Is it normal to live an interior life that is vastly different from the exterior life presented to the world on a daily basis? Is it possible that the mom of the two children named Clifton and Ashton is in fact a rock star punk mom, one who does not see herself as a mother so much as as a rebel who also happens, by circumstance, to be a mother? Is it possible that more people are more like this, telling themselves, that is, who they are separately from who it is they are, than not? If that's the case, how are we to reliably find predictable behaviors or modes of conversation with common roots, without sort of "outing" people's inner identity?
Or maybe that's the ploy. Maybe we should appeal to everyone as if they are duplicitous in self, and see what they tell us when we recognize their true selves?
And I wonder how long the true self goes on? Is the retired high school science teacher really a Bodhisattva?
We play with secret identities all the time. Don't we?
Or are there a cadre of people out there who are uniquely concurrently themselves both internally and externally? If the exist, do they know they exist? If they know they exist, do they know that the other ones, the discordant ones, also exist? If so, do they feel superior? If not, why not? Or is it always the discordant ones who feel superior?
It is strange to think that two people might interact, over the purchase of coffee lets say, and find themselves signaling information about their internally viewed selves (and the internally viewed self's superiority) at the same time, information which may not even land perceptibly on the brain it was intended to land on. And that's even more frightening, because it means that we--the discordant ones at least--are appealing to a group who either doesn't get us, or that we purposefully keep our appeals shrouded so much so as to become illogically non-communicative.
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