1. The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. 2It cannot come where there is conflict, for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness. 3The means of war are not the means of peace, and what the warlike would remember is not love. 4War is impossible unless belief in victory is cherished. 5Conflict within you must imply that you believe the ego has the power to be victorious. 6Why else would you identify with it? 7Surely you realize the ego is at war with God. 8Certain it is it has no enemy. 9Yet just as certain is its fixed belief it has an enemy that it must overcome and will succeed.
2. Do you not realize a war against yourself would be a war on God? 2Is victory conceivable? 3And if it were, is this a victory that you would want? 4The death of God, if it were possible, would be your death. 5Is this a victory? 6The ego always marches to defeat, because it thinks that triumph over you is possible. 7And God thinks otherwise. 8This is no war; only the mad belief the Will of God can be attacked and overthrown. 9You may identify with this belief, but never will it be more than madness. 10And fear will reign in madness, and will seem to have replaced love there. 11This is the conflict’s purpose. 12And to those who think that it is possible, the means seem real.
3. Be certain that it is impossible God and the ego, or yourself and it, will ever meet. 2You seem to meet, and make your strange alliances on grounds that have no meaning. 3For your beliefs converge upon the body, the ego’s chosen home, which you believe is yours. 4You meet at a mistake; an error in your self-appraisal. 5The ego joins with an illusion of yourself you share with it. 6And yet illusions cannot join. 7They are the same, and they are nothing. 8Their joining lies in nothingness; two are as meaningless as one or as a thousand. 9The ego joins with nothing, being nothing. 10The victory it seeks is meaningless as is itself.
4. Brother, the war against yourself is almost over. 2The journey’s end is at the place of peace. 3Would you not now accept the peace offered you here? 4This “enemy” you fought as an intruder on your peace is here transformed, before your sight, into the giver of your peace. 5Your “enemy” was God Himself, to Whom all conflict, triumph and attack of any kind are all unknown. 6He loves you perfectly, completely and eternally. 7The 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. 8Could nature possibly establish this, and make it true? 9Nor is it up to you to say what shall be part of you and what is kept apart.
5. The war against yourself was undertaken to teach the Son of God that he is not himself, and not his Father’s Son. 2For this, the memory of his Father must be forgotten. 3It is forgotten in the body’s life, and if you think you are a body, you will believe you have forgotten it. 4Yet truth can never be forgotten by itself, and you have not forgotten what you are. 5Only a strange illusion of yourself, a wish to triumph over what you are, remembers not.
6. 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. 2There is no conflict between them and the truth. 3Nor are they different from each other. 4Both are not true. 5And so it matters not what form they take. 6What made them is insane, and they remain part of what made them. 7Madness holds out no menace to reality, and has no influence upon it. 8Illusions cannot triumph over truth, nor can they threaten it in any way. 9And the reality that they deny is not a part of them.
7. What you remember is a part of you. 2For you must be as God created you. 3Truth does not fight against illusions, nor do illusions fight against the truth. 4Illusions battle only with themselves. 5Being fragmented, they fragment. 6But truth is indivisible, and far beyond their little reach. 7You will remember what you know when you have learned you cannot be in conflict. 8One illusion about yourself can battle with another, yet the war of two illusions is a state where nothing happens. 9There is no victor and there is no victory. 10And truth stands radiant, apart from conflict, untouched and quiet in the peace of God.
8. Conflict must be between two forces. 2It cannot exist between one power and nothingness. 3There is nothing you could attack that is not part of you. 4And by attacking it you make two illusions of yourself, in conflict with each other. 5And this occurs whenever you look on anything that God created with anything but love. 6Conflict is fearful, for it is the birth of fear. 7Yet what is born of nothing cannot win reality through battle. 8Why would you fill your world with conflicts with yourself? 9Let all this madness be undone for you, and turn in peace to the rememberance of God, still shining in your quiet mind.
9. See how the conflict of illusions disappears when it is brought to truth! 2For 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. 3Thus, conflict is the choice between illusions, one to be crowned as real, the other vanquished and despised. 4Here will the Father never be remembered. 5Yet no illusion can invade His home and drive Him out of what He loves forever. 6And what He loves must be forever quiet and at peace because it is His home.
10. You who are beloved of Him are no illusion, being as true and holy as Himself. 2The stillness of your certainty of Him and of yourself is home to Both of You, Who dwell as one and not apart. 3Open 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. 4You are not a stranger in the house of God. 5Welcome your brother to the home where God has set him in serenity and peace, and dwells with him. 6Illusions have no place where love abides, protecting you from everything that is not true. 7You dwell in peace as limitless as its Creator, and everything is given those who would remember Him. 8Over His home the Holy Spirit watches, sure that its peace can never be disturbed.
11. How can the resting place of God turn on itself, and seek to overcome the One Who dwells there? 2And think what happens when the house of God perceives itself divided. 3The altar disappears, the light grows dim, the temple of the Holy One becomes a house of sin. 4And nothing is remembered except illusions. 5Illusions can conflict, because their forms are different. 6And they do battle only to establish which form is true.
12. Illusion meets illusion; truth, itself. 2The meeting of illusions leads to war. 3Peace, looking on itself, extends itself. 4War is the condition in which fear is born, and grows and seeks to dominate. 5Peace is the state where love abides, and seeks to share itself. 6Conflict and peace are opposites. 7Where one abides the other cannot be; where either goes the other disappears. 8So is the memory of God obscured in minds that have become illusions’ battleground. 9Yet far beyond this senseless war it shines, ready to be remembered when you side with peace.