9 Atonement is for all, because it is the way to
undo the belief that anything is for you alone. To forgive is to
overlook. Look, then,
beyond error, and do not let your perception rest
upon it, for you will believe what your perception holds. Accept as true only what your brother
is if you would know yourself. Perceive what he is
not, and you cannot know what you are
because you see him falsely. Remember always that your identity is shared and that sharing
is its reality.
10 You have a part to play in the Atonement, but the plan of the Atonement
is beyond you. You do not know how to overlook errors, or you would not make them. It would merely be further error to think either that you do
not make them or that you can correct them
without a Guide to correction. And if you do not
follow this Guide, your errors will
not be corrected. The plan is not yours
because of your limited ideas of what you are. This limitation is where
all errors arise. The way to undo them, therefore, is not
of you but
for you.
11 The Atonement is a lesson in sharing which is given you because
you have forgotten how to do it. The Holy Spirit merely reminds you of what is your natural ability. By reinterpreting the ability to attack, which you
did make, into the ability to
share, He translates what you have made into what God created. If you would accomplish this
through Him, you cannot look on your abilities through the eyes of the ego or you will judge them as
it does. All their harmfulness lies in its judgment. All their helpfulness lies in the judgment of the Holy Spirit.
12 The ego, too, has a plan of forgiveness because you are
asking for one, though not of the right teacher. The ego's plan, of course,
makes no sense and
will not work. By following it, you will merely place yourself in an impossible situation to which the ego
always leads you. The ego's plan is to have you see error clearly
first and
then overlook it. Yet how can you overlook what you have made real? By seeing it clearly, you
have made it real and
cannot overlook it.
13 This is where the ego is forced to appeal to "mysteries" and begins to insist that you must accept the meaningless to save yourself. Many have tried to do this in my name, forgetting that my words make
perfect sense because they come from God. They are as sensible now as they ever were because they speak of ideas which are eternal. Forgiveness that is learned of me does
not use fear to
undo fear. Nor does it make real the
unreal and then destroy it.
14 Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning and thus
keeping it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds
at all, or you will also believe that
you must undo what you have made in order to be forgiven. What has no effect does not exist, and to the Holy Spirit, the effects of error are
totally non-existent. By steadily and consistently canceling out
all its effects
everywhere and in
all respects, He teaches that the ego does not exist and
proves it. Follow His teaching in forgiveness then, because forgiveness
is His function, and He knows how to fulfill it perfectly. That is what we meant when we once said that miracles are
natural, and when they do
not occur, something has gone wrong.
15 Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow the Holy Spirit's plan of salvation in recognition of the fact that you do
not know what it is. His work is
not your function, and unless you accept this, you cannot learn what
your function is. The confusion of functions is so typical of the ego that you should be quite familiar with it by now. The ego believes that
all functions belong to it, even though it has no idea what they
are. This is more than mere confusion. It is a particularly dangerous combination of grandiosity
and confusion which makes it likely that the ego will attack anyone and anything for no reason at all. This is exactly what the ego
does. It is
totally unpredictable in its responses because it has no idea of
what it perceives.
16 If one has no idea of what is happening, how appropriately can you
expect him to react? You might still ask yourself, regardless of how you can
account for the reactions, whether they place the ego in a very sound position as the guide for
yours. It seems absurd to have to emphasize repeatedly that the ego's qualifications as a guide are singularly unfortunate and that it is a remarkably poor choice as a teacher of salvation. Yet this question, ridiculous as it seems, is really the crucial issue in the whole separation fantasy. Anyone who elects a totally insane guide
must be totally insane himself.
17 It is not true that you do not know the guide is insane.
You know it because
I know it, and you
have judged it by the same standard as I have. The ego literally lives on borrowed time, and its days are numbered. Do not fear the Last Judgment, but welcome it and do not wait, for the ego's time is borrowed from
your eternity. This
is the Second Coming, which was made
for you as the First was created. The Second Coming is merely the return of
sense. Can this
possibly be fearful?
18 What can be fearful but fantasy, and no one turns to fantasy unless he despairs of finding satisfaction in reality. Yet it is certain that he will
never find satisfaction in fantasy, so that his only hope is to
change his mind about reality. Only if the decision that reality is fearful is
wrong can God be right. And I assure you that God
is right. Be glad, then, that you
have been wrong, but this was only because you did not know who you were. Had you remembered, you could no more have been wrong than God can. The impossible can happen
only in fantasy. When you search for reality in fantasies, you will not find it. The symbols of fantasy are of the ego, and of
these you will find many. But do not look for meaning in them. They have no more meaning than the fantasies into which they are woven.
19 Fairy tales can be pleasant or fearful, pretty or ugly, but no one calls them
true. Children may believe them, and so for a while the tales
are true for them. Yet when reality dawns, the fantasies are gone.
Reality has not gone in the meanwhile. The Second Coming is the
awareness of reality, not its
return. Behold, my children, reality is here. It belongs to you and me and God and is perfectly satisfying to all of us.
Only this awareness heals because it is the awareness of truth.
