Real self is undeniably powerful

   Bald eagles, I just heard, can read a newspaper at 100 yards away. That's something. I didn't even know they could read at all.

   There may be some things we don't know about ourselves, too.

   The oracle at Adelphi in ancient Greece said, "Know thyself." As if we needed a formal introduction.

   They say you get to "know yourself" during actions which require courage, or when you undergo big life changes or struggles. Before that, you may have been just kind of gliding along.

   At the Look-Alike Contest at the San Miguel Fiesta last week, all kinds of people showed up: Johnny Cash, Tina Turner and, of course, Elvis, who never misses these things. They even had a guy who wanted to impersonate the Grand Canyon, but I don't think he made the cut.

   Maybe we've all got a look-alike hiding somewhere down there underneath our skin. We're Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and we pull out one or the other, depending on the occasion. It's like the birthday card my brother sent me last year. It read, "Your birthday takes me back to those awful days when I used to beat up on you and flush your clothes down the toilet ... I miss that."

   That other self was trying to make a comeback, like the Australian who invented a new kind of boomerang, and then went crazy trying to throw the old one away.

   Sometimes we have the feeling we are two different people entirely, or maybe that we live on two different levels. We are what Paul Tournier calls the "personage," or the public and visible side of our selves. And then there's our true self, which we are sometimes able to sense within our "heart" -- the symbol used by some writers as the focus or inner core of our selves, where we experience true freedom and the reality beyond us.

   Whew! Well, back to earth, I've got a skunk in my back yard, which is trying to get close and personal with me. I think it has a crush on me, but I'll have none of it. Maybe I have a public "personage" akin to its own. But I'm letting it know that's not my true self.

   Anyway, that true, inner self of ours can't be lassoed by some quick and fancy method, and neither is it a little compartment of our being. It's really a spontaneity and a process of continual growth. It's the total me, not the fragmented one which I habitually haul out. It's not a thing, and psychologist Carl Rogers said it is positive and healthy, no matter what. The early Greek Christian hermits called it the inner God image, which can never be destroyed. It's our untapped psychic energy and the truest dimension of our being.

   So there, big brother, your Mr. Hyde can go lay an egg. And that skunk in my back yard can take its stink somewhere else. We're looking for the true Elvis and the new boomerang. We're like bald eagles who can read, and we're more than can be seen from the outside. We're bursts of energy, and we can't be destroyed.

   And no moon landings, Jupiter circling, nanoscopic, DNA code discovery; no esoteric, record breaking, outer galactic, mammoth crushing feat we might achieve can match in fractions what we reach by taking just that step of knowing/being our true and genuine self.

   When we live by our true potential, we're quite a work of art.

   Tom Kozeny works for Socorro Mental Health. His views are not necessarily those of his employers or El Defensor Chieftain.