In a world that appears to be so open to closeness our most intimate and fruitful experiences should come from experiencing and living outwards. So how come our self-understanding most often comes from within? The outer experience we have becomes a product of our inner need for understanding and development. This externalization often ends up coming back to harm us rather than doing us good.

Consider a person needs to feel secure and safe and will draw upon the externalizations pushed upon external existence to gain the feeling of safeness and protection. In this case I am referring to police and governments, or whatever a person has externalized to draw a feeling of being protected from.

You can see from this example that such externalizations of inner needs are often illusive until brought to conscious awareness. If a person draws from within themselves a particular raw feeling such as protection, love, or understanding - then this externalization will also occur outward. It is most detrimental to personal growth to give power to some external object over our internal feelings and states of being. In terms of mind and matter, sometimes we tend to put too much emphasis on the matter and not enough on the mind.

Our limitation arises from seeing a physical building such as a hospital or a police station and projecting power on to this building where there is no inherent power.

The essence of all power comes from within

It is the illusion that outer things have power over us that becomes our own self limitation, and destruction.

You might be thinking - how come this process of externalization occurs in the first place. Consider a person who feels that he or she does not have the power of feeling secure, loved, understood, etc. within. Now consider the point at which we feel the fullness of love, safeness, and compassion within ourselves. Imagine what would happen to police, religion, and other external agents.

The thought is both frightening and empowering.