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1-Page Summary of A Return To Love
Overview
The musician Lenny Kravitz once said that we “gotta let love rule.” Marianne Williamson has a similar message. She says that letting the idea of pure, all-powerful love guide our lives will bring us more happiness and meaning. This isn’t just about any particular religion, but rather an understanding of what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. These key points explain why if you can learn to give yourself over to a non-denominational higher power, you’ll experience liberation and joy.
In this book, you’ll learn how the “sea of love” is more than just a song; how to find your divine mission in life; and how gift giving can help you forgive and move on.
Big Idea #1: All of our unhappiness stems from fear.
There are many bad things in the world, but it’s important to understand that they’re all rooted in fear. People often have a lot of anxiety and guilt, which stems from fear. We’re raised to be afraid of everything and everyone.
Society teaches us to be afraid. In school, we’re taught that getting good grades is more important than being kind to our fellow pupils. Because students are compared and graded competitively, fear and contempt are introduced at a young age. After school, the fear continues as we become part of a fear-based economy where we battle for limited resources and job security. Society indoctrinates us with fear from an early age through high school into adulthood where it can consume our lives in the form of job loss or poverty
Fear is a vicious circle. It’s also compounded by individualism in Western cultures, which teaches us that only naive people are kind and loving.
We are told that if we are nice to people, they will hurt us. We should be careful about who we trust because everyone is dangerous. Therefore, it’s best to lock our doors and avoid talking to strangers at night.
There are many potential dangers in life. We can get news about them at any time of day, which makes us think about them all the time. When we spend a lot of our day thinking negative thoughts, we start to believe that there is more negativity than positivity in the world.
The good news is that we can break this cycle and reject fear for good.
Big Idea #2: We are all connected through a powerful force of love, which some call “God.”
Although the modern world tries to hide it, we’re surrounded by love. In fact, you could say that we’re all part of a gigantic sea of love.
For thousands of years, people have tried to describe this feeling. Many cultures call it God, and all of them believe that we’re all connected in some way.
The influential psychologist, Carl Jung, believed that we all share the same mind. He coined the term collective unconscious to describe it. Our physical bodies are responsible for this misconception of separateness.
But our minds are not separate from the world. We’re just a small part of it. Our bodies may keep us apart, but we should be connected to each other and the universe as one big thing—a collective consciousness or something like that.
For a long time, people have called this concept “God,” but we can also call it “love.” People say that God is love, which means they’re basically saying the same thing.
People are uncomfortable with the word “God” because of negative associations with organized religion. However, you don’t need to be religious to believe in God; all you have to do is believe in love. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you want to call it because the important thing is awareness and surrendering yourself to this force.
