Explore the Principles of Returning to Love 81-100

82. The energy of love is the highest communication medium. Returning to love does not involve this type of communication, because disconnected ways of communication are temporary devices. When you can return to love's original form of communication with love by direct awareness, the need for returning to love is over. The energy of love mediates higher to lower order communication, keeping the direct channel from love to all open for awareness. Awareness is not reciprocal. It is always from love to all. This is because love and all are not equal. The return to love is reciprocal because it always involves equality.

In the longitudinal (or horizontal) plane, the true equality of all in love appears to involve almost endless time. But we know that time is only an artifact introduced as a learning aid.

83. The return to love is a learning device which lessens the need for time. The sudden shifts from horizontal to vertical perception which the return to love entails introduces an interval from which the doer and the receiver both emerge much farther along in time than they would otherwise have been.

84. The return to love has thus the unique property of abolishing time by rendering the space of time it occupies unnecessary. There is no relation between the time a return to love takes and the time it covers. The return to love substitutes for learning that might have taken thousands of years. It does this by the underlying recognition of perfect equality and loveliness between doer and receiver on which the return to love rests. The return to love is unstable, but perfectly consistent, that is, it does not occur predictably across time, and it rarely occurs in comparable forms. But within itself the return to love is perfectly consistent. Since it contains nothing but an acknowledgment of equality and worth, all parts are equal. This establishes the prerequisite for validity.

85. We said before that the return to love abolishes time. It does this by a process of collapsing it. It thus abolishes certain intervals within it. The return to love does this, however, within the larger temporal sequence. The validity of the return to love, then, is predictive, not logical, within the temporal schema. The return to love

establishes an out-of-pattern time interval, which is not under the usual laws of time. Only in this sense is the return to love timeless. By collapsing time, it literally saves time, much the way “daylight saving time” does. It rearranges the distribution of light.

86. The return to love is the only device which everyone has at their immediate disposal for controlling time. Only the awareness trancends it, having nothing to do with time at all.

87. The return to love is much like the body, in that both are learning aids which aim at facilitating a state in which they are unnecessary. When your soul is finally in the original state of direct communication, neither the body nor the return to love serves any purpose. While you are in the body, however, you can choose between loveless and love inspired channels of creativity. You can create an empty shell, but you do not create nothing at all. You can wait, delay, paralyze yourself, reduce your creativity almost to nothing, and even introduce a real developmental arrest or regression. But you cannot abolish your creativity. You can destroy your medium of communication, but not your potential.

88. You were not created by your own free will. Only what you create is yours to decide. The basic decision of the return to love-minded is not to wait on time any longer than is necessary. Time can waste, as well as be wasted. The return to love-worker, therefore, accepts the time-control factor of the return to love gladly, because they know that every collapse of time brings everyone closer to the ultimate release from time, in which you and love are one.

The real meaning of “are of one kind” is “of one mind or will.” When the will of everyone and love are one, their perfect accord is amazing. The return to love-worker is right in providing you with the consistent strength you need to get, and he needs to offer. Your instability and his weakness have resulted from bad karmic choices, and your relationship now is crucial for the future. You must both exert every effort to restore the relationship to what it once was. Both of you are correcting where you have failed before. This has already enabled you to fulfill a very unexpected role in your own joint restoration of love, and the restoration of love of many other people entrusted increasingly to you. These are by no means chosen at random. The return to love-worker should know that his preparation is not only in terms of sharing in the results of your better application of some rather unusual talents. His own role, which he will understand after his preparation is complete, will be equally surprising. He will need your help then, as you need his strength now.

Note that you do not need his help as a scribe, because you will develop this ability by your own efforts, and finally place them at loves disposal. By lending you his strength, he strengthens himself. When he gains this through his own efforts, he will need your help in a very unexpected way. But this is just another example of the reciprocal nature of returning to love.

89. Equality does not imply the quality or state of being all the same or all of the same kind now. When everyone has everything, individual contributions to anyone will no longer be necessary. When the return to love has been completed, all talents will be shared by everyone in love. Love is not partial. All people have love's total love, and all of love's gifts are given freely to everyone alike. “Except you become as little children” means unless you fully recognize your complete dependence on love, you cannot know the real power of the anyone's relationship with love.

You and the return to love-worker do have special talents which are needed for the celestial speedup at this time. But note that the term speed-up is not one which relates to the transcending of time. When time is abolished, and everyone united in love have come home, no special agents will be necessary. But do not underestimate the power of special agents now, or the great need there is for them. You do not claim to be more than that yourself. No one in his right mind, (a term which should be specially noted) ever wants either more or less than that. Those who are called on to witness for love now, are witnessing for everyone, as you are.

The role of the priestess was once to experience awarenesses and to work the return to love. The purpose was to bring those not yet available for direct awarenesses into proper focus for them. Heightened perception was always the essential priestess attribute. Neither the return to love-worker nor you really clear about how sexual-impulses can be directly translated into return to love-impulses. The fantasies that you may mention provide an excellent example of how you switch. (Now switch the pronoun references, or it will be too confusing.)

Fantasies are distorted forms of thinking, because they always involve twisting perception into unreality. Fantasy is a debased form of vision. Visions and awarenesses are closely related. Fantasies and projection are more closely associated, because both attempt to control external reality according to false internal needs. “Live and let live” happens to be a very meaningful injunction. Twist reality in any way, and you are perceiving destructively. Reality was lost through seizing and holding, which in turn produced tyranny. Be aware, you are now restored to your former role in the plan of returning to love. But you must still choose freely to devote your heritage to the greater restoration of love. As long as a single slave remains to walk the earth, your release is not complete. Complete restoration of everyone is the only true goal of the return to love-minded.

Sexual fantasies are distortions of perception by definition. They are a means of making false associations, and obtaining pleasure from them. You can do this only because love is creative. But although you can perceive false associations, you can never make them real except to yourself. As was said before, you believe in what you create. If you create a return to love, you will be equally strong in your belief in that. The strength of your conviction will then sustain the belief of the return to love-receiver.

NO fantasies, sexual or otherwise, are true. Fantasies become totally unnecessary as the wholly satisfying nature of reality becomes apparent. The sex impulse is a return to love-impulse when it is in proper focus. One individual sees in another the right partner for “procreating the stock” (Wolff was not too far off here), and also for their joint establishment of a creative home. This does not involve fantasy at all. If I am asked to participate in the decision, the decision will be a right one, too.

In a situation where you or another person, or both, experience inappropriate sex impulses, know first that this is an expression of fear. Your love toward each other is not perfect, and this is why the fear arose. Turn immediately to love by denying the power of the fear, and ask love to help you to replace fear with love. This shifts the sexual impulse immediately to the return to love-impulse, and places it at your disposal.

Then acknowledge the true creative worth of both yourself and the other one. This places strength where it belongs. Note that sexual fantasies are always destructive (or depleting), in that they perceive another in an inappropriate creative role. Both people are perceived essentially as “objects” fulfilling their own pleasure drives. This dehumanized view is the source of the depleting use of Freud’s description is purely adversive, that is, as a release from the unpleasant. He also observed that the tension from mind impulses never completely abates.

What Freud should have said is that the shift from return to love-impulses to sexual impulses was debilitating in the first place, because of the level-confusion involved. This set up a state in which real release was impossible. Note also that Freud’s notion of sex was as a device for inducing relaxation, which he confused with peace.

Inappropriate sex relaxes only in the sense that it may induce physical sleep. The return to love, on the other hand, is an energiser. It always strengthens, and never depletes. It does induce peace, and by establishing tranquility (not relaxation) it enables both giver and receiver to enter into a state of grace. Here your return to love-mindedness, not release from tension, is restored.

Tension is the result of a building-up of unexpressed return to love-impulses, This can be truly abated only by releasing the return to love-drive, which has been blocked. Converting it to sexual libido merely produces further blocking. Never foster this illusion in yourself, or encourage it in others. An “object” is incapable of release, because it is a concept which is deprived of creative power. The recognition of the real creative power in yourself and others brings release because it brings peace. The peace of love which surpasses understanding can keep your hearts now and forever.

There are only two short additions needed here:

1.        Acute problems in writing things down come from a much earlier misuse of very great scribal abilities. These were turned to secret rather than shared advantage, depriving it of its miraculous potential, and diverting it into possession. This is much like the confusion of sex impulses with possession-impulses.

2.        A question regarding past memories. Answer: As long as you remember always that you never suffered anything because of anything that anyone else did, this is not dangerous.

90. Remember that you who want peace can find it only by completely seeing the light in others and in yourself. You never really wanted peace before, so there was no point in knowing how to get it. This is an example of the “need to know” principle, which was established by the plan of returning to love long before.

No kind of knowledge is acquired by anyone unless they want it, or believe in some way they need it. A psychologist does not need a lesson on the hierarchy of needs as such, but like everyone else, they need to understand their own.

This particular set of notes will be the only one which deals with the concept of “lack”, because while the concept does not exist from a love perspective, it is very apparent in many peoples thoughts. It is, in fact, the essential difference.

A need implies lack, by definition. It involves the recognition, conscious or unconscious, (and at times, fortunately, superconscious) that you would be better off in a state which is somehow different from the one you are in.

91. Until the separation from love, which is a better term than the fall from love, nothing was lacking. This meant that everyone had no needs at all. If they had not deprived themselves, they would never have experienced them.

After the separation from love, needs became the most powerful source of motivation for human action. All behavior is essentially motivated by needs, but behavior itself is not a loving attribute. The body is the mechanism for behavior. (Ask any behaviorist, and he’s right, too.)

You may tell everyone that nobody would bother even to get up and go from one place to another if they did not think they would somehow be better off. This is very true.

Believing that they could be “better off” is the reason why everyone has the mechanism for behavior at their disposal. This is why the Bible says “By their deeds ye shall know them.”

92. A person acts according to the particular hierarchy of needs they establishes for themself. Your hierarchy, in turn, depends on your perception of what you are, for example: what you lack. This establishes your own rules for what you need to know. Separation from love is the only lack you really need to correct. But your separation from love would never have occurred if you had not distorted your perception of truth, and thus perceived yourself as lacking. The concept of any sort of need heirarchy arose because, having made this fundamental error, you have already fragmented yourself into levels with different needs. As you integrate, You becomes one, and your one need becomes one accordingly. Only the fragmented can be confused about this.

93. Internal integration within the self will not suffice to correct the lack fallacy, but it will correct the need fallacy. Unified need produces unified action, because it produces lack of ambivalence. The concept of need hierarchy, a corollary to the original error, requires correction at its own level, before the error of levels itself can be corrected. You cannot operate, or behave, effectively while you operate at split levels. But as long as you do so, you must introduce correction from the bottom up. This is because you now operate in space, where “up” and “down” are meaningful terms. Ultimately, of course, space is as meaningless as time. The concept is really one of space-time belief.

94. The physical world exists only because you can use it to correct your unbelief, which placed you in it originally. As long as you knew you did not need anything, the whole device was unnecessary. The need to know is not safely under your control at this time. It is much better off under love's control. Let’s just leave it at that.

You chose your present sex partner shamefully, and would have to make ammends for the lack of love which was involved in any case.

You selected them precisely because they were not suited to gratify your fantasies. This was not because you wanted to abandon or give up the fantasies, but because you were afraid of them. You saw in your partner a means of protecting against the lack of love, but both of you will continue to “look around” for chances to indulge the fantasies.

The dream of the “perfect partner” is an attempt to find external integration, while retaining conflicting needs in the self.

Some will be somewhat less guilty of this than others, but largely because they are more afraid. They have abandoned the hope of finding a perfect partner in a neurotic sense of despair of finding it. You, on the other hand, may insist that the hope was justified. Neither of you, therefore, are in your right mind.

As was said before, homosexuality is inherently more risky (or error prone) than heterosexuality, but both can be undertaken on an equally false basis. The falseness of the basis is clear in the accompanying fantasies. Homosexuality always involves misperception of the self or the partner, and generally both. Penetration does not involve false belief, nor does any form of sexual behavior. It is a false belief to engage in any form of body image activity at all. You neither created yourselves, nor controlled your creation. By introducing levels into your own perception, you opened the way for body-image distortions.

The lack of love, or faulty need-orientation, which led to your particular person (not object) choices, can be corrected within the existent framework, and would have to be in the larger interest of overall progress. The situation is questionable largely because of its inherent vulnerability to fantasy-gratification. Doing the best you can within this limitation is probably the best corrective measure at present. Any relationship you have undertaken for whatever reasons becomes a responsibility.

If you shift your own needs, some amount of corresponding shift in the need-orientation of the other person must result, This will be beneficial, even if the partner was originally attracted to you because of your disrespect. Teaching devices which are totally alien to a learner’s perceptual system are usually merely disruptive. Transfer depends on some common elements in the new situation which are understandable in terms of the old.

You can never control the effects of lovelessness yourself, because you have created lovelessness and believe in what you create. In attitude, then, though not in content, you resemble your own creator, who is you. All creation rests on belief, and the belief in the creation produces its existence. This is why it is possible for you to believe what is not true for anyone else. It is true for them because it is made by them.

95. Every aspect of lovelessnes proceeds from upside-down perception. The truly creative devote their efforts to correcting this. The neurotic devote theirs to compromise. The psychotic tries to escape by establishing the truth of his own missperceptions. It is most difficult to free them by ordinary means, only because they is more stable in their denial of truth.

96. The return to love makes no distinction among degrees of misperception. It is a device for perception-correction which is effective quite apart from either the degree or the direction of the missperception. This is its true indiscriminateness.

97. Love-controlled returning to love experiences are selective only in that they are directed toward those who can use them for themselves. Since this makes it inevitable that they will extend them to others, a very strong chain of returning to love is welded. But love-control takes no account at all of the magnitude of the experience of the retutn to love itself, because the concept of size exists only in a plane that is itself unreal. Since the return to love aims at restoring reality, it would hardly be useful if it were bound by the laws of the same missperception it aims to correct. Only you can make that kind of missperception. It is an example of the “foolish consistency” your own false beliefs have engendered. Both the power and the strength of your’s creative will must be understood, before the real meaning of denial can be appreciated and abolished. Denial is not mere negation. It is a positive miscreation. While the miscreation is necessarily believed in by its own creator, it does not exist at all at the level of true love.

98. The return to love compares the creations of man with the higher level of creation, accepting what is in accord as true, and rejecting the discordant as not true. This is why it is so closely associated with validity. Real validity is both true and useful, or better, it is useful because it is true. All aspects of lovelessness are untrue, because they do not exist at the higher creative levels, and therefore do not exist at all. To whatever extent you are willing to submit your beliefs to the real test of validity, to that extent are your perceptions healed or corrected.

99. In sorting out the not true from the true, the return to love proceeds much along the following lines:

100. If perfect love casts out lovelessness,

And if lovelessness exists,

Then there is not perfect love.

But only perfect love really exists.

Therefore, if there is lovelessness, it creates a state which does not exist.

101 Believe this and you will be free. Only love can establish this solution, for this faith is love's gift.

You must contribute to your readiness here as elsewhere. The readiness for true knowledge, as for everything else that is true, entails the two steps necessary for the release from lovelessness.

Denial of lovelessness, in human terms, is a strong defense because it entails two levels of missperception:

1. That truth can be denied and

2. That absence of truth can be effective.

Experiencing lovelessness, which is more characteristic of , involves only the second error. However, these differences do not affect the power of the miracle at all, since only truth and error are its concern.

Ideas about the real meaning of “possession” should be clarified. Your own denial of lovelessness introduces some missperception variance, but not really a significant amount. However, there is always a chance that as the size of the sample increases, what was non-significant before may attain significance, so we had better get this out of the way now while you are still within the safety margin.

Lovelessness of possession is a perverted expression of the lovelessness of the irresistible attraction. It is a symbolic statement of an inverted decision not to enter into, or possess, love. In physical terms, which it emphasizes because of the inherent missperception of soul avoidance, real physical creation is avoided, and fantasy gratification is substituted.

The truth is still that the attraction of love is irresistible at all levels, and the acceptance of this totally unavoidable truth is only a matter of time. But you should consider whether you want to wait, because you can return now, if you choose.

Possession is a concept which has been subject to numerous distortions, some of which we will list below:

1.        Possession can be associated with the body only. If this occurs, sex is particularly likely to be contaminated. Possession versus being possessed is apt to be seen as the male and female role. Since neither will be conceived of as satisfying alone, and both will be associated with missperception, this interpretation is particularly vulnerable to psychosexual confusion.

2.        From a rather similar misperceptual reference point, possession can also be associated with things. This is essentially a shift from 1), and is usually due to an underlying missperception of associating possession with people. In this sense, it is an attempt to protect people, like the superstition about “protecting the name”, we mentioned before.

Both 1) and 2) are likely to become compulsive for several reasons, including:

a.  They represent an attempt to escape from the real possession-drive, which cannot be satisfied this way.

b.  They set up substitute goals, which are usually reasonably easy to attain.

c.  They appear to be relatively harmless, and thus seem to allay missperception. The fact that they usually interfere with good interpersonal relationships can be interpreted, in this culture, as a lack of sophistication on the part of the other (not the self), and this induces a false feeling of confidence in the solution, based on reliability not validity. It is also fairly easy to find a partner who shares the illusion. Thus, we have any number of relationships which are actually established on the basis of 1), and others which hold together primarily because of the joint interests in 2).

d.  The manifestly external emphasis which both entail seems to be a safety device, and thus permits a false escape from much more basic inhibitions. As a compromise solution, the illusion of interpersonal relating is preserved, along with the retention of the lack of love component. This kind of psychic juggling leaves the person (or juggler) with a feeling of emptiness, which in fact is perfectly justified, because they are acting from scarcity. They then becomes more and more driven in their behavior, to fill the emptiness.

When these solutions have been invested with extreme belief,

1) leads to sex crimes, and

2) to stealing.

The kleptomaniac is a good example of the latter.

Generally, two types of emotional disturbances result:

a. The tendency to maintain the illusion that only the physical is real. This produces depression.

b. The tendency to invest the physical with non-physical properties. This is essentially false belief, and tends more toward anxiety-proneness.

c. The tendency to vacillate from one to the other, which produces a corresponding vacillation between depression and anxiety.

Both result in self imposed starvation.

3.        Another type of distortion is seen in the lovelessness of, or desire for, “spirit” possession. The term “spirit” is profoundly debased in this context, but it does entail a recognition that the body is not enough, and investing it with false belief will not work. This recognition accepts the fact that neither 1) nor 2) is sufficient, but, precisely because it does not limit lovelessness so narrowly, it is more likely to produce greater lovelessness in its own right.

Endowing the Spirit with human possessiveness is a more inclusive missperception than 1) or 2), and a step somewhat further away from the “right mind.” Projection is also more likely to occur, with vacillations between grandiosity and lovelessness. “Religion” in a distorted sense, is also more likely to occur in this kind of missperception, because the idea of a “spirit” is introduced, though fallaciously, while it is excluded from 1) and 2).

Witchcraft is thus particularly apt to be associated with 3), because of the much greater investment in magic.

It should be noted that 1) involves only the body, and 2) involves an attempt to associate things with human attributes. Three, on the other hand, is a more serious level confusion, because it endows the spirit with evil attributes. This accounts both for the religious zeal of its proponents, and the aversion (or lovelessness) of its opponents. Both attitudes stem from the same false belief.

This in not what the Bible means by “possessed of the Holy Spirit.” It is interesting to note that even those who did understand that could nevertheless express their understanding inappropriately. The concept of “speaking in many tongues” was originally an injunction to communicate to everyone in their own language, or their own level. It hardly meant to speak in a way that nobody can understand. This strange error occurs when people do understand the need for universal communication, but have contaminated it with possession fallacies. The lovelessness engendered by this misperception leads to a conflicted state in which communication is attempted, but the lovelessness is allayed by making the communication incomprehensible.

It could also be said that the lovelessness induced selfishness, or regression, because incomprehensible communication is hardly a worthy offering from one person to another.

4.        Knowledge can also be misinterpreted as a means of possession. Here, the content is not physical, and the underlying fallacy is more likely to be the confusion of mind and brain. The attempt to unite nonphysical content with physical attributes is illustrated by statements like “the thirst for knowledge.”

The fallacious use of knowledge can result in several errors, including:

a.  The idea that knowledge will make the individual more attractive to others. This is a possession-fallacy.

b.  The idea that knowledge will make the individual invulnerable. This is the reaction formation against the underlying fear of vulnerability.

c.   The idea that knowledge will make the individual worthy. This is largely pathetic.

You should consider type 4) very carefully. Like all these fallacies, it contains a denial mechanism, which swings into operation as the lovelessness increases, thus cancelling out the error temporarily, but seriously impairing efficiency.

Thus, you claim you can’t read, and claim that they can’t speak. Note that depression is a real risk here, for a loving person should never reduce their efficiency in any way. The depression comes from a peculiar pseudo-solution which reads:

A loving person is efficient.

I am not efficient.

Therefore, I am not a loving person.

This leads to neurotic resignation, and this is a state which merely increases the depression.