Guilt is a part of man’s evolutionary process. If you have no guilt, your mental or emotional progress will be blocked. There is of course a better and worse side of you. The dark side of your guilt affects your personality and develops complexes in your personality, but there are also brighter sides of guilt. Because of this guilt you develop an analytical mind, you search within yourself and because of guilt you are able to balance your ego.
Guilt is created by the social and religious traditions, but apart from that, man is born with guilt. It is in your nature like hunger, sleep, passion. This comes with man’s evolution. Therefore, even if you completely renounce a religion you cannot renounce guilt. There are many people who do not believe in religion, many people who do not believe in God and many people who do not believe in goodness, but still they have guilt because they are born with it.
This is related to your religion and religion is defined by society. Your behaviour may develop guilt in your mind today, because your society has accepted the values of that religion. Society has decided that you should not drink, so if you do that you develop guilt. After one hundred years, the social values may change so your guilt will also change. Suppose I am a Hindu. I do not have guilt in certain respects. In the next generation, my children may become Christians. They may develop the complexes of those situations where I did not have a complex. So, to understand guilt, first of all you have to understand that guilt is necessary to a certain extent.
In order to direct the life of a common man, there has to be some amount of guilt in him. As you grow in spiritual life, the guilt automatically erodes because when you get spiritual knowledge the whole identity of a doer changes. Now you think, ‘I do it, so the mistake is mine and I am guilty.’ After you grow in spiritual life, you begin to think, ‘I don’t do it; I am a puppet in the hands of Nature’ or ‘I am a puppet in the hands of God. He is almighty; He could control me, but He wants me to do it, so His will will be done!’
You say to yourself, ‘I am not the doer; my boss tells me to do this, because God is my boss. He tells me to do this so I am doing it. I am not free. I am under the compulsion of Nature. I am under the compulsion of God. God is almighty. Nature is almighty. I am only a simple person, a small man, so I am not the doer. I am not guilty. A mistake has been made. I didn’t do it. The mind has done it, but I am not the boss of the mind. I am the slave of the mind. The mind is under the control of the forces of prakriti, sattwa, rajas and tamas. My mind has to work under the compulsion of prakriti. Therefore, I am not responsible, so I am not guilty.’
As you grow in spiritual life you realize your own littleness. You realize the greatness of Nature and God and you do not identify with the guilt. You identify with the guilt as long as you have a fat ego. You say, ‘I did it,’ so you are guilty. When you have no ego, you are a little man and then you are not guilty. This is an idea which you have to superimpose on yourself on account of the fat ego, and as you grow in spiritual life you disidentify yourself.
Great saints and sages spoke like this, ‘I do not do anything. I am like a hollow bamboo. Someone is playing me. I am the tool and the mechanism is using me. I am a motor car; the driver is driving me. If there is any accident, it is not the mistake of the car; it is the mistake of the driver. It is the mistake of Nature. Guilt belongs to Nature or it belongs to God, not to me.’ This is important.
However, I tell you that guilt is necessary to some extent because it balances certain aspects of your personality and one should understand it to this extent and accept guilt, otherwise you will say, ‘Oh, it is not my mistake, it is all yours.’ That means I am always right and you are always wrong. Well, if this happens there will be chaos.
Therefore, in order to balance this, there has to be some amount of guilt in you. I may be wrong; you are also wrong I know. I am also wrong. This is how guilt balances the foolishness of man’s personality. If this guilt goes beyond the limit, there are problems in your behaviour. An overdose or over-presence of guilt in the personality can change your manner and behaviour. Guilt can also create physical diseases. This may also change your features and mannerisms. It can also aggravate your complexes like inferiority, or sometimes if your guilt is over-present in your personality, it can make you kill people.
I have also seen that an over-presence of guilt can change the distribution of minerals in the body. Many years ago, I met a lady who always thought that everybody was dirty. She used to go to the bathroom every now and then and wash. Many times a day she used to wash her feet with soap. Six or seven times, the whole day, she used to change her dress and do many other funny things. She thought that I was also dirty, but she did not know that she was sick. She thought that she was alright.
Her husband had great problems because he used to smoke and she would not go and touch that cigarette packet. She used to hate that smell. She did not smoke herself I believe, but why should she hate a cigarette packet and why should she hate the person who is smoking? She became a great problem to her husband. I gave her one little homoeopathic medicine because I knew that she was suffering from lack of mineral assimilation. In sixteen days she became alright. All her behaviour in this respect was normal. She became just a normal being taking bath once or twice a day. She did not agree with her husband’s smoking but did not hate it, did not clean her plate five times, did not clean her soap before cleaning.
Whether this non-distribution of minerals caused that thinking or that thinking caused the non-distribution of minerals is very difficult to say, but from my experience I think they are interrelated. Whether the egg comes first or the chicken, they are interrelated. On the one side, your physiological qualities are diminishing; on the other side, your psychological division is deteriorating and at a particular level they begin to interact upon each other.
Finally, about guilt. I think it is the strength of mind that is important and we should live with guilt, analyse ourselves and try to improve ourselves as much as possible.
1983, Spain