Corresponding Text Section
Chapter 24: Escaping the War against Yourself
2. War and Peace
The Memory of the Divine 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? But victorious over what?
Surely you realize that the ego believes it is at war with the Divine. While it has no adversary in reality, the ego is certain in its fixed belief that it has an enemy that it must overcome, and will succeed. Do you not realize a war against yourself or your sisters and brothers would be a war on the Divine? Is victory in such an encounter conceivable? And if it were, is this a victory that you would want? The death of the Divine, were it possible, would be your death and the death of all that is. Would that be a victory?
The ego always marches to defeat because it thinks that triumph over you is possible, and the Divine thinks otherwise. This is no war, but only the mad belief that the Will of the Divine can be attacked and overthrown. You may unconsciously 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 even to conceive, the means will seem real.
Be certain that it is impossible the ego and the Divine, or yourself and the ego, will ever meet. You seem to meet the ego, 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 therefore meet at a mistake, an error in your self-appraisal. The ego joins with an illusion of yourself that you share with it. And yet illusions cannot join. All illusions are the same, and they are nothing. Their apparent joining lies in nothingness. Two are as meaningless as one, or a thousand. The ego joins with nothing, being nothing. It is simply the mind’s faulty framing of Reality. The victory it seeks is as meaningless as itself.
Sisters and brothers, the war against yourself is almost over. The journey’s End is at the Place of Peace. Will you now accept the Peace offered you here? This adversary you fought as an intruder on your Peace is here transformed before your vision into the Giver of your Peace. Your supposed “enemy” was the Divine Itself, to Whom all conflict, triumph, and attack of any kind are unknown. It loves you perfectly, completely, and eternally. And that is all there is.
The Children of the Divine at war with their Creator is a condition as ridiculous as the wind howling at nature in anger, and proclaiming that it is no longer part of nature, nor nature of it. Could the wind possibly establish this and make it true? Neither is it up to you to say what shall be part of you, and what kept apart. The war against yourself was undertaken to teach the Children of the Divine that they are not themselves, and not their Creator’s Children. For this to be perpetrated, the Memory of their Creator had to be forgotten. It was and is forgotten in the body’s perception, and if you think you are a body, you will believe that you have forgotten it. But 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 merely the battle of two illusions, each struggling to make the other different from itself in spite of their sameness, in the belief that the one that conquers will be true. And yet they are not different from each other, and there is no conflict between them and the Truth. Both are simply 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 no menace to Reality, and has no influence upon It at all. 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.
Conflict must be between two real forces. It cannot exist between Power and nothingness. There is nothing you could attack that is not part of you. By attacking anything, you make two illusions of yourself in conflict with each other. And this occurs whenever you perceive anything that the Divine 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 the Divine, still shining in your quiet mind.
What you remember is a part of you. For you must be as the Divine created you. Truth does not fight against illusion, nor do illusions fight against the Truth. Illusions battle only with themselves. Being fragmented, they fragment. But Truth is indivisible, and far beyond illusions’ 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 in reality. There is no victor and there is no victory. And Truth stands radiant, apart from conflict, untouched and quiet, in the Peace of the Divine.
See how the conflict of illusions disappears when it is brought to Truth! For it seems real only as long as it is perceived as war between conflicting truths, the conqueror to be the truer, the more real; the conquered to be the truth that was less real, made a complete illusion by defeat. For conflict is the choice between illusions, one to be crowned as real, the other vanquished and despised. Here will the Creator never be remembered. Yet no illusion can ever invade the Divine’s Home, or drive It out of what It loves forever. And what It loves must be forever quiet and at peace, because it is Its Home. And you who are beloved of It are no illusions, being as true and holy as Itself.
The Stillness of your Certainty of the Divine and of yourself is the Home to both, Who dwell as One and not apart. Open the Doors of Its most holy Home, and let forgiveness sweep away all trace of the belief in separation that keeps the Divine and Its Children without a home in the minds of the separated ones. You are not strangers in the House of the Divine. Welcome your sisters and brothers to the Home where the Divine has set them in Serenity and Peace, and dwells with them and you forever. 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 It.
Over the Home of the Children of the Divine the Holy Spirit watches, sure that Its Peace can never be disturbed. How can the Resting Place of the Divine turn on Itself, and seek to overcome the One Who dwells there? Think what happens when those who dwell within the Home of the Divine perceive themselves divided. The Altar seems to disappear, the Light to grow dim, and the Temple of the Holy One to become a house of iniquity. And nothing engages the mind that has split itself so except illusions. Illusions can conflict because their forms are different. And they do battle only to establish which form is preferred.
Illusion conflicts with illusion, while Truth meets Itself. The conflict of illusions leads to the illusion of war. Peace beholding 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. Peace and conflict are opposites. Where one abides, the other cannot be; where either is embraced, the other disappears. So is the Memory of the Divine obscured in minds that have become illusion’s battleground. Yet far beyond this senseless war the Divine shines, ready to be remembered when you embrace Peace.
