A Return to Love / Marianne Williamson..

Çoook daha önce okumuş olmayı dilediğim kitapların en sonuncusuna dair post’umla karşınızdayım :) Kendisi 1994’te ilk baskısını yapan ve hatta Türkçe ilk basımı da 1998 yılına denk gelen (‘Sevgiye Dönüş’ adıyla Akaşa Yayınları’ndan çıkmış) ‘A Return to Love’ aslında ‘A Course in Miracles’ adlı bir (tuğlanın, zira 1000’in aşkın bir sayfa sayısına sahip) kitabın temel alındığı, ki iyi ki öyle yapıldığı bir kitap. Sanırım en kabataslak girişi bu şekilde yapabilirim :) İyi ki öyle dedim çünkü olay hem kitabın çok kalın olmasından, hem de tamamen Hristiyan öğretici çerçevesinde dilini kurgulamış olması. Türkçesi olmadığı gibi, dilinin bir nevi eski İngilizce tarzında ve dediğim gibi aşina olmadığımız (en azından benim) bir dini terminolojiye sahip olması açısından, şahsen başlamayı henüz göze alamadım :) İyi ki burada yineliyorum çünkü Marianna W.’ın da kitabın girişinde dile getirdiği ve ben de tüm benzer öğretilerde aynı kapıda olayı karşıladığım üzere, terminolojiden ve hele ki dini terminolojiden bağımsız olarak ele kanaatindeyim. Hepsinin temel amacının, ruhun yolculuğu esnasında aynı özden çıkan ve aynı noktaya ulaştırmayı hedefleyen öğretileri ele alması açısından kelimelerden bağımsız olarak ve o kavramı, kendi inancımız çerçevesinde değerlendirmek yerinde bence. Öyle ki yazardan ve kitaptan haberim, Judith Malika Liberman’ın etkilendiği yazarlar-kitaplar başlıklı Instagram paylaşımları sayesinde oldu. (Kucak dolusu minnetle ona). Ve dediğim gibi, çok utanarak :( bu sene oldu. ve bu öyle bir sene oldu ki, şaka gibi (ki ben de yanıldığımı düşünüp her yerden arattım ancak gerçekti!) ama yazarın ABD başkanlığına adaylığını açıkladığı sene oldu! Evet yanlış okumadınız: kadın şu an ABD başkanlık yarışında! Bir kişisel gelişim kitabının hem de böylesi popüler bir kitabın yazarının nasıl olur da politikaya atıldığını, kitabı okuyunca anlıyor ve çok da özeniyorsunuz, ah bize de nasip et böyle adayları Yarabbim diye. Hatta buna dair bir vurguyu MorAlev post’unda da görünce pek mutlu oldum:

“Kuralların sürekli değiştiği bir dünyada Satürn ve Oğlak’ın yapmaya çalıştıkları tek şey doğruyu yapmaya çalışmaktır. Önümüzdeki üç yıl, ahlak, dürüstlük ve kişisel onur konularında yeniden tanımlanmaya kolektif bir odaklanma olacak.” Ne dersiniz, bu Türkiye’de de yaşanmıyor mu? Ya da dünyada? Marianne Williamson’un (yine bir kadın) ABD’de başkan aday adayı olması ve masaya getirdiği, her gün televizyonlarda tartıştığı bilinçli, yüksek ahlaklı siyaset kavramına dikkatinizi çekerim.”

Kitaba dönecek olursam :) ise böyle bir noktaya gelmiş bir yazarın, bir kadının tam da şu an ihtiyacım olduğu şekliyle her şeyi en öz ifadeyle ortaya koyan bir anlatıma sahip olması inanılmaz iyi geldi bana. Sanki şu ana kadar, özellikle de son bir yılda okuduğum tüm kitapları kocaman bir filtreden geçirircesine, olabilecek en saf hâliyle (en saf öz nedir tahmin edin bakiim ;) ♥) dile getirmesi ve kendinden de örneklerle somutlaştırması çok hoşuma gitti. Bir nevi, o özet geçtiği kitabı (A Course in Miracles) özüne indirgerken veya okuyacak olanlar için esaslı bir giriş yaparken, benim adıma da büyük çerçevenin üzerinde renkli kalemlerle geçmiş oldu. Şahsen okurken çok keyif aldım, içim huzur ve sevgi doldu. Belki çok klişe bir ifade oldu ancak gerçekten öyleydi. (ki hep katılırım, klişeler doğru olduğu için klişedir). Hiç bitsin istemedim. Böyle damla damla okudum, döne döne sindirmeye çalıştım desem yeridir. Hem kavramsal olarak konseptleri en basit-sade şekliyle ifade etmesi, hem de çok nokta atışlı sade yöntemler göstermesi, anlatması çok sevindirdi. Dediğim gibi, terminoloji açısından çevirisi aynı hissi verir miydi hiç bilmiyorum (ki bu noktada onu da almaya niyet ettim hemen) ancak onu da aynı bakışla okuyup kendi kavramsallaştırmamla ele alarak okurdum-okurum diye düşünüyorum ki bu bağlamda aynı kapıya çıkardım-çıkarım kanımca.
Niyet demişken; Meltem Güner’in Niyet Defteri ve niyet olumlamaları (ve tabii ki tüm diğer benzerleri) sizin de bir şekilde gündelik pratiğinize girdiyse, bu kitaptaki bir nevi dua örneklerini benim gibi severek uygulayabileceğinizi düşünüyorum. Dolayısıyla her okuduğum kitaba dair yazdığım yazıda özetle ifade ettiğim aklımda kalanlar-altını çizdiklerim maddeleştirmesi kapsamında :) bu kitapta da en sevdiğim cümlelerden örneklerin yanı sıra aşağıya o örneklerden de birkaç tane ekliyorum ;)
O zaman son olarak ne diyorum: yürü be Marianne, oy atamasam da sana adayımsın gülüm ;) (darısı başımıza)

• In order to love purely, we must surrender our old ways of thinking. For most of us, surrendering anything is difficult. We still think of surrender as failure, as something you do when you’ve lost the war. But spiritual surrender, although passive, is not weak. Actually, it is strong. It is a balance to our aggression. Although aggression is not bad—it is at the heart of creativity—it needs to be tempered by love in order to be an agent of harmony rather than violence. The mind that’s separate from God has forgotten how to check in with love before it saunters out into the world. Without love, our actions are hysterical. Without love, we have no wisdom. To surrender 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. [ss. 20-21]
• When we’re not thinking with love, since only love is real, then we’re actually not thinking at all. We’re hallucinating. .…. But our fear is not our ultimate reality, and it does not replace the truth of who we really are. Our love, which is our real self, doesn’t die, but merely goes underground. .…. The shift from fear to love is a miracle. [s. 23]
• The perfect you isn’t something you need to create, because God already created it. [s. 29]
• What we give to others, we give to ourselves. What we withhold from others, we withhold from ourselves. [s. 36]
• He comes to us in many forms, from a conversation with a friend to a serious spiritual path; from a lyric in a song to an excellent therapist. [s. 38]
• In every situation, the love you’ve given is real, and the love you have received is real. Nothing else exists. Anything other than love is an illusion. In order to escape the illusion and find inner peace, remember that only love in a situation is real. Everything else is a mistake and does not exist. It must be forgotten. We must consciously be willing to let it go. [ss. 38-39]
• Surrendering a situation to God means surrendering to Him our thoughts about it. What we give to God, He gives back to us renewed through the vision of the Holy Spirit. Some people think that if we surrender to God, we’re giving up personal responsibility. But the opposite is true. We’re taking the ultimate responsibility for a situation by being responsible for our thoughts about it. [s. 39]
• The place where we go into anger instead of love, is our wall. Any situation that pushes our buttons is a situation where we don’t yet have the capacity to be unconditionally loving. [s. 39]
• Love isn’t love until it’s unconditional. We’re not experiencing who we really are until we experience our perfect love. …… He uses love to create more love, and He responds to ‘fear as a call for love.’ [s. 40]
• He does this by showing us the possibility of a loving purpose in everything we think and do. He revolutionizes our sense of why we are on the earth. He teaches us to see love as our only function. [s. 41]

• To trust in the force that moves the universe is faith. Faith isn’t blind, it’s visionary. Faith is believing that the universe is on our side, and that the universe knows what it’s doing. Faith is a psychological awareness of an unfolding force for good, constantly at work in all dimensions. [s. 52]
• Internally, the universe supports our survival as well—emotionally and psychologically. The internal equivalent to oxygen, what we need in order to survive, is love. Human relationships exist to produce love. ….. we are threatening our emotional survival. [s. 53]
• We respect the laws of nature in order to survive. And what is the highest internal law? That we love one another. Because if we don’t, we will all die. As surely as a lack of oxygen will kill us, so will a lack of love. [s. 53]
• Faith is an aspect of consciousness. [s. 53]
• We think we’re powerful because of what we’ve achieved rather than because of what we are.  [s. 54]
• The feminine, (surrendered place in us is passive. It doesn’t do anything. The spiritualization process—in men as well as women—is a feminization process, a quieting of the mind.) It is the cultivation of personal magnetism. [s. 55]
• Through a mystical connection between the human and divine, we give birth to our higher Self. [s. 56]
• We learn to trust that the power that holds galaxies together can handle the circumstances of our relatively little lives.  Surrender means, by definition, giving up attachment to results. When we surrender to God, we let go of our attachment to how things happen on the outside and we become more concerned with what happens on the inside. [s. 56]
• Money, sex, power, or any other worldly satisfaction offers just temporary relief for minor existential pain. “God” means love, and “will” means thought. God’s will, then, is loving thought. If God is the source of all good, then the love within us is the source of all good. When we love, we are automatically placing ourselves within an attitudinal and behavioral context that leads to an unfoldment of events at the highest level of good for everyone involved. ….. Our only job in every situation is to merely let go of our resistance to love. [s. 57]
• The truth is, of course, that the more important it is to us, the more important it is to surrender. [s. 58]
• To surrender to God is to accept the fact that He loves us and provides for us, because he loves and provides for all life. Surrender doesn’t obstruct our power; it enhances it. [s. 59]
• To relax, to feel the love in your heart and keep to that as your focus in every situation—that’s the meaning of spiritual surrender. It changes us. We become deeper, more attractive people. [s. 59]
• Surrender means the decision to stop fighting the world, and to start loving it instead. ….. We let down our armor. [s. 61]
• Forgiveness is a full time job, ….. our most noble calling. ….. A radical forgiveness is a complete letting go of the past, in any personal relationship, as well as in any collective drama. [s. 70]
• The only meaning of anything in our past is that it got us here, and should be honored as such. All that is real in our past is the love we gave and the love we received. Everything else is an illusion. ….. The Course teaches, “Give the past to Him Who can change your mind about it for you.” To surrender the past to the Holy Spirit is to ask that only loving, helpful thoughts about it remain in our minds, and all the rest be let go. [s. 71]
• God’s creation holds nothing against us. Our problem is that we don’t believe this. ….. Let us give ourselves permission to begin again. [s. 72]
• “When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. As you see him, you will see yourself. As you treat him, you will treat yourself. As you think of him, you will think of yourself. Never forget this, for in him you will find yourself or lose yourself.” [‘A Course in Miracles’ - s. 91] 
• In every relationship, in every moment, we teach either love or fear. “To teach is to demonstrate.” As we demonstrate love towards others, we learn that we are lovable and we learn how to love more deeply. [s. 92]
• Focusing on their innocence sets us free. [s. 92]
• Forgiveness is the key to inner peace because it is the mental technique by which our thoughts are transformed from fear to love. Our perceptions of other people often become a battleground between the ego’s desire to judge and the Holy Spirit’s desire to accept people as they are. The ego is the great fault-finder. ….. The places in our personality where we tend to deviate from love are not our faults, but our wounds. [s. 93]
• God doesn’t need us to police the universe. ….. Treating someone with compassion and forgiveness is ….. a healed response. [s. 96]
• Relationships are reborn as we let go perceptions of our brother’s past. ‘By bringing the past into the present, we create a future just like the past.’ By letting the past go, we make room for miracles. An attack on a brother is a reminder of his guilty past. In choosing to affirm a brother’s guilt, we are choosing to experience more of it. The future is programmed in the present. To let the past go is to remember that in the present, my brother is innocent. It is an act of gracious generosity to accept a person based on what we know to be the truth about them, regardless of whether or not they are in touch with that truth themselves. [ss. 96-97]
• You forgive them, then, because there’s nothing to forgive. [s. 97]
• The job of the miracle worker is to remain awake. [s. 97]
• It didn’t matter how anyone behaved. Pollyanna had faith in the love she knew existed behind anyone’s fear. ….. Whenever someone says to me, “Marianne, you’re being a Pollyanna,” I think to myself,  “If only I were that powerful.” [ss. 97-98]
• ….. 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. [s. 98]
• ‘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. [s. 98]
• ….. we don’t seek to judge but to heal. We do this through forgiveness. ….. they have lost touch with their essence. …..  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. [s. 99]
• The ego always emphasizes what someone has done wrong. The Holy Spirit always emphasizes what they’ve done right. [s. 101]
• What we think of as people’s guilt is their fear. All negativity derives from fear. When someone is angry, they are afraid. When someone is rude, they are afraid. When someone is manipulative, they are afraid. When someone is cruel, they are afraid. There is no fear that love does not dissolve. There is no negativity that forgiveness does not transform. ….. If we want to be rid of darkness, we must turn on a light. [ss. 102-103]
• ….. it feels as though we’re hurt by what someone else did. But what really has occurred is that someone else’s closed heart has tempted us to close our own, and it is our own denial of love that hurts us. That’s why the miracle is a shift in our own thinking: the willingness to keep our own heart open, regardless of what’s going on outside us. [s. 103]
• The ego says that we can project our anger onto another person and not feel it ourselves, but since all minds are continuous, whatever we project onto another we continue to feel. Getting angry at someone else might make us feel better for a while, but ultimately all the fear and guilt comes back at us. If we judge another person, then they’ll judge us back—and even if they don’t, we’ll feel like they did! [s. 104]
• A Course in Miracles is not about pouring pink paint over our anger and pretending it doesn’t exist. What is psychologically unsound is spiritually unsound. Denial or suppression of emotions is unsound. ….. We mustn’t forget what the Holy Spirit is for. We don’t deny we’re upset, but at the same time we own up to the fact that all our feelings stem from our own loveless thinking, and we’re willing to have that lovelessness healed. ….. Growth is never about focusing on someone else’s lessons, but only on our own. We aren’t victims of the world outside us. As hard as it is to believe sometimes, we’re always responsible for how we see things. [ss. 104-105]
• Relationships are assignments. They are part of a vast plan for our enlightenment, the Holy Spirit’s blueprint by which each individual soul is led to greater awareness and expanded love. Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which He brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth. [s. 107]
• People who have the most to teach us are often the ones who reflect back to us the limits to our own capacity to love, those who consciously or unconsciously challenge our fearful positions. They show us our walls. Our walls are our wounds—the places where we feel we can’t love any more, can’t connect any more deeply, can’t forgive past a certain point. We are in each other’s lives in order to help us see where we most need healing, and in order to help us heal. [s. 109]
• This is why so much anger is often aroused in our closest relationships. We’re projecting onto someone else the rage we feel against ourselves for cutting off our own love. [s. 111]
• The purpose of a special relationship is to teach us to hate ourselves, while the purpose of a holy relationship is to heal us of our self-loathing. In the special relationship, we are always trying to hide our weaknesses. In the holy relationship, it’s understood that we all have unhealed places, and that healing is the purpose of our being with another person. We don’t try to hide our weaknesses, but rather we understand that the relationship is a context for healing through mutual forgiveness. Adam and Eve were naked in the garden of Eden but not embarrassed. [s. 115]
• An intimate romantic love, however, is like taking graduate work toward a Ph.D. in the ways of love, and many of us are hardly out of elementary school. [s. 122]
• Our vulnerability to the myth of “Mr. Right” stems from our glorification of romantic love. The ego uses romantic love for its “special” purposes, leading us to jeopardize our relationships by overvaluing their romantic content. The difference between a friendship and a romance can be illustrated with the image of a long-stemmed rose. The stem is the friendship; the blossom the romance. Because the ego is sensation-oriented, our focus automatically goes to the blossom. But all the nourishment that the blossom needs in order to live, reaches it through the stem. The stem might look boring in comparison, but if you take the blossom off the stem it will not last for long. I shared that image in a lecture once, and a woman then added a lovely thought: A long-term romance is like a rose bush. In any given season, a blossom might fall off. But if the plant is well nourished, then the season will come around again, and new blossoms appear. The disappearance of romantic fervor doesn’t necessarily spell the end of a wonderful relationship, except to the ego. The Spirit can see the seeds of rebirth in any pattern of decline. A Course in Miracles says it is ‘not our job to seek for love, but to seek for all the barriers we hold against its coming.’ [ss. 124-125]
• Looking for Mr. Right leads to desperation because there is no Mr. Right. There is no Mr. Right because there is no Mr. Wrong. There is whoever is in front of us, and the perfect lessons to be learned from that person. [s. 125]
• Part of working on ourselves, in order to be ready for a profound relationship, is learning how to support another person in being the best that they can be. [s. 127]
• What the ego doesn’t want us to see is that our pain doesn’t come from the love we weren’t given in the past, but from the love we ourselves aren’t giving in the present. Salvation is only found in the present. Every moment we have a chance to change our past and our future by reprogramming the present.  [s. 128]
• The miracle-minded attitude here would be, “My parents didn’t tell me I was beautiful. The value of knowing this is that now I’m clearer about why I don’t have an easy time letting anyone else tell me that, and I understand why I haven’t developed the habit of saying it to others. I can develop the habit now. [ss. 128-129]
• Romantically, I realized that I needed to help a man feel more like a man, rather than spend my time worrying about whether or not he was enough of a man. We help another person access their highest by accessing our own. Growth comes from focus on our own lessons, not on someone else’s. [s. 129]
• The fairy tale called “The Frog Prince” reveals the deep psychological connection between our attitudes toward people and their capacity for transformation. In the story, a princess kisses a frog and he becomes a prince. What this signifies is the miraculous power of love to create a context in which people naturally blossom into their highest potential. Neither nagging, trying to get people to change, criticizing, or fixing can do that. The Course says we think we’re going to understand people in order to figure out whether or not they’re worthy of our love, but that actually, until we love them, we can never understand them. What is not loved is not understood. We hold ourselves separate from people and wait for them to earn our love. But people deserve our love because of what God created them to be. As long as we’re waiting for them to be anything better, we will constantly be disappointed. When we choose to join with them, through approval and unconditional love, the miracle kicks in for both parties. This is the primary key, the ultimate miracle, in relationships. [ss. 129-130]
• In looking deeply into ourselves, however, we first have to face what A Course in Miracles calls the ‘ring of fear.’ Before the Prince can save the damsel in distress, he has to slay the dragons that surround her castle. So do we all. Those dragons are our demons, our wounds, our egos, our brilliant ways of denying love to ourselves and others. The ego’s patterns have to be rooted out, detoxed from our system, before the pure love within us can have a chance to come forth. [s. 137]
• A spiritual teacher from India once pointed out that there is no such thing as a gray sky. The sky is always blue. Sometimes, however, gray clouds come and cover the blue sky. We then think the sky is gray. It is the same with our minds. We’re always perfect. We can’t not be. Our fearful patterns, our dysfunctional habits, take hold within our minds and cover our perfection. Temporarily. That is all. We are still perfect sons of God. There has never been a storm that hasn’t passed. Gray clouds never last forever. The blue sky does. [s. 138]
• I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I asked for a miracle, and the following thoughts occurred to me: “You know, Marianne, you’re obsessed, you’re so unreleased about this because you’re not releasing him. Accept him as he is. Release him to be where he wants to be, doing whatever he wants to do with whomever he wants to do it. It’s what you’re not giving that is lacking here. It’s what you’re doing to him that’s causing you pain. Emotionally, your ego is trying to control him, which is why you’re feeling controlled by your emotions.” I got it. I released him in my mind, and then I felt released. [ss. 141-142]
• Someone once told me that the way peacock feathers are made is from peacocks eating thorns. What a beautiful image, that the harsh things we have to digest can contribute to our beauty. But not always. Only when we open up enough to really take in the horror, oddly enough. Resistance and defense only make the error more real, and increase our pain. [s. 170]
• There is no coming to consciousness without forgiving our parents. Whether we like it or not, our mother is our primary image of an adult woman, and our father is our primary image of an adult man. If we hold grievances against our mother, then if we are a man, we will not be able to escape the projection of guilt onto other adult women who come into our lives; and if we are a woman, we will not be able to escape self-condemnation as we grow into our womanhood. If we hold grievances against our father, then if we are a woman, we will not be able to escape projection of guilt onto other adult men who come into our lives; and if we are a man, we will not be able to escape self-condemnation as we grow into our manhood. That’s it. At a certain point, we forgive because we decide to forgive. Healing occurs in the present, not the past. We are not held back by the love we didn’t receive in the past, but by the love we’re not extending in the present. [ss. 174-175]
• Like everything else, money is either holy or unholy, depending on the purposes ascribed to it by the mind. We tend to do with money what we do with sex: we desire it but we judge the desire. It is the judgment that then distorts the desire, turning it into an ugly expression. Because we are ashamed to admit that we want these things, we have insidious ways of pretending that we don’t—such as condemning our desires even as we act them out. The loss of purity is in us, then—not in money or in sex. They are both just canvasses onto which we project our guilt. Just as the fearful mind is the source of promiscuity and sex is merely the vehicle through which it is expressed, so money is not the source of greed. The mind is the source of greed, and money is one of the places where it expresses itself. Both money and sex can be used for holy as well as unholy purposes. Like nuclear energy, the problem isn’t the energy, but how it is applied. ….. My judgmental attitude, masquerading as political consciousness, was actually my ego’s way of trying to make sure that I would never have any money. What we mentally refuse to permit others, we refuse ourselves. What we bless in others, we draw to us. [ss. 194-195]
• We’re not ashamed to admit we’re still in process. The ego emphasizes the goal rather than the process by which we achieve it. This is actually the ego’s way of sabotaging us. [s. 205]
• “I don’t want to do it because I can’t make a living doing it,” is a very weak beam to send into the universe. I lectured on A Course in Miracles for at least two years before it became the source of my income. When I started lecturing, I had no idea it would become my profession. Some things you do for no other reason than because they’re the right thing to do. “I’ll do this because it serves, even if I’m not paid,” is a very high beam. It says to the universe that you must be very serious. And when you get serious about the universe, the universe gets serious about you. [s. 220]
• Love changes the way we think about our disease. Illness comes from separation, says A Course in Miracles, and healing comes from joining. ….., but the last thing a sick person needs is something else to hate about themselves. Healing results from a transformed perception of our relationship to illness, one in which we respond to the problem with love instead of fear. When a child presents a cut finger to his or her mother, the woman doesn’t say, “Bad cut.” Rather, she kisses the finger, showers it with love in an unconscious, instinctive activation of the healing process. Why should we think differently about critical illness? [s. 240]
• If I’m yelling, the person in front of me can react in one of two ways. He can yell back, screaming at me to shut up, but this will tend to make me scream more. Or he can tell me that he cares what my feelings are and he loves me and is sorry that I’m feeling this way, which will tend to quiet me down. Those are our two choices with critical illness. Attacking disease is not a cure. Attacking a disease only makes it yell louder. Healing comes from entering into a conversation with our illness, seeking to understand what it’s trying to tell us. [s. 241]
• We take care of the body as a way of taking better care of the spirit. [s. 256]
• Let’s change our minds. Let’s remember that the longer we live, the more we know, and the more we know, the more beautiful we are. We can actively create a new context for the experience of aging by shifting our outlook towards older people in our society. [ss. 256-257]
• In surrendering our illness to God, we surrender the experience in its entirety, knowing that anything can be used by the Holy Spirit to bring more love into our awareness. ….. whenever we are diagnosed with a critical illness, much of our superficial personal baggage is dropped in the first five minutes. [s. 258]
• You have two choices: You will become harder or you will become softer. You will conclude from this that no one, including God, is ever to be trusted again, or you will allow your heartbreak to so soften you—you will allow your tears to so melt the walls that surround your heart—that you will become a man of rare depth and sensitivity. [s. 259]
• Growth is not always about getting what we think we want. Always, it’s about becoming the men and women we have the potential to be. Loving, pure, honest, clear. [s. 261]
• “But when I’m going on like everything’s great, I’m not being honest with myself,” I can hear the voices say. But the negative self is not our honest self; rather, it is the impostor. We need to be in touch with our negative feelings, but only in order to release them and feel the love which lies beneath them. It’s not so difficult to feel positive feelings or think positive thoughts. The problem is that we resist them. They make us feel guilty. To the ego, there is no greater crime than claiming our natural inheritance. If I’m rich, says the ego, someone else will be poor. If I become successful, someone’s feelings might get hurt. Who am I to have it all? I’ll be a threat and people won’t like me anymore. These are some of the arguments the ego spews into our consciousness. The Course admonishes us to beware the danger of a hidden belief. A hidden belief that many of us hold is that there is something wrong with being too happy. The ego’s religious dogma hasn’t helped. Suffering has been glorified. People have focused on the crucifixion more than the resurrection. But crucifixion without the resurrection is a meaningless symbol. [ss. 272-273]
• It’s easy to have faith when things are going well. But there are times in everyone’s life when we have to fly on instruments, just like a pilot making a landing in low visibility. He knows the land is there, but he can’t see it. He must trust his instruments to navigate for him. And so it is with us, when things aren’t what we’d like them to be. We know that life is always in process, and always on its way to greater good. We just can’t see that. During those times, we rely on our spiritual radar to navigate for us. We trust there’s a happy ending. By our faith, through our trust, we invoke its proof. Resurrection is actively called forth. It represents the decision to see light in the midst of darkness. In the Talmud, … is told how to behave in the midst of dark times. “During the time of the darkest night,” says the Talmud, “act as if the morning has already come.” [ss. 273-274]
• It is not only our right, but in a way, our responsibility to be happy. ….. Happiness is a sign that we have accepted God’s will. It’s a lot easier to frown than to smile. It’s easy to be cynical. In fact, it’s an excuse for not helping the world. [s. 275]
• … I was always too scared to move. And fear, of course, is the great betrayer of Self. The difference between those people “living their potential” and those who don’t, is not the amount of potential itself, but the amount of permission they give themselves to live in the present. [s. 277]
• Love takes more than crystals and rainbows, it takes discipline and practice. It’s not just a sweet sentiment from a Hallmark card. It is a radical commitment to a different way of being, a mental response to life that is completely at odds with the thinking of the world. Heaven is a conscious choice to defy the ego’s voice. [s. 280]
• “conscious contact”… we meditate and pray to build up our mental musculature. The Course says we achieve so little because we have undisciplined minds: we instinctively go into paranoid or judgmental, fearful reactions instead of loving ones. The Course says we are ‘far too indulgent of mind-wandering.’ Meditation disciplines the mind.. [s. 280]
• Our defense against light is always some form of guilt that we project onto ourselves or others. ….. Why the self-hatred? As we’ve already seen, the ego is our mind’s endless need to attack itself. And how do we escape this? ….. God’s will is that we forgive ourselves. [s. 283]
• … we stop denigrating other people, and start blessing them instead. [s. 284]
• “It’s okay for you to want to be beautiful, too.” I said. “In fact, it’s good, and in your own ways you can be. The way to do that is to bless her beauty, praise it, permit it to be so you can permit your own. [s. 284]
• As you bless what she has, you multiply your chances of having it too.” A person who succeeds in any area is only creating more of a possibility for others to do the same. ….. We must learn to think only divine thoughts. [ss. 284-285]
• ….. not just about one person, but about all people. So forgiveness of mankind, of everyone in every circumstance, is our ticket to Heaven, our only way home. [s. 286]
• The way to Heaven is fraught with demons on the side of the road, just as the fairy tale castle is surrounded by dragons. [s. 287]
• The temptation to ‘analyze darkness as a way to light’ is illustrated in some traditional psychotherapeutic models. When used by the ego, psychotherapy is a tool for endless ego investigation: assignment of blame and focus on the past. When used by the Holy Spirit, it is a search for light. It is a sacred interaction in which two people together, consciously or unconsciously, invite the Holy Spirit to enter into their relationship, and to transform painful perceptions into loving knowledge. The only reason we all need therapy so much is because we’ve lost an essential connection to the meaning of friendship. Real relationship of any kind is a form of psychotherapy, as is true religion. [s. 288]