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 which 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 judgement upon this
world. It is the judgement 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 which CAN be made.

There is no basis for 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. 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?