Guilt is The Original Sin🔗

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.

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.

Our 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:

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.

There are three kinds of guilt that take root in us and kill our intelligence:

Before the age of seven, guilt is created by your immediate family. If you don't do according to your parents' wishes, they instill guilt in you. They tell you that god will not approve of what you are doing. Poor god, he has to support whatever anyone says about him! Or your parents tell you that you should respect their wishes as parents. Immediately you feel guilty of making them unhappy. In this way, family sows the first guilt in you. You in turn pass it on to your child. Like a crown, it is passed on over generations. Because you don't have the knowledge to explain why things have to be done in a certain way, you change it to a rule and impose it on the child and create guilt through it. For example, children love whirling. They love moving and flowing with the body. It is a natural way for them to center their energy. But what do we do? We stop the child and put the fear in him that he may fall. We don't stop our efforts until we make the child stiff, frozen and dull like us! The child may want to go outside and play in the sun or collect some flowers or just jump around in the fresh air. If you think about it, it is not much the child is asking for. But the mother says 'no' – he may fall ill due to the hot sun. If you look a little deep, you can see that by saying 'no' she gets a subtle feeling of power, of being in control. She might say it is the sun but it is subtler than that. The 'no' by the mother actually has a deep impact on the child. It creates guilt in the child. Now, the child may force himself to stay in or he may escape convinces you that you are a sinner, you are caught in its grips. Then you cannot enjoy the joy of life any more.

According to me, guilt is the greatest sin. At least other sins will punish you after your death. Guilt will punish you when you are alive.

The Tibetan poet-saint Milarepa sang, 'My religion is to live – and die – without regret.'

You are called a saint or a sinner only by society. As long as society labels you a saint, you are a saint. The moment society labels you a sinner, you are a sinner. If you kill someone in society, you will be called a murderer, you will be punished. But if you kill someone on the battlefield you will be called a hero, you will be given a big award! So there is no absolute scale to decide what is right and what is wrong. It is society's own logic.

A very subtle and cunning way of sowing guilt today is through the idea of heaven and hell. People exploit your fear and greed by showing you ideas of hell and heaven. They create in you greed for heaven and fear for hell. They create so many concepts of hell and heaven and sell them to you. They say, 'If you practice these types of things, you will be rewarded with heaven; if you practice otherwise, you will be punished with hell.' When you are given rules based on greed and fear, you automatically start creating deep guilt in you.

A small story:

Once a military general asked a Zen master, 'Master, what are heaven and hell?'

The master asked, 'What do you do for a living?'

The general replied, 'I am a general.'

The master just laughed, 'Which idiot asked you to be a general? You look more like a butcher!'

The general was furious and took out his sword shouting, 'I will cut you to pieces.'

The master just raised his hand and said, 'These are the gates of hell.'

The general realized his folly and bowed down deeply to the master for forgiveness.

The master continued, 'These are the gates of heaven.'

Be very clear, heaven and hell are not physical locations. They are psycho-logical states of your mind. One instant the mind may be in hell and the your neighbor’s voice and what not! All these voices are in there. If there is only one voice, you will never have any problem. Your mind will move like a river. But there are so many voices telling you so many things and creating the rocks of guilt in your path.

As long as you flow like a river, you will express extraordinary intelligence in your life. You will live with an energy that is overflowing every minute. The moment you allow guilt in you, the moment you are stopped in your free flow, you create energy clots inside your being.

Once you become aware of how you are driven by guilt, you can start practicing to come out of it. When you start practicing anything, naturally you will slip a few times. When you practice to be without guilt, you are bound to slip back into the older patterns of greed and fear. Then suddenly you will remember, ‘Oh, I started working out of fear,’ ‘I started working out of greed.’ Then you will start afresh. When you start working, naturally you will see these things happening.

A small story:

A monk from a big spiritual organization was sent to a remote tribal area for doing service. Suddenly, the headquarters received a lot of complaint letters about the monk.

The president after reading the letters said, ‘We have posted the right person.’

The secretary asked him, ‘What is this Sir? We are getting complaints about him. How do you say we have posted the right person?’

The president replied, ‘If we are getting complaints, it means he has started working, there is something happening!’

When you start something new you will have three phases – the first is resist-ance. The next is just avoidance – people will neither care nor resist. The third is acceptance.

In the same way, when you start doing anything inside your system, you will start growing but these three phases will be there. The first phase will be resist-ance. You will feel the new practice is a difficult change in your current system. Because of this, the next thing that happens is you start avoiding opportunities achieve integrity where there is only one and not two or three or many person-alities fighting in you. Only when the mind flits between the past and future, you become split personalities and integrity doesn’t set in. If the mind is on the present, automatically you become unified and integrity sets in.

A small story:

One day, a priest knelt before god and started crying loudly, ‘I am a sinner. Please have mercy on me, O god.’ A man who was praying silently got inspired by this and also knelt down next to the priest and started praying. Now, another man also went down on his knees and started crying. Seeing this, the priest nudged the first man saying, ‘Look who thinks he is a sinner!’

All our humility, our morality, is more or less a pretence to others and to ourselves. We pretend because we are not solidly integrated within us. We ourselves don’t know which personality within us is authentic and so we get caught in such games. If we are integrated, we will be authentic in every action, and automatically we will be moral.

Please understand, you will never make mistakes if you are deeply aware at the time of making them. When you are aware, you will be one solid personality and moral as well. When you stray from awareness, you will be many personali-ties and immoral also. Morality has to do with awareness, not with any other social rules. Awareness is the only way to be naturally moral.

Awareness causes you to spontaneously take the right action in the right situation. Morality can cause you to do the wrong action in the right situation because it doesn’t have the right base. Its base is not its own, it is built up by society. So you don’t feel connected to it. When you don’t feel connected, you cannot act with confidence. Once you integrate yourself, you will be centered upon awareness. If you remain fragmented, there will be no awareness and you will depend on morality for guidance.

When you start internalizing the laws of society, you create a deep wound in your being. You destroy your innate intelligence. According to me, children can be given a set of rules initially so they don’t move from the path of conscious-ness. But soon they have to be given the understanding of life and the need to operate from consciousness instead of conscience.

If you live with consciousness, you will automatically live a moral life. To start understanding the need to live with consciousness, just look into your morality. Morality is only skin deep, whereas consciousness comes from

Actually there is a taste, a thrill in doing what you are not supposed to do. Most of the time, you develop an instant urge for something if you are asked not to do it. You feel a kind of joy or satisfaction by doing it. That is the basic tendency in every human being.

A small story:

Once a shopkeeper was trying hard to increase his sales. He tried various options – discounts, catchy advertisements, better customer service. Nothing worked. Then one day, he hung a black curtain on his shop window and made a small hole on it. Under the hole he put up a board, 'Peeping strictly forbidden.'

From that day, he saw crowds gathering at his shop, each one curious to peep through the hole to see what was there! His shop sales automatically increased because people now actually saw the variety of grocery items his shop carried.

When you are told not to do something, the basic human tendency is to do exactly that.

As a teenager, when you say 'no' to your parents, you feel you have proved you are independent. When you say 'no', you feel you have proved you are some-body special, somebody different. As long as you say 'yes', you feel you are only a child. When you start saying 'no', you feel you have become an adult.

You feel that you are a man only when you say 'no' to your father. Till then you feel you are a child. Just to prove that you are a man you start saying 'no' to your father. This is basic psychology. When you say 'no' you think you are somebody, until then you think you are nobody. So please be very clear, to whatever you say, your grown up son is going to say 'no', because he wants to be somebody.

In the course of time, many regulations that had meaning earlier become blind rules – without any meaning.

In India, during the times before electricity was invented, tailors would sew by hand with a needle with the help of dim lanterns. So clothes would not be sewn after sunset since sewing in the dim light of the candle or lantern would cause strain on the eye. So the work was always confined to daylight hours.

But even now in India, the elderly people in the house will say, 'It is not a good thing to sew after dusk!' The very reason for not sewing at night doesn't even exist anymore! Electricity and bright lights are there. But it has become a ritual for them, with no connection to its original purpose.

When you don't have the right intelligence or understanding, things become dead rules in your life. around the words and escape from the law. When you catch the words, you become a bureaucrat and you miss the spirit. Only when you catch the spirit, you can be an intelligent being without guilt.

There is a certain guilt that is useful for you, a guilt which if pursued intelli-gently can cause you to move forward in life. It is like this: when you see that you have the potential to do something, when you feel that you have so much potential which you are not using at all, then if you are intelligent, guilt will happen in you. This guilt can spur you to start doing things that will actualize your entire potential.

Sometimes we see the state of things around us and we know in one corner of our mind that we can very well help turn the situation around. But either due to laziness or due to the fear of confrontation, or due to the fear of taking responsibility, we just keep quiet and watch. This type of situation can cause deep guilt in us. This guilt is significant. If we take steps to correct the situation by doing what we really feel we should do, then the guilt will disappear and we will also move forward.

This type of guilt has the ability to drive you to do what needs to be done. Because of its very nature, you cannot harbor this guilt for long. You have to get over it. And the way to get over it is by doing what needs to be done. Once it is done, the guilt also disappears. How long you wish to harbor this guilt without taking steps, for that long you suffer from it. This is the simple logic of this guilt.

Another manifestation of this guilt happens when you can feel your ego surfacing in certain situations and you are unable to help it. When you can smell your ego but you are unable to control it, this guilt arises in you. This guilt is also good since it is a sign of the deep awareness of your own ego. It facilitates you to sincerely work towards eliminating that ego.

Guilt is the sure killer of intelligence. According to me, guilt is the worst killer of intelligence. It will never let you move in your life.

Once one of our devotees had a tumor at the base of her spinal cord. For twenty years she suffered with the tumor. She came to me complaining, ‘Please help me, heal me. I am suffering with this tumor for so many years. After undergoing surgery, it has reappeared.’ to lose all your wealth? Surely not! So there is no problem. In three days you are not going to lose anything. Why don't you give it a try? Just for three days, sincerely, utterly, accept everything in your life one hundred percent!

If you are not able to accept one hundred percent then accept that you are not able to accept one hundred percent. Even the acceptance of 'I am not able to accept myself in the inner world and outer world' will make you drop from the pull and push between the past and future. The moment you understand, 'I am unable to free myself from the pull and push of desires and fears, I am not able to accept my reality,' that very understanding will start doing its job.

If you can fall into the present moment, relaxing from the outer world and inner world things, in three days you will have a glimpse: What is life? What does it mean to live in the present moment? If this happens to you, you will experience such ecstasy, such a different space, such a different life that you have never experienced before.

You have lived based on your philosophy for maybe the last thirty years. Just for three days, don't try to alter anybody in the outer world. You will see that when you experiment with such great techniques, they work miracles in your being. They start a great alchemy process in your being. If you are not able to be sincere, accept that you are not able to be sincere. Even that sincerity is enough. You will start seeing a different space in you.

Why exactly do we compare ourselves with others? First, we compare ourselves because we have never understood ourselves. We are not aware of who we are and what we have. Second, society has conditioned us from our birth to evaluate ourselves based upon others. From childhood the comparison starts. In school, the grading system introduces a child to competition and comparison with others. There are standard benchmarks to measure a child's qualities such as math-ematical ability, scientific aptitude, artistic skill, athletic ability, musical talent and so on. But, what we don't realize is that when we try to measure a quality using a standardized benchmark, it is nothing but using comparison as the scale to measure the child himself. We are literally punishing all children with the reward systems we use in schools. The child gets used to judging and knowing himself by looking at others and comparing himself with them. He has no understanding of himself based on what he is. He knows himself only based on others.

A small story:

Once a man was testifying in court about a road accident. Suddenly, the man noticed that the court reporter was writing while he spoke. As the man started speaking faster and faster he noticed that the reporter was writing faster and faster.

Suddenly the man said to the court reporter, 'Please don't write so fast. I am not able to keep up with you!'

Every judgment you make about yourself is based on some comparison. But why does the idea of the other enter into your mind? It is because you have not looked in and realized who you are. You have not experienced the bliss and tremendous potential you have inside you. You feel incomplete because you have not been able to express yourself as you are. So, the emptiness and lack of fulfillment inside makes you feel inferior to others.

Buddha says, 'Nothing exists except in relationship.' Suppose you were the only person on a new planet, how could you compare yourself with anyone? Could you call yourself tall or short, ugly or beautiful, rich or poor, intelligent or dumb? No! When there is no one with whom to compare ourselves, we just are!

So when you feel hurt, understand that you have a wound. Don't throw the responsibility of the suffering on the other person. The wound needs to be healed and the jealousy has to be dissolved. Then nobody can hurt you. Be very clear, nobody can hurt you without your silent permission.

You compare yourself to each other because you feel that you are somehow lacking. Honestly, you have no idea of your true, unique potential! If you did, you wouldn't spend one second looking outside yourself for answers about how to live a creative, fulfilling life. All of the confidence, intelligence, and vibrant energy that you need already exist inside you. You have the potential to live like god on earth. Don't believe the limiting things that you have been made to believe about yourself. Just look in! Experiment, explore and discover the truth for yourself. Then you will simply radiate all of these qualities effortlessly.

Suppose there was a huge ladder and everybody in the world was asked to stand on it in ascending order of success in any field such as beauty or intel-ligence. You would probably position yourself somewhere in the middle of the ladder. There are many people above you but there are also many people below you. Seeing the people above you causes you to feel jealous. So, you constantly try to become better than them in order to move further up the ladder.

Now, at some point in your life, you may realize the uselessness of this never-ending game. Then you want to jump off the ladder. And you look down. Now what do you see? There are so many people below you. Suddenly you start feeling happy to see so many people below you and you feel hopeful because you are not as inferior as you thought you were when you were looking at the people above you.

This is where the fight starts. When you look up, you feel miserable, but when you look down, you feel happy. Now even though you begin to realize the futility of spending your life just climbing the ladder, still you are not able to jump off the ladder because if you jump off, you will be left alone. There will be nobody above you or below you.

We all function around these three axes of doing, having and being. Doing for having, without enjoying being, is the sole cause of all our misery. Doing never catches up with having! Every time you work hard and fulfill one desire, suddenly that desire loses its pull over you.

As enlightened master, Ramana Maharishi, says beautifully, 'The mind is such that it shows a tiny mustard seed to be a huge mountain until it is attained. As soon as it has been attained, even a mountain appears as insignificant as a mustard seed!’

As soon as a desire is fulfilled, another one starts pulling at you. You don’t even have time to enjoy it and feel satisfied. You may think, ‘Let me get this one more thing also. Then I can relax and enjoy what I have.’ Be very clear, your mind will never let it happen.

The only way to really live and enjoy life is to enjoy the very doing itself. Then automatically the doing, having and being, will be integrated and will happen.

Nature has its own unique way of growth for each of us.

Take the Chinese bamboo for example. When it sprouts, it doesn’t show much growth for the first four years. Then in the fifth year, the bamboo grows ninety feet in six weeks! It was not that the tree was not growing in the first four years. Though the growth was not visible, the roots were being strengthened to make it possible for the plant to grow fast and safely into a huge tree!

Like the bamboo’s growth, there is no scale to measure yourself with anyone other than your own self. If you spend all your energy looking in and competing with yourself, you will progress in leaps and bounds.

First of all, understand that god is an artist, not an engineer. If He was an engineer, He would have made one perfect man and one perfect woman and then made millions of copies from that mould! No. God has made each one of us unique in every way.

It does not matter whether you are a rose or a lily or a wild flower. The important thing is that the wild flower should realize its ultimate potential as a wild flower just as the rose should actualize its inherent potential. The fragrance of you realizing your unique potential is what radiates and, without effort, touches everyone around you.

Whether it is beauty or intelligence, you are unique. It is only when you don’t respect your uniqueness that you start comparing yourself with others. Even if your favorite cinema star or model is very beautiful, can you enjoy drinking even a cup of water from that body? No! You can only enjoy using your own body – your best friend. Accept and welcome it.

There is a beautiful verse in the ancient scriptures that says the power of maya, the energy which runs the universe, uses jealousy as a tool to make you do whatever it wants you to do. his mind, that means he is not a scientist because his conclusion may influence the experiment.

Now, you are the scientist in the laboratory of the inner world science. Be a scientist in your inner world and let your mind be your laboratory. Just be aware and witness without any prejudice.

Don't condemn the emotion saying it is bad because that is what you have been taught. It has not become your experience. If it is your experience that jealousy is a negative emotion you will drop it automatically. It has not become your own experience. It is only something that you have picked up from others. Unless it becomes an experiential understanding in you that jealousy and comparison are negative, it will not become a part of you.

Don't condemn the object of jealousy. The object has not generated the emotion from outside. The jealousy is happening inside you.

Once you see your jealousy with awareness, you will realize that it does not have a basis for existence at all. When this happens, jealousy will drop auto-matically. You won't have to drop it.

A small story:

A woman once hired a professional artist to paint her portrait. The artist carefully made a large portrait and then presented it to her saying, 'How do you like it?'

The lady looked at it and said, 'Yes, very nice. But can you add a few things? I want you to add a glittering diamond necklace, a gold watch and bracelet, emerald earrings and beautiful pearl rings on the fingers. The artist was surprised and said, 'But madam, the portrait looks simple and beautiful as it is. Why do you want to add all the jewelry and clutter it?'

The woman replied, 'I want my rich neighbors to see the painting and go crazy when they see all the jewelry that they will think I have.'

The fire of jealousy can just consume you completely if you don't control it with the fire extinguisher of your awareness.

Jealousy does not allow you to experience your true nature of love and bliss. It arises out of misunderstanding life and yourself. You misunderstand love to be something outside of you that has to be acquired. Not only that, you think love is a quantity that needs to be shared. That is why you are afraid, thinking that if you share your love, your share will be reduced. that's all. Whether it is a sand castle or a stone castle, the seriousness behind it is the same. The object may be different, but the seriousness is the same. So, don't laugh when children fight over sand castles. Seriousness closes your mind to the openness and freedom of life. It makes you dull and dead. It curbs your thinking and makes you stick to the familiar patterns that you know and use all the time.

A small story:

In a Zen monastery, there was a competition among disciples over who had maintained the best garden. One disciple was of a very serious nature. He took the competition quite seriously. He always kept his garden neat, clean, and well-swept. All the grass was of the same height. All the bushes were neatly trimmed. He was sure that he would get the first prize.

On the day of the competition, the master went around all the gardens. Then he came back and ranked the gardens. This disciple's garden got the lowest ranking. Everyone was shocked. The disciple could not contain himself and asked, 'Master, what is wrong with my garden? Why did you rank me the lowest?'

The master looked at him and asked, 'Where are all the dead leaves? A garden maintained in such a way is no longer alive! It is dead.'

Seriousness kills spontaneity. Seriousness destroys creativity. Science has proved that when you perform a task in a relaxed and light manner, your thinking and decision-making capacity is automatically enhanced. The same task when performed in a serious manner dulls your mind. When you do something too seriously, when you are too concerned about the result, you are actually not allowing yourself to perform at the optimum level. Of course, you need to make plans, and you need to think ahead. But do it with sincerity, not with seriousness. Seriousness is not the same as sincerity. Sincerity is focusing on the task with enthusiasm and youthfulness. Sincerity is giving the task your best without worrying excessively about the result! When you are serious, you don't enjoy, you don't laugh. How can you laugh when you are serious!

Perfectionism always comes from your mind. It becomes a goal for you. You work towards it as a goal. When you work towards it as a goal, it becomes dead and mundane. But when you are total, when you are established in your heart, it becomes a deep experience. The outcome has to be beautiful, and it will give you joy. Then, whatever you do, you will be in tune with Existence. Whatever you do, do it wholly, totally, and it will be total. You won't have to worry about perfectionism at all.

Perfectionism never gives you joy; it only fulfills your ego. Even if you feel fulfilled at the end of it, it is only a fulfillment of your ego, never a fulfillment of your being. Be very clear, perfectionists are the biggest egoists. They miss the dimension of being total. Totality is possible when you enter into something deeply. Perfectionism is never possible because it is in your mind, and your mind keeps changing its definition of perfection!

Most of us unconsciously believe that life is filled with incidents that are under the control of our logic. But life again and again reminds you of the truth that life is beyond your logic. You are reminded of this fact, especially when some near and dear friend or family member dies or when something unex-pected happens. If you lose your job, suddenly you see that life is not under your control. You suddenly wake up to the reality that life is beyond your logic. Then you start seeking the Truth.

Especially if you live in the city, your routine is almost fixed. From morning until night, you know exactly how your day will unfold. You know where you will go, what you will do or not do, and what and when you will eat.

Practically, your ego gives an idea, your logic gives you the feeling that your life is under the control of your logic. That is why whenever some incident happens that is beyond your logic, that is not under your control, you are totally shaken. You are not able to handle it. You don't know what to do. Either you fall into depression or you just suffer.

There is an important truth, an ultimate secret that you must understand. Never think things are going smoothly because of you. In spite of you, things are going smoothly! This is one of the important secrets. As long as you think it is because of you that things are going smoothly, you will be constantly suffering with ego.

According to the Upanishads, as long as you think that life has a purpose and you run behind that purpose, you are an egoistic person. When you realize the beauty of the purposelessness of life, you have dropped your ego. The master is the one who makes you understand the purposelessness of life. Whatever you think as being worthy now is not actually the true and worthy thing. A man with ego searches with purpose and misses reality. something when there is nothing to think about! Unless you have something strong to brood over, you don't have a clear-cut boundary in your inner space.

Your mind exists when it hits the corners of your suffering. You don't feel your boundary or your identity unless you have enough suffering. If you look a little deeper, you will understand that many times you feel lonely if you don't have anything to worry or suffer about. That is the way you believe yourselves to be, because by its nature, the mind can record only negative things. The mind can flourish, it can create more thoughts, it can more clearly identify with suffering, dissatisfaction and discontentment. The quality of joy is boundarylessness. When you are in joy, you won't feel your boundary. Whenever you don't feel your boundary, you are in a state of joy, in a satisfied and contented mood.

Your ego cannot exist without your suffering. Suffering is the root of your ego. This is an important thing you need to understand. We always think that the ego is disturbed by suffering. No! Ego is enriched by suffering. One more important thing is that if your suffering is less, your ego is less. You feel you are too small, so you increase your suffering so that you can feel you are somebody.

The less the suffering, the weaker is the ego. The more you suffer, the stronger your ego becomes. So, you always exaggerate your suffering. The problem is that after some time you forget that you exaggerated. Then you are also caught in the same net. You might disagree and say, 'No, you don't know my life; you don't know my suffering.' But be very clear, after some time you are caught in the same net that you yourself created!