Life-Denying Guilt Continued
Life-denying guilt hinders or spoils fulfilling the life-affirming desires of our hearts. It is mind-based. Our thoughts (self talk) and imaginings (mental images) informed by external moral standards provoke it.
Life-Denying Guilt As Preventative
Sometimes the mentally internalized, external moral standards prevent us from fulfilling the life-affirming desires our hearts by making us feel guilty before we do anything. We feel guilty for merely thinking about or imaging doing something life-affirming that might violate the standard. Such guilt can lead us to think less of ourselves and the value of our lives.
Life-Denying Guilt As Spoiler
At other times the mentally internalized moral standards make us feel guilty after we fulfill the natural, life-affirming desires of our hearts. We feel guilty after we fulfill life-affirming desires because the moral standards we have internalized, which are life-denying, tell us that fulfilling such desires is wrong. Such life-denying guilt spoils our life-affirming actions by giving us a bad conscious for commiting life-affirming in violation of the internalized life-denying standards.
Whether we feel life-denying guilt before or after we act, our spirit is diminished and we think less of ourselves.
The Past Orientation of Life-Denying Guilt
When we violate the mentally internalized moral standard, our feelings of guilt make us past-oriented. They are mind-based responses to the memories of what we did.
We might replay the memories in our minds and repeatedly regret our actions and try to undo what we did. We might repeatedly confess, apologize, and vow to never do it again. We might ask to be forgiven in order to relieve us from feeling so guilty. As we do all of this, we live caught up in a memory and feelings of guilt rather than in what we're experiencing at the moment and living our lives now.
The problem is not what we did. The problem is the mentally internalized, life-denying, moral standard of those who would exercise power over us.
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