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:

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

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

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

4. 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 from his mother's eyes and step out. But either way his raw energy is being suppressed. Ifhe forces himself to stay in, his energy is not being allowed to express. If he goes out, he will feel guilty, he will be afraid that somebody might spot him. And all this for nothing big - just for playing in the sun!

As the child grows, this deep engram of guilt will actually settle inside him. Even after he grows up into a man and becomes independent, he may be sitting in the lawn under the sun and those childhood memories may be triggered. He may feel guilty and uneasy for no reason. There is nothing to feel guilty about just sitting in the lawn but the old memories are awakened.

This is how guilt arises. Small incidents like this collect and make guilt your natural way of life.

Why can't we enjoy and encourage the natural joy and happiness the child lives in?

If you look a little deep, you can see that happiness itself has become associated with guilt. A small child knows nothing of guilt - he is just wild and natural. That is why seeing a small child can be so captivating. He is total in whatever he does. He has not been introduced to the mask of civilization. He is still wild. That is why he is so full of energy. He is overflowing with joy and curiosity; he is just vibrating with the energy bubbling inside him.

The child wants to enjoy everything but the parents are filled with the conditionings of society — guilt, seriousness, hypocrisy. The child wants to shout and jump and dance - that is his natural expression. But the adults stop him, 'Don't shout! It is bad manners. You should be civilized. You should carry yourself well like us.' By and by, the notion of being free and happy is itself associated with feelings of guilt.

From seven to fourteen, society creates guilt in you through its rules. The guilt based on fear is created by social laws. Till the age of fourteen, family and society create guilt for you. An important guilt in this is the guilt of sex. Parents or family never open out topic of sex.

When there is a chemical change happening in you, you feel your body is new. A lot of questions arise and clarity is needed but no one is prepared to give it. And to add to the confusion and desire, the media around you constantly bombards you with fantasies in that vulnerable age of change.

To add to it, society instills in you the feeling that you are not enough unto yourself. It makes you feel guilty of what you are, what you do. Once it 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.

‘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

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 psychological states of your mind. One instant the mind may be in hell and the next it may be in heaven — the gates to heaven and hell open and close at any time alternately.

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! You are taught that life is a chain of suffering and endurance, with happiness stepping in once in a while.

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 problem 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 says in the 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 Appo 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.

Please understand that morality should happen out of integrity, not out of guilt.

What do I mean by integrity? Integrity is being in the present moment and being only one solid personality and not many conflicting personalities. It is seeing reality without the play of the mind. Once the mind steps in, duality also steps in. Just by being intensely aware of the present moment, you can achieve integrity where there is only one and not two or three or many personalities 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 personalities 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 consciousness. 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 the very being. Your consciousness tries to break through your conscience. Your consciousness continuously fights with your conscience. Conscience is societal. Consciousness is natural. Conscience is a poor substitute for consciousness.

People ask me, ‘Master, what is this? You are pulling down the whole social structure. Then how can we all live morally?’ I tell them, ‘Be very clear, it is only for kids that you need a forced morality. For them you need to say, ‘Keep quiet, I will give you candy.’ Of course, nowadays kids reply, ‘I am happy. I don’t need your candy. Who cares for your candy!’ For a child you can say that you will give candy and restrict him. You can impose morality on him based on fear or greed. But for you, it is time to grow up. You are not kids anymore. Just stand up with consciousness. When I say consciousness, I mean the intelligent energy of your being.

When anything is a forced rule, you always try to get around it. For example, you always speed when you don’t see the policeman.

A small story: A policeman pulls over a car on the highway for speeding. When he asks for the driver"s license, the driver replies, "But officer I was only trying to keep a safe distance between my car and the car behind me!" When you follow rules blindly without understanding their spirit, this is what happens — you just wait for an excuse to break them.

Honestly answer yourself: if there were no rules, no regulating authority to keep a check on what you did, would you be the same person as you are now? Would you be doing things in the same way as you do now? If your answer is no, be very clear that the rule is coming from your conscience, not from your consciousness. You have not internalized the spirit of the rule or you do not agree with the rule. That is the reason you are not doing things in a way natural to you.

You can see, when you tell children not to do something, they will be most tempted to do it. As long as you don’t mention anything about doing it or not doing it, they may not even be bothered about it. But the moment you tell them not to do something, they will be looking to do it.

A small story: One man says, "I found three ways to get things done."His friend asks, "What are the three ways?" The man replies, "First, do it yourself. Second, hire someone to do it. Third, tell your kids not to do it. That"s all, it will be done!"

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 trfed 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 somebody 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.

A small story: Once a paratrooper was being interviewed on television. The interviewer said, "Your life must be really adventurous." The paratrooper replied, "Yes, it does have its scary moments." The interviewer asked, "What is the most anxious experience in your life?" The paratrooper replied, When I was coming down on the lawn of a house and the sign read, "Keep off the grass!" When you don’t have the right intelligence or understanding, things become dead rules in your life.

When you have understanding, any correct rule can become a friendly technique to live life happily. Rules and rituals are actually techniques for your own enlightenment. When I say enlightenment, I mean a blissful life full of clarity. Of course, when pursued deeply, it will lead to the ultimate state of enlightenment.

A small story: A railway official reported a murder on a train, "The murderer entered the compartment, stabbed the victim multiple times. Then he left the train through the opposite door jumping onto the railway track — there by violating the railway regulations." When you don't have the right understanding, you will miss the whole thing and end up acting in a foolish way. When you are given the right understanding, you will understand that any rule was created just for you and others around you to live a happy and blissful life.

When the spirit of the rule is understood, there won't be any problem falling in line with it. By falling in tune, there will only be juice in your action; there will only be a blissful commitment to it. But if the spirit is missed, everything is missed. Life will seem dull and lifeless. Take meditation for example. Meditation itself is done to go inwards irrespective of the outer world noise and situations. I have seen that some people, before starting their meditation routine, will first try to create a noiseless situation outside. They will go around telling everyone to keep quiet. They will practically freeze people in their normal routine just because they are going to meditate.

Only when the spirit is missed, things become dead rituals. You miss and mess! All rules and regulations were created for a harmonious life with the understanding that you will not kill me and I will not kill you, and both of us will live happily. That was the basic understanding behind them. However in the course of time, they became laws. All rules and regulations were created to live a harmonious and happy life, but the moment you internalize the rules without the understanding, you create guilt. As long as you follow the rules with an understanding, you will be happy. When you start following the words instead of the spirit, you will start creating guilt.

When you want to escape from the law, what do you do? You just catch on to the words of the law and drop the spirit behind them. Then you legally work 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 intelligently 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. "I started talking to her slowly to trace the origin of the problem. I asked her a few questions at the end of which she finally opened up and started weeping. I asked her "Do you have any guilt related to your sex energy? "She slowly opened up. She said she was physically abused when she was very young. One of her close relatives had abused her for many years. That guilt stayed with her. She said, "I started hating that part of my body. I started feeling that that part of the body should not exist in me. I felt that part of my body was not my being. My hatred towards that person turned towards my own body."

Her hatred was so deep. I continued speaking to her. Slowly she opened up more and more. When she brought the guilt out, she came out of the guilt. She was psychologically healed.

I gave her a small meditation technique to meditate on that area. I told her "Express your anger towards that man. Weep, shout, cry, hit. Close the doors, take a pillow, imagine that it is him and show your anger on it. After that sit silently and feel that part of your body also as your own. Feel love towards that part of the body."

You will be surprised that in just ten days the tumor disappeared! It never recurred. Most of our ailments are due to psychological disturbances where guilt plays a major role. Most of the time, our energy flow gets blocked because of guilt. If you look deep, wherever you are not able to move, wherever you are not able to take decisions, wherever you have fear, there will be some guilt lurking.

Acceptance is a wonderful tool to relieve yourself of the pull and push between the past and future. With acceptance you fall into the present straightaway. The first thing is to accept all the happenings of the outer world and all the happenings of the inner world. Whatever problems you have in the outer world and whatever problems you have in the inner world, just accept them in their entirety. Summarize all that you experience as problems and accept them in totality.

Accept all guilt, all mistakes and all failures. Even if you cannot accept, accept that you cannot accept. You will then relax and guilt will drop from your mind.

Just try this small experiment: Just relax for three days with complete acceptance. If you relax for three days without the pull and push in the inner and outer worlds, are you going 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.

From Head to Heart Sit down and close your eyes. Take slow and deep breaths, just for a few minutes. Along with it, feel that your head is being pressed into your heart, into the chest region. Become totally headless. You have no head now. You are headless. Feel that you are breathing from the heart. Feel that you are seeing through the heart. Feel that you are smelling through your heart. Feel very clearly that you are breathing through the heart. Listen through the heart, see through the heart, and feel through the heart.

Stand up. Have the consciousness from the heart and let your movements be as slow as possible. Don't walk. Just move your body around slowly. Remember that you are moving from the heart. Your center is the heart, not the head. Again and again, forget the head. Move from the heart. Remember you are a headless being.

Stand in one place. Now, increase the speed slowly, very slowly. Remember to move from the heart, not from the head. Forget your head. You are a headless being moving. (After few minutes)

Sit down where you are. Just be without the head. Sit only with your heart. Relax.

(After few minutes) Slowly, very slowly, open your eyes.