What is inside....

I have always been intrigued by the inside outside Zen thing, since reading a short story by Hermann Hesse way back called 'Inside and outside'. This story is about 'a little idol that ruptures a friendship'. My memory of the story is that the idol is really ugly to the main character, but that the idol somehow gets a place in his heart so that when it goes missing he notices its absence. Of course my memory of this story could be incorrect after so many years. The Free Online Library says the story reveals Hermann Hesse's 'life's philosophy' that 'our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.' I think I will need to read this story again. What made the story stay in my mind was that I did not completely understand what Hesse was getting at when he said 'What is inside becomes outside, and what is outside becomes inside.' Since then I have again come across references to inside and outside, mainly as philosophical concepts. The novel/philosophical treatise Sophie's world for example talks about two possible views of the world - as a separate entity with everything seen as completely individual and unique, or as all the one entity that incorporates the viewer and the viewed. There is not necessarily a right or wrong view, just possibilities. Again, intriguing. But then philosophy is, and Zen philosophy is meant to get you thinking or meditating on the concepts or meaning behind imagery. You are not meant to understand them in the first instance.