If you have forgiven yourself for unknowingly using someone, illness, pain or a situation, to attack yourself and you have already accepted Spirit’s Atonement (correction of your perception), then it is important to let it go, to trust that it has been healed, regardless of continuing appearances at the form level. If you still feel a loss of peace, then the ego has made another judgment. Do not believe it. Once you have allowed a Holy Instant where you genuinely surrendered your judgment and accepted Atonement, then it is done. To doubt that it has been healed is really self-doubt. However this healing is brought about by Holy Spirit and not by your mistaken identity, so any doubt that arises is from the ego and is not real. Trust is called for now. Love without trust is impossible. Doubt and Love cannot co-exist. Choose one and the other must fall away.

Atonement is accepting the healing of our perception, the one cause of all suffering. It is not our role to take responsibility for what is being atoned for. Once it is given to Spirit, forgiveness takes place and it is not the ego’s responsibility to retain it. To hold onto concern, guilt, or doubt is allowing the ego to perpetuate guilt and suffering. And it acts as a block to receiving and witnessing the certainty and consistency of God’s healing through the miracle. Our responsibility is to offer whatever upsets us over to Spirit to reinterpret on our behalf. And to trust implicitly that God’s perfect healing is done.

“If the sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the Atonement for himself, and I assure you that it is, then the responsibility for [what] is atoned for cannot be yours.”…”If you accept the remedy for disordered thought, a remedy whose efficacy is beyond doubt, how can its symptoms remain?” T-5.V.7:8,12

You are not responsible for the problem. The false PERCEPTION is. You are responsible for choosing to perceive through fear. There is no problem apart from your erroneous perception of it. Yet the false self concept is an impersonal suggestion of sin/evil and is not real. No one has a personal ego. It is not an entity but a thought system. The ego is an impersonal projection and you are not responsible for causing the ego, nor for fixing the ego’s illusory problems. You are not capable of accomplishing either. You are however, responsible for releasing your mistaken perception and for accepting the miracle instead. This is forgiveness, the Atonement.

The personal self which stems from guilt and fear is not an entity, it is a thought system that we either choose to believe, or reject. It’s an impersonal stream of thought based on guilt and fear. As an analogy for the ego, think of a non-stop looping movie that streams continuously. It doesn’t belong to anyone yet it just streams and projects over and over.

In our Creation by God as His one Child, the Holy Self, we knew that we were “one” and that our Identity was indestructible because it was (and still is) Love without opposite. We knew that we were an expression of God’s eternal and Loving Will as no less than the Kingdom of Heaven itself. This remains the Truth of who we are now but we have temporarily forgotten, getting lost in the ego’s looping movie of birth and death. On top of this, and within the ego’s amnesia, we have each taken this impersonal and fear-filled movie and made it personal. As if it’s my life, my body, my partner, my family and so on. Even in the idea of my birth and my death we seize a fragment of the ego’s personal movie and make it our very own. And when we grasp so tightly, we unknowingly abdicate our Power in God, forfeiting it entirely in favor of submitting ourselves to the ego’s illusory laws of suffering, separation and death.

In one of our previous teleclasses, one participant whom I will call Penny (not her real name) had us all riveted as she courageously shared a recent and traumatic incident, one that appeared extremely difficult to forgive within the ego’s hierarchy of illusions. She witnessed an animal being beaten to death. This horrifying act has got to be among the top ten monstrosities of the ego. We could all sense the shock waves of this story as they washed through us. Penny was still feeling traumatized two weeks later and was having great difficulty in seeing this from her Right-Mind with Holy Spirit.

Penny felt an overwhelming guilt for believing that she was personally responsible for having projected this terribly disturbing scene. Because she had witnessed it, she mistakenly believed that this abuse had been manifested by her personally; by her own personal ego. But there is no personal ego! Whatever we decide to make personal, the ego will hijack to increase our guilt and suffering. As revealed earlier, the ego is an impersonal thought system that is streaming all the time. Penny did not play a part in the cause of the incident just because she had witnessed it. Let me explain using this example.

If I am triggered by something then it’s not me personally that is triggered. It is the particular filter that I choose to look through, which is fear as the wrong-mind. Only fear can appear to be personal. If I am triggered then I am choosing to see via the ego thought system. I view the event through its lens of guilt and fear. The event itself is always neutral. No matter how shocking, how unfair…it always remains neutral.

In God’s Truth there is never any suffering. Therefore it is always my interpretation of the event that either reinforces my guilt or frees me from it. If I perceive suffering then I do not perceive with God. But in order to invoke real healing through the miracle then I must, if only for an instant, be willing to join with Spirit in my Right-Mind. If I feel triggered then I am in the wrong-mind. At this point I must remember to look past the ego’s appearances and step myself through the forgiveness/Atonement process. Note: for the forgiveness/Atonement process, click on this link

As I forgive by accepting Atonement, my world will heal because it exists only in my mind. Both the ego’s movie and the Holy Spirit’s movie exist in my mind simultaneously and I will witness the world that I presently value. And as I learn to look past disturbing appearances with Spirit, the Real World or happy dream is revealed to me. However I will not be able to see and truly embody the glory of the Real World until I decide to undo the ego’s filter as the wrong-mind.

This personal ego movie will throw all kinds of horrendous phenomena at us, hoping that we will continue to engage in its endless guilt, fear and death cycle. And this is where we must learn to choose again. Everything that occurs is neutral. Our only responsibility is to maintain awareness of our triggers, the times that we feel threat, and to exchange these for the Atonement, for true forgiveness and the miracle.

The reason I bring Penny’s story in here is because it represents clearly just how, as Course students, we can fall into a common ego trap that causes much confusion and suffering. We inadvertently withdraw our projected guilt from outside, from others and the world as Penny had, and then instead of wholeheartedly giving it to Spirit, we project that same guilt onto ourselves. Guilt is guilt whether we see it outside or within, it’s all the same as an attack on our Holy Self. If we encounter judgment, self judgment or guilt then it’s an immediate sign that we are rejecting God’s Love. Remember? Judgment and guilt are our greatest blocks to the awareness of Love’s presence. When they show up then we need to ask Spirit to heal our perception.

The Atonement is the undoing of fear. It is accomplished in any “now” moment that we choose to wholeheartedly surrender our anguished perception to Spirit’s Love to be healed. But we must accept the Atonement for it to be effective. This is trust. Otherwise the ego hijacks the issue again in an attempt to convince us that nothing was healed, especially when it seems that appearances still prevail, eg. abuse, pain, sickness, scarcity, etc.

The Atonement is the miracle of true forgiveness. It is the miraculous remedy for the ego and its seeming effects. Only one devotion can be on your inner Altar at any one time. Either the problem as you perceive it, or the divine Solution as the Atonement. While worry, anxiety, doubt, and resentment, etc., still remain as idols on your inner Altar, they obstruct true Healing.

“Forgiveness that is learned of me does not use fear to undo fear. Nor does it make real the unreal and then destroy it. 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 mind, 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 nonexistent. By steadily and consistently cancelling out all its effects, everywhere and in all respects, He teaches that the ego does not exist and proves it.” T-9.IV.5.

Remember this, we cannot forgive what we still believe is real.

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. T-9.IV.4.

“Give Him your thoughts, and He will give them back as miracles which joyously proclaim the wholeness and the happiness God wills His Son, as proof of His eternal Love. And as each thought is thus transformed, it takes on healing power from the Mind which saw the truth in it, and failed to be deceived by what was falsely added. All the threads of fantasy are gone. And what remains is unified into a perfect Thought that offers its perfection everywhere.” W-151.14.

Recommended Blogs:
The 7 Keys to Authentic Communication
The Seven Essential Principles of Quantum Forgiveness
Powerful Forgiveness Process – The Atonement