I will accept the Atonement for myself.
1. With this, all decisions come to an end.
²For in doing so, we choose to accept ourselves exactly as God created us.
³And what is choosing, if not entertaining uncertainty about what we are?
⁴All doubt rests on this.
⁵There is no doubt that does not reflect uncertainty about one’s own identity.
⁶There is no conflict that does not contain the single, simple question: “What am I?”
2. Yet who could ask this question except one who has refused to recognize himself?
²Only the refusal to accept oneself could make the question seem sincere.
³The only thing any living being can know with certainty is what he is.
⁴From this single certainty, he perceives other things as being just as certain as himself.
3. Uncertainty about what you are is such an enormous self-deception that its magnitude is almost beyond conception.
²To be alive and not know yourself is to believe that you are actually dead.
³For what is Life but to be yourself?
⁴And what else but you could possibly be alive in your place?
⁵Who is the one who doubts?
⁶What is he doubting?
⁷Whom is he asking?
⁸And who could possibly answer?
4. This uncertainty merely states that he is not himself; and so, believing he is something else, he becomes the one who asks what that something is. I
²Yet he could not be alive if he did not know the answer.
³If he asks as though he did not know, he is merely demonstrating that he does not wish to be what he is.
⁴Yet he must have accepted what he is, because he is alive.
⁵But he has condemned it, denied its worth, and chosen to believe he does not know the one certainty by which he lives.
5. That is why he doubts his life, for he has denied what his life is.
²This denial is why you need the Atonement.
³Your denial has not changed what you are in the least.
⁴But you have split your mind in two: one part that knows the truth, and one that does not.
⁵You are yourself.
⁶And that is beyond all doubt.
⁷Yet you do doubt it.
⁸But you do not ask which part of you could truly doubt yourself.
⁹That part which is questioning cannot really be part of you.
¹⁰For it is questioning the one who does know the answer.
¹¹If it were truly part of you, it would not doubt. II
6. The Atonement corrects the strange idea that it is possible to doubt yourself and not be certain of what you truly are.
²This is the height of madness.
³Yet it is the universal question of this world.
⁴And what could this possibly mean except that the world is insane?
⁵Why share in its madness by believing that what is so widespread here must be true?
⁶Nothing the world believes is true.
⁷The world is a place whose purpose is to be the home where those who claim not to know themselves can come to question what they are.
⁸And they will keep coming until the Atonement is accepted, and they learn that it is impossible to doubt themselves and not be aware of what they are.
7. You can only be asked to accept this, for what you are is beyond all question.
²It is forever established in the holy Mind of God and in your own.
³It lies so far beyond all doubt and questioning that to ask what you are is the only proof you need to recognize you believe in a contradiction: that you do not know what it is impossible not to know.
⁴Is this truly a question, or rather a statement that denies itself by being asked?
8. Let us not allow our holy minds to dwell on such absurd reflections.
²We have a mission to fulfill in this world.
³We did not come to reinforce the madness in which we once believed.
⁴Let us not forget the goal we have accepted.
⁵We came to reach far more than our own happiness.
⁶What we accept as being proclaims what everyone else cannot help but be along with us.
⁷Do not fail your brothers, or you will be failing yourself.
⁸Behold them with Love, so they may know they are part of you, and you of them.
9. This is what the Atonement teaches, and it proves that the oneness of the Son of God is untouched by his belief that he does not know what he is.
²Accept the Atonement today—not to change reality, but simply to accept the truth about yourself—and then go forth rejoicing in the infinite Love of God.
³This is what we are asked to do.
⁴And this is all we will do today.
10. Today we will devote five minutes in the morning and five minutes at night to this task.
²We begin by reviewing our mission with these words:
³I will accept the Atonement for myself.
⁴For I remain as God created me.
11. We have not lost the Knowledge God gave us when He created us like Himself.
²We can remember it for everyone, for in Creation all minds are one.
³And we retain in our memory the remembrance of how deeply we truly loved our brothers; of how all minds are part of us; of how faithful they truly have been to us; and of how the Love of our Father embraces us all.
12. Grateful for all of Creation, and in the Name of its Creator and His Oneness with every aspect of Creation, we reaffirm today our dedication to our cause each hour, letting go of every thought that would distract us from our holy purpose.
²Clear your mind for a moment of all the foolish cobwebs the world has spun around the holy Son of God, and see how fragile are the chains that seem to keep the knowledge of yourself beyond your awareness, as you say:
³I will accept the Atonement for myself.
⁴For I remain as God created me.
I Were it not for the apparently tragic consequences of this split in the mind, you would have to admit that, though the situation has dramatic overtones, it also has its comic side: a subject wanders through an imaginary world—product of a myriad of beliefs he blindly upholds without question—yet harbors enormous uncertainty about himself, which, ironically, is the only thing of which he should be certain.
II Perhaps, when you read this paragraph explaining that your mind is divided into two parts, it occurs to you to think that human beings have their minds divided into two parts. That is not so. The concept of “human being” is an idea that appears precisely in one of those two parts into which your mind, Son of God, seems to be divided. You have only one mind, which you share with all the Sonship, and that mind is whole and not divided at all, for God created it perfect. That division is not real, but purely imaginary. Were it real, the mind would be split for all eternity, for that would be its condition.
The human being—the concept of person or individual identity—is that virtual part of the mind that questions its own identity. You, as a person, as a human being, therefore do not have a mind divided into two parts. No. When you identify with your body and believe yourself to be in the world living a temporal life, you are experiencing yourself as the effect of that imaginary part of the mind that entertains the idea of separation.
What you understand as a “person” is a concept conceived by your hallucinated mind; it is the expression of the sick part of the mind’s vocation to be separate. Persons, from a strictly ontological standpoint, are effects, not subjects; they are not the cause of anything. That is why “persons” cannot be guilty: they have no entity and do not exist in reality.
If you have some understanding of computer science, you will grasp the following allegory, which is quite accurate. You can interpret the mind of the Son of God as the hard drive of a computer. Just as that hard drive is physically real, the mind of the Son of God is absolutely real. Now, perhaps you know that you can partition your hard drive to generate a virtual drive. It is still the same hard drive—nothing has changed—but you have given it instructions to interpret itself as if it were two. Now your computer apparently has two hard drives, the sum of which equals the total capacity of the physical drive. You can use one of those partitions for one purpose—for example, for applications and work documents—and the other for games.
The mind of the Son of God functions similarly: one part creates in eternity, and the other believes in the idea of separation and conceives imaginary worlds. The purpose of this Course is the integration of the mind and the end of that virtual partition; and the strategy it proposes to achieve this is to convince the imaginary part to stop engaging in unsatisfying pursuits and return to the fullness of which it is part.
For that integration to take place, the will must be involved. But since the will is always involved—being one of the three aspects of Being—it must now change: from desiring separation to choosing Heaven.
This Lesson, as indeed all the Lessons of this Course to some degree, appeals to your will so that you may be firmly willing to cease questioning your identity and to accept your condition as the Son of God. That is healing, and that is the Atonement. That is why you need to repeat to yourself that you accept the Atonement for yourself.