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*Quotes in this article are from Foundation for Inner Peace edition; To locate the same quotes in the 'Original Edition', use this link:  http://www.jcim.net/acim_us/Acim.php    
Sarah's Commentary:

[139] I will accept Atonement for myself.
[140] Only salvation can be said to cure.

Here we are almost half way through the year. Hard to believe! Today's lesson is the final one in our review. It is a reminder about dedicating ourselves to accepting our true identity, which is already in our minds and who we are now. We have seemingly partitioned off our true identity from our awareness, yet it is the only real thing about us. What we think we are is an image, a false identity that we took on in that tiny tick of time when we aligned with the ego. It is a bundle of thoughts, beliefs, and values that we hold, and all the concepts that we have about ourselves. None of them are true. The only thing that is true is that we remain as God created us, perfect, whole, holy, and one with Him, with all of His attributes.

For many years, as I studied and practiced the lessons and the text, I had trouble understanding what it really means to accept Atonement for myself. In spite of learning the Course definition of Atonement, I kept having the worldly definition in my mind. Atonement is deeply ingrained in me as a negative concept of attrition for my sins, penance, mea culpa, having done wrong and needing to atone, yet that is not the Course definition. In fact, it is quite contrary to this concept. While we don't believe that we are innocent, and while we know that we have made many mistakes, yet Jesus assures us that there is no need for guilt, only for correction because there is no sin. If we had truly sinned, there could be no correction, only punishment. However, Jesus assures us that we have not sinned, only made a mistake in choosing separation and with it our separate identity. Furthermore, he says that that mistake was corrected the second that we made it and now we just need to accept that correction.

As a result of our choice for the ego, we forgot who we are and got lost in this dark dream of the ego. The only way back to the awareness of our Self, which is already in the mind, is by accepting who we really are in our perfection, in our Oneness with our Creator, and in our innocence. That is what the Atonement means. It is letting go of our guilt and shame, our judgments on ourselves, our self concepts and self assessments, our individuality, our specialness and ultimately our mistaken notion that our reality is that of a body. In fact, it is letting go of everything that we think we are as egos, bodies, and personalities. Basically, to accept the Atonement is to accept the truth about ourselves as innocent, holy and created in the image of God with all of His characteristics. Thus it is a process of reconciliation that is not possible within the framework of the ego thought system.

So what do we do? Jesus has laid out a carefully designed curriculum letting us know how to come back to ourselves. We do these lessons in training the mind, recognize that we don't know the way, and rely on One Who does know. Only with our mind training and our willingness, dedication, commitment and openness can our minds be prepared for His healing. What we do is watch our mistaken thoughts about ourselves, look at all of our judgments, worries, grievances, anger, specialness and bring them to the truth. When we look with the eyes of love and non-judgment, we are looking with the Holy Spirit Who reminds us that what we are seeing is not the truth. He is the Correction always available to us when we are willing to take the first step and look at our own mistaken choices. This is what forgiveness is. It brings the miracle. It shifts our perception.

The ego's "life" depends on our acceptance of ourselves as guilty sinners. The ego's voice berates us: "you can't do that, who do you think you are? It is arrogant to think you are perfect. Look at all the things you have messed up and all the people you have hurt! You should feel guilty. You deserve punishment." Holiness to the ego means acceptance of ourselves as guilty sinners. The ego is happy when we lay that sentence on ourselves. However, Jesus tells us that if we listen to this counsel, and buy into the ego's description of us, we are actually being arrogant. If God says that we are innocent, eternal beings who have never sinned, then to accept the ego's contention about ourselves is indeed arrogant. It says that God is wrong about us and we are right. This is the struggle that goes on in ourselves, in our conflicted minds, but the Spirit does not fight. It simply waits for us to prepare our minds to accept the truth about ourselves. How are we going to get to that truth? By reminding ourselves, through the daily spiritual practice, to accept our innocence, to accept our true nature, not the one we made (our ego) but the Self that has all the attributes of God. It is all about accepting what is true about ourselves, and denying the power of what is false to hurt us, and within that acceptance we will be more willing to look at how we are blocking the truth. When we loosen our sense of ourselves as the body and personality that we have come to believe defines us, we will be more willing to look at our mistaken decisions about ourselves. Through the release of these blocks the space will be opened up for the light of truth to dawn on our minds. With each step in this journey, our trust will increase.

The self-talk that goes on in our heads keeps us from remembering who we are. This self-talk is what keeps us in the dream or nightmare and constitutes the monkey mind of random thoughts that torture us and keep us from peace. We are constantly reminding ourselves of our guilt, our unworthiness, and our justifications for seeing ourselves as victims. We believe our stories and hide our shadows, constantly trying to show the world an image of the face of innocence, yet all that does is cover over the hate and the rage. This is what needs to be seen if we are to discover the love that is beneath it all.

We remind ourselves that, "My mind holds only what I think with God," (W.Review IV.I.2.2) because all the other thoughts are ego-driven and are not real thoughts. They constitute the deceived mind that has forgotten who it is. They are the thoughts that keep us from God. They are the thoughts that keep us in hell. They are the thoughts we choose in order to defend against the love that we are. These are the thoughts that we must be willing to bring to Correction, thus allowing the Holy Spirit to shine them away with the light of truth. How willing are we to do this? How much are we willing to trust Him? How willing are we to walk through the darkness to the light? It does take great honesty and thus a lot of courage. We must let go of our defenses and be willing to be very vulnerable. It is a process.

How do we learn to accept Atonement for ourselves? We take the time to quiet our self-talk, to turn over our anger for healing, to bring every unworthy, guilty, impure thought to the truth. This includes our pain, despair, aloneness, helplessness, fear, hurt, confusion, depression, sadness, grief, judgment and every concept we hold about ourselves, whether we judge it as good or bad. All this and more we bring to this miraculous place of the Atonement. We take the time to connect with the place of peace in ourselves, where we can experience a holy instant, a glimpse of Heaven and let the holiness that is in us come to our awareness. We accept the healing in our minds every time we reach out to a brother with a miracle. When we offer patience and love instead of condemnation and when we offer forgiveness instead of correction of a brother, then we will understand what accepting the Atonement for ourselves is about. Then we will be motivated to visit this place more and more often until we can truly know that this world is not our home and the ego is not who we really are. Then we will know salvation and our healing, which is the only cure for every kind of pain that we experience. It is our willingness to take ourselves and our brothers out of our self imposed prison.

So none of our remedies for the guilt that we project on the body that makes it sick will work. "Only salvation can be said to cure." (W.140) We are reminded in this lesson that the treatments for sickness offered by the world can never cure. Why is that? Because they don't treat the problem, they only address the symptoms. The problem is the guilt in our minds, which we project onto the body and now we see it in form. Now we have the awareness that there is indeed a real cure for the guilt and it is the acceptance of Atonement, which addresses the real problem.

The only problem is the guilt of separation. If God is holiness, which is everywhere, and sin and guilt are nothing and nowhere, then guilt and sin are baseless. They are completely invalid emotions that have no reality. Yes, when we believe in our guilt and sin, it seems that they are real. Our responsibility, however, is to withdraw that belief, and to recognize that sickness is just another form of guilt, offering us an opportunity to see the guilt in our minds, and be willing to bring it to the Holy Spirit for healing. Our responsibility is to open our minds to God's Voice that tells us we are wholly guiltless. It is to remember that we can never heal by addressing effects. We only need to look at the cause, which is the guilt in our mind.

Now we come to our final practice in this review and affirm once again the truth about ourselves. We can check our resistance to waking up from this dream by the investment we have in doing the practice and how often we remember to do it. We all have resistance to giving over our control and independence---our seemingly separate selves. We are very invested in our concepts and our opinions. We are invested in being right about ourselves, but what that does is keep us from being truly happy. We have filled our minds with ideas, beliefs and values that we hold as true, and now we must recognize that none of these ideas has brought true peace. With this recognition comes the motivation to step back into the stillness and defenselessness of our true Self. When we are defending, we have identified with an illusion of ourselves. It is not who we are.

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