I had a client recently, made a mistake at work, that they felt guilty about. And it was bothering them; ‘playing on their mind’, so to speak.
It's a funny one, guilt, isn't it? New Order wrote a (really great) song called Guilt Is A Useless Emotion, and d'you know, I'm inclined to agree!
What purpose does guilt serve?
“It shows we care, Giles!”
Umm, ok. Can you care, without guilt? Sure you can, and do! Guilt's not necessary for caring.
“It prevents us from making the same mistakes again!”
Erm, does it though? It might do (if the feeling is so mortifying that the mind-body will do anything to avoid feeling it again), but equally, it might not.
I could feel guilty every single time I open up the cupboard with all the biscuits in it… and yet keep on doing it.
🤷🏻♂️
So what's it for?
I'm not a social anthropologist, so I don't really care, nor am I that motivated to come up with hypotheses, or investigate other people's.
I like a simple life.
Speaking of which, I do know two things. Firstly:
All behaviour lies downstream of present-moment understanding. So we make ‘mistakes’, yes. We take actions and do things from a state of mind that—sitting in a lab, debating the pros and cons and having crystal clear perspective—we might not normally do.
Welcome to the human race, my friend! It's a bit like that, had you noticed?
😆
And then layered on top of that, there's the feeling of guilt.
So secondly, let's remember this:
Feeling is thought. The two are inseparable.
Guilt doesn't mean anything. It's just a mind, looking in on a situation, judging it against its own rules that it made up (created from your past), and passing judgement.
(On itself 🙄)
Why would you want to get involved in any of that?!
There's a chapter on guilt in Ankush Jain's book, Sweet Sharing, where he comes to this conclusion himself. Feeling regret over past actions, he ‘tries to be a better person’ but realises that his motivation is still tied into guilt, which is just making the whole thing worse – he has to feel bad, in order to behave nicely!
Eventually he sees deeply that feelings of guilt are just a reflection of thought, temporarily taking a ‘guilty’ form, none of which has anything whatsoever to do with him as a person, or how he behaves, or anything really.
It's just thought – it comes and it goes! As do all thought forms.
We've all done things we regret. We've all made mistakes. We've all hurt other people.
(Honestly, I could quite easily sit here, right now and bring to mind myriad actions of the past that fall way short of the mind's values, and as a result, I would feel really bad. That's how it works!)
And yet, that was then, this is now. What happened, happened.
Who—and how—are you going to be, right now?
Present to life, or lost in thought?
That means you, it means me, it means everyone and every mistake and terrible sin ever committed, in the history of mankind.
We don't need guilt to learn. Learning happens all on its own.
And at the same time, of course it's ok to feel guilt. (It's ok to feel anything!)
It's harmless mind-activity, passing through.
If you let it.
💟
Giles
p.s. if I've missed something and my shameless lack of research into the usefulness of guilt has got you all hot under the collar, let me know in the comments below, or drop me an email!
p.p.s. I love being wrong.
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Giles P Croft
Making mistakes on an epic scale. 🇫🇷🍺🍻🥴💦🌑🖼️🚽💤😂