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I wish to examine the place, using the word in an abstract sense, where we most of the time are when we are experiencing life.
By the language we use we show our natural interest in this matter. I may be in a muddle, and then I either crawl out of the muddle or else try to put things in order so that I may, at least for a time, know where I am. Or I may feel I am at sea, and I take bearings so that I may come to port (any port in a storm), and then when I am on dry land I look for a house built on rock rather than on sand; and in my own home, which (as I am English) is my castle, I am in a seventh heaven.
Without straining the language of everyday use I may talk of my behaviour in the world of external (or shared) reality, or I may be having an inner or mystical experience, while squatting on the ground contemplating my navel.
It is perhaps a rather modern use of the word inner, to use it to refer to psychic reality, to claim that there is an inside where personal wealth builds up (or poverty shows) as we make progress in emotional growth and personality establishment.
Here are two places, then, the inside and the outside of the individual. But is this all?
When considering the lives of human beings there are those who like to think superficially in terms of behaviour, and in terms of conditioned reflexes and conditioning; this leads to what is called behaviour therapy. But most of us get tired of restricting ourselves to behaviour or to the observable extrovert life of persons who, whether they like it or not, are motivated from the unconscious. By contrast, there are those who place emphasis on the ‘inner’ life, who think that the effects of economics and even of starvation itself have but little importance as compared with mystical experience. Infinity for those in the latter category is at