If I Feel Shame, It Means That I Advance

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Why is shame necessary for our advancement? After all, it is an unpleasant feeling that burns you and seems to belong to the path of suffering?

Answer: Shame is like feeling a certain pain in the body. The pain indicates an illness that needs to be healed. Thanks to the pain, I am saved from death. It is the same with the feeling of shame; it indicates lack of correction somewhere so is it possible to ignore or to annul this feeling?

But we try to escape it. So Kabbalists tell us that we need the help of the group and the books and everything that can support me and help me bear the feeling of shame.

At the same time it isn’t only that I need to bear it, but I also need to get to know it more deeply and to perform acts of correction. The feeling of shame will continue to grow until it obligates you to cry out for help and then you will receive the Light that Reforms that will correct and heal you.

You are not healed if you cry out weakly. There must be a true outcry, a call out to get rid of it, since it isn’t just any illness; it is the correction of the desire to receive, of your nature.

Question: But we always aspire to feel good, how can I aspire to feel shame?

Answer: In order to do that you increase the importance of the goal, by placing it above your pain. You say: “Let it hurt, I don’t want to identify with what hurts and with the pain itself. I want to attain the goal, and thank you very much for the pain, since it focuses me on the goal.”

It all depends on the recognition of the greatness of the goal, the greatness of the Creator. Since the Creator is a desire to bestow, a form of bestowal and concession. To the extent that these values seem great to you, you begin to suffer from your attributes which are opposite from these values. But if you extinguish this gap, and you inject yourself with some “anesthetic,” you prevent yourself from advancing.

This is why you build an environment that will sustain you in the necessary state. As a result, you see your oppositeness from bestowal, you suffer from that, and still you continue to increase the Creator in your eyes. You adhere to Him, you want to adhere to the group, you don’t want to identify with your evil anymore, but not in order to escape it like a kind of pain, but in order to really reach bestowal, in order to really assimilate in the group.

There are many discernments here and they all lead in one direction. So try to understand how wonderfully the feeling of shame guides you if you use it correctly.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/28/12, “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)”

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