Corresponding Text Section
Chapter 27: The Transition to Holy Ground
3. The Borderland of Thought
Complexity of choice is not of the Divine. How could it be, when all that the Divine knows is One? It knows of One Creation, One Reality, One Truth, and One Divine Family. Nothing conflicts with Oneness. How, then, could there be complexity of choice in the Divine? What could there be to decide? For it is the conflict of complexity that makes choice seem possible.
The Truth is simple. It is One, without an opposite. And how could strife enter into 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 decide to reach It is a decision made apart from time. Here is the Meeting Place where thoughts are brought together, where conflicting values meet, and all illusions are laid beside the Truth and evaluated as untrue and therefore dissolved to the nothingness from which they came. This Borderland is just outside the Gate of Heaven. Here is every thought made pure and wholly simple. Here is separation undone, and everything that is received instead. This is the journey’s End!
This Course has referred to this place between the world of illusions and Heaven 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 world of perception 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. Awakening 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 because every choice has been already made.
No belief that the Children of the Divine hold can be destroyed because in their power they made it. But what is meaningful and real and true to them must be brought to the last Comparison they will ever make, the last Evaluation that will be possible, the “Final Judgment” upon this world. It is the Judgment of Truth upon illusion and of Knowledge on perception, which is that illusion and perception have no eternal Meaning and therefore do not exist in Reality. What exists in Reality and therefore has Meaning is not your decision. It is merely a simple statement of a simple Fact. But in this world there are no simple Facts as long as what is the same and what is different remain unclear. This distinction is the one essential thing needed to make a choice at all. And herein is the difference between the worlds. In this world, meaningful choice seems to be impossible. In the Real World is choosing simplified.
Awakening stops just short of Heaven, for only perception needs awakening. Heaven was never lost or put to sleep and so cannot be awakened. Yet who can make a choice between the will for Heaven and the wish for nightmares unless they recognize that these are not the same? This difference is the learning goal this Course has set. It will not go beyond this aim. The only purpose of this Course 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 meaningful choice in this complex and conflicted world when what is the same and what is different isn’t understood, and choice is made where no choice really is. The Real World is where the area of choice is made real, not in the outcome, but in the perception of alternatives for choice. That there is actual choice is also an illusion because two things to choose between cannot be Reality. Yet within this one illusion rests the possibility for the undoing of every illusion, including this one. Is not this like your unique role, where the separation is undone by change of purpose from what once was specialness to what now is Union?
All illusions are merely one illusion. And in the recognition that this is so rests the ability to give up all attempts to make them different and then to choose between them. How simple is the choice between two things so clearly different, between Truth and illusion, Knowledge and perception. There is no conflict here. No sacrifice is possible in the relinquishment of an illusion recognized as such. Where all belief has been withdrawn from what was never true, can it be hard to give it up, and choose what forever must be true?
