1. Complexity is not of God. 2How could it be, when all He knows is one? 3He knows of one creation, one reality, one truth and but one Son. 4Nothing conflicts with oneness. 5How, then, could there be complexity in Him? 6What is there to decide? 7For it is conflict that makes choice possible. 8The truth is simple; it is one, without an opposite. 9And how could strife enter in its simple presence, and bring complexity where oneness is? 10The truth makes no decisions, for there is nothing to decide between. 11And only if there were could choosing be a necessary step in the advance toward oneness. 12What is everything leaves room for nothing else. 13Yet is this magnitude beyond the scope of this curriculum. 14Nor is it necessary we dwell on anything that cannot be immediately grasped.
2. There is a borderland of thought that stands between this world and Heaven. 2It is not a place, and when you reach it is apart from time. 3Here 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. 4This borderland is just beyond the gate of Heaven. 5Here is every thought made pure and wholly simple. 6Here is sin denied, and everything that is received instead.
3. This is the journey’s end. 2We have referred to it as the real world. 3And yet there is a contradiction here, in that the words imply a limited reality, a partial truth, a segment of the universe made true. 4This is because knowledge makes no attack upon perception. 5They are brought together, and only one continues past the gate where Oneness is. 6Salvation 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.
4. Nothing the Son of God believes can be destroyed. 2But 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. 3It is the judgment of the truth upon illusion, of knowledge on perception: “It has no meaning, and does not exist.” 4This is not your decision. 5It is but a simple statement of a simple fact. 6But in this world there are no simple facts, because what is the same and what is different remain unclear. 7The one essential thing to make a choice at all is this distinction. 8And herein lies the difference between the worlds. 9In this one, choice is made impossible. 10In the real world is choosing simplified.
5. Salvation stops just short of Heaven, for only perception needs salvation. 2Heaven was never lost, and so cannot be saved. 3Yet who can make a choice between the wish for Heaven and the wish for hell unless he recognizes they are not the same? 4This difference is the learning goal this course has set. 5It will not go beyond this aim. 6Its only purpose is to teach what is the same and what is different, leaving room to make the only choice that can be made.
6. There is no basis for a choice in this complex and overcomplicated world. 2For no one understands what is the same, and seems to choose where no choice really is. 3The real world is the area of choice made real, not in the outcome, but in the perception of alternatives for choice. 4That there is choice is an illusion. 5Yet within this one lies the undoing of every illusion, not excepting this.
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? 2All illusions are but one. 3And in the recognition this is so lies the ability to give up all attempts to choose between them, and to make them different. 4How simple is the choice between two things so clearly unalike. 5There is no conflict here. 6No sacrifice is possible in the relinquishment of an illusion recognized as such. 7Where all reality has been withdrawn from what was never true, can it be hard to give it up, and choose what must be true?