Identity Lecture Four

The Goodwill Show

Have you ever heard of the phrase, "Show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are"? This is a presupposition that claims that the individuals that you actively engage with personally can be used as framework or even as evidence to reflect on your own character. How true is this? That separate individuals who have decision systems in isolation can be used to represent one another. This means that if you have ever heard a person saying that their child has bad friends what they really meant was, that their child was the bad one, amongst the friends. If that is true then imagine how many people were called bad and have had to live with the stigma that were of bad influence to others. Maybe what the elderly were trying to do was to separate a group that had potential in the wrong direction, they wanted to divide and conquer. There is a story I read from the Alchemists of a person who knelt daily besides a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that,one morning he fell into the lake and drowned. The goddesses of the forest appeared and found the lake which had been fresh water transformed into a lake of salty tears. The goddesses asked the lake why it weeped and it replied that it weeped for Narcissus. The goddesses said, "It is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus, for you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand" the lake asked the goddesses if Narcissus was actually beautiful. The goddesses replied in shock, "Who better than you to know that?" After all they said, " It was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!" The lake was silent for sometime. Finally it said: "I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that he was beautiful, I weep because each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected." Now I couldn't help but to acknowledge the beauty that is in this principle, where you are with people in your life that see the greatness in themselves in you, as you see yours in them.