Going Neither Backward nor Forward

The ego believes that the guilty must suffer and this is reflected in the world it experiences. Guilt is the glue that seems to firmly hold together your existence. Punishment is the chief theme of your egocentric existence and the world is chock full of "offenses" and "violations" requiring the guilty be punished.

The ego’s guilt simply confirms that you MUST always be less than what YOU ARE and for that, you must consistently punish your 'self' by struggling and sacrificing to be MORE than the LESS you believe you ARE. This is why you are always your own worst enemy, since no one could ever punish you as comprehensively as “you.” As you know, sometimes you really are a royal butthead and you cannot deny this.

Therefore, the ego’s self-actualization (or what you refer to as "self-development," Ha!) through guilt only continues to diminish you. Yet, what would “you” be without guilt? The dynamic is simple. It demands you be guilty and hate yourself for what you are NOT NOW. Make no mistake, if you did not experience guilt, the ego could not exist, because guilt keeps the ego firmly fixated on the past so it can fabricate its ‘story’ of a future "you." Without a past, the ego could not inject itself into a future and without a conceptualized future why else would “you” exist (asks the ego)?

The egocentric world teaches that guilt is impure and you must suffer and sacrifice in order to achieve purity, not now, but IN THE FUTURE. But to make it ‘there,’ you must never forget your past, because “who” would get there without a past to identify with? Religious ideologies (churches) have been constructed almost entirely from the concept of guilt and sin, requiring you seek to “atone” for your past. But, make no mistake, "atonement" is an ego’s greatest fear, since without guilt to weave together its delusions, it would simply dissolve into nothingness.

Then “who” would you be?

Nevertheless, contrary to the ego’s need for your guilt, it also requires your innocence.  The ego is a “master of spin” and can rationalize and justify even the most horrendous knowledge to avoid guilt. The ego demands you be guilty, but only to reinforce its self-actualizing IN the world. Therefore, the ego will easily fabricate its experiences in order to achieve a fragile tension between guilt and innocence, so that you are never completely guilty nor completely innocent (an ego can only exist through incompletion seeking completion). In this way “you” can be PART of everything, but the WHOLE of nothing, demanding “you” seek to be ever more in the future.

You could never be completely innocent, since this would be perfection and the ego-self could NOT exist in complete perfection. Yet, you could never experience complete guilt either, since you might seek to destroy your ‘self’ (note how suicide is becoming a chief cause of death for U.S. combat soldiers).  Therefore, the ego solves this problem by superimposing guilt into its fabricated experience of an ‘outer’ world. Guilt is normal and there are always others more guilty than you (as well as those more innocent). One thing is certain to the ego, guilt is a part of you BECAUSE it is a part of your world. For the ego-self, “you” are the weakest link, because you are only a PART of the world and the WHOLE of nothing.

Guilt is always the chief aspect of the past, which means it can never be absent in your future and, therefore, never absent from “you.” You may argue for some degree of innocence. Yet, you do believe you are incomplete and, even though you seek for completion, this demands you suffer, since the incomplete must always be guilty of something, simply by nature of what you think you ARE.

“Self-development” is the ego’s attempt to keep you invested in the past by promising a future that is absent the suffering known to the past. But you must never forget what you are guilty OF, in the hope that it will NOT be repeated in the future. Now guilt is what you ARE, since the future has yet to be known and without guilt how will you know your ‘self’ when you arrive?

For the guilty who seek a better future free of self-punishment, that future must never arrive because...

... how can you ever be free of that which you CHOOSE to bring with you?

The infinite player has NO interest in the future and this mitigates ALL investment in the past. The infinite player realizes that it is NOT the past that need be surrendered… but the FUTURE. It is the future that demands you reference a past and guilt is always there, waiting to be remembered.

To play life’s games INFINITELY denies the future and thus, reformulates the past to extinguish guilt. To play infinitely is to be unconcerned with future outcomes based on past performance. Infinite play discovers NOW by simply denying the effects of the past because the future is NO longer contingent on it. Think about all the outcomes you desired for your future and how this often changed with the wind, only to be replaced by new goals and objectives when the old ones were seen as no longer viable.

The future is what you suffer from, NOT the past.

The infinite player has no future, since what plays infinitely is beyond time constraints and is most assuredly NOW. With NO future to press your ‘self’ into, the chains of the past have no meaning and life becomes a connecting string of surprising moments weaved into one infinite fabric. There is NO guilt in NOW, because there is no past nor future and without that, “who” or “what” is guilty? Who or what has ‘sinned’? Who or what has succeeded or failed or must be concerned with karma or is not awakened to truth?

Your identifying with a future makes all this necessary.

Surrender the future and the guilt of the past can only fade like a morning fog. Yet when the fog lifts be prepared for surprise, because there is little doubt you will see the world differently when you NO longer see guilt.

Besides, does it really matter what the future holds?

Maybe to "you"...


Artwork by Piercarlo Carella - "Evolution - A ticket to nowhere"