Your ideas of shame and guilt are a social phenomenon. What people feel guilty about in one society, they do not feel guilty about in another society. Shame and guilt are not natural. It is just that certain religions have made you feel guilty about everything. If you list out all the things they consider as sin that you should feel guilty about, you must feel guilty about being alive, because your very birth is supposed to be sin. All your life, you feel guilty. If certain religious teachings were not there, guilt and shame would not exist. If there was no room for guilt and shame, you would correct your actions. Guilt and shame gives you a lot of shadowy area in your life. You can endlessly do the same stupid things, feel guilty about it, wash your guilt away, do the same things again…
Guilt and shame come from social conscience, not from universal consciousness.
People who have been taught great levels of shame and guilt are the ones who commit too many things because there is always a way to fix the guilt, every week. Consciousness is one thing – conscience is another thing. Consciousness is the basis of life and existence. Spiritual process is about consciousness, not conscience. Conscience is a socially set up mechanism, usually with a religious basis, which makes you feel guilty of this or that or everything in your life. When you feel guilty, you will become subservient in some way.
You do not need a conscience – you need consciousness, because consciousness is inclusive. This inclusion fixes your actions. You do not do something not because you think it is wrong. You know that you would not like to do it to yourself, so you would not like to do it to someone else. You know it would not work for yourself, so you would not want to do it for someone else. That is all it is. Consciousness fixes you because of your inclusiveness. Conscience tries to fix you with guilt, fear, punishment, and shame. This is something that makes a human being feel like a wretch, and you cannot expect a human being to grow when he or she feels like a wretch. Instilling shame and guilt means there is no interest in the growth, transformation, and transcendence of human beings. There is only interest in holding them on the leash. Guilt and shame come from social conscience, not from universal consciousness.
"To plunge into the core of life is the only sacredness there is. To live superficially is the only sin."
If you remove the idea of what is right and wrong from your life, you will see that everyone is handling their life the way they know it. Everyone is doing whatever they think is best at that moment. Even a criminal killing someone does it because he thinks that is the best thing to do at that moment. It is not a question of right and wrong, it is only a question of whether certain actions are necessary or unnecessary for our life. That is all we have to look at.
Unfortunately in every society, since childhood, people have constantly fed you with concepts of what is sin and virtue, good and bad. If you look at all the things that are supposed to be a sin, the whole of humanity is always sinning. In such a situation, people naturally become a little deceitful while doing simple activities in their life.
It is only because there is no peace and joy within us that we need teaching.
The one who is performing some activity is going through guilt and the one who is looking at it is suspicious and judgmental because if you are in this state of mind, you can’t help being suspicious.
If you take away your judgments about life, life is happening in so many ways – crazy ways. You take what you want from it and leave what you don’t want. That’s all you can actually do with life. But if you label this action as good and that action as bad, you invariably become suspicious. And there is a lot of room and scope for suspicion because so many people are doing what you think is bad, including yourself.
You have created virtue and sin and then you wonder why guilt, why suspicion? They are by products, you cannot help it. If you don’t want guilt and suspicion in this world, you must take away sin and virtue, right and wrong, and see life the way it is. But we are not willing to take away virtue and sin. The whole world is playing a huge game based on this. We are neither conducting our lives with our intelligence and awareness, nor with our humanity. Unfortunately, we are trying to conduct our life through morality.
If your humanity was in full bloom, would someone have to teach you as to what’s right, what’s wrong, what to do and what not to do? It would happen naturally.
You are conducting your life by your morality, so guilt and suspicion are natural outcomes of that. If you conduct your life on the basis of the quality and exuberance of your humanity, there will be neither guilt nor suspicion.
