What is guilt?

Webster’s Dictionary defines guilt as “remorseful awareness of having done something wrong.”

Guilt is very insidious because it is so pervasive. We have been taught as a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition that we are born in sin, that our whole life is based on the erroneous assumption that we are “wrong” and that we must be made “right”. 

I counseled a person who was learning to live in love’s way. She had created a life that was rife with all abuses, big and small, from emotionally abusive parents, to an emotionally abusive partner, to an emotionally abusive boss. She took a 90-day break from her partner and for the first time was able to get to know, love, appreciate and accept herself. She found someone—within her—that she didn’t even know existed. She then went back to her partner, and her partner had changed. She saw subtle changes in her boss, and she saw subtle changes in her life. She had a hard time believing, receiving and envisioning this “miracle” that occurred could be sustained, because her belief in her inherent “wrongness” was so deep. We had to work much more assiduously at changing the deeper perception that somehow she was wrong, and bad, and odd than we had to do to make the concrete changes in her life. The deep consciousness of guilt–—the erroneous belief that she was somehow wrong—was so “all encompassing” that she didn’t believe her eyes and her current experiences; she could only believe her conditioning, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is how powerful the feeling of guilt is.  

I have a friend who described guilt as a “grinding and unshakeable” internal feeling that wherever he was, he should be somewhere else; whatever he was doing he should be doing something else; and whoever he was, he should be someone else. In our families, we always wonder if we could have said something, or done something that would have made a loved one make a different choice.  On our jobs, we wonder if there was one more thing that we could have done. In our lives we wonder if there is one way that we could be better, and this keeps us from seeing the wonderful unique beings of light that we are. 

So what is guilt? Guilt is an error of perception.  According to A Course In Miracles, sin and guilt are errors of perception. We have believed that we were separate from God and had to get back into God’s good graces like the Prodigal Son.   

Where did guilt begin? In the mind of man. Guilt has been an invention of the mind of man that believed in the separation. It all started in the oral tradition. According to biblical scholar Dr. Rocco Errico (who took the original text of the Bible and translated them back into their original meaning based on the culture and history of the time), because tradition was passed down orally, they used vivid word pictures, flowery language, and stories (like the parable of the Prodigal Son) to illustrate spiritual teachings. As a result, concepts like heaven and hell were formed and the concept of God became personified —as a man with a white beard sitting on a cloud in a robe, waiting to hurl a thunderbolt at us.  

Hell was never a physical place. Outside Jerusalem, they burned the garbage because of sanitation and this was conflated with the story of King Ahaz (in the Old Testament) or Jacob (in the New Testament) who was told by God to go outside the city gates (where incidentally, there was an everlasting fire) and sacrifice his only son. Name your most prized possession. What would happen if you were asked to give up your most prized possession? You’d be confused too. So this concept—this inner state of internal confusion and conflict and drama—became called Gehenna, after the name of the trash dump. When a person was in such a state (Gehenna) they were confused, angry, and doubtful about God. The German translation for Gehenna is Hell.  Hell is not a place—hell is a mental construct. The early church fathers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, created doctrine and created hell as a literal place that you go as opposed to an internal state. However, Jesus said it best, “Know ye not that the kingdom of heaven lies within you?” The concepts of heaven and hell are internal states of being and we don’t have to feel guilty about our past in the worry that our past will doom us to a future state of hell. We create that hell due to the guilt that has only been an invention of the mind of man.  

Therefore, we don’t have to let the shackles of guilt bind us into old patterns that rob us of our peace, cause us harm, and little by little sap our spirits from being the vibrant, living dynamic reflections of God’s creativity, loving essence, and joy from us.  

Realize your oneness with God. Not just in theory, but when you breathe in God, experience the grace of God surrounding you like a shield, feel a sense of love filling your heart, and open to an inner peace that passes all understanding. It begins with a choice. Choose the consciousness of love.