How Shame Arises

002Question: What is the shame that is said to be a kind of creation?

Answer: There is a Creator (the quality of pure bestowal) and there is creation (the quality of pure reception). The connection between them lies in the fact that the creation wants to receive what comes from the Creator. This is how it was made.

At the same time, the creation can absolutely not feel the Creator Himself, but only what comes from Him, like a newborn child who receives everything from his parents. He has no shame: he asks, demands, grabs, and uses his natural desire to receive to fulfill himself.

And suddenly there comes a point when he feels the difference between his parent’s nature and his own. Then he begins to understand that he is a receiver and his parents are givers.

Before, he simply knew that his parents gave and he wanted to take without evaluating anything, whether this was good or bad, or about the benefit of giving or receiving. He felt no qualitative difference between giving and receiving. And suddenly, he begins to feel it.

Then he goes out into the world. If he is always with his parents, he may not feel this difference unless they were teaching him, distancing him from themselves, showing what was allowed and what was not, what he had to work on or needed to earn.

But once we go out into the world, we interact with a wider external circle and begin to understand what I can and cannot do, what is different from the way it was with my parents. If I receive, then I must give, that is, I must work to earn a reward, and so on. Then there is already a feeling of giving and receiving, of upper and lower, of dependence on one another.

It may be simply in the fulfillment or it can be in a sense of quality, especially when there are higher and lower qualities, those that are accepted in nature and society.

It follows that I have qualities that society praises and those that it condemns. And it turns out that I begin to evaluate myself critically. This is how all sorts of complex self-analyses arise.

Question: So shame does not arise from what I receive, but from the fact that I am the opposite of either some social values or the Creator?

Answer: Yes. If I feel another person above me and myself below them and this feeling comes from the fact that this is accepted in my society, then I feel a special attitude toward my egoism, which is my main quality, the desire to receive.

I begin to feel how much my egoism humiliates me. I feel inferior to others and my ego suffers, not because I may have less or more of something, but from being morally inferior to another.

This is shame! I’m ashamed of my nature. What is interesting is not the nature in which the Creator created me, but my present state. I attribute it to myself. I cannot attribute it to the Creator. It depends on us both.

Comment: But He created me this way.

My Response: He created the desire to receive in me, and I’m ashamed of how I use it.
[276875]
From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/22/19

Related Material:
Shame Is The Opposite Of Perfection
Is Shame A Means Of Defeat Or An Ascent?
Shame Develops Man

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