The State of Freedom
A journey of Truth into the mind’s sanctuary
with the destination of inner Freedom.
Α22. “It’s not my fault!”
I watched with interest the heretofore flight and the liberation of the mind from the various reasons for guilt feelings of the past. While the flight in the air towards Mother Earth continues, I feel now the need to answer him in the same spirit, as a confirmation that I deeply understood his liberating message, which opens for me widely the gate to a more unrestricted life. So, I let the usual associations of slavery march through my mind and give to each of them the apt reply which will mollify it. In this way, I will ease for me the burden of the absurd responsibility, which has been annoying me for long with no reason and for no benefit:
- It’s not my fault that my mind finds it difficult to concentrate on one subject and constantly springs to problems which make him worry. Nobody trained me in self-discipline when I was a boy; now I am doing my best and I shall gradually improve.
- It’s not my fault that there are days when I am leisurely and not productive in my work. There are unsolved psychological problems inside me which deprive me of the joy of life from time to time.
- It’s not my fault that I often resist to study myself out of slothfulness. It is absolutely acceptable that I would prefer happiness to be given to me without that I even move my small finger for it. This is what everybody else around me would prefer; those I learned to imitate. In the century of speed in which I grew up I learned to prefer and hastily hunt for the quickest way, not the rifest one, the most beautiful and abundant from the aspect of creativity and knowledge.
- It’s not my fault the way I attack my food. This is also a decades-old habit, an outcome of my need to find an outlet from loads of complexes, for which I also carry no responsibility, since they are due to my old childish naiveness, credulousness and guilelessness.
- It’s not my fault that I am bored to work out for as long as I would like every day. I resist, because I see that the way up to the moment that I will have obtained the body of my dreams is too long and strenuous and I do not believe that I will be patient enough to bear on the effort up to the end.
- It’s not my fault that I very often quit my efforts before I reach the end because I get disappointed by the first difficulties I confront. This happens due to lack of self-confidence, and this is not my fault.
- It’s not my fault that I am a narcissus and want to have a beautiful body, in order to marvel it in front of the mirror and taste the awe of my brothers for it. After so many psychological traumas which have been piled up in me, how could I ever avoid to become an insecure person?
- It’s not my fault that I narcissistically enjoy to prove how more clever and skilful I am than the people around me, without taking care about the sorrow I cause them and the dislike which they feel for me afterwards. I only try to counterbalance the defeats of a lifetime through such handy and easy victories.
- It’s not my fault my innate inclination to grieve, my automatic tendency for misery, whenever I stay alone without a specific work object. When I was a child, I was not educated to simply enjoy the moment, the breath, the life, the light and the sounds. They taught me to always look for something totally concrete, something to occupy the mind and excite him, in order to fill my free time in a pleasant way.
- It’s not my fault that the neck muscles cramp due to anxiety during my working hours, as I harbor in the back of my brain the worry that, if I fail, a big disaster and hunger will ensue. A big fear is hidden there, inherited from my father and from all family leaders of my genealogical tree.
- It’s not my fault the neurotic way in which I am forced to live, with the innumerable anxieties for insignificant small things and the disproportionately big despair which they cause me.
These and many more affirmations of self-disinculpation give to my masterless guilt associations the answer they needed in order to simmer down and give their place to calmness in the breast, peace in the heart and peaceful light in the stomach. So, nothing is my fault, neither what I do wrong nor the right things I don’t do, nor what I do not offer to my needy brothers although I could. My wrong priorities are not my fault, neither the past nor the future ones, and this applies in all sectors of life: carrier, relationships with women and other people, education, matters of altruism and service to the society and whichever other sector I can imagine.
The very notion “it is my fault” is but a fabrication of the human mind. By stating that it is not my fault I do not attempt to shift the responsibility to my parents, to God or to someone else. I only abolish the fake notion “it is my fault”, which lacks a logical meaning; its existence is an outcome of the man’s obsession to find who is guilty for every wrong. The word “guilty” is also meaningless.
At the place of the notions “it is my fault” and “guilty” I put the objectively existent pair “cause-result”; this one yes, this does have a meaning in the dual world where we live. Namely, because some events took place in the past or because my genes are somehow or because any other conditions, which were, are and will be beyond my control, apply, today happens whatever happens inside me and, as a result, respectively, I behave in the way I behave towards myself and my brothers and all other creatures and objects of this world.
Consequently, nothing is my fault. The truth is that whatever I considered as my fault until now is the natural consequence of causes located somewhere in the near or farther past. For these causes I certainly do not carry any responsibility, as my limited human understanding did not allow me to prevent them from taking place or to modify them early enough. It did not even allow me to anticipate that some specific facts would ever be able to constitute causes for the distresses which they finally proved to cause.
As a result, I consider guilt feelings as a nonexistent, reasonless and senseless type of emotions. I ascribe their existence exclusively to the power of imitation and habit. I ignore them completely every time that I see them spring up from my unconsciousness and obsess my mind and in no case do I allow them to become my motive for my work of correcting old habits. For I want my motives on the path to freedom to be shiny and joyful and not gloomy and miserable like guilt feelings.
In this way, the grief, which used to be intertwined with guilt feelings, is also eradicated. Instead of the guilt feelings I prefer thousand times that my motive is the love which I feel for myself, that is to say my intense desire that my self will be happy. Under these conditions, the work is now done in a mood of peace and calmness. The grief of the guilt feelings is thus totally replaced by the joy, which is, respectively, intertwined with the new motives of love, understanding and compassion for the self, which just replaced the old and finished motive of guilt feelings.