From Loving One to One Love

Relationships give us our best moments … and also our worst. It’s no wonder we’re obsessed with them. Why else the tens of thousands of books promising to reveal the secret of how to woo, win, wed, and bed that special someone who will make you happy forever; or, if you’ve already found your soulmate, how to improve your now dull and lifeless time together. From Loving One to One Love: Transforming Relationships Through A Course in Miracles is not another how-to-fix-it guide to relationships. The Course’s take on relationships is radically different from that of the rest of the world. Relationships are not really about love if by love we mean idealization and specialness. They are not merely agreements negotiated between two parties to promote survival and contentment. Rather, according to the Course, relationships are classrooms for enlightenment: for breaking the ego’s grip on the mind and awakening to the true Self. Seen in this light, we don’t get love from a partner nor do we have to give up anything in order to get it. We don’t hunt for it out there in the world. The love comes first, from within, and then infuses all of our relationships, changing their purpose from egoic specialness to holiness. In order to be open to such love, however, we must do the work that the Course calls forgiveness. We release our judgments and grievances about others in the understanding that by freeing them we free ourselves. The result is love beyond anything we can imagine: a universal experience of love that’s not limited to any one special person or group but shines on all alike. As Bob Marley so lyrically put it years ago, there is only One Love and in its glorious radiance we do indeed all get together and feel all right.