Does this kind of internal argument have effects on the outside world and on the enemy? Well, perhaps not directly, but indirectly it certainly does. After one of these arguments we may well be in a bad mood, and take it out on “innocent people,” like our friends and family.
And of course if we meet our enemy then we’ll almost certainly have a worse relationship with him or her because of the ill will we’ve generated. To some extent, the enemy can be another one of those “innocent people.” This person has been away minding his or her own business, and then we inflict the negative mental states – that we have generated in an argument with ourselves – on them.
So what can we learn from this? We could learn just the simple fact of this dynamic, that we cultivate emotions internally and then those have an effect on the outside world. But a somewhat more profound reflection is to begin questioning the very nature of the distinction between our inner and outer worlds. What happens inside us affects our perceptions of the outside world and of the people in it. We might, for example have gotten into a bad mood through our internal argument, and in that bad mood assume that everyone is out to make our lives difficult (it’s childish, I know, but that’s how we act a lot of the time). And as I’ve pointed out, our inner argument directly affects how we perceive our enemy – perhaps it even creates the very perception of having an enemy – and then affects how we relate to them.
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