The Borderland

Chapter 26 – 3. The Borderland

Complexity is not of God. How could it be, when all He knows is One? He
knows of one creation, one reality, one truth and but one Son. Nothing
conflicts with oneness. How, then, could there be complexity in Him? What
is there to decide? For it is conflict that makes choice possible. The truth is
simple; it is one, without an opposite. And how could strife enter in its
simple presence, and bring complexity where oneness is? The truth makes
no decisions, for there is nothing to decide between. And only if there were
could choosing be a necessary step in the advance toward oneness. What is
everything leaves room for nothing else. Yet is this magnitude beyond the
scope of this curriculum. Nor is it necessary we dwell on anything that
cannot be immediately grasped.
 
There is a borderland of thought that stands between this world and Heaven.
It is not a place, and when you reach it is apart from time. Here is the
meeting place where thoughts are brought together; where conflicting
values meet and all illusions are laid down beside the truth, where they are
judged to be untrue. This borderland is just beyond the gate of Heaven.
Here is every thought made pure and wholly simple. Here is sin denied, and
everything that is received instead.
 
This is the journey’s end. We have referred to it as the real world. And yet
there is a contradiction here, in that the words imply a limited reality, a
partial truth, a segment of the universe made true. This is because
knowledge makes no attack upon perception. They are brought together,
and only one continues past the gate where oneness is. Salvation is a
borderland where place and time and choice have meaning still, and yet it
can be seen that they are temporary, out of place, and every choice has been
already made.
 
Nothing the Son of God believes can be destroyed. But what is truth to him
must be brought to the last comparison that he will ever make; the last
evaluation that will be possible, the final judgment upon this world. It is the
judgment of the truth upon illusion, of knowledge on perception: “It has no
meaning, and does not exist. “This is not your decision. It is but a simple
statement of a simple fact. But in this world there are no simple facts,
because what is the same and what is different remain unclear. The one
essential thing to make a choice at all is this distinction. And herein lies the
difference between the worlds. In this one, choice is made impossible. In
the real world is choosing simplified.
 
Salvation stops just short of Heaven, for only perception needs salvation.
Heaven was never lost, and so cannot be saved. Yet who can make a choice
between the wish for Heaven and the wish for hell unless he recognizes they
are not the same? This difference is the learning goal this course has set. It
will not go beyond this aim. Its only purpose is to teach what is the same
and what is different, leaving room to make the only choice that can be
made.
 
There is no basis for a choice in this complex and over-complicated world.
For no one understands what is the same, and seems to choose where no
choice really is. The real world is the area of choice made real, not in the
outcome, but in the perception of alternatives for choice. That there is
choice is an illusion. Yet within this one lies the undoing of every illusion,
not excepting this.
 
Is not this like your special function, where the separation is undone by
change of purpose in what once was specialness, and now is union? All
illusions are but one. And in the recognition this is so lies the ability to give
up all attempts to choose between them, and to make them different. How
simple is the choice between two things so clearly unalike. There is no
conflict here. No sacrifice is possible in the relinquishment of an illusion
recognized as such. Where all reality has been withdrawn from what was
never true, can it be hard to give it up, and choose what must be true?