Why Guilt Serves No Useful Purpose

Chances are you are familiar with feelings of guilt. They aren’t pleasant, are they? They nag at us, drag us down. Guilt leads to anger, resentment, blame, and judgment—sometimes directed toward others when we feel defensive or condemning, and more often directed toward ourselves—because, of course, we feel guilty. Sometimes we even feel guilty for feeling guilty. Or we feel guilty for no apparent reason. When we are stuck in that space, our energies aren’t available to deal effectively with life, let alone experience the joys and pleasures of life.

Royal Way teaches a way of life without guilt. Michael Gottlieb, master spiritual teacher and founder of Royal Way Spiritual Center, writes, “Without guilt, without self-condemnation, the natural inclination of our being—no less than that of a blade of grass—is to grow and be healthy.” Embracing and practicing the teachings of Royal Way, it is possible to rise above guilt and find the divine spark within ourselves.

How to Live Without Guilt

So how do we live a life without guilt? First, it’s useful to understand where guilt comes from.

“The key problem,” Michael writes, “is that so many people have a need to control, a need to tell others what is right and what is wrong.”

We are bombarded with input from people who want to control us and offer us all sorts of reasons to feel guilty. But given the fact that our natural inclination is to grow and be healthy, it is obvious that guilt is not an inherent trait. It is taught to us, either directly—by those who wish to control us—or by implication. That can include social media and advertising, which inform us that we should look, act, and feel a certain way. When we fail to live up to these expectations and standards, we feel guilty. What a sad state of affairs.

“Guilt is not natural,” emphasizes Michael. It is “simply a conditioning in the mind, which you can erase as easily as if it were writing in the sand on a beach. Only one thing matters:  that your mind should be completely cleaned, utterly empty, and silent. Have a silent, loving mind waiting for more to happen. Life is so much that we cannot exhaust it. The mystery is timeless.”

The way to experience a “silent, loving mind” and the timeless mystery of life is through meditation—and, naturally, meditation is a key practice in Royal Way. Through meditation, we are able to quiet the mind. And by quieting the mind, we subdue the mentalism of self-condemnation. We can erase guilt “as if it were writing in the sand on a beach.”

Everyone Is Doing the Best They Can

A key to escaping the trap of guilt is to understand that everyone is always doing the best they can. This isn’t a squishy, “anything goes” statement. It is an existential fact. Michael explains it beautifully:“Nobody wants to be mean, nobody wants to be flaky, nobody wants to be ill or make anyone else ill, etc. But the thousands of variables that exist at any given moment in a person’s life, including history, background, genetics, present situations and circumstances, etc., etc., all converge into a particular configuration that makes a person choose what he or she chooses to do, and at that singular moment, he or she could not possibly choose otherwise. On that level, everybody does the best they can.”

The implications of this teaching are profound. When we understand and embrace the fact that we are all doing the best we can, condemnation of others disappears, condemnation of ourselves disappears, and guilt disappears. “The whole world would change instantly if humanity accepted the premise that everybody does the best they can,” Michael adds.

Michael makes it clear that this teaching does not mean we simply shrug off bad behavior or lawbreaking. He cites as an example a drunk driver who injures another person:

“In the case of the drunken driver, caring and compassion compel me not only to help the injured family, but in certain circumstances to lock this person away in prison for as long as necessary because we, as individuals and as a society, also do the best we can for ourselves.”

The difference, he explains, is an absence of condemnation.

The Problem With Condemnation

Condemnation is guilt’s very close relative. Obviously, self-condemnation results in our feeling guilty. And whether we condemn ourselves or others, it paralyzes us in circumstances that require effective action.

“Without guilt and condemnation,” Michael writes, “when we see an act of destruction of any kind, all our energies are free to deal effectively with the situation. It is because we are stuck with condemning ourselves and others that we become useless in the face of calamitous behavior.” He adds that this applies on every level: “intrapersonally, interpersonally, collectively, nationally, and internationally.”

To repeat: “The whole world would change instantly if humanity accepted the premise that everybody does the best they can.”

Conclusion

Living a life without guilt not only frees us to deal effectively with almost any situation, it also frees us to discover our true nature, our divine spark, which, Michael writes,“naturally and spontaneously inclines, always, to the highest good.” We are free to follow our natural inclination to grow and be healthy.

A life without guilt is a life full of clarity, joy, and discovery. It is the Royal Way way of life.