What is (and What is Not) the Meaning of Atonement?

So, is everybody clear on what Atonement means in the thought system of A Course in Miracles?

Show of hands? No? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

How about we start by clarifying what atonement doesn’t mean. As is true with so many terms Jesus uses in the Course (God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, forgiveness, Heaven, hell, sin, crucifixion, and resurrection just to name a few) His definition is completely different from the traditional Christian meaning associated with the word.

Atonement in A Course in Miracles is NOT a reference to Jesus suffering on the cross to pay for our collective “sins”. Nor is that idea part of the spiritual psychology of the Course at all.

What atonement means in Course philosophy is a complete undoing of the ego thought system that began with our belief that we had separated ourselves from God. As stated in Miracle Principle 26,

“Miracles represent freedom from fear. ‘Atoning’ means ‘undoing’. The undoing of fear is an essential part of the Atonement value of miracles.”
T-1.1.26:1-3

So we’re not “atoning” for being a bunch of guilty sinners, because we’re not.

And while we’re on the subject of sin – let’s go ahead and clarify that too. The word “sin” as it is used in the Course refers to errors or mistakes in thinking – and is defined as a lack of love. That’s all.

The biggest – and actually, only – mistake we ever made was believing we could ever separate from God or our bros in the first place.

So sin is simply error thought – it means we have invested in a belief in fear. When we believe in fear, even though the Course teaches us that fear is basically nothing, nowhere, and does not exist – when we choose to make fear real in any form, we experience that lack of love.

So, what does sin, alias error-thinking, aka a lack of love look like?

It appears to have a lot of faces – whether coming from us or toward us – guilt, shame, jealousy, envy; sadness, arrogance, judgment, blame, criticism, condemnation; fear, hatred, comparison, anger, competition, seeing yourself as a victim; victimizing others, thinking you are less than or better than another, or that someone is lesser or better than you – they are really all the same.

All of these faces are just forms of the ego belief that we separated from our Creator. If we believe that we are separate from our Divinity, our unconscious guilt about that belief will cause us to experience any or all of the above conditions as forms of fear. That, incidentally, is A Course in Miracle’s definition of hell – our belief in separation.

It’s also our one and only problem, to which there is one solution: the Atonement.

“A sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct.”
T.1.VI.2:1

In the beginning, pre-separation, before time and space – there was no concept of “we” or lack or need. All was oneness, there was an awareness of epic, total, unimaginably joyful, peaceful, endless love. We were one big, sparkling, blissed-out, radiant eternal being of light, chillin’ in the heart of God.

Then, just for a fraction of a nano-second, we appeared to have this crazy “tiny, mad idea at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh.” T-27.VIII.6:2

Translation – the mind’s idea that it could go off on its own, separate itself from its Creator and not be a part of the pure Love from which it was created was like, total ridiculousness to the point where our response just should have been something like,“HahahahahahahaOMG!hahahahahahahaha OMG-that is so hilarious! Hahahahahahaha-OMG-STOP IT! If I were a body, Holy water would be coming out my nose!”

THAT would have been awesome. But in the instant we had that tiny mad idea, in our minds – not actually in reality – it caused us to fall asleep, and our minds to go completely unconscious. As the Biblical creation story says, “a deep sleep befell Adam” (and it doesn’t say anything about him ever waking up) and we collectively dreamt a nightmare whereby:

Believing in duality: we now perceived instead of knowing. In place of oneness, we had “twoness”. Life and death. Good and bad. Heaven and hell. Love and fear. Male and female. We never had any of those opposing beliefs before, because in Oneness, they don’t exist. We had only Life, Heaven, Love, Peace, Joy. Timeless, changeless, formless, genderless, endless yumminess.
We thought we had been kicked out of the constant state of pure awareness, Oneness, love – by an angry God, and were now separate from our Creator. (We weren’t really, but that belief has been totally harshing our mellow ever since.)
We made up the Big Bang dream, the projection of our collective guilt onto an illusion of a split-off part of our one mind known as the ego, which appears as the world of form, including what looks like bazillions of separate things and individual bodies, but really isn’t. Aaaaaaannnnd…
We then felt like a bunch of guilty sinners, having rejected God like that.
And then we forgot about it.

Well, F*#?&%K.

But the Truth is, that was just a terrible dream, from which A Course in Miracles is helping us to awaken. Accepting the Atonement is remembering who we are and reclaiming our Divinity.

Jesus is leading us in this awakening – as He reminds us in A Course in Miracles:

“I am in charge of the process of Atonement, which I undertook to begin. When you offer a miracle to any of my brothers, you do it to yourself and me. The reason you come before me is that I do not need miracles for my own Atonement, but I stand at the end in case you fail temporarily. My part in the Atonement is the cancelling out of all errors that you could not otherwise correct. When you have been restored to the recognition of your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself.”
T-1.III.1:1-5

The process the Course provides us with for cancelling out our errors is that of true forgiveness. Remember that miracles are a shift in perception from fear to love, brought about by forgiveness – and as Jesus teaches us in Miracle principle 25,

“Miracles are part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness which, when completed, is the Atonement.”
T-1.1.25:1

As we are all joined together as the One Son of God, it is only by our seeing the innocence in our bros and remembering who they are that we are able to see the truth of ourselves and remember who we are.

Although this world was made up by the ego to be the home of guilt, the Holy Spirit has given us a different function for our time spent here:

“We have a mission here. We did not come to reinforce the madness that we once believed in. Let us not forget the goal that we accepted. It is more than just our happiness alone we came to gain. What we accept as what we are proclaims what everyone must be, along with us. Fail not your brothers, or you fail yourself.”
W-139.9:1-6

The only way we can fail our brothers and by extension ourselves is by continuing to see them as guilty rather than practicing the forgiveness that enables us to see their innocence and thus our own.

As we engage in this holy process, we undo layer after layer of the egoic false self. This alters our perception from fear to love, and as we awaken to remembering who we are, we finally get that the separation was the biggest ego fake-out of all time. We understand that we remain in the heart of God with all our bros in the home we never left.

And BOOM! Here we are at the Atonement.

And no, it isn’t “at-one-ment”. Let’s all just agree not to change Jesus’s words, ok? Especially since doing so actually changes their meaning. That kind of thinking is what got us here in the first place.

Oneness is certainly the truth of us as the Son of God, but the atonement is a realization that we were erroneous in our thought, it is not Oneness itself.

What is (and What is Not) the Meaning of Atonement?

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Thank you so much to your beautiful sinless self for being here with me today. I hope the clarification of the Atonement was helpful to you. If so, please share and leave a comment. I love hearing from you.

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