produced a brief surge of terror in me–what if they were right? Realizing after a few moments that my great fear was the result of my having been abusively conditioned as a child by such frightening stories, my terror quickly converted to rage. Now paying more attention to my inner authority, I managed to suppress expression of both of these strong emotions and to continue with a fairly interesting dialogue with my jurors, and even got invited to offer a closing prayer when the trial came to an end. The most powerful experience of my inner authority came after I walked out of the church. When I got to the parking lot, and was quite separate from those who represented external authority of the church, I spontaneous and exuberantly began to leap into the air and shout for joy.
A more interesting question about internal versus external authority comes up when there are major philosophical or moral questions in need of answers. Questions about the purpose of one’s life, the ultimate nature of reality, or what is intrinsically moral in response to a given situation, are examples of such questions. These are the types of questions that come up repeatedly during the course of one’s life, and one is therefore well advised to have some ongoing way of introspecting deeply enough to be able to find answers as they are needed.
As example of the need for such answers was presented a few years ago by the publication of the book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Goldhagen, 1996). It told of the thousands of German citizens, seemingly normal and decent human beings, who willingly went along with one of the most ghastly examples of genocide the world has seen. It is interesting to speculate about the response of a