Why Do We Feel That Various Good and Evil People and Actions Take Place Outside of Us?

Our perception of reality divides into internal and external. We picture what is inside of us as kind and good, since we feel that it belongs to us, and on the contrary, we picture what is outside of us as harmful, evil and foreign.

This is why we can easily justify our own actions, no matter how harmful they might be to others, and it is why we find it much more difficult to justify the actions of others.

The advice for correcting this egocentric perception is to discover that others are actually us. Through increasing our understanding, awareness and self-reflection, and then ultimately through correcting ourselves with the help of the surrounding society, we should reach the point where we start perceiving the world as inside of us.

Then the question arises, if the world and other people are inside of us, why then do we continue calling them “they” instead of “us” or “me”? “They” are our thoughts, qualities and feelings that we disagree with, which we perceive as existing outside of us.

Such a perception is given to us so that we work on ourselves to make these qualities feel positive. Then, the extent to which we feel them as our own qualities is the extent to which they become our inner qualities. Likewise, those that we do not clearly feel as our own qualities will remain feeling external to us.

By reaching a perception of the world as existing simultaneously inside and outside of us, this duality helps us correct ourselves faster in order to feel the world as our personal inner whole, like the ten Sefirot of our soul. There is nothing besides this soul, and everything we perceive is its parts.

When we embark on this process of correcting our perception of reality, we then feel progress in such a direction as a start-stop process, with one impulse after another. We can compare it somewhat to a tiger before it leaps. It first sways, and then it leaps, and then it sways again, and then leaps again. Each time we make a leap, we attain an inclusion of an additional area that was supposedly a former external one.

This describes spiritual progress toward the discovery of ourselves as existing in a single soul. This soul divided into internal and external parts called Galgalta Eynaim and AHP (Awzen, Hotem, Peh) in the wisdom of Kabbalah. They are also called the Shoresh (root), Neshama (soul) and Guf (body) that a person feels within, and the Levushim (garments) and Heichalot (palaces/structures) that we feel outside of us.