OrEd-T-23.2-The Irreconcilable Beliefs.1
7. The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It cannot come where there is conflict, for a mind at war against itself does not remember 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 me must imply that I believe the ego has the power to be victorious. Why else would I identify with it? Surely I realize the ego is at war with God. The ego is certain it has no enemy. Yet, just as certain is its fixed belief that it has an enemy that it must, and will, successfully overcome.
8. I do realize a war against myself would be a war on God. Victory is not conceivable, and it is not a victory that I would want. If it were possible, the death of God would be my death, not victory. This is no war, only the mad belief the Will of God can be attacked and overthrown. I may identify with this belief, but it will never be more than madness. And fear will reign in madness and will seem to have replaced love there. This is the purpose of conflict. And the means seem real to those who think that it is possible. The ego always marches to defeat, because it thinks that triumph over me is possible, but God thinks otherwise.
9. I am certain it is impossible that God and the ego, or myself and the ego, will ever meet. I seem to meet and make my strange alliances on grounds that have no meaning. For my beliefs converge upon the body, the ego's chosen home, believing it is my home. The ego meets me at an error in my self-appraisal, a mistake. I join with an illusion of myself that I share with the ego. And yet illusions cannot join. They are nothing, and they are all the same. Their joining lies in nothingness. Two are as meaningless as one or a thousand. Being nothing, the ego joins with nothing. The victory it seeks is as meaningless as itself.
10. The war against ourselves is almost over. The journey's end is at the place of peace. I would now accept the peace offered me here. This "enemy" I fought as an intruder on my peace, is transformed here before my sight into the giver of my peace. My "enemy" was God Himself. All attack, triumph, and conflict of any kind, are all unknown to Him. He loves me perfectly, completely, and eternally. The Son of God at war with his Creator, is a condition as ridiculous as nature angrily roaring at the wind, proclaiming that the wind is not part of nature itself.
11. Nature could not possibly establish this and make it true. Nor is it up to me to say what shall be part of me and what is kept apart. The war against myself was waged to teach the Son of God that he is not himself and not his Father's Son. For him to believe this, the memory of his Father must be forgotten. It is forgotten in the body's life, and if I think I am a body, I will believe I have forgotten it. Yet truth can never be forgotten by truth, and I have not forgotten what I am. Only a strange illusion of myself, a wish to trump over what I am, does not remember.
12. The war against myself is only the battle of two illusions struggling to be different from each other, in the belief that the one which conquers will be true. They are not different from each other because both are not true. What made them is insane, and they remain part of what made them. And so it does not matter what form they take. Madness has no influence on reality, and holds out no menace to it. Illusions cannot threaten truth in any way, nor can they triumph over it. The reality which illusions deny is not a part of them. There is no conflict between illusions and the truth.
