[guide][fundationnal] The Balance Between The Internal And The External.

[Lynnel]

I feel the need to write about this just to get it out of my head. I am sure this may benefit some of you. In this long ass guide I will talk about quite nuanced distinctions and cover the whole topic between the balance of inner and outer work in great detail with quite a few exemples.

So let's start right away, shall we ?

While it may seem at first that you have found yourself in kindergarden I am simply very methodic and rigorous and prefer to be clear about every notion I will be using for clarity's sake.

 

Introduction

As human beings, we have only two options when it comes to doing  because  we only have :

- Our Inner world : Our feelings, level of awareness, skills, mindsets, past, history, knowledge, so on and so forth.

- Our external world : our house, car, spouse, cat, the food we eat, the sport we do in the morning, basically everything which is  not involved in the inner world of the person, what Eckhart Tolle may call your life situation.

I'm stating "our" because we do not care what happens in Africa or with the economy of the village far away in the dunes  : only about your life situation.

Also, it is important noting that the inside the inner world there is the relationship  we have to the external, aka how we relate to your children or spouse, which is internal, while what you maybe have to do with them, aka how to alter your personnal circumstances such a spouse, for instance by divorce, belongs to the external world.

(External = outer/ Inner = internal)

Problem solving strategies

In the same way, our problems may fall into two categories only:

A) Internal problems

You feel sad or depressed all the time, you have no idea what to do with your life, you can't meditate for more than 3 minutes, you never read, you do not feel satisfied with what is going on, in short, there is some problem in your inner world.

B) External problems

You have no money, your wife is a whiney bitch, your couch is so shitty you cannot meditate properly, so on and so forth.

C) Solutions

While there is an endless stream of methods to solve your problems all of those solutions always fall into one of those 4 ways :

1) Solving internal problems externally

2) Solving internal problems internally

3) Solving external problems internally

4) Solving external problems externally

Everyone alive is acting upon a % of those four ways in their life. And as you may have guessed only TWO of those are great - the other two ( Spoiler : those which don't match) will RUIN your life.

Let's look at those 4 ways in more detail, shall we ?

 

 

Solving internal problems externally

 

STOP DOING IT.

This is the main message of this whole post : do stop solving your internal problems externally. But of course you're not doing that, right ? Or maybe you're just not aware of it ?

Do you have any idea why you are doing what you are doing ? For instance, why do you believe you are distracting yourself from ? Why do you want success ?

Most of what you are doing IS most likely strying to solve internal problems externally - by changing the external world instead of changing your internal world.

Stop it.

Solve your inner issues internally.

Quick examples :

A) You feel like you need to get x, y, z , be it women, cash, or a car, or w/e else so your life feels complete. Otherwise it will never feel complete.

B) You need to get into that PhD program or your life will be ruined.

C) You are taking a lot of action but see absolutely no change : you've made this or that, you had a lot of different experiences, but inside it still feels like the same old shitty you no matter what.

A lesson from transformationnal mastery.

I mainly contemplated the sentence " what is internal can only be solved internally" for a long time before I got this insight but some of the ideas came from the transformational mastery by RSD Julien.

Okay,  look at this :

 

Your internal state is most likely at arround 3/10.

10/10 is happiness, joy and bliss. Which you do not feel yet.

All of the garbage, the past experiences, trauma, so on and so forth are mostly subconscious and keep you DOWN at 3/10.

So you do feel shitty inside, whether you know it or not, and then, well, what are you trying to do about it ?

One thing : RUNNING  AWAY

By for instance smoking, drinking, playing games, doing this or that, in short, acting in the external world, hoping it will someone change how you feel inside.
Inside you do not feel happy, nor fulfilled, joyful, present, etc. and you believe you need something external to fix it.

For instance : name something you cannot be happy without. E.g. I cannot be happy if I do not finish my life as a millionaire.

Is it gonna make you happy ? You will say yes because you believe it will fix what is inside and make you feel like x or y. But in the end it will always feel the same no matter what you do externally. Always.

One of the greatest examples was recently Neil Strauss. He felt he needed to try out polyamory and have a household of three beautiful women. After countless awesome sex experiences he felt into depression because he realized that he was broken. Not the relationships. Not the external. He, inside, was broken.

The great distinction : Scarcity VS Abundance

The core assumption of the external solving the internal problem is the fact that it cannot be solved inside. E.g. you feel unhappy inside of you and there is nothing that can be done about it : this is scarcity : you feel like unless you DO ( and you have to always be DOING) to feel 10/10, happy, etc. you MUST do and act. It is impossible naturally.

Abudance is the opposite : it is recognizing you've been fucking up and telling hold on...those experiences cannot fix me. I have to go inside. Abundance means you feel 10/10 to begin with ( remember when you were playing as a child) but then, a lot of bad things happened : unmet needs, bad parenting, layers and layers of garbage which put you down. So now you feel 3/10 and you've fallen into huge consumerism : do and consume experiences to feel better. You get the hit but nothing really changes. You are always on the run and you're always reinforcing the fact that you are unhappy to begin with, by doing all those things that are supposed to make you happy.

how to know you're running away ?

The great rule of the thumb !

Whatever state or feeling you are trying to achieve by doing something is escaping from the lack of it internally. You have to go inside and solve that problem inside.

You want to feel powerful/x/emotion ?

Look inside at your feelings and experiences that made you feel powerless/ x/y/emotion opposite.

When you feel like you need something or some external condition, and you need to have it no matter what.

Any form of attachement may indicate that. If you feel you need this or x to feel happy you are running away from your own insides.

 

The great solution or cleansing the augean stables.

Upon learning this however you will run away, maybe even more xD. You're not gonna be like oh yeah this is cool now let's just solve all of my problems internally and be done with it. You are escaping in the first place because you have no idea how to do the inner work and escaping is just so much easier and comfortable, I mean, what would you choose between :

1) Feeling and processing your old trauma and emotions

2) Having a nice vacation in thailand with hot girls and nice landscapes

You do not wanna look inside. You may look at some parts of it and never solve the inner issue because it's really painful to look at. I mean yeah doing real inner work is very painful and rewarding only after a while. Who wants to clean out the augean stables ? Of course you wanna run away.

And most people run away forever. And this is not a way to live because you will always cope and never thrive. You will never truly live.

Why you actually need to solve this :

1) You will finally thrise and stop running away and coping

2) This is the only way of living truly and authentically

While the message is very basic, like do deep inner work, you have to notice where you are running away from it and just doing some stuff on the sidelines instead of handling the real issues.

This is very important because as long as you are running away you are desperate and what you do in the world is also coming out of desperation and not insperation.

Have you wondered why Leo did a negative value release in the life purpose course ? Exactly for this reason. So it doesn't run you.

But the real work goes way deeper. Have you really wondered why you are always coping and not inspired to do shit ? Not inspired to go and realize your life purpose ? Exactly for this reason. It's coming out of desperation.

You need your life purpose (or x/y/z) to feel complete, to get meaning, purpose, (solve a series of your internal issues), get more girls, more money, to feel better about yourself.

But if you feel happy you will simply share your gift with pure joy and it will be even more rewarding. It does NOT stop at 10/10. At 10/10 THE REAL DEAL begins. You do not feel resistance (or wayyy less). You can slay it. You are giving your gifts and it feels fucking pure. When you feel joy you can finally share joy and find even MORE JOY in sharing. Same for happiness. You do not need anything.

You confuse right now desires for wants. Wanting is easy it's this is nice. It doesn't have an attachement/need/cling to it/  the need has.

IN short, STOP SOLVING your inner problems externally.

But maybe if you are but I need this or that to feel happy, well : you're either gonna self-sabotage yourself because deep down you don't feel like you deserve it and even if you make it you are only going to feel the issue you tried to solve even deeper.

If you tried getting a hot girl for the sake of it while it was to feel good about yourself, to feel worthy. You will get her and you will feel even more unwhorthy. And after a few occurences of that well, you will do the inner work. You will drop the scarcity paradigm and handle your inner garbage and finally achieve abundance. After a lot of work.

What can be done.

1) Therapy. I find it amazing for exploring and going trough all the trauma inside of you.

2) use the rule of the thumb to identify your issues and work on them internally.

3) Yoga is amazing

4) how to let go and the Julien's program helped me a lot ( I'm not affiliated with him in any way I just liked it because I had all those insights)

5) Pranayama breathing techniques are also amazing

6) How to let go by david hawkins

7) Any painfull real and deep inner work you can do, be it visualisations like the ones leo does, meditations, strange obscure techniques, as long as you are solving internal problems internally it is fine.

One key point is not to run away from the problem by doing irrelevant shit on the side. Because if you cannot run away to the next country your mind will find another way to run away from it. I mean, it only wants to protect you.

Don't watch the second part it's annoying self promotion but the first part can be great to understand what I'm talking about from another pespective.

Learn to slay it
 

Solving internal problems internally

Yes, this is what you are supposed to be doing. Quick example :

You cat dies and you feel sad.  Is it an external or internal problem ?

(You feeling sad is internal : the cat dying is not a problem in itself)

An internal solution is to handle your sadness, understand how to process your emotions, etc.

And external solution is to buy a NEW CAT to fill in that role, or even worse, pretending the old cat is still alive or even doing a ritual to bring the old cat to life.

 

Again, and once more and forever : solve internal problems INTERNALLY.

 

Solving external problems internally

I didn't even think this could happen but it does. While most of us run away from problems by acting in the outer world some of us solve problems that can be solved by taking action and acting in the outer world.

E.g. Your couch hurts your back . You need to get a new couch and not find a new way to meditate so that your couch gets better.

E.g. You have no chemistry with your bitchy and whiney wife but you still keep her arround. You do not need to solve your anger issues but get rid of her.

(Although you have deep inner work to do in that case to, to understand why you attracted her, stayed with her, and to check whether you can actually have a successfull relationship).

This falls into the category of people who are mentally masturbating a lot and not doing crap. Sometimes you need to go out in the real world and act. This is the balance between theory and practice which you have to tune  - Leo talked about that in a recent video so go watch it and handle it.

Solving external problems externally

You have no chairs in your house so you cannot properly work so you decide that you're gonna learn the ultimate way of the yogi and levitate up to your computer to pursue your life purpose. THis is an absolute no no. Get your ass to ikea and fix this short materialistic problem correctly.

Sometimes the external requires external action. You just need to carefully identify what is really an external problem and what is an internal issue.

 

Examples and short case studies

All you have to do it determine whether a given problem is external or internal.

Remember : inner problems are to be solved internally. External is to be handled on the external too.

(I'll maybe add more examples later on - and feel free to ask any questions )

Quote

I am M. Smith and I am 19 years old. I've never had any girlfriend. I feel like I need to get one.

 

Split the issue :

solve the internal : aka learn why you may need or want  a girlfriend and solve in internally.

solve the external : your sexual needs can be solved only by sex hence go get it - talk to girls, etc. Act in the real world. Endless theory will not help for this.

 

Quote

I've been doing releases and some inner work but progress/change is very slow. Is that normal ?

Yes. Progress is very slow. You're doing real deep painful work. It gets a bit easier the more you do it and investment pays off a LOT over time but at the start you have to work a lot.

This is no fancy vacation - this is no easy task.

You are not hercules and you won't be able to use two rivers to cleanse the stables. You have to take out the garbage.

So do the deep inner work. Take out the trash. Do not run away. This is not fun. Not great and not amazing. The real deal is not fancy but is very rewarding. Work at it. Slay it. Do it.

Solve the internal - internally !

Best of luck on your path !

Any feedback appreciated

Edited June 1, 2017 by Lynnel

[Visitor]

In a nut shell, humans comprise of body-mind-soul.

Body-mind focus is external, mind-soul focus is internal.

Facts and knowledge is recognised by body-mind (ext). Truth and knowing, is recognised by mind-soul (int).

All problems can be solved by the truth and knowing (int). IMHO

[alyra]

be careful because nothing is black and white. sometimes it is bad to solve internal problems internally. sometimes it is good to solve external problems internally. 

 

the trick is realizing that there is no problem there is no solving. there is no real difference between external and internal. they are all placeholders we use to fulfill a purpose we attribute to existence. 

 

it is in our nature to attribute purpose to existence. embrace that. practice any of the four things mentioned in the opening post that you aren't doing - just to explore its power and its weakness. that is - when you have the focus of effort available to do so focus on what you find to matter the most - even if it is hard - but don't obsess over how much there is out there to learn. because there is too much for any human to fathom. we are finite experience within infinite possibility. 

[Lynnel]

17 hours ago, alyra said:

be careful because nothing is black and white. sometimes it is bad to solve internal problems internally. sometimes it is good to solve external problems internally.

No, there is no such case. It only means the problem is actually not internal otherwise you're always better solving it internally because otherwise you're only running away.

 

19 hours ago, Captain Flint said:

@Lynnel Wow, great stuff! Thank you! I tried to formulate this topic of "problem solving strategies" for myself for so long!

I call your approach "term splitting". Dividing one big problem into several smaller sub-problems is a trully underestimated way of resolving contradictions! 

BTW, advices on solving external problems internally (which are often highly appreciated here) are like cancer of this forum.

 

Thanks ! Glad I could help !

Yeah you have to be pragmatic sometimes and if your roof is leaky actually go and fix it and not wait for enlightenement so it's not percieved as a "problem" anymore. People who really study non-duality can do both : inquire and handle the "external" properly. Like leo who is careful about what he is eating etc.

 

[alyra]

the world is not constrained by such rules you're projecting upon it

[Lynnel]

On 03/06/2017 at 2:04 PM, alyra said:

the world is not constrained by such rules you're projecting upon it

Of course not. A concept is only a concept. I'm only providing a practical framework to allow some progress to be done. (Cf. Latest leo's insight - I've been a pragmatic my whole life).