Reading Genesis Three, I’m struck by the metaphorical implications of this passage. Adam and Eve, having eaten the “fruit,” know good from evil and have a sort of wisdom because of it. God punishes them certainly. But it seems like they got a really sweet deal out of it at the end of the day.  Living in the garden, Adam and Eve are perfectly enlightened beings, wanting nothing and frolicking about as children. But they know nothing of their enlightenment, immortality, or why they are there in the first place. It seems to me they reside there because, honestly, they suck at the whole living thing. Take other animals in creation, for example. Carnivores, with their long teeth, sharp claws, and a fine-tuned sense of smell, are adept at killing. Herbivores are remarkable empaths that react to their environment before they can blink. Birds can fly, fish, reptiles, and amphibians can outswim us, and even though Usain Bolt can clock upwards of 30 mph, that’s still not enough to outrun most quadrupeds. So, humans suck. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. In fact, the only competitive advantage humans seem to have is the ability to be ashamed. Yes, bigger brains and all that. But what do these brains do? The fruit Adam and Eve took bites from is the knowledge of rationality, good and bad, empathy and shame. Without it, they would still be playing hopscotch in the mud until a Lion found them and decided this whole vegetarian magic garden lifestyle needed some updating.  There are many hypotheses for how rationality evolved or why, and they are all true to some degree. We know for sure that the advent of the pre-frontal cortex (which makes humans “human”) allowed for community. Greater mutual understanding and boundaries of what makes right or wrong allowed for larger groups of individuals to come together as one.  Sure, God punished Adam and Eve for this knowledge. Women would forever be in pain during childbirth, and all individuals, due to their inferiority at everything else, must toil in the fields and crawl on the ground eating dust. But despite those disadvantages, Adam and Eve had rationality and empathy. Further, they had shame, and shame is the bedrock of any society containing more than one person.  This is where I should be ashamed of proclaiming shame as some sort of golden principle. And while I’m not advocating for more shame in a very shamefully shame-filled world, I believe it’s essential to understand why shame exists and the function of necessary shame, which I will refer to as guilt.    The Power of Shame Shame sucks, really bad. In a society that glorifies humiliation and martyrdom, it seems that even if we don’t feel shame, that’s something to be ashamed about. And yet, there’s a purpose there. If shame didn’t exist and we could live without consequences, then it’s doubtful the world would be a better place. I imagine a tragedy of the commons, everyone living for the sake of living and ignoring the results of their actions.  At the same time, promoting shame to the proportions of the Spanish Inquisition runs into the same, if converse, issues. If we become ashamed of everything we do and live in constant fear, we will never have independent thought or action: our lives will be enslaved to shame.  Which takes us to necessary shame or guilt. You see, shame isn’t good or bad. It’s a reaction to the world around us. In some cases, these reactions are sound and reasonable. In most cases, we’re figuring out how to judge our perceived feelings of what’s happening. But the shame is not the action and does not color it black or white. The shame is a reaction. For this reason, we can experience complex emotions like meta-shame, where we feel shame for feeling shame for feeling shame until we’re ashamed that we don’t know why we’re ashamed.  It’s this reaction phase or feeling emotion in response to other emotions that also allows for complex rationality and empathy among humans. These meta-emotions that enable us to evaluate actions also allowed us to form complex and massively frustrating societies where we can use tools like shame to manipulate people into getting along with one another.  Again, I should clarify, shame in itself is not good or bad. It is a way to reflect and evaluate our actions. However, as a tool, shame used to manipulate and coerce others definitely is terrible and irresponsible. It’s taking the natural feeling of guilt and using it to influence, rather than improve, individual or group actions.  To use the admittedly overused cave-people example, imagine a hunter-gatherer tribe roaming the earth that is thirty strong and very efficient at securing food and staying protected. Berber, an eccentric youth with a fiery attitude, decides that since he’s pretty good at hunting, brighter and more attractive than his tribemates and begins to take a cut off the top of the meat earnings that quarter, just a few pork chops and maybe some sweetmeats. Over time he does less and less work and skims more and more.  Eventually, the tribe finds out and confronts Berber, telling him that he’s no longer part of the group and must fend for himself. He’s become ostracized from the group. He is filled with guilt. The guilt itself sucks, but it is the appropriate genetic response for taking advantage of the group. It would have changed who he was for the better, really, but without a tribe, he didn’t last long wandering into a saber-tooth tiger den.  That is the primary function of guilt: to keep us from doing anything that would ostracize us from the group or isolate us. If 2020 was an indication of anything, it’s that we can’t be isolated. Isolation sucks. Shame is the genesis of isolation.  The problem is that it is 2021, not 202,000 years ago. While our genetic makeup has remained mostly the same, our society and the rules for inclusion have changed drastically.  Augustine Evens with Adam and Eve This brings us back to Adam and Eve. Personally, I believe the story of Adam and Eve is a powerful indicator of what happens to “enemies” or those who don’t belong. If you break the utopian garden’s arbitrary rules, you’re forced to live in exile and hardship.  But St. Augustine, a notable Christian philosopher in the fourth century, took it a bit further. For him, the shame of Adam and Eve actually happened and literally set the scene for the rest of us. Original Sin went from being “the sin which kicks me from the group” to “the sin which ultimately and finally kicked all of us from the group.” Whether or not we were included no longer mattered. What was important was that we are ultimately fucked up beyond repair, and there’s nothing to be done except experience shame or pronounce blame.  You see, Augustine wasn’t just a Philosopher Theologian Saint guy. He was also a regular old standard human. Like the rest of us, he had basic and routine thoughts of fluids and butts and skin. All kinds of naked flesh thoughts. But the problem was that Theologian Philosopher Saint guys are supposed to wear glasses and know how to fix computers. They’re not supposed to think about sex! He had the fundamental issue of having an idea of who he was that conflicted with who he actually was. This issue is called shame.  Whether we like it or not, when thoughts about who we see ourselves as conflict with the reality of ourselves, we use shame to hide the fact. Guilt also occurs with this dissonance. However, with guilt, there’s a basic acknowledgment in the schism and an effort to mend that schism. When we feel shame, and all of us do, we are refusing to restore this fundamental dissonance in an attempt to pass the shame to someone else.  The dissonance itself is based in isolation. We have an idea of who we are within the group, and we have the reality of who we authentically are. In our desire to stay included, we reinforce concepts of ourselves that will improve our relations with the community. It’s a natural process that we all do, if nothing else, to survive. However, when this projection of our group-self conflicts with reality, shame at not meeting up to our projections creeps in.  For example, in the Garden of Eden, Adam, after all his mansplaining to Eve about what vegetation is safe to eat, consumes the sacred fruit. He sees himself as someone who follows the rules even though he isn’t, blaming Eve. In the same situation, she cannot reconcile who she believes she is with her actions and passes the blame to the Snake. The poor Snake, living ouroboros, knows who it is and is punished for it. The fact that the Snake is not ashamed of something it owned up to somehow makes it Satan or something.    The Three Sides of Shame Shame is not a static process. While it is not good or bad in itself, it still involves relationships between people acting out various archetypes. By archetypes, I mean every individual is not a static entity or identity. We are all constantly changing and evolving and going through multiple personas, sometimes called archetypes. I love mythology and religious symbolism because the gods, heroes, and saints we know of are themselves archetypes of our own potential.  Jean Bolen does an excellent job of categorizing these archetypes in Gods in Everyman and Goddesses in Everywoman, where she identifies common personality types with the greek pantheon. The alpha-masculine dominant type is Zeus, the seductive and demure type is Aphrodite, the reclusive and artistic type is Hades, etc. What’s terrific about her analysis is that she doesn’t point to static types for any individual. These are all potentials that all individuals of any gender can experience.  We are not any of the archetypes. We are not even solely dependent on masculine or feminine archetypes. They are all aspects of the whole which we can be. However, while archetypes are a fantastic tool for understanding the potentials of the self, it doesn’t change the fact that all of us tend to identify with one view of ourselves over another.  Ultimately, the goal of understanding these archetypes is to untangle ourselves with identifying as them and living through them to reach our highest potential as whole and complete beings, which leads us to shame.  Shame is not an archetype or heroic character. It is a relationship between them. Within shame, three archetypes hold an interdependent relationship with each other. Each requires the other so that all three can dance together unashamedly. A bit of an alliterative tongue-twister, they are victim, that which is being wronged, villain, that which is wronging, and victor, that which is conquering the villain and saving the victim.  I want to stress that there is nothing wrong with any of these roles, and in our lives, we play out each role some time or another. We likely have a particular role we lean into and enjoy. The distinction here is identifying with these roles rather than playing them out. If we believe we are any archetype or part, then we allow those roles to have power over us, and our sense of who we are becomes distorted, creating a schism with reality that leads to shame.  Shame originates in ostracization from the group and has manifested in the feelings of not being worthy enough, good enough, not enough, or complete. The incomplete parts of ourselves have power over us, which control us because we believe they are us. When we identify with the roles we play, we give up our autonomy and become incomplete, filled with shame that we are not enough.  How do the Three Sides of Shame Play Out in Our Lives? The relationship between victim, victor, and villain is a pyramid of domination. If we act out each role as part of a hero’s journey, this hierarchy is quite natural and expressive of the sinusoidal trajectory of our lives. However, when we associate with one archetype over others, we limit ourselves and our ability to be definitive as a whole individual.  The inclination to associate with one of three archetypes is rooted in duality. Like most dual notions, they are effective as far as they go and disruptive when taken further. Like language, the dualistic idea of good and bad people helps us to understand the world. Additionally, when leading a political entity such as a nation or church, these notions allow people to take over villages, cities, or even whole countries by uniting those people against a common enemy.  There is no actual victor, villain, or victim. These are archetypes we play out in our lives. Subscribing to the ideas that there’s something to save, or that we need to be saved, or someone to defeat are all problematic ways of perpetuating duality. In the same way that one victor sees another as the enemy, that same enemy sees themselves as the victor. It is not the identity of the forces in question that perpetuate disintegration, rather the friction that arises from polarized duality.  The reality is not that we are one thing or the other, but that we cycle through various archetypes on the journey to finding the self.  Accounting for Shame: Respect and Consent So how do we deal with this identification process? Because it is a pretty natural process that has helped us survive in more dangerous times and could be limiting us now. The answer is through respect and consent.  For example, I like to think of myself as a prolific writer, but I’m not. I constantly procrastinate because the thought of writing all this profoundly personal stuff is horrifying, and I’d instead read articles about how UK warships are playing chicken with Russia than confront the most authentic parts of myself. The dissonance of me seeing myself as a writer and not writing makes me ashamed. I’m not worthy of writing. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I should be writing. I’m supposed to. And it’s precisely the thoughts of inadequacy and believing that I’m a victim of writer’s block or amateurism that allows me to continue doing so and let my feelings of shame find further distractions for occupying my time. However, if I accept that I procrastinate, if I acknowledge that I am not inadequate, but sometimes I play the role of inadequacy, that I can come to terms with these crippling feelings and allow them not to control me so much. It doesn’t make writing any more straightforward. But being vulnerable and accepting what I have to say, even if it’s dumb and selfish and makes me look bad, at least allows me to write and helps me to disidentify with the belief that I am unworthy and inadequate.  And it’s essential to note that the unpleasant feelings are still there and still really powerful. The shame has become guilt. Still unpleasant, still a thorn in my side, but where shame is the motivator to continue the behaviors that caused shame, guilt is the motivator to end those behaviors.  So What is the Difference Between Shame and Guilt? Shame and guilt both have negative connotations and are often confused with one another. In our context, though, neither is wrong, and both have very different motivations. Shame is the negative experience of feeling incomplete or left out of the whole. It involves identifying with the archetype of victim and believe that one is, like the victim, somehow inferior. To relinquish the feelings of inferiority which for anyone are unbearable, we pass those feelings onto something or someone else. Because the shame-blame game does not account for an individual’s feelings but passes them on, the root motivation for feeling shame is only shared.  Alternatively, guilt, while still very uncomfortable, motivates us towards growth and acceptance. Guilt involves taking responsibility for our actions and perceived sense of self and reconciling these with who we want to be. It recognizes that we are not what we identify with. Instead, we are infinite and capable of being whoever we choose to be, as long as we take responsibility for that becoming.  Where shame makes us avoid relationships, vulnerability, and community because of the associated depression, anxiety, and self-destruction, guilt motivates us towards integration. In both cases, an extremely negative feeling arises, and in both cases, something is shared. However, the divisiveness we share in passing shame is very different from the community that arises from accepting responsibility for our guilt.    What are the Steps We Can Take to Address Shame? So what the heck do we do about shame? Talking about it does not make it go away or feel any better. Instead, we need tools to recognize and account for shame and understand that the root motivation for it is that we are somehow incomplete and can be empirically measured in any given moment. This is not the same as saying that the belief we are incomplete is wrong or less than the belief we are complete. Rather, instead of wondering whether or not we are, we can test for ourselves the validity of that Truth right now.  The most powerful way of doing this is simple awareness. Simple and excruciatingly challenging to accomplish. When feelings arise, allow yourself to experience all of them. All, the uncomfortable ones too. There is no such thing as positive or negative emotions, simply the feelings that arise. These feelings are trying to communicate with us, to be accepted and known for what they are.  Your shadow may be murky and unknown. It may be ugly and unpleasant. But your shadow is not something you can put in your closet and forget about. It is a part of you. Knowing your shadow, understanding it, and accepting it will allow you to integrate that part of you into the whole.  Another way we can shape our understanding and action of shame is by addressing the language itself. Language is a powerful tool for helping us understand and interpret the world. So powerful and ubiquitous is language that we often take for granted the influence it plays on our lives.  Language is a human construct that, while helping us understand the world by labeling, in the same stroke determines a binary good or bad association of who a person, or even thoughts, feelings, and objects, are. Taken too far, this tool takes away our ability to see people as human and the contexts that put humans in the situations they are judged for. All behavior requires context to understand, the gray between black and white.  How Does Shame Play into Separateness? But, and this is very important, what about actual victims of abuse or trauma who have gone through horrific things some of us can’t even imagine? These actions are unacceptable and deeply harmful, but these actions do not make us who we are. If we identify with being a victim, we will perpetuate that victimhood. If we see ourselves as broken, we will share that brokenness. Identifying as any archetype perpetuates isolation, separateness, and ultimately suffering.  It’s easy to identify with these archetypes, which inevitably further the destructive shame-blame game because we get pleasure from being the victor or the villain. Sometimes it’s difficult to realize we were victims of others’ abuse, and it’s not our fault. That realization can be tremendously empowering.  However, there can come the point where that shame-reducing realization can reverse itself into a shame-producing disempowering identification with victimhood. This occurs because identifying with either the victor or victim are ways to avoid the shame of being a villain. But the villain is just as essential to this process as the victor or victim. Without a villain, how can a victim be wronged? Without a villain, what is there for the victor to save? Who is there to point the finger of justice and get the high of not being a victim? Because we believe that doing something wrong makes someone inherently a bad person, we threaten our worthiness of love and the desperate need to be loved. So we repress and deny anything that can mark us as evil, fearing that we will become outcasts by the tribe. This whole process is accomplished through separateness and labels by identifying with the impermanent.    There is No Shame in This Moment The Permanent, the Infinite, the Absolute is all there is. Labels, duality, and separateness are where all the shame comes back to. Mind separate from the body, God different from self, good independent from evil.  This duality and the shame it perpetuates is why any meaningful reformation of Christianity must be non-dual. A reformation that is built on a fundamental Yes to this moment, rather than an absolute no.  When we say no to this moment, we experience a world divided up by fear or shame. We build identities on that which hurts us the most: being alone, separate, and ashamed. The dualistic cycle of shame and identification is why wars are fought, how patriarchy constructs itself, the practices of systemic racism, white fragility, bigotry, and scapegoating. All of it depends on the fuel that comes from the self-perpetuating cycle of dualistic shame. The only way to break this cycle is with Yes.  When non-dual concepts like the notion that we are all one and not at all separate are pushed upon those with trauma in an attempt to heal them or get them away from this moment of pain and skip the messy feelings may speed up the process of recovery. But in reality, these practices do more to perpetuate victim-blaming and spiritual bypassing. Shame hurts. Shame really sucks.  When we don’t engage in this moment and feel our most authentic pain (and truest self), we create a spiritual netherworld that, as a notion, is better than this moment. Because it allows us to escape some of the necessary pain of vulnerability and acceptance, it feels better than saying Yes right now. Now may be being in the thick of blame and shame. If that’s what’s happening right now, then that’s what is. The only way to deal with it is to lean in and accept.  The thing about emotions is they’re fickle. They move like quicksilver, and we have to accept them and allow them to move and breathe so they can be a part of us, not something that controls us.  Whether it’s through therapy, plant-based medicine, spiritual practices, better language tools, or any other valuable method, no practice is outside of right now, this moment. We hope you find the right tools for you. But the truth is you don’t need any tools. What you’re looking for is within you. You are already whole and complete in this moment. You already are who you are. What else could you be in this moment? You are entirely whole in this moment. The only thing missing is an imaginary moment in your mind where something could be different. How could this moment be more perfect than it already is? To answer that question, just imagine. Imagine for a moment, or at the least pretend, that you found out right now that every single thing you’ve done in your life, every word, thought, triumph, and mistake, were completely necessary for there to be harmony in the universe. Imagine if every action you took is and always was already perfect. That is right now, this moment. Say Yes, and accept.