My World is Mine to Save

The problem with comparing my life to other people’s runs deeper than its being a bad idea, something that’s not good for me. It’s not one of those things to know I shouldn’t do but still do “because I’m only human”. The problem lies in its being an artifact of a false paradigm – an error which exposes a misunderstanding of the whole way the world is put together.

There is a part of the daily prayer (given by Mrs. Eddy in the Manual of the Mother Church) that says, “Let the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love be established in me.” When I think of the “me” in the prayer, I sometimes think “the kingdom of me,” to remind myself that everything I perceive is part of myself, and the establishment of the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love in me means that it’s all I can ever see, in my whole world.

This is not a megalomanic statement. It just acknowledges that all I can ever know of others is my perception of them. My prayer for others is my looking to God – my source, our common source, to see something of their true identity. Seeing them, then, as perfect, is not some wonderful thing I do for them. It’s just cleaning up my own act about something that is already true.

It comes down to this. I have access to my world through my perceptions. What I perceive is, in a very real way, my world. I can’t assume that it is the same as anyone else’s. I don’t have access to anyone else’s world, except for this: through communion with God, I have access to the truth. The truth as God knows it doesn’t include any relative opinions about people. It doesn’t include an assessment of strengths and weaknesses, achievements and follies. It only includes the deep and perfect being, rooted in the infinite, sustained by Love itself. The only opinion I can have that comes anywhere near the truth is this perception of reality. Any other opinion is only my construct – the story I tell myself, based on my projections.

When I interact with you, it is an intersection of our worlds. I know that I am interacting with you, but what I think you are, and what I think you do, may be very different from what you think you are and do. You may say something that I feel compels me to react in a certain way –say for example, with indignation. But since what I see as you is just my construct, I’m not actually compelled to react in any way at all. I can notice that my impulse to react is based on my perception, but that my perception isn’t the actual fact. I can stop and check in with Truth before I react.

If I act on assumptions I have about you, based on what kind of person I think you are, I probably will offend you, as the assumptions expose the difference between my and your perceptions of you. My best chance at having an authentic interaction is by acknowledging that I can’t rightly know anything about you except by seeing what God knows.

Comparing my relative achievements with others is just comparing my view of myself with what I’ve projected about others. I can only do it in my world. I may assume that I have some kind of an objective standpoint from which I can judge, but I don’t. The others I would compare myself with are just my own constructs, and are probably unrecognizable by the people who share their names.

The powerful part of this realization is that my world is mine to save. It’s up to me to make sure that I view my world correctly, that I take careful and diligent time to make a fair estimation of what everything is, based on what God knows about it. Then I can expect to see my perceptions come more and more in line with the perfect reality. I may have wondered when “they” would get around to seeing things in a more intelligent way. But now the answer is clear: it’s up to me. Of course, this can be said by everyone else as well, though of course, I can’t say it for anyone but me.