{"id":957,"date":"2008-02-14T09:45:57","date_gmt":"2008-02-14T09:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/beyondblue\/2008\/02\/marianne-williamson-falling-in.html"},"modified":"2008-02-14T09:45:57","modified_gmt":"2008-02-14T09:45:57","slug":"marianne-williamson-falling-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2008\/02\/marianne-williamson-falling-in.html","title":{"rendered":"Marianne Williamson: Falling in Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Falling in love has been getting a bad rap recently.  Supposedly more sophisticated types suggest that falling in love is an illusion, a state of non-reality because it is based on failure to see the love object as a \u201creal\u201d human being.  According to this view, \u201creal\u201d love sets in only at the end of infatuation.  A beautiful smile or dreams of greatness, for instance, are not considered as real as one\u2019s tendency to squeeze the toothpaste from the top of the tube.<br \/>\nFrom an illumined perspective, falling in love is not neurotic but rather one of the few genuinely non-neurotic things we do on this earth.  Falling in love is an effort to retrieve Paradise, that dimension of bliss where no one is blamed for anything and everyone is fully appreciated for who they are.  When we fall in love, we drop for however brief a time our tendency to judge.  We suspend our disbelief and eschew our faithlessness in another human being.<br \/>\nWhat usually happens after that is not that we finally wake up to reality.  What tends to happen after that is that we fall asleep to reality.  We cannot wake up to our brother\u2019s imperfections, because the perception of imperfection is itself a nonawakened state.  Our spiritual perfection is not altered by our imperfect personalities.  Seeing perfection is seeing the light.  Falling in love is not an illusion, as much as falling out of love is a fall from grace.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nWhat we see when we fall in love is not illusion but truth.  We want to fall in love because we want so much to return to God.  Of course we want to escape this darkened world.  We want desperately to go home to a place where all of us can see how beautiful we are.<br \/>\nSome people say that falling in love is a state of denial.  It is, actually.  In love, we are in a positive denial: a denial of darkness.  What then occurs is that we start to believe the serpent\u2019s lies \u2013we begin to see good and evil: \u201cI like him, but he doesn\u2019t make enough money\u201d or \u201cI like her, but she\u2019s too high maintenance.\u201d  Spirit has celebrated how wonderful they are; now the negative mind gets to celebrate how guilty they are.<br \/>\nGuilt is the ego\u2019s orgasm.<br \/>\nMost people do not have the personality structure to hold on to the strength it takes to love without judgment.  And so love\u2019s magic dies, casting Adam and Eve out of<br \/>\nParadise.<br \/>\nAs our minds are illumined, we become better at romance because we become better at being human.  We become better at forgiveness and support and love.  The enlightened world will not be one in which no one ever falls in love.  The enlightened world will be one in which everyone is in love with everyone all the time.  There will be no judgment, therefore, no blocks to the awareness of love.  We will see each other as God created us: as the perfect, loving and lovable people we really are at our core.  The purpose of romantic love is to jump start our enlightenment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Falling in love has been getting a bad rap recently. Supposedly more sophisticated types suggest that falling in love is an illusion, a state of non-reality because it is based on failure to see the love object as a \u201creal\u201d human being. According to this view, \u201creal\u201d love sets in only at the end of&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-relationships"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Marianne Williamson: Falling in Love - Beyond Blue<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2008\/02\/marianne-williamson-falling-in.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Marianne Williamson: Falling in Love - Beyond Blue\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Falling in love has been getting a bad rap recently. Supposedly more sophisticated types suggest that falling in love is an illusion, a state of non-reality because it is based on failure to see the love object as a \u201creal\u201d human being. According to this view, \u201creal\u201d love sets in only at the end of&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2008\/02\/marianne-williamson-falling-in.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Beyond Blue\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2008-02-14T09:45:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Beyond Blue\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Marianne Williamson: Falling in Love - Beyond Blue","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2008\/02\/marianne-williamson-falling-in.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Marianne Williamson: Falling in Love - Beyond Blue","og_description":"Falling in love has been getting a bad rap recently. 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According to this view, \u201creal\u201d love sets in only at the end of&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2008\/02\/marianne-williamson-falling-in.html","og_site_name":"Beyond Blue","article_published_time":"2008-02-14T09:45:57+00:00","author":"Beyond Blue","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2008\/02\/marianne-williamson-falling-in.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2008\/02\/marianne-williamson-falling-in.html","name":"Marianne Williamson: Falling in Love - Beyond Blue","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/#website"},"datePublished":"2008-02-14T09:45:57+00:00","dateModified":"2008-02-14T09:45:57+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/#\/schema\/person\/47318cdf8063cc052eccff0c99db4e75"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2008\/02\/marianne-williamson-falling-in.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2008\/02\/marianne-williamson-falling-in.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2008\/02\/marianne-williamson-falling-in.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Marianne Williamson: Falling in Love"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/","name":"Beyond Blue","description":"Beliefnet Voices - Therese J. 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Borchard writes the daily blog, Beyond Blue, on Beliefnet.com. She is the author of Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression &amp; Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes and The Pocket Therapist. 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