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.

Brothers, 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, and proclaiming that 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 which
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 which 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 remembrance 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 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. And you who are beloved of Him are
no illusions, 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 strangers 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’s battleground. Yet far beyond this senseless war
it shines, ready to be remembered when you side with peace.