Shame is an experience so loathed, it can trump even our most basic instinct: to survive.
The ancient Japanese samurai would willingly commit suicide to avoid shame and protect their pride in a ritual known as Seppuku. Whilst this may seem extraordinary, it's really not. Today in the west, precisely the same motivation drives suicide across society. Be it financial ruin, cyber bullying, scandal, the list goes on… the forced destruction of pride and the core experience of shame are often, quite simply, intolerable.
The impulse to avoid shame and protect pride is powerfully symbolised in the Bible. Right at the start of the book, the first humans are tempted to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Immediately afterwards, they become ashamed of being naked, and cover their sexual organs. In eating the forbidden fruit "the eyes of both of them were opened", likely symbolising the birth of self-awareness. According to the Bible, then, self-awareness facilitates shame. And, by the same token, pride.
This makes sense. In gaining knowledge of our own existence, the awareness of it, we try to make ourselves look better. And in trying to make ourselves look better, we necessarily hide parts of ourself. And so it goes; as soon as we develop a sense of identity, we spend the rest of our lives trying to improve and protect it.
But right in at the core of all this lies a conundrum: we're hiding. All the things we fear about ourselves, the things we dare not show, are locked away inside of us and covered up with a fanciful outer layer. Beliefs about our own inadequacy, in one way or another, imprison us within the walls of our own pride. And we ourselves guard that prison, making sure to protect our most precious asset: our identity. For if any cracks were to develop, the truth would be revealed and not only would our inadequacies be exposed, but with them the shocking truth of our long-standing fraudulence.
But we are all frauds.
We all cover up, just like Adam and Eve. It's part of the necessary functioning of being human and playing the game of life in society. And however authentic we believe ourselves to be, there are always more layers of the egoic onion to peel. And, indeed, peeling that onion, stripping back the layers of pride, continually and courageously, is the path to self-realisation. The agonising process of exposure, layer by layer, gradually and painfully, slowly brings us back to the true truth. The truth of who we really are. Of what we really are. And why any of it matters in the first place.