Who Do You Think You Are?
Conflicted feelings of personal identity seem to be part of the human condition. This conflict is a recurring theme in one of my favorite movies, The Wrestler. In this movie, Mickey Rourke plays 'Randy the Ram' an aging, down on his luck wrestler whose sense of self-worth derives only from the faded glory of his professional persona even though its taking a terrible toll on his aging body. In the opening scene, as he walks through the arena after a wrestling match in his grungy nylon jacket, his battered wheeled suitcase creaking behind him, he stops to sign an autograph for a fan. The expression on the young fan's face conveys his shocked disillusionment that his hero is just a beaten down 'has been' - how Rourke's character appears on the outer level.
Rourke becomes romantically involved with a stripper played by Marissa Tomei, who is equally torn between her personal and professional identity. At night she's 'Cassidy' a lap dancer in a seedy strip club. By day she's Pam, an upscale single mom living in a luxury apartment building. Pam/Cassidy is drawn to The Ram by the qualities she senses in him on inner levels, his good heart, decency and vulnerability. But fearing involvement, she abruptly ends things by coldly relating to him as a customer, and not the man she's falling for. Hurt and humiliated, the next time they meet he retaliates by objectifying her and relating to her as a paid sex worker - not the individual person she is.
In a larger collective sense, the psychologist Carl Jung wrote "We will never know what we truly are until we see ourselves reflected in an eye other than human." By that he meant through the eyes of another species with our level of intelligence and conscious awareness. But what if, when we met such an alien species, they turned out not to be little green men (and women), but looked just like us..? What if their mother planet had animals, fish, birds, trees, etc., just like the ones who live with us here on Earth..?
Suppose these aliens only differed from us on inner levels? What if they really believed in a One Divine Source of All, so any religious conflict was incomprehensible to them? What if instead of separating out into sub-groups, they identified primarily as just one species among many - so warfare among sub-groups of their kind was something they couldn't even imagine? Suppose on their planet, rather than regarding the animals, fish, birds, trees, etc,, as commodities to be used and exploited at will, they believed their purpose as a species was to love, honor, respect, protect and be of service to the whole web of creation on their world - and beyond..? How would we see ourselves reflected in their eyes? No doubt we'd feel inferior and less evolved.
But maybe they would also inspire us, and model for us a new, grander possibility of who we could be - if we worked to make it happen.