Dignity

As for dignity, I do think it is the freedom to carry oneself upright, to the full length of one’s being.  To have to bow down, to be hunched over, to have people address themselves as if to someone half your height, or to your body rather than your mind, is undignified.

 

Also—I think it is a very fruitful area to look into WHAT IT TAKES to see oneself from the outside and WHY this is important.  I think it is important because one needs to know what one’s actual range is, and where others may mislead you about your range or make you take on a false sense of identity to serve their purposes. 

 

It seems to me that in the second leg of my shamanic journey (after the frightening initiatory experience), I tried to learn what others thought of me, but more importantly how valid or invalid those assessments really were.   It might seem self-obsessed to embark on a journey to find out what others think of you, and indeed it is, but I could not gain a deeper sense of reality unless I knew what was true and what was false about their perceptions.   (I could have taken on the identity that had been bestowed on me, but that felt like misshapen clothes and shoes that didn’t even fit.)  

 

So, one must do something very dangerous which is to solicit for other people’s opinions, in an often hostile context, when one doesn’t want to “wear” their opinions at all, but find out what they are in order to know what is true or false about society’s appraisals of oneself.  Once one has enough information from the outside, one can close the circle and not take in any more data.  But until then, one has to be open and try to process the data that may not make much direct sense. 

 

And all of this is just to reclaim one’s dignity by being aware of false projections (false attire) and being able to dress only as one chooses.