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A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles (Paperback)
by Marianne Williamson
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Spirituality, Self help |
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A Return of Love offers a life-affirming approach to spiritual and personal growth. Powerful healing message in the form of poetry. |
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Author: Marianne Williamson
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Pub. in: April, 1996
ISBN: 0060927488
Pages: 336
Measurements: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00348
Other information: Reissue edition
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- Awards & Credential -
The #1 New York Times Bestseller |
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- MSL Picks -
The spiritual journey is the relinquishment - or unlearning - of fear and the acceptance of love back into 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…
The goal of spiritual practice is full recovery, and the only thing you need to recover from is a fractured sense of self. (Marianne Williamson)
During the 1960s, Helen Schucman, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, was told by an inner voice to transcribe a three-volume work called A Course in Miracles. Before long study groups had formed all over the country to interpret this program of spiritual psychotherapy. This book is one teacher's interpretation of this document.
Marianne Williamson proclaims how the principles of Hell, God, You, Surrender, and Miracles form a spiritual practice with ramifications that give meaning to relationships, work, body, and Heaven. At the outset, she notes: "Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here. The spiritual journey is the relinquishment, or unlearning, of fear and the acceptance of love back in our hearts." We can become miracle workers, according to Williamson, once we let our lives be unspooled in love. Living the good life has nothing to do with accumulating possessions or status or power. It has to do with serving others, expanding the fund of love in the universe.
Williamson believes that the positive messages of A Course in Miracles have special appeal to the Baby Boom generation which has expended far too much energy on fear, addiction, selfishness, and greed. A Return To Love, which was an almost instant bestseller when it was originally released and rose to the #1 slot on the New York Times list, is a landmark book in the spiritual renaissance of the 1990s and new millennium. It clearly has struck a chord by pointing the way to a spiritual path for a wayward prodigal generation.
Williamson is tremendously skilled at putting the principles of A Course in Miracles into understandable terms, which makes this book a dynamically easy and beautiful read.
Target readers:
Anyone on a spiritual path.
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Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential
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An internationally acclaimed lecturer and the bestselling author of A Return to Love, The Healing of America, A Woman’s Worth, Enchanted Love, and Illuminata, among other works. Marianne Williamson has done extensive charitable organizing throughout the country in service to people with life-challenging illnesses; and is the founder of The Global Renaissance Alliance, a nonprofit grass-roots organization dedicated to introducing spiritual principles into our political discourse.
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From Publisher and
Back by popular demand - and newly updated by the author - the mega- bestselling spiritual guide in which Marianne Williamson shares her reflections on A Course in Miracles and her insights on the application of love in the search for inner peace.
Williamson reveals how we each can become a miracle worker by accepting God and by the expression of love in our daily lives. Whether psychic pain is in the area of relationships, career, or health, she shows us how love is a potent force, the key to inner peace, and how by practicing love we can make our own lives more fulfilling while creating a more peaceful and loving world for our children.
First published in 1992, this book integrates spiritual principles drawn from A Course in Miracles with personal growth and interpersonal relations, to teach us not only how to realize our divine nature, but how to embody that nature in human form. Williamson writes in the Preface that her book "is about the practice of love, as a strength and not a weakness, as a daily answer to the problems that confront 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 pain is in the area of relationships, health, career, or elsewhere, love is a potent force, the cure, the Answer.” Love is the answer, she tells us, to our relationships with "money, the body, work, sex, death, ourselves, and one another."
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Part 1
"There is no place for hell in a world whose loveliness can yet be so intense and so inclusive it is but a step from there to Heaven."
Those passages with double quotation marks are quoted directly from A Course in Miracles. Those passages with single quotation marks are paraphrased interpretations of that book. A complete listing of citations to A Course in Miracles appears beginning on p. 301. - M.W.
The Darkness
"The journey into darkness has been long and cruel, and you have gone deep into it."
What happened to my generation is that we never grew up. The problem isn't that we're lost or apathetic, narcissistic or materialistic. The problem is we're terrified.
A lot of us know we have what it takes - the looks, the education, the talent, the credentials. But in certain areas, we're paralyzed. We're not being stopped by something on the outside, but by something on the inside. Our oppression is internal. The government isn't holding us back, or hunger or poverty. We're not afraid we'll get sent to Siberia. We're just afraid, period.
Our fear is free-floating. We're afraid this isn't the right relationship or we're afraid it is. We're afraid they won't like us or we're afraid they will. We're afraid of failure or we're afraid of success. We're afraid of dying young or we're afraid of growing old. We're more afraid of life than we are of death.
You'd think we'd have some compassion for ourselves, bound up in emotional chains the way we are, but we don't. We're just disgusted with ourselves, because we think we should be better by now. Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking other people don't have as much fear as we do, which only makes us more afraid. Maybe they know something we don't know. Maybe we're missing a chromosome.
It's become popular these days to blame practically everything on our parents. We figure it's because of them that our self-esteem is so low. If only they'd been different, we'd be brimming with self-love.
But if you take a close look at how our parents treated us, whatever abuse they gave us was often mild compared to the way we abuse ourselves today. It's true that your mother might have said repeatedly, "You'll never be able to do that, dear." But now you say to yourself, "You're a jerk. You never do it right. You blew it. I hate you." They might have been mean, but we're vicious.
Part 2
Our generation has slipped into a barely camouflaged vortex of self- loathing. And we're always, even desperately, seeking a way out, through growth or through escape. Maybe this degree will do it, or this job, this seminar, this therapist, this relationship, this diet, or this project.
But too often the medicine falls short of a cure, and the chains just keep getting thicker and tighter. The same soap operas develop with different people in different cities. We begin to realize that we ourselves are somehow the problem, but we don't know what to do about it. We're not powerful enough to overrule ourselves.
We sabotage, abort everything: our careers, our relationships, even our children. We drink. We do drugs. We control. We obsess. We co-depend. We overeat. We hide. We attack. 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.
Part 3
I remember, years ago, having an image in my mind that frightened me terribly. I would see a sweet, innocent little girl in a perfect white organdy apron, pinned screaming with her back against a wall. A vicious, hysterical woman was repeatedly stabbing her through the heart with a knife.
I suspected that both characters were me, that they lived as psychic forces inside my mind. With every passing year, I grew more scared of that woman with the knife. She was active in my system. She was totally out of control, and I felt like she wanted to kill me.
When I was most desperate, I looked for a lot of ways out of my personal hell. I read books about how our minds create our experience, how the brain is like a bio-computer that manufactures whatever we feed into it with our thoughts. "Think success and you'll get it," "Expect to fail and you will," I read. But no matter how much I worked at changing my thoughts, I kept going back to the painful ones.
Temporary breakthroughs would occur: I would work on having a more positive attitude, get myself together and meet a new man or get a new job. But I would always revert to the patterns of self-betrayal: I'd eventually turn into a bitch with the man, or screw up at the job.
I would lose ten pounds, and then put them back on in five minutes, terrified by how it felt to look beautiful. The only thing more frightening than not getting male attention, was getting lots of it. The groove of sabotage ran deep and automatic. Sure, I could change my thoughts, but not permanently. And there's only one despair worse than "God, I blew it." - and that's, "God, I blew it again."
My painful thoughts were my demons. Demons are insidious. Through various therapeutic techniques, I'd become very smart about my own neuroses, but that didn't necessarily exorcise them. The garbage didn't go away; it just became more sophisticated. I used to tell a person what my weaknesses were, using such conscious language that they would think, "Well, obviously she knows what her patterns are, so she won't do that again."
But oh yes, I would. Acknowledging my patterns 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 before I'd ruined a situation completely. I would say the exact words that would make the man leave, or hit me, or make someone fire me, or worse. In those days, it never occurred 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-religious garbage category. 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.
I once attended a twelve-step meeting where people were asking God to take away their desire to drink. I had never gone overboard 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 occurred to me that, just as with any other addictive behavior, maybe a power greater than myself could turn things around. Neither my intellect nor my willpower had been able to do that.
Understanding what occurred when I was three years old hadn't been enough to free me. Problems I kept thinking would eventually go away, kept getting worse every year. I hadn't emotionally developed the way I should have, and I knew it.
Somehow, somewhere, it was as though wires deep inside my brain had gotten crossed. Like a lot of other people in my generation and culture, I had gotten off track many years before, and in certain ways just never grew up. We've had the longest post-adolescence in the history of the world. Like emotional stroke victims, we need to go back a few steps in order to go forward. 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 cute enough, or smart enough, or talented enough, or clever enough - and if nothing else worked, I could call my father and ask for money. But finally I got myself into so much trouble, that I knew I needed more help than I could muster up myself. At twelve- step meetings, I kept hearing it said that a power greater than I could do for me what I couldn't do for myself. There was nothing else to do and there was no one left to call. My fear finally became so great, that I wasn't too hip to say "God, please help me."
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| View all 11 comments |
Teresa Honeycheck (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
Praise to this book! I was just not expecting to have it change my life! I walked into the bookstore looking for something to help me with my occasional destructive behavior and prayed to be led to the right one. I picked this edition up, sat on the floor, and was totally taken aback with just the introduction! I devoured the book in a short time and have decided to take a second run at a much slower pace. This book helped me to put "my purpose" and my self destructive behavior in a much clearer light. My husbands tells me he has definitely seen a change in my personality. I know I've changed - I feel it - I feel wonderful! |
Andrew Parodi (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
This book is wonderful. I love Marianne's stories, particularly about her upbringing at the hands of an "eccentric Jewish father." "I come from a dysfunctional family," Marianne writes, "But who doesn't? This world is dysfunctional."
I have given this book as a gift twice, and I love Marianne's audio tapes upon which this book is based. Marianne Williamson is very direct and very strong. Her thinking is very clear. However, I would have to say that this book is for beginners on the path of the Course. The Course is a very demanding spirituality that makes us take stock of all our beliefs and eventually finds them to all be lacking. Further, the Course is founded on a non-dual view of God which many comment is quite similar to the Vedanta. Marianne does not tackle any of these more "abstract" themes of the Course in this book. The result is that the metaphysics of the Course do not always come vividly clear in this book. But that doesn't take away from the appeal of this book.
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Tim Burness (MSL quote), UK
<2006-12-31 00:00>
This book is packed with profound and practical spiritual truths. Marianne Williamson is writing with deep compassion and obviously has considerable first-hand experience of the principles she's writing about.
The basic message here is that we are all perfect expressions of love, and that the energy of love and God is all there is. Anything else is an illusion. All the judgments of oneself and others, feelings of superiority and inferiority and so on fall away if one chooses a path of unconditional surrender to God's will, that being the truth of who one is. Many practical examples of how to apply this approach are presented. I found the chapters on relationships and work particularly interesting.
As someone who struggled to get to grips with the original A Course in Miracles in the 1980s, I thank Marianne Williamson for giving us a more accessible version of the same powerful truths. As with the original text, some people (e.g. me!) may be a bit uncomfortable with some of the use of Christian terminology, but God and God's love are being re-defined here, in a similar fashion to Neale Donald Walsch's extraordinary Conversations With God books. Masterful stuff!
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Lisa Brown (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
I first discovered this book 2 years ago. I specifically say discovered, for it's like unearthing a treasure. I can't begin to express the impact this book made upon my life & continues to do so. Williamson explains in vivid detail how thoughts & perception can literally alter your life. Happiness isn't something we're innately in contact with, it requires cultivation, something we actively choose every moment of everyday. Anguish & suffering is a part of the human condition, but it doesn't have to consume your life. Often- times modern society is so consumed with success, competition, and acquiring material things, we forget the concept of joy is also a part of the human condition. We have a right to anticipate it, but it doesn't just saunter up & plop in your lap. It's labor intensive. I found concrete steps on how to redirect my energies & thoughts, and eventually my reality. What value does life hold if we can not love, permit ourselves to be loved, & be joyful? This book is the ultimate "how to" improve your consciousness book. I refer to it every time I feel a bit blue. It's really my blueprint of reaffirming or correcting my thought patterns. I've highlighted points crucial for my life & refer when necessary. Most importantly it works without fail. That is indeed the true litmus test. I also strongly recommend Williamson's various cassette lecture series. If you're weary because of some negative things you may have read about Williamson I urge the reader to disregard them. Truthfully I don't care if she has some inconsistencies in her life, don't all humans? You're not moving into her home, you just want to benefit from some profoundly wise & inspiration advice. The basic truth is, the principles she details quite simply work. I am forever grateful to her & have purchased this book for my friends. If you desire to live & not just exist, this is a great gift for yourself & loved ones. Enjoy. |
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