Protecting the Mind
We're used to think of shame as something bad, an embarrassment feeling. However, it has a double meaning and Saint john Paul II explores this in his Theology of the Body. Lust, the desire to grasp, possess and use the other for our own sensitive purposes have led us to loose sight of the original meaning of our nakedness: total gift of ourselves to the other. Shame enters our psychic world as an alert feeling when Man let's lust enter his "heart". Lust violates our dignity, thus, covering our sexual organs because of shame is an inherent act to protect our body from the inner degradation cause by lust. Our body is too important, too sacred, too beautiful for a "lustful" eye to violate.
Shame has a positive function, contrary to what we might think in the beginning. It protects our body from not being a gift as it should. But what protects our mind?
We're mindful bodies and bodily minds. We're not a dissociation between body and mind. Those believing in the resurrection of the body consider that our body-mind is being transformed. Not only our mind entering a bodiless state of being. And if our bodies orient to the Truth being total-self-giving bodies, also the mind orients toward the Truth. But...
Often the mind is in danger and we find that especially in "closed-minded" people. People with fixed ideas close their mind to the novelty brought by relating with other minds. Close-minded people seldom welcome the ideas of others but expect others to accept their ideas because it is "the evident truth". An example of this are some atheists and religious fundamentalists.
Yes. There are fundamentalists on both sides. Not only on the side of religion.
Atheist fundamentalists are so certain of their disbelief in God that close their mind to the novelty in better understanding the world through that possibility.
Religious fundamentalists are so certain about who God is that close their mind to new scientific understandings failing to acknowledge that the universe is a language through which God speaks to us.
The true enemy of Truth is close-minded certainty.
There must be a way to protect our mind and intelligence from close-minded certainty, similar to the way shame protects the body from lust.
I think the way is doubt.
We may regard doubt as a lack of knowledge and a bad thing, but it is quite the contrary. Doubt is one of the most important drivers in the search of knowledge. Unless we doubt, we may never set ourselves in the path to find the truth about the world surrounding us, and the world within us. Doubt keeps our mind open to the richness in the minds of other. Doubt keeps us going deeper into ultimate questions about who we are, where we came from, where are we going and who God is, or isn't.
What shame is for the body, doubt is for the mind.
