Lift yourself by your self🔗

Once you become aware of how you are driven by guilt, you can start practicing to come out of it. When you start practicing anything, naturally you will slip a few times. When you practice to be without guilt, you are bound to slip back into the older patterns of greed and fear. Then suddenly you will remember, 'Oh, I started working out of fear,' 'I started working out of greed.' Then you will start afresh. When you start working, naturally you will see these things happening.

A small story:

A monk from a big spiritual organization was sent to a remote tribal area for doing service. Suddenly, the headquarters received a lot of complaint letters about the monk.

The president after reading the letters said, 'We have posted the right person.'

The secretary asked him, 'What is this Sir? We are getting complaints about him. How do you say we have posted the right person?'

The president replied, 'If we are getting complaints, it means he has started working, there is something happening!'

When you start something new you will have three phases – the first is resistance. The next is just avoidance – people will neither care nor resist. The third is acceptance.

In the same way, when you start doing anything inside your system, you will start growing but these three phases will be there. The first phase will be resistance. You will feel the new practice is a difficult change in your current system. Because of this, the next thing that happens is you start avoiding opportunities where you should be practicing the change. Again and again you will go back to your older ways. Your system will resist, it will try to create all kinds of complications, all possible arguments. If you allow the resistance to grow, you become your own enemy.

Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, 'Let you lift yourself by yourself. If you don't, you will be your worst enemy.' It is up to you to help yourself as your best friend or hurt yourself as your worst enemy.

Be very clear: nobody can hurt you unless you allow. Nobody can help you unless you allow.

If you have forgotten the practice, remember and again and again lift yourself. Don't fall into depression, don't have guilt. Don't think you will not be able to do it.

Even in the life of Buddha if you read, he was about to leave the body when his disciples asked him to give his ultimate message, and he said Atma deepo bhava – Let you be your own light, let you be guided by yourself.

To feel guilty is to be in sin. In fact that is the only sin. The hell that we talk about is not in another time and space. It is within us when we feel guilty, without doing anything to change our mindset.

All your guilt, all your pain, everything is a pure imaginary shaft you create inside your head. The mistake you did ten years ago, the mistake you did seven years ago and the mistake you did three years ago, are independent and unconnected incidents. But when you connect them and start thinking about it, naturally you start creating guilt. You start feeling like a continuous sinner. This is one approach.

There is another approach. When you commit a mistake, see objectively why you committed it, how you committed it. Watch as an observer how and why it is getting repeated. Look scientifically into the mechanism of guilt. Just this awareness will open a new door and you will never commit the same mistake again – because once you look into it, and you find the cause, it will disappear. To know a thing totally is to be free of it.