What Am I? Social Work and Spirituality Week 2 Journal

Spirituality and Social Work: Week 2 Journal

This week we watched Avatar. It is certainly a fair question to ask why, even though it is somewhat obvious that there is something spiritual going on in the movie. I’ve heard Avatar being compared to Dancing With Wolves with aliens and better visuals. That’s a fair comparison. That comparison has also been used as means of criticism for the movie. I believe that is completely unfair.

To begin with, it is important to make sure that every generation of kids has access to sort of story. Let’s be honest, the genocide committed against Native Americans is not portrayed properly in the American school system. It might be easier for our culture to teach about this subject through fiction where it is not so obvious whose hands are bloody. Secondly, the fantastic nature of the story allows the audience to be drawn into some complex philosophical issues without feeling that they are.

The audience is able to consider deep messages of identity as it moves along with Jake, Avatar’s main charector. This entire movie is about the creation and maintence of identity. It explores the spiritual implication of what it means to be a thinking being. Are we our body, are we our mind, or are we both.? Actually, it would be fair to simply ask, what are we? After watching the movie it would be easy to say that we are our mind. After all Jake continues to live even after his human body dies, but I am not so sure. If that is the conclusion we come to, I think we miss the deeper soiritual implications of the story. The Jake that survives at the end is mentally not the same Jake that began. It’s easy to notice that his body has changed, it is very difficult to realize that Jake is a completely different person is his mind. Jake has not changed his mind, he has had his mind changed. His journey is to reflect on his beliefs about self an other, a familiar psychological concept for social workers. He was able to cross over the divide between self and other as evidenced by his acceptence into the tribe.

I was in a philosophy class during my undergraduate years. We discussed the nature of identity quite a bit. The teacher posed a question; what would it mean if you body and mind were cloned perfectly, which clone would be you? I raised my hand and said “They would both be me, right up untill the point where they are experincing different perspectives.” I felt like I was on to something, the teacher shot by down without even thinking about what I was saying. I believe he did so because, deep down in his soul, he could not bear to think that there is no REAL “him” or “me”. That was my intuitve leap that day, as scary as it was, there is no REAL me, I am always changing. And yet, because I am always changing, itis diffuclt to pinpoint exactly what that “I” is. My answer to the question was in the right direction, but not exactly right. Today I would say, “Before you have figure out which one is you, you have to prove there is a REAL, unchanging you, that is seperate in some way.”.

That is the basic point, the one that Na’vi were  trying to empart on Jake throughout the movie. We are more than a lonely individual. We are always connected to the universe around us. That connection implies that any conception of the individual is a delusion if it separates the self from the other. The Na’vi’s respect for the unending cycle of life was clear in the movie. As Jake started realizing what they meant, that sense of self that he had maintained for his whole life split apart.

When we come back from distant planets and universes, we are confronted with the ugly truth that our solid sense of sense is the backbone of our ability to commit atrocities on others. Before one can go into the complicated drama of human culture, there must be recognition that all war is started because someone has to say “I am different than you.” The reasons don’t matter, the moment someone believes they are fundamentally different from another the possibility emerges that they  are superior to that other. From this position, we find the rationale to kill the “savage” Native American’s in real life and the Na’vi in fiction.

In reality, the conclusion that anything is far removed from a human being is naive. It is a failing of our imagination, and the ability to have honest internal dialogue. It is easy to label something that is not understood, that is just fear. It is hard to go deep and see the innumerable way that beings have more in common than they have differences. Trivial differences like language, skin color, religion, history and beliefs are not enough to erase the fact that we are all virtually genetically identical, have the same emotional spectrum, and dependent on the resources of the environment in the same way. There is no way to say that I am born of this universe and you are not. That is just delusion. Eventually when you go back far enough we are all born of the same star. Jake crossed his conditioning, humans have yet to accomplish this feat.