13. What is Guilt?

When you have desires you have guilt as well. Guilt is the opposite face of desire. Sometimes you feel guilty about desiring something because you feel it is not right to desire it. Other times you feel guilty when your desires are fulfilled because you feel you are not deserving of what you receive. When your desires do not come true you feel guilty because you feel you have not done what you ought to have. Desires invariably lead to guilt.

Guilt is nothing but your past decisions and actions being reviewed with your updated intelligence.

For example, when you were in school, you might have said a few mean things to one of your friends which caused a relationship to break. Now, this many years later, with the intelligence that you have, is it right to review that incident and feel guilty? No! At that time you had only that much intelligence, so you behaved in that fashion. Now, you have updated intelligence.

It doesn't make sense to review the past with your present intelligence.

The futility of the past

What is gone is gone. What has been done is done. You cannot undo it. Now if you constantly think about the past and feel guilty, you destroy your present and your future too. Nothing can be done about it, so guilt is useless. What can you do? All that you can do is not repeat the same pattern again, that's all. At that time with whatever intelligence you had, you acted, that's all.

The past is always past, it is always dead. That is why it is called past. Yet we always let the past affect us. How do we allow the past to affect us? In two ways:

1. If you review your past incidents or decisions using the present intelligence, you will create guilt in your being.

2. If you base your present decisions on past experiences, you will be repeating the same past into the future also, maybe in a little updated fashion!

Even though you might not commit exactly the same mistake, you will be moving in the same experiential level, in the same plane.

Our mind falls into a groove, a track, a mindset that forces it to do what it has always done. So we keep making the same mistakes as well.