Crippling guilt is just as egoic and "unspiritual" as our original offense.

When we cause suffering to someone - whether intentionally or unintentionally - we do it because we are acting from an enclosed, constricted, and narrow worldview. In other words, we've failed to extend our identity beyond our own ego to include the perspective of the other person, culture, landscape or species whom we've wronged. However, once we become aware of the suffering we've caused, our tendency then is to obsessively beat ourselves up internally for the offense, thinking this will then make things right again.

However, castigating ourselves is actually simply another form of the constricted mindset that caused us to inflict the suffering in the first place! All acts of self-castigation - together with the associated feelings of guilt that afflict us so intensely - are, in truth, just as constricted and narrow as the mindset that caused the original offense! For ALL forms of constriction are, it turns out, innately egoic and imprisoning. As such, they are actually the antithesis of true spirituality, which is inherently open, free and spacious. Psychologically-speaking, the crippling guilt we inflict upon ourselves is even more egoic than the original mindset that caused the wrong in the first place because it has such a tight, heavy, claustraphobic, leaden, oppressive feel to it. It is, in fact, this oppressive tightness that is the very definition of "ego."

My spiritual mentor, Thomas Keating, used to remind me that when we do something wrong, only the original "prick" of conscience can be considered spiritual. Any obsessive feelings of guilt and self-castigation that follow should be regarded as they really are - as "temptations" to be released. For me, the liberating thing is to realize that both the original wrong AND the crippling guilt we feel afterwards arise from the SAME tight, constricted, egoic state of consciousness. The solution is to do what we can to right the wrong, move beyond the constricted worldview that caused it in the first place, AND release the leaden sense of guilt as well, allowing both the offense and the resulting guilt to become a transparent window through to the Light and Spaciousness of the Divine Self in which BOTH constrictions can open and then dissolve! And THAT, I know for a fact, is TRUE liberation :)

Photo: Sunlight shining through a twin-topped Subalpine Fir at treeline, with Niwot Ridge in the background, Indian Peaks Wilderness, CO, January 26, 2015 #NaturePhotoQuotes  #StephenHatch