On Guilt
Posted: September 23, 2009 Filed under: Buddhism, Literature, Zelazny 2 Comments »Something I read in Roger Zelazny’s short-story, Home is the Hangman that really caught my attention, especially in light of recent events, as well as the fall Ohigan Buddhist holiday that started a few days ago:
Look to instinct for a true assessment of the ferocity of life, for a view of the natural world before man came upon it. For instinct in its purest form, seek out the insects. There, you will see a state of warfare which has existed for millions of years with never a truce. Man, despite enormous shortcomings, is nevertheless possessed of a greater number of kindly impulses than all the other beings, where instincts are the larger part of life. These, impulses, I believe, are owed directly to this capacity for guilt. It is involved in both the worst and the best of man.
Too often in today’s post-modern world, we like our spirituality friendly and non-confrontational, and without any guilt to make us feel bad about ourselves. We like to write off our behavior as “only human” or just instinct and never learn or reflect from it. Teachings on Buddhist morality, for example, may grate on many converts who have only recently converted from other religions, but to whitewash our faults as just a part of life is self-defeating. There’s no room for personal growth until we acknowledge and reflect upon the terrible things we have committed in our lives and then awaken a resolve to not repeat them again.
However, to balance this out, Zelazny reminds us in To Die on Italbar not to be overly burdened by it either:
Sandow: Life is sufficiently furnished that one need not go looking about for extra guilt.
One should appreciate the value of guilt, but not burden themselves with excessive guilt either. There’s just no point to religion or a spiritual path if you don’t want to change who you are, and you can’t change who you are until you reflect on what you are now, even if it’s ugly and uncomfortable.
Namo Shakyamuni Buddha
P.S. This post sounds like the “Zen of Roger Zelazny”, but I just read a couple good books of his lately that had convergent quotations. 
Hello, this blog is about my life as a father, Buddhist and Japanophile. Any useful information I can pass along will hopefully make the 
“There’s no room for personal growth until we acknowledge and reflect upon the terrible things we have committed in our lives and then awaken a resolve to not repeat them again.”
Bingo! Thank you, Doug.
When I first began practicing Buddhism many years ago, I decided a beneficial course of action would be to forgive myself for the bad choices I had made in my youth. Of course, it also meant that I actually had to recognize the things I had done. I decided to no longer look at my past actions from a third person point of view. It was me that did those things. I had to stop making excuses and to accept responsibility. It was only when I accepted the things that done that I could finally let go of the guilt. And when I did let go of the guilt, I found it incredibly easy not to repeat those same bad actions.
It was an incredibly difficult thing for me to do though. It was hard to break the pattern of years of denial and it took me many, many years. But now that I am better at recognizing my actions, accepting the outcome of my decisions, and moving on from them in a positive direction, I can give Metta to myself and to others.
Yeah, the very same process is something I still am learning to do, and struggle with. Maybe it’s pride or something, but it’s hard to accept something I’ve done before, rather than just pretend it’s not there. So much easier to just pretend it’s not there, but it’s not a good long-term solution.