I. The Irreconcilable Beliefs

T-23.I.1. The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. ² It cannot come where there is conflict, for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness. ³ The means of war are not the means of peace, and what the warlike would remember is not love. ⁴ War is impossible unless belief in victory is cherished. ⁵ Conflict within you must imply that you believe the ego has the power to be victorious. ⁶ Why else would you identify with it? ⁷ Surely you realize the ego is at war with God. ⁸ Certain it is it has no enemy. ⁹ Yet just as certain is its fixed belief it has an enemy that it must overcome and will succeed.

T-23.I.2. Do you not realize a war against yourself would be a war on God? ² Is victory conceivable? ³ And if it were, is this a victory that you would want? ⁴ The death of God, if it were possible, would be your death. ⁵ Is this a victory? ⁶ The ego always marches to defeat, because it thinks that triumph over you is possible. ⁷ And God thinks otherwise. ⁸ This is no war; only the mad belief the Will of God can be attacked and overthrown. ⁹ You may identify with this belief, but never will it be more than madness. ¹⁰ And fear will reign in madness, and will seem to have replaced love there. ¹¹ This is the conflict's purpose. ¹² And to those who think that it is possible, the means seem real.

T-23.I.3. Be certain that it is impossible God and the ego, or yourself and it, will ever meet. ² You seem to meet, and make your strange alliances on grounds that have no meaning. ³ For your beliefs converge upon the body, the ego's chosen home, which you believe is yours. ⁴ You meet at a mistake; an error in your self-appraisal. ⁵ The ego joins with an illusion of yourself you share with it. ⁶ And yet illusions cannot join. ⁷ They are the same, and they are nothing. ⁸ Their joining lies in nothingness; two are as meaningless as one or as a thousand. ⁹ The ego joins with nothing, being nothing. ¹⁰ The victory it seeks is meaningless as is itself.

T-23.I.4. Brother, the war against yourself is almost over. ² The journey's end is at the place of peace. ³ Would you not now accept the peace offered you here? ⁴ This "enemy" you fought as an intruder on your peace is here transformed, before your sight, into the giver of your peace. ⁵ Your "enemy" was God Himself, to Whom all conflict, triumph and attack of any kind are all unknown. ⁶ He loves you perfectly, completely and eternally. ⁷ 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. ⁸ Could nature possibly establish this, and make it true? ⁹ Nor is it up to you to say what shall be part of you and what is kept apart.

T-23.I.5. The war against yourself was undertaken to teach the Son of God that he is not himself, and not his Father's Son. ² For this, the memory of his Father must be forgotten. ³ It is forgotten in the body's life, and if you think you are a body, you will believe you have forgotten it. ⁴ Yet truth can never be forgotten by itself, and you have not forgotten what you are. ⁵ Only a strange illusion of yourself, a wish to triumph over what you are, remembers not.

T-23.I.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. ² There is no conflict between them and the truth. ³ Nor are they different from each other. ⁴ Both are not true. ⁵ And so it matters not what form they take. ⁶ What made them is insane, and they remain part of what made them. ⁷ Madness holds out no menace to reality, and has no influence upon it. ⁸ Illusions cannot triumph over truth, nor can they threaten it in any way. ⁹ And the reality that they deny is not a part of them.

T-23.I.7. What you remember is a part of you. ² For you must be as God created you. ³ Truth does not fight against illusions, nor do illusions fight against the truth. ⁴ Illusions battle only with themselves. ⁵ Being fragmented, they fragment. ⁶ But truth is indivisible, and far beyond their little reach. ⁷ You will remember what you know when you have learned you cannot be in conflict. ⁸ One illusion about yourself can battle with another, yet the war of two illusions is a state where nothing happens. ⁹ There is no victor and there is no victory. ¹⁰ And truth stands radiant, apart from conflict, untouched and quiet in the peace of God.

T-23.I.8. Conflict must be between two forces. ² It cannot exist between one power and nothingness. ³ There is nothing you could attack that is not part of you. ⁴ And by attacking it you make two illusions of yourself, in conflict with each other. ⁵ And this occurs whenever you look on anything that God created with anything but love. ⁶ Conflict is fearful, for it is the birth of fear. ⁷ Yet what is born of nothing cannot win reality through battle. ⁸ Why would you fill your world with conflicts with yourself? ⁹ Let all this madness be undone for you, and turn in peace to the rememberance of God, still shining in your quiet mind.

T-23.I.9. See how the conflict of illusions disappears when it is brought to truth! ² 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. ³ Thus, conflict is the choice between illusions, one to be crowned as real, the other vanquished and despised. ⁴ Here will the Father never be remembered. ⁵ Yet no illusion can invade His home and drive Him out of what He loves forever. ⁶ And what He loves must be forever quiet and at peace because it is His home.

T-23.I.10. You who are beloved of Him are no illusion, being as true and holy as Himself. ² The stillness of your certainty of Him and of yourself is home to Both of You, Who dwell as One and not apart. ³ 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. ⁴ You are not a stranger in the house of God. ⁵ Welcome your brother to the home where God has set him in serenity and peace, and dwells with him. ⁶ Illusions have no place where love abides, protecting you from everything that is not true. ⁷ You dwell in peace as limitless as its Creator, and everything is given those who would remember Him. ⁸ Over His home the Holy Spirit watches, sure that its peace can never be disturbed.

T-23.I.11. How can the resting place of God turn on itself, and seek to overcome the One Who dwells there? ² And think what happens when the house of God perceives itself divided. ³ The altar disappears, the light grows dim, the temple of the Holy One becomes a house of sin. ⁴ And nothing is remembered except illusions. ⁵ Illusions can conflict, because their forms are different. ⁶ And they do battle only to establish which form is true.

T-23.I.12. Illusion meets illusion; truth, itself. ² The meeting of illusions leads to war. ³ Peace, looking on itself, extends itself. ⁴ War is the condition in which fear is born, and grows and seeks to dominate. ⁵ Peace is the state where love abides, and seeks to share itself. ⁶ Conflict and peace are opposites. ⁷ Where one abides the other cannot be; where either goes the other disappears. ⁸ So is the memory of God obscured in minds that have become illusions' battleground. ⁹ Yet far beyond this senseless war it shines, ready to be remembered when you side with peace.