Meaning doesn’t lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren’t love – the money, the car, the house, the prestige – we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It’s not that they’re bad. It’s that they’re nothing.
Light is to darkness what love is to fear; in the presence of one, the other disappears. All the darkness in my life – the fears, neuroses, dysfunctions, and diseases – are not so much things as the absence of things. They represent not the presence of a problem but rather the absence of the answer. And the answer is love. All fearful manifestations disappear in the presence of love.
Making another person feel guilty will never build unity or goodwill; only blessing, not blaming, can do that. All judgment does is to shut people down emotionally and psychologically.
Where you hadn’t yet dealt with your shadows, you manifested shadowy situations. Broken parts of you encountered broken parts of others.
Similarly, if we want to be rid of fear, we cannot fight it but must replace it with love.
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.
Love not only makes a crisis endurable; it makes it transformable.
According to A Course in Miracles, this separation from God first happened millions of years ago. But the important revelation, the crux of the Course, is that in reality it never happened at all.
Jesus lived within this world of fear, and perceived only love. Every action, every word, every thought was guided by the Holy Spirit instead of the ego. He was a thoroughly purified being. To think about him is to think about, and so to call forth, the perfect love inside ourselves.
I didn’t know that a miracle is just a shift in perception.
A certain amount of desperation is usually necessary before we’re ready for God.
God knows our crooked places that need to be made straight, the wounds in our hearts that fester for years unhealed, the broken pieces of our lives that seem beyond repair. And He who is the author of miracles has infinite desire as well as power to heal them all.
We’re affected by other peoples’ lovelessness only to the extent to which we judge them for it. Otherwise we are invulnerable to the ego, as the Son of God is meant to be.
I said to myself, “Marianne. Next time you’re down on your knees, why don’t you just stay there?
The irony is that the opposite is true: available people are the ones who are dangerous, because they confront us with the possibility of real intimacy. They might actually hang around long enough to get to know us. They could melt our defenses, not through violence but through love. This is what the ego doesn’t want us to see. Available people are frightening. They threaten the ego’s citadel. The reason we’re not attracted to them is because we’re not available ourselves.
By striving to be the best we can be, we create the internal blueprint by which we do the best we can do. On a soul level, we want to work, we want to create, we want to be productive and serve others and share our gifts with the world.
Your job is to allow the Holy Spirit to remove the fearful thinking that surrounds your perfect self, just as excess marble surrounded Michelangelo’s perfect statue.
Sometimes, in fact, it was the people who loved us the most who felt it was their responsibility to train us to struggle.
Eastern religions tell us that if we go for God, all that is not authentically ourselves will drop.
God has lit your mind Himself, and keeps your mind lit by His Light because His Light is what your mind is.