A small story:
A railway official reported a murder on a train, 'The murderer entered the compartment, stabbed the victim multiple times. Then he left the train through the opposite door jumping onto the railway track – thereby violating the railway regulations.'
When you don't have the right understanding, you will miss the whole thing and end up acting in a foolish way. When you are given the right understanding, you will understand that any rule was created just for you and others around you to live a happy and blissful life.
When the spirit of the rule is understood, there won't be any problem falling in line with it. By falling in tune, there will only be juice in your action; there will only be a blissful commitment to it. But if the spirit is missed, everything is missed. Life will seem dull and lifeless.
Take meditation for example. Meditation itself is done to go inwards irrespective of the outer world noise and situations. I have seen that some people, before starting their meditation routine, will first try to create a noiseless situation outside. They will go around telling everyone to keep quiet. They will practically freeze people in their normal routine just because they are going to meditate.
Only when the spirit is missed, things become dead rituals. You miss and mess!
All rules and regulations were created for a harmonious life with the understanding that you will not kill me and I will not kill you, and both of us will live happily. That was the basic understanding behind them. However in the course of time, they became laws.
All rules and regulations were created to live a harmonious and happy life, but the moment you internalize the rules without the understanding, you create guilt. As long as you follow the rules with an understanding, you will be happy. When you start following the words instead of the spirit, you will start creating guilt.
When you want to escape from the law, what do you do? You just catch on to the words of the law and drop the spirit behind them. Then you legally work around the words and escape from the law. When you catch the words, you become a bureaucrat and you miss the spirit. Only when you catch the spirit, you can be an intelligent being without guilt.