What is shame?

Can shame exist without ideals and comparison? Does shame cure and heal? Is there shame in love? Does shame lead to betterment? These and more are the questions we want to talk over.

Man is the only creature that experiences shame. It is a simple and direct fact that reveals so much about the nature of shame. Which means that there can be no shame inherent in the biological scheme of things. The child is not born with shame. Shame is a taught phenomenon. And like everything else that is taught, shame too is taught with the purpose, with the hope that it will lead to betterment.

Man is the only creature that experiences shame, and man is also the only creature that has God, and these two facts must be mentioned in the same breath. For the entire universe, the entire existence, there is God. For man, there is the consciousness of God.

A tree or a deer has no God relative to its tree-ness or deer-ness. The God of our deer is so deep within it that it’s deer-ness does not touch God. The God of a tree is so deep within the tree that the tree-ness of the tree will not touch God. Hence, there is no God in the consciousness of a deer.

Consciousness of any being is related only to the superficial form and expression of that being. The deer is the periphery, of which God is the center. The tree is the periphery of which God is the center. At the…