Hi, I'm Marianne Williamson, and this is my book, *A Return to Love*.

I grew up in a middle-class Jewish family, laced with the magical overtones of an eccentric father. In 1965, when I was 13, he took me to Vietnam to show me what war was. He wanted to make sure the military-industrial complex didn't eat my brain and convince me war was okay.

My grandfather was very religious, and sometimes I would go to synagogue with him on Saturday mornings. 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 religious 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 children starve?" I argued, "or infants get cancer, or the Holocaust happen?" I figured I was too well-read now to believe in God. Like a lot of people at that time, late '60s, early '70s, I was pretty wild. Every door marked "no" by conventional standards seemed to hold the key to some lascivious pleasure I just had to have.

I didn't know what to do with my life, though. I remember my parents kept begging me to do something. I went from relationship to relationship, job to job, city to city, looking for some sense of identity or purpose, some feeling that my life had finally kicked in. I knew I had talent, but I didn't know it. What I knew I had intelligence, but I was too frantic to apply it to my own circumstances.

I went into therapy several times, but it rarely made an impact. I sank deeper and deeper into my own neurotic patterns, seeking relief in food, drugs, people, or whatever else I could find to distract me from myself. I was always trying to make something happen in my life, but nothing much happened except all the drama I created around things not happening. There was some huge rock of self-loathing sitting in the middle of my stomach during those years, and it got worse with every phase I went through. By my mid-20s, I was a total mess.

I kept thinking there was something very important that no one was discussing. I believed other people were dying inside too, just like me, but there was some conspiracy not to talk about it. I didn't have the words myself, but I was sure that something was fundamentally off in this world.

One day in 1977, I saw a set of blue books with gold lettering sitting on someone's coffee table in New York City. I opened to the introduction. It read: "This is *A Course in Miracles*. It is a required course; only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum; it means only that you can elect what you want to take 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 removing the blocks to the awareness of Love's presence, which is your natural inheritance."

This time, I was so depressed I didn't even notice the language it used. Traditional Christian terms, but in decidedly non-traditional, non-religious ways. I was struck, as most people are, by the profound authority of its voice. It answered questions I'd begun to think were unanswerable. It talked about God in brilliant psychological terms, challenging my intelligence and never insulting it. The Course seemed to have a basic message: "Relax."

I was confused to hear that, because I had always associated relaxing with resigning. 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 surrender the fight completely. I was surprised, but very relieved. I had long suspected I was not 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 reading the Course and following its workbook exercises, I could feel almost immediately that the changes it produced inside of me were positive. I felt happy. I felt like I was beginning to calm down. I began to understand myself, to get some hook on why my relationships had been so painful, why I could never stay with anything, why I hated my body. And most importantly, I began to have some sense that I could change.

*A Course in Miracles*, a self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy contained in three books, claims no monopoly on God and is a statement of universal spiritual themes. There's only one truth spoken different ways, and the Course is just one path to it out of many. If it's your path, however, you know it. For me, the Course was a breakthrough experience, intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically. It freed me from a terrible emotional pain. Over the next 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 Los Angeles. The group began to grow. Since then, my lecture audiences have grown significantly, here and abroad. I have had the opportunity to see how relevant this material is to people throughout the world. My prayer is that these tapes might help someone. I'm speaking with an open heart; I hope you'll listen with an open mind.

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, struggles, sickness, finite resources, limitation, guilt, bad death, scarcity, and loss. We began to think them, and so we began to know them. We were taught that things like grades, and being good enough, and 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. Fear is what we learned. Love is what we were born with.

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 here nevertheless. This is the meaning of a world of light. We experience it as kindness, giving, mercy, compassion, peace, joy, acceptance, non-judgment, joining, and intimacy.

What is fear? Our world of darkness. It's our shared lovelessness, our individual and collective hells. When fear is expressed, we recognize it is anger, abuse, abuse, disease, pain, greed, addiction, selfishness, obsession, corruption, violence, and war. But love cannot be destroyed; it can only be covered over. The world we knew as children is still buried within our minds. The truth doesn't stop being the truth just because we're not looking at it. Love just became clouded over or surrounded by mental mists. And that's what a miracle is: a parting of those mists, a decision to see love where we had seen fear before. It's a shift in perception, a return to love.

What happened to my generation is that we never grew up. The problem isn't that we're lost or apathetic, too 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 in a free-floating terror. 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 change the way we are, but we don't. We're just disgusted with ourselves because we think we should be better by now. It's become popular these days to blame practically everything on our parents; they're a new scapegoat. 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 they treated us, whatever abuse they gave us was often mild compared to the way we abuse ourselves today. They might have been mean, but we're vicious.

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. We sabotage, abort everything: our careers, our relationships, even our children. We drink, we do drugs, we control, we obsess, we attack. The form of the dysfunction is pretty 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 health, addiction, obsession, compulsion, depression, violent relationships, illness. Projected outward, it becomes our collective health, violence, war, crime, oppression. But it's all the same thing. Hell has many mansions, too.

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 biocomputer that manufactures whatever we feed into it with our thoughts. But no matter how much I worked at changing my thoughts, I kept going back to the painful ones. Temporary breakthroughs would occur, but I would always revert to the patterns of self-betrayal. The groove of sabotage ran deep into 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."

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. 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 a man leave or hit me, or make someone fire me, or worse.

For me, no matter what hot water I'd gotten myself into, I had always thought that I could get out of it. I was cute enough, or smart enough, or talented enough, or clever enough. And finally, if things got too terrible, I could always 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. 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."

So I went through this grandiose, dramatic moment where I invited God into my life. It was terrifying at first, but then I kind of got off on the idea. After that, nothing really felt the way I expected it to. I'd read about people surrendering to God and then feeling this profound sense of peace descend like a mantle over their shoulders. I did get that feeling, but only for about a minute and a half. After that, I just felt like I'd been busted. This didn't turn me off to God so much as it made me respect his intelligence. It implied he understood the situation better than I would have expected. If I was God, I'd have busted me too.

Until this happens, you keep trying all your old tricks, the ones that never did work, but that you keep thinking might work this time. Once you've had enough, you can't do it anymore. You consider the possibility that there might be a better way. That's when your head cracks open and God comes in. More people have felt their heads crack open in some way or another than have admitted it to their friends. These days, it's not an uncommon phenomenon. And this isn't bad news; in a way, it's good. Until your knees finally hit the floor, you're just playing at life, and on some level, you're scared because you know you're just playing.

The moment of surrender is not when life is over; it's when life really begins. It's better to endure one sharp pain, however sharp and however long, than a dull ache of unconsciousness that lasts the rest of your life. How ironic! You spend your whole life resisting the notion that someone's out there who's smarter than you are, and then all of a sudden, you're so relieved to know it's true. All of a sudden, you're not too proud to ask for help. That's what it means to surrender to God.

I'd never realized that depending on God meant depending on love. I had heard it said that God was love, but it had never kicked in for me exactly what that meant. As I began to study *A Course in Miracles*, I saw the following things about God: Number one, He is the love within us. Number two, whether we follow Him (i.e., whether we think with love) is entirely up to us. Number three, when we choose to love, or to allow our minds to be one with God, then life is wonderful. And when we turn away from love, the pain sets in. And that's pretty much it.

When we think with love, then life is peaceful. That's the meaning of heaven. When we think without love, life is painful. That's the meaning of hell. Surrender to God means surrender to love. To surrender to God means to just let go and love. By affirming that love is our priority in any situation, we actualize the power of God. This is not metaphor; it's fact. We literally use our minds to co-create with Him. Through a mental decision, a conscious recognition of Love's importance and our willingness to experience it, we call on a higher power. We set aside our normal habit patterns and allow them to be superseded by a different, gentler mode of perception. That's what it means to let a power greater than we are direct our lives.

The problem with the world is that we have strayed from God, or wandered away from love. According to *A Course in Miracles*, the separation from God first happened millions of years ago, but the important revelation, the crux of the Course, is that in reality, it never actually happened at all. The meaning of the Course can be summed up very simply: One, love is real; it's an eternal creation, and nothing can destroy it. Number two, anything that isn't love is an illusion. Number three, remember this, and you'll be at peace.

*A Course in Miracles* says that only love is real, and that the opposite of love is fear. When we think with love, we're literally co-creating with God. And when we're not thinking with love, since only love is real, then we're not actually thinking at all. When thinking loveless, we're hallucinating. And that's what this world is: a mass hallucination where fear seems more real than love. The way out of fear is through opening the mind to love. Love casts out fear, the way light casts out darkness. And this shift from fear to love is a miracle. Love in your mind produces love in your life; this is the meaning of heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life; this is the meaning of hell.

Our worldly problems are actually just symptoms of the real problem, which is always a lack of love. And that's the story. Adam and Eve were happy until she ate of the knowledge of good and evil. What that means is that everything was perfect until they began to judge, to keep their hearts open sometimes but closed at others. Closing our hearts destroys our peace. It's alien to our real nature; it warps us and turns us into people we're not meant to be. Freud defined neurosis: a separation from self. And so it is. The real self is the love within us; it's the child of God. The impostor self, the fearful one, is called in the Course the ego. The return to love is the great cosmic drama, the personal journey back to sanity and peace.

Let's talk about you. You are a child of God. You were created in a blinding flash of creativity, a primal thought when God extended himself in love. Everything you've added on since is useless. When Michelangelo was asked how he created a piece of sculpture, he answered that the statue already existed within the marble. God had already created the perfect David, Moses. Michelangelo's job, as he saw it, was to get rid of the excess marble which surrounded God's creation. So it is with you. The perfect you isn't something you need to create, because God already created it. The perfect you is the love within you. Your job is to allow God's power to remove the fearful thinking which surrounds your perfect self, just as excess marble surrounded Michelangelo's perfect statue.

To remember that you're part of God, that you're loved and lovable, is not arrogant; it's humble. To think you, or anything else, is arrogant because it implies you're something other than a creation of God. What you do or don't do is not what determines your essential value, your growth perhaps, but not your value. God is totally approving and accepting of you exactly as you are. What's not to like? You were not created in sin; you were created in love.

As children, we were taught to be "good boys and girls," which of course implies when not that already. We were taught we're good if we clean up our room, or we're good if we make good grades. But very few of us were taught that we're essentially good. Very few of us were given a sense of unconditional approval, a feeling that we're precious because of what we are, not what we do. And that's not because we were raised by monsters; we were raised by people who were raised the same way we were. Sometimes, in fact, it was the people who loved us the most who felt it was their responsibility to train us to struggle. Why? Because the world as it is is tough, and they wanted us to make good. So we had to become as crazy as the world is, or we would never fit in here.

What we lost was the sense of our own power, and what we learned was fear: fear that we weren't good enough just the way we are. Fear does not promote learning; it warps us, it stunts us, it makes us neurotic. And by the time we were teenagers, most of us were severely cracked. Our love, our hearts, our real selves were constantly invalidated by people who didn't love us, and by people who did. In the absence of love, we began slowly but surely to fall apart.

In Course terminology, our entire network of fearful perceptions, all stemming from that first false belief in our separation from God and from one another, is called the ego. The word "ego" is used differently here than the way in which it is often used in modern psychology. It is being used here as the ancient Greeks used it: the notion of a small, separated self. It is a false belief about ourselves, a lie about who and what we are. And even though that lie is our neurosis, and living that lie is a terrible anxiety, it's amazing how resistant we are to healing.

The split, the ego, has a pseudo life of its own and, like all life forms, fights hard for its survival. Most of us are so sick of ourselves, in one way or another, it's unbelievable how tenaciously we cling to what we have prayed to be released from. The ego is like a gravitational force field, built up over eons of fearful thinking, which draws us away from the love in our hearts. Being our own mental power, we are turned against ourselves. It's clever, like we are, and smooth-talking, like we are, and manipulative, like we are.

God is a force of love which corrects every mistake the moment it occurs. And the ego is quite literally a mental mistake. God's answer to the birth of the ego was the creation of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God's internal teacher, an eternal communication link with His separated sons. The Holy Spirit mentally guides us back to a perception of reality that is based on love.

Sometimes people think that calling on God means inviting a force into our lives which will make everything rosy. The truth is, it means inviting everything into our lives which will force us to grow. And growth can be messy. In order to ensure our progress, or 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.

God means love, and will means thought. Thought that which is real is only that which stems from loving thought. And neither the Holocaust nor AIDS arose from loving thought. Both of them, rather, are products of fear. When we invite the Holy Spirit into these situations, however, He uses them as reasons and opportunities for us to grow into the very level of deep love through which they are eradicated from the earth. If we had been in that loving space to begin with, these manifestations of darkness would never have occurred.

If we really desire a moral answer to the Holocaust, we do everything in our power to create 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 share his evil vision, did not have the moral fiber to say no to him. What would the Holy Spirit have us do now? Although we cannot guarantee that a Hitler will never again be born, we can, in fact, create a world in which, even if a Hitler appeared, there would be so much love that no one would listen or conspire with him.

Everything we do in our lives will be used or interpreted by the ego or by the Holy Spirit. The ego uses everything to lead us further into anxiety. The Holy Spirit uses everything to lead us back to inner peace. There are people who have lived on the earth, and perhaps there are people living here now, whose minds have been completely healed by the Holy Spirit. In all religions, there are stories of saints or prophets who worked miracles. That is because when the mind returns to love, it becomes a vessel for God's power. The power of God transcends the laws of this world.

Saints and prophets have fully actualized the love of God within them. They have been purified of all fearful thoughts, and only love remains within their minds. These purified beings are called the enlightened ones. Enlightened beings, Jesus and others, exist in a state which is only potential in the rest of us. The Christ mind is merely the perspective of unconditional love. You and I have the Christ, or perfectly loving, mind in us as much as Jesus does. The difference between him and us is that we are tempted to deny it. Jesus and other enlightened masters are our evolutionary elder brothers.

According to the laws of evolution, a species develops in a certain direction until that development is no longer well adapted for survival. At that point, a mutation occurs. A thoroughly loving person is like an evolutionary mutation, manifesting a beingness which puts love first and thus creates the context in which miracles occur. The mutation, the enlightened ones, show the rest of us our evolutionary potential. They point the way.

Sometimes people claim they don't need a crutch like 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 make great music, you listen to music that's been made by great musicians who have gone before. If you're studying to be a painter, it's a good idea to study the great masters. If Picasso came into your room while you were learning to draw and said, "Hi, I have a couple of hours, would you like some hints?" would you say no? So it is with spiritual masters. Jesus, Buddha, or any other enlightened being; they are geniuses in the way they used their minds and hearts, just as Beethoven was a genius with music or Shakespeare a genius with words. Why not learn from them? Follow their lead. Study what they were doing right.

*A Course in Miracles* does not push Jesus on anyone. Although these books came from him, it's very clear that you can be an advanced student of the Course and not relate personally to him at all. *A Course in Miracles* understands our resistances, but it doesn't cater to them. It is time for a huge revolution in our understanding of Christic philosophy, and most particularly in our understanding of Jesus. The Christian religion has no monopoly on Christ, or on Jesus himself. In every generation, we must rediscover truth for ourselves.

Who is Jesus? He is a personal symbol of the Holy Spirit. Having been totally healed by the Holy Spirit, he has become one with Him. He is definitely a "top of the mountain" experience, but that's not to say he's the only one up there. He 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. Jesus was a thoroughly purified being. To think about him is to think about, and so to call forth, the perfect love inside ourselves. He is not an idol; he is an elder brother. He is a gift.

What if we truly believed there is a God, a beneficent order to things, a force that's holding things together without our conscious control? What if we could see in our daily lives the working of that force? What if we believed it loved us and cared for us and protected us? What if we believed we could afford to relax, to trust in the force that moves the universe? Is faith? Faith isn't blind; it's visionary. It means believing that the universe is on our side, and that it knows what it's doing. Faith is a psychological context of an unfolding force for good, constantly at work in all dimensions. Our attempts to direct this force only interfere with it. Our willingness to relax into it allows it to work on our behalf.

The scientific revolution proved that there are objective, discernible laws of physical phenomena. Take gravity, for instance. You don't exactly have faith in the law of gravity; so much as you just know that the law is the law. Now we are learning that there are objective, discernible laws of non-physical phenomena. These two sets of laws are parallel. Externally, the universe supports our physical survival. Photosynthesis in plants and plankton in the ocean produce oxygen, which we need in order to breathe. Internally, the universe also supports our survival. Emotionally and psychologically, the internal equivalent to oxygen, what we need in order to survive, is love. And human relationships exist to produce love. 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.

*A Course in Miracles* tells us that there's no such thing as a faithless person. Faith is an aspect of consciousness. We either have faith in fear or we have faith in love. Faith in the power of the world, or faith in the power of God. When we surrender to God, we surrender to something bigger than ourselves, to a universe that knows what it's doing. When we stop trying to control events, they fall into a natural order, an order that works.

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. The experience of love is a choice we make, a mental decision to see love as the only real purpose and value of any situation. Money, sex, power, any other worldly satisfaction are just temporary relief from minor existential pain.

God's will means 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 which leads to an unfoldment of events on the highest level of good for everyone involved. We don't always know what that unfoldment would look like, but we don't need to. God will do His part if we'll do ours. Our only job in every situation is to merely let go of our resistance to love. What happens then is up to Him. We've surrendered control; we're letting Him lead, and we have faith. He knows how.

Where we have an attachment to results, we tend to have a hard time giving up control. But how can we know what result to try to achieve in a situation when we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow? What do we ask for instead? "Dear God, please let us fall in love," or "Please give me the money." We say, "Dear God, my desire, my priority is inner peace. I want the experience of love. I don't know what would bring that to me. I leave the results of this situation in Your hands. I trust Your will. May Your will be done. Amen."

To relax, to feel the love in your heart, and to keep that as your focus in every situation, that's the meaning of spiritual surrender. It changes us. We become deeper, more attractive people. In the Christic tradition, this is the meaning of becoming as a little child. Little children don't think they know what things mean. In fact, they know they don't know. They ask someone older and wiser to explain things to them. We're like children who don't know but think we do. We're meant to shine. Look at small children; they're all so unique before they start trying to be. Because they demonstrate the power of genuine humility. This is also the explanation of beginner's luck. When we go into a situation not knowing the rules, we don't pretend to know how to figure anything out, and we don't know yet what there is to be afraid of. This releases the mind to create from its own higher power.

Love is a win-win mode, a successful and attractive vibration. We think that success is difficult, and so for us, it is. But we don't have to be struggling all the time. If you think about it, taking the bull by the horns would be a very dangerous thing to do. In fact, ambitious tension actually limits our ability to succeed because it keeps us in a state of contraction, emotionally and physically. It seems to give us energy, but doesn't really. Like the white sugar of mental health, there's a short high followed by a crash. The cultivation of mental rest, or surrender, it's like eating healthy food. It doesn't give us an immediate rush, but over time, it provides a lot more energy.

Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. The world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love. The world. Surrender means the decision to stop fighting the world and to start loving it instead. It is a gentle liberation from pain. We're simply asked to shift focus, to take on a more gentle perception. That's all. God needs just one sincere, surrendered moment when love matters more than anything, and we know that nothing else really matters at all. That's when we create miracles.

According to the Course, miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. They reflect a shift in how we think, releasing the power of the mind to the processes of healing and correction. This healing takes many forms. Sometimes a miracle is a change in material conditions, such as physical healing. At other times, it is a psychological or emotional change. It is a shift, not so much in an objective situation (although that often occurs), as it is a shift in how we perceive a situation. What changes primarily is how we hold an experience in our minds, how we experience the experience. In asking for miracles, we're seeking a practical goal: a return to inner peace. We're not asking for something outside of us to change, but for something inside of us to change. We're looking for a softer orientation to life.

Our self-perception determines our behavior. If we think we're small, limited, inadequate creatures, then we tend to behave that way, and the energy we radiate will reflect those thoughts. No matter what we do. If we think we're magnificent creatures with an infinite abundance of love and power to give, then we tend to behave that way. As we relinquish the fears which block the love within us, we become God's instrument. We become His miracle workers.

There are times when miraculous thinking is not easy because our mental habit patterns are permeated with fear. When that's the case, when our anger, our jealousy, our hurt seems stuck to our hearts and we can't let them go, how do we work miracles then? By asking the Holy Spirit to help us. The Course tells us that we can do many things, but one thing we can never do is to call on the Holy Spirit in vain. We're told that we don't ask God for too much; in fact, we ask for too little. Whenever we feel lost or insane or afraid, all we have to do is to ask for His help. The help might not come in the form we expected, or even thought we desired, but it will come, and we will recognize it by how we feel. In spite of everything, we will feel at peace.

When I was down on my knees completely, and I truly understood that God was a force to be reckoned with, when I finally knew what it meant to feel sincerely humbled, I almost expected to feel His anger. Instead, it was as though I heard Him gently say, "Can we start now?" Until that point, I was hiding from my love, and thus I was hiding from my life.

The return to love is hardly the end of life's adventure; it's the real beginning. *A Course in Miracles* says we think we have many different problems, but we really only have one: denying love is the only problem, and embracing it is the only answer. Love heals all of our relationships to money, the body, work, sex, death, ourselves, and one another. The future can be reprogrammed in this moment. We don't need another seminar, another degree, another lifetime, or anyone's approval in order for this to happen. All we need is a gentler perception. All we have to do is to ask for a miracle, a new beginning, a life unlike the past.

*A Course in Miracles* prides itself on being a practical course with a practical goal: the attainment of inner peace. Forgiveness is the key to inner peace because it is the mental technique by which our thoughts are transformed from fear to love. Forgiveness is selective remembering: a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go. But the ego is relentless. It presents the most subtle and insidious arguments for casting other people out of our hearts.

The miracle worker consciously invites the Holy Spirit to enter into every relationship and deliver us from the temptation to judge and find fault. We ask Him to save us from our tendency to condemn. We ask Him to reveal to us the innocence within others, that we might see it within ourselves. "Dear God, I surrender this relationship to You" means, "Dear God, I surrender to You my thoughts about this person. Let me see their innocence through Your eyes."

It's easy to forgive people who have never done anything to make us angry. People who do make us angry, however, are our most important teachers. They indicate the limits to our capacity for forgiveness. It can be very hard to let go of your perception of someone's guilt if you know that by every standard of ethics, morality, or integrity, you're right to find fault with them. But the Course asks us: "Do you prefer that you be right or happy?" If you're judging a brother, you're wrong, even if you're right.

There have been times when I've had a very hard time giving up my judgment of someone, mentally protesting, "But I'm right!" I thought giving up my judgment amounted to condoning their behavior. But God doesn't need us to police the universe. Our shaking our finger at someone doesn't help them change. If anything, our perception of someone's guilt only keeps them stuck in it. Treating someone with compassion and forgiveness is much more likely to elicit a healed response. People are less likely to be defensive and more likely to be open to correction.

Forgiveness is the choice to see people as they are now. What people said or did in the past is not who they are. By letting the past go, we make room for miracles. *A Course in Miracles* tells us that whenever we're harboring an attack thought towards someone, it is as though we're 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? In large part, 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; the Son of God cannot sin. We can make mistakes, however, and we obviously do. But God's attitude toward error is a desire to heal us, to correct us, not to punish us. 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.

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 we seek to punish them. But whatever we do to others, we're 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 forgive a rapist, tell him we know he just had a bad day, and send him home? Of course not. We 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 of the attacker. Forgiveness works in the same way. When we attack back, and defense is a form of attack, we initiate a war which no one can win.

The ego always emphasizes what someone has done wrong. The Holy Spirit always emphasizes what they've done right. The Course likens the ego to a scavenger dog, which seeks out every scrap of evidence for our brother's guilt and lays it at its master's feet. We can find, and in fact, we will find whatever it is we're looking for in life. Whether we choose to focus on the guilt in people's personality or the innocence in their soul is up to us.

Darkness is merely the absence of light, and fear is merely the absence of love. We can't get rid of darkness by hitting it with a baseball bat because there's nothing to hit. But if we want to be rid of darkness, we turn on a light. Similarly, if we want to be rid of fear, we cannot fight it but must replace it with love.

*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. You don't say, "I'm not angry, really, I'm not. I'm on page 140 of *A Course in Miracles*, and I don't get angry anymore," when inside you're seething. The Holy Spirit tells us, "Don't try to purify yourself before coming to me; I am the purifier."

I was once on my way to giving a lecture on *A Course in Miracles*, and I thought about a woman I knew who I was feeling annoyed with. Very quickly, I tried to hide the thought, as though it wasn't holy enough for me to be thinking at this time. And then it seemed as though a voice in my head said, "Hey, I'm your friend." Remember, the Holy Spirit wasn't judging me for my anger; He was there to help me move past it.

Now, let's talk about an issue in *A Course in Miracles* called special relationships. We can all relate to the desire to find Mr. or Ms. Right. It's almost a cultural obsession. But according to *A Course in Miracles*, the search for the perfect person to "fix us" is one of our biggest psychic wounds, one of the ego's most powerful delusions. It represents a notion in *A Course in Miracles* called the special relationship. Although the word "special" normally implies something wonderful, from a Course perspective, special means different, therefore separate, which is characteristic of ego rather than Spirit.

A special relationship is a relationship based on fear. To God, no one is different or special because no one is actually separate from anyone else. Our desire to find one special person, one part of the sunship who will complete us, is hurtful because it is delusional. It means we're seeking salvation in separation rather than in Oneness. Often, when we think we're in love with a person, *A Course in Miracles* would indicate that we're actually anything but. The special relationship is based not on love but on guilt. The ego tells us that there's some special person out there who will make all the pain go away. We don't really believe that, of course, but then, on the other hand, we really do. Our culture has bred the idea into us through books, songs, movies, advertising, and the conspiracy of other egos.

The special relationship makes other people, their behavior, their choices, their opinions of us, too important. It makes us think we need another person when, in fact, we are complete and whole as we are. Under the Holy Spirit's guidance, we come together to share joy. And the ego's direction, we come together to share our desperation. A relationship is not meant to be the joining of the hip of two emotional invalids. The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather for two complete people to join together for the greater glory of God. And what's our miracle here? It's a shift from thoughts of specialness to

Thoughts of Holiness. Our mental patterns in regard to relationships are so fraught with fear, attack, and defensiveness, guilt, and selfishness, however prettily disguised, that many times we're brought to our knees. And as always, that's a good place to be. We pray for God to guide our thoughts and feelings.

The holy relationship is the old special relationship transformed. In the special relationship, the ego guides our thinking, and we meet in fear, mask to mask. In the Holy relationship, the Holy Spirit has changed our minds about the purpose of love, and we meet Heart to Heart. In the Holy relationship, it is understood that we all have unhealed places, and that healing is the purpose of our being with another person. So 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. That doesn't mean they were physically naked; it means they were emotionally naked, totally real and honest. Yet they were not embarrassed because they felt accepted completely for who they were. The holy relationship is, above all else, a friendship between two brothers. We are not put on this Earth to audition one another, put someone on trial, or use other people to gratify our own ego needs. We're not here to fix, change, or belittle another person. We are here to support, forgive, and heal one another.

How do we find a holy relationship? Not by asking God to change our partners, but by asking God to change our minds. We don't run away from someone we're attracted to because we're afraid of specialness. Anytime there's a potential for love, there's a potential for specialness. I often ask audiences now, "What's the first thing we should do when we're attracted to someone?" And they reply, like a pep rally, "Pray." The prayer goes something like this: "Dear God, You know and I know that I have more potential for neurosis in this area than in any other. Please take my attraction, my thoughts and feelings about this person, and use them for Your purposes. Let this relationship unfold according to Your will. Amen."

Let's talk about romantic love. People ask, "Why can't I find a deep, intimate romance?" The question is understandable because people are lonely. An intimate romantic love, however, is like taking graduate work toward a PhD in the ways of love, and many of us are hardly out of elementary school. When we're not in a relationship, the ego makes it seem as though all the pain would go away. If the relationship lasts, however, it will actually bring much of our existential pain to the surface. That's part of its purpose. It will demand all of our skills at compassion, acceptance, release, forgiveness, and selflessness. Relationships don't necessarily take the pain away. The only thing that takes the pain away is a healing of the things that cause the pain. And it isn't the absence of other people in our lives which causes the pain, but rather what we do with them when they're there.

People ask, "When will my soulmate get here?" But praying for the right person is useless if we're not ready to receive him or her. Our soulmates are human beings, just like we are, going through the normal processes of growth. Our vulnerability to the myth of Mr. and Mrs. 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 is illustrated in the image of a long-stemmed rose. The stem is the friendship; the blossom is the romance. Because the ego is sensation-oriented, our focus automatically goes to the blossom. But all the nourishment which 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.

A Course of Miracles says that it's not our job to seek for love, but to seek for all the barriers we hold against its coming. Thinking that there is some special person out there who's going to save us is a barrier to pure love. We seek desperately for love, but it is that same desperation which leads us to destroy it once it gets here. We don't have to remind God that we'd like wonderful relationships; He's already clear about that. Of course, the Miracles teaches us that a desire is a prayer. The most enlightened prayer isn't, "Dear God, send me someone wonderful," but, "Dear God, make me into someone wonderful."

I spent years waiting for a man to make me feel like a real woman. Only when I realized that my feminine energy is not a man's gift to me, but rather my gift to myself and to him, did the men around me start to demonstrate the more masculine energy I craved. The fairy tale called "The Frog Prince" reveals the deep psychological connection between our attitudes towards people and their capacity for transformation. In this 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.

A Course of Miracles 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.

Of course, a good relationship isn't always crystals and rainbows. It's a birth process, often painful, often messy. A spiritual relationship isn't necessarily one in which two people are smiling all the time. Spiritual means to be, above all else, authentic, real. Work can only occur in the presence of rigorous honesty. We all long for that, but we're afraid of honestly communicating with another person because we think they'll leave us if they see who we really are.

"I know that it's not my job to fix Deborah," he said. "I don't want to change her; I just want out." "Oh, I bet you think that's so spiritual," I said. He looked surprised. I think he thought he'd been a very good student of A Course of Miracles. "You haven't suspended judgment of Deborah," I said. "You've withheld vital information from her, data without which she couldn't function effectively within the relationship. Why don't you just tell her why you're so angry?" Once again, he repeated, "I'm not angry."

"Well," I said, "pretend you're an actor. Go on, Rick. We're safe here. Let her have it." And boy, once he got started, he let it out. He told her that she'd had no concept of how to live with another person. She just did everything however she wanted to do it, and if he wanted to come along, well, that was just great. I don't remember exactly what else he had to say, but there was a lot of communication that just came gushing out once he allowed it to. When he was finished, Deborah, obviously moved, said quietly and sincerely, "I never knew that. Thank you for telling me." They left my office and did not break up their relationship. They told me later it was reborn in that session.

The anger that Rick was feeling was pent-up energy that came from the fact that he had felt it "unspiritual" to share his honest feelings with Deborah as they went along. But it's far better to communicate than to suppress our feelings. Anger is often a result of a series of uncommunicated feelings building up inside of us and ultimately exploding. If anger comes up, it's to be accepted. If we think our partner won't love us if we get angry, then we stop being honest, and the relationship is doomed for sure.

The miraculous perspective is not to pretend we're not angry, but rather to say, "I'm angry, but I'm willing not to be. Dear God, please show me what it is I'm not seeing." There's a way of sharing our upset with people without expressing it as an attack. Instead of saying, for instance, "You made me feel this or that," we say, "This is how I'm feeling. I'm not saying you made me feel this way or that you're to blame. I'm simply sharing this as part of my healing in order to release this feeling and move beyond it." In this way, you see, we're taking responsibility for our feelings, and what could have been seen as an argument, or even avoided as unpleasant, can become an important part of the healing power in the relationship.

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. Now, it's the same thing 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, but temporarily. That's all. We are still perfect children of God. There has never been a storm that hasn't passed. Gray clouds never last forever, but the blue sky does.

So, what are we to do with our fear, our anger, the clouds which cover the love inside us? Relinquish them to the Holy Spirit. He transforms them through love, and never through an attack on another person. It is attack, not the anger itself, which is destructive. Yelling into pillows has become popular in certain circles, and for good reason. Getting the energy up and out is often a good way to shed the physical tension that makes it so difficult to pray when you need it the most. Our anger stands in front of our love. Letting it out is part of the process of relinquishing it, of letting go the barriers we hold against love's coming.

The last thing we ever want to do is to buy into the insidious delusion that spiritual lives and spiritual relationships are always quiet or always blissful. I once knew a man who came on very strong at the beginning of relationships, but couldn't seem to help closing his heart as soon as a woman had opened hers. I've heard that kind of behavior referred to as an addiction to the attraction phase in relationships. This man did not maliciously go around hurting women; he sincerely wanted to be in a genuine, committed relationship. What he lacked were the spiritual skills which would enable him to settle down in one place long enough to build anything solid with an equal partner. As soon as he saw human faults and weaknesses in a woman, he would run.

The narcissistic personality is looking for perfection, which is a way of making sure that love never has a chance to blossom. The initial high of romance can be so heady, so tantalizing, that the real work of growth which needs to follow the initial attraction phase can seem too dull, too hard to commit to. As soon as the other person has seemed to be a real human being, the ego is repelled and wants to find somewhere else to play. At the end of a relationship with someone like this, we feel as though we've taken cocaine. We had a fast, very exciting ride, and it felt at the time like something very meaningful was happening. Then we crashed, realized that nothing meaningful had happened at all. It was all made up. Now all we have is a headache, and we can see that this kind of thing is not good, it's not healthy, and we don't want to do it again.

But there's a reason why we're attracted to relationships like this. We were drawn to the illusion of meaning. Sometimes someone who has nothing to offer in a real relationship can come on like they're offering the world. They were so dissociated from their own feelings that they had become highly skilled performers, unconsciously playing whatever part our fantasies prescribe. But the responsibility for our pain still remains our own. If we hadn't been looking for a cheap thrill, we wouldn't have been vulnerable to the lie.

"How could we have been so stupid?" That's the question we always ask ourselves at the end of these experiences. But once we've had enough of them, we admit to ourselves that we weren't really stupid at all. We suspected this was a drug. The problem was, we wanted it. We saw exactly what the game was with this person, usually within the first 15 minutes, yet we were so attracted to the high we were willing to pretend we didn't see it for just a night, or a week, or however long it lasted. The fact that someone said to us, "You are so fabulous, you're so wonderful, this is such a great date, how lucky a guy is to get to date you," when he's only known you for an hour, is the blinking red light to any thinking woman.

The problem is, the depth of our wounds can be so great, we can be so hungry to hear those words because deep down we suspect that they're untrue. That hearing them can cause us to put aside all rational considerations. When you're starved, you're desperate. Women say to me sometimes, "Marianne, why do I always meet emotionally abusive men?" My answer is usually the following: "The problem is not that you met him; the problem is that you gave him your number." The problem, in other words, is not that we attract a certain kind of person, but rather that we are attracted to a certain kind of person. Someone who is distant, emotionally, might remind us, for instance, of one or both of our parents. "Ah, he's distant and emotionally subtly disapproving. Must be home."

The problem is not just that we are offer pain, but that we are comfortable with that pain. It's what we've always known. The flip side of our dangerous attractions to people who have nothing to offer us is our tendency to feel bored by people who do. Nothing which is alien to our system can enter into us and stay there for long. This is true whether we're talking about something taken into our bodies or into our minds. If I swallow a piece of aluminum foil, my body will regurgitate until the offending object is expelled. If I'm being asked to swallow an idea that doesn't agree with me, then my psychological system will go through the same process of regurgitation in order to expel the defending material.

So if I'm convinced I'm not good enough, then I will have a very difficult time accepting someone into my life who thinks I am. It's the Groucho Marx syndrome of not wanting to like anyone who would want me in their club. The only way that I can accept anyone's finding me wonderful is if I find myself wonderful. To the ego, self-acceptance is death. And that's why we're attracted to people who don't want us. We know they're not into it from the beginning. We pretend to be surprised later when we find ourselves betrayed, when they leave us after an intimate but fairly short stay. They fit perfectly into our ego's plan: "I will not be loved."

Our barriers to love are rarely consciously chosen. They are efforts to protect the places where the heart is bruised. Somewhere, sometime, we felt as though an open heart caused us pain or humiliation. We loved with the openness of a child, and someone didn't care, or laughed, or even punished us for the effort. So in a quick moment, perhaps a fraction of a second, we made a decision to protect ourselves from ever feeling that pain again. We would never again allow ourselves to be so vulnerable. We built emotional defenses. We tried to build a fortress across our heart to protect us from any cold assault. The only problem is, according to A Course of Miracles, that we create what we defend against.

There was a time in my life when I felt I should stop opening up so much to people who didn't honor my heart as I wished it to be honored. I was angry at people who I felt had hurt me, but I denied the anger instead of getting in touch with it and releasing it to God. This is a common trap for Course in Miracles students. If anger isn't brought up into conscious awareness, it has no place to go. It either turns into an attack on self or an inappropriate, unconscious attack on others. I didn't recognize the full extent of my anger, you see, and I thought the lesson to be learned was merely that I shouldn't reveal so much of my honest feelings. I then went into relationships with two strikes against me. I was closed, cold, and armed with hidden emotional knives coming from my unconscious anger. Contrary to whatever front I might have been able to lead with, that's not exactly a delightful package. Between the coldness and the anger, I could turn off the saintly as man, and this, of course, only increased my anger and distrust.

I had often thought about the idea in the Course of Miracles that we think we're angry at what our brother did to us, but that really we're angry because of what we've done to him. Now, I vaguely known that this was true, but it took a lot of uncovering to see just what it was I was doing to these guys who I just knew were doing all these horrible things to me. A Course of Miracles speaks of shadow figures we bring with us from our past. He tells us that we tend to see no one as they are now. We keep blaming someone in the present for something someone else did to us in the past.

Some poor guy would tell me, "Darling, I'm not able to come back Sunday night like I'd planned. I've got to keep working on this project. I might not be back until Tuesday." Well, he might just as well have told me that my cat was dead and the dog was dying. The problem wasn't that the man wasn't coming home for a few days more. The problem was how it made me feel inside to hear him say that. Such a dark despair would run across my heart. I can't begin to tell you. I wasn't relating to that man or that circumstance. I was remembering all the times I had ever felt as though I didn't matter, I wasn't attractive, daddy didn't want to hold me, or someone else didn't want to have sex anymore.

From the Course perspective, this situation was coming up now in order for me to feel that feeling and know that it has nothing to do with the present. I asked for a miracle. "I am willing to see this difference. I am willing to remember who I am." God's answer to my pain was not going to be, contrary to what my ego kept insisting was the only way out of this grief, a man who was going to tell me 60 times a day, "You're fabulous, you're wonderful, I love you, I want you," and then show me just how desirable I really was maybe twice, let's say three times a day. The feeling, in fact, was bound to come ultimately for men who would not, because no one can really tolerate my neediness or the guilt I would try to project onto them in order to get my needs met, or what I thought my needs were.

My real need, of course, was to realize that I didn't need a man to fill what only felt like these insatiable emotional needs. The needs themselves were not real, but merely a reflection of the fact that I thought of myself is less than perfect. Salvation would only come through my relinquishing the thought that I'm not good enough and accepting the fact that I'm all right exactly as I am. By defending against being abandoned, I continue to recreate the conditions in which it was bound to occur. The goal of spiritual practice is full recovery, and the only thing we need recovered from is a fractured sense of self. If we don't already believe it ourselves, another person cannot convince us we're okay. If they act as though we are, we will either not believe them or become so dependent on their reinforcement that we proceed through our dependency to change their mind. Either way, we get to stay convinced that we're not okay.

We awaken to our own perfection through our desire to see the perfection in someone else. Sometimes this is not easy. When I feel the old familiar darkness starting to descend around me, when a man, for instance, makes a comment that I know intellectually is probably innocent enough, but which makes me feel that I'm abandoned or uncared for or rejected. I've been through enough in my life to know that the evil does not lie in what he just said. He is not the enemy; the enemy is this feeling which, in the past, has led me to attack or defend enough to make him feel exactly what I'm afraid he's feeling, but which he really isn't. I can choose to see this differently. This is my wall. This is where we must be very conscious and call on God. We ask for a miracle. "Dear God, please help me. This is it, right here. This is where the sword enters my heart. This is where I blow it every time."

The moment when the pain is greatest is a wonderful opportunity. The ego would prefer that we never look too directly into the pain. When in crisis, there's a good chance we might have a slip and ask Heaven for help. The ego would prefer that we not go into crisis. The ego prefers that a mild river of misery run through the background of our lives, never bad enough to make us question whether our own choices are creating that pain.

The process of miraculous change is twofold: one, I see my error or dysfunctional pattern; two, I ask God to take it from me. The first principle without the second is impotent. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, "Your best thinking got you here. You're the problem, but you're not the answer." The second principle isn't enough to change us either. The Holy Spirit can't take from us what we will not release to Him. He won't work without our consent. He cannot remove our character defects with without our willingness, because that would be violating our free will. We chose those patterns, however mistakenly, and He will not force us to give them up. In asking God to heal us, we're committing to the choice to be healed. This means the choice to change. The ego's resistance to this is intense. It wants us to think that an old dog doesn't change.

The only advantage of knowing that we're angry is so that we can make a choice to be otherwise. We can spend years in therapy, but until the choice is made to do it differently, we just keep going around in circles. Of course, it feels unnatural to be gentle when we've been harsh for many years, but that's no excuse for not trying. A Course in Miracles says that the most effective way to teach a child is not by saying, "Don't do that," but by saying, "Do this." We don't reach the light through endless analysis of the dark; we reach the light by choosing the light. Light means understanding. Through understanding, we're healed.

If the purpose of a relationship is for people to be healed, and healing can only occur when our wounds are revealed, then the ego confronts us with a terrible Catch-22. If I don't show myself, there can be no growth. Without growth, there will ultimately be boredom, which is death for the relationship. But if I do reveal myself honestly, then I might appear unattractive, and my partner might leave. The ego defends against love, not fear.

Pain in relationships can be a perversely comfortable pain, in that it is one we know. We're used to it. I once heard a tape by Ram Dass, a major spiritual teacher, in which he told of seeing a newspaper article about an abused baby being taken away from his mother. As a police matron tried to take the baby, he kept struggling to remain in his mother's arms, although his mother was the one who beat him. She was the one he knew; he was used to her. He wanted to remain in familiar territory. This story illustrates our relationship to our own egos. The ego is our pain, but it is what we know, and we resist moving out of it. The effort it takes to grow out of painful patterns often feels more uncomfortable than remaining within them.

Personal growth can be so painful because it can make us feel ashamed and humiliated to face our own darkness. But the goal of personal growth is the journey out of dark emotional patterns which causes pain to those which causes peace. A Course of Miracles says that at their peak, religion and psychotherapy become one. They both represent experience and are used by the Holy Spirit to celebrate one of the most glorious human potentials: our capacity to consciously change. There is a tendency these days to analyze our neuroses ad infinitum, yet use the analysis itself to justify rather than heal the wound. After a certain point, having seen why a pattern developed (my father was emotionally unavailable, for example, or my mother abused me) and the effect it's had on our personalities (such as, "I don't know how to let a man get close to me now," or "I have a very hard time trusting authority figures"), actual change occurs because of a decision on our part: the decision to heal, the decision to change. It ultimately doesn't matter so much why I become angry or defensive; what matters is that I decide I want to be healed and I ask God to help me.

I was once talking to a friend, and he made some comment about how he was afraid that if we got closely involved, one of us might get hurt. "So, which one of us are you concerned for?" I asked. And he answered, "You." I felt an anticipatory rejection. I was angry, and I told him so. "That's what I mean," he said. "You obviously take things so personally. I don't think I could stand it for long." Now, I knew this was a moment I had repeated in various ways with various people, and I had asked for healing. I was open, so I asked him, "Tell me honestly, how could I have done it differently? What else could I have said?" "You could have just smiled and said, 'Don't flatter yourself.'" I was so excited. I was like an eager actress working with a great director. "That's so great," I said. "Let's go back and do that scene one more time. Say what you said again." "All right," he said. "You know, Marianne, I just have this awful feeling that if we really got together, one of us would get hurt." And I asked him, "Which one of us are you afraid for?" "You." I looked at him and I smiled. "Huh. Don't flatter yourself." He laughed, and I held with excitement. This had been no small awakening. It was a genuine empowerment, a reprogramming of my emotional computer in an area where I had unconsciously gone for an unworkable response pattern every time. I now established a new groove, a new set of possibilities. Initially, I had chosen the way of anger, and now I chose the way of love. I did not have to be the wounded animal; I could choose to identify with my own strength, which was in fact the more natural role for me to play. The only problem was, before this point, I hadn't known how to play it. I had asked, and I had been shown. I could choose to see others through a generous, trusting nature. My brother wasn't here to attack me; he was here to love me. It was completely up to me whether to trust that and love him back.

The issue is the practice of forgiveness. Now, to the ego, love is a crime. It seeks to convince us that forgiveness is a dangerous position which entails an unfair sacrifice on our part. The ego claims that forgiveness can lead us into situations where we become someone's doormat. To the ego, love is weakness. To the Holy Spirit, love is strength.

I was dating someone several years ago when the Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles. The opening ceremonies were a marvelous theatrical presentation, and it was very difficult to get tickets. Because he was involved in the media, Mike was given at the last minute one pass that would enable him to go. Now, I was very excited for him. Everyone in town knew it was going to be a wonderful event. We decided that I would watch the ceremonies on TV, and we would meet afterwards at the conclusion of the broadcast. I started getting dressed and figured that it might be an hour or so before I heard from him, since the traffic around the stadium was bound to be horrendous. So an hour passed, and then another. Well, I thought, he's in TV, so maybe something came up. Another hour, and then another. Midnight came, and midnight went. I took off my clothes and makeup. 2 a.m., then 3. At times I fell asleep; at other times I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling. At times I was livid; at other times I was scared. He was lying in a ditch, dead somewhere. I started calling his house. No answer. I'd call again. No answer. Finally, hardly having slept at all, I called around 6 a.m., and he answered the phone. "Hello," he said. "Mike," I said. "This is Maryann." "Oh, hi. Are you all right?" "Yeah. Why?" "We had a date yesterday." "Did you forget?" "All right," he said. "I had a kind of late night."

Now, I don't know what I said to get off the phone, but I know how I felt, and it wasn't wonderful. I had been stood up, and I felt that kind of blow to my self-esteem that starts in your gut and shoots emotional black ink through all your veins. I was dazed, but I somehow fell asleep, and when I woke up, I had a whole new take on the situation. I just knew that he was going to wake up feeling sorry for how he had acted. He was going to show up at my door any minute, carrying a dozen roses and saying, "Hey, babe, can I take you to lunch?" The scenario in my head called for my being oh so gracious. "Well, of course you can, darling," would come out of my mouth in a sort of girlish melody.

The problem is, he never came. Not only did he not come, he never called. I was in a dark zone. Now, what would A Course of Miracles say about that? I knew I needed a miracle, but all I could come up with were two choices for the ways to deal with this, both of which I tried before in similar situations, and neither one felt good or got me what I wanted. My first choice was to get very angry and let him know it. "Who do you think you are to treat me like that, you son of a..." The problem with that choice was that it would completely invalidate my position. "Well, Marianne's a nice girl, but her temper just doesn't cut it. She's hysterical when she doesn't get her way." The only other choice I could imagine was to forgive him and let it go. But that didn't feel good either. "It's okay, you stood me up, Mike. I don't care. It doesn't matter now." Unconditional love, I could understand, but not unconditional dating. I didn't know what to do, so I asked for a miracle.

I considered the possibility of another possibility. I gave the situation to God and remembered that I need do nothing. From a Course's perspective, the first thing I had to do was deal with my own judgment. There's no exiting a conflict from the level of consciousness of the conflict. As long as I was not at peace, my behavior would carry the energy of my conflict. Conflicted behavior cannot bring peace; it can only produce more conflict. First, I had to deal with my own perceptions. The rest would follow. So I came up with an exercise I would repeat constantly, out loud when I could, and silently when other people were present: "I forgive you, Mike, and I release you to the Holy Spirit. I forgive you, Mike, and I release you to the Holy Spirit."

Now, since Mike didn't call the day after our early morning phone call, or the day after, or the day after that, I had a lot of negative feelings to try to dissipate. My forgiveness chant, a kind of mantra or repeated affirmation of spiritual wisdom, worked like a healing bomb on my emotional turmoil. It deterred my temptation to focus on Mike's behavior and kept me focused on my own feelings instead. My goal was inner peace, and I knew I couldn't have that as long as I perceived him as guilty. In case you're wondering, it took him two weeks to call. By that time, of course, I had forgotten about it. I had continued, however, to say over and over to myself, "I forgive you, Mike, and I release you to the Holy Spirit." So I was high. The constant repetition of my willingness to forgive someone had worked on my brain like a pleasurable drug. I didn't care whether I heard from him again or not.

So one day, I'm in my house, the phone rings, and when I answer it, I hear Mike's familiar voice. "Hey, Maryann." Before I could even think about it consciously, a real warmth and love filled up my chest. "Mike, hi. It's so good to hear from you." And you know, it felt wonderful to hear his voice. "So, how you doing?" he said. "I've missed you." I don't know if I said I'd missed him too; his line was so ridiculous. I probably didn't say anything. But I do remember this: he said, "Well, uh, can I see you?" "When?" "How about tonight?" At that moment, words came out of my mouth that startled me as much as they must have startled him. I said, with a lot of love and kindness, "Mike, I really care for you, and that's not going to change. I'm still your friend, no matter what. But when it comes to dating, we don't seem to do the same dance. So if you want to have lunch sometime, please call. But as far as as a date is concerned, I need to pass." We both mumbled a few more pleasantries and then got off the phone. I was worried that I rejected a brother, but just as that worry came into my mind, I saw an internal image of lots of champagne bottles with their corks popping off in the middle of Heaven. I hadn't rejected a brother; I had simply accepted myself in a whole new way. He had a win, a lesson learned, and a friendship, if he wanted it. And I had a win, too. Forgiveness hadn't turned me into a doormat; it had taught me how to own my yes and own my no, without anger, with dignity and with love.

The Holy Spirit accepts people unconditionally. To the ego, this is an outrageous thought because unconditional love is the death of the ego. "How will people grow if we all go around just accepting each other as we are all the time?" Accepting people as they are has the miraculous effect of helping them improve. Acceptance doesn't prohibit growth; rather, it fosters it. People who are always telling us what's wrong with us don't help us so much as they paralyze us with shame and guilt. People who accept us help us to feel good about ourselves, to relax, to find our way. Accepting another person doesn't mean we never share constructive suggestions, but like everything else, our behavior is not so much the issue as the energy which it carries. If I'm criticizing someone in order to change them, that's my ego talking. But if I've prayed and asked God to heal me of my judgment, and then I'm still led to communicate something, then the style of my sharing will be one of love instead of fear. It will not carry the energy of attack, but rather the energy of support. When we speak to each other, the key to communication is not what we say, but rather the attitude that lies behind what we say.

The miracle worker is a finely tuned, intuitional instrument. A Course in Miracles says we're to listen to our brother first and foremost. If we're supposed to speak, He'll let us know. Jesus sent his disciples out into the countryside and told them to teach the gospel. "What shall we say?" they asked Him. And His answer was, "I'll tell you when you get there." We're not to try to figure out what to say to a brother; it's merely our job to ask the Holy Spirit to purify our perceptions of the other person. From that place within, and only from that place, we will find the power of words and the power of silence which bring the peace of God.

A lot of us wonder about the meaning of marriage. Marriage, like anything else, can be used by either the ego or the Holy Spirit. Its content is never predetermined. It is a living organism which reflects the continuous choices of the individuals involved. Very little is sacred anymore in this world, but one thing must be treated with reverence, or the moral fabric of the world can continues to disintegrate, and that is an agreement between two people. An enlightened marriage is a commitment to participate in the process of mutual growth and forgiveness, sharing a common goal of service to God. Marriage is a more profound commitment than other forms of relationships, such as a couple who are living together, because it's an agreement that while a whole lot of shaking and screaming might go on, no one's going to leave the room. We're both safe to go through whatever upset is called forth from deep within. And whenever we're truthful, there are times when we're upset, but it's safe to do that here; no one is leaving. A marriage is God's gift to a man and to a woman. It is a gift which should then be given back to Him. A man's wife is literally God's gift to him, and a woman's husband is God's gift to her. But God only gives gifts that are meant for everyone. So it is that a marriage is meant to be a blessing on the world because it is a context in which two people might become more than what they would have been alone. The entire world is blessed by the presence of healed people.

Another important issue for the spiritual seeker is our relationship to our parents. 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're 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're 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're a woman, we will not be able to escape projection of guilt onto other adult men who come into our lives. And if we're 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're not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not giving in the present. Present.

There's a lot of talk today about people growing up in dysfunctional homes, but who didn't grow up in a dysfunctional home? This world is a dysfunction. However, there's nothing we've been through or seen or done that cannot be used to make our lives more valuable now. We can grow from any experience, and we can transcend any experience. Forgiveness remains the only path that leads out of hell. Whether we're forgiving our parents, or someone else, or ourselves, the laws of mind mind remain the same. As we love, we shall be released from pain, and as we deny love, we shall remain in pain. Each of us have different fears and different manifestations of fear, but all of us are saved by the same technique: the call to God to save our lives by salvaging our minds. "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for love is the kingdom, and love is the glory, and love is the power, forever and forever."

Now I'd like to discuss with you the way that miraculous principles apply to work and career. Success means we go to sleep at night knowing that our talents and our abilities were used in a way that served people. We're compensated by grateful looks in other people's eyes, whatever material abundance supports us in performing joyfully and at high energy, and the magnificent feeling that we did our bit today to help save the world. The atonement, which is the Holy Spirit's correction of our perception, means putting love first in everything, in business as well as in everything else. You're in business to spread love. Your agency should spread love. Your screenplay should spread love. Your store should spread love. Your life should spread love. The key to a successful career is realizing that it's not separate from the rest of your life, but is rather an extension of your most basic self, and your most basic self is love.

Each of us has a particular part to play in God's plan for salvation. The Holy Spirit's job is to reveal to us our function and to help us perform it. The Holy Spirit asks us, "Is it reasonable to assume that He would assign us a task and then not provide us with the means of its accomplishment?" Some people have said to me, "But I'm afraid to surrender my career to God. I'm a musician. What if He wants me to be an accountant?" My answer to that, of course, is, "Why would He? Wouldn't He rather have someone who understands numbers do that job?" If we're talented at music, that talent is of God. If something makes our hearts sing, that's God's way of telling us it's a contribution He wants us to make. Sharing our gifts is what makes us happy. We're most powerful, and God's power is most apparent on the Earth, when we're happy. A Course in Miracles says that the only real pleasure comes from doing God's will. The only thing to be saved from is our own negativity or fear. The crux of salvation in any area is a shift in our sense of purpose. That shift is a miracle. As always, we consciously ask for it. "Dear God, please give my life some sense of purpose. Use me as..."

An instrument of your peace. Use my talents and abilities to spread love. I surrender my job to you. Help me to remember that my real job is to love the world back to health. Thank you. Amen.

Don't ask God to send you a brilliant career; rather, ask Him to show you the brilliance which is within you. It is the recognition of our brilliance which releases it into expression. Stable, meaningful external effects don't occur until we've experienced an internal stirring, and once an internal stirring has occurred, external effects can't fail to happen. We're all capable of an internal stirring and are, in fact, coded for it. It is our potential for greatness. Achievement doesn't come from what we do, but from who we are. Our worldly power results from our personal power. Our career is an extension of our personality. People who profoundly achieve aren't necessarily people who do so much; they're people around whom things get done. Mahatma Gandhi and John F. Kennedy were both examples of this. Their greatest achievements lay in all the energy they stirred in other people, the invisible forces they unleashed around them. By touching their own depths, they touched the depths within others. That kind of charisma, the power to affect what happens on the earth from an invisible realm within, is that the natural right and function of the Son of God? The new frontiers are internal ones. The real stretch is always within us. Instead of expanding our ability or willingness to go out and get anything, we expand our ability to receive what is already here for us. Personal power emanates from someone who takes life seriously. The universe takes us as seriously as we take it. There is no greater seriousness than the full appreciation of the power and importance of love. Miracles flow from the recognition that love is the purpose of our career.

A Course in Miracles discusses a traditional Christian concept called the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The idea here is that when our lives are given to the Holy Spirit to use for His purposes, new talents emerge within us. We don't get our lives together and then give them to God, but rather, we give our lives to God, and then things start coming together. As our hearts open, our talents and our gifts begin to blossom. A Course in Miracles tells us that all of the children of God have power. We are all special, yet no one has special power. All of us are special, and yet none of us are special. No one has any more potential than anyone else for spreading the love and light of God. The Course in Miracles says that one day all the gifts of God will be shared equally by everyone. We all have the potential for greatness, but it gets plowed out of us at an early age. Fear entered when someone told us there's a first prize, second prize, and third prize, that some efforts deserve praise, but others get us nowhere. After a while, part of us becomes afraid to even try. The only thing we have to give to the world is our own take on it. But the ego argues that this is not enough. It leads us to cover up our simple truth, to try to invent a better one. But the ego isn't protecting us here, although, as always, it pretends to be. It isn't guarding against our making fools of ourselves; it is guarding against our experience of who we really are, the brilliance of expressing it, and the joy which that expression brings to ourselves and others. The natural light of God within us is what the Course refers to as our grandeur. The ego's efforts to embellish our natural state is what the Course refers to as grandiosity. Grandiosity interferes with the clear expression of our power by trying to get us to add something to it. This is actually a ploy by which it thwarts our capacity to express who we really are and accept full recognition from others in return. Once again, separation is the ego's goal.

I used to always be on an emotional roller coaster, feeling I was better than other people, and then feeling I was worse. "I'm better." "No, I'm not as good." "I'm better." "No, I'm not as good." But they're the same mistake. The truth is, we're just like everybody else. Knowing this, that we're no better or worse than anyone else because we're all essentially the same, is a thought lacking in luster only until we fully appreciate what kind of club we belong to. Humanity is a group of infinitely powerful creatures. Our power, however, is in us but not of us. It is God's spirit inside of us which enlightens and enlivens our lives. Of ourselves, we're really no big deal. We're tempted to think that we're more impressive when we put on airs. We're not. Of course, we're rather pathetic when we do that. The Light of Christ shines most brightly within us when we relax and let it be. Our deepest fear, you see, is not that we're inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we're powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? We are children of God. Our playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We're all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God which is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as you let your own light shine, you unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As you're liberated from your own fear, your presence automatically liberates others. A miracle worker is an artist of the soul, and there's no higher art than living a good life. An artist informs the world of what's available behind the masks we all wear, and that's what we're all here to do. The reason so many of us are obsessed with becoming stars is because we're not yet starring in our own lives. The cosmic spotlight isn't pointed at you; it radiates from within you. I used to feel like I was waiting for someone to discover me, to produce me, like Lou Turner at the drugstore. Ultimately, I realized that the person I was waiting for was myself. If we wait for the world's permission to shine, we'll never receive it. How could Leonardo da Vinci not have painted? How could Shakespeare not have written? In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke tells a young writer to write only if he has to. We are to do what there is a deep psychological and emotional imperative for us to do. That's our point of power, the source of our brilliance. Our power is not rationally or willfully called forth; it's a Divine dispensation, an act of grace. It's a mark on our forehead that makes it appear as though God had chosen us. People who appear chosen are people who, on some level of their being, chose God, even if they don't yet know it. There's a light in their eyes; there's something in their beingness which implies a mind attuned to a higher purpose and a heart that sings a sweeter song. Do what you love. Do what makes your heart sing, and never do it for the money. Don't go to work to make money; go to work to spread joy. Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and the Maserati will get here when it's supposed to. God doesn't have a poverty consciousness. He doesn't want us to have a boring life or a boring career. He doesn't have anything against the things of this world. Money isn't evil; it's just nothing like anything else. It can be used for holy or unholy purposes.

When our goal is making money, creativity becomes distorted. If I saw money as the ultimate goal of my teaching career, then I would have to think more about what people wanted to hear and less about what I feel it's important to say. When we're working solely for money, our motivation is getting rather than giving. The miraculous transformation here is a shift from a sales mentality to a service mentality. Until we make this switch, we're operating from ego and concentrating on the things of this world rather than on love. The Bible says it's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle. That's because the attachment to money is a huge temptation to deviate from love. But the moral imperative isn't to block the reception of money into our lives; the challenge is to spiritualize our relationship to it by seeing that its only purpose is to help heal the world. In an enlightened society, rich people will not necessarily have less money; poor people, however, will have much more. The problem, contrary to the ego's perception, is not just the distribution of wealth but the consciousness around it. It behooves us to remember that our money is God's money, and we want to have whatever He wants us to have in order to do with it whatever He wants us to do. God wants us to have whatever material support contributes to our greatest happiness. The ego tries to convince us that God demands sacrifice and that the life of service would be a life of poverty. This is not the case. Our purpose on this earth is to be happy, and it is the Holy Spirit's function to help us achieve that. There's much work to be done for the healing of the world, and some of it costs money. Often, the Holy Spirit sends us money in order that we may perform tasks He wants accomplished on His behalf. A responsible attitude towards money is one in which we're open to whatever comes and trusting that it always will. One of the principles to remember about money is how important it is to pay for services rendered. If we begrudge someone else the right to make a living, we're begrudging ourselves the same. What we give, we will receive, and what we withhold will be withheld from us. And the universe doesn't register the difference between stealing from a huge corporation or stealing from a nice little old lady. The universe will always support our integrity.

Sometimes our debts are so big or confusing that even though we have the best of intentions, the burden and the guilt may be so overwhelming that we just go on automatic, push the bills to the back of the drawer, and try to forget them or change our phone number. The universe will not support that. A big person is not someone who never falls down; a big person is someone who, when they fall, does what it takes to get up again. As always, the issue is to ask for a miracle. Purity of heart creates breakthroughs. The universe is forgiving. If you owe back bills, no matter how much, write a letter to the company or individual owed. Issue an apology, if appropriate, and then let them know that you're setting up a payment plan effective immediately. Send something with the letter. Don't set yourself up for failure. If you can't afford to send $15 a month, that's okay; send five if that's all you can, but send it. Send it regularly and send it on time. It doesn't matter if the bill is $50,000. The Course says there's no order of difficulty in miracles. No matter what the shape of a problem, its form, or its size, a miracle can handle it. Miracles mean that at any moment, we can begin again.

There's one other principle that seems to me very important when dealing with our attitudes towards money. It seems to me that a lot of people hold judgment against wealth. I was once driving around a very wealthy neighborhood in Houston, Texas, and I found myself thinking these thoughts: "These people who live in these big houses work for huge multinational corporations that oppress people throughout the Third World." And then I asked myself, "How do I know what these people spend their money on?" I realized that if I judged other people for money, I would never allow myself to have any. I understood how deeply we're rooted in a prejudice against money, a feeling that money is unspiritual. This is another area where it behooves us to ask God to heal our thoughts. There's nothing spiritual about poverty; there's nothing holy about breadlines, and there's nothing beautiful about what happens in a society when money stops circulating. And so we pray: "Dear God, I surrender to you all my thoughts about money. I surrender to you my debts. I surrender to you my wealth. Open my mind to receive abundantly. Channel your abundance through me in a way that serves the world. Amen."

Goals are an interesting subject these days. Goal setting has become very popular in recent years. Goal setting is a process of focusing the mind on a desired result, but this is actually just another way of trying to get the world to do what we want it to do. It is not spiritual surrender. A Course in Miracles discusses the difference between magic and miracles. Magic is when we focus the mind on a desired manifestation, giving our shopping list to God and telling Him what we want Him to do for us. Miracles are when we ask God what we can do for Him. Miracles shift us from a "get" to a "give" mentality. The desire to get something reflects a core belief that we don't have enough already. As long as we believe there's scarcity inside of us, we'll continue to manufacture scarcity around us because that's our basic thought. No matter what we get, it will never be enough. When our desire is to give instead of get, our core belief is that we have so much abundance we can afford to give it away. The subconscious mind takes its clue from our core beliefs and brilliantly manufactures situations which reflect them. Our willingness to give directs the universe to give to us. The miracle worker's goal in every circumstance is peace of mind.

A Course in Miracles tells us that we don't know what would make us happy; we just think we do. All of us have gotten things we thought would make us happy, and they didn't. The miracle mind of perception would be to make happiness itself our goal and to relinquish the thought that we know what that would look like. We never know what's going to happen in a month or a year from now, and if we got what we wanted now, then perhaps we would be worse off for it later on. Let's say we're going in for a job interview. We want the job very much, and someone might have suggested to us that we should affirm, "I'll be getting the job," making that our goal. As miracle workers, we would make inner peace our only goal. What that does is to direct our mind to focus on all the factors which contribute to our peace and leave everything else out of our conscious consideration. The mind, like the physical eye, is inundated with so many impressions at one time that a built-in sensor mechanism brings focus to our perception. It chooses what we'll notice and what we won't. Making our goal anything other than peace is emotionally self-destructive. If our goal is to get the job, then that's fine if we do. But if we don't get the job, then we'll feel depressed. If we make peace our goal, then if we get the job, that's great. But if we don't, we're still peaceful. A Course in Miracles tells us it's important to set a goal at the beginning of a situation, or it will seem to unfold chaotically. If our goal is peace, we're programmed for emotional stability no matter what happens. The mind will have been directed to see the situation from a peaceful perspective. If we didn't get the job we wanted, it won't matter so much. We'll truly understand that there's something better coming up soon, or that this isn't really the perfect job for us anyway. We'll have faith in God. The miracle is that we will really feel our faith; it won't just be positive goo thrown over our pain. Our emotions flow from our thoughts, and not the other way around.

Another problem with setting specific goals is that they can be limiting. Perhaps we're asking for something good when God's will was that we'd be given something great. Once, when I was lecturing in New York, a young man stood up and asked me about affirmations. At that time, Hill Street Blues was a popular television show. He said, "I've been writing down, '50 times before I go to sleep at night: I have a regular part on Hill Street Blues. I have a regular part on Hill Street Blues.' Are you telling me I shouldn't do that?" I said to him, "You can write those affirmations 50 times before you go to bed at night, and chances are good you'll pull in a part on Hill Street Blues because the mind is very powerful. But for all you know, a year will pass, and an important director will be wanting you for the lead in a major feature film, but they won't be able to get you because you're under contract for a little part on Hill Street Blues." The issue underlying our need to tell God what to do is our lack of trust. We're afraid to leave things in God's hands because we don't know what He'll do with them. It's like we're afraid He'll lose our file. It is a very powerful demon in the racial consciousness which tempts us to think that God's will is that we sacrifice or be poor or be unhappy for His sake. If we're going to set any goal, let us set the goal of being healed of the belief that God is fear instead of love. Remember that our happiness and our function are one. If God is our goal, that's the same thing as saying that happiness is our goal. There's no need to believe that God can't figure out the details or provide for the ways to make it happen.

Another miraculous transformation is the shift from a sales mentality to a service mentality. When we're motivated by the desire to sell, we're only looking out for ourselves. When we're motivated by the desire to serve, we're looking out for others. Since in the realm of consciousness, we only get to keep what we give away, a service mentality is a far more abundant attitude. According to the Course, the teacher of God is generous out of self-interest. The thought system which dominates our culture is laced with selfish values, and relinquishing those values is a lot easier said than done. The journey to a pure heart can be highly disorienting. For years, we may have worked for power, money, and prestige. Now, all of a sudden, we've learned that those are just the values of a dying world. We don't know where to search for motivation anymore. If we're not working in order to get rich, then why are we working at all? What are we supposed to do all day? Just sit home and watch bad TV? Not at all. But thinking so is a temporary phase that many people go through when the values of the old world no longer have a hold on us, but the values of the new don't yet grab our soul. They will. There comes a time, not too long into the journey to God, when the realization that the world could work beautifully if we would give it the chance begins to excite us. Yes, it becomes our new motivation. The news isn't how bad things are; the news is how good they could be, and our own activity could be part of the unfoldment of Heaven on Earth. There is no more powerful motivation than to feel we're being used in the creation of a world where love has healed all wounds. We're no longer ambitious for ourselves but are rather inspired by the vision of a healed world. Inspiration rearranges our energies; it sources within us a new power and direction. We no longer feel like we're trying to carry a football to the finish line, clutching it to our chest and surrounded by hostile forces. We feel instead as though angels are pushing us from behind and making straight our path as we go.

Purity of heart will not make us poor. The exaltation of poverty as a spiritual virtue is of the ego, not the spirit. A person acting from a motivation of contribution and service rises to such a level of moral authority that worldly success is a natural result. Give all your gifts away in service to the world. If you want to paint, don't wait for a grant; paint a wall in your town that looks drab and uninviting. You never know who's going to see that wall. Whatever it is you want to do, give it away in service to your community. At my lectures in Los Angeles, I grew so tired of hearing actors moan about not getting jobs. "Go to hospitals, to retirement homes, to mental institutions," I said. "Put on plays there." If you want to act, act. "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; it was something I was doing simply because it was the right thing to do. When you get serious about the universe, the universe gets serious about you. I never felt the need to advertise much for my lectures. I figured that if they were of genuine interest to people, then people would hear about them. That's not to say that advertising is bad, as long as the motivation for it is to inform people as opposed to manipulating them. Arnold Patent wrote that if you genuinely have something to say, there's someone who genuinely needs to hear it. We don't have to invent an audience so much as we have to hone the message we plan to give them once they get here. Serving three people is as important as serving 300. Once we're clear about how to deal with a small following, a large following will develop automatically, if that would serve the world. Our power lies in our clarity about the role our work can play in the creation of a more beautiful world. The miracle is to think of our career as our contribution, however small, to the healing of the universe.

The ego would have us believe that the world is based on finite resources. This world is but God's world is not. In God's world, which is the real world, the more we give, the more we have. Your having a piece of the world's pie doesn't mean there's less for anyone else, and someone else having a piece of the pie doesn't mean there's less for you. You needn't compete in business or anywhere else. Your generosity towards others is the key to your positive experience of the world. There's enough room for everyone to be beautiful. There's enough room for everyone to be successful. There's enough room for everyone to be rich. It is only our thinking which blocks that possibility from manifestation. The people who have achieved more than you in any area are only a half a step ahead of you in time. Bless them and praise their gifts and blessings, and praise your own. The world would be less rich without their contributions, and it would be less rich without yours. There's more than room for everyone; in fact, there's a need for everyone. As we are healed, the world is healed. Doing anything for a purpose other than love means reliving the split from God, perpetuating and maintaining that split. Every person is a cell in the body of human consciousness. At the moment, it is as though the body of Christ is suffering from cancer. In cancer, a normal working cell decides that it no longer wants to function in contribution to the whole. Instead of being part of the support system of the blood or the liver, the cell goes off and builds its own kingdom. That's a malignancy which threatens to destroy the organism. And so it is with the body of humanity. Everyone's gone off to do their own thing: "My career, my store, my money." We've lost sight of our essential interrelatedness, and this forgetfulness threatens to destroy us. The "my" mentality is the ego; it is the belief in separation; it is our cosmic disease. Taking what we have and devoting it to the restoration of the whole is our salvation and the salvation of the world. Our devotion then becomes our work, and our work becomes our devotion.

And now, let's talk about miracles in health and healing. A friend of mine once told me that we're not punished for our sins, but by our sins. Sickness is not a sign of God's judgment on us, but of our judgment on ourselves. If we were to think that God created our sickness, then how could we turn to Him for healing? In asking for healing, we're not just asking for our own health, but rather, we're asking that the idea of sickness be removed from God's Son's mind. Illness is a sign of separation from God, and a healing is a sign that we have returned to Him. The return to God is merely the return to love.

In his book Quantum Healing, Dr. Deepak Chopra tells a powerful story about the connection between love and physical healing: "An Ohio University study of heart disease in the 1970s was conducted by feeding quite toxic, high-cholesterol diets to rabbits in order to block their arteries, duplicating the effect that such a diet has on human arteries. Consistent results began to appear in all the rabbit groups except for one, which strangely displayed 60% fewer symptoms. Nothing in the rabbits' physiology could account for their high tolerance to the diet until it was discovered by accident that the student who was in charge of feeding these particular rabbits liked to fondle and pet them. He would hold each rabbit lovingly for a few minutes before feeding it. Astonishingly, this alone seemed to enable the animals to overcome the toxic diet. Repeat experiments in which one group of rabbits was treated neutrally while the others were loved came up with similar results. Once again, the mechanism that causes such immunity is quite unknown. It is baffling to think that evolution has built into the rabbit mind an immune response that needs to be triggered by human cuddling."

Studies have shown that cancer patients who attend support groups live, on the average, twice as long after diagnosis as those who don't. What is this psycho-immunological factor which, by now, science knows exists but doesn't know how to identify? That factor is love, or God. Over the last several years, I've counseled many people diagnosed with cancer, AIDS, and other life-challenging illnesses. In 1987, I asked my friend Louise Hay if she would help me start a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people in physical crisis, to be called the Los Angeles Center for Living. In 1989, the Manhattan Center for Living opened in New York City. The center's mission statement is that we provide free, non-medical support services to people dealing with life-challenging illness and grief. On both coasts, we've seen the miracles which occur when people invoke the power of love in the midst of disease and grief.

Does that mean that it's a mistake to take medicine? Absolutely not. A Course in Miracles reminds us that the Holy Spirit enters into our lives at our present level of consciousness. Many of us believe that the doctor in the white coat can heal us with that pill he's giving us. Therefore, says the Course, we should take the pill. But the healing doesn't come from the pill; it comes from our belief. Cancer studies have shown that rates of recovery in patients choosing traditional medical treatment versus those taking a more holistic route are roughly equal. This makes perfect sense because, in neither case, is the recovery the result of the form of cure; it is the patient's mental and emotional interaction with his treatment which activates its healing power. I've led many support groups for people dealing with life-challenging illness where, during the entire session, disease was mentioned only in passing. We attend groups not to grow closer to our disease, but rather to grow closer to the powerful healing which lies within us. Many of the issues which confront us when we are ill are the same issues which confronted us, in one way or another, when we were still healthy, but we didn't deal with them until now. Life goes on when we're ill; it's merely intensified. We tend to handle illness basically the same way we handle everything else in life. We must avoid the temptation to see illness as a block to our capacity to find God and instead use it as a springboard from which we soar into His arms.

An epidemic such as AIDS is a collective heartbreak, pulling millions of people into its painful vortex. But this also means that it brings millions of people to their knees, and as soon as enough of us get there, as soon as love reaches a critical mass, or as the Course says, "enough people become miracle-minded," there will be a sudden breakthrough in consciousness, a rapture, an instantaneous healing. It will be as though millions of us have recognized our lovelessness and asked that we be healed. When the cure for AIDS is finally found, we'll give prizes to a few scientists, but many of us will know that millions and millions of prayers helped it to happen. The connection between body and mind might be new to Western science, but it is not new to Eastern medicine or to the fields of religion and philosophy. The body has an intelligence of its own. As Deepak Chopra writes in Quantum Healing, "Life itself is intelligence writing everywhere on chemicals. We mustn't make the mistake of thinking that the rider and the horse are the same." A spiritual, holistic notion of healing includes treatment not only of the body but of the mind and spirit as well.

Love changes the way we think about our disease. Illness comes from separation, says A Course in Miracles, and healing comes from joining. 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? Cancer and AIDS and other critical illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream, and their message is not "Hate me," but "Love me." Seeing sickness as our own love which needs to be reclaimed is a more positive approach to healing than is seeing the sickness as something hideous. We must get rid of it. Energy cannot be destroyed; it can, however, be miraculously transformed, and that miracle emerges from our own thoughts, our own decision to let go our belief in fear and danger and to embrace instead a view of the world which is based on hope and love. There's certainly nothing to lose; no risk in trying. A Course of Miracles tells us, "The atonement is so gentle; you need but whisper to it and all its power will rush to your assistance and support." God will do His part when we do ours.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that our real identity lies not in our body but in our spirit. Neither is another person's body who they really are either. The body is an illusionary wall which appears to separate us; the ego's chief device in trying to convince us that we are separate from each other and separate from God. Minds are joined, says the Course, but bodies are not. The body of itself is nothing; it cannot forgive, it cannot see, and it cannot communicate. The Course says that when you equate yourself with a body, you will always experience depression. Equating another person with a body will bring up the same anxiety. One of the ways the body can be used to manufacture depression is through loveless sex. Our sexual impulses become canvases onto which we extend our love or project our fear. When sex is of the Holy Spirit, it is a deepening of communication. But when it is of the ego, it is a substitute for communication. The Holy Spirit uses sex to heal us; the ego uses it to wound us. Sometimes we have the thought that sex with another person would cement the bond between us, and instead, it turned out to manufacture more illusion and anxiety than there was before. It is only when sex is a vehicle for spiritual communion, when it is truly loving, that it joins us to another person. Then it is a sacred act. Many spiritual seekers have felt the need to eschew all body-related things, but that is an over-attachment to the physical. Anything used to spread joy and communicate love is a part of God's plan for salvation. A life lived for oneself alone is not liberation but merely another form of bondage. Since we're not bodies, we do not exist in isolation. Living as though we do can only lead to pain.

What is vanity? What is the ego-oriented, neurotic obsession with weight, hair, looks, and sex appeal that has Americans spending billions of dollars a year on products they can't afford and don't really need, and young women falling into dangerous disease patterns in their efforts to be thin? These things are inevitable results of a cultural orientation which leaves out the reality of spirit. Concentration on the body as an end rather than a means in our perception breeds fear: fear that we're not enough, that we're not good enough or attractive enough, fear that they won't like us, fear that we'll lose out in life. There is no way to escape this painful maelstrom without replacing body identification with the memory that we aren't bodies at all, that who we are is the love inside us, and it is that love alone which determines our value. When our minds are filled with light, there's no room for darkness. When we understand who and what we really are, there's no room for pain and confusion.

When I was in my 20s, I had a problem with weight. Not enough of a problem to be called fat, maybe, but enough to keep me miserable. There was a problematic 10 to 15 pounds which I could never shake. Anytime I went on a diet, I ended up gaining weight. This makes sense psychologically because if someone tells us not to think about the Eiffel Tower, we'll think about it all the time. Telling myself not to think about food only made me more obsessed about it. Deprivation is a lousy way to lose weight. I used to pray about my problem and would receive the following guidance: "Eat anything you want." That sounded thoroughly insane to me, but if I tell myself to do that, I thought, then I'll start eating and I'll never stop. To that, my internal guidance responded, "Yes, you will do that at first. You will have to compensate for all the pressure you've been putting on yourself for years. And then you will have had enough. Then you will return to your natural rhythms. Then you will heal." So I let go. I met a woman who had lost a huge amount of weight and told me that she had asked God to do it for her. "I didn't ask that I lose weight," she said. "I just asked that He take this monkey off my back. I didn't care if I was fat; I told Him that if He wanted me to be fat, to make me comfortable with it. I just wanted out of this hell." I decided that it didn't matter how much I weighed; I couldn't take the horror of the obsession anymore. I began to realize that how much I weighed didn't matter; all that mattered was love. And as I got more involved with practicing the Course, I stopped thinking so much about my weight. That was all. And one day, I looked in the mirror and saw that it was gone. What I realized was that my weight had nothing to do with my body but with my mind. I was terrified of people and had unconsciously manufactured a wall around myself to protect me from them. I was terrified, however, because of the love that I myself was not giving. My ego's purpose for the weight was to keep me separate, and until I gave up that purpose, I would never be able to give up the extra pounds. My subconscious mind was merely following instructions. As I began to put my energy into reaching across that wall, when I allowed the Christ to enter my mind, the wall miraculously disappeared.

After learning in the Course that the body isn't important, I wasn't sure why we should exercise or eat well. What I learned was that when I exercise, I actually think less about my body than when I don't. When I don't exercise, I can't help thinking about heavy thighs and a thick waist. Similarly, the point of healthy food is that it supports us in existing the most lightly and energetically within the body. It is heavier, unhealthy food which ties us to the body. We take care of the body as a way of taking care of the spirit. Part of our cultural neurosis has been an appearance of age. Like anything else, age will only transform when we have first accepted it as it is. Many of us think the ego is so terrible, so unappealing, so unsexy, when actually these are just thoughts we have. And so we need to change our minds. Let us 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. We are a cold and uncaring culture in our treatment of older Americans. We have a thought in America that youth is better, and so because we think that it is not because it is an objective truth, but only because it's a thought we carry and manifest as our collective experience. No matter what the illness or addiction or distorted physical expression, its causes are in the mind, and only there can it truly be healed. The greatest power we're given, says the Course, is the power to change our minds. Our physical condition does not determine our emotional condition. The experience of peace comes only from the mind. Peace of mind, says A Course in Miracles, is clearly an internal matter.

Many people ask about death and reincarnation. The Course says that birth is not a beginning but a continuation, and death is not an end but a continuation. Life goes on forever; it always was and always will be. Physical incarnation is just one form that life can take. A Course in Miracles mentions the Great Rays, a concept also found in other metaphysical teachings. The Great Rays are lines of energy which emanate from within each of us on subtler levels than our physical senses yet perceive. Our physical senses reflect our current belief system, and as our belief system expands, so will our senses. There will come a time when we will physically perceive the Great Rays. Some people, such as those who see auras, are already beginning to. Buddha and Jesus and other enlightened masters are often pictured with halos around their heads or lines of light radiating from their hearts. These lines of light and energy are our life force. The body is merely a temporary encasement. Because we do not yet realize this, we think that the death of the body is the death of the person. It is not. The spirit does not die when the body dies. Physical death is like taking off a suit of clothes. To the ego, reality is only what we can perceive physically. But many things which we know to exist cannot be seen with the naked eye: neither atoms, nor protons, nor viruses, nor cells. Scientists are now beginning to recognize a oneness which lies beyond all perceived reality. This oneness is God, and our beingness lies within it. Physical incarnation is a classroom experience, and souls come to the class to learn what we need to learn here. It's much like tuning into a channel on television. Let's say we're all tuned to Channel 4. When someone dies, they're no longer on Channel 4, but that doesn't mean they're not broadcasting; they're now, let's say, on Channel 7 or 8. Cable systems exist regardless of whether or not we have the cable equipment with which to receive them. It is only the arrogance of the ego which would have us believe that what we can't physically perceive must not exist.

People have reported seeing a light exiting through the top of the head of a dying person, and many people have spoken of their near-death experiences where the physical body is let go temporarily. I once met a young woman who had been in a major plane crash. She lost over half the blood in her body, and her legs were almost completely severed. In describing her experience to me, she said, "I died and then came back. It felt seductive, very warm, like a wonderful, motherly love, but I knew I had a choice. I thought of my father, and I knew my death would be unbearable for him, so I fought and came back. But I never cry at funerals anymore," she said. "I can cry for the people who are left here, but I know from my own experience that the people who died are in a wonderful place." Once the Great Rays are registered by our physical senses, the body will seem to be a mere shadow in front of our true selves. When we hear that someone has died, it will merely mean that a shadow has been removed. Death will no longer be perceived as the end of a relationship. When Jesus said, "Death shall be the last enemy," He meant that it shall be the last thing we perceive as an enemy. The problem is not really death, but what we think death is. We will all die. Some of us will take the 9:30, and some of us will be on the 10:07, but we're all headed out. Accepting a healing of our thoughts about what that means is a cornerstone in our transformation from body to spirit orientation. Life is like a book that never ends; chapters close, but not the book itself. The end of one physical incarnation is like the end of a chapter, and on some level, it's a setup for the beginning of another. I once heard a friend say, "My relationship with my father has only improved since his death." A Course of Miracles says that communication does not stop with the destruction of the physical body. True communication rests on more than what is said or heard physically. When someone has died, we must speak with them differently than we did before, but in staying open to the possibility of an eternal life force, we direct our minds to develop the capacity for a transphysical conversation. Writing letters to the person who has died, or having any other kind of conversational experience which broadens our openness to the possibility of life beyond death, stretches our self-imposed mental boundaries. Our dreams and other emotional experiences then become freed from the bondage of our refusal to believe. Sometimes, when someone has died, we say, "This isn't happening; it feels unreal. I feel like they're still here." And that's because they are. Although the ego voices of the world will say, "It's just your imagination," the truth is that it is death itself which is just our imagination. The truth, as God created it, is that death does not exist, and deep in our hearts, we know that this is true.

And what about reincarnation? Technically, reincarnation doesn't exist in quite the way we think of it, simply because there is no linear time. If we have past lives or future lives, then they're all happening at once. Still, it's helpful to be reminded that we have a life separate from the experience of any one physical lifetime. A Course in Miracles has no doctrine. An advanced student of the Course may or may not believe in reincarnation. The only meaningful question is whether a concept is helpful. We are told to ask our own internal teacher for guidance in our thinking about any idea and its use in our lives. In the enlightened world, we will still drop the body, but death will be experienced very differently. This is the way it is written in The Song of Prayer, an extension of A Course in Miracles: "This is what death should be: a quiet choice made joyfully and with a sense of peace, because the body has been kindly used to help the Son of God along the way. He goes to God. We thank the body then for all the service it has given us, but we are thankful too the need is done to walk the world of limits and to reach the Christ in hidden form and clearly seen at most in lovely flashes. Now we can behold Him without blinders in the light that we have learned to look upon again." Life is much more than the life of the body; it is an infinite expanse of energy, a continuum of love in countless dimensions, a psychological and spiritual experience independent of physical form. We've been alive forever; we will be alive forevermore. But the life of the body is an important classroom. It is our opportunity to deliver the world from hell.

Dear God, may Your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Let us remember that Heaven and happiness are the same thing. It is God's will that we be happy, just as it is God's will that we be in Heaven. In asking that God's will be done, we're instructing our minds to focus on the beauty in life, to see all the reasons to celebrate instead of mourn. Usually, we figure out what we think would make us

Happy and then try to make those things happen. But happiness is not circumstance dependent. There are people who have every reason in the world to be happy, who are not. And there are people with genuine problems who are happy. The key to happiness is the decision to be happy.

There's been a lot of talk in the last few years about allowing our feelings. It's an important concept, but one which can be used by the ego for its own purposes. Most of the time when we hear someone say "feel your feelings," they mean feel the negative ones. Feel your pain, feel your anger, feel your shame. But we need support in feeling our positive feelings just as much as we need support in feeling our negative ones. It is the experience of genuine emotion of any kind which the ego resists. We need support and permission to feel our love, to feel our satisfaction, and to feel our happiness. The ego does hidden battle against happiness.

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's no greater crime than claiming our natural inheritance. "If I'm rich," says the ego, "then someone else will be poor. If I become successful, then someone's feelings might get hurt. Who am I to 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.

"Blessed are those who have faith, who cannot see," says Jesus. 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, and by our faith, through our trust, we invoke its proof.

"During the time of the darkest night," says the Talmud, "act as if the morning had already come." The world has taught us we're less than perfect. In fact, we've been taught that it's arrogant to think we're deserving of total happiness. This is the point where we're stuck. If anything comes into our lives—love, success, happiness—which seems like it would be suited to a deserving person, then our subconscious mind concludes it can't possibly be for us. And so we sabotage. Few people have wronged us like we've wronged ourselves. No one has snatched the candy away from us like we've thrown it away from ourselves. We have been unable to accept Joy because it doesn't match who we think we are.

Happiness is a sign that we've accepted God's will. It's a lot easier to frown than to smile. It's easier to be cynical. In fact, it's an excuse for not helping. Whenever people say to me, "Marian, I'm so depressed about world hunger," I say to them, "Do you give $5 a month to one of the organizations that feed the hungry?" The reason I ask is that I've noticed that people who participate in the solution to problems don't seem to find themselves as depressed about those problems as do people standing on the sidelines and doing nothing. Hope is born of participation in hopeful solutions.

We're happy to the extent that we choose to notice and to create the reasons for happiness. Optimism and happiness are the results of spiritual work. In the eyes of God, we're all perfect and we all have unlimited capacity to express brilliantly. I say unlimited capacity rather than unlimited potential because potential can be a dangerous concept. We can use it to tyrannize ourselves, to live in the future instead of the present, to set ourselves up for despair by constantly measuring ourselves against what we think we could be rather than what we are. Potential is a concept which can bind us to personal powerlessness. Focus on human potential remains impotent without a focus on human capacity.

Capacity is expressed in the present. It is immediate. The key to it lies not in what we have inside of us, but rather in what we are willing to own that we have inside of us. There's no point in waiting until we're perfect at what we do, or enlightened masters, or PhDs in life, before opening ourselves to what we're capable of doing now. Of course, we're not as good today as we'll be tomorrow, but how will we ever get to tomorrow's promise without making some sort of move today?

We are the adult generation. We have adult bodies and adult responsibilities and adult careers. What many of us lack, however, is an adult context for our lives, one in which we give ourselves permission to shine, to blossom fully, to show up powerfully in the present without fearing that we're not good enough. Waiting for a powerful future is a way of making sure it never gets here. An adolescent dreams of what will be; an adult takes joy in today.

We're often afraid to do anything unless we know we can do it extremely well. But we get to Carnegie Hall by practicing. I think the reason people don't have hobbies today as much as they did in past generations is because we can't bear to do anything we're not fabulous at. Several years ago, I started taking piano lessons again after having played for many years as a child. Now, Chopin I'm not, but there was so much therapeutic value in just playing. I saw very clearly that you don't have to be a virtuoso at everything you do in order to be a virtuoso at life. Virtuosity in life means singing out, not necessarily singing well.

Most of us feel, on some level, like racehorses chomping at the bit, pressing at the gate, hoping and praying that someone might open the door and let us run out. We feel so much pent-up energy, so much locked-up talent. We know in our hearts that we were born to do great things, and we have a deep-seated dread of wasting our lives. But the only person who can free us is ourselves. And most of us know that. We realize that the locked door is our own fear. But we've learned by now that, on some level, our terror of moving forward is so great that it would take a miracle to free us. The ego would like us to be born with great potential and die with great potential.

A miracle frees us to live fully in the present, to release our power, and to claim our glory. Hell is what the ego makes of the present. Heaven is another take on it altogether. God exists in eternity. The only point where eternity meets time is in the present. The present is the only time there is. A miracle is a shift in thinking from what we might have done in the past or should be doing in the future to what we feel free to do right here, right now. A miracle is a release from internal bondage. Our capacity for brilliance is equal to our capacity to forget the past and forget the future. That's why little children are brilliant. They don't remember the past and they don't relate to the future. If we could be as little children, the world would finally grow up.

One of the exercises in the Course workbook reads: "The past is over. It can touch me not." Forgiving the past is an important step in allowing ourselves the experience of miracles. 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 past is merely a thought we have. It is literally all in our minds. 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. "All your past except its beauty is gone," says the Course, "and nothing is left but a blessing."

What we are left with, then, is the present. The only time where miracles happen. We place the past, and the future as well, into the hands of God. The biblical statement that "time shall be no more" means that we will one day live fully in the present without worrying about either past or future. The universe provides us with a clean slate in every moment. God's creation holds nothing against us. Our problem is that we don't believe this. Let us ask forgiveness, not of God, who has never condemned us, but of ourselves for all we think we did and did not do. Let us give ourselves permission to begin again.

The Course points out that there's no way for us to know what's going to happen tomorrow, or the next day, or five years from now. Only the ego speculates about tomorrow. In heaven, we place our future in the hands of God. The Holy Spirit returns our minds to total faith and trust that should we live with fully open hearts today, tomorrow will take care of itself. As Jesus said in The Sermon on the Mount: "Be you not anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow shall be anxious for itself."

In the present, we have the opportunity to break the continuity of past and future by asking the Holy Spirit to intervene. This is the miracle we want: a new life, a new beginning. We desire a life untainted by any darkness of the past, and being entitled to miracles, we're entitled to that full release. This is what it means to say that Jesus washes us clean of our sins. Sins are misperceptions. Sin is an archery term; it means you missed the mark. When we think a loveless thought, that's what we have done. We have missed the mark. And Jesus completely removes all loveless thoughts. We relinquish any thoughts of judgment of anyone or anything which holds us to the past. We relinquish any thoughts of attachment which keep us grasping at the future.

In the Course, we're taught to pray: "Let miracles replace all grievances." The world of the ego is a world of constant changes, ups and downs, darkness and light. Heaven is a realm of constant peace because it is an awareness of a reality which lies beyond change. The world of time is not the real world. The world of eternity is our real home.

Love takes more than crystals and rainbows. It takes discipline and practice. It's not just a sweet sentiment from a Hallmark card. It's a radical commitment to a different way of being, a mental response to life which is completely at odds with the thinking of the world. Heaven is a conscious choice to defy the ego's voice. The more time we spend with the Holy Spirit, the greater our capacity to do this, to focus on Love.

A Course in Miracles tells us that five minutes spent with the Holy Spirit in the morning, doing the workbook of A Course in Miracles or any other serious practice of prayer or meditation, guarantees that He will be in charge of our thought forms throughout the day. The Course says we achieve so little because we have undisciplined minds. We instinctively go into paranoid or judgmental fear, fearful reactions, instead of loving ones. Knowing that about ourselves, we ask the Holy Spirit for help.

When we meditate, our brains literally emit different brain waves. We receive information at a deeper level than we do during normal waking consciousness. A Course in Miracles says that its workbook is the crux of the Course because the exercises train our minds to think along the lines the text sets forth. It's not what we think that is the transformative issue so much as how we think. Meditation is time spent with God in silence and quiet listening. It is the time during which the Holy Spirit has a chance to enter into our minds and perform His divine alchemy. What changes because of this is not just what we do, but who we are.

In the workbook of A Course in Miracles, which is a 365-day set of psychological exercises, we're given a very specific curriculum for relinquishing a thought system based on fear and accepting instead a thought system based on love. Each day, we're given a specific thought to focus on. Eyes closed for a specific amount of time. We're even told in the introduction to the workbook that we don't have to like the exercises. We might even be hostile to them, but we should just do them. Our attitude doesn't affect their efficacy in any way. If I'm lifting weights at the gym, I can either love the experience or hate it, but it doesn't really matter. All that affects my body is whether or not I lift the weights. And so it is with meditation also.

As with physical exercise, the effects of meditation are cumulative. When we go to the gym and work out for an hour, we don't really see any change in our bodies at the end of that hour. But if we go every day for 30 days, then we do see a change. And so it is with meditation. And sometimes we're not the ones who can see the change as much as others can. We might not even be aware of how much the quality of our energy, the invisible emanations of our minds, affect our environment and the people within it. But others do, and they respond accordingly.

Spiritual practice supports the development of personal power. Spiritually powerful people are not necessarily people who do so much as they are people around whom things get done. At the highest level of our being, we don't do anything. We are at rest while the power of God works through us. Meditation is a profound relaxation. The ego's frantic voice, its vain imaginings, are burned away.

We all have within us a direct radio line to the Voice for God. The problem is the radio is full of static. In our quiet times, we spend with God, the static melts away. We learn to hear the small, still voice for God. In heaven, that is the only voice we hear. That is why we're happy there.

Our defense against light is always some form of guilt, which 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? Through the acceptance of God's will. God's will is that we be happy. God's will is that we forgive ourselves. God's will is that we find our place in heaven now. It is not our arrogance, but our humility, which teaches us that who we are is good enough and what we have to say is valid. It is our own self-hatred which makes it difficult for us to consistently support and nurture our other people, because supporting others amounts to supporting ourselves.

When I speak publicly, there's a palpably different feeling between audiences who want me to win and those who are sitting back, signaling, "Oh yeah, show me." The former is a context in which I am invited to shine, and the latter is one in which I am challenged to shine. Isn't life challenging enough? Is human kindness so lightweight?

So, one of the conditions of heaven, and heaven is a psychological awareness, is that we profoundly accept ourselves and others. We know that good is infinite. We can all have it all. We're at peace with who we are. We give each other room to breathe. How jealous some people are of other people's success! They work at tearing it down. They criticize, they gossip. It will be very difficult for us to find heaven without a fundamental shift in our attitudes towards success. In heaven, everyone is allowed to be successful.

If you think of all the ways in which the world is full of pain and suffering, the end of the world as we know it wouldn't be such a horrible thing. Liberation, as the Course points out, is not a breaking out, but a gentle melting in. In the end days, we will not escape through vehicles that soar into outer space, but through vehicles which soar into inner space. Those vehicles are our healed minds, guided by the Holy Spirit.

What does heaven look like? Most of us have only had tiny glimpses, but those glimpses were enough to keep us always hoping to go back. The Course says there's an ancient melody we all remember, always beckoning, always calling. Heaven is our home. It's where we came from. It's our natural state. Unfortunately, we embark upon endless searches for what we cannot find—one person, one circumstance which holds the key to heaven. But heaven is within us, having nothing ultimately to do with the thoughts of someone else, and having everything to do with what we choose to think ourselves—not just about one person, but about all people. And so, forgiveness of mankind, of everyone and every circumstance, is our ticket to heaven, our only way home.

Our goal is God. Nothing short of that goal will bring us bliss, and it is bliss to which we are entitled. Talk of bliss is not simplistic. As we've already seen, there's no getting to heaven without acknowledging hell—not its ultimate reality, but its reality for us while we remain in this illusion. A Course in Miracles is not proposing emotional denial and suppression of darkness as a way to light. It is a psychotherapeutic process by which darkness is brought to light, not the other way around.

In the enlightened world, psychotherapy, guided by the Holy Spirit, will certainly have a place. No one can escape from illusions unless he looks at them. The Course says, "For not looking is the way they're protected." The way to heaven is fraught with demons on the side of the road, just as the fairy tale castle is surrounded by dragons. The work toward enlightenment often entails a painful and not very pretty arousal of the worst of which we're capable, made plain to ourselves and others, in order that we might consciously choose to release our personal darkness. But without a commitment to light, a conscious intent to go for heaven, we remain enamored of darkness, too tempted by its complexities.

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, psychotherapy 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 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.

In the world to come, couples will use psychotherapy more and more frequently, not as counseling, but as a maintenance procedure. There was a time when most people saw therapy as something you only did if you were crazy. Now we see it as a valuable tool for staying sane. So it is that couples will come to see the value in a constant and consistent formal evaluation of their thoughts and feelings as they walk together toward God.

Just outside of heaven's gate, there's a lot of action. As we stand before the gate, uncertain of which way to go, impelled to love and yet so trained to fear, we need to realize the sacred responsibility which has been placed in our hands. The Course says, "And so you walk toward heaven or toward hell, but not alone." We choose for everyone. For many years to come, the decisions we make today, individually and collectively, will determine whether the planet goes to hell or goes to heaven. One thing, however, is sure: we are the transitional generation. The critical choices lie in our hands. Future generations will know who we were. They will think of us often. They will curse us, or they will thank us.

We are poised at heaven's gate. In our minds, we left there millions of years ago. Today, we're returning home. We're a prodigal son generation. We left home, and now there's an excitement in the air because we're back. We did everything to violate love of ourselves and others before a life of wholesomeness began to attract us. That's not our shame, but our strength. There are certain doors we don't have to go through anymore, not because of false moralism, "not to," but because we opened them already, and we know they lead nowhere. Oddly enough, this gives us a kind of moral authority. We speak from experience. We've done the dark side, and now we're ready to move on. We're attracted to the light. We're an interesting generation. We just don't see that about ourselves.

When I first realized what a decisive time this is, that the decisions made on this planet in the next 20 years will literally determine whether or not mankind survives much longer, I was afraid for the world. The fate of the world is left up to us. "Not us!" I thought. "Anyone but us! We're spoiled brats, morally bankrupt." But when I looked more closely, what I saw surprised me. We're not bad; we're wounded, and our wounds are simply our opportunities to heal. There is a holy return in the air today. Despite the pain, despite the conflicts, there is a cautious excitement, a hope for heaven.

Before we awaken, the Holy Spirit transforms our bitter dreams into happy ones. Here are some reflections on a few happy dreams that could possibly bring the whole world a little closer to Heaven.

First, there needs to be a mass collective forgiveness of what went before, in order for our culture to have a chance to heal itself and begin again. Some of the best and the brightest that America has to offer are dropping through the cracks because they can't shake their pasts. How sad for America that anyone who has had too much sex or drugs in their past, for instance, is too scared to enter politics for fear of being crucified for their personal histories. The important thing about our past is not what happened, but what we have done with what happened. Anything can contribute to our being a more compassionate person now, if we choose. The meaningful question is never what we did yesterday, but what we learned from it and are doing today.

Secondly, how wonderful it would be for America if we were to make amends in our hearts and to the world for the violation of our own most sacred principles in dealing with nations such as Vietnam. We are a great country, and like all nations, we've made our mistakes. Our greatness lies not in our military might, but in our holding to sacred internal truths. A big nation, like a big individual, admits when it has made mistakes, atones for its errors, and asks God and man for a chance to begin again. This would not make us look weak to the rest of the world; it would make us look humble and honest, traits with which there is no greatness.

And another one: Wouldn't it be wonderful? Abraham Lincoln paved the way. If we could just make one huge, simple apology to all black Americans on behalf of our ancestors: "We apologize for bringing you here as slaves from your native home. We recognize the pain which this terrible violation has caused generations of good people. Please forgive us. Let us begin again." And then, the least we can do is to build a lasting memorial to American slaves. White Americans have more of an internal need to do this than do blacks. Blacks will find it much easier to forgive us when we have asked for forgiveness. All of these things, of course, apply as well to the American Indians. Until this atonement, there will be little room for a miraculous healing of our racial tensions. The parades for our soldiers coming home from the Persian Gulf represented, in part, an attempt to rectify our harsh treatment of Vietnam veterans. I just wish there were parades for our teachers and our scientists and other national treasures.

And speaking of national treasures: Children are our most important resources. For a fraction of the cost of keeping one criminal in jail for a year, we could provide a child from an underprivileged background a plethora of personal and educational opportunities that would include the propensity to hopeless despair. The temptation to experience drugs, delinquency, and other paths to criminal behavior would then be greatly diminished. There is no amount of money, time, or energy too great to spend on our children. They are our angels, and they must not fall. For as they do so, does our world.

Just outside the gate, there is so much to do. As we allow the motivation for a transformed world to energize our souls and make manifest our convictions, we must have faith in God and faith in ourselves. Whatever He wills, He can let us know, and whatever He wants done, He can show us how to do it. In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there's the power to do it. Our greatest need is for an enlightened worldview.

Christmas and Easter are attitudinal bookends for an enlightened worldview. With an enlightened view of Christmas, we understand that it is within our power, through God, to give birth to a Divine Self. With an enlightened view of Easter, we understand that this Self is the power of the universe, before which death itself has no real power. Resurrection is the symbol of joy. It is the great "aha!" The acceptance of the resurrection is the realization of the fact that we need wait no longer to see ourselves as healed and whole.

I was sitting around talking with my girlfriend, Barbara. She recently experienced a kind of emotional triple header: her father lay dying, she broke up with a boyfriend of seven years, and then she fell into a rather passionate affair with a classic Peter Pan type of man. As we discussed the principles of resurrection and our desire for heaven, she remarked to me, "I guess I just have to trust that God has a plan and that things will get better when they're supposed to."

In a desire to understand the principles of A Course in Miracles as deeply as possible, I pointed out to her that theoretically, since there is no time, resurrection has nothing to do with God saving us later. The message of resurrection is that the crucifixion never occurred, except in our minds. Christ Consciousness is not that the wounds of her father's death will heal, or that her breakup with the boyfriend will grow more comfortable in time, or that the affair would one day turn to friendship. Christ Consciousness is the understanding that heaven is here now. Her father will not die when he dies; the change of form in the long-term relationship means absolutely nothing, because the love itself is changeless. And Peter Pan's departure means nothing, because the bond which unites the two of them is eternal. Her sadness rests not on fact, but on fiction. It is her interpretation of events, and not the events themselves, which keeps her heart in chains. Heaven is the transformation of these events within her mind. The physical world then follows. The resurrection is our awakening from the dream, our return to right-mindedness, and thus our deliverance from hell.

So she gladdened. Barbara and I laughed like little children as we allowed ourselves to scan our lives, the relationships, the circumstances, the events that make up our own crosses to bear, our crucifixion. We recognized how avidly we drill the nails into our own hands and feet, holding on to earthly interpretations of things when a choice to do otherwise would release us and make us happy. We prayed for a more consistent ability to remember that only love is real. We saw, even for a few minutes, the needlessness of our despair. We saw in that time a glimpse of heaven, and we prayed for the ability to experience more of it.

At the end of A Course in Miracles, we're told, "This course is a beginning, not an end." A spiritual path is not home; it is a road home. Home is within us, and every moment we're choosing to rest there or to fight the experience. Our real terror, says the Course, is of redemption. But there is within us one who knows the truth, who has been given by God the job of outwitting our ego, outsmarting our self-hatred. The Christ does not attack our ego; he transcends it, and he is within us. He is with us every moment and every circumstance. He is to our left and to our right, before us and behind us, above us and beneath us. He responds fully to our slightest invitation, and with our prayers, we invite Him in. He who is already there. With prayer, we speak to God; with miracles, He responds. The endless chain of communication between loved and lover, between God and man, is the most beautiful song, the sweetest poem. It is the highest art and the most passionate love.

"Dear God, I give this day to You. The fruit of my labor and the desires of my heart. In Your hands I place all questions. On Your shoulders I place all burdens. I pray for my brothers and for myself. May we return to love. May our minds be healed. May we all be blessed. May we find our way home from pain to peace, from fear to love, from hell to heaven. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and forever. Amen."

[Music]

The ego always emphasizes what someone has done wrong. The Holy Spirit always emphasizes what they've done right. The Course likens the ego to a scavenger dog, which seeks out every scrap of evidence for our brother's guilt and lays it at its Master's feet. We can find, and in fact, we will find, whatever it is we're looking for in life. Whether we choose to focus on the guilt in people's personality or the innocence in their soul is up to us.

Darkness is merely the absence of light, and fear is merely the absence of love. We can't get rid of darkness by hitting it with a baseball bat, because there's nothing to hit. But if we want to be rid of darkness, we turn on a light. Similarly, if we want to be rid of fear, we cannot fight it, but must replace it with love. A Course in Miracles is not about pouring pink pain over our anger and pretending it doesn't exist. What is psychologically unsound is spiritually unsound. Denial or suppression of emotions is unsound. You don't say, "I'm not angry, really, I'm not. I'm on page 140 of A Course in Miracles, and I don't get angry anymore," when inside you're seething.

The Holy Spirit tells us, "Don't try to purify yourself before coming to me. I am the purifier." I was once on my way to giving a lecture on A Course in Miracles, and I thought about a woman I knew who I was feeling annoyed with. Very quickly, I tried to hide the thought, as though it wasn't holy enough for me to be thinking at this time. And then it seemed as though a voice in my head said, "Hey, I'm your friend." Remember, the Holy Spirit wasn't judging me for my anger; He was there to help me move past it.

Now, let's talk about an issue in A Course in Miracles called special relationships. We can all relate to the desire to find Mr. or Ms. Right. It's almost a cultural obsession. But according to A Course in Miracles, the search for the perfect person to "fix" us is one of our biggest psychic wounds, one of the ego's most powerful delusions. It represents a notion in A Course in Miracles called the special relationship. Although the word "special" normally implies something wonderful, from a Course perspective, special means different, therefore separate, which is characteristic of ego rather than Spirit.

A special relationship is a relationship based on fear. To God, no one is different or special, because no one is actually separate from anyone else. Our desire to find one special person, one part of the sunship, who will complete us, is hurtful because it is delusional. It means we're seeking salvation in separation rather than in Oneness. Often, when we think we're in love with a person, A Course in Miracles would indicate that we actually aren't. The special relationship is based not on love, but on guilt. The ego tells us that there's some special person out there who will make all the pain go away. We don't really believe that, of course, but then, on the other hand, we really do. Our culture has bred the idea into us through books, songs, movies, advertising, and the conspiracy of other egos. The special relationship makes other people—their behavior, their choices, their opinions of us—too important. It makes us think we need another person when, in fact, we are complete and whole as we are.

Under the Holy Spirit's guidance, we come together to share joy. Under the ego's direction, we come together to share our desperation. A relationship is not meant to be the joining of the hip of two emotional invalids. The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather for two complete people to join together for the greater glory of God. And what's our miracle here? It's a shift from thoughts of specialness to thoughts of holiness.

Our mental patterns in regard to relationships are so fraught with fear, attack and defensiveness, guilt and selfishness, however prettily disguised, that many times we're brought to our knees. And as always, that's a good place to be. We pray for God to guide our thoughts and feelings. The holy relationship is the old special relationship transformed. In the special relationship, the ego guides our thinking, and we meet in fear, mask to mask. In the holy relationship, the Holy Spirit has changed our minds about the purpose of love, and we meet heart to heart. In the holy relationship, it is understood that we all have unhealed places, and that healing is the purpose of our being with another person. So we don't try to hide our weaknesses, but rather we understand that the relationship is a context for healing through mutual forgiveness.

How do we find a holy relationship? Not by asking God to change our partners, but by asking God to change our minds. We don't run away from someone we're attracted to because we're afraid of specialness. Anytime there's a potential for love, there's a potential for specialness. I often ask audiences now, "What's the first thing we should do when we're attracted to someone?" And they reply, "Like a pep rally: Pray." The prayer goes something like this: "Dear God, You know and I know that I have more potential for neurosis in this area than in any other. Please take my attraction, my thoughts and feelings about this person, and use them for Your purposes. Let this relationship unfold according to Your will. Amen."

People ask, "When will my soulmate get here?" But praying for the right person is useless if we're not ready to receive him or her. Our soulmates are human beings, just like we are, going through the normal processes of growth. Our vulnerability to the myth of Mr. and Ms. 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.

A Course in Miracles says that it's not our job to seek for love, but to seek for all the barriers we hold against its coming. Thinking that there is some special person out there who's going to save us is a barrier to pure love. We seek desperately for love, but it is that same desperation which leads us to destroy it once it gets here. We don't have to remind God that we'd like wonderful relationships; He's already clear about that. A Course in Miracles teaches us that a desire is a prayer. The most enlightened prayer isn't, "Dear God, send me someone wonderful," but, "Dear God, make me into someone wonderful."

A Course in Miracles says we think we're going to understand people in order to figure out whether or not they're worthy of our love. But 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.

Of course, a good relationship isn't always crystals and rainbows. It's a birth process, often painful, often messy. A spiritual relationship isn't necessarily one in which two people are smiling all the time. Spiritual means, to me, above all else, authentic. Real work can only occur in the presence of rigorous honesty. We all long for that, but we're afraid of honestly communicating with another person because we think they'll leave us if they see who we really are.

A couple from my lectures once came to me for counseling. Earlier that day, the man had told the woman he was breaking off their relationship. She was shocked and hurt and asked him if he would come with me to see me in order to help her work through the loss. As the two of them sat across from me on my couch, I assured Rick that I wasn't there to try to get them back together, but to join with them in asking for peace. I remembered a similar situation I had been in myself, and how brilliantly my therapist had handled it. I said to him, "Why are you so angry at Deborah?" "I'm not angry at her," he said. "Well, you sure sound angry." "I know that." "It's not my job to fix Deborah," he said. "I don't want to change her; I just want out." "Oh, I bet you think that's so spiritual," I said. He looked surprised. I think he thought he'd been a very good student of A Course in Miracles. "You haven't suspended judgment of Deborah," I said. "You've withheld vital information from her, data without which she couldn't function effectively within the relationship. Why don't you just tell her why you're so angry?" "Once again," he repeated, "I'm not angry." "Well," I said, "pretend you're an actor. Go on, Rick. We're safe here. Let her have it." And boy, once he got started, he let it out. He told her that she'd had no concept of how to live with another person; she just did everything however she wanted to do it, and if he wanted to come along, well, that was just great. I don't remember exactly what Elsie had to say, but there was a lot of communication that just came gushing out once he allowed it to. When he was finished, Deborah, obviously moved, said quietly, sincerely, "I never knew that. Thank you for telling me." They left my office and did not break up their relationship. They told me later it was reborn in that session. The anger that Rick was feeling was pent-up energy that came from the fact that he had felt it "unspiritual" to share his honest feelings with Deborah as they went along. But it's far better to communicate than to suppress our feelings. Anger is often a result of a series of uncommunicated feelings building up inside of us and ultimately exploding. If anger comes up to be accepted, if we think our partner won't love us if we get angry, then we stop being honest, and the relationship is doomed for sure.

Please show me what it is I'm not seeing. There's a way of sharing our upset with people without expressing it as an attack. Instead of saying, for instance, "You made me feel this or that," we say, "This is how I'm feeling." I'm not saying you made me feel this way, or that you're to blame. I'm simply sharing this as part of my healing in order to release this feeling and move beyond it. In this way, you see, we're taking responsibility for our feelings. And what could have been seen as an argument, or even avoided as unpleasant, can become an important part of the healing power in the relationship.

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. Now, it's the same thing 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, but temporarily. That's all. We are still perfect children of God. There has never been a storm that hasn't passed. Gray clouds never last forever, but the blue sky does.

So, what are we to do with our fear, our anger, the clouds which cover the love inside us? Relinquish them to the Holy Spirit. He transforms them through love and never through an attack on another person. It is attack, not the anger itself, which is destructive. Yelling into pillows has become popular in certain circles, and for good reason. Getting the energy up and out is often a good way to shed the physical tension that makes it so difficult to pray when you need it the most. Our anger stands in front of our love. Letting it out is part of the process of relinquishing it, of letting go the barriers we hold against love's coming.

The last thing we ever want to do is to buy into the insidious delusion that spiritual lives and spiritual relationships are always quiet or always blissful. I once knew a man who came on very strong at the beginning of relationships but couldn't seem to help closing his heart as soon as a woman had opened hers. I've heard that kind of behavior referred to as an addiction to the attraction phase in relationships. This man did not maliciously go around hurting women. He sincerely wanted to be in a genuine, committed relationship. What he lacked were the spiritual skills which would enable him to settle down in one place long enough to build anything solid with an equal partner. As soon as he saw human faults and weaknesses in a woman, he would run. The narcissistic personality is looking for perfection, which is a way of making sure that love never has a chance to blossom.

The initial high of romance can be so heady, so tantalizing, that the real work of growth which needs to follow the initial attraction phase can seem too dull, too hard to commit to. As soon as the other person has been seen to be a real human being, the ego is repelled and wants to find somewhere else to play. At the end of a relationship with someone like this, we feel as though we've taken cocaine. We had a fast, very exciting ride, and it felt at the time like something very meaningful was happening. Then we crashed, realized that nothing meaningful had happened at all. It was all made up. Now, all we have is a headache, and we can see that this kind of thing is not good. It's not healthy, and we don't want to do it again.

But there's a reason why we're attracted to relationships like this. We were drawn to the illusion of meaning. Sometimes, someone who has nothing to offer in a real relationship can come on like they're offering the world. They were so dissociated from their own feelings that they had become highly skilled performers, unconsciously playing whatever part our fantasies prescribed. But the responsibility for our pain still remains our own. If we hadn't been looking for a cheap thrill, we wouldn't have been vulnerable to the lie.

"How could we have been so stupid?" That's the question we always ask ourselves at the end of these experiences. But once we've had enough of them, we admit to ourselves that we weren't really stupid at all. We suspected this was a drug. The problem was, we wanted it. We saw exactly what the game was with this person, usually within the first 15 minutes. Yet, we were so attracted to the high, we were willing to pretend we didn't see it, for just a night, or a week, or however long it lasted. The fact that someone said to us, "You are so fabulous, you're so wonderful, this is such a great date, how lucky a guy is to get to date you," when he's only known you for an hour, is the blinking red light to any thinking woman.

The problem is, the depth of our wounds can be so great, we can be so hungry to hear those words because deep down, we suspect that they're untrue. That hearing them can cause us to put aside all rational considerations. "When you're starved, you're desperate." Women say to me sometimes, "Marianne, why do I always meet emotionally abusive men?" My answer is usually the following: The problem is not that you met him. The problem is that you gave him your number. The problem, in other words, is not that we attract a certain kind of person, but rather that we are attracted to a certain kind of person. Someone who is distant, emotionally, might remind us, for instance, of one or both of our parents. "Ah, he's distant and emotionally subtly disapproving. Must be home."

The problem is not just that we are offered pain, but that we are comfortable with that pain. It's what we've always known. The flip side of our dangerous attractions to people who have nothing to offer us is our tendency to feel bored by people who do. Nothing which is alien to our system can enter into us and stay there for long. This is true whether we're talking about something taken into our bodies or into our minds. If I swallow a piece of aluminum foil, my body will regurgitate until the offending object is expelled. If I'm being asked to swallow an idea that doesn't agree with me, then my psychological system will go through the same process of regurgitation in order to expel the offending material. So, if I'm convinced I'm not good enough, then I will have a very difficult time accepting someone into my life who thinks I am. It's the Groucho Marx syndrome of not wanting to like anyone who would want me in their club. The only way that I can accept anyone's finding me wonderful is if I find myself wonderful. To the ego, self-acceptance is death. And that's why we're attracted to people who don't want us. We know they're not into it from the beginning. We pretend to be surprised later when we find ourselves betrayed, when they leave us after an intense but fairly short stay. They fit perfectly into our ego's plan: "I will not be loved."

Our barriers to love are rarely consciously chosen. They are efforts to protect the places where the heart is bruised. Somewhere, sometime, we felt as though an open heart caused us pain or humiliation. We loved with the openness of a child, and someone didn't care, or laughed, or even punished us for the effort. So, in a quick moment, perhaps a fraction of a second, we made a decision to protect ourselves from ever feeling that pain again. We would never again allow ourselves to be so vulnerable. We built emotional defenses. We tried to build a fortress across our heart to protect us from any cold assault. The only problem is, according to A Course of Miracles, that we create what we defend against.

There was a time in my life when I felt I should stop opening up so much to people who didn't honor my heart as I wished it to be honored. I was angry at people who I felt had hurt me, but I denied the anger instead of getting in touch with it and releasing it to God. This is a common trap for Course of Miracles students. If anger isn't brought up into conscious awareness, it has no place to go. It either turns into an attack on self or an inappropriate, unconscious attack on others. I didn't recognize the full extent of my anger, you see, and I thought the lesson to be learned was merely that I shouldn't reveal so much of my honest feelings. I then went into relationships with two strikes against me. I was closed, cold, and armed with hidden emotional knives coming from my unconscious anger, contrary to whatever front I might have been able to lead with. That's not exactly a delightful package. Between the coldness and the anger, I could turn off the saintly as man, and this, of course, only increased my anger and distrust.

I had often thought about the idea in A Course of Miracles that we think we're angry at what our brother did to us, but that really, we're angry because of what we've done to him. Now, I vaguely known that this was true, but it took a lot of uncovering to see just what it was I was doing to these guys who I just knew were doing all these horrible things to me. A Course of Miracles speaks of shadow figures we bring with us from our past. It tells us that we tend to see no one as they are now. We keep blaming someone in the present for something someone else did to us in the past. Some poor guy would tell me, "Darling, I'm not able to come back Sunday night like I planned. I've got to keep working on this project. I might not be back until Tuesday." Well, he might just as well have told me that my cat was dead and the dog was dying. The problem wasn't that the man wasn't coming home for a few days more. The problem was how it made me feel inside to hear him say that. Such a dark despair would run across my heart. I can't begin to tell you. I wasn't relating to that man or that circumstance. I was remembering all the times I'd ever felt as though I didn't matter, I wasn't attractive, daddy didn't want to hold me, or someone else didn't want to have sex anymore.

From the Course's perspective, this situation was coming up now in order for me to feel that feeling and know that it has nothing to do with the present. I asked, "What miracle am I willing to see this differently? I am willing to remember who I am." God's answer to my pain was not going to be contrary to what my ego kept insisting was the only way out of this grief: a man who was going to tell me 60 times a day, "You're fabulous, you're wonderful, I love you, I want you," and then show me just how desirable I really was maybe twice, let's say three times a day. The feeling, in fact, was bound to come ultimately for men who would not, because no one can really tolerate my neediness or the guilt I would try to project onto them in order to get my need met, or what I thought my needs were. My real need, of course, was to realize that I didn't need a man to fill what only felt like these insatiable emotional needs. The needs themselves were not real, but merely a reflection of the fact that I thought of myself as less than perfect. Salvation would only come through my relinquishing the thought that I'm not good enough and accepting the fact that I'm all right exactly as I am.

By defending against being abandoned, I continued to recreate the conditions in which it was bound to occur. The goal of spiritual practice is full recovery, and the only thing we need recovered from is a fractured sense of self. If we don't already believe it ourselves, another person cannot convince us we're okay. If they act as though we are, we will either not believe them or become so dependent on their reinforcement that we proceed through our dependency to change their mind. Either way, we get to stay convinced that we're not okay. We awaken to our own perfection through our desire to see the perfection in someone else.

Sometimes this is not easy. When I feel the old familiar darkness starting to descend around me, when a man, for instance, makes a comment that I know intellectually is probably innocent enough, but which makes me feel that I'm abandoned, or uncared for, or rejected. I've been through enough in my life to know that the evil does not lie in what he just said. He is not the enemy. The enemy is this feeling, which in the past has led me to attack or defend enough to make him feel exactly what I'm afraid he's feeling, but which he really isn't. I can choose to see this differently. This is my wall. This is where we must be very conscious and call on God. We ask for a miracle. "Dear God, please help me." This is it, right here. This is where the sword enters my heart. This is where I blow it every time.

The process of miraculous change is twofold: one, I see my error or dysfunctional pattern; two, I ask God to take it from me. The first principle without the second is impotent. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, "Your best thinking got you here. You're the problem, but you're not the answer." The second principle isn't enough to change us either. The Holy Spirit can't take from us what we will not release to him. He won't work without our consent. He cannot remove our character defects without our willingness because that would be violating our free will. We chose those patterns, however mistakenly, and he will not force us to give them up. In asking God to heal us, we're committing to the choice to be healed. This means the choice to change. The ego's resistance to this is intense. It wants us to think that an old dog doesn't change.

The only advantage of knowing that we're angry is so that we can make a choice to be otherwise. We can spend years in therapy, but until the choice is made to do it differently, we just keep going around in circles. Of course, it feels unnatural to be gentle when we've been harsh for many years, but that's no excuse for not trying. A Course of Miracles says that the most effective way to teach a child is not by saying, "Don't do that," but by saying, "Do this." We don't reach the light through endless analysis of the dark. We reach the light by choosing the light. Light means understanding. Through understanding, we're healed.

Pain in relationships can be a perversely comfortable pain, in that it is one we know. We're used to it. I once heard a tape by Ram Dass, a major spiritual teacher, in which he told of seeing a newspaper article about an abused baby being taken away from his mother. As a police matron tried to take the baby, he kept struggling to remain in his mother's arms, although his mother was the one who beat him. She was the one he knew. He was used to her. He wanted to remain in familiar territory. This story illustrates our relationship to our own egos. The ego is our pain, but it is what we know, and we resist moving out of it. The effort it takes to grow out of painful patterns often feels more uncomfortable than remaining within them.

Personal growth can be so painful because it can make us feel ashamed and humiliated to face our own darkness. But the goal of personal growth is the journey out of dark emotional patterns which cause pain to those which cause peace. A Course of Miracles says that at their peak, religion and psychotherapy become one. They both represent experience and are used by the Holy Spirit to celebrate one of the most glorious human potentials: our capacity to consciously change. There is a tendency these days to analyze our neuroses ad infinitum, yet use the analysis itself to justify rather than heal the wound. After a certain point, having seen why a pattern developed (my father was emotionally unavailable, for example, or my mother abused me, and the effect it's had on our personalities, such as "I don't know how to let a man get close to me now," or "I have a very hard time trusting authority figures"), actual change occurs because of a decision on our part: the decision to heal, the decision to change. It ultimately doesn't matter so much why I become angry or defensive. What matters is that I decide I want to be healed and I ask God to help me.

I was once talking to a friend, and he made some comment about how he was afraid that if we got closely involved, one of us might get hurt. "So, which one of us are you concerned for?" I asked. And he answered, "You." I felt an anticipatory rejection. I was angry, and I told him so. "That's what I mean," he said. "You obviously take things so personally. I don't think I could stand it for long." Now, I knew this was a moment I'd, in various ways, with various people, and I had asked for healing. I was open, so I asked him, "Tell me honestly, how could I have done it differently? What else could I have said?" "You could have just smiled and said, 'Don't flatter yourself.'" I was so excited. I was like an eager actress working with a great director. "That's so great!" I said. "Let's go back and do that scene one more time. Say what you said again." "All right," he said. "You know, Marianne, I just have this awful feeling that if we really got together, one of us would get hurt." And I asked him, "Which one of us are you afraid for?" "You." I looked at him and smiled. "Huh. Don't flatter yourself." He laughed, and I thrilled with excitement. This had been no small awakening. It was a genuine empowerment, a reprogramming of my emotional computer in an area where I had unconsciously gone for an unworkable response pattern every time. I now established a new groove, a new set of possibilities. Initially, I had chosen the way of anger, and now I chose the way of love. I did not have to be the wounded animal. I could choose to identify with my own strength, which was, in fact, the more natural role for me to play. The only problem was, before this point, I hadn't known how to play it. I had asked, and I had been shown. I could choose to see others through a generous, trusting nature. My brother wasn't here to attack me; he was here to love me. It was completely up to me whether to trust that and love him back.

I was dating someone several years ago when the Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles. The opening ceremonies were a marvelous theatrical presentation, and it was very difficult to get tickets. Because he was involved in the media, Mike was given at the last minute one pass that would enable him to go. I was very excited for him. Everyone in town knew it was going to be a wonderful event. We decided that I would watch the ceremonies on TV, and we would meet afterwards at the conclusion of the broadcast. I started getting dressed and figured that it might be an hour or so before I heard from him, since the traffic around the stadium was bound to be horrendous. So, an hour passed, and then another. Well, I thought, he's in TV, so maybe something came up. Another hour, and then another. Midnight came, and midnight went. I took off my clothes and makeup. 2 a.m., then 3. At times I fell asleep; at other times I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling. At times I was livid; at other times I was scared. He was lying in a ditch, dead somewhere. I started calling his house. No answer. I'd call again. No answer. Finally, hardly having slept at all, I called it around 6:00 a.m., and he answered the phone. "Hello," he said. "Marianne?" "Yes," I said. "This is Marianne." "Oh, hi." "Are you all right?" "Yeah. Why?" "We had a date yesterday. Did you forget?" "All right," he said. "I had a kind of late night." Now, I don't know what I said to get off the phone, but I know how I felt, and it wasn't wonderful. I'd been stood up, and I felt that kind of blow to my self-esteem that starts in your gut and shoots emotional black ink through all your veins. I was dazed, but I somehow fell asleep.

Now, when I woke up, I had a whole new take on the situation. I just knew that he was going to wake up feeling sorry for how he had acted. He was going to show up at my door any minute, carrying a dozen roses and saying, "Hey, babe, can I take you to lunch?" The scenario in my head called for my being oh so gracious. "Well, of course you can, darling," would come out of my mouth in a sort of girlish melody. The problem is, he never came. Not only did he not come, he never called. I was in a dark zone.

Now, what would A Course of Miracles say about that? I knew I needed a miracle, but all I could come up with were two choices for the ways to deal with this, both of which I tried before in similar situations, and neither one felt good or got me what I wanted. My first choice was to get very angry and let him know it. "Who do you think you are to treat me like that? You son of a..." The problem with that choice was that it would completely invalidate my position. "Well, Marianne's a nice girl, but her temper just doesn't cut it. She's hysterical when she doesn't get her way." The only other choice I could imagine was to forgive him and let it go. But that didn't feel good either. "It's okay, you stood me up, Mike. I don't care. It doesn't matter." No unconditional love, I could understand, but not unconditional dating. I didn't know what to do, so I asked for a miracle.

I considered the possibility of another possibility. I gave the situation to God and remembered that I need do nothing. From a Course perspective, the first thing I had to do was deal with my own judgment. There's no exiting a conflict from the level of consciousness of the conflict. As long as I was not at peace, my behavior would carry the energy of my conflict. Conflicted behavior cannot bring peace; it can only produce more conflict. First, I had to deal with my own perceptions. The rest would follow. So, I came up with an exercise I would repeat constantly, out loud when I could, and silently when other people were present: "I forgive you, Mike, and I release you to the Holy Spirit. I forgive you, Mike, and I release you to the Holy Spirit."

Now, since Mike didn't call the day after our early morning phone call, or the day after, or the day after that, I had a lot of negative feelings to try to dissipate. My forgiveness chant, kind of mantra or repeated affirmation of spiritual wisdom, worked like a healing bomb on my emotional turmoil. It deterred my temptation to focus on Mike's behavior and kept me focused on my own feelings instead. My goal was inner peace, and I knew I couldn't have that as long as I perceived him as guilty. In case you're wondering, it took him two weeks to call. But that time, of course, I had forgotten about it. I had continued, however, to say over and over to myself, "I forgive you, Mike, and I release you to the Holy Spirit." So, I was high. The constant repetition of my willingness to forgive someone had worked on my brain like a pleasurable drug. I didn't care whether I heard from him again or not.

So, one day, I'm in my house, the phone rings, and when I answer it, I hear Mike's familiar voice. "Hey, Marianne." Before I could even think about it consciously, a real warmth and love filled up my chest. "Mike! Hi! It's so good to hear from you." And, you know, it was. It felt wonderful to hear his voice. "So, how you doing?" he said. "I've missed you." I don't know if I said I'd missed him too. His line was so ridiculous. I probably didn't say anything. But I do remember this: he said, "Well, uh, can I see you?" "When?" "How about tonight?" At that moment, words came out of my mouth that startled me as much as they must have startled him. I said, with a lot of love and kindness, "Mike, I really care for you, and that's not going to change. I'm still your friend, no matter what. But when it comes to dating, we don't seem to do the same dance. So, if you want to have lunch sometime, please call. But as far as a date is concerned, I need to pass." We both mumbled a few more pleasantries and then got off the phone. I was worried that I rejected a brother. But just as that worry came into my mind, I saw an internal image of lots of champagne bottles with their corks popping off in the middle of Heaven. I hadn't rejected a brother; I had simply accepted myself in a whole new way. He had a win: a lesson learned and a friendship, if he wanted it. And I had a win, too. Forgiveness hadn't turned me into a doormat; it had taught me how to own my ass and own whom I know, without anger, with dignity, and with love.

The miracle worker is a finely tuned intuitional instrument. A Course of Miracles says we're to listen to our brother first and foremost. If we're supposed to speak, he'll let us know. Jesus sent his disciples out into the countryside and told them to teach the gospel. "What shall we say?" they asked him. And his answer was, "I'll tell you when you get there." We're not to try to figure out what to say to a brother. It's merely our job to ask the Holy Spirit to purify our perceptions of the other person. From that place within, and only from that place, we will find the power of words and the power of silence which bring the peace of God.

[Music]

A marriage is God's gift to a man and to a woman. It is a gift which should then be given back to him. A man's wife is literally God's gift to him, and a woman's husband is God's gift to her. But God only gives gifts that are meant for everyone. So it is that a marriage is meant to be a blessing on the world because it is a context in which two people might become more than what they would have been alone. The entire world is blessed by the presence of healed people.

Another important issue for the spiritual seeker is our relationship to our parents. 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're 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're 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're a woman, we will not be able to escape projection of guilt onto other adult men who come into our lives. And if we're 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're not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not giving in the present.

There's a lot of talk today about people growing up in dysfunctional homes, but who didn't grow up in a dysfunctional home? This world is a dysfunction. However, there's nothing we've been through or seen or done that cannot be used to make our lives more valuable now. We can grow from any experience, and we can transcend any experience. Forgiveness remains the only path that leads out of hell. Whether we're forgiving our parents, or someone else, or ourselves, the laws of mind remain the same. As we love, we shall be released from pain, and as we deny love, we shall remain in pain. Each of us have different fears and different manifestations of fear, but all of us are saved by the same technique: the call to God to save our lives by salvaging our minds. "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for love is the kingdom, and love is the glory, glory, and love is the power, forever and forever."

Now, I'd like to discuss with you the way that miraculous principles apply to work and career. Success means we go to sleep at night knowing that our talents and our abilities were used in a way that served people. We're compensated by grateful looks in other people's eyes, whatever material abundance supports us in performing joyfully and at high energy, and the magnificent feeling that we did our bit today to help save the world. The atonement, which is the Holy Spirit's correction of our perception, means putting love first in everything, in business as well as in everything else. You're in business to spread love. Your agency should spread love. Your screenplay should spread love. Your store should spread love. Your life should spread love.

The key to a successful career is realizing that it's not separate from the rest of your life, but is rather an extension of your most basic self, and your most basic self is love. Each of us has a particular part to play in God's plan for salvation. The Holy Spirit's job is to reveal to us our function and to help us perform it. The Holy Spirit asks us, "Is it reasonable to assume that He would assign us a task and then not provide us with the means of its accomplishment?" Some people have said to me, "But I'm afraid to surrender my career to God. I'm a musician. What if He wants me to be an accountant?" My answer to that, of course, is, "Why would He? Wouldn't He rather have someone who understands numbers do that job? If we're talented at music, that talent is of God. If something makes our hearts sing, that's God's way of telling us it's a contribution He wants us to make." Sharing our gifts is what makes us happy. We're most powerful, and God's power is most apparent on the earth, when we're happy. A Course of Miracles says that the only real pleasure comes from doing God's will. The only thing to be saved from is our own negativity or fear. The crux of salvation in any area is a shift in our sense of purpose. That shift is a miracle. As always, we consciously ask for it: "Dear God, please give my life some sense of purpose. Use me as an instrument of Your peace. Use my talents and abilities to spread love. I surrender my job to You. Help me to remember that my real job is to love the world back to health. Thank you. Amen."

Don't ask God to send you a brilliant career; rather, ask Him to show you the brilliance which is within you. It is the recognition of our brilliance which releases it into expression. Stable, meaningful external effects don't occur until we've experienced an internal stirring, and once an internal stirring has occurred, external effects can't fail to happen. We're all capable of an internal stirring and are, in fact, coded for it. It is our potential for greatness. Achievement doesn't come from what we do, but from who we are. Our worldly power results from our personal power. Our career is an extension of our personality. People who profoundly achieve aren't necessarily people who do so much; they are people around whom things get done. Mahatma Gandhi and John F. Kennedy were both examples of this. Their greatest achievements lay in all the energy they stirred in other people, the invisible forces they unleashed around them. By touching their own depths, they touched the depths within others. That kind of charisma, the power to affect what happens on the earth from an invisible realm within, is the natural right and function of the Son of God. The new frontiers are internal ones. The real stretch is always within us. Instead of expanding our ability or willingness to go out and get anything, we expand our ability to receive what is already here for us. Personal power emanates from someone who takes life seriously. The universe takes us as seriously as we take it. There is no greater seriousness than the full appreciation of the power and importance of love. Miracles flow from the recognition that love is the purpose of our career.

A Course of Miracles discusses a traditional Christian concept called the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The idea here is that when our lives are given to the Holy Spirit to use for His purposes, new talents emerge within us. We don't get our lives together and then give them to God; but rather, we give our lives to God, and then things start coming together. As our hearts open, our talents and our gifts begin to blossom. A Course of Miracles tells us that all of the children of God have power. We are all special, yet no one has special power. All of us are special, and yet none of us are special. No one has any more potential than anyone else for spreading the love and light of God. The Course of Miracles says that one day, all the gifts of God will be shared equally by everyone.

We all have the potential for greatness, but it gets plowed out of us at an early age. Fear entered when someone told us there's a first prize, second prize, and third prize, that some efforts deserve an A, but others get a C. After a while, part of us becomes afraid to even try. The only thing we have to give to the world is our own take on it. But the ego argues that this is not enough. It leads us to cover up our simple truth, to try to invent a better one. But the ego isn't protecting us here, although, as always, it pretends to be. It isn't guarding against our making fools of ourselves; it is guarding against our experience of who we really are, the brilliance of expressing it, and the joy which that expression brings to ourselves and others.

The natural light of God within us is what the Course refers to as our grandeur. The ego's efforts to embellish our natural state is what the Course refers to as grandiosity. Grandiosity interferes with the clear expression of our power by trying to get us to add something to it. This is actually a ploy by which it thwarts our capacity to express who we really are and accept full recognition from others in return. Once again, separation is the ego's goal.

I used to always be on an emotional roller coaster, feeling I was better than other people, and then feeling I was worse. "I'm better. No, I'm not as good. I'm better. No, I'm not as good." But they're the same mistake. The truth is, we're just like everybody else. Knowing this, that we're no better or worse than anyone else because we're all essentially the same, is a thought lacking in luster, only until we fully appreciate what kind of club we belong to. Humanity is a group of infinitely powerful creatures. Our power, however, is in us, but not of us. It is God's spirit inside of us which enlightens and enlivens our lives. Of ourselves, we're really no big deal. We're tempted to think that we're more impressive when we put on airs. We're not. Of course, we're rather pathetic when we do that. The Light of Christ shines most brightly within us when we relax and let it be. Our deepest fear, you see, is not that we're inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we're powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? We are children of God. Our playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We're all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God which is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as you let your own light shine, you unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As you're liberated from your own fear, your presence automatically liberates others.

A miracle worker is an artist of the soul, and there's no higher art than living a good life. An artist informs the world of what's available behind the masks we all wear, and that's what we're all here to do. The reason so many of us are obsessed with becoming stars is because we're not yet starring in our own lives. The cosmic spotlight isn't pointed at you; it radiates from within you. I used to feel like I was waiting for someone to discover me, to produce me, like Lana Turner at the drugstore. Ultimately, I realized that the person I was waiting for was myself. If we wait for the world's permission to shine, we'll never receive it. How could Leonardo da Vinci not have painted? How could Shakespeare not have written? In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke tells a young writer to write only if he has to. We are to do what there is a deep psychological and emotional imperative for us to do. That's our point of power, the source of our brilliance. Our power is not rationally or willfully called forth; it's a divine dispensation, an act of grace. It's a mark on our forehead that makes it appear as though God had chosen us. People who appear chosen are people who, on some level of their being, chose God, even if they don't yet know it. There's a light in their eyes, there's something in their beingness which implies a mind attuned to a higher purpose and a heart that sings a sweeter song.

Do what you love. Do what makes your heart sing. And never do it for the money. Don't go to work to make money; go to work to spread joy. "Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and the Maserati will get here when it's supposed to." God doesn't have a poverty consciousness. He doesn't want us to have a boring life or a boring career. He doesn't have anything against the things of this world. Money isn't evil; it's just nothing like anything else. It can be used for holy or unholy purposes. When our goal is making money, creativity becomes distorted. If I saw money as the ultimate goal of my teaching career, then I would have to think more about what people wanted to hear and less about what I feel is important to say. When we're working solely for money, our motivation is getting rather than giving.

The miraculous transformation here is a shift from a sales mentality to a service mentality. Until we make this switch, we're operating from ego and concentrating on the things of this world rather than on love. The Bible says it's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle. That's because the attachment to money is a huge temptation to deviate from love. But the moral imperative isn't to block the reception of money into our lives; the challenge is to spiritualize our relationship to it by seeing that its only purpose is to help heal the world. In an enlightened society, rich people will not necessarily have less money; poor people, however, will have much more. The problem, contrary to the ego's perception, is not just the distribution of wealth, but the consciousness around it. It behooves us to remember that our money is God's money, and we want to have whatever He wants us to have in order to do with it whatever He wants us to do. God wants us to have whatever material support contributes to our greatest happiness. The ego tries to convince us that God demands sacrifice and that the life of service would be a life of poverty. This is not the case. Our purpose on this Earth is to be happy, and it is the Holy Spirit's function to help us achieve that. There's much work to be done for the healing of the world, and some of it costs money. Often, the Holy Spirit sends us money in order that we may perform tasks He wants accomplished on His behalf. A responsible attitude towards money is one in which we're open to whatever comes and trusting that it always will. One of the principles to remember about money is how important it is to pay for services rendered. If we begrudge someone else

The right to make a living. We're begrudging ourselves the same. What we give, we will receive, and what we withhold will be withheld from us. And the universe doesn't register the difference between stealing from a huge corporation or stealing from a nice little old lady.

The universe will always support our integrity. Sometimes our debts are so big or confusing that even though we have the best of intentions, the burden and the guilt may be so overwhelming that we just go on automatic. Push the bills to the back of the drawer and try to forget them, or change her phone number. The universe will not support that.

A big person is not someone who never falls down. A big person is someone who, when they fall, does what it takes to get up again. As always, the issue is to ask for a miracle. Purity of heart creates breakthroughs. The universe is forgiving.

If you owe back bills, no matter how much, write a letter to the company or individual. Own the issue, apologize if appropriate, and then let them know that you're setting up a payment plan effective immediately. Send them something with the letter. Don't set yourself up for failure. If you can't afford to send $15 a month, that's okay. Send five if that's all you can, but send it. Send it regularly and send it on time. It doesn't matter if the bill is $50,000. The Course says there's no order of difficulty in Miracles. No matter what the shape of a problem, its form, or its size, a miracle can handle it. Miracles mean that at any moment, we can begin again.

This is another area where it behooves us to ask God to heal our thoughts. There's nothing spiritual about poverty. There's nothing holy about breadlines, and there's nothing beautiful about what happens in a society when money stops circulating. And so we pray: "Dear God, I surrender to you all my thoughts about money. I surrender to you my debts. I surrender to you my wealth. Open my mind to receive abundantly. Channel your abundance through me in a way that serves the world. Amen."

A Course in Miracles discusses the difference between magic and miracles. Magic is when we focus the mind on a desired manifestation, giving our shopping list to God and telling him what we want him to do for us. Miracles are when we ask God what we can do for him. Miracles shift us from a "get" to a "give" mentality. The desire to get something reflects a core belief that we don't have enough already. As long as we believe there's scarcity inside of us, we'll continue to manufacture scarcity around us because that's our basic thought. No matter what we get, it will never be enough.

The miracle worker's goal in every circumstance is peace of mind. The Course in Miracles tells us that we don't know what would make us happy; we just think we do. All of us have gotten things we thought would make us happy, and they didn't. The miracle mind of perception would be to make happiness itself our goal and to relinquish the thought that we know what that would look like. We never know what's going to happen in a month or a year from now, and if we got what we wanted now, then perhaps we would be worse off for it later on.

Making our goal anything other than peace is emotionally self-destructive. If our goal is to get the job, then that's fine if we do. But if we don't get the job, then we'll feel depressed. If we make peace our goal, then if we get the job, that's great, but if we don't, we're still peaceful.

A Course in Miracles tells us it's important to set a goal at the beginning of a situation, or it will seem to unfold chaotically. If our goal is peace, we're programmed for emotional stability. No matter what happens, the mind will have been directed to see the situation from a peaceful perspective. If we didn't get the job we wanted, it won't matter so much. We'll truly understand that there's something better coming up soon, or that this isn't really the perfect job for us anyway. We'll have faith in God. The miracle is that we will really feel our faith; it won't just be positive goo thrown over our pain. Our emotions flow from our thoughts and not the other way around.

Lose the issue underlying our need to tell God what to do is our lack of trust. We're afraid to leave things in God's hands because we don't know what he'll do with them. It's like we're afraid to lose our file. It is a very powerful demon in the racial consciousness which tempts us to think that God's will is that we sacrifice or be poor or be unhappy for his sake. If we're going to set any goal, let us set the goal of being healed of the belief that God is fear instead of love. Remember that our happiness and our function are one. If God is our goal, that's the same thing as saying that happiness is our goal. There's no need to believe that God can't figure out the details or provide for the ways to make it happen.

The journey to a pure heart can be highly disorienting. For years, we may have worked for power, money, and prestige. Now, all of a sudden, we've learned that those are just the values of a dying world. We don't know where to search for motivation anymore. If we're not working in order to get rich, then why are we working at all? What are we supposed to do all day? Just sit home and watch bad TV? Not at all. But thinking so is a temporary phase that many people go through when the values of the old world no longer have a hold on us, but the values of the new don't yet grab our soul. They will.

There comes a time, not too long into the journey to God, when the realization that the world could work beautifully if we would give it the chance begins to excite us. It becomes our new motivation. The news isn't how bad things are; the news is how good they could be, and our own activity could be part of the unfoldment of Heaven on Earth. There is no more powerful motivation than to feel we're being used in the creation of a world where love has healed all wounds. We're no longer ambitious for ourselves but are rather inspired by the vision of a healed world. Inspiration rearranges our energies; it sources within us a new power and direction. We no longer feel like we're trying to carry a football to the finish line, clutching it to our chest and surrounded by hostile forces. We feel instead as though angels are pushing us from behind and making straight our path as we go.

"Some people who heard me formed a group called The Miracle Players, and they did just that." "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 2 years before it became the source of my income. When I started lecturing, I had no idea it would become my profession. It was something I was doing simply because it was the right thing to do. When you get serious about the universe, the universe gets serious about you. And I never felt the need to advertise much for my lectures. I figured that if they were of genuine interest to people, then people would hear about them. That's not to say that advertising is bad, as long as the motivation for it is to inform people as opposed to manipulating them. Arnold Patent wrote that if you genuinely have something to say, there's someone who genuinely needs to hear it. We don't have to invent an audience so much as we have to hone the message we plan to give them once they get here. Serving three people is as important as serving 300. Once we're clear about how to deal with a small following, a large following will develop automatically, if that would serve the world. Our power lies in our clarity about the role our work can play in the creation of a more beautiful world. The miracle is to think of our career as our contribution, however small, to the healing of the universe.

The ego would have us believe that the world is based on finite resources. This world is but God's world. God's world, which is the real world, is not. The more we give, the more we have. You having a piece of the world's pie doesn't mean there's less for anyone else, and someone else having a piece of the pie doesn't mean there's less for you. You needn't compete in business or anywhere else. Your generosity towards others is the key to your positive experience of the world. There's enough room for everyone to be beautiful. There's enough room for everyone to be successful. There's enough room for everyone to be rich. It is only our thinking which blocks that possibility for manifestation. The people who have achieved more than you in any area are only a half a step ahead of you in time. Bless them and praise their gifts, and bless and praise your own. The world would be less rich without their contributions, and it would be less rich without yours. There's more than room for everyone; in fact, there's a need for everyone. As we are healed, the world is healed.

Doing anything for a purpose other than love means reliving the split from God, perpetuating and maintaining that split. Every person is a cell in the body of human consciousness. At the moment, it is as though the body of Christ is suffering from cancer. In cancer, a normal working cell decides that it no longer wants to function in contribution to the whole. Instead of being part of the support system of the blood or the liver, the cell goes off and builds its own kingdom. That's a malignancy which threatens to destroy the organism. And so it is with the body of humanity. Everyone's gone off to do their own thing: "my career, my store, my money." We've lost sight of our essential interrelatedness, and this forgetfulness threatens to destroy us. The "my" mentality is the ego. It is the belief in separation. It is our cosmic disease. Taking what we have and devoting it to the restoration of the whole is our salvation and the salvation of the world. Our devotion then becomes our work, and our work becomes our devotion.

And now let's talk about miracles in health and healing. A friend of mine once told me that we're not punished for our sins, but by our sins. Sickness is not a sign of God's judgment on us, but of our judgment on ourselves. If we were to think that God created our sickness, then how could we turn to him for healing? In asking for healing, we're not just asking for our own health, but rather we're asking that the idea of sickness be removed from God's son's mind. Illness is a sign of separation from God, and a healing is a sign that we have returned to him. The return to God is merely the return to love.

In his book Quantum Healing, Dr. Deepak Chopra tells a powerful story about the connection between love and physical healing: "An Ohio University study of heart disease in the 1970s was conducted by feeding quite toxic, high-cholesterol diets to rabbits in order to block their arteries, duplicating the effect that such a diet has on human arteries. Consistent results began to appear in all the rabbit groups except for one, which strangely displayed 60% fewer symptoms. Nothing in the rabbit's physiology could account for their high tolerance to the diet until it was discovered by accident that the student who was in charge of feeding these particular rabbits liked to fondle and pet them. He would hold each rabbit lovingly for a few minutes before feeding it. Astonishingly, this alone seemed to enable the animals to overcome the toxic diet. Repeat experiments in which one group of rabbits was treated neutrally while the others were loved came up with similar results. Once again, the mechanism that causes such immunity is quite unknown. It is baffling to think that evolution has built into the rabbit mind an immune response that needs to be triggered by human cuddling."

Studies have shown that cancer patients who attend support groups live on the average twice as long after diagnosis as those who don't. What is this psycho-immunological factor which by now science knows exists but doesn't know how to identify? That factor is love, or God.

Over the last several years, I've counseled many people diagnosed with cancer, AIDS, and other life-challenging illnesses. In 1987, I asked my friend Louise Hay if she would help me start a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people in physical crisis, to be called the Los Angeles Center for Living. In 1989, the Manhattan Center for Living opened in New York City. The center's mission statement is that we provide free, non-medical support services to people dealing with life-challenging illness and grief on both coasts. We've seen the miracles which occur when people invoke the power of love in the midst of disease and grief.

I've led many support groups for people dealing with life-challenging illness where, during the entire session, disease was mentioned only in passing. We attend groups not to grow closer to our disease, but rather to grow closer to the power for healing which lies within us. Many of the issues which confront us when we are ill are the same issues which confronted us, in one way or another, when we were still healthy, but we didn't deal with them until now. Life goes on when we're ill; it's merely intensified. We tend to handle illness basically the same way we handle everything else in life. We must avoid the temptation to see illness as a block to our capacity to find God and instead use it as a springboard from which we soar into his arms.

An epidemic such as AIDS is a collective heartbreak, pulling millions of people into its painful vortex. But this also means that it brings millions of people to their knees. And as soon as enough of us get there, as soon as love reaches a critical mass, or as the Course says, "enough people become miracle-minded," there will be a sudden breakthrough in consciousness, a rapture, and instantaneous healing. It will be as though millions of us have recognized our lovelessness and asked that we be healed. When the cure for AIDS is finally found, we'll give prizes to a few scientists, but many of us will know that millions and millions of prayers helped it to happen.

Cancer and AIDS and other critical illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream, and their message is not "Hate me," but "Love me." Seeing sickness as our own love which needs to be reclaimed is a more positive approach to healing than is seeing the sickness as something hideous we must get rid of. Energy cannot be destroyed; it can, however, be miraculously transformed, and that miracle emerges from our own thoughts, our own decision to let go our belief in fear and danger and to embrace instead a view of the world which is based on hope and love. There's certainly nothing to lose; no risk in trying. A Course of Miracles tells us, "The atonement is so gentle; you need but whisper to it, and all its power will rush to your assistance and support." God will do his part when we do ours.

One of the ways the body can be used to manufacture depression is through loveless sex. Our sexual impulses become canvases onto which we extend our love or project our fear. When sex is of the Holy Spirit, it is a deepening of communication. But when it is of the ego, it is a substitute for communication. The Holy Spirit uses sex to heal us; the ego uses it to wound us. Sometimes we have the thought that sex with another person would cement the bond between us, and instead, it turned out to manufacture more illusion and anxiety than there was before. It is only when sex is a vehicle for spiritual communion, when it is truly loving, that it joins us to another person. Then it is the sacred act.

Many spiritual seekers have felt the need to eschew all body-related things, but that is an over-attachment to the physical. Anything used to spread joy and communicate love is a part of God's plan for salvation. A life lived for oneself alone is not liberation but merely another form of bondage. Since we're not bodies, we do not exist in isolation. Living as though we do can only lead to pain.

What is vanity? What is the ego-oriented neurotic obsession with weight, hair, looks, and sex appeal that has Americans spending billions of dollars a year on products they can't afford and don't really need, and young women falling into dangerous disease patterns in their efforts to be thin? These things are inevitable results of a cultural orientation which leaves out the reality of spirit. Concentration on the body as an end rather than a means in our perception breeds fear: fear that we're not enough, that we're not good enough or attractive enough, fear that they won't like us, fear that we'll lose out in life. There is no way to escape this painful maelstrom without replacing body identification with the memory that we aren't bodies at all, that who we are is the love inside us, and it is that love alone which determines our value. When our minds are filled with light, there's no room for darkness. When we understand who and what we really are, there's no room for pain and confusion.

So I let go. I met a woman who had lost a huge weight and told me that she had asked God to do it for her. "I didn't ask that I lose weight," she said. "I just asked that he'd take this monkey off my back. I didn't care if I was fat; I told him that if he wanted me to be fat, to make me comfortable with it. I just wanted out of this hell." I decided that it didn't matter how much I weighed; I couldn't take the horror of the obsession anymore. I began to realize that how much I weighed didn't matter; all that mattered was love. And as I got more involved with practicing the Course, I stopped thinking so much about my weight. That was all. And one day, I looked in the mirror and saw that it was gone.

What I realized was that my weight had nothing to do with my body but with my mind. I was terrified of people and had unconsciously manufactured a wall around myself to protect me from them. I was terrified, however, because of the love that I myself was not giving. My ego's purpose for the weight was to keep me separate, and until I gave up that purpose, I would never be able to give up the extra pounds. My subconscious mind was merely following instructions. As I began to put my energy into reaching across that wall, when I allowed the Christ to enter my mind, the wall miraculously disappeared.

Part of our cultural neurosis has been an abhorrence of age. Like anything else, age will only transform when we have first accepted it as it is. Many of us think age is so terrible, so unappealing, so unsexy. When, actually, these are just thoughts we have. And so we need to change our minds. Let us 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. We are a cold and uncaring culture in our treatment of older Americans. We have a thought in America that youth is better, and so because we think that it is not because it is an objective truth, but only because it's a thought we carry and manifest is our collective experience.

No matter what the illness or addiction or distorted physical expression, it causes in the mind, and only there can it truly be healed. The greatest power we're given, says the Course, is the power to change our minds. Our physical condition does not determine our emotional condition. The experience of peace comes only from the mind. Peace of mind, says A Course in Miracles, is clearly an internal matter.

Of an eccentric father in 1965, when I was 13, he took me to Vietnam to show me what war was. He wanted to make sure the military-industrial complex didn't eat my brain and convince me war was okay. My grandfather was very religious, and sometimes I would go to synagogue with him on Saturday mornings. 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 religious 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 children starve, I argued, or infants get cancer, or the Holocaust happen? I figured I was too well-read now to believe in God. Like a lot of people at that time, late '60s, early '70s, I was pretty wild. Every door marked "no" by conventional standards seemed to hold a key to some lascivious pleasure I just had to have. I didn't know what to do with my life, though. I remember my parents kept begging me to do something. I went from relationship to relationship, job to job, city to city, looking for some sense of identity or purpose, some feeling that my life had finally kicked in. I knew I had talent, but I didn't know it. What I knew I had intelligence, but I was too frantic to apply it to my own circumstances. I went into therapy several times, but it rarely made an impact. I sank deeper and deeper into my own neurotic patterns, seeking relief in food, drugs, people, or whatever else I could find to distract me from myself. I was always trying to make something happen in my life, but nothing much happened except all the drama I created around things not happening. There was some huge rock of self-loathing sitting in the middle of my stomach, and it got worse with every phase I went through. By my mid-20s, I was a total mess.

One day in 1977, I saw a set of blue books with gold lettering sitting on someone's coffee table in New York City. I opened to the introduction. It read: "This is A Course in Miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum; it means only that you can elect what you want to take 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 removing the blocks to the awareness of Love's presence, which is your natural inheritance."

I remember thinking that sounded rather intriguing, if not arrogant. Reading further, however, I noticed Christian terminology throughout the books. This made me nervous. Although I had studied Christian theology in school, I had kept it at an intellectual distance. I put the books back on the table. It took another year before I picked them up again. Another year and another year's misery. Then I was ready. This time, I was so depressed I didn't even notice the language it used. Traditional Christian terms, but in decidedly non-traditional, non-religious ways. I was struck, as most people are, by the profound authority of its voice. It answered questions I'd begun to think were unanswerable. It talked about God in brilliant psychological terms, challenging my intelligence and never insulting it.

The Course seemed to have a basic message: "Relax." I was confused to hear that because I had always associated relaxing with resigning. 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 surrender the fight completely. I was surprised but very relieved. I had long suspected I was not 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 reading the Course and following its workbook exercises, I could feel almost immediately that the changes it produced inside of me were positive. I felt happy. I felt like I was beginning to calm down. I began to understand myself, to get some hook on why my relationships had been so painful, why I could never stay with anything, why I hated my body, and most importantly, I began to have some sense that I could change.

A Course in Miracles, a self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy contained in three books, claims no monopoly on God and is a statement of universal spiritual themes. There's only one truth spoken different ways, and the Course is just one path to it out of many. If it's your path, however, you know it. For me, the Course was a breakthrough experience, intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically. It freed me from a terrible emotional pain. Over the next 5 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 Los Angeles. The group began to grow. Since then, my lecture audiences have grown significantly here and abroad. I have had the opportunity to see how relevant this material is to people throughout the world. My prayer is that these tapes might help someone. I'm speaking with an open heart; I hope you'll listen with an open mind.

When we were 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 this 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, struggles, sickness, finite resources, limitation, guilt, bad death, scarcity, and loss. We began to think them, and so we began to know them. We were taught that things like grades, and being good enough, and 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. Fear is what we learned here; love is what we were born with.

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. Love is who we are, and love is what we're here for. Nothing else is real, and nothing else matters. 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 here nevertheless. This is the meaning of a world of light. We experience it as kindness, giving, mercy, compassion, peace, joy, acceptance, non-judgment, joining, and intimacy.

What is fear? Our world of darkness. It's our shared lovelessness, our individual and collective hells. When fear is expressed, we recognize it is anger, abuse, disease, pain, greed, addiction, selfishness, obsession, corruption, violence, and war. But love cannot be destroyed; it can only be covered over. The world we knew as children is still buried within our minds. The truth doesn't stop being the truth just because we're not looking at it. Love just became clouded over or surrounded by mental mists. And that's what a miracle is: a parting of those mists, a decision to see love where we had seen fear before. It's a shift in perception, a return to love.

What happened to my generation is that we never grew up. The problem isn't that we're lost or apathetic, too 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 in a free-floating terror. We're afraid this isn't the right relationship; what if 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. It's become popular these days to blame practically everything on our parents; they're a new scapegoat. 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 they treated us, whatever abuse they gave us was often mild compared to the way we abuse ourselves today. They might have been mean, but we're vicious. 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, we sabotage, abort everything: our careers, our relationships, even our children. We drink, we do drugs, we control, we obsess, we pervert. 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, a powerful emotion, turned inward, becomes our personal hell, 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.

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. But no matter how much I worked at changing my thoughts, I kept going back to the painful ones. Temporary breakthroughs would occur, but I would always revert to the patterns of self-betrayal. 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." Through various therapeutic techniques, I became very smart about my own neurosis, but that didn't necessarily exorcise them. The garbage didn't go away; it just became more sophisticated. 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 a 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 a shift in my own perception. For me, no matter what hot water I gotten myself into, I had always thought that I could get out of it. I was cute enough, or smart enough, or talented enough, or clever enough. And finally, if things got too terrible, I could always 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. 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." So I went through this grandiose, dramatic moment where I invited God into my life. It was terrifying at first, but then I kind of got off on the idea. After that, nothing really felt the way I expected it to. I'd read about people surrendering to God and then feeling this profound sense of peace descend like a mantle over their shoulders. I did get that feeling, but only for about a minute and a half. After that, I just felt like I'd been busted. This didn't turn me off to God so much as it made me respect his intelligence. He implied he understood the situation better than I would have expected. If I was God, I'd have busted me too.

A certain amount of desperation is usually necessary before we're ready for God. When it came to spiritual surrender, I didn't get serious, not really, 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 make Marian function again. I fell apart. I had what is commonly called a nervous breakdown. Nervous breakdowns can be highly underrated methods of spiritual transformation. They certainly get your attention. I've seen people have little mini-breakdowns year after year, each time stopping just short of getting the point. I was lucky enough to get mine over with in one fell swoop. The things I learned there, I will not forget. I was profoundly humbled. I saw very clearly that of myself, I am nothing. Until this happens, you keep trying all your old tricks, the ones that never did work, but that you keep thinking might work this time. Once you've had enough, you can't do it anymore. You consider the possibility that there might be a better way. That's when your head cracks open, and God comes in. More people have felt their heads crack open in some way or another than have admitted it to their friends. These days, it's not an uncommon phenomenon, and this isn't bad news; in a way, it's good. Until your knees finally hit the floor, you're just playing at life, and on some level, you're scared because you know you're just playing. The moment of surrender is not when life is over; it's when life really begins. It's better to endure one sharp pain, however sharp and however long, than a dull ache of unconsciousness that lasts the rest of your life. How ironic: you spend your whole life resisting the notion that someone's out there who's smarter than you are, and then all of a sudden, you're so relieved to know it's true. All of a sudden, you're not too proud to ask for help. That's what it means to surrender to God.

There have been times in my life, and they still happen today, though they're more the exception now than the rule, when I felt as though sadness would overwhelm me. Our lives in those moments can be so painful, and the mind begins an endless search for things that could make us feel better or change the situation. What I learned from A Course in Miracles is that the change we're looking for is always inside our own head. The way we perceive experiences can change, and that shift in our perception is the meaning of miracles. I'd never realized that depending on God meant depending on love. I had heard it said that God was love, but it had never clicked in for me exactly what that meant. As I began to study A Course in Miracles, I saw the following things about God: Number one, he is the love within us. Number two, whether we follow him, i.e., whether we think with love, is entirely up to us. Number three, when we choose to love, or to allow our minds to be one with God, then life is wonderful, and when we turn away from love, the pain sets in. And that's pretty much it. When we think with love, then life is peaceful; that's the meaning of Heaven. When we think without love, life is painful; that's the meaning of Hell.

Surrender to God means surrender to love. To surrender to God means to just let go in love. By affirming that love is our priority in any situation, we actualize the power of God. This is not metaphor; it's fact. We literally use our minds to co-create with him. Through a mental decision, a conscious recognition of love's importance and our willingness to experience it, we call on a higher power. We set aside our normal habit patterns and allow them to be superseded by a different, gentler mode of perception. That's what it means to let a power greater than we are direct our lives.

The problem with the world is that we have strayed from God, or wandered away from love. According to A Course in Miracles, the separation from God first happened millions of years ago, but the important revelation, the crux of the Course, is that in reality, it never actually happened at all. The meaning of the Course can be summed up very simply.

One Love is Real. It's an eternal creation, and nothing can destroy it.

Anything that isn't love is an illusion. Remember this, and you'll be at peace.

A Course in Miracles says that only love is real, and that the opposite of love is fear. When we think with love, we're literally co-creating with God. And when we're not thinking with love, since only love is real, then we're not actually thinking at all. When thinking loveless, we're hallucinating, and that's what this world is: a mass hallucination where fear seems more real than love.

The way out of fear is through opening the mind to love. Love casts out fear, the way light casts out darkness. And this shift from fear to love is a miracle. Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of Hell.

Our worldly problems are actually just symptoms of the real problem, which is always a lack of love. Love. And that's the story. Adam and Eve were happy until she ate of the knowledge of Good and Evil. What that means is that everything was perfect until they began to judge. To keep their hearts open sometimes, but closed at others. Closing our hearts destroys our peace. It's alien to our real nature. It warps us and turns us into people we're not meant to be.

For I define neurosis a separation from self. And so it is. The real self is the love within us. It's the child of God. The impostor self, the fearful one, is called in the Course, the ego. The return to love is the great cosmic drama, the personal journey back to sanity and peace.

Let's talk about you. You are a child of God. You were created in a blinding flash of creativity, a primal thought when God extended himself in love. Everything you've added on since is useless. When Michelangelo was asked how he created a piece of sculpture, he answered that the statue already existed within the marble. God had already created the Pi David, Moses. Michelangelo's job, as he saw it, was to get rid of the excess marble which surrounded God's creation. So it is with you. The perfect you isn't something you need to create, because God already created it. The perfect you is the love within you. Your job is to allow God's power to remove the fearful thinking which surrounds your perfect self, just as excess marble surrounds a Michelangelo's perfect statue.

To remember that you're part of God, that you're loved and lovable, is not arrogant. It's humble. To think you are anything else is arrogant, because it implies you're something other than a creation of God. What you do or don't do is not what determines your essential value. Your growth, perhaps, but not your value. God is totally approving and accepting of you exactly as you are. What's not to like? You were not created in sin. You were created in love.

As children, we were taught to be good boys and girls, which of course implies we're not that already. We were taught we're good if we clean up our room, or we're good if we make good grades. But very few of us were taught that we're essentially good. Very few of us were given a sense of unconditional approval, a feeling that we're precious because of what we are, not what we do. And that's not because we were raised by monsters. We were raised by people who were raised the same way we were. Sometimes, in fact, it was the people who loved us the most who felt it was their responsibility to train us to struggle. Why? Because the world as it is is tough, and they wanted us to make good. So we had to become as crazy as the world is, or we would never fit in here.

What we lost was a sense of our own power. And what we learned was fear. Fear that we weren't good enough just the way we are. Fear does not promote learning. It warps us. It stunts us. It makes us neurotic. And by the time we were teenagers, most of us were severely cracked. Our love, our hearts, our real self were constantly invalidated by people who didn't love us, and by people who did. In the absence of love, we began slowly but surely to fall apart.

In Course terminology, our entire network of fearful perceptions, all stemming from that first false belief in our separation from God and from one another, is called the ego. The word ego is used differently here than the way in which it is often used in modern psychology. It is being used here as the ancient Greeks used it: the notion of a small, separated self. It is a false belief about ourselves, a lie about who and what we are. And even though that lie is our neurosis, and living that lie is a terrible anxiety, it's amazing how resistant we are to healing.

The split, the ego has a pseudo life of its own and, like all life forms, fights hard for its survival. Most of us are so sick of ourselves, in one way or another, it's unbelievable how tenaciously we cling to what we have prayed to be released from. The ego is like a gravitational force field, built up over eons of fearful thinking, which draws us away from the love in our hearts, being our own mental power turned against ourselves. It's clever, like we are, and smooth-talking, like we are, and manipulative, like we are.

God is a force of love which corrects every mistake the moment it occurs. And the ego is quite literally a mental mistake. God's answer to the birth of the ego was the creation of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God's internal teacher, an eternal communication link with his separated Sons. The Holy Spirit mentally guides us back to a perception of reality that is based on love.

Sometimes people think that calling on God means inviting a force into our lives which will make everything rosy. The truth is, it means inviting everything into our lives which will force us to grow. And growth can be messy. In order to ensure our progress toward 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.

God means love. And will means thought. That which is real is only that which stems from loving thought. And neither the Holocaust nor AIDS arose from loving thought. Both of them, rather, are products of fear. When we invite the Holy Spirit into these situations, however, he uses them as reasons and opportunities for us to grow into the very level of deep love through which they are eradicated from the earth. If we had been in that loving space to begin with, these manifestations of darkness would never have occurred.

If we really desire a moral answer to the Holocaust, we do everything in our power to create 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 share 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 born, we can, in fact, create a world in which, even if a Hitler appeared, there would be so much love that no one would listen or conspire with him.

The power of God transcends the laws of this world. Saints and prophets have fully actualized the love of God within them. They have been purified of all fearful thoughts, and only love remains within their minds. These purified beings are called the enlightened ones. Enlightened beings, Jesus and others, exist in a state which is only potential in the rest of us. The Christ mind is merely the perspective of unconditional love. You and I have the Christ, or perfectly loving, mind in us as much as Jesus does. The difference between him and us is that we are tempted to deny it.

Jesus and other enlightened masters are our evolutionary elder brothers. According to the laws of evolution, a species develops in a certain direction until that development is no longer well-adapted for survival. At that point, a mutation occurs. A thoroughly loving person is like an evolutionary mutation, manifesting a beingness which puts love first and thus creates the context in which miracles occur. The mutation, the enlightened ones, show the rest of us our evolutionary potential. They point the way.

Sometimes people claim they don't need a crutch like 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 make great music, you listen to music that's been made by great musicians who have gone before. If you're studying to be a painter, it's a good idea to study the great masters. If Picasso came into your room while you were learning to draw and said, "Hi, I have a couple of hours. Would you like some hints?" would you say no? So it is with spiritual masters. Jesus, Buddha, or any other enlightened being. They are geniuses in the way they used their minds and hearts, just as Beethoven was a genius with music, or Shakespeare a genius with words. Why not learn from them? Follow their lead. Study what they were doing right.

A Course in Miracles does not push Jesus on anyone. Although these books came from him, it's very clear that you can be an advanced student of the Course and not relate personally to him at all. A Course in Miracles understands our resistances, but it doesn't cater to them. It is time for a huge revolution in our understanding of Christic philosophy, and most particularly in our understanding of Jesus. The Christian religion has no monopoly on Christ, or on Jesus himself. In every generation, we must rediscover truth for ourselves.

Who is Jesus? He is a personal symbol of the Holy Spirit. Having been totally healed by the Holy Spirit, he has become one with him. He is definitely a "top of the mountain" experience, but that's not to say he's the only one up there. He 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. Jesus was a thoroughly purified being. To think about him is to think about, and so to call forth, the perfect love inside ourselves. He is not an idol. He is an elder brother. He is a gift.

What if we truly believed there is a God, a beneficent order to things, a force that's holding things together without our conscious control? What if we could see in our daily lives the working of that force? What if we believed it loved us and cared for us and protected us? What if we believed we could afford to relax, to trust in the force that moves the universe? Is faith. Faith isn't blind. It's visionary. It means believing that the universe is on our side, and that it knows what it's doing. Faith is the psychological context of an unfolding force for good, constantly at work in all dimensions. Our attempts to direct this force only interfere with it. Our willingness to relax into it allows it to work on our behalf.

The Scientific Revolution proved that there are objective, discernible laws of physical phenomena. Take gravity, for instance. You don't exactly have faith in the law of gravity so much as you just know that the law is the law. Now we are learning that there are objective, discernible laws of non-physical phenomena. These two sets of laws are parallel. Externally, the universe supports our physical survival. Photosynthesis in plants and plankton in the ocean produce oxygen, which we need in order to breathe. Internally, the universe also supports our survival. Emotionally and psychologically, the internal equivalent to oxygen, what we need in order to survive, is love. And human relationships exist to produce love. And what is the highest internal law? That we love one another. Because if we don't, we will all die, as surely a lack of oxygen will kill us, so will a lack of love.

A Course in Miracles tells us that there's no such thing as a faithless person. Faith is an aspect of consciousness. We either have faith in fear, or we have faith in love. Faith in the power of the world, or faith in the power of God. When we surrender to God, we surrender to something bigger than ourselves, to a unit that knows what it's doing. When we stop trying to control events, they fall into a natural order, an order that works. 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.

The experience of love is a choice we make, a mental decision to see love as the only real purpose and value of any situation. Money, sex, power, any other worldly satisfaction are just temporary relief from minor existential pain. God's will means 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 which leads to an unfoldment of events on the highest level of good for everyone involved. We don't always know what that unfoldment would look like, but we don't need to. God will do his part if we'll do ours. Our only job in every situation is to merely let go of our resistance to love. What happens then is up to him. We've surrendered control. We're letting him lead, and we have faith he knows how.

Where we have an attachment to results, we tend to have a hard time giving up control. But how can we know what result to try to achieve in a situation when we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow? What do we ask for? Instead of, "Dear God, please let us fall in love," or, "Please give me the money," we say, "Dear God, my desire, my priority is inner peace. I want the experience of love. I don't know what would bring that to me. I leave the results of this situation in your hands. I trust your will. May your will be done. Amen."

To relax, to feel the love in your heart, and to keep that as your focus in every situation, that's the meaning of spiritual surrender. It changes us. We become deeper, more attractive people. In the Christic tradition, this is the meaning of becoming as a little child. Little children don't think they know what things mean. In fact, they know they don't know. They ask someone older and wiser to explain things to them. We're like children who don't know, but think we do. We're meant to shine. Look at small children. They're all so unique before they start trying to be. Because they demonstrate the power of genuine humility. This is also the explanation of beginner's luck. When we go into a situation not knowing the rules, we don't pretend to know how to figure anything out, and we don't know yet what there is to be afraid of. This releases the mind to create from its own higher power.

Love is a win-win mode, a successful and attractive vibration. We think that success is difficult, and so for us it is. But we don't have to be struggling all the time. If you think about it, taking the bull by the horns would be a very dangerous thing to do. In fact, ambitious tension actually limits our ability to succeed because it keeps us in a state of contraction, emotionally and physically. It seems to give us energy, but doesn't really. Like the white sugar of mental health, there's a short high followed by a crash. The cultivation of mental rest, or surrender, is like eating healthy food. It doesn't give us an immediate rush, but over time it provides a lot more energy.

Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. The world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love. Surrender means the decision to stop fighting the world and to start loving it instead. It is a gentle liberation from pain. We're simply asked to shift focus, to take on a more gentle perception. That's all. God needs just one sincere, surrendered moment when love matters more than anything, and we know that nothing else really matters at all. That's when we create miracles.

Our self-perception determines our behavior. If we think we're small, limited, and adequate creatures, then we tend to behave that way, and the energy we radiate will reflect those thoughts. No matter what we do. If we think we're magnificent creatures with an infinite abundance of love and power to give, then we tend to behave that way. As we relinquish the fears which block the love within us, we become God's instruments. We become his miracle workers.

There are times when miraculous thinking is not easy, because our mental habit patterns are permeated with fear. When that's the case, when our anger, our jealousy, our hurt seems stuck to our hearts, and we can't let them go, how do we work miracles then? By asking the Holy Spirit to help us. The Course tells us that we can do many things, but one thing we can never do is to call on the Holy Spirit in vain. We're told that we don't ask God for too much. In fact, we ask for too little. Whenever we feel lost or insane or afraid, all we have to do is to ask for his help. The help might not come in the form we expected, or even thought we desired, but it will come, and we will recognize it by how we feel. In spite of everything, we will feel at peace.

When I was down on my knees, completely, and I truly understood that God was a force to be reckoned with, when I finally knew what it meant to feel sincerely humbled, I almost expected to feel his anger. Instead, it was as though I heard him gently say, "Can we start now?" Until that point, I was hiding from my love, and thus I was hiding from my life.

The return to love is hardly the end of life's adventure. It's the real beginning. A Course in Miracles says we think we have many different problems, but we really only have one: denying love. Is the only problem, and embracing it is the only answer. Love heals all of our relationships to money, the body, work, sex, death, ourselves, and one another. The future can be reprogrammed in this moment. We don't need another seminar, another degree, another lifetime, or anyone's approval in order for this to happen. All we need is a gentler perception. All we have to do is to ask for a miracle, a new beginning, a life unlike the past.

A Course in Miracles prides itself on being a practical course with a practical goal: the attainment of inner peace. Forgiveness is the key to inner peace because it is the mental technique by which our thoughts are transformed from fear to love. Forgiveness is selective remembering, a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go. But the ego is relentless. It presents the most subtle and insidious arguments for casting other people out of our hearts. The miracle worker consciously invites the Holy Spirit to enter into every relationship and deliver us from the temptation to judge and find fault. We ask him to save us from our tendency to condemn. We ask him to reveal to us the innocence within others, that we might see it within ourselves.

"Dear God, I surrender this relationship to you." Means, "Dear God, I surrender to you my thoughts about this person. Let me see their innocence through your eyes." It's easy to forgive people who have never done anything to make us angry. People who do make us angry, however, are our most important teachers. They indicate the limits to our capacity for forgiveness. It can be very hard to let go of your perception of someone's guilt if you know that, by every standard of ethics, morality, or integrity, you're right to find fault with them. But the Course asks, "Do you prefer that you be right, or happy?" If you're judging a brother, you're wrong, even if you're right.

A Course in Miracles tells us that whenever we're harboring an attack thought towards someone, it is as though we're 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? In large part, 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. The Son of God cannot sin. We can make mistakes, however, and we obviously do. But God's attitude toward error is a desire to heal us, to correct us, not to punish us. 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.

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 we seek to punish them. But whatever we do to others, we're 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.

The ego always emphasizes what someone has done wrong. The Holy Spirit always emphasizes what they've done right. The Course likens the ego to a scavenger dog, which seeks out every scrap of evidence for our brother's guilt and lays it at its master's feet. We can find, and in fact we will find, whatever it is we're looking for in life. Whether we choose to focus on the guilt in people's personality or the innocence in their soul is up to us.

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. You don't say, "I'm not angry, really, I'm not. I'm on page 14 of A Course in Miracles, and I don't get angry anymore," when inside you're seething. The Holy Spirit tells us, "Don't try to purify yourself before coming to me. I am the purifier."

I was once on my way to giving a lecture on A Course in Miracles, and I thought about a woman I knew who I was feeling annoyed with. Very quickly, I tried to hide the thought, as though it wasn't holy enough for me to be thinking at this time. And then it seemed as though a voice in my head said, "Hey, I'm your friend." Remember, the Holy Spirit wasn't judging me for my anger. He was there to help me move past it.

Now, let's talk about an issue in A Course in Miracles called special relationships. We can all relate to the desire to find Mr. or Ms. Right. It's almost a cultural obsession. But according to A Course in Miracles, the search for the perfect person to "fix us" is one of our biggest psychic wounds, one of the ego's most powerful delusions. It represents a notion in A Course in Miracles called the special relationship. Although the word "special" normally implies something wonderful, from a Course perspective, special means different, therefore separate, which is characteristic of ego rather than Spirit.

A special relationship is a relationship based on fear. To God, no one is different or special, because no one is actually separate from anyone else. Our desire to find one special person, one part of the sunship, who will complete us, is hurtful because it is delusional. It means we're seeking salvation in separation rather than in oneness. Often, when we think we're in love with a person, A Course in Miracles would indicate that we're actually anything but. The special relationship is based not on love, but on guilt. The ego tells us that there's some special person out there who will make all the pain go away. We don't really believe that, of course, but then, on the other hand, we really do. Our culture has bred the idea into us through books, songs, movies, advertising, and the conspiracy of other egos.

The special relationship makes other people, their behavior, their choices, their opinions of us, too important. It makes us think we need another person when, in fact, we are complete and whole as we are. Under the Holy Spirit's guidance, we come together to share joy. Under the ego's direction, we come together to share our desperation. A relationship is not meant to be the joining of the hip of two emotional invalids. The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather for two complete people to join together for the greater glory of God.

And what's our miracle here? It's a shift from thoughts of specialness to thoughts of holiness. Our mental patterns in regard to relationships are so fraught with fear, attack and defensiveness, guilt and selfishness, however prettily disguised, that many times we're brought to our knees. And as always, that's a good place to be. We pray for God to guide our thoughts and feelings.

The holy relationship is the old special relationship transformed. In the special relationship, the ego guides our thinking, and we meet in fear, mask to mask. In the holy relationship, the Holy Spirit has changed our minds about the purpose of love, and we meet heart to heart. In the holy relationship, it is understood that we all have unhealed places, and that healing is the purpose of our being with another person. So 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. That doesn't mean they were physically naked. It means they were emotionally naked, totally real and honest. Yet they were not embarrassed because they felt accepted completely for who they were. The holy relationship is, above all else, a friendship between two brothers. We are not put on this earth to audition one another, put someone on trial, or use other people to gratify our own ego needs. We're not here to fix, change, or belittle another person. We are here to support, forgive, and heal one another.

How do we find a holy relationship? Not by asking God to change our partners, but by asking God to change our minds. We don't run away from someone we're attracted to because we're afraid of specialness. Any time there's a potential for love, there's a potential for specialness. I often ask audiences now, "What's the first thing we should do when we're attracted to someone?" And they reply, like a pep rally, "Pray." The prayer goes something like this: "Dear God, you know, and I know, that I have more potential for neurosis in this area than in any other. Please take my attraction, my thoughts and feelings about this person, and use them for your purposes. Let this relationship unfold according to your will. Amen."

Let's talk about romantic love. People ask, "Why can't I find a deep, intimate romance?" The question is understandable because people are lonely. An intimate romantic love, however, is like taking graduate work toward a PhD in the ways of love, and many of us are hardly out of elementary school. When we're not in a relationship, the ego makes it seem as though all the pain would go away if we were. If the relationship lasts, however, it will actually bring much of our existential pain to the surface. That's part of its purpose. It will demand all of our skills at compassion, acceptance, release, forgiveness, and selflessness. Relationships don't necessarily take the pain away. The only thing that takes the pain away is a healing of the things that cause the pain. And it isn't the absence of other people in our lives which causes the pain, but rather what we do with them when they're there.

People ask, "When will my soulmate get here?" But praying for the right person is useless if we're not ready to receive him or her. Our soulmates are human beings, just like we are, going through the normal processes of growth. Our vulnerability to the myth of Mr. and Ms. 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 is illustrated in the image of a long-stemmed rose. The stem is the friendship. The blossom is the romance. Because the ego is sensation-oriented, our focus automatically goes to the blossom. But all the nourishment which 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.

A Course in Miracles says that it's not our job to seek for love, but to seek for all the barriers we hold against its coming. Thinking that there is some special person out there who's going to save us is a barrier to pure love. We seek desperately for love, but it is that same desperation which leads us to destroy it once it gets here. We don't have to remind God that we'd like wonderful relationships. He's already clear about that. A Course in Miracles teaches us that a desire is a prayer. The most enlightened prayer isn't, "Dear God, send me someone wonderful," but, "Dear God, make me into someone wonderful."

A Course in Miracles 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.

Of course, a good relationship isn't always crystals and rainbows. It's a birth process, often painful, often messy. A spiritual relationship isn't necessarily one in which two people are smiling all the time. Spiritual means, to me, above all else, authentic. Real work can only occur in the presence of rigorous honesty. We all long for that, but we're afraid of honestly communicating with another person because we think they'll leave us if they see who we really are.

A couple from my lectures once came to me for counseling. Earlier that day, the man had told the woman he was breaking off their relationship. She was shocked and hurt and asked him if he would come with her to see me in order to help her work through the loss. As the two of them sat across from me on my couch, I assured Rick that I wasn't there to try to get them back together, but to join with them in asking for peace. I remembered a similar situation I had been in myself, and how brilliantly my therapist had handled it. I said to him, "Why are you so angry at Deborah?" "I'm not angry at her," he said. "Well, you sure sound angry." "I know that. It's not my job to fix Deborah," he said. "I don't want to change her. I just want out." "Oh, I bet you think that's so spiritual," I said. He looked surprised. I think he thought he'd been a very good student of A Course in Miracles. "You haven't suspended judgment of Deborah," I said. "You've withheld vital information from her, data without which she couldn't function effectively within the relationship. Why don't you just tell her why you're so angry?" Once again, he repeated, "I'm not angry." "Well," I said, "pretend you're an actor. Go on, Rick. We're safe here. Let her have it." And boy, once he got started, he let it out. He told her that she'd had no concept of how to live with another person. She just did everything however she wanted to do it, and if he wanted to come along, well, that was just great. I don't remember exactly what Elsie had to say, but there was a lot of communication that just came gushing out once he allowed it to. When he was finished, Deborah, obviously moved, said quietly and sincerely, "I never knew that. Thank you for telling me." They left my office and did not break up their relationship. They told me later it was reborn in that session. The anger that Rick was feeling was pent-up energy that came from the fact that he had felt it "unspiritual" to share his honest feelings with Deborah as they went along. But it's far better to communicate than to suppress our feelings. Anger is often a result of a series of uncommunicated feelings building up inside of us and ultimately exploding. If anger comes up, it's to be accepted. If we think our partner won't love us if we get angry, then we stop being honest, and the relationship is doomed for sure.

I've suggested to couples that they agree not to break up a relationship because of a fight. It's very important to have a safe space for fighting. I say that because fighting isn't always fighting. Once I was having a dramatic discussion with my friend Evan. A mutual friend of ours spoke up and said, "I can't stand the way you guys are fighting all the time." "We're not fighting," I said. "We're Jewish." He thought we were fighting, but we thought we were having a passionate conversation. Just because someone isn't expressing their rage, by the way, doesn't mean they don't have any rage. Turned outward is called rage. Rage turned inward is called ulcers and cancer and things like that. The unhealthiest thing we can do with anger is to deny we have it. The miraculous perspective is not to pretend we're not angry, but rather to say, "I'm angry, but I'm willing not to be. Dear God, please show me what it is I'm not seeing." There's a way of sharing our upset with people without expressing it as an attack. Instead of saying, for instance, "You made me feel this or that," we say, "This is how I'm feeling. I'm not saying you made me feel this way, or that you're to blame. I'm simply sharing this as part of my healing, in order to release this feeling and move beyond it." In this way, you see, we're taking responsibility for our feelings. And what could have been seen as an argument, or even avoided as unpleasant, can become an important part of the healing power in the relationship.

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. Now, it's the same thing with our minds. We're always perfect. We can't not be. Our fearful patterns, our dysfunctional habits take hold within our mind and cover our perfection, but temporarily. That's all. We are still perfect children of God. There has never been a storm that hasn't passed. Gray clouds never last forever, but the blue sky does.

So what are we to do with our fear, our anger, the clouds which cover the love inside us? Relinquish them to the Holy Spirit. He transforms them through love, and never through an attack on another person. It is attack, not the anger itself, which is destructive. Yelling into pillows has become popular in certain circles, and for good reason. Getting the energy up and out is often a good way to shed the physical tension that makes it so difficult to pray when you need it the most. Our anger stands in front of our love. Letting it out is part of the process of relinquishing it, of letting go the barriers we hold against love's coming.

The last thing we ever want to do is to buy into the insidious delusion that spiritual lives and spiritual relationships are always quiet or always blissful. I once knew a man who came on very strong at the beginning of relationships, but couldn't seem to help closing his heart as soon as a woman had opened hers. I've heard that kind of behavior referred to as an addiction to the attraction phase in relationships. This man did not maliciously go around hurting women. He sincerely wanted to be in a genuine, committed relationship. What he lacked were the spiritual skills which would enable him to settle down in one place long enough to build anything solid with an equal partner. As soon as he saw human faults and weaknesses in a woman, he would run.

The narcissistic personality is looking for perfection, which is a way of making sure that love never has a chance to blossom. The initial high of romance can be so heady, so tantalizing, that the real work of growth which needs to follow the initial attraction phase can seem too dull, too hard to commit to. As soon as the other person has been seen to be a real human being, the ego is repelled and wants to find somewhere else to play. At the end of a relationship with someone like this, we feel as though we've taken cocaine. We had a fast, very exciting ride, and it felt at the time like something very meaningful was happening. Then we crashed, realized that nothing meaningful had happened at all. It was all made up. Now all we have is a headache, and we can see that this kind of thing is not good. It's not healthy, and we don't want to do it again.

But there's a reason why we're attracted to relationships like this. We were drawn to the illusion of meaning. Sometimes someone who has nothing to offer in a real relationship can come on like they're offering the world. They were so dissociated from their own feelings that they had become highly skilled performers, unconsciously playing whatever part our fantasies prescribed. But the responsibility for our pain still remains our own. If we hadn't been looking for a cheap thrill, we wouldn't have been vulnerable to the lie.

"How could we have been so stupid?" That's the question we always ask ourselves at the end of these experiences. But once we've had enough of them, we admit to ourselves that we weren't really stupid at all. We suspected this was a drug. The problem was, we wanted it. We saw exactly what the game was with this person, usually within the first 15 minutes. Yet we were so attracted to the high, we were willing to pretend we didn't see it, for just a night, or a week, or however long it lasted. The fact that someone said to us, "You are so fabulous, you're so wonderful, this is such a great date, how lucky a guy is to get to date you," when he's only known you for an hour, is the blinking red light to any thinking woman. The problem is the depth of our wounds can be so great, we can be so hungry to hear those words because deep down we suspect that they're untrue, that hearing them can cause us to put aside all rational considerations.

When you're starved, you're desperate. Women say to me sometimes, "Marianne, why do I always meet emotionally abusive men?" My answer is usually the following: The problem is not that you met him. The problem is that you gave him your number. The problem, in other words, is not that we attract a certain kind of person, but rather that we are attracted to a certain kind of person. Someone who is distant, emotionally, might remind us, for instance, of one or both of our parents. "Ah, he's distant and emotionally, subtly disapproving. Must be home." The problem is not just that we are off of pain, but that we are comfortable with that pain. It's what we've always known.

The flip side of our dangerous attractions to people who have nothing to offer us is our tendency to feel bored by people who do. Nothing which is alien to our system can enter into us and stay there for long. This is true whether we're talking about something taken into our bodies or into our minds. If I swallow a piece of aluminum foil, my body will regurgitate until the offending object is expelled. If I'm being asked to swallow an idea that doesn't agree with me, then my psychological system will go through the same process of regurgitation in order to expel the offending material. So if I'm convinced I'm not good enough, then I will have a very difficult time accepting someone into my life who thinks I am. It's the Groucho Marx syndrome of not wanting to like anyone who would want me in their club. The only way that I can accept anyone's finding me wonderful is if I find myself wonderful. To the ego, self-acceptance is death. And that's why we're attracted to people who don't want us. We know they're not into it from the beginning. We pretend to be surprised later when we find ourselves betrayed, when they leave us after an intense but fairly short stay. They fit perfectly into our ego's plan: "I will not be loved."

What the ego doesn't want us to see. Available people are frightening. They threaten the ego citadel. The reason we're not attracted to them is because we're not available ourselves.

Our barriers to love are rarely consciously chosen. There are efforts to protect the places where the heart is bruised. Somewhere, sometime, we felt as though an open heart caused us pain or humiliation. We loved with the openness of a child, and someone didn't care, or laughed, or even punished us for the effort. So, in a quick moment, perhaps a fraction of a second, we made a decision to protect ourselves from ever feeling that pain again. We would never again allow ourselves to be so vulnerable. We built emotional defenses. We tried to build a fortress across our heart, to protect us from any cold assault.

The only problem is, according to A Course of Miracles, that we create what we defend against. There was a time in my life when I felt I should stop opening up so much to people who didn't honor my heart as I wished it to be honored. I was angry at people who I felt had hurt me, but I denied the anger instead of getting in touch with it and releasing it to God. This is a common trap for Course in Miracle students. If anger isn't brought up into conscious awareness, it has no place to go. It either turns into an attack on self or an inappropriate unconscious attack on others. I didn't recognize the full extent of my anger, you see, and I thought the lesson to be learned was merely that I shouldn't reveal so much of my honest feelings.

I then went into relationships with two strikes against me. I was closed, cold, and armed with hidden emotional knives coming from my unconscious anger. Contrary to whatever front I might have been able to lead with, that's not exactly a delightful package. Between the coldness and the anger, I could turn off the saintly as man. And this, of course, only increased my anger and distrust.

A Course of Miracles speaks of shadow figures we bring with us from our past. It tells us that we tend to see no one as they are now. We keep blaming someone in the present for something someone else did to us in the past. Some poor guy would tell me, "Darling, I'm not able to come back Sunday night like I planned. I've got to keep working on this project. I might not be back until Tuesday." Well, he might just as well have told me that my cat was dead and the dog was dying. The problem wasn't that the man wasn't coming home for a few days more. The problem was how it made me feel inside to hear him say that. Such a dark despair would run across my heart. I can't begin to tell you. I wasn't relating to that man or that circumstance. I was remembering all the times I had ever felt as though I didn't matter, I wasn't attractive, daddy didn't want to hold me, or someone else didn't want to have sex anymore.

More from the Course's perspective, this situation was coming up now in order for me to feel that feeling and know that it has nothing to do with the present. I asked for a miracle. "I am willing to see this differently. I am willing to remember who I am." God's answer to my pain was not going to be, contrary to what my ego kept insisting, was the only way out of this grief: a man who was going to tell me 60 times a day, "You're fabulous, you're wonderful, I love you, I want you," and then show me just how desirable I really was maybe twice, let's say three times a day. But feeling, in fact, was bound to come ultimately for men who would not, because no one can really tolerate my neediness or the guilt I would try to project onto them in order to get my needs met, or what I thought my needs were.

The goal of spiritual practice is full recovery, and the only thing we need recovered from is a fractured sense of self. If we don't already believe at ourselves, another person cannot convince us we're okay. If they act as though we are, we will either not believe them or become so dependent on their reinforcement that we proceed through our dependency to change their mind. Either way, we get to stay convinced that we're not okay. We awaken to our own perfection through our desire to see the perfection in someone else.

Sometimes this is not easy. When I feel the old familiar darkness starting to descend around me, when a man, for instance, makes a comment that I know intellectually is probably innocent enough, but which makes me feel that I'm abandoned, or uncared for, or rejected. I've been through enough in my life to know that the evil does not lie in what he just said. He is not the enemy. The enemy is this feeling, which in the past has led me to attack or defend enough to make him feel exactly what I'm afraid he's feeling, but which he really isn't. I can choose to see this differently. This is my wall. This is where we must be very conscious and call on God. We ask for a miracle. "Dear God, please help me." This is it right here. This is where the sword enters my heart. This is where I blow it every time.

The moment when the pain is greatest is a wonderful opportunity. The ego would prefer that we never look too directly into the pain. When in crisis, there's a good chance we might have a slip and ask heaven for help. The ego would prefer that we not go into crisis. The ego prefers that a mild river of misery run through the background of our lives, never bad enough to make us question whether our own choices are creating that pain.

The process of miraculous change is two-fold. One, I see my error or dysfunctional pattern. Two, I ask God to take it from me. The first principle without the second is impotent. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, "Your best thinking got you here. You're the problem, but you're not the answer." The second principle isn't enough to change us either. The Holy Spirit can't take from us what we will not release to him. He won't work without our consent. He cannot remove our character defects without our willingness because that would be violating our free will. We chose those patterns, however mistakenly, and he will not force us to give them up. In asking God to heal us, we're committing to the choice to be healed. This means the choice to change. The ego's resistance to this is intense. It wants us to think that an old dog doesn't change. The only advantage of knowing that we're angry is so that we can make a choice to be otherwise. We can spend years in therapy, but until the choice is made to do it differently, we just keep going around in circles. Of course, it feels unnatural to be gentle when we've been harsh for many years, but that's no excuse for not trying.

A Course in Miracles says that the most effective way to teach a child is not by saying, "Don't do that," but by saying, "Do this." We don't reach the light through endless analysis of the dark. We reach the light by choosing the light. Light means understanding. Through understanding, we're healed.

I once heard a tape by Ram Dass, a major spiritual teacher, in which he told of seeing a newspaper article about an abused baby being taken away from his mother. As a police matron tried to take the baby, he kept struggling to remain in his mother's arms. Although his mother was the one who beat him, she was the one he knew. He was used to her. He wanted to remain in familiar territory. This story illustrates our relationship to our own egos. The ego is our pain, but it is what we know, and we resist moving out of it. The effort it takes to grow out of painful patterns often feels more uncomfortable than remaining within them.

There is a tendency these days to analyze our neuroses ad infinitum. It uses the analysis itself to justify rather than heal the wound. After a certain point, having seen why a pattern developed (my father was emotionally unavailable, for example, or my mother abused me) and the effect it's had on our personalities (such as, "I don't know how to let a man get close to me now," or "I have a very hard time trusting authority figures"), actual change occurs because of a decision on our part. The decision to heal. The decision to change. It ultimately doesn't matter so much why I become angry or defensive. What matters is that I decide I want to be healed and I ask God to help me.

I was once talking to a friend, and he made some comment about how he was afraid that if we got closely involved, one of us might get hurt. "So, which one of us are you concerned for?" I asked. And he answered, "You." I felt an anticipatory rejection. I was angry, and I told him so. "That's what I mean," he said. "You obviously take things so personally. I don't think I could stand it for long." Now, I knew this was a moment I had repeated in various ways with various people, and I had asked for healing. I was open, so I asked him, "Tell me honestly, how could I have done it differently? What else could I have said?" "You could have just smiled and said, 'Don't flatter yourself.'" I was so excited. I was like an eager actress working with a great director. "That's so great!" I said. "Let's go back and do that scene one more time. Say what you said again." "All right," he said. "You know, Marian, I just have this awful feeling that if we really got together, one of us would get hurt." And I asked him, "Which one of us are you afraid for?" "You." I looked at him and I smiled. "Huh. Don't flatter yourself." He laughed, and I held with excitement. This had been no small awakening. It was a genuine empowerment, a reprogramming of my emotional computer in an area where I had unconsciously gone for an unworkable response pattern every time. I now established a new groove, a new set of possibilities. Initially, I had chosen the way of anger, and now I chose the way of love. I did not have to be the wounded animal. I could choose to identify with my own strength, which was, in fact, the more natural role for me to play. The only problem was, before this point, I hadn't known how to play it. I had asked, and I had been shown. I could choose to see others through a generous, trusting nature. My brother wasn't here to attack me; he was here to love me. It was completely up to me whether to trust that and love him back.

The issue is the practice of forgiveness. Now, to the ego, love is a crime. It seeks to convince us that forgiveness is a dangerous position, which entails an unfair sacrifice on our part. The ego claims that forgiveness can lead us into situations where we become someone's doormat. To the ego, love is weakness. To the Holy Spirit, love is strength.

I was dating someone several years ago when the Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles. The Opening Ceremonies were a marvelous theatrical presentation, and it was very difficult to get tickets. Because he was involved in the media, Mike was given, at the last minute, one pass that would enable him to go. Now, I was very excited for him. Everyone in town knew it was going to be a wonderful event. We decided that I would watch the ceremonies on TV, and we would meet afterwards at the conclusion of the broadcast. I started getting dressed and figured that it might be an hour or so before I heard from him, since the traffic around the stadium was bound to be horrendous. So, an hour passed, and then another. Well, I thought, he's in TV, so maybe something came up. Another hour, and then another. Midnight came, and midnight went. I took off my clothes and makeup. 2 a.m., then 3 a.m. At times I fell asleep; at other times I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling. At times I was livid; at other times I was scared. He was lying in a ditch, dead somewhere. I started calling his house. No answer. I'd call again. No answer. Finally, hardly having slept at all, I called it around 6 a.m., and he answered. "Hello," he said. "Mike," I said. "This is Maryanne." "Oh, hi. Are you all right?" "Yeah. Why?" "We had a date yesterday. Did you forget?" "All right," he said. "I had a kind of late night." Now, I don't know what I said to get off the phone, but I know how I felt, and it wasn't wonderful. I'd been stood up, and I felt that kind of blow to my self-esteem that starts in your gut and shoots emotional black ink through all your veins. I was dazed, but I somehow fell asleep.

Now, what would A Course of Miracles say about that? I knew I needed a miracle, but all I could come up with were two choices for the ways to deal with this, both of which I tried before in similar situations, and neither one felt good or got me what I wanted. My first choice was to get very angry and let him know it. "Who do you think you are to treat me like that, you son of a—?" The problem with that choice was that it would completely invalidate my position. "Well, Marian's a nice girl, but her temper just doesn't cut it. She's hysterical when she doesn't get her way." The only other choice I could imagine was to forgive him and let it go. But that didn't feel good either. "It's okay, you stood me up, Mike. I don't care. It doesn't matter." No unconditional love, I could understand, but not unconditional dating. I didn't know what to do, so I asked for a miracle.

In case you're wondering, it took him two weeks to call. But that time, of course, I had forgotten about it. I had continued, however, to say over and over to myself, "I forgive you, Mike, and I release you to the Holy Spirit." So I was high. The constant repetition of my willingness to forgive someone had worked on my brain like a pleasurable drug. I didn't care whether I heard from him again or not.

So, one day, I'm in my house, the phone rings, and when I answer it, I hear Mike's familiar voice. "Hey, Maryanne." Before I could even think about it consciously, a real warmth and love filled up my chest. "Mike! Hi! It's so good to hear from you." And you know, it was—it felt wonderful to hear his voice. "So, how you doing?" he said. "I've missed you." I don't know if I said I'd missed him too. His line was so ridiculous. I probably didn't say anything. But I do remember this: he said, "Well, uh, can I see you?" "When?" I said. "How about tonight?" At that moment, words came out of my mouth that startled me as much as they must have startled him. I said, with a lot of love and kindness, "Mike, I really care for you, and that's not going to change. I'm still your friend, no matter what. But when it comes to dating, we don't seem to do the same dance. So, if you want to have lunch sometime, please call. But as far as a date is concerned, I need to pass." We both mumbled a few more pleasantries and then got off the phone. I was worried that I rejected a brother. But just as that worry came into my mind, I saw an internal image of lots of champagne bottles with their corks popping off in the middle of heaven. I hadn't rejected a brother; I had simply accepted myself in a whole new way. He had a win: a lesson learned and a friendship, if he wanted it. And I had a win too. Forgiveness hadn't turned me into a doormat; it had taught me how to own my yes and own my no, without anger, with dignity, and with love.

A lot of us wonder about the meaning of marriage. Marriage, like anything else, can be used by either the ego or the Holy Spirit. Its content is never predetermined. It is a living organism which reflects the continuous choices of the individuals involved. Very little is sacred anymore in this world, but one thing must be treated with reverence, or the moral fabric of the world continues to disintegrate, and that is an agreement between two people. An enlightened marriage is a commitment to participate in the process of mutual growth and forgiveness, sharing a common goal of service to God. Marriage is a more profound commitment than other forms of relationship, such as a couple who are living together, because it's an agreement that while a whole lot of shaking and screaming might go on, no one's going to leave the room. We're both safe to go through whatever upset is called forth from deep within. And whenever we're truthful, there are times when we're upset, but it's safe to do that here. No one is leaving. A marriage is God's gift to a man and to a woman. It is a gift which should then be given back to him. A man's wife is literally God's gift to him, and a woman's husband is God's gift to her. But God only gives gifts that are meant for everyone. So it is that a marriage is meant to be a blessing on the world because it is a context in which two people might become more than what they would have been alone. The entire world is blessed by the presence of healed people.

There's a lot of talk today about people growing up in dysfunctional homes, but who didn't grow up in a dysfunctional home? This world is a dysfunction. However, there's nothing we've been through, or seen, or done, that cannot be used to make our lives more valuable now. We can grow from any experience, and we can transcend any experience. Forgiveness remains the only path that leads out of hell. Whether we're forgiving our parents, or someone else, or ourselves, the laws of mind remain the same. As we love, we shall be released from pain, and as we deny love, we shall remain in pain. Each of us have different fears and different manifestations of fear, but all of us are saved by the same technique: the call to God to save our lives by salvaging our minds. "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for love is the kingdom, and love is the glory, and love is the power forever and forever."

A Course in Miracles says that the only real pleasure comes from doing God's will. The only thing to be saved from is our own negativity or fear. The crux of salvation in any area is a shift in our sense of purpose. That shift is a miracle. As always, we consciously ask for it. "Dear God, please give my life some sense of purpose. Use me as an instrument of Your peace. Use my talents and abilities to spread love. I surrender my job to You. Help me to remember that my real job is to love the world back to health. Thank you. Amen."

Don't ask God to send you a brilliant career; rather, ask Him to show you the brilliance which is within you. It is the recognition of our brilliance which releases it into expression. Stable, meaningful external effects don't occur until we've experienced an internal stirring, and once an internal stirring has occurred, external effects can't fail to happen. We're all capable of an internal stirring and are, in fact, coded for it. It is our potential for greatness. Achievement doesn't come from what we do, but from who we are. Our worldly power results from our personal power. Our career is an extension of our personality. People who profoundly achieve aren't necessarily people who do so much; they are people around whom things get done. Mahatma Gandhi and John F. Kennedy were both examples of this. Their greatest achievements lay in all the energy they stirred in other people, the invisible forces they unleashed around them. By touching their own depths, they touched the depths within others. That kind of charisma, the power to affect what happens on the earth from an invisible realm within, is the natural right and function of the Son of God. The new frontiers are internal ones. The real stretch is always within us. Instead of expanding our ability or willingness to go out and get anything, we expand our ability to receive what is already here for us. Personal power emanates from someone who takes life seriously. The universe takes us as seriously as we take it. There is no greater seriousness than the full appreciation of the power and importance of love. Miracles flow from the recognition that love is the purpose of our career.

A Course in Miracles discusses a traditional Christian concept called the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The idea here is that when our lives are given to the Holy Spirit to use for His purposes, new talents emerge within us. We don't get our lives together and then give them to God, but rather we give our lives to God, and then things start coming together. As our hearts open, our talents and our gifts begin to blossom. A Course in Miracles tells us that all of the children of God have power. We are all special, yet no one has special power. All of us are special, and yet none of us are special. No one has any more potential than anyone else for spreading the love and light of God. The Course of Miracles says that one day all the gifts of God will be shared equally by everyone. We all have the potential for greatness, but it gets plowed out of us at an early age. Fear entered when someone told us there's a first prize, second prize, and third prize, that some efforts deserve an A, but others get a C. After a while, part of us becomes afraid to even try. The only thing we have to give to the world is our own take on it. But the ego argues that this is not enough. It leads us to cover up our simple truth, to try to invent a better one. But the ego isn't protecting us here, although, as always, it pretends to be. It isn't guarding against our making fools of ourselves; it is guarding against our experience of who we really are, the brilliance of expressing it, and the joy which that expression brings to ourselves and others.

The natural light of God within us is what the Course refers to as our grandeur. The ego's efforts to embellish our natural state is what the Course refers to as grandiosity. Grandiosity interferes with the clear expression of our power by trying to get us to add something to it. This is a ploy by which it thwarts our capacity to express who we really are and accept full recognition from others in return. Once again, separation is the ego's goal.

I used to always be on an emotional roller coaster, feeling I was better than other people, and then feeling I was worse. "I'm better. No, I'm not as good. I'm better. No, I'm not as good." But they're the same mistake. The truth is, we're just like everybody else. Knowing this, that we're no better or worse than anyone else because we're all essentially the same, is a thought lacking in luster only until we fully appreciate what kind of club we belong to. Humanity is a group of infinitely powerful creatures. Our power, however, is in us, but not of us. It is God's spirit inside of us which enlightens and enlivens our lives. Of ourselves, we're really no big deal. We're tempted to think that we're more impressive when we put on airs. We're not. Of course, we're rather pathetic when we do that. The Light of Christ shines most brightly within us when we relax and let it be. Our deepest fear, you see, is not that we're inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we're powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? We are children of God. Our playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We're all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God which is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as you let your own light shine, you unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As you're liberated from your own fear, your presence automatically liberates others.

A miracle worker is an artist of the soul, and there's no higher art than living a good life. An artist informs the world of what's available behind the masks we all wear, and that's what we're all here to do. The reason so many of us are obsessed with becoming stars is because we're not yet starring in our own lives. The cosmic spotlight isn't pointed at you; it radiates from within you. I used to feel like I was waiting for someone to discover me, to produce me, like Lena Horne at the drugstore. Ultimately, I realized that the person I was waiting for was myself. If we wait for the world's permission to shine, we'll never receive it. How could Leonardo da Vinci not have painted? How could Shakespeare not have written? In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke tells a young writer to write only if he has to. We are to do what there is a deep psychological and emotional imperative for us to do. That's our point of power, the source of our brilliance. Our power is not rationally or willfully called forth; it's a divine dispensation, an act of grace. It's a mark on our forehead that makes it appear as though God had chosen us. People who appear chosen are people who, on some level of their being, chose God, even if they don't yet know it. There's a light in their eyes; there's something in their beingness which implies a mind attuned to a higher purpose and a heart that sings a sweeter song.

Do what you love. Do what makes your heart sing. And never do it for the money. Don't go to work to make money; go to work to spread joy. "Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and the Maserati will get here when it's supposed to." God doesn't have a poverty consciousness. He doesn't want us to have a boring life or a boring career. He doesn't have anything against the things of this world. Money isn't evil; it's just nothing like anything else. It can be used for holy or unholy purposes. When our goal is making money, creativity becomes distorted. If I saw money as the ultimate goal of my teaching career, then I would have to think more about what people wanted to hear and less about what I feel it's important to say. When we're working solely for money, our motivation is getting rather than giving. The miraculous transformation here is a shift from a sales mentality to a service mentality. Until we make this switch, we're operating from ego and concentrating on the things of this world rather than on love.

The Bible says it's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle. That's because the attachment to money is a huge temptation to deviate from love. But the moral imperative isn't to block the reception of money into our lives; the challenge is to spiritualize our relationship to it by seeing that its only purpose is to help heal the world. In an enlightened society, rich people will not necessarily have less money; poor people, however, will have much more. The problem, contrary to the ego's perception, is not just the distribution of wealth, but the consciousness around it. It behooves us to remember that our money is God's money, and we want to have whatever He wants us to have in order to do with it whatever He wants us to do. God wants us to have whatever material support contributes to our greatest happiness. The ego tries to convince us that God demands sacrifice and that the life of service would be a life of poverty. This is not the case. Our purpose on this earth is to be happy, and it is the Holy Spirit's function to help us achieve that. There's much work to be done for the healing of the world, and some of it costs money. Often, the Holy Spirit sends us money in order that we may perform tasks He wants accomplished on His behalf.

A responsible attitude towards money is one in which we're open to whatever comes and trusting that it always will. One of the principles to remember about money is how important it is to pay for services rendered. If we begrudge someone else the right to make a living, we're begrudging ourselves the same. What we give, we will receive, and what we withhold will be withheld from us. And the universe doesn't register the difference between stealing from a huge corporation or stealing from a nice little old lady. The universe will always support our integrity.

Sometimes our debts are so big or confusing that even though we have the best of intentions, the burden and the guilt may be so overwhelming that we just go on automatic, push the bills to the back of the drawer and try to forget them, or change our phone number. The universe will not support that. A big person is not someone who never falls down; a big person is someone who, when they fall, does what it takes to get up again. As always, the issue is to ask for a miracle. Purity of heart creates breakthroughs. The universe is forgiving. If you owe back bills, no matter how much, write a letter to the company or individual. Own the issue. Apologize, if appropriate, and then let them know that you're setting up a payment plan, effective immediately. Send them something with the letter. Don't set yourself up for failure. If you can't afford to send $15 a month, that's okay; send five if that's all you can, but send it. Send it regularly and send it on time. It doesn't matter if the bill is $50,000. The Course says there's no order of difficulty in miracles. No matter what the shape of a problem, its form, or its size, a miracle can handle it. Miracles mean that at any moment, we can begin again.

There's one other principle that seems to me very important when dealing with our attitudes towards money. It seems to me that a lot of people hold judgment against wealth. I was once driving around a very wealthy neighborhood in Houston, Texas, and I found myself thinking these thoughts: "The people who live in these big houses work for huge multinational corporations that oppress people throughout the Third World." And then I asked myself, "How do I know what these people spend their money on?" I realized that if I judged other people for money, I would never allow myself to have any. I understood how deeply we're rooted in a prejudice against money, a feeling that money is unspiritual. This is another area where it behooves us to ask God to heal our thoughts. There's nothing spiritual about poverty. There's nothing holy about breadlines, and there's nothing beautiful about what happens in a society when money stops circulating. And so we pray: "Dear God, I surrender to You all my thoughts about money. I surrender to You my debts. I surrender to You my wealth. Open my mind to receive abundantly. Channel Your abundance through me in a way that serves the world. Amen."

Goals are an interesting subject these days. Goal setting has become very popular in recent years. Goal setting is a process of focusing the mind on a desired result, but this is actually just another way of trying to get the world to do what we want it to do. It is not spiritual surrender. A Course in Miracles discusses the difference between magic and miracles. Magic is when we focus the mind on a desired manifestation, giving our shopping list to God and telling Him what we want Him to do for us. Miracles are when we ask God what we can do for Him. Miracles shift us from a "get" to a "give" mentality. The desire to get something reflects the core belief that we don't have enough already. As long as we believe there's scarcity inside of us, we'll continue to manufacture scarcity around us because that's our basic thought. No matter what we get, it will never be enough. When our desire is to give instead of get, our core belief is that we have so much abundance we can afford to give it away. The subconscious mind takes its clue from our core beliefs and brilliantly manufactures situations which reflect them. Our willingness to give directs the universe to give to us.

The miracle worker's goal in every circumstance is peace of mind. A Course in Miracles tells us that we don't know what would make us happy; we just think we do. All of us have gotten things we thought would make us happy, and they didn't. The miracle-minded perception would be to make happiness itself our goal and to relinquish the thought that we know what that would look like. We never know what's going to happen in a month or a year from now, and if we got what we wanted now, then perhaps we would be worse off for it later on. Let's say we're going in for a job interview. We want the job very much, and someone might have suggested to us that we should affirm, "I will be getting the job," making that our goal. As miracle workers, we would make inner peace our only goal. What that does is to direct our mind to focus on all the factors which contribute to our peace and leave everything else out of our conscious consideration. The mind, like the physical eye, is inundated with so many impressions at one time that a built-in sensor mechanism brings focus to our perception. It chooses what we'll notice and what we won't. Making our goal anything other than peace is emotionally self-destructive. If our goal is to get the job, then that's fine if we do. But if we don't get the job, then we'll feel depressed. If we make peace our goal, then if we get the job, that's great. But if we don't, we're still peaceful.

A Course in Miracles tells us it's important to set a goal at the beginning of a situation, or it will seem to unfold chaotically. If our goal is peace, we're programmed for emotional stability no matter what happens. The mind will have been directed to see the situation from a peaceful perspective. If we didn't get the job we wanted, it won't matter so much. We'll truly understand that there's something better coming up soon, or that this isn't really the perfect job for us anyway. We'll have faith in God. The miracle is that we will really feel our faith; it won't just be positive goo thrown over our pain. Our emotions flow from our thoughts, and not the other way around.

Will is that we sacrifice or be poor or be unhappy for his sake. If we're going to set any goal, let us set the goal of being healed of the belief that God is fear instead of Love. Remember that our happiness and our function are one. If God is our goal, that's the same thing as saying that happiness is our goal. There's no need to believe that God can't figure out the details or provide for the ways to make it happen.

The journey to a pure heart can be highly disorienting. For years we may have worked for power, money, and prestige. Now, all of a sudden, we've learned that those are just the values of a dying world. We don't know where to search for motivation anymore. If we're not working in order to get rich, then why are we working at all? What are we supposed to do all day? Just sit home and watch bad TV? Not at all. But thinking so is a temporary phase that many people go through when the values of the old world no longer have a hold on us, but the values of the new don't yet grab our our soul. They will.

There comes a time, not too long into the journey to God, when the realization that the world could work beautifully if we would give it the chance begins to excite us. It becomes our new motivation. The news isn't how bad things are; the news is how good they could be, and our own activity could be part of the unfoldment of Heaven on Earth. There is no more powerful motivation than to feel we're being used in the creation of a world where love has healed all wounds. We're no longer ambitious for ourselves but are rather inspired by the vision of a healed world. Inspiration rearranges our energies. It sources within us a new power and direction. We no longer feel like we're trying to carry a football to the finish line, clutching it to our chest and surrounded by hostile forces. We feel instead as though angels are pushing us from behind and making straight our path as we go.

Purity of heart will not make us poor. The exaltation of poverty is a spiritual virtue is of the ego, not the spirit. A person acting from a motivation of contribution and service rises to such a level of moral authority, but worldly success is a natural result. Give all your gifts away in service to the world. If you want to paint, don't wait for a grant. Paint a wall in your town that looks drab and uninviting. You never know who's going to see that wall. Whatever it is you want to do, give it away in service to your community. At my lectures in Los Angeles, I grew so tired of hearing actors moan about not getting jobs. "Go to hospitals, to retirement homes, to mental institutions," I said. "Put on plays there." If you want to act, act.

"Some people who heard me formed a group called The Miracle Players, and they did just that." "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 2 years before it became the source of my income. When I started lecturing, I had no idea it would become my profession. It was something I was doing simply because it was the right thing to do. When you get serious about the universe, the universe gets serious about you. I never felt the need to advertise much for my lectures. I figured that if they were of genuine interest to people, then people would hear about them. That's not to say that advertising is bad, as long as the motivation for it is to inform people as opposed to manipulating them. Arnold patent wrote that if you genuinely have something to say, there's someone who genuinely needs to hear it. We don't have to invent an audience so much as we have to hone the message we plan to give them once they get here. Serving three people is as important as serving 300. Once we're clear about how to deal with a small following, a large following will develop automatically if that would serve the world. Our power lies in our clarity about the role our work can play in the creation of a more beautiful world.

The miracle is to think of our career as our contribution, however small, to the healing of the universe. The ego would have us believe that the world is based on finite resources. This world is but God's world is not. In God's world, which is the real world, the more we give, the more we have. You're having a piece of the world's pie doesn't mean there's less for anyone else, and someone else having a piece of the pie doesn't mean there's less for you. You needn't compete in business or anywhere else. Your generosity towards others is the key to your positive experience of the world. There's enough room for everyone to be beautiful. There's enough room for everyone to be successful. There's enough room for everyone to be rich. It is only our thinking which blocks that possibility from manifestation. The people who have achieved more than you in any area are only a half a step ahead of you in time. Bless them and praise their gifts, and bless and praise your own. The world would be less rich without their contributions, and it would be less rich without yours. There's more than room for everyone; in fact, there's a need for everyone. As we are healed, the world is healed.

Doing anything for a purpose other than love means reliving the split from God, perpetuating and maintaining that split. Every person is a cell in the body of human consciousness. At the moment, it is as though the body of Christ is suffering from cancer. In cancer, a normal working cell decides that it no longer wants to function in contribution to the whole. Instead of being part of the support system of the blood or the liver, the cell goes off and builds its own kingdom. That's a malignancy which threatens to destroy the organism. And so it is with the body of humanity. Everyone's gone off to to do their own thing: "my career, my store, my money." We've lost sight of our essential interrelatedness, and this forgetfulness threatens to destroy us. The "my" mentality is the ego. It is the belief in separation. It is our cosmic disease. Taking what we have and devoting it to the restoration of the whole is our salvation and the salvation of the world. Our devotion then becomes our work, and our work becomes our devotion.

In his book Quantum Healing, Dr. Deepak Chopra tells a powerful story about the connection between love and physical healing: "An Ohio University study of heart disease in the 1970s was conducted by feeding quite toxic, high-cholesterol diets to rabbits in order to block their arteries, duplicating the effect that such a a diet has on human arteries. Consistent results began to appear in all the rabbit groups except for one, which strangely displayed 60% fewer symptoms. Nothing in the rabbit's physiology could account for their high tolerance to the diet until it was discovered by accident that the student who was in charge of feeding these particular rabbits liked to fondle and pet them. He would hold each rabbit lovingly for a few minutes before feeding it. Astonishingly, this alone seemed to enable the animals to overcome the toxic diet. Repeat experiments in which one group of rabbits was treated neutrally while the others were loved came up with similar results. Once again, the mechanism that causes such immunity is quite unknown. It is baffling to think that evolution has built into the rabbit mind an immune response that needs to be triggered by human cuddling."

Studies have shown that cancer patients who attend support groups live on the average twice as long after diagnosis as those who don't. What is this psychoimmunological factor which by now science knows exists but doesn't know how to identify? That factor is love, or God. Over the last several years, I've counseled many people diagnosed with cancer, AIDS, and other life-challenging illnesses. In 1987, I asked my friend Louise Hay if she would help me start a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people in physical crisis to be called the Los Angeles Center for Living. In 1989, the Manhattan Center for Living opened in New York City. The center's mission statement is that we provide free, non-medical support services to people dealing with life-challenging illness and grief. On both coasts, we've seen the miracles which occur when people invoke the power of love in the midst of disease and grief.

Does that mean that it's a mistake to take medicine? Absolutely not. A Course in Miracles reminds us that the Holy Spirit enters into our lives at our present level of Consciousness. Many of us believe that the doctor in the white coat can heal us with that pill he's giving us. Therefore, says the Course, we should take the pill. But the healing doesn't come from the pill; it comes from our belief. Cancer studies have shown that rates of recovery in patients choosing traditional medical treatment versus those taking a more holistic route are roughly equal. This makes perfect sense because in neither case is the recovery result of the form of cure. It is the patient's mental and emotional interaction with his treatment which activates its healing power. I've led many support groups for people dealing with life-challenging illness where, during the entire session, disease was mentioned only in passing. We attend groups not to grow closer to our disease, but rather to grow closer to the powerful healing which lies within us. Many of the issues which confront us when we are ill are the same issues which confronted us, in one way or another, when we were still healthy, but we didn't deal with them until now. Life goes on when we're ill; it's merely intensified. We tend to handle illness basically the same way we handle everything else in life. We must avoid the temptation to see illness as a block to our capacity to find God and instead use it as a springboard from which we soar into his arms.

The connection between body and mind might be new to Western science, but it is not new to Eastern medicine or to the fields of religion and philosophy. The body has an intelligence of its own. As Deepak Chopra writes in Quantum Healing, "Life itself is intelligence writing everywhere on chemicals. We mustn't make the mistake of thinking that the rider and the horse are the same." A spiritual, holistic notion of healing includes treatment not only of the body but of the mind and spirit as well. Love changes the way we think about our disease. Illness comes from separation, says A Course in Miracles, and healing comes from joining. Healing results from a transformed perception of our relationship to illness, 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? Cancer and AIDS and other critical illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream, and their message is not "hate me," but "love me." Seeing sickness as our own love which needs to be reclaimed is a more positive approach to healing than is seeing the sickness as something hideous. We must get rid of. Energy cannot be destroyed; it can, however, be miraculously transformed, and that miracle emerges from our own thoughts, our own decision to let go our belief in fear and danger and to embrace instead a view of the world which is based on hope and love. There's certainly nothing to lose; no risk in trying. A Course of Miracles tells us, "The Atonement is so gentle; you need but whisper to it, and all its power will rush to your assistance and support." God will do his part when we do ours.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that our real identity lies not in our body but in our spirit. Neither is another person's body who they really are either. The body is an illusionary wall which appears to separate us; the ego's chief device in trying to convince us that we are separate from each other and separate from God. Minds are joined, says the Course, but bodies are not. The body of itself is nothing; it cannot forgive, it cannot see, and it cannot communicate. The Course says that when you equate yourself with a body, you will always experience depression. Equating another person with a body will bring up the same anxiety. One of the ways the body can be used to manufacture depression is through loveless sex. Our sexual impulses become canvases onto which we extend our love or project our fear. When sex is of the Holy Spirit, it is a deepening of communication. But when it is of the ego, it is a substitute for communication. The Holy Spirit uses sex to heal us; the ego uses it to wound us. Sometimes we have the thought that sex with another person would cement the bond between us, and instead, it turned out to manufacture more illusion and anxiety than there was before. It is only when sex is a vehicle for spiritual communion, when it is truly loving, that it joins us to another person. Then it is a sacred act. Many spiritual seekers have felt the need to eschew all body-related things, but that as an over attachment to the physical. Anything used to spread joy and communicate love is a part of God's plan for salvation. A life lived for oneself alone is not liberation but merely another form of bondage. Since we're not bodies, we do not exist in isolation. Living as though we do can only lead to pain.

I met a woman who had lost a huge weight and told me that she had asked God to do it for her. "I didn't ask that I lose weight," she said. "I just asked that he take this monkey off my back. I didn't care if I was fat; I told him that if he wanted me to be fat, to make me comfortable with it. I just wanted out of this hell." I decided that it didn't matter how much I weighed; I couldn't take the horror of the obsession anymore. I began to realize that how much I weighed didn't matter; all that mattered was love. And as I I got more involved with practicing the Course, I stopped thinking so much about my weight. That was all. And one day, I looked in the mirror and saw that it was gone. What I realized was that my weight had nothing to do with my body but with my mind. I was terrified of people and had unconsciously manufactured a wall around myself to protect me from them. I was terrified, however, because of the love that I myself was not giving. My ego's purpose for the weight was to keep me separate, and until I gave up that purpose, I would never be able to give up the extra pounds. My subconscious mind was merely following instructions. As I began to put my energy into reaching across that wall, when I allowed the Christ to enter my mind, the wall miraculously disappeared.

Part of our cultural neurosis has been an abhorrence of age. Like anything else, age will only transform when we have first accepted it as it is. Many of us the age is so terrible, so unappealing, so unsexy. When actually, these are just thoughts we have, and so we need to change our minds. Let us 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. We are a cold and uncaring culture in our treatment of older Americans. We have a thought in America that youth is better, and so because we think that it is not because it is an objective truth, but only because it's a thought we carry and manifest is our collective experience.

No matter what the illness or addiction or distorted physical expression, its causes in the mind, and only there can it truly be healed. The greatest power we're given, says the Course, is the power to change our minds. Our physical condition does not determine our emotional condition. The experience of peace comes only from the mind. Peace of mind, says A Course in Miracles, is clearly an internal matter.

The body is merely a temporary encasement. Because we do not yet realize this, we think that the death of the body is the death of the person. It is not. The spirit does not die when the body dies. Physical death is like taking off a suit of clothes. To the ego, reality is only what we can perceive physically. But many things which we know to exist cannot be seen with the naked eye: neither atoms, nor protons, nor viruses, nor cells. Scientists are now beginning to recognize a oneness which lies beyond all perceived reality. This oneness is God, and our beingness lies within it. Physical Incarnation is a classroom experience, and souls come to the class to learn. What we need to learn here, it's much like tuning into a channel on television. Let's say we're all tuned to channel 4. When someone dies, they're no longer on channel 4, but that doesn't mean they're not broadcasting; they're now, let's say, on channel 7 or 8. Cable systems exist regardless of whether or not we have the cable equipment with which to receive them. It is only the arrogance of the ego which would have us believe that what we can't physically perceive must not exist.

People have reported seeing a light exiting through the top of the head of a dying person, and many people have spoken of their near-death experiences where the physical bodies let go temporarily. I once met a young woman who had been in a major plane crash. She lost over half the blood in her body, and her legs were almost completely severed. In describing her experience to me, she said, "I died and then came back. It felt seductive, very warm, like a wonderful motherly love, but I knew I had a choice. I thought of my father, and I knew my death would be unbearable for him, so I fought and came back. But I never cry at funerals anymore," she said. "I can cry for the people who are left here, but I know from my own experience that the people who died are in a wonderful place."

Once the great rays are registered by our physical senses, the body will seem to be a mere shadow in front of our true selves. When we hear that someone has died, it will merely mean that a shadow has been removed. Death will no longer be perceived as the end of a relationship. When Jesus said, "Death shall be the last enemy," he meant that it shall be the last thing we perceive as an enemy. The problem is not really death, but what we think death is. We will all die. Some of us will take the 9:30 and some some of us will be on the 10:07, but we're all headed out. Accepting a healing of our thoughts about what that means is a cornerstone in our transformation from body to spirit orientation.

Life is like a book that never ends. Chapters close, but not the book itself. The end of one physical Incarnation is like the end of a chapter, and on some level, it's a setup for the beginning of another. I once heard a friend say, "My relationship with my father has only improved since his death." A Course in Miracles says that communication does not stop with the destruction of the physical body. True communication rests on more than what is said or heard physically. When someone has died, we must speak with them differently than we did before, but in staying open to the possibility of an eternal life force, we direct our minds to develop the capacity for a transphysical conversation. Writing letters to the person who has died or having any other kind of conversational experience which broadens our openness to the possibility of life beyond death stretches our self-imposed mental boundaries. Our dreams and other emotional experiences then become freed from the bondage of our refusal to believe. Sometimes, when someone has died, we say, "This isn't happening. It feels unreal. I feel like they're still here," and that's because they are. Although the ego voices of the world will say, "It's just your imagination," the truth is that it is death itself which is just our imagination. The truth, as God created it, is that death does not exist, and deep in our hearts, we know that this is true.

In the enlightened world, we will still drop the body, but death will be experienced very differently. This is the way it is written in the Song of Prayer, an extension of A Course of Miracles: "This is what death should be: a quiet choice made joyfully and with a sense of peace, because the body has been kindly used to help the Son of God along the way. He goes to God. We thank the body then for all the service it has given us, but we are thankful too the need is done to walk the world of limits and to reach the Christ in hidden form and clearly seen at most in lovely flashes. Now we can behold Him without blinders in the light that we have learned to look upon again."

Life is much more than the life of the body. It is an infinite expanse of energy, a continuum of love in countless dimensions, a psychological and spiritual experience independent of physical form. We've been alive forever; we will be alive forevermore. But the life of the body is an important classroom. It is our opportunity to deliver the world from Hell.

Dear God, may your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Let us remember that Heaven and happiness are the same thing. It is God's will that we be happy, just as it is God's will that we be in Heaven. In asking that God's will be done, we're instructing our minds to focus on the beauty in life, to see all the reasons to celebrate instead of mourn. Usually, we figure out what we think would make us happy and then try to make those things happen. But happiness is not circumstance dependent. There are people who have every reason in the world to be happy who are not, and there are people with genuine problems who are happy. The key to happiness is the decision to be happy.

There's been a lot of talk in the last few years about allowing our feelings. It's an important concept, but one which can be used by the ego for its own purposes. Most of the time, when we hear someone say, "Feel your feelings," they mean feel the negative ones: feel your pain, feel your anger, feel your shame. But we need support in feeling our positive feelings just as much as we need support in feeling our negative ones. It is the experience of genuine emotion, of any kind, which the ego resists. We need support and permission to feel our love, to feel our satisfaction, and to feel our happiness. The ego does hidden battle against happiness.

I remember when I was in college, walking around with books of Russian poetry under my arm, cultivating what I felt was a sophisticated, cynical frown worthy of my intellectual prowess. I felt it indicated that I understood the human condition. Ultimately, I realized that my cynicism revealed very little understanding of the human condition because the most important facet of that condition is that we can always choose to perceive things differently. There's an old cliché: you can see the glass half empty, or you can see it half full. In other words, you can focus on what's wrong in your life, or you can focus on what's right. But whatever we focus on, we're going to get more of. Think lack, and we get lack. Think abundance, and we get abundance. It's not so difficult to feel positive feelings or think positive thoughts. The problem is that we resist them; that makes us feel guilty. To the ego, there's no greater crime than claiming our natural inheritance. "If I'm rich," says the ego, "then someone else will be poor. If I become successful, then someone's feelings might get hurt. Who am I to have at 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's 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. "Look at the crucifixion," says A Course in Miracles, "but do not dwell on it." "Blessed are those who have faith, who cannot see," says Jesus. 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, and by our faith, through our trust, we invoke its proof. During the time of the darkest night, says the Talmud, act as if the morning had already come.

The world has taught us we're less than perfect. In fact, we've been taught that it's arrogant to think we're deserving of total happiness. This is the point where we're stuck. If anything comes into our lives—love, success, happiness—which seems like it would be suited to a deserving person, then our subconscious mind concludes it can't possibly be for us, and so we sabotage. Few people have wronged us like we've wronged ourselves. No one has snatched the candy away from us like we've thrown it away from ourselves. We have been unable to accept joy because it doesn't match who we think we are. Happiness is a sign that we've 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. Whenever people say to me, "Marian, I'm so depressed about world hunger," I say to them, "Do you give $5 a month to one of the organizations that feed the hungry?" The reason I ask is that I've noticed that people who participate in the solution to problems don't seem to find themselves as depressed about those problems as do people standing on the sidelines and doing nothing. Hope is born of participation in hopeful solutions. We're happy to the extent that we choose to notice and to create the reasons for happiness. Optimism and happiness are the results of spiritual work. In the eyes of God, we're all perfect, and we all have unlimited capacity to express brilliantly. I say unlimited capacity rather than unlimited potential because potential can be a dangerous concept. We can use it to tyrannize ourselves, to live in the future instead of the present, to set ourselves up for despair by constantly measuring ourselves against what we think we could be rather than what we are. Potential is a concept which can bind us to personal powerlessness. Focus on human potential remains impotent without a focus on human capacity. Capacity is expressed in the present; it is immediate. The key to it lies not in what we have inside of us, but rather in what we are willing to own that we have inside of us. There's no point in waiting until we're perfect at what we do or enlightened masters or PhDs in life before opening ourselves to what we're capable of doing now. Of course, we're not as good today as we'll be tomorrow, but how will we ever get to tomorrow's promise without making some sort of move today?

I remember spending years of my life so upset about all the life choices I felt I had available that I never moved. I was paralyzed by all the possibilities. I couldn't figure out which road would lead me to the fulfillment of my potential, this glorious neurotic myth that lay always just in front of anything I could manifest. Now, so 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. We are the adult generation. We have adult bodies and adult responsibilities and adult careers. What many of us lack, however, is an adult context for our lives, one in which we give ourselves permission to shine, to blossom fully, to show up powerfully in the present without fearing that we're not good enough. Waiting for a powerful future is a way of making sure it never gets here. An adolescent dreams of what will be; an adult takes joy in today.

We're often afraid to do anything unless we know we can do it extremely well. But we get to Carnegie Hall by practicing. I think the reason people don't have hobbies today as much as they did in past generations is because we can't bear to do anything we're not fabulous at. Several years ago, I started taking piano lessons again after having played for many years as a child. Now, Chopin, I'm not, but there was so much therapeutic value in just playing. I saw very clearly that you don't have to be a virtuoso at everything you do in order to be a virtuoso at life. Virtuosity in life means singing out, not necessarily singing well.

Most of us feel on some level like racehorses chomping at the bit, pressing at the gate, hoping and praying that someone might open the door and let us run out. We feel so much pent-up energy, so much locked-up talent. We know in our hearts that we were born to do great things, and we have a deep-seated dread of wasting our lives. But the only person who can free us is ourselves. And most of us know that. We realize that the locked door is our own fear, but we've learned by now that on some level, our terror of moving forward is so great that it would take a miracle to free us. The ego would like us to be born with great potential and die with great potential. A miracle frees us to live fully in the present, to release our power, and to claim our glory.

Hell is what the ego makes of the present. Heaven is another take on it altogether. God exists in eternity. The only point where eternity meets time is in the present. The present is the only time there is. A miracle is a shift in thinking from what we might have done in the past or should be doing in the future to what we feel free to do right here, right now. A miracle is a release from internal bondage. Our capacity for brilliance is equal to our capacity to forget the past and forget the future. That's why little children are brilliant; they don't remember the past and they don't relate to the future. If we could be as little children, the world would finally grow up.

One of the exercises in the Course workbook reads: "The past is over; it cannot touch me." Forgiving the past is an important step in allowing ourselves the experience of miracles. 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 past is merely a thought we have; it is literally all in our minds. 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. "All your past except its beauty is gone," says the Course, "and nothing is left but a blessing."

What we are left with then is the present, the only time where miracles happen. We place the past and the future, as well, into the hands of God. The biblical statement that "time shall be no more" means that we will one day live fully in the present without worrying about either past or future. The universe provides us with a clean slate in every moment. God's creation holds nothing against us. Our problem is that we don't believe this. Let us ask forgiveness, not of God, who has never condemned us, but of ourselves for all we think we did and did not do. Let us give ourselves permission to begin again.

The Course points out that there's no way for us to know what's going to happen tomorrow or the next day or 5 years from now. Only the ego speculates about tomorrow. In Heaven, we place our future in the hands of God. The Holy Spirit returns our minds to total faith and trust that should we live with fully open hearts today, tomorrow will take care of itself. As Jesus said in The Sermon on the Mount, "Be you not anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow shall be anxious for itself." In the present, we have the opportunity to break the continuity of past and future by asking the Holy Spirit to intervene. This is the miracle we want: a new life, a new beginning. We desire a life untainted by any darkness of the past, and being entitled to miracles, we're entitled to that full release. This is what it means to say that Jesus washes us clean of our sins. Sins are misperceptions. Sin is an archery term; it means you missed the mark. When we think a loveless thought, that's what we have done; we have missed the mark. And Jesus completely removes all loveless thoughts. We relinquish any thoughts of judgment of anyone or anything which holds us to the past. We relinquish any thoughts of attachment which keep us grasping at the future. In the Course, we're taught to pray, "Let miracles replace all grievances."

The world of the ego is a world of constant changes, ups and downs, darkness and light. Heaven is a realm of constant peace because it is an awareness of a reality which lies beyond change. The world of time is not the real world; the world of eternity is our real home. Love takes more than crystals and rainbows; it takes discipline done in practice. It's not just a sweet sentiment from a Hallmark card; it's a radical commitment to a different way of being, a mental response to life which is completely at odds with the thinking of the world. Heaven is a conscious choice to defy the ego's voice. The more time we spend with the Holy Spirit, the greater our capacity to do this, to focus on Love.

A Course in Miracles tells us that 5 minutes spent with the Holy Spirit in the morning, doing the workbook of A Course in Miracles or any other serious practice of prayer or meditation, guarantees that he will be in charge of our thought forms throughout the day. 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. Knowing that about ourselves, we ask the Holy Spirit for help. When we meditate, our brains literally emit different brain waves. We receive information at a deeper level than we do during normal waking consciousness. A Course in Miracles says that its workbook is the crux of the Course because the exercises train our minds to think along the lines the text sets forth. It's not what we think that is the transformative issue so much as how we think.

Meditation is time spent with God in silence and quiet listening. It is the time during which the Holy Spirit has a chance to enter into our minds and perform his divine alchemy. What changes because of this is not just what we do, but who we are. In the workbook of A Course in Miracles, which is a 365-day set of psychological exercises, we're given a very specific curriculum for relinquishing a thought system based on fear and accepting instead a thought system based on love. Each day, we're given a specific thought to focus on, eyes closed for a specific amount of time. We're even told in the introduction to the workbook that we don't have to like the exercises; we might even be hostile to them, but we should just do them. Our attitude doesn't affect their efficacy in any way. If I'm lifting weights at the gym, I can either love the experience or hate it, but it doesn't really matter. All that affects my body is whether or not I lift the weights. And so it is with meditation also.

As with physical exercise, the effects of meditation are cumulative. When we go to the gym and work out for an hour, we don't really see any change in our bodies at the end of that hour, but if we go every day for 30 days, then we do see a change. And so it is with meditation. And sometimes we're not the ones who can see the change as much as others can. We might not even be aware of how much the quality of our energy, the invisible emanations of our minds, affect our environment and the people within it, but others do, when they respond accordingly. Spiritual practice supports the development of personal power. Spiritually powerful people are not necessarily people who do so much as there are people around whom things get done. At the highest level of our being, we don't do anything; we are at rest while the power of God works through us. Meditation is a profound relaxation. The ego's frantic voice, its vain imaginings, are burned away. We all have within us a direct radio line to the Voice for God. The problem is the radio is full of static. In our quiet times, we spend with God, the static melts away. We learn to hear the small, still voice for God. In Heaven, that is the only voice we hear. That is why we're happy there.

Remember, only the light within us is real. We're not afraid of the dark within ourselves so much as we're afraid of the light. The dark is familiar; it's what we know. The light—the thought that we might indeed be good enough—is such a threat to the ego that it takes out its very big guns to defend against it. Someone I know remarked to me about a mutual friend, "Oh, he has a mean-spirited soul." "No, he doesn't," I replied. "He has a mean-spirited personality. His soul is one of the brightest I've ever seen. His mean-spiritedness is simply a defense against his light. If he were to let in his light and choose to really express all of his love, it would overwhelm his ego. His meanness is his armor, his protection against the light." Our defense against light is always some form of guilt, which 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? Through the acceptance of God's will as our own. God's will is that we be happy. God's will is that we forgive ourselves. God's will is that we find our place in Heaven now. It is not our our arrogance but our humility which teaches us that who we are is good enough.

And what we have to say is valid. It is our own self-hatred which makes it difficult for us to consistently support and nurture other people, because supporting others amounts to supporting ourselves.

So, one of the conditions of Heaven, and Heaven is a psychological awareness, is that we profoundly accept ourselves and others. We know that good is infinite. We can all have it all. We're at peace with who we are. We give each other room to breathe. How jealous some people are of other people's success! They work at tearing it down. They criticize. They gossip. It would be very difficult for us to find Heaven without a fundamental shift in our attitudes towards success. In Heaven, everyone is allowed to be successful.

If you think of all the ways in which the world is full of pain and suffering, the end of the world as we know it wouldn't be such a horrible thing. Liberation, as the Course points out, is not a breaking out but a gentle melting in. In the end days, we will not escape through vehicles that soar into outer space, but through vehicles which soar into inner space. Those vehicles are our healed minds, guided by the Holy Spirit.

What does Heaven look like? Most of us have only had tiny glimpses, but those glimpses were enough to keep us always hoping to go back. The Course says there's an ancient melody we all remember, always beckoning, always calling. Heaven is our home. It's where we came from. It's our natural state. Unfortunately, we embark upon endless searches for what we cannot find: one person, one circumstance, which holds the key to Heaven. But Heaven is within us, having nothing ultimately to do with the thoughts of someone else, and having everything to do with what we choose to think ourselves. Not just about one person, but about all people.

And so, forgiveness of mankind, of everyone and every circumstance, is our ticket to Heaven, our only way home. Our goal is God. Nothing short of that goal will bring us bliss, and it is bliss to which we are entitled. Talk of bliss is not simplistic. As we've already seen, there's no getting to Heaven without acknowledging Hell, not its ultimate reality, but its reality for us while we remain in this illusion.

A Course in Miracles is not proposing emotional denial and suppression of darkness as a way to light. It is a psychotherapeutic process by which darkness is brought to light, not the other way around. In the enlightened world, psychotherapy, guided by the Holy Spirit, will certainly have a place. No one can escape from illusions unless he looks at them. The Course says, "For not looking is the way they're protected."

The way to Heaven is fraught with demons on the side of the road, just as the fairy tale castle is surrounded by dragons. The work toward enlightenment often entails a painful and not very pretty arousal of the worst of which we're capable, made plain to both ourselves and others, in order that we might consciously choose to release our personal darkness. But without a commitment to light, a conscious intent to go for Heaven, we remain enamored of darkness, too tempted by its complexities.

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, psychotherapy 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 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. In the world to come, couples will use psychotherapy more and more frequently, not as crisis counseling, but as maintenance procedure. There was a time when most people saw therapy as something you only did if you were crazy. Now we see it as a valuable tool for staying sane. So it is that couples will come to see the value in a constant and consistent formal evaluation of their thoughts and feelings as they walk together toward God.

Just outside of Heaven's Gate, there's a lot of action. As we stand before the gate, uncertain of which way to go, impelled to love and yet so trained to fear, we need to realize the sacred responsibility which has been placed in our hands. The Course says, "And so you walk toward Heaven or toward Hell, but not alone. We choose for everyone." For many years to come, the decisions we make today, individually and collectively, will determine whether the planet goes to Hell or goes to Heaven.

One thing, however, is sure: we are the transitional generation. The critical choices lie in our hands. Future generations will know who we were. They will think of us often. They will curse us or they will thank us. We are poised at Heaven's Gate. In our minds, we left there millions of years ago. Today, we're returning home. We're a prodigal son generation. We left home, and now there's an excitement in the air because we're back. We did everything to violate love of ourselves and others before a life of wholesomeness began to attract us. That's not our shame, but our strength. There are certain doors we don't have to go through anymore, not because a false moralism says not to, but because we opened them already, and we know they lead nowhere. Oddly enough, this gives us a kind of moral authority. We speak from experience. We've done the dark side, and now we're ready to move on. We're attracted to the light.

We're an interesting generation. We just don't see that about ourselves. When I first realized what a decisive time this is, that the decisions made on this planet in the next 20 years will literally determine whether or not mankind survives much longer, I was afraid for the world. The fate of the world is left up to us. Not us! I thought, anyone but us. We're spoiled brats, morally bankrupt. But when I looked more closely, what I saw surprised me. We're not bad, we're wounded, and our wounds are simply our opportunities to heal.

There is a holy return in the air today. Despite the pain, despite the conflicts, there is a cautious excitement and hope for Heaven. Before we awaken, the Holy Spirit transforms our bitter dreams into happy ones. Here are some reflections on a few happy dreams that could possibly bring the whole world a little closer to Heaven.

The parades for our soldiers coming home from the Persian Gulf represented, in part, an attempt to rectify our harsh treatment of Vietnam veterans. I just wish there were parades for our teachers and our scientists and other national treasures. And speaking of national treasures, children are our most important resources. For a fraction of the cost of keeping one criminal in jail for a year, we could provide a child from an underprivileged background a plethora of personal and educational opportunities that would allude the propensity to hopeless despair. The temptation to experience drugs, delinquency, and other paths to criminal behavior would then be greatly diminished. There is no amount of money, time, or energy too great to spend on our children. They are our angels, and they must not fall, for as they do so does our world.

Our greatest need is for an enlightened worldview. Christmas and Easter are attitudinal bookends for an enlightened worldview. With an enlightened view of Christmas, we understand that it is within our power, through God, to give birth to our divine self. With an enlightened view of Easter, we understand that this self is the power of the universe, before which death itself has no real power. Resurrection is the symbol of joy. It is the great "aha!" The acceptance of the Resurrection is the realization of the fact that we need wait no longer to see ourselves as healed and whole.

I was sitting around talking with my girlfriend, Barbara. She recently experienced a kind of emotional triple header: her father lay dying, she broke up with a boyfriend of seven years, and then she fell into a rather passionate affair with a classic Peter Pan type of man. As we discussed the principles of resurrection and our desire for Heaven, she remarked to me, "I guess I just have to trust that God has a plan and that things will get better when they're supposed to."

In a desire to understand the principles of A Course in Miracles as deeply as possible, I pointed out to her that theoretically, since there is no time, Resurrection has nothing to do with God saving us later. The message of Resurrection is that the crucifixion never occurred, except in our minds. Christ Consciousness is not that the wounds of her father's death will heal, or that her breakup with the boyfriend will grow more comfortable in time, or that the affair would one day turn to friendship. Christ Consciousness is the understanding that Heaven is here now. Her father will not die when he dies. The change of form in the long-term relationship means absolutely nothing because the love itself is changeless, and Peter Pan's departure means nothing because the bond which unites the two of them is eternal. Her sadness rests not on fact, but on fiction. It is her interpretation of events, and not the events themselves, which keeps her heart in chains. Heaven is the transformation of these events within her mind. The physical world then follows. The resurrection is our awakening from the dream, our return to right-mindedness, and thus our deliverance from Hell.

So she gladdened. Barbara and I laughed like little children as we allowed ourselves to scan our lives, the relationships, the circumstances, the events that make up our own crosses to bear, our crucifixion. We recognized how avidly we drill the nails into our own hands and feet, holding on to earthly interpretations of things when a choice to do otherwise would release us and make us happy. We prayed for a more consistent ability to remember that only love is real. We saw, even for a few minutes, the needlessness of our despair. We saw in that time a glimpse of Heaven, and we prayed for the ability to experience more of it.

At the end of A Course in Miracles, we're told, "This course is a beginning, not an end." A spiritual path is not home; it is a road home. Home is within us, and every moment we're choosing to rest there or to fight the experience. Our real terror, says the Course, is of redemption. But there is within us one who knows the truth, who has been given by God the job of outwitting our ego, outsmarting our self-hatred. The Christ does not attack our ego; He transcends it, and He is within us. He is with us every moment, in every circumstance. He is to our left and to our right, before us and behind us, above us and beneath us. He responds fully to our slightest invitation, and with our prayers, we invite Him in. He who is already there. With prayer, we speak to God; with miracles, He responds. The endless chain of communication between loved and lover, between God and man, is the most beautiful song, the sweetest poem. It is the highest art and the most passionate love.

Dear God, I give this day to You. The fruit of my labor and the desires of my heart, in Your hands I place all questions. On Your shoulders I place all burdens. I pray for my brothers and for myself. May we return to love. May our minds be healed. May we all be blessed. May we find our way home from pain to peace, from fear to love, from Hell to Heaven. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and forever. Amen.

The ego always emphasizes what someone has done wrong. The Holy Spirit always emphasizes what they've done right. The Course likens the ego to a scavenger dog, which seeks out every scrap of evidence for our brother's guilt and lays it at its Master's feet. We can find, and in fact, we will find, whatever it is we're looking for in life. Whether we choose to focus on the guilt in people's personality or the innocence in their soul is up to us.

A Course in Miracles is not about pouring pink pain over our anger and pretending it doesn't exist. When a psychologically unsound is spiritually unsound, denial or suppression of emotions is unsound. You don't say, "I'm not angry, really, I'm not. I'm on page 140 of A Course in Miracles, and I don't get angry anymore," when inside you're seething. The Holy Spirit tells us, "Don't try to purify yourself before coming to Me. I am the purifier."

I was once on my way to giving a lecture on A Course in Miracles, and I thought about a woman I knew who I was feeling annoyed with. Very quickly, I tried to hide the thought, as though it wasn't wholly enough for me to be thinking at this time. And then it seemed as though a voice in my head said, "Hey, I'm your friend. Remember?" The Holy Spirit wasn't judging me for my anger; He was there to help me move past it.

Now, let's talk about an issue in A Course in Miracles called special relationships. We can all relate to the desire to find "Mr. or Miss Right." It's almost a cultural obsession. But according to A Course in Miracles, the search for the perfect person to "fix us" is one of our biggest psychic wounds, one of the ego's most powerful delusions. It represents a notion in A Course in Miracles called the special relationship. Although the word "special" normally implies something wonderful, from a Course perspective, "special" means different, therefore separate, which is characteristic of ego rather than Spirit. A special relationship is a relationship based on fear. To God, no one is different or special, because no one is actually separate from anyone else. Our desire to find one special person, one part of the sunship, who will complete us, is hurtful because it is delusional. It means we're seeking self in separation rather than in Oneness.

Often, when we think we're in love with a person, A Course in Miracles would indicate that we're actually anything but. The special relationship is based not on love, but on guilt. The ego tells us that there's some special person out there who will make all the pain go away. We don't really believe that, of course, but then, on the other hand, we really do. Our culture has bred the idea into us through books, songs, movies, advertising, and the conspiracy of other egos. The special relationship makes other people, their behavior, their choices, their opinions of us, too important. It makes us think we need another person when, in fact, we are complete and whole as we are. Under the Holy Spirit's guidance, we come together to share joy. Under the ego's direction, we come together to share our desperation. A relationship is not meant to be the joining of the hip of two emotional invalids. The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather for two complete people to join together for the greater glory of God.

And what's our miracle here? It's a shift from thoughts of specialness to thoughts of holiness. Our mental patterns in regard to relationships are so fraught with fear, attack, and defensiveness, guilt, and selfishness, however prettily disguised, that many times we're brought to our knees. And as always, that's a good place to be. We pray for God to guide our thoughts and feelings. The holy relationship is the old special relationship transformed. In the special relationship, the ego guides our thinking, and we meet in fear, mask to mask. In the Holy relationship, the Holy Spirit has changed our minds about the purpose of love, and we meet heart to heart. In the Holy relationship, it is understood that we all have unhealed places, and that healing is the purpose of our being with another person. So we don't try to hide our weaknesses, but rather we understand that the relationship is a context for healing through mutual forgiveness.

Let's talk about romantic love. People ask, "Why can't I find a deep, intimate romance?" The question is understandable because people are lonely. Only an intimate romantic love, however, is like taking graduate work toward a PhD in the ways of love, and many of us are hardly out of elementary school. When we're not in a relationship, the ego makes it seem as though all the pain would go away if we were. If the relationship lasts, however, it will actually bring much of our existential pain to the surface. That's part of its purpose. It will demand all of our skills at compassion, acceptance, release, forgiveness, and selflessness. Relationships don't necessarily take the pain away. The only thing that takes the pain away is a healing of the things that cause the pain, and it isn't the absence of other people in our lives which causes the pain, but rather what we do with them when they're there.

People ask, "When will my soulmate get here?" But praying for the right person is useless if we're not ready to receive him or her. Our soulmates are human beings, just like we are, going through the normal processes of growth. Our vulnerability to the myth of "Mr. and Mrs. 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 fairy tale called "The Frog Prince" reveals the deep psychological connection between our attitudes towards people and their capacity for transformation. In this 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. No nagging, trying to get people to change, criticizing, or fixing can do that.

A Course in Miracles 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 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.

Of course, a good relationship isn't always crystals and rainbows. It's a birth process, often painful, often messy. A spiritual relationship isn't necessarily one in which two people are smiling all the time. Spiritual means to be, above all else, authentic, real. Work can only happen in the presence of rigorous honesty. We all long for that, but we're afraid of honestly communicating with another person because we think they'll leave us if they see who we really are.

A couple from my lectures once came to me for counseling. Earlier that day, the man had told the woman he was breaking off their relationship. She was shocked and hurt and asked him if he would come with her to see me in order to help her work through the loss. As the two of them sat across from me on my couch, I assured Rick that I wasn't there to try to get them back together, but to join with them and ask for peace. I remembered a similar situation I had been in myself and how brilliantly my therapist had handled it. I said to him, "Why are you so angry at Deborah?" "I'm not angry at her," he said. "Well, you sure sound angry." "I know that. It's not my job to fix Deborah," he said. "I don't want to change her; I just want out." "Oh, I bet you think that's so spiritual," I said. He looked surprised. I think he thought he'd been a very good student of A Course in Miracles. "You haven't suspended judgment of Deborah," I said. "You've withheld vital information from her, data without which she couldn't function effectively within the relationship. Why don't you just tell her why you're so angry?" "Once again," he repeated, "I'm not angry." "Well," I said, "pretend you're an actor. Go on, Rick. We're safe here. Let her have it." And boy, once he got started, he let it out. He told her that she'd had no concept of how to live with another person; she just did everything however she wanted to do it, and if he wanted to come along, well, that was just great. I don't remember exactly what Elsie had to say, but there was a lot of communication that just came gushing out once he allowed it to. When he was finished, Deborah, obviously moved, said quietly and sincerely, "I never knew that. Thank you for telling me." They left my office and did not break up their relationship. They told me later it was reborn in that session. The anger that Rick was feeling was pent-up energy that came from the fact that he had felt it "unspiritual" to share his honest feelings with Deborah as they went along. But it's far better to communicate than to suppress our feelings. Anger is often a result of a series of uncommunicated feelings building up inside of us and ultimately exploding. If anger comes up, it's to be accepted. If we think our partner won't love us if we get angry, then we stop being honest, and the relationship is doomed for sure.

There's a way of sharing our upset with people without expressing it as an attack. Instead of saying, for instance, "You made me feel this or that," we say, "This is how I'm feeling. I'm not saying you made me feel this way or that you're to blame. I'm simply sharing this as part of my healing in order to release this feeling and move beyond it." In this way, you see, we're taking responsibility for our feelings, and what could have been seen as an argument or even avoided as unpleasant can become an important part of the healing power in the relationship.

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. Now, it's the same thing 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, but temporarily. That's all. We are still perfect children of God. There has never been a storm that hasn't passed. Gray clouds never last forever, but the blue sky does.

The last thing we ever want to do is to buy into the insidious delusion that spiritual lives and spiritual relationships are always quiet, are always blissful. I once knew a man who came on very strong at the beginning of relationships, but couldn't seem to help closing his heart as soon as a woman had opened hers. I've heard that kind of behavior referred to as an addiction to the attraction phase in relationships. This man did not maliciously go around hurting women; he sincerely wanted to be in a genuine, committed relationship. What he lacked were the spiritual skills which would enable him to settle down in one place long enough to build anything solid with an equal partner. As soon as he saw human faults and weaknesses in a woman, he would run.

The narcissistic personality is looking for perfection, which is a way of making sure that love never has a chance to blossom. The initial high of romance can be so heady, so tantalizing, that the real work of growth which needs to follow the initial attraction phase can seem too dull, too hard to commit to. As soon as the other person is seen to be a real human being, the ego is repelled and wants to find somewhere else to play. At the end of a relationship with someone like this, we feel as though we've taken cocaine. We had a fast, very exciting ride, and it felt at the time like something very meaningful was happening. Then we crashed, realized that nothing meaningful had happened at all; it was all made up. Now all we have is a headache, and we can see that this kind of thing is not good, it's not healthy, and we don't want to do it again.

Women say to me sometimes, "Marian, why do I always meet emotionally abusive men?" My answer is usually the following: The problem is not that you met him; the problem is that you gave him your number. The problem, in other words, is not that we attract a certain kind of person, but rather that we are attracted to a certain kind of person. Someone who is distant, emotionally, subtly disapproving, "Must be home." The problem is not just that we are offered pain, but that we are comfortable with that pain. It's what we've always known.

The reason that nice, available people seem boring to us is because they bust us. The ego equates emotional danger with excitement and claims that the nice, available person isn't dangerous enough. 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, and this is what the ego doesn't want us to see. Available people are frightening; they threaten the ego citadel. The reason we're not attracted to them is because we're not available ourselves. Our barriers to love are consciously chosen. There are efforts to protect the places where the heart is bruised. Somewhere, sometime, we felt as though an open heart caused us pain or humiliation. We loved with the openness of a child, and someone didn't care, or laughed, or even punished us for the effort. So, in a quick moment, perhaps a fraction of a second, we made a decision to protect ourselves from ever feeling that pain again. We would never again allow ourselves to be so vulnerable. We built emotional defenses. We tried to build a fortress across our heart to protect us from any cold assault. The only problem is, according to A Course in Miracles, that we create what we defend against.

There was a time in my life when I felt I should stop opening up so much to people who didn't honor my heart as I wished it to be honored. I was angry at people who I felt had hurt me, but I denied the anger instead of getting in touch with it and releasing it to God. This is a common trap for Course in Miracles students. If anger isn't brought up into conscious awareness, it has no place to go. It either turns into an attack on self or an inappropriate, unconscious attack on others. I didn't recognize the full extent of my anger, you see, and I thought the lesson to be learned was merely that I shouldn't reveal so much of my honest feelings. I then went into relationships with two strikes against me. I was closed, cold, and armed with hidden emotional knives coming from my unconscious anger, contrary to whatever front I might have been able to lead with. That's not exactly a delightful package. Between the coldness and the anger, I could turn off the saintly as man, and this, of course, only increased my anger and distrust.

I was once talking to a very wise therapist. I made some comment like, "Well, a lot of women in my age are finding it very hard to find really loving, available men." Her answer rang through my head like church bells: "Well, when a woman says that to me," she said, "what we usually find, when we look closely enough, is a contempt for men." Contempt for men. Contempt for men. The words resounded through my skull. I don't know if that was the issue for every woman she spoke to, but I knew she had hit the nail on the head in my case. I had often thought about the idea in the Course of Miracles that we think we're angry at what our brother did to us, but that really we're angry because of what we've done to him. Now, I vaguely known that this was true, but it took a lot of uncovering to see just what it was I was doing to these guys who I just knew were doing all these horrible things to me.

A Course in Miracles speaks of shadow figures we bring with us from our past. He tells us that we tend to see no one as they are now. We keep blaming someone in the present for something someone else did to us in the past. Past. Some poor guy would tell me, "Darling, I'm not able to come back Sunday night like I'd planned. I've got to keep working on this project. I might not be back until Tuesday." Well, he might just as well have told me that my cat was dead and the dog was dying. The problem wasn't that the man wasn't coming home for a few days more; the problem was how it made me feel inside to hear him say that. Such a dark despair would run across my heart. I can't begin to tell you. I wasn't relating to that man or that circumstance; I was remembering all the times I'd ever felt as though I didn't matter, I wasn't attractive, didn't want to hold me, or someone else didn't want to have sex anymore.

From the Course's perspective, the situation was coming up now in order for me to feel that feeling and know that it has nothing to do with the present. I asked for a miracle: "I am willing to see this differently. I am willing to remember who I am." God's answer to my pain was not going to be, contrary to what my ego kept insisting was the only way out of this grief, a man who was going to tell me 60 times a day, "You're fabulous, you're wonderful, I love you, I want you," and then show me just how desirable I really was, was maybe twice, let's say three times a day. The feeling, in fact, was bound to come ultimately for men who would not, because no one can really tolerate my neediness or the guilt I would try to project onto them in order to get my needs met, or what I felt my needs were. My real need, of course, was to realize that I didn't need a man to fill what only felt like these insatiable emotional needs. The needs themselves were not real, but merely a reflection of the fact that I thought of myself as less than perfect. Salvation would only come through my relinquishing the thought that I'm not good enough, and accepting the fact that I'm all right exactly as I am. By defending against being abandoned, I continue to recreate the conditions in which it was bound to occur.

The goal of spiritual practice is full recovery, and the only thing we need recovered from is a fractured sense of self. If we don't already believe it ourselves, another person cannot convince us we're okay. If they act as though we are, we will either not believe them or become so dependent on their reinforcement that we proceed through our dependency to change their mind. Either way, we get to stay convinced that we're not okay. We awaken to our own perfection through our desire to see the perfection in someone else.

Sometimes this is not easy. When I feel the old familiar darkness starting to descend around me, when a man, for instance, makes a comment that I know intellectually is probably innocent enough, but which makes me feel that I'm abandoned, or uncared for, or rejected, I've been through enough in my life to know that the evil does not lie in what he just said. He is not the enemy; the enemy is this feeling which, in the past, has led me to attack or defend enough to make him feel exactly what I'm afraid he's feeling, but which he really isn't. I can choose to see this differently. This is my wall. This is where we must be very conscious and call on God. We ask for a miracle: "Dear God, please help me. This is it, right here. This is where the sword enters my heart. This is where I blow it every time."

The process of miraculous change is twofold: One, I see my error or dysfunctional pattern. Two, I ask God to take it from me. The first principle without the second is impotent. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, "Your best thinking got you here. You're the problem, but you're not the answer." The second principle isn't enough to change us either. The Holy Spirit can't take from us what we will not release to Him. He won't work without our consent. He cannot remove our character defects without our willingness, because that would be violating our free will. We chose those patterns, however mistakenly, and He will not force us to give them up. In asking God to heal us, we're committing to the choice to be healed. This means the choice to change. The ego's resistance to this is intense. It wants us to think that an old dog doesn't change. The only advantage of knowing that we're angry is so that we can make a choice to be otherwise. We can spend years in therapy, but until the choice is made to do it differently, we just keep going around in circles. Of course, it feels unnatural to be gentle when we've been harsh for many years, but that's no excuse for not trying.

A Course in Miracles says that the most effective way to teach a child is not by saying, "Don't do that," but by saying, "Do this." We don't reach the light through endless analysis of the dark; dark. We reach the light by choosing the light. Light means understanding. Through understanding, we're healed.

If the purpose of a relationship is for people to be healed, and healing can only occur when our wounds are revealed, then the ego confronts us with a terrible Catch-22. If I don't show myself, there can be no growth. Without growth, there will ultimately be boredom, which is death for a relationship. But if I do reveal myself honestly, then I might appear unattractive, and my partner might leave. The ego defends against love, not fear. Pain in relationships can be a perversely comfortable pain, in that it is one we know; we're used to it.

He wanted to remain in familiar territory. This story illustrates our relationship to our own egos. The ego is our pain, but it is what we know, and we resist moving out of it. The effort it takes to grow out of painful patterns often feels more uncomfortable than remaining within them.

There's a tendency these days to analyze our neuroses ad infinitum, yet use the analysis itself to justify rather than heal the wound. After a certain point, having seen why a pattern developed (my father was emotionally unavailable, for example, or my mother abused me) and the effect it's had on our personalities (such as, "I don't know how to let a man get close to me now," or "I have a very hard time trusting authority figures"), actual change occurs because of a decision on our part: the decision to heal, the decision to change. It ultimately doesn't matter so much why I become angry or defensive. What matters is that I decide I want to be healed and I ask God to help me.

I was once talking to a friend, and he made some comment about how he was afraid that if we got closely involved, one of us might get hurt. "So which one of us are you concerned for?" I asked. And he answered, "You." I felt an anticipatory rejection. I was angry, and I told him so. "That's what I mean," he said. "You obviously take things so personally. I don't think I could stand it for long."

Now, I knew this was a moment I had repeated in various ways with various people, and I had asked for healing. I was open, so I asked him, "Tell me honestly, how could I have done it differently? What else could I have said?"

"You could have just smiled and said, 'Don't flatter yourself.'"

I was so excited. I was like an eager actress working with a great director. "That is so great!" I said. "Let's go back and do that scene one more time. Say what you said again."

"All right," he said. "You know, Mary, and I just have this awful feeling that if we really got together, one of us would get hurt."

"And I asked him, 'Which one of us are you afraid for?'"

"'You.'"

I looked at him and I smiled. "Huh. Don't flatter yourself." He laughed, and I held with excitement. This had been no small awakening. It was a genuine empowerment, a reprogramming of my emotional computer in an area where I had unconsciously gone for an unworkable response pattern every time. I now established a new groove, a new set of possibilities. Initially, I had chosen the way of anger, and now I chose the way of love. I did not have to be the wounded animal; I could choose to identify with my own strength, which was, in fact, the more natural role for me to play. The only problem was, before this point, I hadn't known how to play it. I had asked, and I had been shown. I could choose to see others through a generous, trusting nature. My brother wasn't here to attack me; he was here to love me. It was completely up to me whether to trust that and love him back.

I started getting dressed and figured that it might be an hour or so before I heard from him, since the traffic around the stadium was bound to be horrendous. So, an hour passed, and then another. Well, I thought, he's in TV, so maybe something came up. Another hour, and then another. Midnight came, and midnight went. I took off my clothes and makeup. 2:00 a.m., then 3:00. At times, I fell asleep. At other times, I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling. At times, I was livid. At other times, I was scared. He was lying in a ditch, dead somewhere. I started calling his house. No answer. I'd call again. No answer. Finally, hardly having at all, I called it around 6:00 a.m., and he answered the phone.

"Hello," he said.

"Mike," I said.

"This is Maryanne."

"Oh, hi. Are you all right?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"We had a date yesterday. Did you forget?"

"Oh, right," he said. "I had a kind of late night."

Now, I don't know what I said to get off the phone, but I know how I felt, and it wasn't wonderful. I'd been stood up, and I felt that kind of blow to my self-esteem that starts in your gut and shoots emotional black ink through all your veins. I was dazed, but I somehow fell asleep.

The problem is, he never came. Not only did he not come, he never called. I was in a dark zone. Now, what would A Course in Miracles say about that? I knew I needed a miracle, but all I could come up with were two choices for the ways to deal with this, both of which I had tried before in similar situations, and neither one felt good or got me what I wanted.

My first choice was to get very angry and let him know it. "Who do you think you are to treat me like that, you son of a—!" The problem with that choice was that it would completely invalidate my position. "Well, Marian's a nice girl, but her temper just doesn't cut it. She's hysterical when she doesn't get her way."

The only other choice I could imagine was to forgive him and let it go. But that didn't feel good either. "It's okay, you stood me up, Mike. I don't care. It doesn't matter now." Unconditional love, I could understand, but not unconditional dating. I didn't know what to do, so I asked for a miracle.

So, I came up with an exercise I would repeat constantly, out loud when I could, and silently when other people were present: "I forgive you, Mike, and I release you to the Holy Spirit. I forgive you, Mike, and I release you to the Holy Spirit."

In case you're wondering, it took him two weeks to call. By that time, of course, I had forgotten about it. I had continued, however, to say over and over to myself, "I forgive you, Mike, and I release you to the Holy Spirit." So, I was high. The constant repetition of my willingness to forgive someone had worked on my brain like a pleasurable drug. I didn't care whether I heard from him again or not.

So, one day I'm in my house, the phone rings, and when I answer it, I hear Mike's familiar voice. "Hey, Maryanne." Before I could even think about it consciously, a real warmth and love, love, filled up my chest. "Mike! Hi! It's so good to hear from you." And you know, it felt wonderful to hear his voice.

"So, how you doing?" he said. "I've missed you." I don't know if I said I'd missed him too. His line was so ridiculous. I probably didn't say anything, but I do remember this: he said, "Well, uh, can I see you?"

"When?"

"How about tonight?"

At that moment, words came out of my mouth that startled me as much as they must have startled him. I said, with a lot of love and kindness, "Mike, I really care for you, and that's not going to change. I'm still your friend, no matter what. But when it comes to dating, we don't seem to do the same dance. So, if you want to have lunch sometime, please call. But as far as a date is concerned, I need to pass." We both mumbled a few more pleasantries and then got off the phone.

I was worried that I rejected a brother. But just as that worry came into my mind, I saw an internal image of lots of champagne bottles with their corks popping off in the middle of Heaven. I hadn't rejected a brother; I had simply accepted myself in a whole new way. He had a win, a lesson learned, and a friendship, if he wanted it. And I had a win, too. Forgiveness hadn't turned me into a doormat; it had taught me how to own my yes and own my no, without anger, with dignity, and with love.

Accepting another person doesn't mean we never share constructive suggestions, but like everything else, our behavior is not so much the issue as the energy which it carries. If I'm criticizing someone in order to change them, that's my ego talking. But if I've prayed and asked God to heal me of my judgment, and then I'm still led to communicate something, then the style of my sharing will be one of love instead of fear. It will not carry the energy of attack, but rather the energy of support. When we speak to each other, the key to communication is not what we say, but rather the attitude that lies behind what we say.

The miracle worker is a finely tuned intuitional instrument. A Course in Miracles says we're to listen to our brother first and foremost. If we're supposed to speak, He'll let us know. Jesus sent his disciples out into the countryside and told them to teach the gospel. "What shall we say?" they asked him. And his answer was, "I'll tell you when you get there." We're not to try to figure out what to say to a brother; it's merely our job to ask the Holy Spirit to purify our perceptions of the other person. From that place within, and only from that place, we will find the power of words and the power of silence which bring the peace of God.

[Music]

A lot of us wonder about the meaning of marriage. Marriage, like anything else, can be used by either the ego or the Holy Spirit. Its content is never predetermined; it is a living organism which reflects the continuous choices of the individuals involved. Very little is sacred anymore in this world, but one thing must be treated with reverence, or the moral fabric of the world continues to disintegrate, and that is an agreement between two people. An enlightened marriage is a commitment to participate in the process of mutual growth and forgiveness, sharing a common goal of service to God. Marriage is a more profound commitment than other forms of relationship, such as a couple who are living together, because it's an agreement that while a whole lot of shaking and screaming might go on, no one's going to leave the room. We're both safe to go through whatever upset is called forth from deep within. And whenever we're truthful, there are times when we're upset, but it's safe to do that here; no one is leaving.

A marriage is God's gift to a man and to a woman. It is a gift which should then be given back to Him. A man's wife is literally God's gift to him, and a woman's husband is God's gift to her. But God only gives gifts that are meant for everyone. So it is that a marriage is meant to be a blessing on the world, because it is a context in which two people might become more than what they would have been alone. The entire world is blessed by the presence of healed people.

That's it. At a certain point, we forgive because we decide to forgive. Healing occurs in the present, not the past. We're not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not giving in the present. There's a lot of talk today about people growing up in dysfunctional homes, but who didn't grow up in a dysfunctional home? This world is a dysfunction. However, there's nothing we've been through or seen or done that cannot be used to make our lives more valuable. People now can grow from any experience, and we can transcend any experience. Forgiveness remains the only path that leads out of hell. Whether we're forgiving our parents, or someone else, or ourselves, the laws of mind remain the same. As we love, we shall be released from pain, and as we deny love, we shall remain in pain. Each of us has different fears and different manifestations of fear, but all of us are saved by the same technique: the call to God to save our lives by salvaging our minds. "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for love is the kingdom, and love is the glory, and love is the power, forever and forever."

Each of us has a particular part to play in God's plan for salvation. The Holy Spirit's job is to reveal to us our function and to help us perform it. The Holy Spirit asks us: Is it reasonable to assume that He would assign us a task and then not provide us with the means of its accomplishment? Some people have said to me, "But I'm afraid to surrender my career to God. I'm a musician. What if He wants me to be an accountant?" My answer to that, of course, is: Why would He? Wouldn't He rather have someone who understands numbers do that job? If we're talented at music, that talent is of God. If something makes our hearts sing, that's God's way of telling us it's a contribution He wants us to make. Sharing our gifts is what makes us happy. We're most powerful, and God's power is most apparent on the earth, when we're happy. A Course in Miracles says that the only real pleasure comes from doing God's will. The only thing to be saved from is our own negativity or fear. The crux of salvation in any area is a shift in our sense of purpose. That shift is a miracle. As always, we consciously ask for it: "Dear God, please give my life some sense of purpose. Use me as an instrument of Your peace. Use my talents and abilities to spread love. I surrender my job to You. Help me to remember that my real job is to love the world back to health. Thank You. Amen."

Don't ask God to send you a brilliant career; rather, ask Him to show you the brilliance which is within you. It is the recognition of our brilliance which releases it into expression. Stable, meaningful external effects don't occur until we've experienced an internal stirring, and once an internal stirring has occurred, external effects can't fail to happen. We're all capable of an internal stirring and are, in fact, coded for it. It is our potential for greatness. Achievement doesn't come from what we do, but from who we are. Our worldly power results from our personal power. Our career is an extension of our personality. People who profoundly achieve aren't necessarily people who do so much; they're people around whom things get done. Mahatma Gandhi and John F. Kennedy were both examples of this. Their greatest achievements lay in all the energy they stirred in other people, the invisible forces they unleashed around them. By touching their own depths, they touched the depths within others. That kind of charisma, the power to affect what happens on the earth from an invisible realm within, is the natural right and function of the Son of God. The new frontiers are internal ones. The real stretch is always within us. Instead of expanding our ability or willingness to go out and get anything, we expand our ability to receive what is already here for us.

Personal power emanates from someone who takes life seriously. The universe takes us as seriously as we take it. There is no greater seriousness than the full appreciation of the power and importance of love. Miracles flow from the recognition that love is the purpose of our career. A Course in Miracles discusses a traditional Christian concept called the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The idea here is that when our lives are given to the Holy Spirit to use for His purposes, new talents emerge within us. We don't get our lives together and then give them to God, but rather we give our lives to God, and then things start coming together. As our hearts open, our talents and our gifts begin to blossom.

A Course of Miracles tells us that all of the children of God have power. We are all special, yet no one has special power. All of us are special, and yet none of us are special. No one has any more potential than anyone else for spreading the love and light of God. The Course of Miracles says that one day all the gifts of God will be shared equally by everyone. We all have the potential for greatness. It gets plowed out of us at an early age. Fear entered when someone told us there's a first prize, second prize, and third prize; that some efforts deserve an A, but others get a C. After a while, part of us becomes afraid to even try. The only thing we have to give to the world is our own take on it. But the ego argues that this is not enough. It leads us to cover up our simple truth, to try to invent a better one. But the ego isn't protecting us here, although, as always, it pretends to be. It isn't guarding against our making fools of ourselves; it is guarding against our experience of who we really are, the brilliance of expressing it, and the joy which that expression brings to ourselves and others.

Our deepest fear, you see, is not that we're inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we're powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? We are children of God. Our playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We're all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God which is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as you let your own light shine, you unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As you're liberated from your own fear, your presence automatically liberates others.

How could Leonardo da Vinci not have painted? How could Shakespeare not have written? In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke tells a young writer to write only if he has to. We are to do what there is a deep psychological and emotional imperative for us to do. That's our point of power, the source of our brilliance. Our power is not rationally or willfully called forth; it's a Divine dispensation, an act of grace. It's a mark on our forehead that makes it appear as though God had chosen us. People who appear chosen are people who, on some level of their being, chose God, even if they don't yet know it. There's a light in their eyes; there's something in their beingness which implies a mind attuned to a higher purpose and a heart that sings a sweeter song.

Do what you love. Do what makes your heart sing, and never do it for the money. Don't go to work to make money; go to work to spread joy. "Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and the Maserati will get here when it's supposed to." God doesn't have a poverty consciousness. He doesn't want us to have a boring life or a boring career. He doesn't have anything against the things of this world. Money isn't evil; it's just nothing like anything else. It can be used for holy or unholy purposes.

The ego tries to convince us that God demands sacrifice and that the life of service would be a life of poverty. This is not the case. Our purpose on this earth is to be happy, and it is the Holy Spirit's function to help us achieve that. There's much work to be done for the healing of the world, and some of it costs money. Often, the Holy Spirit sends us money in order that we may perform tasks He wants accomplished on His behalf. A responsible attitude towards money is one in which we're open to whatever comes and trusting that it always will.

One of the principles to remember about money is how important it is to pay for services rendered. If we begrudge someone else the right to make a living, we're begrudging ourselves the same. What we give, we will receive, and what we withhold will be withheld from us. And the universe doesn't register the difference between stealing from a huge corporation or stealing from a nice little old lady. The universe will always support our integrity.

Sometimes our debts are so big or confusing that even though we have the best of intentions, the burden and the guilt may be so overwhelming that we just go on automatic, push the bills to the back of the drawer and try to forget them, or change our phone number. The universe will not support that. A big person is not someone who never falls down; a big person is someone who, when they fall, does what it takes to get up again. As always, the issue is to ask for a miracle. Purity of heart creates breakthroughs. The universe is forgiving. If you owe back bills, no matter how much, write a letter to the company or individual, own the issue, apologize if appropriate, and then let them know that you're setting up a payment plan effective immediately. Send them something with the letter. Don't set yourself up for failure. If you can't afford to send $15 a month, that's okay; send five if that's all you can, but send it. Send it regularly and send it on time. It doesn't matter if the bill is $50,000. The Course says there's no order of difficulty in miracles. No matter what the shape of a problem, its form, or its size, a miracle can handle it. Miracles mean that at any moment, we can begin again.

There's one other principle that seems to me very important when dealing with our attitudes towards money. It seems to me that a lot of people hold judgment against wealth. I was once driving around a very wealthy neighborhood in Houston, Texas, and I found myself thinking these thoughts: "These people who live in these big houses work for huge multinational corporations that oppress people throughout the Third World." And then I asked myself, "How do I know what these people spend their money on?" I realized that if I judged other people for money, I would never allow myself to have any. I understood how deeply we're rooted in a prejudice against money, a feeling that money is unspiritual. This is another area where it behooves us to ask God to heal our thoughts. There's nothing spiritual about poverty. There's nothing holy about breadlines, and there's nothing beautiful about what happens in a society when money stops circulating. And so we pray: "Dear God, I surrender to You all my thoughts about money. I surrender to You my debts. I surrender to You my wealth. Open my mind to receive abundantly. Channel Your abundance through me in a way that serves the world. Amen."

Goals are an interesting subject these days. Goal setting has become very popular in recent years. Goal setting is a process of focusing the mind on a desired result, but this is actually just another way of trying to get the world to do what we want it to do. It is not spiritual surrender. A Course in Miracles discusses the difference between magic and miracles. Magic is when we focus the mind on a desired manifestation, giving our shopping list to God and telling Him what we want Him to do for us. Miracles are when we ask God what we can do for Him. Miracles shift us from a get to a give mentality. The desire to get something reflects a core belief that we don't have enough already. As long as we believe there's scarcity inside of us, we'll continue to manufacture scarcity around us because that's our basic thought. No matter what we get, it will never be enough.

When our desire is to give instead of get, our core belief is that we have so much abundance we can afford to give it away. The subconscious mind takes its clue from our core beliefs and brilliantly manufactures situations which reflect them. Our willingness to give directs the universe to give to us. The miracle worker's goal in every circumstance is peace of mind. A Course in Miracles tells us that we don't know what would make us happy; we just think we do. All of us have gotten things we thought would make us happy, and they didn't. The miracle-minded perception would be to make happiness itself our goal and to relinquish the thought that we know what that would look like. We never know what's going to happen in a month or a year from now, and if we got what we wanted now, then perhaps we would be worse off for it later on.

Let's say we're going in for a job interview. We want the job very much, and someone might have suggested to us that we should affirm, "I'll be getting the job," making that our goal. As miracle workers, we would make inner peace our only goal. What that does is to direct our mind to focus on all the factors which contribute to our peace and leave everything else out of our conscious consideration. The mind, like the physical eye, is inundated with so many impressions at one time that a built-in sensor mechanism brings focus to our perception. It chooses what we'll notice and what we won't. Making our goal anything other than peace is emotionally self-destructive. If our goal is to get the job, then that's fine if we do. But if we don't get the job, then we'll feel depressed. If we make peace our goal, then if we get the job, that's great, but if we don't, we're still peaceful.

A Course in Miracles tells us it's important to set a goal at the beginning of a situation, or it will seem to unfold chaotically. If our goal is peace, we're programmed for emotional stability no matter what happens. The mind will have been directed to see the situation from a peaceful perspective. If we didn't get the job we wanted, it won't matter so much. We'll truly understand that there's something better coming up soon, or that this isn't really the perfect job for us anyway. We'll have faith in God. The miracle is that we will really feel our faith; it won't just be positive goo thrown over our pain. Our emotions flow from our thoughts, and not the other way around.

I said to him, "You can write those affirmations 50 times before you go to bed at night, and chances are good you'll pull in a part on Hill Street Blues because the mind is very powerful. But for all you know, a year will pass, and an important director will be wanting you for the lead in a major feature film, but they won't be able to get you because you're under contract for a little part on Hill Street Blues."

The issue underlying our need to tell God what to do is our lack of trust. We're afraid to leave things in God's hands because we don't know what He'll do with them. It's like we're afraid He'll lose our file. It is a very powerful demon in the racial consciousness which tempts us to think that God's will is that we sacrifice or be poor or be unhappy for His sake. If we're going to set any goal, let us set the goal of being healed of the belief that God is fear instead of love. Remember that our happiness and our function are one. If God is our goal, that's the same thing as saying that happiness is our goal. There's no need to believe that God can't figure out the details or provide for the ways to make it happen.

The journey to a pure heart can be highly disorienting. For years, we may have worked for power, money, and prestige. Now, all of a sudden, we've learned that those are just the values of a dying world. We don't know where to search for motivation anymore. We're not working in order to get rich, then why are we working at all? What are we supposed to do all day? Just sit home and watch bad TV? Not at all. But thinking so is a temporary phase that many people go through when the values of the old world no longer have a hold on us, but the values of the new don't yet grab our soul. They will.

There comes a time, not too long into the journey to God, when the realization that the world could work beautifully if we would give it the chance begins to excite us. It becomes our new motivation. The news isn't how bad things are; the news is how good they could be, and our own activity could be part of the unfoldment of Heaven on Earth. There is no more powerful motivation than to feel we're being used in the creation of a world where love has healed all wounds. We're no longer ambitious for ourselves, but are rather inspired by the vision of a healed world. Inspiration rearranges our energies. It sources within us a new power and direction. We no longer feel like we're trying to carry a football to the finish line, clutching it to our chest and surrounded by hostile forces. We feel instead as though angels are pushing us from behind and making straight our path as we go.

"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 2 years before it became the source of my income. When I started lecturing, I had no idea it would become my profession. It was something I was doing simply because it was the right thing to do. When you get serious about the universe, the universe gets serious about you. I never felt the need to advertise much for my lectures. I figured that if they were of genuine interest to people, then people would hear about them. That's not to say that advertising is bad, as long as the motivation for it is to inform people as opposed to manipulating them. Arnold Patent wrote that if you genuinely have something to say, there's someone who genuinely needs to hear it. We don't have to invent an audience so much as we have to hone the message we plan to give them once they get here. Serving three people is as important as serving 300. Once we're clear about how to deal with a small following, a large following will develop automatically, if that would serve the world. Our power lies in our clarity about the role our work can play in the creation of a more beautiful world. The miracle is to think of our career as our contribution, however small, to the healing of the universe.

The ego would have us believe that the world is based on finite resources. This world is but God's world. God's world is not in God's world, which is the real world. The more we give, the more we have. You having a piece of the world's pie doesn't mean there's less for anyone else, and someone else having a piece of the pie doesn't mean there's less for you. You needn't compete in business or anywhere else. Your generosity towards others is the key to your positive experience of the world. There's enough room for everyone to be beautiful. There's enough room for everyone to be successful. There's enough room for everyone to be rich. It is only our thinking which blocks that possibility from manifestation. The people who have achieved more than you in any area are only a half a step ahead of you in time. Bless them and praise their gifts, and bless and praise your own. The world would be less rich without their contributions, and it would be less rich without yours. There's more than room for everyone; in fact, there's a need for everyone. As we are healed, the world is healed. Doing anything for a purpose other than love means reliving the split from God, perpetuating and maintaining that split.

Every person is a cell in the body of human consciousness. At the moment, it is as though the body of Christ is suffering from cancer. In cancer, a normal working cell decides that it no longer wants to function in contribution to the whole. Instead of being part of the support system of the blood or the liver, the cell goes off and builds its own kingdom. That's a malignancy which threatens to destroy the organism. And so it is with the body of humanity. Everyone's gone off to do their own thing: "my career, my store, my money." We've lost sight of our essential interrelatedness, and this forgetfulness threatens to destroy us. The "my" mentality is the ego. It is the belief in separation. It is our cosmic disease. Taking what we have and devoting it to the restoration of the whole is our salvation and the salvation of the world. Our devotion then becomes our work, and our work becomes our devotion.

And now let's talk about miracles in health and healing. A friend of mine once told me that we're not punished for our sins, but by our sins. Sickness is not a sign of God's judgment on us, but of our judgment on ourselves. If we were to think that God created our sickness, then how could we turn to Him for healing? In asking for healing, we're not just asking for our own health, but rather we're asking that the idea of sickness be removed from God's son's mind. Illness is a sign of separation from God, and a healing is a sign that we have returned to Him. The return to God is merely the return to love.

In his book Quantum Healing, Dr. Deepak Chopra tells a powerful story about the connection between love and physical healing: "An Ohio University study of heart disease in the 1970s was conducted by feeding quite toxic, high-cholesterol diets to rabbits in order to block their arteries, duplicating the effect that such a diet has on human arteries. Consistent results began to appear in all the rabbit groups except for one, which strangely displayed 60% fewer symptoms. Nothing in the rabbit's physiology could account for their high tolerance to the diet until it was discovered by accident that the student who was in charge of feeding these particular rabbits liked to fondle and pet them. He would hold each rabbit lovingly for a few minutes before feeding it. Astonishingly, this alone seemed to enable the animals to overcome the toxic diet. Repeat experiments in which one group of rabbits was treated neutrally while the others were loved came up with similar results. Once again, the mechanism that causes such immunity is quite unknown. It is baffling to think that evolution has built into the rabbit mind an immune response that needs to be triggered by human cuddling."

Studies have shown that cancer patients who attend support groups live, on the average, twice as long after diagnosis as those who don't. What is this psycho-immunological factor which by now science knows exists but doesn't know how to identify? That factor is love, or God. Over the last several years, I've counseled many people diagnosed with cancer, AIDS, and other life-challenging illnesses. In 1987, I asked my friend Louise Hay if she would help me start a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people in physical crisis, to be called the Los Angeles Center for Living. In 1989, the Manhattan Center for Living opened in New York City. The center's mission statement is that we provide free, non-medical support services to people dealing with life-challenging illness and grief. On both coasts, we've seen the miracles which occur when people invoke the power of love in the midst of disease and grief.

That means that it's a mistake to take medicine. Absolutely not. A Course in Miracles reminds us that the Holy Spirit enters into our lives at our present level of consciousness. Many of us believe that the doctor in the white coat can heal us with that pill he's giving us. Therefore, says the Course, we should take the pill. But the healing doesn't come from the pill; it comes from our belief.

Cancer studies have shown that rates of recovery in patients choosing traditional medical treatment versus those taking a more holistic route are roughly equal. This makes perfect sense because in neither case is the recovery the result of the form of cure. It is the patient's mental and emotional interaction with his treatment which activates its healing power.

I've led many support groups for people dealing with life-challenging illness. During the entire session, disease was mentioned only in passing. We attend groups not to grow closer to our disease, but rather to grow closer to the power for healing which lies within us. Many of the issues which confront us when we are ill are the same issues which confronted us in one way or another when we were still healthy, but we didn't deal with them until now. Life goes on when we're ill; it's merely intensified. We tend to handle illness basically the same way we handle everything else in life. We must avoid the temptation to see illness as a block to our capacity to find God and instead use it as a springboard from which we soar into his arms.

An epidemic such as AIDS is a collective heartbreak, pulling millions of people into its painful vortex. But this also means that it brings millions of people to their knees. And as soon as enough of us get there, as soon as love reaches a critical mass, or as the Course says, "enough people become Miracle-minded," there will be a sudden breakthrough in consciousness, a Rapture, and instantaneous healing. It will be as though millions of us have recognized our lovelessness and asked that we be healed. When the cure for AIDS is finally found, we'll give prizes to a few scientists, but many of us will know that millions and millions of prayers helped it to happen.

A spiritual, holistic notion of healing includes treatment not only of the body, but of the mind and spirit as well. Love changes the way we think about our disease. Illness comes from separation, says A Course in Miracles, and healing comes from joining. 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?

Cancer and AIDS and other critical illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream, and their message is not "Hate me," but "Love me." Seeing sickness as our own love which needs to be reclaimed is a more positive approach to healing than is seeing the sickness as something hideous. We must get rid of energy. Cannot be destroyed; it can, however, be miraculously transformed, and that miracle emerges from our own thoughts, our own decision to let go our belief in fear and danger and to embrace instead a view of the world which is based on hope and love. There's certainly nothing to lose; no risk in trying. "A Course in Miracles tells us the Atonement is so gentle you need but whisper to it and all its power will rush to your assistance and support." God will do his part when we do ours.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that our real identity lies not in our body, but in our spirit. Neither is another person's body who they really are either. The body is an illusionary wall which appears to separate us, the ego's chief device in trying to convince us that we are separate from each other and separate from God. Minds are joined, says the Course, but bodies are not. The body of itself is nothing; it cannot forgive, it cannot see, and it cannot communicate. The Course says that when you equate yourself with a body, you will always experience depression. Equating another person with a body will bring up the same anxiety.

One of the ways the body can be used to manufacture depression is through loveless sex. Our sexual impulses become canvases onto which we extend our love or project our fear. When sex is of the Holy Spirit, it is a deepening of communication. But when it is of the ego, it is a substitute for communication. The Holy Spirit uses sex to heal us; the ego uses it to wound us. Sometimes we have the thought that sex with another person would cement the bond between us, and instead, it turned out to manufacture more illusion and anxiety than there was before. For it is only when sex is a vehicle for spiritual communion, when it is truly loving, that it joins us to another person. Then it is the sacred act.

Many spiritual seekers have felt the need to eschew all body-related things, but that is an over-attachment to the physical. Anything used to spread joy and communicate love is a part of God's plan for salvation. A life lived for oneself alone is not liberation, but merely another form of bondage. Since we're not bodies, we do not exist in isolation. Living as though we do can only lead to pain.

What is vanity? What is the ego-oriented neurotic obsession with weight, hair, looks, and sex appeal that has Americans spending billions of dollars a year on products they can't afford and don't really need, and young women falling into dangerous disease patterns in their efforts to be thin? These things are inevitable results of a cultural orientation which leaves out the reality of spirit. Concentration on the body and as an end rather than a means in our perception breeds fear: fear that we're not enough, that we're not good enough or attractive enough, fear that they won't like us, fear that we'll lose out in life. There is no way to escape this painful maelstrom without replacing body identification with the memory that we aren't bodies at all, that who we are is the love inside us, and it is that love alone which determines our value. When our minds are filled with light, there's no room for darkness. When we understand who and what we really are, there's no room for pain and confusion.

I used to pray about my problem and would receive the following guidance: "Eat anything you want." That sounded thoroughly insane to me, but if I tell myself to do that, I thought, then I'll start eating and I'll never stop. To that, my internal guidance responded, "Yes, you will do that at first. You will have to compensate for all the pressure you've been putting on yourself for years, and then you will have had enough. Then you will return to your natural rhythms. Then you will heal." So I let go.

I met a woman who had lost a huge amount of weight and told me that she had asked God to do it for her. "I didn't ask that I lose weight," she said. "I just asked that He take this monkey off my back. I didn't care if I was fat. I told Him that if He wanted me to be fat, to make me comfortable with it. I just wanted out of this hell." I decided that it didn't matter how much I weighed; I couldn't take the horror of the obsession anymore. I began to realize that how much I weighed didn't matter. All that mattered was love. And as I got more involved with practicing the Course, I stopped thinking so much about my weight. That was all. And one day, I looked in the mirror and saw that it was gone.

What I realized was that my weight had nothing to do with my body, but with my mind. I was terrified of people and had unconsciously manufactured a wall around myself to protect me from them. I was terrified, however, because of the love that I myself was not giving. My ego's purpose for the weight was to keep me separate, and until I gave up that purpose, I would never be able to give up the extra pounds. My subconscious mind was merely following instructions. As I began to put my energy into reaching across that wall, when I allowed the Christ to enter my mind, the wall miraculously disappeared.

Part of our cultural neurosis has been an abhorrence of age. Like anything else, age will only transform when we have first accepted it as it is. Many of us engage is so terrible, so unappealing, so unsexy, when actually these are just thoughts we have, and so we need to change our minds. Let us 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. We are a cold and uncaring culture in our treatment of older Americans. We have a thought in America that youth is better, and so because we think that it is, not because it is an objective truth, but only because it's a thought we carry and manifest as our collective experience.

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A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson Audiobook

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