~A Return to Love~

When we are born, we were programmed perfectly.  We had a natural tendency to focus on love.  Our imaginations were creative and flourishing, and we knew how to use them.  We were 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 reached a certain age, looked around, and the enchantment was gone?

Because we were taught to focus elsewhere, we were taught to think unnaturally. We were taught a very bad philosophy, a way of looking at the world that contradicts who we are.

We were taught to think thoughts like competition, struggle, sickness, finite resources, limitation, guilt, bad, death, scarcity, and loss.  We began to think these things, and so we began to know them.  We were taught 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 not based on love, began pounding in our ears the moment we hit 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 into our hearts. 

……………………..

Love isn’t seen with the physical eyes or heard with physical ears.  The physical senses can’t perceive it; it’s perceived through another kind of vision.  Meta-physicians call I 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 knowing or thinking.  Love is the intuitive knowledge of our hearts.  It’s a “world beyond” that we all secretly long for.  An ancient memory of this love haunts all of us all the time, and beckons us to return.

Love isn’t material. It’s energy. It’s the feeling in a room, a situation, a person.  Money can’t buy it.  Sex doesn’t guarantee it.  It has nothing at all to do with the physical world, but it can be expressed nonetheless. We experience it as kindness, giving, mercy, compassion, peace, joy, acceptance, non-judgment, joining, and intimacy.

Fear is our shared lovelessnes, our individual and collective hells. It’s a world that seems to press on us from within and without, giving constant false testimony to the meaninglessness of love.  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.  The world we knew as children is still buried within our minds.  I once read a delightful book called The Mists of Avalon.  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.  Our childlike self is the deepest level of our being.  It is who we really are and what is real doesn’t go away.  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 that Avalon is behind them.

And that’s what a miracle is: a parting of the mists, a shift in perception, a return to love...."

Excerpt from A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson

Giving Up Jugement...

“Judgment is not an attribute of God.”

A Course in Miracles tells us that whenever we are contemplating attacking someone, it is as though we are holding a sword above their head.  The sword, however, doesn’t fall on them but on us.  Since all thought is thought about ourselves, then to condemn another is to condemn ourselves.

How do we escape judgment?  Largely through a reinterpretation of what we’re judging.  A Course in Miracles describes the difference between a sin and an error.  ‘A sin would mean we did something so bad that God is angry at us.’  But since we can’t do anything that changes our essential nature, God has nothing to be angry at. 

Only love is real.  Nothing else exists.  ‘The Son of God cannot sin.  We can make mistakes,’ to be sure, and we obviously do.  But God’s attitude toward error is a desire to heal us.  Because we ourselves are angry and punishing, we have concocted the idea of an angry, punishing God. We are created in God’s image, however, and not the other way around.   

As extensions of God, we are ourselves the spirit of compassion, and in our right minds, we don’t seek to judge but to heal.  We do this through forgiveness.  When someone has behaved unlovingly- when they yell at us, or lie about us, or steal from us-they have lost touch with their essence.  They have forgotten who they are.  But everything that someone does, says the Course, is either ‘love or a call for love.’  If someone treats us with love then of course love is the appropriate response.  If they treat us with fear, we are to see their behavior as a call for love.

The American prison system illustrates the philosophical and practical difference between the choice to perceive sin or to perceive error.  We see criminals as guilty and seek to punish them.  But whatever we do to others, we are doing to ourselves.   

Statistics painfully prove that our prisons are schools for crime; a vast number of crimes are committed by people who have already spent time in prison.  In punishing others, we end up punishing ourselves.  Does that mean we’re to forgive a rapist, tell him we know he just had a bad day and send him home? Of course not.  We’re to ask for a miracle.   

A miracle here would be a shift from perceiving prisons as houses of punishment to perceiving them as houses of rehabilitation.  When we consciously change their purpose from fear to love, we release infinite possibilities of healing.

Forgiveness is like the martial arts of consciousness.  In Aikido and other martial arts, we sidestep our attacker’s force rather than resisting it.  The energy of the attack then boomerangs back in the direction.  Forgiveness works in the same way.  When we attack back, and defense is a form of attack, we initiate a war that no one can win.  Since lovelessness is not real, we’re not at the effect of it in ourselves or others.  The problem, of course, is that we think we are.  In seeking a miracle, we don’t take part in life’s battles, but rather we are asking to be lifted above them.  The Holy Spirit reminds us that the battle is not real.

“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” means “Relinquish the idea of vengeance.”  God balances all wrong, but not through attack, judgment or punishment.  Contrary to how it feels when we’re lost in the emotions that tempt us to judge, there’s no such thing as righteous anger.  When I was a little girl, I would fight with my brother and sister, and when my mother came home she would be annoyed at us for arguing.  One of us would always say, ‘They did it first.”  It actually doesn’t matter who “did it first.” 

Whether you’re attacking first or attacking back, you’re an instrument of attack and not of love.

Several years ago I was at a cocktail party where I got into a very heated debate about American foreign policy.  Later that night, I had a kind of waking dream.  A gentleman appeared to me and said, “Excuse me, Miss Williamson, but we thought we should tell you: In the cosmic roll call, you are considered a hawk, not a dove.”

I was incensed. “No way, “I said indignantly. “I’m totally for peace.  I’m a dove all the way.”

“I’m afraid not,” he said.  “I’m looking on our charts, and it says very clearly right here: Marianne Williamson, warmonger.  You’re at war with Ronald Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, the CIA, in fact the entire American defense establishment.  No, I’m sorry.  You’re definitely a hawk.”

I saw, of course, that he was right.  I had just as many missiles in my head as Ronald Reagan had in his.  I thought it was wrong for him to judge communists, but I thought it was okay for me to judge him. Why? Because I was right, of course!

I spent years as an angry left-winger before I realized that an angry generation can’t bring peace…Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it.  As Gandhi said, “We must be the change.” What the ego doesn’t want us to see is that the guns we need to get rid of first are the guns in our own head…” 

excerpt from A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson