Let's End Moral Guilt: Part One

Imagine a world without guilt. Your life doesn't hit the speed bumps of feeling you have to somehow make up for a past behavior or experience. Or that your nature and behavior is intrinsically tarnished in some way. Your energy is not consumed by directing you away from the present moment, forcing you to carry the weight of your past or fear for your future (as a sinner). Instead, you realize mistakes, intended and unintended, are part of discovering who you are. That there are skills and techniques you can develop through self-cultivation that do not require you to feel shame or frustration or struggle through never-ending loops of guilt, resolution, and guilt again.

You don't have to plead to higher powers for inherently temporary forgiveness or turn to alcohol and drugs to forget your inner guilt. You are free of all that. You accept responsibility for your life without perpetual damnation or rituals of atonement. Mistakes are the building blocks which will only make you stronger. On your own terms.

I am guiltless. I am guilty of nothing at all. I am free from that gnawing daily sensation that I did something wrong and must somehow make it right. I don't lay awake at night wrestling with guilty feelings, beseeching pardons. I don't dream of guilt. I don't awaken with guilt on my mind, unable to shake it even after attaining either amnesty or forgiveness for my alleged guilt. I am free of guilt.

It was not always this way. I used to feel guilty all the time. As a kid growing up, as a teenager doing mischief, as a wild college partying guy, I often wallowed in guilt, sometimes sobbing in my heavy burden of guilt. So I know what guilt is, what it feels like, the misery it causes in a person's life. I remember the feeling all too well. My banishment of guilt in no way causes me to forget the weight that guilt once held upon my Being.

Exactly when or how I became rid of guilt I cannot tell you. It was never a specific goal of mine, only something I came to notice about myself in the past tense. It seems to me now that it happened about the time I returned from India. Maybe it was all the meditation and yoga I was doing daily back then. All I know is that I have rarely (see here) felt guilty about anything in the last 35 or so years.

Even more importantly, I do not project guilt onto the lives of other people. Family, friends, whoever, I may criticize and even judge but I do not hold any of them as guilty of something nor expect any judgment of mine to be taken seriously by anyone other than myself (which is one benefit to letting go of guilt). If I think something I do will cause guilt in another person then I do not behave in a way to make that happen. After all, if I am going to banish guilt from my life it would hypocritical for me to dish out guilty feelings toward others, as is so common across humankind. People are constantly “guilting” each other, a behavior I equate with something on the order of gossip – I don't engage in. We need a transformation beyond guilt.

To be clear, I am not talking about regrets. I have plenty of those. I should have done so many things in my life better than I did (see link above). There are many things I should not have done at all. But what's done is done. What should have been done is past. If I can apply my regrets constructively through self-cultivation then those regrets have nothing to do with what I will do /now/. Also, I am not talking about legal guilt either. Committing fraud, embezzlement, murder, arson, burglary, assault, or rape are all valid reasons for guilt. Ethics still applies. What I experience now, rarely, is /ethical/ guilt.

Moral guilt is what I don't experience or project toward anyone. Moral guilt has lost its original power and relevance to living a fulfilling life. There are better ways to deal with the underlying issues moral guilt was originally intended to address (it did its job in its time, as I will mention next). What we feel as moral guilt can be addressed in ways more effectively than the atonement or forgiveness mandated by moral codes.

Thousands of years ago, we lived our lives according to a moral code and if we broke that code we felt guilty. (Most people still live this way, which is one more reason we are more ancient than modern.) Initially, morality was probably based on things people naturally felt guilty about like cheating, lying, or certain urges and desires. Morality began simply as culturally recognized guilt meticulously inventoried and codified by religion. More often than not, moral guilt played guilt on itself, causing people to feel terrible about their lives, inducing various psychological conditions such as shame, sorrow and self-hate. Even today, this guilt swallows up vast amounts of your psychic energy as you wrestle with its emotional complexity.

For many centuries, moral guilt has been used to regulate individual behaviors and maintain social order by making people feel ashamed or obligated to atone for perceived transgressions. However, today we understand that guilt-based compliance comes at a detrimental cost to human well-being and imagination.

Guilt predates any scientific understanding of psychology, human development or ethics. Yet now we recognize that forced guilt actively harms mental health and blocks individual growth (outside of religious development itself, religion monopolizes it's authority on guilt). Carrying guilt strips people of agency over their lives and actions in favor of appeals outside oneself. Excessive guilt is linked to anxiety, depression, and lowered self-esteem without any offsetting gain. In short, guilt's capacity to regulate behavior relies on emotional distortion and ignorance, not enlightened understanding. (I have mentioned this before here.)

In the contemporary context, guilt remains pervasive yet serves no function that could not be better achieved through self-cultivation, compassion, responsibility, communication, and focusing on preventing future harms rather than judging the past (and trapping you in the past). People still routinely suffer guilt rooted in outdated religious notions of sin and necessary atonement. This is forced guilt and it provides more institutional control than social benefit. Moral guilt is a tribal habit that swelled into the power and authority of most major religions.

As a complex self-conscious emotion, guilt likely evolved as an adaptive signal of social norm violation. Early human groups could then utilize guilt to dissuade behaviors that might threaten group cohesion and trust. The capacity for guilt became part of our biological inheritance, in no small part because most humans tended to experience guilt about certain behaviors – the very real emotional experiences out of which religions formed their power. Common people tend to feel badly about not living up to certain community standards.

Therefore, while excessive guilt is unhealthy today, the basic guilt response persists due to its deep evolutionary and neurological roots. Our social nature endowed us with guilt much like it gave us capacity for empathy. This unfortunately afforded institutions fertile ground to magnify guilt through rigorous indoctrination.

Among the population at large it is almost an unquestioned habitual pattern. If you don't feel moral guilt you are probably psychopathic or something, so they claim. But, rather than prove the necessity of morality in guilt, it merely speaks to how ingrained guilt has become psychologically. Moral guilt is parasitic. Unraveling its grip will prove challenging given its deep historical roots and neurological habit. Despite having little positive purpose today, guilt arose and embedded itself into societies and institutions over thousands of generations. All because it was once the only “system” or “power” we had to control human society.

Religious indoctrination in particular normalizes guilt from early childhood as a moral necessity. The design of guilt used crude religious notions of "sinfulness" or “wrongfulness” requiring atonement to justify emotional manipulation and thought control. Religious authorities weaponized guilt without scientific understanding, of course, yet its legacy persists. Generations of faith-based messaging is hard to overcome.

Religions weaponized guilt millennia ago when there was no conception of mental health versus psychological harm. Antiquated faiths induced guilt by declaring innate aspects of human nature and behavior as irredeemably sinful or faulty, claiming transgressions deserved eternal damnation unless properly atoned. Fear is a huge motivator in guilt. You can't have one without the other, which is so very harmful to each of us.

Religious institutions forced guilt by teaching followers they were born sinners unable to be moral without obeying dogmatic rules and authority. Guilt was intentionally imposed through threat and shame. Faith-based indoctrination conditioned children to normalize guilt before critical thinking developed as a self-practice. Victims internalized the guilt as a false necessity for redemption, lacking wisdom to recognize the manipulation. Only servitude and atonement could supposedly absolve the imagined sins and guilt that religions deliberately fabricated and ingrained for control over society.

Despite the emergence of secular ethics, ingrained religious notions still perpetuate guilt today. Many faiths maintain doctrines of original sin, commandments with threatened punishments, and redemption only through moral authorities. This preserves power for clergy and institutions that determine absolution. Religions continue pressuring guilt by claiming human flaws can only be overcome through faith, obedience and atonement dictated by them.

Rather than promote self-forgiveness and positive growth, dogmatic beliefs keep followers psychologically chained to guilt. (You are always a “sinner” whether or not you have transgressed recently.) Moral guilt became weaponized by religious and social institutions for power and control throughout history (though I do not claim religions did this intentionally. No one said, “Hey, let's codify everything we feel guilty about and use it against everybody”). However, these institutions could only leverage guilt so effectively because it rests upon innate emotional phenomena hardwired into the human brain.

The neurological wiring of moral guilt even impacts those without any religious faith. As the world begins to pivot away from religion with the growth of secularization, alternative spirituality, and the increase of religious “nones,” people still wrestle with guilt because they do not have the tools to redirect the experience of it in their brains.

Nevertheless, emotional responses remain malleable, even if difficult to recondition once entrenched. The brain's basic neuroplastitcity allows for emotional change and transformation. As ethics and emotional intelligence evolve culturally, society has opportunities to reshape its relationship with guilt. Though unlikely eliminated entirely, guilt's purpose may be productively reframed - from dwelling in shame to catalyzing reconciliation. In essence, grasping guilt's innate basis reminds us that constructive evolution requires wisdom - not damnation. Most of us are not so wise yet, but that can change.

Recognizing moral guilt is introjected manipulation as much as one's true conscience is liberating. Identifying core values, and understanding these values need not apply to anyone other than yourself (that's important), provides anchor for moral reasoning beyond guilt. Forgiving oneself for imagined sins releases energy to live purposefully. No longer carrying the weight of the past opens the future.

Practices like mindfulness meditation and self-acceptance therapies help individuals transcend struggling with guilt, holding back their potential. Mindfulness builds awareness to objectively observe guilt feelings without identifying with or being controlled by them. This diffuses guilt's visceral power over thoughts and choices. Self-acceptance emphasizes innate human worth versus dwelling on flaws. It counters the judgmental forces driving moral guilt.

Psychologists have developed effective cognitive-behavioral techniques to reframe guilt-based thinking patterns into self-compassion. These and similar methods adjust how guilt has been subconsciously embedded to unlock personal capacities guilt previously obscured. With diligent practice, even deeply rooted guilt can be productively transformed into motivation for moral betterment. This is my personal experience.

Abandoning culturally-ingrained guilt (which usually takes work, I only developed it through other life practices) presents a newly liberated sense of lightness and control over our thoughts. Letting go of past sins frees huge amounts of psychic energy previously wasted on rumination and anxiety over imagined transgressions. Relief comes from recognizing one's constant inherent worth versus endless atonement (once a sinner always a sinner or why can't I escape my faults?). 

Living each moment fully present becomes possible without guilt dragging us back into regressive thoughts. Self-acceptance reduces defensive avoidance, enabling self-accountability. Feelings of interconnection increase when others are no longer judged. In these ways, individuals who have transcended taught guilt experience profound benefits including improved mood, resilience, creativity and sense of purpose. It becomes clear guilt only obstructed their human potential.

(to be continued)