Caring for the body vs the cult of the body

17/12/201317/12/2013 Leonardo Boff3 Comentários

Understanding human existence, starting from the theory of complexity, is enriching. It is worth noting that we are complex beings, endowed with a convergence of countless factors, material, biological, energized, spiritual, earthly and cosmic. We possess an outward appearance with which we make others aware we are one of them and that we belong to the universe of the bodies. And we have an interior inhabited by vigorous positive and negative energies that form our psychic individuality. We are carriers of the dimension of the profound where the most important questions exist about the meaning of our journey through this world. These dimensions constantly coexist and interact, influencing each other and molding that which we call the human being.

We must care for everything in us. Otherwise, we lose the equilibrium among the forces of which we are constructed and dehumanize ourselves. In dealing with the topic of caring for the body, we must consciously oppose the dualism that the culture persists in maintaining: on one side, the «body», detached from the spirit, and on the other, the disembodied «spirit». In this way, we lose the unity of human life.

Commercial propaganda exploits this duality, presenting the body not as the totality of the human, but breaking it up; muscles, hands, feet, etc., into its different parts. The principal victims of this fragmentation are women, because the machista vision found refuge in the media world of marketing, using parts of the woman, her breasts, her gender, and other aspects to continue making woman an «object» of consumption by the machista men. We should firmly oppose this cultural distortion.

It is also important to reject the «cult of the body» promoted by the plethora of gymnasiums and other ways of working on the physical person, as if the man/woman-body were a machine stripped of its spirit, that seeks to constantly enlarge the muscles. With this we do not want to detract from the merit of the different types physical exercise, in function of good health and a better integration of mind-body; the massages that renew the body’s vigor and make the vital energies flow, particularly the oriental disciplines such as yoga, that favor a meditative posture of life, or the incentive to maintain a balanced diet, including fasting, either as voluntary asceticism or as a way of better harmonizing the vital energies.

Clothing deserves special consideration. Not only does it have a utilitarian function, to protect us from inclement weather, it also relates to caring for the body, because clothes represent a language, a form of presenting oneself on the stage of life. It is important to take care that clothing expresses a form of being, and that it shows the human and aesthetic profile of a person. This is especially meaningful for a woman, because she has a more intimate relationship with her body and its appearance.

There is nothing more ridiculous and revealing of an anemic spirit than beauty constructed with unnecessary botox and plastic surgeries. From this artificial embellishment has grown a whole industry of cosmetics and slimming practices in clinics and spas that are hardly in service of a more integrated dimension of the body. This is not to say that we must invalidate massages and cosmetics that are important for the skin and for proper embellishment. But there is a beauty appropriate for each age, the enchantment born of the life’s work and the spirit in the physical expression of the human being. No photoshop can displace the rugged beauty of a laborer’s face, sculpted by the harshness of life, the lines etched by suffering. The struggles of so many women who work in the fields, in the city and in the factories have left in their bodies another form of beauty, frequently with an expression of great strength and energy. They speak of real life and not of an artificial and made-up existence. To the contrary, the touched-up photographs of the icons of conventional beauty, almost all shaped by current beauty fashions, barely conceal the artificiality of the figure and the frivolous vanity there revealed.

Everyone is a victim of a culture which does not cultivate the caring appropriate to each phase of life, with its beauty and luminosity, and also with the tell-tale marks of a life lived, that imprinted in the face and body the struggles, the sufferings, the overcoming. Such marks create a singular beauty and a specific luminosity, instead of fixing the persons in the profile of an outdated past.

We care for the body in a positive manner, by returning, with an attitude of synergy and communion with all things, to nature and the Earth, whence we had exiled ourselves centuries ago. This means establishing a biophilic relationship, of love and sensitivity towards the animals, flowers, plants, climates, sceneries and the Earth. When they show her to us from outer space – those beautiful images of the terrestrial globe transmitted by telescopes or space craft — we burst with feelings of reverence, respect and love for our Great Mother, from whose womb we all come. She is small, cosmologically already old, but radiant and full of life.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for the human being-body consists of achieving an equilibrium of self affirmation, without falling into arrogance and rejection of others, and the integration of a major whole, of family, community, the work team and society, without allowing one’s self to be overcrowded and fall into uncritical adhesion. The search for this type of equilibrium is not resolved at once, it must be worked on daily, because it is demanded from us at every moment. An adequate balance must be found between the two forces that could either tear us apart or integrate us.

Caring for our being-in-the-world also includes our diet: what we eat and drink. It is to make of eating more than an act of nourishment, but a rite of celebration and communion with our fellow diners and with the fruits of the Earth’s generosity. It is to know how to select organic products or those least filled with chemicals. A healthy life results from that, a life that assumes a posture of caution against the eventual diseases that may befall us as a result of the degraded environment.

In this manner the human being-body makes its inner and exterior harmony transparent, as a member of the great community of life

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU

Caring for the body vs the cult of the body

15/12/2013 Leonardo Boff5 Comentários

In this manner the human being-body makes its inner and exterior harmony transparent, as a member of the great community of life.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

Mandela’s meaning for the threatened future of humanity

12/12/2013 Leonardo Boff2 Comentários

With his death, Nelson Mandela has been imbedded in the collective unconsciousness of humanity, never ever to fade away, because he has been transformed into a universal archetype, that of an unjustly condemned person who harbored no rancor, who knew how to forgive, how to reconcile antagonistic poles, and who gave us an undying hope that there are still solutions to the human condition. After spending 27 years in jail and being elected President of South Africa in 1994, he proposed and accomplished the great challenge of transforming a society that was structured on the supreme injustice of apartheid, that dehumanized the great Black majorities of his country, who were condemned to being non-persons, into a unique society, united without discrimination, democratic and free.

And he accomplished that by choosing the path of virtue, forgiveness and reconciliation. To forgive is not to forget. The wounds are still there, many of them still fester. To forgive is not to give the last word to bitterness and the spirit of revenge, or to allow it to determine the path of life. To forgive is to liberate people from the chains of the past, to turn the page on Blacks and Whites, and to start writing on another. Reconciliation is only possible and real when crimes are openly admitted by their authors, and victims have full knowledge of their acts. The punishment of the criminals is the moral condemnation of the entire society.

One of his solutions, a very original one, presupposes a concept that is alien to our individualistic culture: Ubuntu. It means: “I only can be myself through you and with you”. Thus, without an enduring bond that links all with all, a society will be, as is ours, in danger of tearing itself apart with endless conflict.

In all the school books around the world should be found this humanist affirmation by Mandela: “I struggled against domination by the Whites and struggled against domination by the Blacks. I cultivated the ideal of a democratic and free society, where all persons can live in harmony together and have equal opportunities. This is my ideal and I hope to live long enough to attain it. But, if it be necessary, I am ready to die for this ideal”.

Why has Mandela’s life and saga created hope in the future of humanity and in our civilization? Because we have reached the nucleus of a conjunction of crises that could threaten our future as human species. We plainly are in sixth great mass extinction. Cosmologists (Brian Swimme) and biologists (Edward Wilson) warn us that if things continue as they are, this devastating process could culminate by 2030. This means that the belief shared by the whole world, including Brazil, that material economic growth will bring us social, cultural and spiritual development, is an illusion. We are living in times of hopeless barbarism.

I will quote a person who is above all suspicion, Samuel P. Huntington, former Pentagon advisor and shrewd analyst of the process of globalization, who at the end of his book, Clash of Civilizations says: “Law and order are the first pre-requisites of civilization; in large parts of the world they seem to be evaporating; on a world scale, civilization appears, in many aspects, to be giving way to barbarism, creating the specter of an unprecedented phenomenon, a worldwide Dark Age, falling on humanity” (1997:409-410).

I will add the opinion of the well known philosopher and political scientist Norberto Bobbio who, like Mandela, believed in human rights and democracy, as values to solve the problem of violence between States, and lead to a pacific coexistence. In his last interview he declared: “I would not know what to say as to what the Third Millennium will be like. My certainties fail and only an enormous question mark swirls in my head: will it be the millennium of the war of extinction, or the millennium of concord between human beings? I cannot possibly answer that question”.

Facing these somber prospects Mandela would surely respond, based on his political experience: yes, it is possible for the human being to reconcile with himself, for the human being to give precedence to his sapiens dimension over his demens dimension, and to inaugurate a new form of being together in the same House. Perhaps there is value in the words of his great friend, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who coordinated the Truth and Reconciliation process: “Having confronted the beast of the past, face to face, having asked and received forgiveness, let us now turn the page: not to forget that past, but not to let it oppress us forever. Let us advance towards a glorious future of a new society where people are valued not for irrelevant biological reasons or other strange attributes, but because they are persons, of infinite value, created in the image of God.”

Nelson Mandela leaves us this lesson of hope: we can live, if, without discrimination, we make Ubuntu a reality

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, cybermelinaalfaro@bandalibre.com,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

The Longest Journey: to our own heart

08/12/2013 Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

C. G. Jung, the great expert of the meanderings of the human psyche, observed: the journey to our own center, to our own heart, can be longer and more dangerous than a trip to the Moon. Our inner being is inhabited by angels and demons; tendencies that can lead to madness and death, and energies that are conducive of ecstasy and communion with the Whole.

There is a question that has never been resolved among students of the human condition: what is the base structure of the human being? There are many schools of thought, but it would be beside the point to enumerate them all now.

Getting directly to the point, I would say it is not reason, as is commonly held. Reason does not erupt, it is not the first to appear. Reason refers to more primitive dimensions of our human reality, those which nourish and permeate all its expressions. Kantian pure reason is an illusion. Reason always comes impregnated with emotion, passion and interest. To know is always to enter in an interested and affective communion with the object of knowledge.

More than ideas and visions of the world, passions, strong feelings, and germinal experiences are what move us and cause us to act. They lift us, make us face danger, and even risk our own lives.

The basis seems to be cordial, sensible and emotional intelligence. Its biological roots are the most ancestral, linked to the emergence of life, 3.8 billion years ago, when the first bacteria burst onto the evolutionary scene and began to interact chemically with the environment in order to subsist. This process deepened, millions of years ago, when the limbic brain of mammals appeared; the brain which is the root of caring, tenderness, affection and love for the young, gestated in the bosom of this new species of animals to which we humans also belong. In us, it has reached the self conscious and intelligent phase. All of us are linked to this first tradition.

Western thought, logic-centric and anthropocentric, put affection under suspicion, with the pretext that it harmed the objectivity of knowledge. It led to excess, namely, rationalism, that produced in some sectors of culture a kind of lobotomy, this is, a total insensitivity in the face of human suffering, the suffering of other beings and of Mother Earth. Pope Francis, in Lampedusa, in front of African immigrants, criticized the globalization of insensitivity, that is incapable of feeling compassion and of crying.

But it could be said that, starting with European romanticism (with Herder, Goethe and others), the sensible intelligence began to make a comeback. Romanticism is more than a literary school; it is a manner of perceiving the world, our belonging to nature, and the integration of human beings into the great chain of life (Löwy and Sayre, Rebelión y melancolía, Vozes, 28-50).

In current times, affection, feelings and passion (pathos) have been gaining centrality. This step is now imperative, because with just reason (logos) we cannot confront the grave crises that life, humanity and the Earth are experiencing. Intellectual reason needs to be united with emotional intelligence, without which we could not build an integrated social reality with a human face. The heart of the heart cannot be reached without passing through affection and love.

Among many other important data, it is worth, however, noting one, for its relevance and for the great tradition it enjoys: it is the structure of desire that defines the human psyche. Starting with Aristotle, passing through Saint Augustine and the Medievals, such as Saint Bonaventure (he calls Saint Francis vir desideriorum, a man of desires), through Schleiermacher and Max Scheler in modern times, and culminating with Sigmund Freud, Ernst Bloch and Rene Girard most recently, all affirm the centrality of desire.

Desire is not just any other impulse. It is a motor that energizes and sets all psychic life in motion. It functions as a principle, so well expressed by philosopher Ernst Bloch as the hope principle. By its nature, desire is infinite and confers an infinite character on the human species.

Desire makes existence dramatic and, sometimes, tragic. When it is fulfilled, it provides an unparalleled happiness. But on the other hand, it produces a grave disillusionment when the human being identifies a finite reality as the infinitely desired object. It can be a beloved person, an always desired profession, a property, a tour around the world or a new model of cellular phone.

Before long, those desired realities seem illusory, and only aggravate the inner emptiness, which is as great as the greatness of God. How can one emerge from this impasse, which tries to equate the infinite desire with the finite nature of reality, and wanders from one object to another, without ever finding repose? The human being must seriously ask this question: What is the true and hidden object of our desire? I dare to answer: it is the Being and not the entity, the Whole and not the part; it is the Infinite and not the finite.

After much pilgrimage, the human being is led to undergo the cor inquietum experience of Saint Augustine, the tireless man of desire and untiring pilgrim of the Infinite. In his autobiography, Confessions, Saint Augustine declares with moving sentiment:

Late I loved You, oh Beauty always old and always new. Late I loved You. You touched me and I burn in the desire of Your peace. My cor inquietum will not rest until in You it reposes (book X, n.27).

Here we have described the trajectory of the desire that searches for and finds its hidden object, always desired, in dreams and vigils. Only the infinite befits the infinite desire of the human being. Only then does the journey to the heart end, and the sabbath of human and Divine rest begin.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.