Guilt is a great method to not to change || Acharya Prashant (2015)

EXCERPT: Come face to face with the fact of your being. Grand notions, or petty notions, any notions, will not work. They are not evil, they are just useless. It is just that in my dictionary, the useless is the evil. There is no other evil. That is the definition of evil. That which is not needed is evil. That which you are needlessly carrying is the evil.

Questioner: I was reading the book by an existentialist author, Albert Camus, and the book is titled ‘The Outsider’. In the book, the protagonist somehow ends up murdering a man, and at the end of the book, he is at his trial, and there is no sense of regret within him. So the jury, and the judges find this extremely troublesome that the man does not regret what he has done. So instead of the trial being about whether the murder was premeditated or was it under self-defense, the trial becomes about the man being a monster. That he is not human, that he does not have any sense of guilt. They deemed him as a murderer because there was no sense of guilt within this man.

So I am bringing out this topic of guilt. What does it create within us? When I see a man who does not feel guilty or does not regret any of his actions, what does that do to me? To such an extent where I would not look at the objective picture as a whole, but just look at the fact, “Oh my god, the man does not feel guilty, what kind of a man is this?”

Acharya Prashant: Superficially, what is guilt supposed to be? Guilt is supposed to be both a driver and an instrument of correction, self-correction. So there is something that is wrong with me – in the sense that it is not as per the standards, benchmarks, and internal expectations that I have set for myself. It does not conform to my self-concept, does not agree with my self-image—So, I am troubled, I think myself to be one man, but my thoughts or actions are revealing that I am not quite the man I imagine myself to be. So I am troubled, because in my eyes, who am I? My own concept. What I