or hear d with
physical ears. The physical senses can’t per ceive it; it’s
perceived thr ough another kind of vision. Metaphysicians
call it the Thir d 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 r equir es a diﬀer ent kind of “seeing”
than we’r e used to—a diﬀer ent kind of knowing or thinking.Love is the intuitive knowledge of our hearts. It’s a “ world
beyond” that we all secr etly long for . An ancient memory of
this love haunts all of us all the time, and beck ons us to
return. Love isn’t material. It’s ener gy. It’s the feeling in a r oom,
a situation, a person. Money can’t buy it. Se x doesn’t
guarantee it. It has nothing at all to do with the physical
world, but it can be e xpressed nonetheless. W e experience
it as kindness, giving, mer cy, compassion, peace, joy,
acceptance, non-judgment, joining, and intimacy . Fear is our shar ed lovelessness, our individual and
collective hells. It’s a world that seems to pr ess on us fr om
within and without, giving constant false testimony to the
meaninglessness of love. When fear is e xpressed, we
recognize it as anger, abuse, disease, pain, greed, addiction,
selﬁshness, obsession, cor ruption, violence, and war . Love is within us. It cannot be destr oyed, but can only be
hidden. The world we knew as childr en is still buried within
our minds. I once r ead a delightful book called The Mists of
Avalon . The mists of A valon ar e 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 ther e, the mists won’t part. Avalon symbolizes a world beyond the world we see with
our physical eyes. It r epresents a miraculous sense of
things, the enchanted r ealm that we knew as childr en. Our
childlik e self is the deepest level of our being. It is who we
really ar e and what is r eal doesn’t go away . The truth
doesn’t stop being the truth just because we’r e not looking
at it. L ove mer ely becomes clouded over, or sur rounded by
mental mists.Avalon is the world we knew when we wer e still
connected to our sof tness, our innocence, our spirit. It’s
actually the same world we see now, but infor med by love,
interpr eted gently, with hope and faith and a sense of
wonder . It’s easily r etrieved, because per ception is a choice. The mists part when we believe that A valon is behind them. And that’s what a miracle is: a parting of the mists, a
shift in per ception, a r eturn to love. OceanofPDF .comPART I
Principles
OceanofPDF .comCHAPTER 1
Hell
“Ther e is no place for hell in a world whose
loveliness can yet be so intense and so inclusive
it is but a step fr om ther e to Heaven .”
 
 
 
Those passages with double quotation marks ar e
quoted dir ectly fr om A Course in Miracles. Those
passages with single quotation marks ar e
paraphrased interpr etations of that book. A
complete listing of citations to A Course in
Miracles appears beginning on p. 301 . M.W. 1. THE DARKNES S
“The jour ney into darkness has been long and
cruel, and you have gone deep into it .”
What happened to my generation is that we never gr ew up. The pr oblem isn’t that we’r e lost or apathetic, nar cissistic ormaterialistic. The pr oblem is we’r e terriﬁed. A lot of us know we have what it tak es—the looks, the
education, the talent, the cr edentials. But in certain ar eas,
we’re paralyzed. W e’re not being stopped by something on
the outside, but by something on the inside. Our oppr ession
is inter nal. The gover nment isn’t holding us back, or hunger
or poverty . We’re not afraid we’ll get sent to Siberia. W e’re
just afraid, period. Our fear is fr ee-ﬂoating. W e’re afraid this
isn’t the right r elationship or we’r e afraid it is. W e’re afraid
they won’t lik e us or we’r e afraid they will. W e’re afraid of
failur e or we’r e afraid of success. W e’re afraid of dying
young or we’r e afraid of gr owing old. W e’re mor e afraid of
life than we ar e of death. You’d think we’d have some compassion for ourselves,
bound up in emotional chains the way we ar e, but we don’t. We’re just disgusted with ourselves, because we think we
should be better by now . Sometimes we mak e the mistak e
of thinking other people don’t have as much fear as we do,
which only mak es us mor e afraid. Maybe they know
something we don’t know . Maybe we’r e missing a
chromosome. It’s become popular these days to blame practically
everything on our par ents. W e ﬁgur e it’s because of them
that our self -esteem is so low . If only they’d been diﬀer ent,
we’d be brimming with self -love. But if you tak e a close look
at how our par ents tr eated us, whatever abuse they gave us
was of ten mild compar ed to the way we abuse ourselves
today . It’s true that your mother might have said r epeatedly,
“You’ll never be able to do that, dear .” But now you say to
yourself, “Y ou’re a jerk. Y ou never do it right. Y ou blew it. I
hate you.” They might have been mean, but we’r e vicious.Our generation has slipped into a bar ely camouﬂaged
vorte x of self -loathing. And we’r e always, even desperately,
seeking a way out, thr ough gr owth or thr ough escape. Maybe this degr ee will do it, or this job, this seminar, this
therapist, this r elationship, this diet, or this pr oject. But too
often the medicine falls short of a cur e, and the chains just
keep getting thick er and tighter . The same soap operas
develop with diﬀer ent people in diﬀer ent cities. W e begin to
realize that we ourselves ar e somehow the pr oblem, but we
don’t know what to do about it. W e’re not powerful enough
to over rule ourselves. W e sabotage, abort everything: our
careers, our r elationships, even our childr en. W e drink. W e
do drugs. W e contr ol. W e obsess. W e code-pend. W e
overeat. W e hide. W e attack. The for m of the dysfunction is
irrelevant. W e can ﬁnd a lot of diﬀer ent ways to e xpress how
much we hate ourselves. But e xpress it we will. Emotional ener gy has got to go
somewher e, and self -loathing is a powerful emotion. T urned
inwar d, it becomes our personal hells: addiction, obsession,
compulsion, depr ession, violent r elationships, illness. Projected outwar d, it becomes our collective hells: violence,
war, crime, oppr ession. But it’s all the same thing: hell has
many mansions, too . I remember, years ago, having an image in my mind that
frightened me ter ribly. I would see a sweet, innocent little
girl in a perfect white or gandy apr on, pinned scr eaming with
her back against a wall. A vicious, hysterical woman was
repeatedly stabbing her thr ough the heart with a knife. I
suspected that both characters wer e me, that they lived as
psychic for ces inside my mind. W ith every passing year, I
grew mor e scar ed of that woman with the knife. She was
active in my system. She was totally out of contr ol, and I felt
like she wanted to kill me.When I was most desperate, I look ed for a lot of ways out
of my personal hell. I r ead books about how our minds
create our e xperience, how the brain is lik e a bio -computer
that manufactur es whatever we feed into it with our
thoughts. “Think success and you’ll get it, ”Expect to fail
and you will,” I r ead. But no matter how much I work ed at
changing my thoughts, I k ept going back to the painful
ones. T emporary br eakthr oughs would occur : I would work
on having a mor e positive attitude, get myself together and
meet a new man or get a new job. But I would always r evert
to the patter ns of self -betrayal: I’d eventually tur n into a
bitch with the man, or scr ew up at the job. I would lose ten
pounds, and then put them back on in ﬁve minutes, ter riﬁed
by how it felt to look beautiful. The only thing mor e
frightening than not getting male attention, was getting lots
of it. The gr oove of sabotage ran deep and automatic. Sur e,
I could change my thoughts, but not per manently . And
there’s only one despair worse than “ God, I blew it.”—and
that’s, “ God, I blew it again .”
My painful thoughts wer e my demons. Demons ar e
insidious. Thr ough various therapeutic techniques, I’d
become very smart about my own neur oses, but that didn’t
necessarily e xorcise them. The garbage didn’t go away; it
just became mor e sophisticated. I used to tell a person what
my weaknesses wer e, using such conscious language that
they would think, “W ell, obviously she knows what her
patter ns ar e, so she won’t do that again.”
But oh yes, I would. A cknowledging my patter ns was just
a way of diverting someone’s attention. Then I’d go into a
rampage or other outrageous behavior so quickly and
smoothly that no one, least of all myself, could do anything
to stop me befor e I’d ruined a situation completely . I would
say the e xact wor ds that would mak e the man leave, or hitme, or mak e someone ﬁr e me, or worse. In those days, it
never occur red to me to ask for a miracle. For one thing, I wouldn’t have known what a miracle was. I put them in the pseudo -mystical-r eligious garbage
category . I didn’t know, until r eading A Course in Miracles ,
that a miracle is a r easonable thing to ask for . I didn’t know
that a miracle is just a shif t in per ception. I once attended a twelve-step meeting wher e people
were asking God to tak e away their desir e to drink. I had
never gone overboar d with any one particular dysfunctional
behavior . It wasn’t drinking or drugs that was doing me in; it
was my personality in general, that hysterical woman inside
my head. My negativity was as destructive to me as alcohol
is to the alcoholic. I was an artist at ﬁnding my own jugular . It was as though I was addicted to my own pain. Could I ask
God to help me with that? It occur red to me that, just as
with any other addictive behavior, maybe a power gr eater
than myself could tur n things ar ound. Neither my intellect
nor my willpower had been able to do that. Understanding
what occur red when I was thr ee years old hadn’t been
enough to fr ee me. P roblems I k ept thinking would
eventually go away, k ept getting worse every year . I hadn’t
emotionally developed the way I should have, and I knew it. Somehow, somewher e, it was as though wires deep inside
my brain had gotten cr ossed. Lik e a lot of other people in
my generation and cultur e, I had gotten oﬀ track many
years befor e, and in certain ways just never gr ew up. W e’ve
had the longest postadolescence in the history of the world. Like emotional str oke victims, we need to go back a few
steps in or der to go forwar d. We need someone to teach us
the basics. For me, no matter what hot water I had gotten into, I had
always thought that I could get myself out of it. I was cuteenough, or smart enough, or talented enough, or clever
enough—and if nothing else work ed, I could call my father
and ask for money . But ﬁnally I got myself into so much
trouble, that I knew I needed mor e help than I could muster
up myself . At twelve-step meetings, I k ept hearing it said
that a power gr eater than I could do for me what I couldn’t
do for myself . Ther e was nothing else to do and ther e was
no one lef t to call. My fear ﬁnally became so gr eat, that I
wasn’t too hip to say “ God, please help me.”
2. THE LIGHT
“The light is in you .”
So I went thr ough this grandiose, dramatic moment
wher e I invited God into my life. It was ter rifying at ﬁrst, but
then I kind of got oﬀ on the idea. After that, nothing r eally felt the way I e xpected it to . I
had thought that things would impr ove. It’s as though my
life was a house, and I thought God would give it a
wonderful paint job—new shutters per haps, a pr etty portico,
new r oof. Instead, it felt as though, as soon as I gave the
house to God, He hit it with a giant wr ecking ball. “Sor ry,
honey,” He seemed to say, “Ther e wer e cracks in the
foundation, not to mention all the rats in the bedr oom. I
thought we better just start all over .”
I had r ead about people sur rendering to God and then
feeling this pr ofound sense of peace descend lik e a mantle
over their shoulders. I did get that feeling, but only for about
a minute and a half . After that, I just felt lik e I’d been
busted. This didn’t tur n me oﬀ to God so much as it made
me respect His intelligence. It implied He understood the
situation better than I would have e xpected. If I was God, I’dhave busted me too . I felt mor e grateful than r esentful. I
was desperate for help. A certain amount of desperation is usually necessary
befor e we’r e ready for God. When it came to spiritual
surrender, I didn’t get serious, not r eally, until I was down on
my knees completely . The mess got so thick that all the
king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t mak e Marianne
function again. The hysterical woman inside me was in a
maniacal rage, and the innocent child was pinned to the
wall. I fell apart. I cr ossed the line between in-pain-but-still-
able-to -function-nor mally, and the r ealm of the total bask et
case. I had what is commonly called a nervous br eakdown. Nervous br eakdowns can be highly under rated methods
of spiritual transfor mation. They certainly get your
attention. I have seen people have little mini-br eakdowns
year af ter year, each time stopping just short of getting the
point. I think I was luck y to get mine over with in one fell
swoop. The things I lear ned her e, I will not for get. As painful
as this e xperience was, I now see it as an important,
perhaps necessary step in my br eakthr ough to a happier
life. For one thing, I was pr ofoundly humbled. I saw very
clearly that, ‘of myself, I am nothing.’ Until this happens,
you k eep trying all your old tricks, the ones that never did
work but that you k eep thinking might work this time. Once
you’ve had enough and you can’t do it anymor e, you
consider the possibility that ther e might be a better way . That’s when your head cracks open and God comes in. I felt during those years as though my sk ull had
exploded. It seemed as though thousands of little pieces of
it had shot into outer space. V ery slowly, they began to
come together again. But while my emotional brain was soexposed, it seemed to be r ewired, lik e I’d had some kind of
psychic sur gery. I felt lik e I became a diﬀer ent person. 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. P eople ar e 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’r e just playing at life,
and on some level you’r e scar ed because you know you’r e
just playing. The moment of sur render is not when life is
over. It’s when it begins. Not that that moment of eur eka—that calling out to God
—is it, and it’s all P aradise fr om then on. Y ou’ve simply
started the climb. But you know you’r e not running ar ound
in cir cles at the bottom of the mountain anymor e, never
really getting anywher e, dreaming of the top and having no
idea how to get ther e. For many people, things have to get
very bad befor e ther e’s a shif t. When you truly bottom out,
there comes an e xhilarating r elease. Y ou recognize ther e’s a
power in the universe bigger than you ar e, who can do for
you what you can’t do for yourself . All of a sudden, your last
resort sounds lik e a very good idea. How ir onic. Y ou spend your whole life r esisting the notion
that ther e’s someone out ther e smarter than you ar e, and
then all of a sudden you’r e so r elieved to know it’s true. All
of a sudden, you’r e not too pr oud to ask for help. That’s what it means to sur render to God. OceanofPDF .comCHAPTER 2
God
“You ar e in God .”
 
1. GOD IS THE ROCK
“There is no time, no place, no state wher e God
is absent .”
There have been times in my life—and they still happen
today, though they’r e mor e the e xception now than the rule
—when I have felt as though sadness would overwhelm me. Something didn’t tur n out the way I wanted it to, or I was in
conﬂict with someone, or I was afraid of what might or
might not happen in the futur e. Life in those moments can
be diﬃcult to bear, and the mind begins an endless sear ch
for its escape fr om pain. What I lear ned fr om A Course in Miracles  is that the
change we’r e really looking for is inside our heads. Events
are always in ﬂux. One day people love you; the ne xt day
you’r e their tar get. One day a situation is running smoothly;
the ne xt day chaos r eigns. One day you feel lik e you’r e an
okay person; the ne xt day you feel lik e you’r e an utterfailur e. These changes in life ar e always going to happen;
they’r e part of the human experience. What we can change,
however, is how we per ceive them. And that shif t in our
perception is a miracle. There’s a biblical story wher e Jesus says we can build our
house on sand or we can build it on r ock. Our house is our
emotional stability . When it is built on sand, then the winds
and rain can tear it down. One disappointing phone call and
we crumble; one stor m and the house falls down. When our house is built on r ock, then it is stur dy and
strong and the stor ms can’t destr oy it. W e are not so
vulnerable to life’s passing dramas. Our stability r ests on
something mor e enduring than the cur rent weather,
something per manent and str ong. W e’re depending on God. I had never r ealized that depending on God meant
depending on love. I had hear d it said that God was love,
but it had never kick ed in for me e xactly what that meant. As I began to study A Course in Miracles , I discover ed the
following things:
God is the love within us . Whether we “ follow Him,” or think with love, is
entirely up to us . When we choose to love, or to allow our minds
to be one with God, then life is peaceful. When
we tur n away fr om love, the pain sets in . And whether we love, or close our hearts to love, is a
mental choice we mak e, every moment of every day .2. LOVE IS GOD
“Love does not conquer all things, but it does set
all things right .”
Love tak en seriously is a radical outlook, a major
departur e from the psychological orientation that rules the
world. It is thr eatening not because it is a small idea, but
because it is so huge. For many people, God is a frightening concept. Asking
God for help doesn’t seem very comforting if we think of
Him as something outside ourselves, or capricious or
judgmental. But God is love. W e wer e created in His image,
or mind, which means that we ar e extensions of His love. This is why we ar e called the Sons of God. We think we author ed God, rather than r ealizing that He
author ed us. The Course says we have an ‘authority
problem.’ R ather than accepting that we ar e the loving
beings that He cr eated, we have ar rogantly thought that we
could cr eate ourselves, and then cr eate God. Because we
are angry and judgmental, we have pr ojected those
characteristics onto Him. W e have made up a God in our
image. But God r emains who He is and always has been: the
energy, the thought of unconditional love. He cannot think
with anger or judgment; He is mer cy and compassion and
total acceptance. The pr oblem is that we have for gotten
this, and so we have for gotten who we ourselves ar e.
I began to r ealize that taking love seriously would be a
complete transfor mation of my thinking. A Course in
Miracles  calls itself a ‘mind training’ in the r elinquishment of
a thought system based on fear, and the acceptance
instead of a thought system based on love. Now, over a
decade since starting the study of A Course in Miracles , mymind is har dly the touchstone of holy per ception. I certainly
don’t pr etend 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. In order to love pur ely, we must sur render our old ways
of thinking. F or most of us, sur rendering anything is diﬃcult. We still think of sur render as failur e, as something you do
when you’ve lost the war . But spiritual sur render, although
passive, is not weak. A ctually, it is str ong. It is a balance to
our aggr ession. Although aggr ession is not bad—it is at the
heart of cr eativity—it needs to be temper ed by love in or der
to be an agent of har mony rather than violence. The mind
that’s separate fr om God has for gotten how to check in with
love befor e it saunters out into the world. W ithout love, our
actions ar e hysterical. W ithout love, we have no wisdom. To sur render to God means to let go and just love. By
aﬃrming that love is our priority in a situation, we actualize
the power of God. This is not metaphor; it’s fact. W e literally
use our minds to co -create with Him. Thr ough a mental
decision—a conscious r ecognition of love’s importance and
our willingness to e xperience it—we “call on a higher
power .” We set aside our nor mal mental habit patter ns and
allow them to be superseded by a diﬀer ent, gentler mode of
perception. That is what it means to let a power gr eater
than we ar e direct our lives. Once we get to the point wher e we r ealize that God is
love, we understand that following God simply means
following the dictates of love. The hur dle we have to face
next is the question of whether or not love is such a wise
thing to follow . The question is no longer “What is God?” The
question we ask now is, “What is love?”Love is ener gy. It’s not something we can per ceive with
our physical senses, but people can usually tell you when
they feel it and when they don’t. V ery few people feel
enough love in their lives because the world has become a
rather loveless place. W e can har dly even imagine a world
in which all of us wer e in love, all the time, with everyone. There would be no wars because we wouldn’t ﬁght. Ther e
would be no hunger because we would feed each other . There would be no envir onmental br eakdown because we
would love ourselves, our childr en and our planet too much
to destr oy it. Ther e would be no pr ejudice, oppr ession or
violence of any kind. Ther e would be no sor row. Ther e would
only be peace. Although we may not r ealize it, most of us ar e violent
people—not necessarily physically, but emotionally . We
have been br ought up in a world that does not put love ﬁrst,
and wher e love is absent, fear sets in. F ear is to love as
darkness is to light. It’s a ter rible absence of what we need
in order to survive. It’s a place we go wher e all hell br eaks
loose. When infants ar en’t held, they can become sick, even
die. It’s universally accepted that childr en need love, but at
what age ar e people supposed to stop needing it? W e never
do. We need love in or der to live happily, as much as we
need o xygen in or der to live at all. 3. ONL Y LOVE IS REAL
“God is not the author of fear . You ar e.”
So the pr oblem with the world is that we have strayed fr om
God, or wander ed away fr om love. A ccording to A Course in
Miracles , this separation fr om God ﬁrst happened millions ofyears ago . But the important r evelation, the crux of the
Course, is that in r eality it never happened at all. The intr oduction to A Course in Miracles  states:
“The Course can be summed up very simply :
Nothing r eal can be thr eatened . Nothing unr eal e xists. Herein lies the peace of God .”
What that means is this:
1. Love is r eal. It’s an eter nal cr eation and
nothing can destr oy it. 2. Anything that isn’t love is an illusion. 3. Remember this, and you’ll be at peace. A Course in Miracles  says that only love is r eal: “The
opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can
have no opposite.” When we think with love, we ar e literally
co-creating with God. And when we’r e not thinking with
love, since only love is r eal, then we’r e actually not thinking
at all. W e’re hallucinating. And that’s what this world is: a
mass hallucination, wher e fear seems mor e real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and
trauma ar e literally all imagined . That is not to say they
don’t e xist for us as human beings. They do . But our fear is
not our ultimate r eality, and it does not r eplace the truth of
who we r eally ar e. Our love, which is our r eal self, doesn’t
die, but mer ely goes under ground. The Course teaches that fear is literally a bad dr eam. It is
as though the mind has been split in two; one part stays intouch with love, and the other part veers into fear . Fear
manufactur es a kind of parallel universe wher e the unr eal
seems r eal, and the r eal seems unr eal. Love casts out sin or fear the way light casts out
darkness. The shif t from fear to love is a miracle. It doesn’t
ﬁx things on the earth plane; it addr esses the r eal sour ce of
our pr oblems, which is always on the level of consciousness. The only r eal pr oblem is a lack of love. T o addr ess the
world’s pr oblems on any other level is a temporary palliative
—a ﬁx but not a healing, a tr eatment of the symptom but
not a cur e.
Thoughts ar e like data pr ogrammed into a computer,
register ed on the scr een of your life. If you don’t lik e what
you see on the scr een, ther e’s no point in going up to the
screen and trying to erase it. Thought is Cause; e xperience
is Eﬀect. If you don’t lik e the eﬀects in your life, you have to
change the natur e of your thinking. Love in your mind pr oduces love in your life. This is the
meaning of Heaven. Fear in your mind pr oduces fear in your life. This is the
meaning of hell. A shif t in how we think about life pr oduces a shif t in how
we experience it. T o say, “ God, deliver me fr om hell,” means
“God, Deliver me fr om my fearful thinking.” The altar to God
is the human mind. T o “desecrate the altar ” is to ﬁll it with
non-loving thoughts. Adam and Eve wer e happy until she “ate of the
knowledge of good and evil.” What that means is that
everything was perfect until they lear ned 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.”Closing our hearts destr oys our peace because it’s alien to
our natur e. It warps us and tur ns us into people we’r e not
meant to be. Freud deﬁned neur osis as separation fr om self, and so it
is. Our r eal self is the love within us. It’s the “child of God.”
The fearful self is an impostor . The r eturn to love is the gr eat
cosmic drama, the personal jour ney fr om pr etense to self,
from pain to inner peace. So then it might go lik e this, or at least it did for me. I’d
get myself into some ter rible mess, and I’d r emember that
all I needed was a miracle, ‘a shif t in per ception’. I’d pray,
“God, please help me. Heal my mind. Wher ever my
thoughts have strayed fr om love—if I’ve been contr olling,
manipulative, gr eedy, ambitious for myself—whatever it is,
I’m willing to see this diﬀer ently. Amen.”
So, the universe would hear that, and “ Ding!,” I’d get my
miracle. R elationship transfor med, situation healed. But
then I’d go back to the same kind of fearful thinking that
had gotten me down on my knees to begin with, and I’d
repeat the patter n. I’d get myself into some emotional car
crash, once again end up on my knees, once again ask God
to help me, and once again be r eturned to sanity and peace. Finally, af ter a lot of r epetition of those embattled
scenarios, I said to myself, “Marianne. Ne xt time you’r e
down on your knees, why don’t you just stay there?” Why
don’t we stay in the r ealm of the answer, rather than always
returning to the r ealm of the pr oblem? Why not seek some
level of awar eness wher e we don’t create these pr oblems
for ourselves all the time? L et’s not just ask for a new job, a
new r elationship, or a new body . Let’s ask for a new world. Let’s ask for a new life.When I was down on my knees completely, and I knew
what it meant to feel sincer ely humbled, I almost e xpected
to feel God’s anger or contempt. Instead, it was as though I
heard a gentle voice say, “ Can we start now?” Until that
point, I was hiding fr om my love, and so r esisting my own
life. The r eturn to love is not the end of life’s adventur e, but
the beginning. It’s the r eturn to who you r eally ar e.
OceanofPDF .comCHAPTER 3
You
“The Thought God holds of you is lik e a star,
unchangeable in an eter nal sk y.”
 
1. THE PERFECT Y OU
“Again—nothing you do or think or wish or mak e
is necessary to establish your worth .”
You ar e a child of God. Y ou wer e created in a blinding ﬂash
of creativity, a primal thought when God e xtended Himself
in love. Everything you’ve added on since is useless. When Michelangelo was ask ed how he cr eated a piece of
sculptur e, he answer ed that the statue alr eady e xisted
within the marble. God Himself had cr eated the P ieta, David,
Moses. Michelangelo’s job, as he saw it, was to get rid of the
excess marble that sur rounded God’s cr eation. So it is with you. The perfect you isn’t something you
need to cr eate, because God alr eady cr eated it. The perfect
you is the love within you. Y our job is to allow the Holy Spirit
to remove the fearful thinking that sur rounds your perfectself, just as e xcess marble sur rounded Michelangelo’s
perfect statue. To remember that you ar e part of God, that you ar e loved
and lovable, is not ar rogant. It’s humble. T o think you ar e
anything else is ar rogant, because it implies you’r e
something other than a cr eation of God. Love is changeless and ther efore so ar e you. Nothing that
you have ever done or will ever do can mar your perfection
in the eyes of God. Y ou’re deserving in His eyes because of
what you ar e, not because of what you do . What you do or
don’t do is not what deter mines your essential value—your
growth per haps, but not your value. That’s why God is
totally appr oving and accepting of you, e xactly as you ar e.
What’s not to lik e? You wer e not cr eated in sin; you wer e
created in love. 2. THE DIVINE MIND
“God has lit your mind Himself, and k eeps your
mind lit by His Light because His Light is what
your mind is .”
Psychologist Carl Jung posited the notion of the “collective
unconscious,” an innate mental structur e encompassing the
universal thought for ms of all humanity . His idea was that if
you went deeply enough into your mind, and deeply enough
into mine, ther e is a level we all shar e. The Course goes one
step further; if you go deeply enough into your mind, and
deeply enough into mine, we have the same mind . The
concept of a divine, or “ Christ” mind, is the idea that, at our
core, we ar e not just identical, but actually the same being. “Ther e is only one begotten Son ” doesn’t mean thatsomeone else was it, and we’r e not. It means we’r e all it. There’s only one of us her e.
We’re like the spok es on a wheel, all radiating out fr om
the same center . If you deﬁne us accor ding to our position
on the rim, we seem separate and distinct fr om one another . But if you deﬁne us accor ding to our starting point, our
source—the center of the wheel—we’r e a shar ed identity . If
you dig deep enough into your mind, and deep enough into
mine, the pictur e is the same: at the bottom of it all, what
we ar e is love. The wor d Christ is a psychological ter m. No r eligion has a
monopoly on the truth. Christ r efers to the common thr ead
of divine love that is the cor e and essence of every human
mind. The love in one of us is the love in all of us. ‘Ther e’s
actually no place wher e God stops and you start,’ and no
place wher e you stop and I start. L ove is ener gy, an inﬁnite
continuum. Y our mind e xtends into mine and into everyone
else’s. It doesn’t stay enclosed within your body . A Course in Miracles  likens us to ‘sunbeams’ thinking
we’re separate fr om the sun, or waves thinking we’r e
separate fr om the ocean. Just as a sunbeam can’t separate
itself fr om the sun, and a wave can’t separate itself fr om the
ocean, we can’t separate ourselves fr om one another . We
are all part of a vast sea of love, one indivisible divine mind. This truth of who we r eally ar e doesn’t change; we just
forget it. W e identif y with the notion of a small, separate
self, instead of the idea of a r eality we shar e with everyone. You ar en’t who you think you ar e. Aren’t you glad? Y ou’re
not your grades, or your cr edentials, or your r esumes, or
your house. W e aren’t those things at all. W e are holybeings, individual cells in the body of Christ. A Course in
Miracles  reminds us that the sun continues to shine and the
ocean continues to swell, oblivious to the fact that a fraction
of their identity has for gotten what it is. W e are who God
created us to be. W e are all one, we ar e love itself . “Accepting the Christ” is mer ely a shif t in self -perception. W e
awak en from the dr eam that we ar e ﬁnite, isolated
creatur es, and r ecognize that we ar e glorious, inﬁnitely
creative spirits. ‘W e awak en from the dr eam that we ar e
weak, and accept that the power of the universe is within
us.’
I realized, many years ago, that I must be very powerful
if I could mess up everything I touched, everywher e I went,
with such amazing consistency . I ﬁgur ed ther e must be a
way to apply the same mental power, then embedded in
neurosis, in a mor e positive way . A lot of today’s most
common psychological orientation is to analyze the
darkness in or der to r each the light, thinking that if we focus
on our neur oses—their origins and dynamics—then we will
move beyond them. Easter n religions tell us that if we go for
God, all that is not authentically ourselves will dr op. Go for
the light and darkness will disappear . Focus on Christ means
focus on the goodness and power that lie latent within us, in
order to invok e them into r ealization and e xpression. W e get
in life that which we focus on. Continual focus on darkness
leads us, as individuals and as a society, further into
darkness. F ocus on the light brings us into the light. “I accept the Christ within ” means, “I accept the beauty
within me as who I r eally am. I am not my weakness. I am
not my anger . I am not my small-mindedness. I am much,
much mor e. And I am willing to be r eminded of who I r eally
am.”3. THE EGO
“The ego is quite literally a fearful thought .”
As childr en, we wer e taught to be “good” boys and girls,
which of course implies we wer e not that alr eady. We wer e
taught we’r e good if we clean up our r oom, or we’r e good if
we mak e good grades. V ery few of us wer e taught that
we’re essentially  good. V ery few of us wer e given a sense of
unconditional appr oval, a feeling that we’r e precious
because of what we are, not what we do. And that’s not
because we wer e raised by monsters. W e wer e raised by
people who wer e raised the same way we wer e. Sometimes,
in fact, it was the people who loved us the most who felt it
was their r esponsibility to train us to struggle. Why? Because the world as it is, is tough, and they
wanted us to mak e good. W e had to become as crazy as the
world is, or we would never ﬁt in her e. We had to achieve,
make the grade, get into Harvar d. What’s strange is that we
didn’t lear n discipline fr om that perspective, so much as a
weird displacement of our sense of power away fr om
ourselves and onto e xternal sour ces. What we lost was a
sense of our own power . And what we lear ned was fear, fear
that we wer en’t good enough, just the way we ar e.
Fear does not pr omote lear ning. It warps us. It stunts us. It mak es us neur otic. And by the time we wer e teenagers,
most of us wer e sever ely crack ed. Our love, our hearts, our
real “self” wer e constantly invalidated by people who didn’t
love us and by people who did. In the absence of love, we
began slowly but sur ely to fall apart. Years ago, I told myself not to wor ry about a devil. I
remember thinking that ther e’s no for ce of evil out stalking
the planet. That, I told myself, is all in my mind. Then Irealized this is not good news. Since every thought cr eates
experience, ther e’s no worse place it could possibly be. While it’s true ther e isn’t an actual devil out ther e grabbing
for our souls, ther e is a tendency in our minds, which can be
amazingly str ong, to per ceive without love. Having been taught since we wer e childr en that we ar e
separate, ﬁnite beings, we have a very har d time when it
comes to love. L ove feels lik e a void that thr eatens to
overwhelm us, and that’s 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 ar e, we feel lik e we’ll die without it. What’s dying is
the frightened mind, so the love inside us can get a chance
to breathe. In Course ter minology, our entir e network of fearful
perceptions, all stemming fr om that ﬁrst false belief in our
separation fr om God and one another, is called the ego . The
word ego is used diﬀer ently her e than the way in which it is
often used in moder n psychology . It is being used as the
ancient Gr eeks used it—as the notion of a small, separated
self. It is a false belief about ourselves, a lie about who and
what we r eally ar e. Even though that lie is our neur osis, and
living that lie is a ter rible anxiety, it’s amazing how r esistant
we ar e to healing the split. Thought separated fr om love is a pr ofound miscr eation. It’s our own power tur ned against ourselves. The moment
the mind ﬁrst deviated fr om love—when ‘the Son of God
forgot to laugh’—an entir e illusionary world came into being. A Course in Miracles  calls this moment our “detour into
fear,” or “separation fr om God.”
The ego has a pseudo -life of its own, and lik e all life
forms, ﬁghts har d for its survival. As uncomfortable as ourlife might be, as painful or even desperate at times, the life
we’re living is the life we know, and we cling to the old
rather than try something new . Most of us ar e so sick of
ourselves, in one way or another . It’s unbelievable how
tenaciously we cling to what we’ve prayed to be r eleased
from. The ego is lik e a virus in the computer that attacks the
core system. It seems to show us a dark parallel universe, a
realm of fear and pain that doesn’t actually e xist but
certainly seems to . Lucifer was the most beautiful angel in
Heaven befor e he fell. The ego is our self -love tur ned into
self-hatr ed. The ego is lik e a gravitational for ce ﬁeld, built up over
eons of fearful thinking, which draws us away fr om the love
in our hearts. The ego is our mental power tur ned against
ourselves. It is clever, lik e we ar e, and smooth-talking, lik e
we ar e, and manipulative, lik e we ar e. Remember all the talk
about a 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. R ather, it says things lik e, “Hi, I’m your adult,
matur e, rational self . I’ll help you look out for number one.”
Then it pr oceeds to counsel us to look out for ourselves, at
the e xpense of others. It teaches us selﬁshness, gr eed,
judgment, and small-mindedness. But r emember, ther e’s
only one of us her e: What we give to others, we give to
ourselves. What we withhold fr om others, we withhold fr om
ourselves. In any moment when we choose fear instead of
love, we deny ourselves the e xperience of P aradise. T o the
extent that we abandon love, to that e xtent we will feel it
has abandoned us. 4. HOL Y SPIRIT“The Holy Spirit is the call to awak en and be
glad.”
The power of the mind is itself neutral. It is the power given
to us fr eely by God. ‘W e have the fr ee will to think whatever
we want to think, but no thoughts ar e neutral. Ther e is no
such thing as an idle thought. All thought cr eates for m on
some level.’ Nothing can deprive us of our own cr eativity . We are personally r esponsible for what dir ection we apply it
in. Taking r esponsibility for our lives, then, means taking
responsibility for our thoughts. And praying to God to “save”
our lives, means praying for Him to save us fr om our own
negative thoughts. Since only God e xists, and everything else is an illusion,
then the eﬀects of lovelessness ar e only happening within
the ego’s hallucination. The wor d sin means loveless
perception. It is an ar chery ter m. It means “ you missed the
mark.” So God isn’t angry at our sins because they’r e not
really happening. He doesn’t see sins, but only er rors in
perception. He doesn’t want to punish us, but to heal us. The way He heals us is thr ough a for ce of conciousness
called the Holy Spirit. The Course teaches that the Holy Spirit was cr eated in
the moment when the ﬁrst fearful thought was thought. As
perfect love, God cor rects all mistak es the moment they
occur . He couldn’t for ce us back to love, because love
doesn’t for ce. It does, however, cr eate alter natives. The
Holy Spirit is God’s alter native to fear . The Holy Spirit was God’s answer to the ego . He is God’s
“eter nal communication link with His separated Sons,” a
bridge back to gentle thoughts, “the gr eat T ransfor mer ofPerception.” Of ten the Holy Spirit is r eferred to as the
“Comforter .” God can’t for ce His way back into our thinking,
because that would be violating our fr ee will. But the Holy
Spirit is a for ce of consciousness within us that “delivers us
from Hell,” or fear, whenever we consciously ask Him to,
working with us on the Causal level, transfor ming our
thoughts fr om fear to love. W e cannot call on him in vain. Having been cr eated by God, He’s built into the computer . He comes to us in many for ms, fr om a conversation with a
friend to a serious spiritual path; fr om a lyric in a song to an
excellent therapist. He is the ine xorable drive towar d
wholeness that e xists within, no matter how disoriented or
crazy we get. Something within us always longs to go home,
and He is that something. The Holy Spirit guides us to a diﬀer ent per ception of
reality : one that is based on love. His cor rection of our
perception is called the A tonement. He r eminds us that, in
every situation, the love you’ve given is r eal, and the love
you have r eceived is r eal. Nothing else e xists. Anything
other than love is an illusion. In or der to escape the illusion
and ﬁnd inner peace, r emember that only love in a situation
is real. Everything else is a mistak e and does not e xist. It
must be for gotten. W e must consciously be willing to let it
go. The only thing lacking in any situation is our own
awar eness of love. In asking the Holy Spirit to help us, we
are expressing our willingness to per ceive a situation
diﬀer ently. We give up our own interpr etations and opinions,
and ask that they be r eplaced by His. When in pain, we
pray, “ Dear God, I am willing to see this diﬀer ently.”
Surrendering a situation to God means sur rendering to Him
our thoughts  about it. What we give to God, He gives back
to us r enewed thr ough the vision of the Holy Spirit. Some
people think that if we sur render to God, we’r e giving uppersonal r esponsibility . But the opposite is true. W e’re taking
the ultimate r esponsibility for a situation by being
responsible for our thoughts about it. W e’re responsible
enough to know that, when lef t to our own mental devices,
we will instinctively r espond fr om fear . We’re responsible
enough to ask for help. Sometimes people think that calling on God means
inviting a for ce into our lives that will mak e everything r osy. The truth is, it means inviting everything into our lives that
will for ce us to gr ow—and gr owth can be messy . The
purpose of life is to gr ow into our perfection. Once we call
on God, everything that could anger us is on the way . Why? Because the place wher e we go into anger instead of love, is
our wall. Any situation that pushes our buttons is a situation
wher e we don’t yet have the capacity to be unconditionally
loving. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job to draw our attention to that,
and help us move beyond that point. Our comfort zones ar e the limited ar eas in which we ﬁnd
it easy to love. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job not to r espect those
comfort zones, but to bust them. W e’re not at the
mountaintop until any zone is comfortable. L ove isn’t love
until it’s unconditional. W e’re not e xperiencing who we
really ar e until we e xperience our perfect love. In order to insur e our pr ogress towar d the goal of
enlightenment, ‘the Holy Spirit has a highly individualized
curriculum for everyone.’ Every encounter, every
circumstance can be used by Him for His purposes. He
translates between our perfect cosmic self and our worldly
insanity . He enters into the illusion and leads us beyond it. He uses love to cr eate mor e love, and He r esponds to ‘fear
as a call for love.’The Holocaust was not God’s will, nor is AIDS. Both of
them ar e products of fear . When we invite the Holy Spirit
into these situations, however, He uses them as r easons
and opportunities for us to gr ow into the very level of deep
love thr ough which they ar e eradicated fr om the earth. They
challenge us to love mor e deeply than we have ever loved
befor e.
If we r eally desir e a moral answer to the Holocaust, we
do everything in our power to cr eate a world in which it
could never happen again. As any thinking person knows,
Hitler did not act alone. He could never have done what he
did without the help of thousands of people who, although
they did not shar e his evil vision, did not have the moral
ﬁber to say no to it. What would the Holy Spirit have us do
now? Although we cannot guarantee that a Hitler will never
again be bor n, we can in fact cr eate a world in which, even
if a Hitler appear ed, ther e would be so much love that
hardly anyone would listen or conspir e with him. The spiritual path, then, is simply the jour ney of living
our lives. Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just
don’t know it. The Holy Spirit is a for ce in our minds that
knows us in our perfectly loving, natural state—which we’ve
forgotten—but enters into the world of fear and illusion with
us, and uses our e xperiences her e to r emind us who we ar e.
He does this by showing us the possibility of a loving
purpose in everything we think and do . He r evolutionizes
our sense of why we ar e on the earth. He teaches us to see
love as our only function. Everything we do in our lives will
be used, or interpr eted, by the ego or the Holy Spirit. The
ego uses everything to lead us further into anxiety . The Holy
Spirit uses everything to lead us into inner peace. 5. ENLIGHTENED BEINGS“Enlightenment is but a r ecognition, not a
change at all .”
There are people who have lived on the earth, and per haps
there are people living her e now, whose minds have been
completely healed by the Holy Spirit. They have accepted
the A tonement. In all r eligions, ther e are stories of saints or
prophets who work ed miracles. That is because, when the
mind r eturns to God, it becomes a vessel for His power . The
power of God transcends the laws of this world. Saints and
prophets, by accepting the A tonement, have actualized the
Christ within them. They have been puriﬁed of fearful
thoughts and only love r emains within their minds. These
puriﬁed beings ar e called the Enlightened ones. Light means
understanding. The enlightened “understand.”
Enlightened people don’t have anything we don’t have. They have perfect love inside, and so do we. The diﬀer ence
is that they don’t have anything else. Enlightened beings
—‘Jesus and others—e xist in a state that is only potential in
the rest of us.’ The Christ-mind is mer ely the perspective of
unconditional love. Y ou and I have the Christ-mind in us as
much as Jesus does. The diﬀer ence between him and us is
that we ar e tempted to deny it. He’s beyond that. His every
thought and action stems fr om love. The unconditional love,
or Christ within him, is ‘the truth that sets us fr ee,’ because
it’s the perspective that saves us fr om our own fearful
thoughts. Jesus and other enlightened masters ar e our evolutionary
elder br others. A ccording to the laws of evolution, a species
develops in a certain dir ection until that development is no
longer well adapted for survival. A t that point, a mutation
occurs. Although the mutation doesn’t r epresent the
majority of the species, it r epresents the line of evolutionbetter adapted for the species’ survival. The descendants of
the mutation ar e then the ones to survive. Our species is in tr ouble because we ﬁght too much. W e
ﬁght ourselves, each other, our planet, and God. Our fear -
ridden ways ar e threatening our survival. A thor oughly
loving person is lik e an evolutionary mutation, manifesting a
being that puts love ﬁrst and thus cr eates the conte xt 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 r est of us
our evolutionary potential. They point the way . Ther e is a
diﬀer ence between a wayshower and a crutch. Sometimes
people claim they don’t need a crutch lik e Jesus. But he’s
not a crutch; he’s a teacher . If you want to be a writer, you
read the classics. If you want to mak e great music, you
listen to music composed by gr eat musicians who have
gone befor e. If you’r e studying to be a painter, it’s a good
idea to study the gr eat masters. If P icasso came into your
room while you wer e lear ning to draw and said, “ Hi, I have a
couple of hours…would you lik e some hints?” would you say
no? So it is with spiritual masters: Jesus, Buddha, or any
other enlightened being. They wer e geniuses in the way
they used their minds and hearts, just as Beethoven was a
genius with music, or Shak espear e a genius with words. Why not lear n from them, follow their lead, study what they
were doing right? A Course in Miracles  uses traditional Christian
terminology, but it uses it in very non-traditional ways. Words lik e Christ, Holy Spirit, salvation, Jesus, etc., ar e used
for their psychological rather than r eligious signiﬁcance.
_OceanofPDF.com_A_Return_to_Love_-_Marianne_Williamson.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        OceanofPDF. comA Return to Love
Reﬂections on the Principles of A COURSE IN
MIRACLES
Marianne Williamson
“Be not afraid, but let your world be lit by miracles. ”
—A Course in Miracles
 
OceanofPDF. com 
 
 
 
 
For both my fathers, 
who art in Heaven. OceanofPDF. comCONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Foreword to the New Edition
Preface
Introduction
Part I. Principles
1. Hell
2. God
3. You
4. Surrender
5. Miracles
Part II. Practice
6. Relationships
7. Work8. Body
9. Heaven
Endnotes
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
OceanofPDF. comA C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
This new edition of A Return to L ove is possible because of
the book’s popularity since 1992. F or that, my deepest
thanks to Oprah W infrey. Her enthusiasm and gener osity
have given the book, and me, an audience we would never
otherwise have had. Many thanks as well to my literary agent, Al L owman. Because of him I started the book, and because of him I
ﬁnished it. Andr ea Cagan also did much to help bring this
book to completion. Her contribution was enor mous. Thanks
to Car ol Cohen, A drian Zackheim, Mitchell Ivers, and all the
others at HarperCollins who helped pr oduce this new
edition. F or my friends Rich Cooper, Nor ma F erarra, David
Kessler, and V ictoria P earman, my gratitude is deep and
abiding. Thanks to every person who has attended my lectur es
since I began giving them. Thanks to my par ents for all they’ve given me, and to my
daughter for bringing a sweetness to my life that soars way
beyond wor ds. And most of all, thanks to all the many people who have
read A Return to L ove since it was ﬁrst published and shar ed
with me such powerful testimony of its value their lives. Their support for my eﬀorts means mor e to me than I can
express on this page.
Marianne Williamson
Who is the author of the book "A Return to Love"?
The book is about the practice of love as a strength and not a weakness, and how to apply its principles to daily life.
What is the main theme of the book "A Return to Love"?
The author believes that God is love and that we are all one, and that our individual and collective pain is a result of our separation from God.
What is the author's perspective on the concept of God?
The author states that the ego is a fearful thought and that we must let go of our fearful thinking and replace it with love.
What is the author's message about the ego and fear?
The author believes that the Holy Spirit is a force within us that guides us towards love and helps us overcome fear and negativity.
What is the author's perspective on the concept of the Holy Spirit?