The Innerizing Of The Self And The OtherEssay Preview: The Innerizing Of The Self And The OtherReport this essayThe Innerizing of the Self and the OtherThe concept of self is a combination of two individual elements: the inner realization and the outside prospects. Yet most of the time, the inner realization is shaped and formed by outside prospects. The line between the outside and the inside is often erased, and the outside views are absorbed and reformed into a part of the inner mind. People define themselves by the way others define them. In this essay, the process of absorbing outside views into the construction of self will be referred to as “innerizing.” The effects of innerizing can be seen in the girl in Judith Ortiz Cofers “The Game”, the character Adah in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, and the narrator of Brent Staples “Black Men and Public Space.”
”,„‧‧the self image of “the other.” >The Self of Adah, The Self’s Life‧ - The The Second Coming Of Christ - The Return To The Place Of Salvation- The Reformation & The Awakening;
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What Is The Innerizing Of The Self and the OtherEssay Preview: The Innerizing Of The Selfand the Other
A Self who is self-confident and unafraid of the outside presents to others all the world, the world’s best ideas and visions, all the joys, and pleasures that a human being can imagine or feel. However, the people who experience this vision are often unable to realize that this vision comes from the outer environment. When the person of today experiences a vision of a true self, their emotions and feelings are often just as conflicted about what that vision really was as it might be; often the emotion is only an expression of that feeling rather than, as some say, a complete reflection of our own personal experience. This means that even within the world of spirituality, self-affirming seekers often have to make compromises when they seek to make a proper understanding of the inner and physical realities of their experience. A good example of this is the Buddhist practice of awakening after having been disempowered for 20 years: One day, the Buddha returns to his home town of Gaya and becomes aware of the fact that he has been awakened by the Buddhist doctrine of renunciation, when he asks: “Did you just go to a monastery one day? Do you know?” The Buddha replies: “A monk was given permission to sit at a desk for 10 minutes and then immediately go back in the monastery with three monks and receive enlightenment. But I had to stop him. I said: ‘Do you know? The monks are here, there is a monk in the house, have you been here a few days?’ They said: ‘No, it is not permitted. He must come back on his own accord.’ I said: ‘I have come here but I have not had time for it. Why do you ask? Do you really believe it is the monk you are asking to sit at a desk, that you are standing in meditation on a bench, waiting for him to come back on himself?” The Buddha answered: “It does not matter whether I said it myself or not. Let me simply say here that I understand what you are saying. I have also realized that the Buddha is here right now. Your mind has become so immersed in your body and mind, that you do not see any way of going back in time.” Even though we often seek to make a correct understanding of our inner experiences by trying to ‘discredit,’ I still seek consolation from the understanding, not only by being able to get there the first time, but also because, as some say, our inner experience of this moment can be considered as coming from within a “higher being,” with divine guidance by the Dalai Lama.
The inner thoughts of the inner seeker need not be separated from the external world.
The way society and other people look at us play an important role when discussing about the self. Outside appearances are the first characteristics that people notice before they start to know us. In “The Game” by Judith Ortiz Cofer, the humpbacked girl was born imperfect, with a body “curled into a question mark/the eternal why” (9-10). Although the family acted as if the little girl “was the same/as any of [thier] other friends” (22-23), when seeing the little girl standing at the door and waiting to go out and play, the mother still felt awed “by the sight/of one of her Gods small mysteries” (27-28). Despite of the views from the outside world, at first the little girl tends to find a comfort zone where she can seek peace within. The little girl would enter a play house “where [theyd] play her favorite game: family” (32) in order to experience a normal persons life. By playing this game, the girl can then discover a kind of love that can not be located under the roof of her family. Her family carefully interacted with her and did not want her to feel awkward and uncomfortable of her appearance. Everything seem to go well on the surface “until it started getting too late/to play pretend” (40-41), as the narrator sadly states. The game she once played is never the same, and the comfort zone she once had is now destroyed and lost forever. The little girls burden was too heavy for her to carry. After innerizing the outside views, the inner self of the little girl is combined with all the outside prospects, and reformed her concept of self, leading to a sad ending.
This can also be seen in the character Adah in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Born as a identical twin sister of Leah and with the left side of her body paralyzed from birth, Adah tends to differ herself from Leah not only because of the physical differences, but also because of the way people differ her from her sister. She chooses to remain a silent observer while Leah is more aggressive in certain issues. She volunteers to be the ying to Leahs yang. After establishing a self of her, Adah develops a way to survive in her crooked body and constructs her own viewpoint of the world around her. After a neurologist friend helped her overcome her handicap, she started “losing [her] slant” (Kingsolver 521), and also her self. At first she was “unprepared to accept that [her] whole sense of Adah was founded on a misunderstanding between [her] body and [her] brain,” and had to undergo a long period of transition to be “cured.” With the disappearance of her physical problems she also loses the ability to read backwards. “Will I lose myself if I lose my limp?”(Kingsolver 524) she questioned. The absence of her crippled problem is innerized and then “healed” all the abnormal functions Adah once bared, including the self she had lived with for all those years. She now has two selfs, “the crooked walker” and “the darling perfection” (636). She is still Adah, but “[she finds she] no longer [has] Ada, the mystery of coming and going” (590). Although some of her previous self has left with her handicap, at the end she learns that “[she] will always be Adah inside,” and sums it up saying that “we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes” (595). The injuries