The internal path is about understanding the self, the external path is about understanding life, the universe and everything.
When I was in my teens I read the book "extraterrestrial civilization" by Stefan Denaerde. a Dutch writer who claimed to have met beings from the planet Iarga.
These Iargans are not that different from us. They are not much more advanced than us either. Yet, they have created a paradise world for themselves by simply structuring their society and economy in a certain way(resource based)
From my mother's recollections of her own childhood, back in those days everyone was kind and helpful and you could easily just leave your front door open, perfectly safe.
This led me to believe, for many decades, that human behaviour could readily be changed simply through environment. Of course, I also had no clue about all the manipulations that are ongoing in our world.
Next, for a very long time I fell very much asleep not doing anything much at all with spirituality.
This changed when I finally, around 2012 started my esoteric path with the work of Gurdjieff. Humans have almost no free will, he said, Unless we discover our programming we are nothing but automatons. This would point at the internal path to be the dominant one. Its your own mind that keeps you enslaved until as Jung would say "until we make the subconscious conscious it will rule our lives and we will call it fate"
In 2014 my twin flame Annie turned up and massively accelerated my transformation. She also brought with her a deep and thorough knowledge of the true nature of the world we live in, something I hitherto did not have a clue at all.
How has this been for you all? How are these paths related? Which one did you encounter first? Would you say that pursuing one automatically leads to the other, or is that not a given?