Guilt, Debt and Happiness

Not everyone, but many people, have a level of guilt, insecurity or self-consciousness, a general unease and discomfort around other people. This article is about the cause and thus how to release guilt and attain emotional freedom. The key is at the end of the article, but you need to read the whole thing!

Guilt is caused by having a debt. If we pay our debts, we will have no guilt and in this relinquishment, be emotionally free and happy. Debt in this case can be money, but is far more than that, we are deeply controlled by emotional debts.

If you believe you have a debt, it is going to effect you even if no one else in the world feels you have that debt. Remember the essence of our work ‘All and everything is in your own mind’. Your universe exists in your mind regardless of objective reality or other people's beliefs and opinions.

To say; ‘it’s all in your mind’ can have a bad connotation as if you are just imagining it. In fact, that is what is happening. If you think about something, you go into your mind and search your memory.

We all know how a memory can get distorted. Thus our memories are based on factual events but tainted by our own imagination. Again, referring to our work, we react to every event in the present based on an identification of this event to an event in our past. Since our memories are distorted, we will always react (at least slightly), inappropriately to every thought that reaches our mind as it searches our memory to identify it.

How we are manipulated

Manipulation requires power. The person in power is usually one who is owed a debt. If you owe a debt you have not paid, you will have guilt about it and feel a weakness. If the debt is in your imagination, you have guilt that permeates many aspects of your life daily without your knowing why. This guilt can effect you and bring you down for even the slightest thing you think you should do but did not do.

Some people even feel guilty for not being the bright light in the room thinking they should always have a smile on their face, which is one cause of a false and shallow personality they try to always put on. You may feel guilty about not doing a simple task and that weighs on your mind all day, bringing a darker mood you cannot find a cause for.

Thus, if you can be manipulated, that is because you have guilt. If you have no guilt you cannot be manipulated because you do not owe anyone anything. This is spiritual wealth, emotional freedom, being debt free.

The fakir is the Sufi or Eastern term associated with being a spiritual person who is totally poor. This is an Arabic word meaning ‘poor person’. In a spiritual sense, it is not materially poor, but rather spiritually poor, we are separate from God.

If we look on it from the personality level, the guilt obstructs our mind and makes us insecure and very self-absorbed and that of course separates us from unity with anyone else not to mentio
God, whatever you perceive God to be.

If I have no debt then I have no guilt and I owe nothing to anyone, I am truly free. But if I have debts and I feel guilty, I will be insecure and therefore easily manipulated emotionally by other people either by their intentionally doing it or simply my own guilt and fear which makes me respond in a way that is reacting to how I imagine them to think about me. I know I am lacking in a crucial requirement of being an upstanding person, that of having paid my debts.

If someone is heavily in debt financially, no job or home, that person will be very insecure and will always be fearful of what anyone thinks of them, and so can be very easily emotionally manipulated or manipulatable because they are always in fear of what others think of them.

To become emotionally free and without fear, we must be materially free without debt as well as emotionally without debt, then in our own mind and imagination, free of any guilt and that makes a person free.

A crucial component of being able to achieve freedom is to master the ego and this requires the attitude that you owe debts but no one ever owes you a debt. Debts can be owed or owed to you, either way, debts control.

We have debts and guilt on a material sense either financially that we cannot pay, or someone has helped you to get ahead in life, so there is a debt to them that you do not even know how to pay.

Guilt is inbred pretty much since the beginning of life either by religion or in the family with the debt you can never repay to your mother, which parents, especially mothers remind us of what we owe them when we are rambunctious teenagers.

There is a level of guilt in all of us. Denying it does not help remove it. That is only what we call self-lying which avoids the possibility of eliminating guilt.

We have to uproot every trace of every thought that has any guilt tied to it as an absolute prerequisite to emotional independence.

THE EXERCISE

Make a list of all the debts you owe, even to those who taught you to read and write, anything that you would not have learnt on your own such as how to walk. Walking we would have figured out without anyone's help.

With this list, you will realise how much you owe to other people, and that brings up the realisation of how much debt you have that is creating subconscious guilt.

Next, if you can in person, or if not then at least on paper, thank everyone for what they have given you. Make it a sincere exercise in your mind, to feel the true gratitude by realising where you would be if you had not received the gift they bestowed on you.

We do not need to pay dollar for dollar, but we do need to pay with acknowledgement and appreciation, even if it is only in our own mind.

And most importantly, do NOT think you owe a debt for everything on your list, nor build the size of the debt to be impossible to pay. There are many things in life that we received out of obligation of the giver. For example, I do not feel I owe a debt to my parents for giving birth to me, nor feeding or clothing me as an infant. They wanted a kid, and so with their desire to bring a child into the world, they owe me a debt to keep me alive.

I am sure a lot of parents would like to trash me for this, but give it a little objective thought when reviewing your list of debts, and then determine if you really owe the debt that you think you owe.

Be objective and look at the cause of the situation, and you will find that many of the debts you feel guilty about are ones you can never repay and are also not valid. Those are the debts which destroy us, the ones which are not real or valid, because those can never be repaid and thus will forever plague us with guilt.

Review carefully and objectively and remove all debts from your mind either by gratitude and payment for the valid ones, or removal of the false ones.