 Today we continue on with the text from chapter 2, the second section, The Atonement as Defense. You can do anything I ask. I have asked you to perform miracles and have made it clear that miracles are natural, corrective, healing, and universal. There is nothing they cannot do, but they cannot be performed in the spirit of doubt or fear. When you are afraid of anything, you are acknowledging its power to hurt you. Remember that where your heart is, there is your treasure also. You believe in what you value. If you are afraid, you will inevitably value wrongly, and by endowing all thoughts with equal power will inevitably destroy peace. That is why the Bible speaks of the peace of God which patheth the understanding. This peace is totally incapable of being shaken by errors of any kind. It denies the ability of anything not of God to affect you. This is the proper use of denial. It is not used to hide anything, but to correct error. It brings all error into light, and since the error and darkness are the same, it corrects error automatically. True denial is a powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is not a concealment, but a correction. Your right mind depends on it. Denial of error is a strong defense of truth, but denial of truth results in miscreation, the projections of the ego. In the service of the right mind, the denial of error frees the mind and re-establishes the freedom of the will. When the will is really free, it cannot miscreate because it recognizes only truth. You can defend truth as well as error. The means are easier to understand after the value of the goal is firmly established. This is a question of what it is for. Everyone defends his treasure and will do so automatically. The real questions are what do you treasure and how much do you treasure it? Once you have learned to consider these questions and to bring them into all your actions, you will have little difficulty in clarifying the means. The means are available whenever you ask. You can, however, save time if you do not protract this step unduly. The correct focus will shorten it immeasurably. The atonement is the only defense that cannot be used destructively because it is not a device you made. The atonement principle was in effect long before the atonement began. The principle was love, and the atonement was an act of love. Acts were not necessary before the separation because belief in space and time did not exist. It was only after the separation that the atonement and the conditions necessary for its fulfillment were planned. Then a defense so splendid was needed that it could not be misused, although it could be refused. Refusal could not, however, turn it into a weapon of attack, which is the inherent characteristic of other defenses. The atonement thus becomes the only defense that is not a two-edged sword. It can only heal. The atonement was built into the spacetime belief to set a limit on the need for the belief itself, and ultimately to make learning complete. The atonement is the final lesson. Learning itself, like the classrooms in which it occurs, is temporary. The ability to learn has no value when change is no longer necessary. The eternally creative have nothing to learn. You can learn to improve your perceptions and can become a better and better learner. This will bring you into closer and closer accord with the sonship. But the sonship itself is a perfect creation, and perfection is not a matter of degree. Meanwhile, there is a belief in differences is learning meaningful. Evolution is a process in which you seem to proceed from one degree to the next. You correct your previous missteps by stepping forward. This process is actually incomprehensible in temporal terms, because you return as you go forward. The atonement is the device by which you can free yourself from the past as you go ahead. It undoes your past errors, thus making it unnecessary for you to keep retracing your steps without advancing to your return. In this sense, the atonement saves time, but like the miracle it serves does not abolish it. As long as there is need for atonement, there is need for time. But the atonement as a completed plan has a unique relationship to time. Until the atonement is complete, its various phases will proceed in time, but the whole atonement stands at time's end. And at that point the bridge of return has been built. The atonement is a total commitment. You may still think this is associated with loss, a mistake all the separated sons of God make in one way or another. It is hard to believe a defense that cannot attack is the best defense. This is what is meant by the meek shall inherit the earth. They will literally take it over because of their strengths. A two-way defense is inherently weak precisely because it has two edges and can be turned against you very unexpectedly. This possibility cannot be controlled except by miracles. The miracle turns the defense of atonement to your real protection. And as you become more and more secure, you assume your natural talent of protecting others, knowing yourself as both a brother and a son. And from the workbook, lesson number eight. My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts. This idea is, of course, the reason why you see only the past. No one really sees anything. He sees only his thoughts projected outward. The mind's preoccupation with the past is the cause of the misconception about time from which your seeing suffers. Your mind cannot grasp the present, which is the only time there is. It therefore cannot understand time and cannot, in fact, understand anything. The one holy truth thought one can hold about the past is that it is not here. To think about it at all is therefore to think about illusions. Very few have realized what is actually entailed in picturing the past or in anticipating the future. The mind is actually blank when it does this, because it is not really thinking about anything. The purpose of the exercises for today is to begin to train your mind to recognize when it is not really thinking at all. While thoughtless ideas preoccupy your mind, the truth is blocked. Recognizing that your mind has been merely blank rather than believing that it is filled with real ideas is the first step to opening the way to vision. The exercises for today should be done with eyes closed. This is because you actually cannot see anything, and it is easier to recognize that no matter how vividly you may picture a thought, you are not seeing anything. With as little investment as possible, search your mind for the usual minute or so, merely noting the thoughts you find there. Name each one by the central figure or theme it contains, and pass on to the next. Introduce the practice period by saying, I seem to be thinking about blank. Then name each of your thoughts specifically, for example, I seem to be thinking about name of a person, about name of an object, about name of an emotion, and so on concluding at the end of the mind searching period with, but my mind is preoccupied with past thoughts. This can be done four or five times during the day unless you find it irritates you. If you find it trying, three or four times is sufficient. You might find it helpful, however, to include your irritation or any emotion that the idea for today may induce in the mind searching itself. My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts. So today the focus is taking a moment to allow the idea that the reason I perceive only the past, the reason that I'm addicted to the past, the reason that I have been locked in unreality or stuck dreaming is because of the belief that the thoughts I think I think are real thoughts. But in authenticity, I notice that the stream of thoughts that are moving through consciousness are really just thinking about the past and thinking about the future. It's past future thinking that is where the preoccupation occurs. It's past future thinking that is the addiction. And that is what we must notice today to pull our focus away from the images of the world and come to an admission that I have a thought problem going on here. It can be tempting to think about people and things, emotions, situations, but those are all just projections of the thoughts that are passing through consciousness. So there's no point in remaining so focused on effects when we are being told that these erroneous thoughts about the past and the future are causing or projecting the world of images that seems to be there. We are told the one thought, the one holy true thought one can hold about the past is that it is not there. And so we could say the one holy true thought we can hold about the world is that it is not there. And you see this sets your mind on a very helpful direction of paying attention to the thoughts that you think you think from a reminder, from a context of they aren't reality. The past is gone. The future past is an imagination as well and is gone. We're being convinced by the Holy Spirit that what is to come is already over. And think how that would change your outlook. Think how that would change your efforting if you had a glimmer of an experience that what is to come is already past and that the past is over. You may have a hint of how this relates to peace of mind because why would you retain future goals if you had an awareness that the future was already over? You'd start to see how ridiculous and silly future goals are, how ridiculous ambition is. Always egoic, always about a personal self and attainable so called future goals that will make things much better. Ego wants you to hold on to these thoughts of past and future because that's the only way that the ego can be perpetuated. An illusion of self based in time can only be perpetuated if you keep giving your mind over to that future that's not there and that past that is gone. So in our reading from the text today we learned that the atonement is the correction. It's the only so called defense will say that works. That can't be used destructively. It's not a double edged sword. It's the only thing that will work. It's the gateway to eternity and while the sleeping mind believes in time then the atonement, the correction to this false belief in time is really the only thing worthy of your mind. You could wake up every day with that one word in your mind. Atonement, not future goals, not what will I do today, not thinking about what happened last night or what happened last week. That's the same old, same old versions of past future thinking that keep the mind from joy, from true happiness and peace. So the focus is atonement or correction. That could be a mantra if you want a mantra. Let me accept the correction for the belief in time and space, the belief that I've separated from my source, my creator. Let me accept the correction and today's lesson, my mind is preoccupied with past thoughts is just a reminder again of causation. It's the thoughts that cross consciousness. It's the thoughts that I think I'm actually thinking that are causing the world that I seem to see. And when I see the impossibility of these thoughts, I see the impossibility of causing such a world. We can't stop with thinking that we're just causing the world, but we have to admit it. We have to come to a moment of stark, clear, unproductive admission of this setup before we can laugh and let it go and come fully into our holiness, which could never be concerned with such a foolish imagining, such silliness. So join me in this today. Join me just in accepting the admission that will begin to free the mind. And what is that admission? My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts.