Forever innocent

hell is other people

(Jean-Paul Sartre)

What I am about to say is not easy. It is not easy because it is all unconscious. But I hope we can come to reveal the truth of it, by coming to see the reason and the logic of what I am trying to proclaim. You have to be the judge of what I am trying to convey.

What I am about to try and explain, concerns guilt, and it concerns the ego, and its eternal hate for the light.

Let me start at the point where it all started for me.

Some days ago, I was meditating, and all of a sudden, it was like a big storm ran through me, a storm of aggressive preaching of feelings of guilt and needing to make things up. You know, like people who are giving each other shit. You say ‘and you did this and that and now you have to do this and that to make it up to me’. It was preaching like a thunderstorm and it was not calm at all. It was one big strong and heavy wind that contained a lot of penalties and obligations to redeem. Some extreme piece of guilt, very compelling and enraged. Like one big giant storm wind out of nowhere.

It was accusing, and it was demanding penitence, it was demanding gratification.

It was enraged.

And then, feeling that storm that was just raging through me, like coming from nowhere, I felt a tiny little being sitting under that storm wind, bent and frozen, burning and burning in the purest form of guilt. And then I understood people. I understood that they are not to blame.

You see, as a psychologist, and a psychoanalyst, and even only as some kind of homegrown philosophy brewer, I have come to the conviction that people treat other people the way they are treating themselves. They do unto others as they do unto themselves. And when you see someone being harsh on someone else, this calls for compassion, as you can be sure they are now being harsh on that other person for one moment, but they are forever and always just as harsh upon themselves. They make the other person suffer for one moment, just as they are suffering themselves all of the time.

A psychoanalyst would say they are acting out.

Feelings of guilt?

It is interesting to put this line of thought in a psychodynamic context and language. It is all very logical and very clear. But it is also very disturbing and revealing at the same time.

For when we say ‘we’ are being harsh on ‘ourselves’, it is really the ego that is raging against our hearts and souls. And the heart, experiencing that ego, is consumed by the fire of guilt. It is burning in it. This is the atmosphere of hell, this is what the devil does to the light.

Why then? You may ask.

Because the devil must make the light small, if he is to survive. It is the only chance he’s got.

For the devil is darkness, and darkness cannot exist in the presence of the light.

So it must chase the light away, it must make it small and keep it small.

So he preaches… heavily, insane guilt.

You are guilty, you are bad… the ego is yelling at the soul. Get out of my sight, go somewhere where I don’t have to see you. So the way the devil treats the light, is by trying to make it small. This is the preaching of guilt.

Burning in guilt, the soul is frozen, bent and dead.

But it would not stay that way. The soul would live up again, and stand in its eternal native health, and speak again. And the darkness would once again disappear.

Of course, this may not be. This can never happen. It would be a disaster if the darkness were to die. So the way to instill this constant state of dimness of the light, is to never stop the preaching. To keep the guilt installed and to keep the guilt alive in a basic state of repression.

This bending of the light, I believe, is the feeling associated with the mirror stage Lacan has described to us. It is when the shadow comes into our lives, and starts controlling what was once innocence, awareness, purity and light.

All of a sudden, we are ashamed, and it is the devil that makes us so.

In a second time and movement, in a second operation, as Lacan may call it, perhaps the Oedipus that relieves us of the tension, the devil, having preached his accusation and his blame, will tell us what we have to do. We have to do things, consciously, because we are feeling guilty, basically and mostly unconsciously.

So for instance, we see people who have obsessive-compulsive neuroses. They may have to wash their hands every fifteen minutes, or count the number of fries on their plate before eating them, or they may have to do other things that no ‘sane’ person would think of doing, let alone feel obliged and forced to do. We can see now, considering the unconscious basis of our feelings of duty and obligation, that this is always built on a basic state of shame and guilt. And this is only because of the darkness in our lives, because of the ego, the devil, the shadow who is afraid of the light, and must keep it small in order to survive itself.

So we have to do a lot of things, because we are guilty. We are guilty of being the light, and that is not to the liking of the devil.

For the light will always be the end of him.

We have to do a lot of things, we have to keep paying for what we did wrong. We will forever have pooped our pants, and we can never wash off the shit. We will never be clean. We will always be guilty.

And we make each other feel guilty, and we tell each other what to do. To make it up, to make it right. We make each other pay. And we preach the guilt, and we preach the shame, and we are demanding gratification and penitence, and we are demanding that they make it up to us.

And the other might say, okay, I will try to make it right. I will pay for what I’ve done. I will listen to your penalties and your sentencing.

But we will never be clean, we will never be free.

We cannot, because it would mean the end of the preacher, the end of the dark one.

So how can we get out of these games, how on earth can we get out of this hell?

We can forgive.

We can choose the other way, the way other than accusing and making people pay. We can choose a logic that is not that of the devil, and that is not to preach guilt, and not to demand that people do this and do that, all based on the attempt to remove the guilt and pay penitence for their sins.

We can forgive.

Forgiving is a cure from the devil, forgiving is the other way.

Forgiving, in this hell of accusation and payback, is the only way to stop the burning of the soul that sits bent and shivering, consumed by guilt and not knowing why or where it came from.

Ever since our egos have come into play.

The knowledge of self, the image of the body, the self-image at the center of our minds.

So we should forgive like hell, we should forgive like we are obsessed with it, we should forgive with a vengeance, we should forgive and forgive and forgive, because we believe and believe and believe in it.

Because we simply do not believe in the devil.

We know he has his own agenda, and it is only based on fear. On the fear of the light, the fear of the heart, the fear of the soul. The fear of god.

The devil is afraid of us, because we are god, we are the light that would chase him into oblivion.

And so he preaches guilt, and he makes us endlessly pay for what is not even true. And we may keep doing things, obsessively, compulsively, and this may even lead to richness and success, us being so busy all the time being good and obedient citizens, but it is always based on guilt, it is always paying for a crime that was really just a blessing. The crime of being born, the crime of being an angel of the light.

The devil does not like the angels. No he certainly does not. For in heaven, there is no place for him.

He can only exist by making this earth a living hell.

Where every soul is kept burning dead in guilt, sentenced to this state by the ever-fearful devil.

So that is the truth, the devil is afraid, and that is why he makes us feel guilty.

And if we buy it, we start to pay.

With Lacan, as I see it, the mirror is where you buy it, the primal repression, the Oedipus is where you start to pay, the actual repression based upon your purchase.

And we are paying all our lives for a crime that was only being innocent.

So it is very hard to see, and very annoying to realize, that people are always paying off debts they never owed in the first place. There never was anything to feel guilty about. There never was a crime. We are forgiven.

Never mind.

So people, as successful as they may be in all of their compulsions and states of stress, are basically feeling guilty. And all of this is a setup, a put-up job by the devil. He says we are guilty, because he is afraid to die at our hands. And thus he keeps us small, and thus the darkness can survive.

In these times, people are busy as never before. They are constantly active, they never rest. They are successful, sometimes, and they may buy and pay a lot, but the sad thing is, they are forever paying off their debt, they are always paying for their crime, they are forever guilty in the eyes of the devil and never are they forgiven.

And that is why I felt I had to share these thoughts with you.

To try to open your eyes, and to bring the glad tidings.

That we are forgiven, and that there is no guilt.

And that we should let that raging storm of debt and fine pass, like a tree that may bend withstanding the tempest, but that does not break when it is deeply rooted in forgiveness. In emptiness. In no-mind.

So let us forgive like we are obsessed with it, and let us believe that it is the way that will get us out of the ever continuing preaches of the darkness, the way that will lead us to the light, the way out of this hell and straight back into the heavens where we are at home.

For even though our souls may have been sentenced to death in some mirror stage, we may yet find ourselves not guilty.

And when the devil once again comes knocking on your door to preach and say you are a sinner and you are guilty of this and that and you have to pay for it by doing that and this, pretend you truly are a gangster and just say to that piece of shit that he can suck your dick.

Your cunt.

Your tits.

Or your whatever.

Just don’t buy it.

Just don’t pay.

And thus the whole system falls apart.