¹⁰ It is not difficult to understand the reasons why you do not ask the Holy Spirit to solve all problems for you. He has not greater difficulty in resolving some than others. Every problem is the same to Him because each one is solved in just the same respect and through the same approach. The aspects which need solving do not change, whatever form the problem seems to take. A problem can appear in many forms, and it will do so while the problem lasts. It serves no purpose to attempt to solve it in a special form. It will recur and then recur again and yet again until it has been answered for all time and will not rise again in any form. And only then are you released from it.

 

¹¹ The Holy Spirit offers you release from every problem that you think you have. They are the same to Him because each one, regardless of the form it seems to take, is a demand that someone suffer loss and make a sacrifice that you might gain. And when the situation is worked out so no one loses, is the problem gone because it was an error in perception which now has been corrected. One mistake is not more difficult for Him to bring to truth than is another. For there is but one mistake---the whole idea that loss is possible and could result in gain for anyone. If this were true, then God would be unfair, sin would be possible, attack be justified, and vengeance fair.

 

¹² This one mistake in any form has one correction. There is no loss; to think there is, is a mistake. You have no problems, though you think you have. And yet you could not think so if you saw them vanish one by one without regard to size, complexity, or place and time, or any attribute which you perceive that makes each one seem different from the rest. Think not the limits you impose on what you see can limit God in any way.

 

¹³ The miracle of justice can correct all errors. Every problem is an error. It does injustice to the Son of God and therefore is not true. The Holy Spirit does not evaluate injustices as great or small or more or less. They have no properties to Him. They are mistakes from which the Son of God is suffering, but needlessly. And so He takes the thorns and nails away. He does not pause to judge whether the hurt be large or little. He makes but one judgment---that to hurt God's Son must be unfair and therefore is not so.

 

¹⁴ You who believe it safe to give but some mistakes to be corrected while you keep the others to yourself, remember this: justice is total. There is no such thing as partial justice. If the Son of God is guilty, then is he condemned, and he deserves no mercy from the God of justice. But ask not God to punish him because you find him guilty and would have him die. God offers you the means to see his innocence. Would it be fair to punish him because you will not look at what is there to see? Each time you keep a problem for yourself to solve or judge that it is one which has no resolution, you have made it great and past the hope of healing. You deny the miracle of justice can be fair.

 

¹⁵ If God is just, then can there be no problems that justice cannot solve. But you believe that some injustices are fair and good and necessary to preserve yourself. It is these problems that you think are great and cannot be resolved. For there are those you want to suffer loss and no one whom you wish to be preserved from sacrifice entirely. Consider once again your special function. One is given you to see in him his perfect sinlessness. And you will ask no sacrifice of him because you could not will he suffer loss. The miracle of justice you call forth will rest on you as surely as on him. Nor will the Holy Spirit be content until it is received by everyone. For what you give to Him is everyone's, and by your giving it can He ensure that everyone receives it equally.

 

¹⁶ Think then how great your own release will be when you are willing to receive correction for all your problems. You will not keep one, for pain in any form you will not want. And you will see each little hurt resolved before the Holy Spirit's gentle sight. For all of them are little in His sight and worth no more than just a tiny sigh before they disappear, to be forever undone and unremembered. What seemed once to be a special problem, a mistake without a remedy, or an affliction without a cure, has been transformed into a universal blessing. Sacrifice is gone. And in its place the love of God can be remembered and will shine away all memory of sacrifice and loss.

 

¹⁷ God cannot be remembered until justice is loved instead of feared. He cannot be unjust to anyone or anything because He knows that everything that is belongs to Him and will forever be as He created it. Nothing He loves but must be sinless and beyond attack. Your special function opens wide the door beyond which is the memory of His love kept perfectly intact and undefiled. And all you need to do is but to wish that Heaven be given you instead of hell, and every bolt and barrier that seems to hold the door securely barred and locked will merely fall away and disappear. For it is not your Father's Will that you should offer or receive less than He gave when He created you in perfect love.

IV. The Borderland 

¹⁸ 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.

 

¹⁹ 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.

 

²⁰ 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.

 

²¹ 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.

 

²²  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.

 

²³ 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.

 

  ²⁴ 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?