Guilt created by you🔗

Till the age of twenty one, knowledge from family and society creates guilt. After twenty one, the guilt sown in you by family and society grows roots inside you. Then you start creating guilt for yourself without any reason. Guilt becomes a permanent guest in your being!

The guilt created by family and the guilt created by society are imposed guilt; they are like a crown that is passed on from one generation to another. The third guilt is the worst - that which you create for yourself. When you internalize guilt based on greed and fear, you create new types of guilt for yourself.

The moment you start feeling guilty about something, you can be exploited. That too when you start fighting with yourself it is easier to exploit you.

If you look into your life you can see how every moment you are subtly looking for some reason to fight with yourself, to feel discontent with yourself. You cannot remain without some conflict, you want to create misery for yourself because that is what you have been taught – happiness is a sin.

You are designed to move like a freely flowing river. Guilt is like the rocks in the path of the water. Society has subtly branded happiness as a sin. That is the problem. That is why you will notice, when everything is going smoothly and happily, there will be a lurking feeling of guilt in you. You are taught by society that being happy and enjoying life is being irresponsible in a way. So you feel guilty.

But when you feel sad and depressed, do you ever feel guilty? No!

This is also why people can't take it when you are happy and smiling all the time. They try their best to bring you back to the so-called reality - by instilling guilt in you.

When you are enjoying, dancing or relaxing at the beach for example, suddenly you will observe guilt starts rising in you about all the work that is pending, about all the responsibilities that need to be fulfilled.

Guilt has no basis but it can destroy your whole life. If you can live without guilt, you will enjoy every moment without any regret and still fulfill all your responsibilities.

The prob-lem is that your being is a crowd of voices that don't belong to you. It is a totality of your mother's voice, your father's voice, your teacher's voice, 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 resistance. 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 resistance. 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 where you should be practicing the change. Again and again you will go back to your older ways. Your system will resist, it will try to create all kinds of complications, all possible arguments. If you allow the resistance to grow, you become your own enemy.

Krishna^Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita^{Bhagavad Gita}, ‘Let you lift yourself by yourself. If you don’t, you will be your worst enemy.’ It is up to you to help yourself as your best friend or hurt yourself as your worst enemy.

Be very clear: nobody can hurt you unless you allow. Nobody can help you unless you allow.

If you have forgotten the practice, remember and again and again lift yourself. Don’t fall into depression, don’t have guilt. Don’t think you will not be able to do it.

Even in the life of Buddha if you read, he was about to leave the body when his disciples asked him to give his ultimate message, and he said Atma deepo bhava – Let you be your own light, let you be guided by yourself.

To feel guilty is to be in sin. In fact that is the only sin. The hell that we talk about is not in another time and space. It is within us when we feel guilty, without doing anything to change our mindset.

All your guilt, all your pain, everything is a pure imaginary shaft you create inside your head. The mistake you did ten years ago, the mistake you did seven years ago and the mistake you did three years ago, are independent and unconnected incidents. But

when you connect them and start thinking about it, naturally you start creating guilt. You start feeling like a continuous sinner. This is one approach.

There is another approach. When you commit a mistake, see objectively why you committed it, how you committed it. Watch as an observer how and why it is getting repeated. Look scientifically into the mechanism of guilt. Just this awareness will open a new door and you will never commit the same mistake again - because once you look into it, and you find the cause, it will disappear. To know a thing totally is to be free of it.