GUILT AND PRIDE

The social connection

If you kill an ant and you develop guilt in your mind that you have done something wrong, your mind will start working against you. But when you kill people of an enemy country on the border in a war and you have enough reasons to have pride that you have done something right for a greater good or that you have performed your duty, which is your Dharma, your mind will start working in favour of yourself. You know that your society/ country gives you security, work, freedom, subsidies and above all the thing is that you belong to it. This is your society. You are part of it. You share the collective consciousness of it. You may deny the sense of belonging, but it is there deep inside in subtle form because you share the collective mind of the society. Suppose you do something against your society. You may have hundreds of reasons to justify it. But somewhere deep in some corner of your heart, you will have a feeling that you should not do this. This is guilt. When it is fragmentary, momentary and deep, it is more dangerous because it will manifest in the weak moments of the mind.

The game of the mind

If your mind starts working against you, everything starts working against you. When I say ‘everything’ I mean to say ‘whole of the cosmos’. When you are burdened by guilt, everything becomes topsy-turvy. You just look at the moon. The moon does not look so nice. The moon is not that beautiful because you are burdened by guilt. The sleep is not sound because the flow of thoughts gets affected by tension and anxiety. Now as a consequence, psychosomatic manifestations would start appearing. You may fall ill. You may have an accident. Not only you but even your wife, mother or children may be affected because your mind is entangled with theirs. Suppose your spouse believes that eating eggs is unethical. But you believe that it is not so. Your spouse does not eat eggs but allows you to eat. This is going to affect the whole of the family because all the family members share the collective family mind. 

This is all in the game of the mind. When I say mind, here, in this context, I don’t mean just the mind you perceive as yours. Your mind is not just a limited entity as you think. You may be sixty years old, but your mind is thousands of years old. Have you ever wondered why dogs run after cars? This is because of their hunting instinct. Thousands of years before dogs managed their food only through hunting. Later on, they began to live with humans and got accustomed to eating the leftovers of humans. Instincts are acquired from generation to generation, through heredity. You might have heard about the fight-or-flight response. It is automatic. It is acquired through heredity. You can not do anything about it. According to Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, each individual’s psyche is interconnected with the collective unconscious and is shared by all members of the human race. Only the conscious part of the mind is under your control, and that control too is very restricted. 

The law is the hero

As far as the presence of some hero or a father figure around you to control you is concerned, it is perhaps beyond the scope here. The real hero is there inside you. The collective consciousness of eternity is watching you. It resides in your mind and extends through the universe. This is the Law. You can give it any name. You cannot escape it. You cannot deceive it. You need to obey it. Although you have the option to disobey. If you obey, you are rewarded, if you disobey, you have to pay the price. For example, gravity is the law. Suppose you are walking on a roof that has no fence and you walk off the roof, the gravity is there to break your legs. It is very simple.

Conclusion 

The conclusion is that if you are doing or going to do something that does not conform to the standards of the ethics set by you, your family and your society- stay assured that you have to pay the price through the guilt that will prevail not just in your mind, but also in the collective mind shared with the family and the society. Similarly, if you do things that conform to the law so that they instil pride and confidence in you, stay assured that the law has millions of ways to reward you. You will be rewarded through the collective consciousness of eternity that resides within your mind equally, as it resides everywhere else extending through the universe.