Guilt: A Spiritual Matter, Part 4

Life-Affirming Guilt

Life-affirming guilt preserves and sustains our spirit and life so that we can fulfill the life-affirming desires of our hearts. It is based in our immediate experience, instincts, and intuition.

It's about our present experience of our immediate past treatment of another living being. 

Life-affirming guilt is analogous to physical pain. The physical pain we feel when we touch fire tells us that fire is a threat to our life. Likewise, the acute guilt we feel after we mistreat, threaten, injure, or end the life of another living being tells us that such actions threaten the other's spirit and life. It re-enforces the value of the spirit and life of every living being.

Life-affirming guilt teaches us on the basis of our own experiences. It teaches us to avoid behaviors that threaten the life of others. 

The feeling of guilt in our spirit teaches us how not to behave so that we may live life-affirming lives in relation to to others.

We do well to recognize and banish life-denying, mind-based guilt. We do well to recognize and develop life-affirming, spirit-focused guilt. It sustains our life, re-enforces the value of life, and enables us to fulfill the life-affirming desires of our hearts.

Guilt: A Spiritual Matter, Part 3

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.

Guilt: A Spiritual Matter, Part 1

Like fear, guilt is an acute condition of our spirit. Guilt is real and plays an important role in our lives. We do well to develop rather than diminish our ability to feel guilty. 

Guilt indicates that we mistreated, threatened, injured, or ended the life of another living being. Since spirit is that which makes alive and guilt indicates that we harmed a living being, guilt is a matter of the spirit.

It is more a thumological rather than psychological event. 

While we do well to develop our ability to feel guilty, it is important to understand that there are two kinds of guilt: life-denying and life-affirming.

My next post will be about life-denying guilt.