You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for our own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful. - Maria Sklodowska
“Just put the man together and the world comes out all right.”
In 1957, Dr. Ethel Alpenfels, the well-known anthropologist, spoke to a group of high school students on their role in society. After discussing the goals and the problems of her adolescent audience, Dr. Alpenfels related an anecdote which illustrates the necessity of having one’s own life in order internally before one will experience order in the external world. To change the world, change yourself.
The story goes like this:
On an especially humid and uncomfortable day, a young child was annoying his weary father. “What can I do? the youngster begged. “Give me something to play with, Daddy.”
The parent, wishing to be rid of the child, reached for a map of the world and cut it into varied shapes.
“Here,” the boy’s father said, “take this puzzle and see if you can put it back together.”
Jumping at the unusual plaything, the child soon became engrossed in it, while his father relaxed and eagerly anticipated a few hours of peace.
In a few moments, however, the boy returned with the map, which was perfectly pieced together. His father was amazed. “How did you do that?” he demanded.
“Oh,” his son replied, “there was a picture of a man on the other side of the map. So I just put the man together and the world came out all right!”
Seek for nothing outside of yourself to give you what you need. The only thing you need pay attention to, is you.
Some Passages from A Course in Miracles
What we believe we see outside (the body: “the outside picture”) is nothing more than what we first perceived to be real inside (the mind: “an inward condition”):
“Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that.…It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition (T-21.in.1:1-2,5).” - A Course in Miracles
Where projection takes us from the mind to the body, the dreamer to the dream figure, the miracle returns the dream to its source in the mind, which it never really left. We can therefore see that the purpose of A Course in Miracles is to provide a reversed perspective of the world. Instead of seeing the world as determining our feelings, reactions, and behaviors, being our cause, we recognize that our minds are the cause of everything we experience. This does not make us responsible for what other egos do, but it does make us responsible for our response to what they do. The direct implication is that nothing — absolutely nothing — has the power to make us happy or sad, joyful or depressed:
“The seeming cost of accepting today’s idea [“My salvation comes from me.”] is this: It means that nothing outside yourself can save you; nothing outside yourself can give you peace. But it also means that nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace or upset you in any way (W-pI.70.2:1-2).
This explains why we are never upset (or unkind) for the reasons we think (W-pI.5). It is never the world or people that cause our distress or happiness, but only the wrong mind’s secret wish to perpetuate its separated self and assume no responsibility for what it does, feels, or thinks. Therefore, all events, situations, or relationships are the same because none of them can affect us. This is why the Holy Spirit “makes no distinction among dreams,” as we read in another passage from the text:
“To judge them [our senseless substitutions for love] individually is pointless. Their tiny differences in form are no real differences at all. None of them matters. That they have in common and nothing else. Yet what else is necessary to make them all the same? (T-18.I.7:8-12)”
“Thus, our focus shifts from the external form to the internal content: the world to the mind, effect to its cause. As we saw above, since projection makes perception, it is our mind’s decision for the ego that is the problem, not the form the projection takes. That is why Jesus reminds us in the manual for teachers that we only get angry at an interpretation of a fact, not the fact itself (M-17.4).”
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