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Many leaders such as Churchill, and even the Pope, have talked of a new world to be built. Their aims are excellent but it will not suffice to change things externally alone; people must be educated aright, which means they must be educated in truth. The time to sit in seclusion or to enjoy one's inner peace all alone will then have gone. Service and Action will be the keynote. The justification of the higher philosophy is what it can do ultimately, not merely what it can think. It alone has a sane view because it alone knows the need of a sound foundation in correct thinking plus an active effort afterwards, erected on such a foundation. How hard this ultimate teaching is as a way of life until one becomes habituated to it! For he has to feel that all the world is but a dream, even horrid wars, and yet he will have to know it as actual and act as though it were real. For ultimately it is real. Just as all the events, people, and objects of a dream are after all nothing but Mind, in essence, because they are ideas and Mind is their reality, so in this world we have to understand that that which is regarded as Mind, unified, all around us is the real. It is because ignorant people concentrate only on their material beliefs, taking body and environment as matter, and regarding everything as individual and separate, that they can never get at this higher realization. If he remembers that all golden rings, watches, tie pins, and so on, are in essence only one substance--gold--so he may remember that all bodies, things, and events are in essence also one substance--Mind. The sage is the person who holds firmly to this double "vision" or rather understanding and has made it his or her own by unremitting effort.

-- Notebooks Category 11: The Negatives > Chapter 3 : Their Presence in The World > # 395