Guilt is for what you did.
Shame is for what you are, or what some discovery has ‘revealed’ you to be. Shame can seem ineradicable, like some base line of identity.
in yo’ bones.
Darlene Lancer bought out a new Utube video on shame and co-dependent relations.
http://www.whatiscodependency.com/
She draws our attention to what a wrecker shame is in relationships.
Shame is generally about failing, being-a-failure.
But life is full of failing.
Actually,
” If youre not failing you’re not trying.” Chris Bonnington.
The impulse to grow and change impels us into situations which are difficult by necessity. There has to be a chance of not making it for it to be worth striving for in the first place.
So, as well as being, ‘thrust into multiplicity,’ (Hillman) we can fold in the face of it and be thrown back.
And people’s lives in respect of their private endevours are full of failing..
-or ought to be –
let alone their lives together.
And if we can’t fail without excessive shaming of ourselves, or allowing ourselves to be shamed by others, then we are unlikely to try very hard in the first place.
Don’t try, can’t fail, no shaming.
Of course, there is also the teensy issue that the whole of Western Civilisation has as its cornerstone a story of shame and being cast out. Right from the start, ‘Thou Shalt not Fail’.
or be conscious..
Our dominant culture is rooted in shame. And so we can’t learn how to fail, or find the value of confusion, the magic of not-knowing, or of having to.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”. T.A. Edison
Many of our more philosophical enquires are likewise rooted in shame-avoidance and fear of failing. Even the question, ‘what is the meaning of life?’ is itself run through with the assumption that whatever it is, it is something I have to grasp or attain.
Something to be understood by the mind,
a quest which must fail…
With the erosion of the divine feminine from the collective imagination we must, perforce, sacrifice the Principle of Relatedness as part of the deal. This means that compassion for and accepting the inevitability of failure, something a mother might convey to her child with a simple look, becomes increasingly lost to us.
We have to know who we are, where we are going and have all kinds of definite beliefs.
To demonstrate our maturity.
And no-where, in any of that, is their any reference to Mystery.
Unless its to surmount it…
No encounter with the Ground-of-Being.
And loss of the internal relatedness wherein I might get to coach me…..
……as me crashes and burns.
There’s a couple of square miles in the Chiltern hills I know so well that I can walk around them for hours at night without a light. Badgers don’t like torches.
Sometimes I do get lost. But I learned from my feet that the part of me which felt lost and didn’t like it, wasn’t as big as the part of me that was lost and didn’t mind, that was ok with pressing on regardless, perhaps in the faith that some landmark would eventually emerge from the dark.
Failing to know where I was from one moment to the next became less important than the encounter with forest. And because I was ok with being lost I was never lost for long.
You might say that there has had to be this sacrifice of belonging, once intrinsic to our ancient polytheistic selves, in order for consciousness to evolve, but in fact what it seems to have given rise to is co-dependency rather than individuality. To individualism, a cult of persona, rather than actually standing apart from the crowd.
On your own two feet.
What divine kingship knows, whispered perhaps down the backstairs of Yahweh’s Chambers to those early kings; epoch spawning kings… Jacob, David and ‘ol Neb’…..
way back….
is that its greatest strength lay not in the fealty of the people but their being seductively offered the path of least resistance, having to acheive nothing provided they are loyal….
ashamed of failing and therefore easily led…
If we can’t fail we can’t learn, and wind up with ‘a cult of ignorance.’ Isaac Asimov…
We lose the capacity to compromise and therefor must come adrift in our relationships.
If the psyche is self balancing then you wonder, what the deal could possibly be for the ordinary, cheering person, who will likely be shamefully squeezed in perpetuity by the very monarch he’s praising, or sent to die in wars that having nothing to do with the fighting men involved.
Could it be that this era of divinely appointed monarchs, supposedly a necessary adjunct to the evolution of consciousness, is simply the collective implimentation of Yahweh’s original promise to us all of an easy life – by acting out the coniunctio, the sacred marriage, and doing it ‘on behalf of the people’… so that the people don’t have to do it for themselves. Which is why they cheer so loud…
an’ take so much shit.
The shame is worth not having to do anything about it.