“Shame on you!” We’ve all heard it, and we’ve all said it. The Oxford Dictionary defines shame as both a feeling and an action, “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior,” as well as, to “make (someone) feel ashamed.” Shame is a feeling nearly everyone everywhere tries to avoid, with the irony being that those most vulnerable to criticism are the ones most prone to overindulge in attempting to elicit that feeling in others. In some ways the dichotomy of shame is perhaps the most profound of hypocrisy litmus tests there is. What is Creator’s perspective?

We would say, for one thing, this is human-level wisdom in action, often wrong-headed in the choice to fight fire with fire. Because shame is potent as an emotion and many times devastating to experience, the ability to inflict it on others is a handy weapon and often safer to use than a physical assault because many will get away with it, in the sense that freedom of speech confers a relative margin of safety for verbal assaults, for that is what shaming someone represents. We would say that shame is so potent because it is next to the lowest of vibrations one can experience, only exceeded by humiliation when that shaming is witnessed by others as well, and that magnifies the pain being caused in the act of being shamed. To be of a low vibration is disorienting and that is because it weakens a person, so shaming someone is a very deliberate attempt to lay them low, to hit them where it hurts. We could use many such phrases from common language utilization showing how much a part of life and human behavior the act of shaming has become. The deeper reason, of course, is how dysfunctional the world truly is, that often one is coming from behind, might be outnumbered, or cornered in some way and unable to mount a rational defense of strength and character. That is when people often resort to violence because they run out of gentler tools. Because feeling shame is so common in human experience, and the shaming of others as frequent, correspondingly, because the one goes with the other, what changes is merely who is on the receiving end. It becomes built into the culture. People are often unduly influenced by what others do. Too frequent a demonstration of shaming by many people confers an air of legitimacy that it is culturally acceptable to inflict shaming on another if one feels justified. This is quite a slippery slope. The basic divine perspective here is a simple one but a powerful contrast to the very idea of bringing shame to someone so they experience such a low blow and such an unhappy state of being. The art of living is being in divine alignment and our first statement of principles is the dictum, "Raise up the self with no harm to others and raise up others with no harm to the self." That is a most important standard and one necessary to go by in order to be in divine alignment and remain there. If you think about this carefully, there is no room for shame anywhere on the part of anyone. What this means is you are not to shame yourself, nor anyone else, without violating this basic principle of divinity, and we can assure you if you do there will be consequences—that is the part missing from the dictionary and from most human discourse. People make the mistake of doing what they believe they can get away with. This is thinking selfishly and inherently from a place of weakness. If you are standing strong, connected to your power as a divine being, there is no room for something lowly because you are filled with the ability to not only experience well-being, confidence, and acceptance of the self on a deep level, but by not being in need and feeling inferior, being generous to others, being forgiving, understanding, uplifting, and even charitable is not experienced as a penalty but rather a joyous demonstration of that feeling of completion when one is standing strong, in divine alignment, because they have learned their way to a high level of discernment and self-control. Realistically, people cannot maintain that state of being indefinitely, sooner or later something will come along to knock them down, so it is important to understand the dynamics of feeling shame and shaming others because it is part of learning the ropes, as a human being, as you will encounter it along your journey.