III. The Borderland

T-26.III.1. Complexity is not of God. ² How could it be, when all He knows is One? ³ He knows of one creation, one reality, one truth and but one Son. ⁴ Nothing conflicts with oneness. ⁵ How, then, could there be complexity in Him? ⁶ What is there to decide? ⁷ For it is conflict that makes choice possible. ⁸ The truth is simple; it is one, without an opposite. ⁹ And how could strife enter in its simple presence, and bring complexity where oneness is? ¹⁰ The truth makes no decisions, for there is nothing to decide between. ¹¹ And only if there were could choosing be a necessary step in the advance toward oneness. ¹² What is everything leaves room for nothing else. ¹³ Yet is this magnitude beyond the scope of this curriculum. ¹⁴ Nor is it necessary we dwell on anything that cannot be immediately grasped.

T-26.III.2. There is a borderland of thought that stands between this world and Heaven. ² It is not a place, and when you reach it is apart from time. ³ 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. ⁴ This borderland is just beyond the gate of Heaven. ⁵ Here is every thought made pure and wholly simple. ⁶ Here is sin denied, and everything that is received instead.

T-26.III.3. This is the journey's end. ² We have referred to it as the real world. ³ 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. ⁴ This is because knowledge makes no attack upon perception. ⁵ They are brought together, and only one continues past the gate where oneness is. ⁶ 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.

T-26.III.4. Nothing the Son of God believes can be destroyed. ² 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. ³ It is the judgment of the truth upon illusion, of knowledge on perception: "It has no meaning, and does not exist." ⁴ This is not your decision. ⁵ It is but a simple statement of a simple fact. ⁶ But in this world there are no simple facts, because what is the same and what is different remain unclear. ⁷ The one essential thing to make a choice at all is this distinction. ⁸ And herein lies the difference between the worlds. ⁹ In this one, choice is made impossible. ¹⁰ In the real world is choosing simplified.

T-26.III.5. Salvation stops just short of Heaven, for only perception needs salvation. ² Heaven was never lost, and so cannot be saved. ³ Yet who can make a choice between the wish for Heaven and the wish for hell unless he recognizes they are not the same? ⁴ This difference is the learning goal this course has set. ⁵ It will not go beyond this aim. ⁶ 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.

T-26.III.6. There is no basis for a choice in this complex and over-complicated world. ² For no one understands what is the same, and seems to choose where no choice really is. ³ The real world is the area of choice made real, not in the outcome, but in the perception of alternatives for choice. ⁴ That there is choice is an illusion. ⁵ Yet within this one lies the undoing of every illusion, not excepting this.

T-26.III.7. 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? ² All illusions are but one. ³ And in the recognition this is so lies the ability to give up all attempts to choose between them, and to make them different. ⁴ How simple is the choice between two things so clearly unalike. ⁵ There is no conflict here. ⁶ No sacrifice is possible in the relinquishment of an illusion recognized as such. ⁷ 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?