Marianne Williamson became legendary when Oprah began raving about her book, A Return to Love. Here are the insights about the inner life that overturned so many people’s perceptions of what it means to find love. It’s not as far from each of us as we tend to think.

We were born perfect, with a natural, God-instilled proclivity to love. We were innocent and free, thriving and full of unbound creativity. Everything seemed miraculous and full of wonder. What happens to this innate perfection? At some point in childhood or adolescence, everyone experiences disenchantment. We are taught to turn our attention to other things. Influences in our lives direct us away from what matters and train us to process and evaluate in a way contrary to our design. We have been taught to see the world in terms of struggle, competition, shame, guilt, disease, and death.

We were born with love, and fear is what we have learned since. The heart of the spiritual journey is to unlearn fear and return to love. Love is ultimate reality and our purpose. Meaning is not found in the material world. It’s found in each of us. We are co-creators with God when we choose to love. Anything else will leave us drifting through life without direction. It’s a kind of hell.

Love is not a feeling. It’s not sexual encounter. It’s not physical. It’s energy. It enables us to see the world in an entirely different way. Its name varies with tradition—Third Eye, the Holy Spirit’s guidance, the Higher Self—but the concept is the same. We are seeking a world beyond, but that world is closer to us than we think: an ancient memory invites us to return. Love is within each of us. Its indelible impression can be obscured or smothered, but never erased. The childlike self—the truest self—awaits rediscovery.

Here’s a thought that most people think, but few have the courage to verbalize: “I’ve never grown up.” Underneath the hunger for the material, the self-obsession, and withdrawn apathy is a deep, abiding fear. Even in the absence of an oppressive regime, plague or famine, we can still be mired. The constraints imposed upon us are often internal rather than external, emotional rather than circumstantial.

The fear is often amorphous and will take the shape of whatever decision we make—or merely consider making. We’re afraid of being with the wrong person; but we’re just as afraid of being with the right person. Winning her admiration is just as scary as facing her rejection. We’re afraid of dying, but living can be just as daunting.

So here we are, shackled to our emotional baggage, but we refuse to extend any compassion to our hurting, fearful self. We look upon ourselves with disgust and loathing. Even the harshest abuse we’ve experienced from family and coworkers and exes is mild compared to the vicious haranguing and condemnation we heap upon ourselves.

We collect degrees and wealth and accolades to flee from the self-hatred, but the critic is never far behind us, regardless of what we might achieve. So we truncate and annihilate: we wreck relationships, careers, our children, ourselves. We medicate with alcohol, control, and codependent relationships. Self-hatred comes in a staggering variety of flavors, but each of them is making life hell for us. It’s true at the individual as well as the collective level. What is war and genocide but a manifestation of our collective self-loathing?

So many people spend most of their time managing their personal hells rather than living life. You may obsess over learning about yourself, discover the intricacies of what makes you tick, but self-awareness alone isn’t enough to tear down your hell. It takes a miracle.

Most of us have experienced an abysmal soul sadness that seems on the verge of completely enveloping us. Usually, it is emotions and circumstances that dictate who we think we are and how we feel we are doing. There’s  a great deal we can’t change, but what we can always adjust is our perception of things. This perspective change is miraculous. Jesus describes it as the difference between building your house on the rock or the sand. As the parable goes, a storm hits both homes, but only the house built on the rock withstands the deluge. In the same way, people can be hit by the same storm, but, depending on your perspective, you will either overcome life’s rains and floods, or you will be swept away.

The question that is always before each of us is whether to choose love or to close oneself off from love. When we choose to act and think with love, we are experiencing union with God. These moments of union are life’s most peace-saturated. To choose against it is to opt for anguish and chaos.

When we talk about love, we are talking about God, its author. Far from a crusty, crotchety, uptight grandfather in the sky, God is love and love is God. He made us in his image, which means that we are an extension of love. What happens though, is that we tend to make God in our own image, projecting our own rage and self-hatred and judgmentalism onto God. The cost of this has been devastating fear and isolation. When we begin to recognize who is made in Whose image, we uncover who we truly are. We begin to love as we were created to and then unleash the power of God on the world. This is not just metaphor. We actually join him in creating and restoring the world to what Love intended it to be. Love is energy; it is the only thing that truly is. Everything else is illusion.

When Michelangelo reflected on his masterful statue of David, he said that David was already in the block of marble, and simply needed to be freed. The artist cut away all that wasn’t David. So it is with human beings: the Holy Spirit removes fear in its many guises, uncovering more and more of “you” through the process.

It’s not a statement of arrogance to acknowledge that you are loved and loveable. Recognizing the way things are, who you are in the grand scheme of things, is actually an act of humility.

God’s love for you is unconditional. Your value in his eyes doesn’t change with your achievements or mistakes because love is not based on performance.

Carl Jung talked about a collective unconscious, a mental structure we hold in common, a universal mind. We share the mind of Christ. This is more a psychological statement than a spiritual one. After all, no religion is the sole proprietor of truth. When we talk about Christ, we are talking about the love at the center of each of us. There’s only One begotten Son, and we are all Him.

No wonder we hate ourselves: we make ourselves small, isolated individuals who insist that we are fragmented from others and love itself. We are no more separate from each other than one sunbeam is from another. Moreover, a sunbeam would not be a sunbeam at all without a Source, a sun from which to beam.

Accepting Christ is a shift in perception. We realize that we are actually powerful, that there is love and goodness in us. To focus on Christ is to direct our attention to that love. We have amazing power. Think of all the ways we burn bridges, sully settings of work and play. Imagine what would happen if we used these mental powers for good.

The shift in perspective, away from fear and back to love, is of course, hamstrung at every turn by the ego. The word “ego” here means something slightly different than in psychology. It harkens back to the Greek understanding, that of a puny, individuated self. The false belief that we are distinct from others and from God is the root of all our fears. When we act and think according to this misperception, life is unbearable. We are living for ego, this false self, and we desperately cling to the very things we want freedom from, the things that make us fearful.

The truth that the ego wants us to forget is that we are all one. This means that the venom you expend on others is poisoning you, too. The ego is sneaky. He doesn’t introduce himself as misery or your imposter self, but as the more rational, mature, intelligent voice there to protect you. We need the Holy Spirit because he is the rallying call to wake up, to live, and be grateful. When we are tempted to choose fear, he redirects us to love, to union with God.

Whatever we do and see, it will be either ego or the Holy Spirit that interprets the experience: either through a lens of fear or a lens of love.

The universe is governed by particular laws. There are seasons and processes that give rise to life. They all take place in glorious symbiotic unison, from plants photosynthesizing to lungs inhaling and exhaling, converting carbon dioxide to oxygen. We are tethered to earth by gravity, the same force that keeps planets rotating around the sun. There are external forces that guide the physical universe, and internal forces that guide the emotional and psychological aspects of existence.

Faith involves trusting that the universe is on our side, and that we only need to sync up with the music of the spheres. Out of fear, we try to seize control of things, fretfully grasping at things that are simply beyond our ability to manipulate.

Can we let go of our obsession with outcomes, of a future beyond our control? The unholy trinity of money, sex, and power makes so many promises, but keeps none of them. We pursue them, hoping for satisfaction, but find they only temporarily slake the deeper gnawing hunger. Our job is not to grasp for these things or even for growth from these things, but simply to rest. When we choose to rest, we open ourselves up to a power beyond measure, that acts on our behalf and achieves far more than our anxious hands can craft. When we surrender, we relinquish the impulse to control, which is ultimately resistance to love. Whatever happens after is up to him.

Of course, no one has surrendered everything. It’s an ongoing process. There are realms in each of our lives that need to be surrendered. The more precious something is to you, the more difficult it will be to surrender. But the more you do so, the more freedom you will experience. What happens when you keep opening an oven to check on that cake you’re baking? It won’t actually bake because of the cool drafts you’re letting in with your paranoid check-ins.

So let go. The Zen Buddhists compare the Zen mind to an empty rice bowl and a novice’s mind to a full bowl. Unless you empty yourself, you cannot be filled with the universe. The key is not trying harder (though this is usually what our culture advocates).  Fretful, ambitious energy is more constricting than expanding. It’s like sugar for emotional health: it’s a brief shot that ultimately leaves us depleted. There is no chaos on the other side of letting go of fear. There is actually tremendous love.

It often takes a kind of rock-bottom desperation to become open to a deep transformation. We’ve all had those flat-on-your-face moments. They tend to be excruciating and embarrassing and humbling, but it is usually these very moments when we come to the end of self that prove the most transformative. The humility to surrender is not the end of the world, but it can be the start of truly living.