I would have played a song --Edith Piaf.... "Regrete Rein"-- I Regret Nothing.

A few quotes. Conscience doesn't prevent most people from sinning, it just keeps you from enjoying it. It's that voice that tells us someone is looking. A guilty conscience is the mother of invention. A free conscience is that feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

Archibald MacLeish: "We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent."

A believer is a bird in a cage. A freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing. (Ingersol)

The religious have it easy. They've imagined an authority--and let other authorities set themselves up--that tell them all they can and can't do. They've been trained never to make a decision of their own.

Rational people have a more difficult time; we gotta do it for ourselves. I'll try to help. Soon.

On one hand... all the major religions teach (more or less) about discarding the self; being self-less. But there is something missing from our sense of it, here in the western world. The idea that simple selflessness equals satori, enlightenment, or sainthood may be partly true, but achieving it is not the final result or even the real goal. Even if you aim at selflessness, you'll wind up with a greater and clearer sense of self than before! You may find a self that is without the need to make up for supposed deficiencies; that can help others as well as yourself, and without guilt. Zen is full of paradoxes.

And yet one of the major purveyors of fear and guilt in our culture is religion. The church authorities use it as a form of control, from the shoulds and shalt-nots that they try so hard to instill in helpless children. Catholics and fundamentalists made up over half of my therapy clients.

They give it to ya, then claim that they're the cure for it!

Guilt obscures desires. This is one popular, though destructive, use of guilt. You've failed to accede to someone else's desires, so you feel guilty. The guilt is the more powerful feeling, so your desires get lost under the weight. They'd have you feel guilty for even having a single desire that's your own! Then: to have some level of guilt may seem to "protect" you against the "evil" of having a desire. So there's another sick attractiveness to guilt. Feeling guilty expiates and redeems us? Nonsense! You don't become a "good" person by cultivating the feeling that you're a "bad" person! (Or, maybe if you tried to feel really awful, you'd be sainted...)

Automatic Guilt is a negative identity, and it's not even yours. It comes from parents and peers, etc.. It leads to a hypnotic repetition of those negative self-definers: I am / always / never / don't / can't. That freezes what would otherwise be a naturally occuring change for the better. A lack of growthful change is a damage in itself!

Though guilt may result in a lack of authentic change, it's not the cause. It's the other way around. It's the lack of permission to change that leaves us with guilt (resentment against ourselves). Knowing that we want to change--to proceed toward a goal--and can't, we feel guilty for giving up our identity, our power of rebellion and decision. And it's circular: we feel self-resentment for believing we don't deserve... and we feel we don't deserve anything good after we fail to do as we "should". Those repeated shoulds and self-definers have locked us out of permission to assert ourselves and change our image to a more current version.

The extreme is the hermit; one who can live with guilt and weeds... easier than with self-examination and shelter.

Anticipitory guilt is the expectation that you will always be guilty. It seemed obvious to you as a child that there was so much that could so easily be done so wrong, that you'd never get it all right. You learned to feel guilty before an act, even if you'd consciously decided to do it. The next step could be saving up guilt for the unplanned, unknown next time. Save up a little rain for that sunny day... And your folks seemed so big and omniscient, you thought they knew you were guilty of things you hadn't even thought of doin' yet! Like sex.

All this creates people with many covert styles of getting the goodies otherwise denied them. Some of these styles are about as covert as "cold wars". The obvious and infamous martyr-mom says, as the 18 year-old leaves home (sigh), "I've made the funeral arrangements for the first summer you don't come home to visit." Her comfort zone is staked out and the status quo is nailed down.

Misery loves company, but you are not obligated or required to be that company; it is not helpful.

The flipside of guilt is blame.

You might have a habit of thinking back to your childhood and taking blame for what you would now do much differently. You "could've done better". Relax! This is like blaming the Neanderthal people for not inventing the hang-glider. They could have; out of bamboo, bark-twine and animal membranes. They could've spun silk and cotton to put together a good three-piece suit! (If that proves intelligence...)

A child knows vastly less, yet somehow we think it makes sense to blame the child we were.

We are born as prince/cesses, and our parents turn us into frogs. It's natural for the infant to believe that the world is focused on her/him. So anything that goes wrong is connected to her/his influence, and if obvious bad feelings come of it, then it's her/his fault. These seemingly insignificant assumptions we produce in the child are actually very important.

You learned very early that society was organized far beyond your ken, and that there were vast numbers of behaviors that you had to learn in order to be "OK". You probably thought you absorbed them less well than other people; which, by the way, was the same thing they thought. So we tried to find out what we should do in order to make them coo and smile like they used to. We redoubled our efforts to discover... the secrets of acceptability.

Sometimes people assume that feeling guilty will confirm that they're really not evil. "If I feel guilty, how could I be bad?" Unfortunately, that leaves them with a reward for feeling guilty, and so they're less likely to change the undesirable behavior!

All nonsense. There's nothing good about feeling bad! It's better to assume you're good and do as you will, than assume you're born bad and use enormous effort to fight yourself all your life!

Holding on to a past wrong-doing (or wearing it on the sleeve, as some do) keeps you in it; and prevents your natural learning and growth.

"Guilt enobles" a friend sez? (He didn't mean it.) No, no, no. ...not in itself. It can be used to purposefully lead to a nobler self, but it in no way does it all by itself!

The guilt path should lead from realization to a real (but simple) guilty feeling, to change, to self-forgiveness, to a very modest (and silent) righteousness. Ya gotta deal witt it!

I fear that the shame path, on the other hand, leads from realization to shame, to shame, to shame, to more shame. It tends not to lead to self-examination, because the shame is seen as part of the self, and thence, deserved.

Stress is caused by a lack of decision. Ask yourself why a desire is not automatically a decision. What prevents it? Does a cat stop to think of whether someone wants to pet them? Nooo! "Hi, I'm a cat; you can pet me now." I feel that cats do things without ever having thought of doing them. No cat ever felt guilty.

Guilt is the fear of feelings from the past, and those feelings are powerful role-regressors. {*A thought or happening that takes you back to feeling and acting a role you once had.} Fear aside, your natural desire is to avoid bad feelings. So... what to do?

Now, finally, let's get to the secret. First let's assume you've done something wrong. On reflection, you realize the error of your ways, and you're sorry. Are you guilty? Not necessarily. And if you are, you can get out of it yet.

But there's one big caveat, y'see... one requirement to kill your guilt. And it's not as easy as it sounds. Here 'tis: Ya gotta be sorry. It's easily said. Too easy; because it's not easily done. What does "sorry" mean?

Y' see, if you're sorry, guilt is a false belief... the belief that you are still the same person that did or thought something that you NOW reject. But, to feel guilty, you'd have to be unaware. Unaware that rejecting that action/thought makes you a different person in that small area. Once you've rejected the error, it's too late to feel guilty, because there's already no reason to. Why? If you're truly sorry, that part--that exact person --that "you"-- doesn't exist anymore! ... ...

But no double-think tricks! You can't plan on changing later so as to not then be guilty of what you're planning on doing now! Doing something wrong now with the plan of changing later... makes your "conversion" very suspect; and because you'd know it's phony, what would be the point?

You are not a static thing; you are a process of change. What kind of change is "sorry"? Here it comes! ... Truly sorry means a complete reevaluation, reorganization and change in your core self (as re that certain behavior). The core: ALL the way in! From then on, you don't need to remember why not to do it... because it is not in you. The "you" that you are now... didn't do it!

If you're truly core-sorry, you will make amends without thought and effort, and never do it again. Automatically. Because that behavior isn't "you" any more.

Even if amends cannot be made, yet consideration and awareness have changed us, then the truly guilty part of us no longer exists, and you can just forget it! As my father often quoted, "What is beyond repair may be beyond regard." Or: change what you can, accept what you are sure you can't, and trust your wisdom to feel the difference.

Children are known to claim that "they didn't do it". Maybe they mean that... at that very moment, at least, they feel sorry, and that they've changed. So maybe they're right: they didn't do it.

Here, I was gonna confess my biggest guilty act, but I've run out of time.
Wait --come to think of it, that wasn't me!