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 its sharing IS its reality.

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.

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 judgement.
All their helpfulness lies in the judgement of the Holy Spirit.

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.

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.

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 cancelling 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.

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.

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.

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 Judgement, 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?

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.

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.