Behind the Curtain of the Atonement

            Last week as I lay down for a nap one afternoon I was thinking about consciousness—I don’t remember what—when things shifted and instead of thinking I received a sort of “download” of information. The download was more experiential than informational, so it is hard to convey. But first I saw the split nature of consciousness, ego and Spirit, or dark and Light, a reinforcement of what I have been seeing for a long while. I dozed off and the download continued, even as I dreamt nonsense dreams in a shallow sleep. When I awoke, the download was still going, and I found the idea of the essence of the Atonement had come again after I had not thought about it in months.

God, being All, must contain the idea of Its Own opposite. But being All, God cannot have an opposite. So as soon as the idea of not-God arises it is simultaneously undone. But, as not-God contains the idea of time, in time it seems as though the idea of not-God arose long ago and will be undone in some indefinite future. This idea of not-God and its undoing is played out as consciousness in the Mind of God and is called, in A Course in Miracles, the Atonement, or the correction of the perception of separation from God. The miracle, as defined by the Course, is the means of the Atonement—those moments of undoing or correction that occur in time.

I wrote about the essence of the Atonement last June (read it here) and what I saw last week reinforced and expanded on what I have already seen. By essence I mean seeing behind the curtain of the human drama to what is really occurring, revealing what in time and consciousness can be granted any significance: Miracles, those moments of correction.

Basically, what I have seen behind the curtain is God’s Light extending, hitting a block of darkness (denial of or resistance to God), and flowing through the block, over and over again. This then shows up in the human drama as an emotional or psychological breakthrough of some kind, small or large. At minimum, the breakthrough has only personal consequences, at maximum it undoes an obstacle to God. But, in any case, the person or persons involved, and their particular story or stories, are irrelevant. The correction is not in the details in the story, which are a distant, meaningless depiction of the Atonement, but really on another level, in the Light breaking up the darkness. In other words, the Light does not come to bring someone a breakthrough, the Light breaks up the darkness and somewhere someone experiences a breakthrough in the human drama.

While the who and the what are insignificant because the stories of Atonement are simply fluff (even though soooo important to those who think they are real), the when and where of moments of Light, or correction, are immutable aspects of the Atonement as it progresses toward completion in time. All that can be said in ego-consciousness to have any whiff of Reality are those moments of correction, because of course the Atonement, essence or depiction, is not necessary, and expresses only an impossible idea and its undoing. So, what happens between miracles is nothing at all.

Imagine a horizontal line representing your person’s life in time. Miracles would show up as spots of Light, or correction, on that line. Around your line would be the lines of others, shooting off in all sorts of directions, their lines with more or less spots of Light, some spots of Light connecting to spots of Light on other lines when a breakthrough on one line affected a breakthrough on another, the accumulation of these spots of Light breaking up darkness representing the Atonement.

Essence or depiction, the Atonement’s unfolding is predetermined. Time, consciousness, the Atonement—all the same thing—are an expression, their cause in the past, their outcome inevitable.

 

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