The Irreconcilable Beliefs

Chapter 23 – 2. The Irreconcilable Beliefs

The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It cannot come where there is
conflict, for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness.
The means of war are not the means of peace, and what the warlike would
remember is not love. War is impossible unless belief in victory is
cherished. Conflict within you must imply that you believe the ego has the
power to be victorious. Why else would you identify with it? Surely you
realize the ego is at war with God. Certain it is it has no enemy. Yet just as
certain is its fixed belief it has an enemy that it must overcome and will
succeed.
 
Do you not realize a war against yourself would be a war on God? Is victory
conceivable? And if it were, is this a victory that you would want? The
death of God, if it were possible, would be your death. Is this a victory? The
ego always marches to defeat, because it thinks that triumph over you is
possible. And God thinks otherwise. This is no war; only the mad belief the
 
Will of God can be attacked and overthrown. You may identify with this
belief, but never will it be more than madness. And fear will reign in
madness, and will seem to have replaced love there. This is the conflict’s
purpose. And to those who think that it is possible, the means seem real.
 
Be certain that it is impossible God and the ego, or yourself and it, will ever
meet. You seem to meet, and make your strange alliances on grounds that
have no meaning. For your beliefs converge upon the body, the ego’s
chosen home, which you believe is yours. You meet at a mistake; an error in
your self-appraisal. The ego joins with an illusion of yourself you share
with it. And yet illusions cannot join. They are the same, and they are
nothing. Their joining lies in nothingness; two are as meaningless as one or
as a thousand. The ego joins with nothing, being nothing. The victory it
seeks is meaningless as is itself.
 
Brother, the war against yourself is almost over. The journey’s end is at the
place of peace. Would you not now accept the peace offered you here? This
“enemy” you fought as an intruder on your peace is here transformed,
before your sight, into the giver of your peace. Your “enemy” was God
Himself, to Whom all conflict, triumph and attack of any kind are all
unknown. He loves you perfectly, completely and eternally. The Son of God
at war with his Creator is a condition as ridiculous as nature roaring at the
wind in anger, proclaiming it is part of itself no more. Could nature possibly
establish this, and make it true? Nor is it up to you to say what shall be part
of you and what is kept apart.
 
The war against yourself was undertaken to teach the Son of God that he is
not himself, and not his Father’s Son. For this, the memory of his Father
must be forgotten. It is forgotten in the body’s life, and if you think you are
a body, you will believe you have forgotten it. Yet truth can never be
forgotten by itself, and you have not forgotten what you are. Only a strange
illusion of yourself, a wish to triumph over what you are, remembers not.
 
The war against yourself is but the battle of two illusions, struggling to
make them different from each other, in the belief the one that conquers will
be true. There is no conflict between them and the truth. Nor are they
different from each other. Both are not true. And so it matters not what form
they take. What made them is insane, and they remain part of what made
them. Madness holds out no menace to reality, and has no influence upon it.
Illusions cannot triumph over truth, nor can they threaten it in any way. And
the reality that they deny is not a part of them.
 
What you remember is a part of you. For you must be as God created you.
Truth does not fight against illusions, nor do illusions fight against the truth.
Illusions battle only with themselves. Being fragmented, they fragment. But
truth is indivisible, and far beyond their little reach. You will remember
what you know when you have learned you cannot be in conflict. One
illusion about yourself can battle with another, yet the war of two illusions
is a state where nothing happens. There is no victor and there is no victory.
 
And truth stands radiant, apart from conflict, untouched and quiet in the
peace of God.
 
Conflict must be between two forces. It cannot exist between one power and
nothingness. There is nothing you could attack that is not part of you. And
by attacking it you make two illusions of yourself, in conflict with each
other. And this occurs whenever you look on anything that God created
with anything but love. Conflict is fearful, for it is the birth of fear. Yet
what is born of nothing cannot win reality through battle. Why would you
fill your world with conflicts with yourself? Let all this madness be undone
for you, and turn in peace to the rememberance of God, still shining in your
quiet mind.
 
See how the conflict of illusions disappears when it is brought to truth! For
it seems real only as long as it is seen as war between conflicting truths; the
conqueror to be the truer, the more real, and the vanquisher of the illusion
that was less real, made an illusion by defeat. Thus, conflict is the choice
between illusions, one to be crowned as real, the other vanquished and
despised. Here will the Father never be remembered. Yet no illusion can
invade His home and drive Him out of what He loves forever. And what He
loves must be forever quiet and at peace because it is His home.
 
You who are beloved of Him are no illusion, being as true and holy as
Himself. The stillness of your certainty of Him and of yourself is home to
Both of You, Who dwell as One and not apart. Open the door of His most
holy home, and let forgiveness sweep away all trace of the belief in sin that
keeps God homeless and His Son with Him. You are not a stranger in the
house of God. Welcome your brother to the home where God has set him in
serenity and peace, and dwells with him. Illusions have no place where love
abides, protecting you from everything that is not true. You dwell in peace
as limitless as its Creator, and everything is given those who would
remember Him. Over His home the Holy Spirit watches, sure that its peace
can never be disturbed.
 
How can the resting place of God turn on itself, and seek to overcome the
One Who dwells there? And think what happens when the house of God
perceives itself divided. The altar disappears, the light grows dim, the
temple of the Holy One becomes a house of sin. And nothing is
remembered except illusions. Illusions can conflict, because their forms are
different. And they do battle only to establish which form is true.
 
Illusion meets illusion; truth, itself. The meeting of illusions leads to war.
Peace, looking on itself, extends itself. War is the condition in which fear is
born, and grows and seeks to dominate. Peace is the state where love abides,
and seeks to share itself. Conflict and peace are opposites. Where one
abides the other cannot be; where either goes the other disappears. So is the
memory of God obscured in minds that have become illusions’ battleground.
Yet far beyond this senseless war it shines, ready to be remembered when
you side with peace.