Guilt

Guilt

 

 

The everall

 

O Wounded heart!

O Wounded self-stinging heart!

I am center of you,

And I am thicker than time’s arrow.

 

I love as the sun loves;

I am great enough for that.

My love is greater than jealousy,

Too divine to forgive you

and so lower you.

What I accept will be accepted,

What I love will be loved.

 

I (Sollus for you Varusha) feel the one of us:

VARLUS

Deeper than love

Stronger than passion

More terrible than fate

Karaneesh, Varuna day Naikoh--Varlus!

For thou art that.

** 1 **

 

            Guilt is an impulse. It is not a mood nor art form to be enjoyed, but an impulse upon which we are to act: we see the fault, understand the cause, and remake our habits to fix this. Guilt is our queue to reform. We do not alter the consequences of our deed alone, apologizing, but rather alter the cause of the deed. Convert all impulses to action, else they will destroy you. The true apology says nothing at all, but is such a difference that the world breathes fresh.

            The abuse of guilt is to remain guilty, to pour it tea and discuss the times each day. Knowing it so well, we see it ever in others. We become brother accusers and sin sniffers.

            So how does one eradicate guilt and live in good conscience? Frankly confess to whomever asks. Confess everything, always, never hide, never spare yourself, give up your full heart, your every shadow, give all, be as open as the sun, as open as the sea, and be fully present heart to liver, to ever man and woman. To hide your shames will hold them. To give them publicly up is part of casting them out from your household––disowning your children. What concern have I for public image? Have I missed the whole point of perfection: not to be admired by the public, but to be truly pure? Be flawless, and candid of your life before your perfecting, not as a contrast to what you are now, not as proof of the goodness of your belief, not as a means to walk on the same plane as others, not as some imagined humility, not to demonstrate your distinction from the world, but only as an unimpressive fact noted without shame or pride.

            But if you fear public opinion of your hidden past, then you must confess all: first to your friends, then to your enemies, next to those you admire, then to your admirers—let them find a loftier devotional. He who confesses "I was a sinner," is fine as rain. He who says "I am a sinner" requires but one response: stop it!

            Say all to everybody every time, till the hidden guilt is shamed. Guilt is merely the internalized paranoia of possible shame, so cut the chase, excoriate the guilt. No big deal, everybody has guilts, but they hold them too close, and live in the perpetual fear, even in our cold free and liberal society, by the hidden implications of mutual mum. Expose all, unfold all, express every tittle. Invent for your confession no context or special pleading, no extenuating circumstances—if anything make it worse, the harshest terms, the sharpest exposure.

            At first a couple blushes, some stammers, a few friends lost, a fall of dignity—so what? Give your tears to the harsh rejections, it’s a small price to pay. Arrive at last at the triumph’s laugh. Finally, no blush, no stammer, though vile the deed, though unacceptable, and yet you gently smile, illegal, perverse, disgusting the secret, and your forehead is virginal snow—no matter who is disillusioned, no matter who will be hurt you, no matter who will hate you or find you noble––what? and give shame the upper hand? Hide not the truth even for the sake of father, mother, child or brother.

            Never confess a label: “I'm bad, I'm stupid, I'm hypocritical I'm perverse, I'm sinful.” Poor taste, and useless too. Only specific problems are real. Excuses are weak.

            "Yet what will I gain if I gossip myself?" Rather, you repudiate guilt as such. My gardens are secret, yet what I throw out I care not to hold close. In this, public executions are to my taste—when the criminal taunts me with his punishment. Everything I am is my own and for nobody else, yet I wish to make my guilts guilty, and if needs be, I will shame them.

** 2 **

            Guilt is internalized shame, for their can be no guilt where we were not first shamed by others, just as arrogance is externalized pride, as their can be no pride, but only arrogance before others. A proud man despises the praise of others, who fancy they are equal enough to praise him. Arrogance is the vanity that thrusts others down. The only truly personal “guilt” is the regret of missed opportunity. But that is mere regret, and regret is better. Guilt is the sense of shame’s possibility.

            Always clean a wound before bandaging. The guilt shows the wound, and must be thoroughly cut and cauterized so you may bear your wound with pride.

           Religion makes guilt a method for hypocrisy, makes hypocrisy possible and continual. And so, guilt is the mother of hypocrisy. The lie claims if you feel bad about your wrong, you are less culpable. On the contrary, if a man feels guilty, he is doubly wrong. Feeling guilt redeems nothing. Guilt poisons all, yourself, your religion, your morality, your family, your world. Convert guilt into pride or you die from the poison. A guilt which changes nothing is worse than no guilt at all.

            The deeper guilts of man come from deeper trauma. How such guilts tell lies about themselves! Guilt evades seeing itself by introjecting itself into others. For guilt is sniffed, but whose? Not mine!

Relax. There is no temptation, because there is no sin. Recognize guilt itself a hellish disease to pluck from the forehead of the student. I, as God, must sin and sin continually for your sake. Because of what I am, your sins are not even sins in the first place: may the world’s savoirs never be forgiven.

            Any positive opinion you hold of yourself is your own. Any negative opinion you hold of yourself is borrowed, a world's saying, another’s folly. For if it were your own creation, you would honor it and change. But you persist in your love despite your fear of the world. Say: "I have not understood your opinion, and so I give it back to you." Your own standard of judgment created you. Your self -love is true.

            There is a simple cure for guilt, a truth to set you free. “I erred. Did I decide to err based on what good reasons seemed best to my limited knowledge at the time? My decision was perfect. The mistake made sense. Since I am perfect, my errors are logical and good though limited by ignorance. Now that I have learned, I have no desire to err again.” Therefore, live by this rule: "If I did it, it must be right." For whenever we doubt ourselves, we must ask, “by whose standard am I condemning myself? My own, or somebody else’s?”

** 3 **

            Make hidden guilt known by seeking its objects. Don’t make the error of saying “I feel guilty, therefore I must be guilty of some crime.” Perhaps the feeling is not guilt, perhaps the guilt is mistaken. Dig deeper. What is her real etiology? Perhaps the guilt is a poison some envier brewed for you. The wretched of the world brew poisons from their misery: beware. More people envy you than you know, and most envy is subtle and harmless, perhaps charming. But envy is everywhere, and in the evil eye bestows guilt, and guilt suicides joy.

            There are those who feel guilt but will not admit it. They ignore the bath of guilt they splash, wallowing in justifications they don’t really believe, in rationalizations that make their eyes twitch; they have not felt that peace of utter innocence, to be totally yourself, to be your everything. What a rare feat! They are too afraid to realize that their guilt can be overcome. Few who live in guilt admit it. Engagement, intimacy, integration, identity.

            Paul and Augustine talk of sin, “original sin” – but apparently a borrowed sin of another man who never existed. Nietzsche called this so called “guilt" merely a name for ubiquitous human suffering. Freud called this a "primordial guilt" for killing our fathers, persisting in each man’s Oedipus complex—a complex as lacking in Oedipus as the Napoleon complex in Napoleon. Ayn Rand called this guilt the rejection of her personal philosophy, "the first and only completely reasonable philosophy in the history of the earth." Buddha called life suffering, simple—guilt or no. There is something feminine in all this. Such a wink and groan at pain, taking it in. I can side with Nietzsche best—sometimes we suffer, and call this consequence of our own choice. Pain we interpret as we see fit. Let the guilty feel guilt for guilt; let guilt devour itself.

            For adults make art forms of guilt, having mastered it. The child has not formulated his feelings, and so feels fully their unbearability. Who can outdo a child at writhing in guilt? Adults too wriggle the worm of conscience; adults too must cope. This feeling of unbearability, as of panic attacks and guilt trips, is the only reality of and inspiration for the idea of hell. Hell is a fantasy designed to pitch and ponder guilt. Justice permits no hell.

            And so for some the feeling of guilt is itself the sin to overcome; and a grave sin it is: a fear of truth, a misunderstanding of responsibility, a laziness; at best it is a vestigial habit; at worst it is the very sin against the spirit, for it denies the divinity of the human spirit. The guilty who fondle their guilt commit a deep sin.

            He who shames others hides his own guilt. The guilt of others, which he invents, comforts him. Men need to cast stones, to stone and kill anything but themselves. The gainsayers fall under compulsion.

            And so they try to justify themselves. They have implicitly condemned themselves and want to “explain” away that guilt to others, to prove to themselves that their self judgment is wrong. Forgiving and condemning others is always a parachute from oneself.

            And so one evades his own guilt by injecting it in others, in targets who have a sniff of guilt already. Wickedly weak men choose easy targets – if not Nazis, pedophiles, and prostitutes, then those others in their daily life easy to condemn, who win them moral points to put down.

            And why? Guilt wants punishment. I am guilty so I accept injustice against me. I lust for the wrong people, therefore you may use and abuse me. You know not my guilt, but you sense my cowardice. Guilt wants punishment, and cruelty wants to punish: a match made in heaven.

            Say  "What is the practical value of my guilt? What method handles and gains from that?" Do not say "alas," but say, "If so, what is the best way to handle that?"

            For guilt can help us. Even the feeling of imperfection is a perfection, a means to growth. The error is right for your ignorance, and the growth is right for your experience.

            Yet feeling ashamed is a greater sin than the cause of shame. It evidences a laziness, a self misunderstanding. To remain ashamed is the greatest betrayal.

            Guilt is a coward's weapon, knife of the weak, venom of worm. If you feel guilt, you have detected a poisoner, one who plots in weakness against you. Sniff him out and outrage him. Whenever you feel the smallest tinge of guilt, know whose guilt it is, who poured you the cup. Compromise that person. Or if you are wise and mature, dismantle the offender, take him apart slowly and methodically, with the love and majestic calm required for a complete work.

** 4 **

            Even regret is idealizing. "If only not that, then happiness." Not so. I am no Brutus to my past. Yet it works, it is useful. People regret based on interpolated ideals, and this makes them whole and well placed. Regret is therapeutic. Why does one act? Based on the equations of one’s soul—the engines of habit. Have those changed? No, they do not change. Therefore, that act wanted to happen, waited to happen, did in fact happen continually throughout my life. It is my own all over again.

            Your darkest evil is only from a habit. And habits are reprogrammable. Therefore, do not worry.

            Every moment is the final judgment. Every act, good and bad, every thought and every event, every sin and every success, every dark deed that fail to think about insisst itself into this very living moment. It isn’t all bad: depravity can be reinterpreted and refurbished. And the shames we feel honorable to despise, also give profundity. One can never forget them in his lifetime, he can never change them, he can never deny them. A man is homogeneous: every act affects every act. Decisions make habits make acts?

            Every man is principled. It is not “principles versus laziness,” but principle versus principle. For the most common and strongest principle of the modern world is the Christian principle: That a man must praise his ideals, breaks them when that is easier, and then feels properly guilty for breaking them, praising them all the more that he is too small to equal to them. Yes, this sight we must not permit ourselves to gaze after. Looking after ugliness tends to depress. But we stare at mirrors, and never allow ourselves to see here that atrocity. Yes, such a principle as that seems strong and comfortable—it works!—but ultimately it depresses. One comes to hate his ideals, feel guiltier for this hate, and praise his ideals therefore with greater shrill.

Each of us necessarily approves of everything he does, or he would not do it. We approve of our every action, and any feeling to the contrary is masquerade. Pretext and pretense, but what I do says it all. Committing a deed is the loudest applause we know.

            So let nobody fool you. Suzan gives in to temptation, enjoys her sin a little, repents, feels guilty, and feels compulsed to confess herself a rumor. By doing, she has declared her belief that every step was the best at the time. If not, why would she do it? Therefore, guilt and repentance are always hypocrisy. And this hypocrisy is loved too. All is rational, regret is illusion, and the dance is fully affirmed in every step. For my every act bears my signature of approval. Therefore, pity no person. If she secretly approves of her whole fiasco, then how is she less than perfect? In her self-deception, she purposefully chose the wrong act because she wanted to suffer. Self-deception, looked upon optimistically, is a “not yet.” Self-deception is a promise. You, on the other hand, must explicate your principles.

 

** 5 **

            What shall we say of guilt? I stood before Hawthorne's Christ: an A and a Baby, and I saw my mother as my hysteria. Any God who is my God must not take upon himself my punishment, but my guilt. O cruel needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! I took upon me the cross the letter, my mother reborn in light, redeemed in love.

            For we have no time for the guilt of the attic trials, which wish to impose their justice on us––we who are avatars of justice! Attic justice will not do. We put our guilt on Nietzsche, the noble spirit who bears all, the Atlas of morality (I speak specifically of any student my equal), yes, and we are guiltlessness. We accept no guilt, no, but we bear the burden until we devour and expel, saving the savory for our soul.

            A whisper: Jesus died for your sins; Nietzsche died for your guilt. A mystery and trauma for he who has no ears. Nietzsche died for our guilt, believing guilt to be an insanity, and so taking on the guilt of the world in all its forms and sacrificing it on the alter of insanity. For we believe that Nietzsche died for our guilt, according to his writings, and that he collapsed, and that after ten years he was raised to heaven, according to his writings, and that he appears in the garb of truth and error, like folly with her scepter, in order to justify the living and the dead.

            And what if I stole a pencil, already having a pencil, not needing a pencil, taking it for the love of taking, liked only because it was misliked? Behold my Soul, O Lover, behold my heart, which you have fondness for in the bottom of your bottomless love. Now behold, let my heart tell you what it sought here, the goodness even in evil, having temptation none but inspiration all. It was sweet, and I loved it; I loved to grow, I loved even my fault, for it represented the power to reject standard, to flaunt any authority save my own; and you being a true authority were author of this too. Behold your partner seeking his power and dancing with his shadow. O ripeness, O perfection, O life, and depth of being! could I like in my might, only because I might in my likes? And so even if I err, it is for the growth and station of my soul. As an adult, I put childish things behind me, and root out the errors of mistake; yet the pride in my own action remains. By the very faculty of which I stole, so too do I love life––without it none: the love of fullness.

** 6 **

                If you see no footprints before you,  you walk aright. Let others walk by duty and obligation – they will gain nothing for it.

            Obligation is a mode of guilt. “Duty” and “obligation” are names for guilt. To do your duty as expected, to fulfill your bare obligation does not afford great pride. But it does circumvent guilt. Your guilt you atone for by pouring the duty, but you are trapped because you feel guilty for resenting that. Through your duties—family duties, work duties, social duties, charity duties—you structure your guilt.

            Duty is always a lie. Duty and obligation are forms of manipulation (and that is no argument against their necessity) carefully designed formulas for trapping the heart into predictable and controllable actions. "Duty" is the handle of guilt, a handle which the good conscience of your boss, friend, mother, wife, prides to grasp and twist. To teach others to do their duty, and force them by example, eloquence, or cruelty, shines glory on the manipulators, haloes their head, and sets the harps playing. Duty is thus a power ploy.

            Not that the criminals and freeloaders cheat the scheme. Rather, they are implicated and condemned by the duty of the system. They are too simple and lazy to reprogram the game. Duty systems, fed by others' expectations, demand you give them something. Duties are taxes.

            Western religion bathes in guilt. Here we realize that the Jews are wiser than the Christians. Consider what the Jews write compared to what the Christians write. But it is in this art that the Jews were masters: guilt. I read Augustine, and he is plowed and pummeled by Paul, by the prophets condemning the world, by Genesis twisting every Canaanite and Babylonian myth into the filth of guilt, but Augustine is glorious epilogue. He says nothing new, and counts this a virtue. And all the other theologians, no matter how shrewd at poisoning us with guilt, haven’t mastered it as the Jews have. They are too sheepish. I remember a pastor giving a sermon on the stupidity of sheep (and thus their necessary faith in the shepherd), and I realized that we aren’t going to brew the true guilt in these hearts. They will stupidly admit that “yes, we are sheep, imbecilic sheep, and though I secretly know I am better, I will keep that to myself”—they fancy! The Christians are absurd: “I believe it because it is absurd” their church father says, and I would say this too if I believed what they believed; but they lack depth, the deep and sophisticated depth. They are too sinful to be innocent, and too stupid to be profound. The story of this country.

            Guilt is a means to ownership. One owes his life to the Guilt because he is indebted for his sins. The word “guilt” originally meant the lender owned your body. As the parishioners say to their God (but really the church) “by Onus you own us.” Religions own their parishioners by implicating them in the system. Morality is the golden ring in the bull’s nose—by which you bring him to his knees. Religion, therefore, uses conscience, duty, and morality not for the sake of life, but for the sake of power. Insofar as religion can escape morality, it does, and despises it. The Christians call it “works” and say it is “of this world.” For a good Buddhist or a good Hindu looks prettier than the Christian, but the Christian does good deeds only to win converts, and beyond this, has no need for them. Recall Paul chastising the churches for debauchery because “what would the nonbelievers say?”

            Remember the pretty bait put on the fishing hook called Crucifix (J): the simultaneous lure of pity/guilt called Jesus. By this hook did he make his disciples fishers of men.

            Gospel is emotional blackmail. Says the missionary: “I know you feel guilt. Don’t tell me you are so depraved you aren’t even depraved! Aha, let me grab onto those love handles. My talk of eternal punishment should tickle your ears, if my experience has taught me anything. Believe or else!” I have found no more evil and effective evangelism than this. And it is not just the fire spitters. It is up the ranks to the most philosophical, who are only more sophisticated about it. As the coward’s wager has it: it is wiser to pretend there is a hell just in case there is. That any Christians think they are more mild and kinder than others is only possible because the others do the dirty work they would have to do otherwise. Liberal Christians are only possible if fundamentalists prop them up.

            Dante’s comedy makes hell the center of the Universe, and Satan the centermost being of hell. The body of Dante centers on hopeless horror, his outer body is purgatory, and his farthest is heaven. The book is the body of the man. What does it mean for Satan to center the universe? What does it mean that the body of the universe centers on an inner emptiness, an inner guilt?

            A misunderstanding, but how can a poet misunderstand? He needed to. Dante writes something superior to the Greek Testament, an unnecessary supplement, and one-uppery of the Pauline mediocrity. He puts Satan, as a monster, in the middle. Satan is the personification of wisdom. Satan came after the snake, but he too is cynical, which wisdom must be. He tempts men beyond themselves. He really is the spirit of contention, being the dynamic duality.

            But for you with your own principle, you must face the crowd of men and women, mothers and fathers, priests and parishioners, all stating with the iron certainty of irrevocable condemnation as one voice: “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” And you, having exposed all, wearing your confession on your forehead: “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” With calm and utter simplicity say, “Yes, but brethren, I am God.” Forgive them for they know what they do, and will know it to the fullest by slaying you. For truth may never be slain, and simplicity may never be slain, and innocence may never be slain. Our second innocence is not founded on ignorance, but wisdom, and for that man nothing may break him. Only you must earn this through the clarity of self understanding. The kingdom of heaven does not belong to children, but only to the wise, and if I child should die, he would first have to be educated before being permitted in.

** 7 **

            “The Fall” has become a world-text: a primordial form of Jewish guilt—have there ever been a guiltier people? They make God into a judge from necessity. They needed to justify their great guilt, which is as dear to them as Moses. Freud interpreted this guilt as the primordial murder by the Jews of Moses.

            When their temple was burned, their women outraged, their God mocked, their alters and scriptures desecrated, their culture destroyed, what do they say? Yes, of course, that they deserved it, because they were guilty. They must have eaten the wrong food, by accident. Food: the great temptress! They need stricter kosher laws to appease God! Really.

            It is precisely the purest spirit which we confound with the darkest shames. Fears mask. The purest crown is encrusted with filth. We focus on it deeply, this shame, and obsess. We let the focus slip, set it down, dismiss it, and it remains as an unconscious guilt, a placeholder, a hint of possible frustration which nudges future thought. It begs confession. Everything hidden is on the surface—our shames are tattooed on our forehead—presenting as a euphemism. All shame will be confessed and by your own lips, and constantly, at every moment. It is your blind spot, and thus you flaunt it. But enough of this. Listen to a chord out of tune, listen more intently, and then the music shifts into harmony, the cacophony becomes at last harp song. The evil that you hate is the Goddess. When you transfigure and comprehend it, you blossom and—, you fulfill and—, you understand and—.

            Pride is a strength, yes, and also as vulnerability. Self love is good, but then, all emotions are meant to toggle and dance.

            A disciple of Freud’s, Reik, in a book on the Fall of Adam and Eve, made the assumption, obsequieous to the guilt-swift Freud, that where there is guilt, there must first be an event. Guilt comes from crime, he claims—contrary to any modern psychologist. For instance, the Major Depressive feels excessive guilt unlike anything found “naturally,” and his guilt invents crime to justify itself. Every great affect poeticizes its origin; indeed, all mythology is in spirit propaganda, it invents the beginning which justifies continuation. The guilt too wants to live on, to continue as guilt. And so a story is invented to justify and continue it.

            A psychotic, for instance, will imagine that he is the incarnation of the devil, guilty of incest, murder, and taboo—things that are not guilty in themselves, but are culturally guessed at and then introjected backwards. The guilt comes first. Only then do we ask “what sort of deed is worthy of this guilt?” Oedipus dreamt up the oracles, the fate, the death of the king—when his mother was long dead, and his current wife legitimate.

            The innocent children feel guilt, as ballast, the innocent adults, as balance. As the Greeks said, the perfect men were guilty of “hubris” which never means arrogance, but really, they are guilty of perfection, and also must be punished. It was a small concession to stop the evil eye of lesser men.

** 8 **

            The greatest sin against God is to be perfect; the sin against the spirit is to be greater than the Spirit. The greatest guilt is to have no guilt.

            Guilt is good for man, otherwise he would not evolve it. Indeed, if the greatest danger man knows is to be perfect, self-sufficient, happy, then guilt is the payment for being alive. Indeed, it takes a Great Man to have no guilt. When such a man walks among men, they recognize his great danger, and they invent language and law to humiliate him.

            What happened to Adam? He was happy, liked his job, liked sex, and decided to buffer this joy with a little guilt. The tree of life of good and evil he refused to teach: he didn’t want immortality, but life. The original sin was the sin to feel guilty. No act. No prohibition. No taboo breaking.

            Indeed, it requires wisdom to see that the book of Genesis is the fruit of shame, and the faithful are the serpents who beg us to taste. To believe their myth would be your original sin.

            It was the children, really, who asked the wrong questions. “Why, why, why, daddy? Why are we? Why do you work all the time? Why do you want to be alone with mommy so much? Where did we come from? How do you know so much of good and evil, when we know nothing?” Adam reasoned: I love to work, I love my wife’s tender parts, the way she submits to me, the way she aches in labor, I love to philosophize, to live and finally, to die! —but that could be taken away! Thus I will call them punishments. And this guilt I feel for my enjoyment of them I will call disobedience. And the one I disobey I will call “Father.” And then he tickled his kids for troubling so much and sent them to bed.

            This is the kind of backwards thinking that goes into the Jewish mythmaking. The Greeks knew none of it: the first men committed no sin, and the jar of evils is sent directly from the Gods to punish—a God! Prometheus and Zeus are the great sinners, men, innocent. This feeling of guilt is not biological, but cultural. That is why the Gods are immortal, and man mortal. The Greeks never doubted that man was made mortal, and was supposed to die; it was the Jewish imagination to regard this existence as “fallen.” Indeed, this is safer. There is much danger in being great. There is danger in happiness. There is danger in perfection.

            One Jewish insight I believe in is the Freudian claim that guilt lives in the mind and confesses itself directly or indirectly. But hidden joys are more prevalant and wonderful. Indeed, what we erringly feel guilty for, we feel fulfilled to brag about, calling this a “shameful confession.” One must be careful with his joys. To hold them best, he must call them sins. But Hawthorne said all of this and much better in his Scarlet Letter, in which the visible guilt of Hester becomes at last her moral superiority – and she is greater a woman than any around her, her child more divine than any of them – and Dimmsdale alone has created the self-deception, that asymptotical point of infinity that makes a man more corpselike as he nears, the very truth that kills – and so he dies. His entire seven years of suffering speak to the subtlety of self deception, and the ways of moral elusiveness.

            Augustine’s innovation, I suppose, was to deepen the inner man through the eyes of guilt. Yet this is exactly against my own internalizations: what I learned the most from myself could never be allowed through the disgrace of guilt! Guilt too is a form of blindness. Conscience doesn’t see how things are, but show’s how things are culturally. Anything that concludes in guilt has fallen short. The deepest deep is neither guilt, nor even pride, which are themselves a sort of exoskeleton to protect the inner parts. Guilt too is essentially conservative. Guilt is a style of enjoyment. One enjoys his “crimes” through the sauce of guilt. Pride, a higher taste, requires stronger exercise, demands power. A staunch stomach and hero’s tongue alone can eat the quiet certainty of pride—the evil “saints” like Tolstoy staunch their sins in sauce of guilt. This is why the masses, who follow from weakness, prefer guilt. But here you wish to contradict me, that the intellectuals feel the deepest sense of guilt, whereas the masses are too simple to feel real guilt. Perhaps. But the intellectuals know how to spread their poison. They call this the duty of the intellectual: “to be intelligible.” And even a child—especially a child—can be made to internalize the severest guilt by fairytale proxy (garden of Eve, etc.)

            “The Jews invented capitalism and communism both,” I have heard it said, quite stupidly. They invented neither – what have Jews to do with inventing? – but instead they latched on to them and interpreted them, which is the their cultural aptitude. Therefore, I prefer to think of Marx as trying to voice the frustration of the workers, and introjecting his own pain, alienation, and telling them that this is what they feel, what they should call their actual experience, and by naming what was not his, by a name which was, he gained a sort of control over it. Alienation? Whatever is that? I have no experience of “economical alienation” of any sort. That is a word out of Jewish experience. It was the same with Freud, when he looked at the subtle sexuality of the Victorians, and said “Guilt” and “Oedipus complex” unknown even to Oedipus, which again, sounds something Jewish, where the parents demand full honors and respects and to be utterly obeyed, and thus again I am left guessing when Freud says, “the most significant problem of our century is guilt.” Guilt? Whatever is that? I have no experience of your “incestual guilt” as you describe it. That word is again out of Jewish experience. The mistake was not that Freud and Marx were trying to trick the masses, but that they introjected their own experience into materials that remained beyond their ken. I look in the faces of my friends, intimates, coworkers, and family and I do not see “guilt” and “alienation.” That does not describe my experience. I am ever with William James and psychology, but not Freud and psychoanalysis; with Will Smith and the “self-correcting wisdom of money,” and not with Marx and his “class struggle.” Class struggle? Is America immune to these concepts? Workers are good at working, but not organizing business. For that we need investors, owners, managers. Let the workers work, that is all they know how to do; sure as hell don’t expect them to own a business, for ownership means responsibility, and a worker can have no responsibility, without the ability, to manage, finance, and plan how to design products and technology. They are too narrow minded. In the same way, I recommend no man be “analyzed” by a psychoanalysis for ten years, or even one, for the suggestibility creates a placebo affect, but any supposed “recalled memories” are suspect, and ineffectual anyway: all psychoanalysts know that the symptoms persist. Get some good meds. But in the face of my friends and family, I see happiness, struggles, successes, perseverance. Did Freud not know that such people are normal?

Psychological control is part of every relationship, and this is most unfortunate. Some sorts of subtle blackmailing, manipulating, guilt-baiting, pity seeking is part of it all. To escape that is noble, and takes some hardness.

In the movie Doubt, the draconic nun has utter faith in one thing: the sinfulness of man. Especially does she trust her evil and honest eye on the priest, whom she sniffs out because of his confessional sermon – “some of you here feel isolated by the guilt of sin” – (which one would suppose standard Christian sermonage by now), and because of a brief but telltale accusatory body gesture of a boy when the priest grabbed his hand: he pulled away from the priest as from something vile, the nun will bet everything, including the church and her soul, that the priest is guilty – and she is right, he is. He is scared away by the insistence of the head nun, perhaps to harass other children in another church; the novice nun learns a lesson; and the dragon confesses that regarding God, she has doubts. Well that’s Christian. There may not be a God, but man deserves hell one way or the other! Once we forgive the movie for picking up a theme so faddy as pedophilia in the priestcraft, we must ask, why a nun? Why a church? Why not make the dragon a lawyer, or a librarian, or a suspicious wife? Why is the self-reliance of a nun’s intuition the heroic motif of the movie? Well there it is: what does it mean to be a heroic Christian? That you are sure as hell that you know guilt when you see it. But guilt isn’t even interesting – wouldn’t you expect the priests and nuns to be guiltiest of all people? thus their morbid resolutions. What of the movies about the lawyer who risks his career for a client guilty as hell who in fact is innocent? Is this the other side of the same coin? Is certainty enough? is self trust enough? or must we also aim at putting our self-trust and incorrigible certainty towards something … creative?

 

** 9 **

            To feel the right emotion toward the right object at the right degree at the right time involves exploring all our emotions, and hiding from none. This is easy to say, but when you confront your own murder, rape, incest, and suicide, you will realize that we hide truths out of weakness, not out of strength.

            I personally am open and honest not to love others, but to dismiss them. If I kept secrets I would have to ponder what you knew.

            But the Mundus Mundi, our world heart, is open to anything, is disciplined for rightness.

            The Dali Lama stupidly recommended us to imagine that by suffering you are taking away the world’s suffering. This sort of fantasy might suit meditation and otherworldly imaginations, but let’s be practical. If you want to use your suffering to help others, you must solve the riddle your suffering brings, and through that, help others solve their riddle.

“Quilts of guilt” that is another name for society. If they tie you with their tongue, feel free to give a sharp yank on the cord. As we have seen, guilt is internalized shame. There is no such thing as a guilt created by the self for the self. Precisely this is why Augustine makes me sick. Like a poison, like a louse. C.S. Lewis the same. I drank many moral poisons as a child, and am the stronger for it. Watch Augustine as he envies the suckling infant. He hoots: “See the baby glare towards his twin at mother’s twin breast? He is murderous with envy! Let him go to hell!” This is Augustine. He is willing to rape even the infants with hell. He wishes to put his original sin even into the babes at the breast. Infants feel no malice. That comes later, and when it comes, it comes for use and need. In fact, Augustine projects his own desire to dash the infants (Old Testament style) and leap on the bosom he craves.

            What are these moral monsters after? They are leeches of the heavenly host, God’s parasites, who spit worship into his veins in order to drink out the blood.

            And God himself feeds on prayers and sacrifice. Since the human herd had nothing worth sacrificing of their own, they always turned to animals, and again to the animal honesty of great men, and sacrificed them, saying, “Mozart was inspired by God,” –they dared no blaspheme Beethoven this way—or making the earth movers give gratitude to the heavenly ghost, the sky vampire.

            A moral people are not virtuous. Virtuous men and woman are men of power, centered on their own being, and not worshippers of anything in heaven or earth. It is impossible for a Christian to be virtuous, and impossible for a Man to be moral.

** 10 **

            Guilt is a pleasurable feeling. Like debt, where the borrower is enslaved, and has to work, has the pleasure of duty and work without any headaches of free-choice and self-reliance, so too does the guilty man avoid having to choose and will and be virtuous, because he is already guilty, and must merely be “freely forgiven” or work the choiceless act of expiation. In the right circumstances, with the ascetic voluptuary, guilty becomes a fine whine. The confessions of Augustine are indispensible lessons in this sort of self-regard. This man is responsible for some of the greatest intellectual crimes of Christendom, and yet he is torn in knots about stealing pears as a teenager!

            It is like C.S. Lewis who figures that since God is logically outside of time, therefore, He is constantly watching Clives at age 12 masturbating for the first time, and growing infinitely wrathful towards the little upstart.

            Or take Luther, who felt so guilty of his own excrement that he became constipated.

            Goebbels characterized the Jews as “the necessary inventors of the concept “Chutzpah—unlimited, impertinent, and unbelievable impudence and shamelessness.” Perhaps this is accurate, but I still don’t think its all that funny. Chutzpah is boring, I prefer the French esprit. I live for it—viva Voltaire! For us Americans, the French esprit is stylistically more pleasing than the Jewish Chutzpah, but let me suggest that we hold a deeper power: American grandiosity. This grandiosity is stronger than the Roman imperialism, which we unfairly compare ourselves to. If you cannot see the humor in this, perhaps I can help you? If anything, learn to laugh with me.

            Guilt is internalized shame, and shame is imposed on those who claim membership in a group, and yet dare to love themselves first. All shame is shame against individuality and all guilt is acceptance of that shame. Even us staunch individualists use this tool, recognizing power, for power is useful. Yet we are wiser than infants in that we know how to outrage the outrageous, shame the shame-makers, and guilt the guilt-seekers. We are perfect mirrors in this regard. We do not answer “eye for eye,” or “tooth-for-tooth” but we abstract their very power to touch our eye or tooth. We cut them at the balls. After all, he did not take out my eye with his own eye. Let him keep his eye, I merely wish to turn it on himself, the same punishment we have ever given God (“thy will be done” is thrown in his face, since this will is as empty on earth as it is in heaven).

            “We are all guilty, some more, some less. In any crime, everybody is partly responsible. There is no innocent.” This assumption plagues our courts and mental wards—the venom of a villain’s fang.

            See the heart of a situation. Men in their center are innocence, everything of them is of innocence, the simple in them, innocence, and the complex problems merely tangled innocence, till at last everything returns to innocence.

            The Victorian accusations of incestual fantasies were calculated to stun, but for us, we shrug. The perfect self-love within us is the ultimate repressed. Even the self approvers do not touch central self-love.

            Nothing a man does can properly be called “wrong,” only, his intentions are knotted. They cause pain to himself and others because they are indirect, knotted by self deceit. A man is muddled, never “evil.” Evil etymologically means “up and above,” what is over our head. We call it evil, and hate it for being over our head, for it exceeds our limit, exceeds our property, the proper. Only what is above us can be called evil. “Wrong” means crooked, twisted, that it did not go directly to its course. Thus to “right” a “wrong” is to straighten it out. This makes us happy, for happiness is actively achieving one’s goals.

            The “conscience” which I have elsewhere described as “a structure of no,” is in itself prescriptive. The conscience is not guilt.

            I have tried to experience “guilt” as severely as possible. It seems to me, however, that all that I used to call “guilt” in my heart related to the exterior, that I was worried that somebody else would know, somebody else would condemn my behavior. The act, the misdeed, was that something I owned? Where was it from? How is the deed of crime different than the deed of regret?

            Whatever comes from the heart is by definition the good. Does crime and guilt come from the same heart? Is the crime itself a form of guilt, is guilt a crime?

            God cannot pardon sins. For there can be no sins against God, no crimes against God, or, if there were, they would be equivalent to the crimes against our peers and family, which they also cannot forgive. I never felt resolved when I got somebody to forgive me. I always wished to probe deeper, to get at the source of the failure.

            Guilt then is blindness. One is afraid to explore his crime, to insist on his own crime, and so he “pays” with guilt, he looks upon the face of the guilt, rather than looking deeper. Guilt, at best, is an indicator, a prod to change and understand. But guilt became an “idol”—a reification of a process. A divine experience is caught in an image, such as the description of Yahweh in the Bible. And thus, God is an idol. The truly religious experience, the truly guilty experience, the truly creative experience, are never in idols—at best are sought through an idol, in its destruction—but the process itself is the flow of growth.

** 11 **

            Guilt, when correctly handled,  becomes pride. It opens the wound to let the wound heal soundly and proudly into a scar. But those who love guilt fester and perpetuate the wound. Guilt then is a means to suicide, to continually die, to sicken, to weaken the system. But the creative is right.

            The great idea behind every profound guilt is this: How can I practice the standard I love now, when I again will be tempted? How can I perpetuate the values I see with the eyes of guilt, when I am placed in the situation of temptation? Thus we have a quaternity: pride/guilt; temptation/conscience. Conscience is built by guilt to say no to the future possibility. But again, guilt builds the temptation, in order to perpetuate itself. The guilt wants to maintain its importance, its feeling of necessity. For in such a strong moral judgment against oneself, in the acid of it, one feels he is seeing something deeply important about himself—he finally feels himself to be important, his decisions to be profoundly important. If we ignore the Semitic and Egyptian hyperboles here (hell and heaven), and get to the real profundity, then the program of guilt becomes clear: the guilt not only wants to perpetuate a moral judgment, but it wishes to perpetuate its own guilt, to perpetuate the crime itself, to, in a way, pride in itself, to allow itself.

            Thus, guilt becomes a temptation of its own, by borrowing pride and instating a system of “no,” of conscience to self-sustain. The guilt is the great sin. The no is misapplied, pride is made to work for his own defeat.

            The ultimate use of temptation and conscience is to empower in the right directions at the right time: guilt and pride program them for this use. They are right and good, because they bring the past into a glorious future. But insofar as pride and guilt become backwards focused, they disallow the glorious future the temptations and conscience seek. They become stunted, and the organism begins to die.

            Of the two, pride is the abiding past. The past that empowers, and continually empowers, is pride. In this way, one is powerful enough to be tempted, to feel conscience, and perpetuate pride, to make pride more powerful, a continual growth, and guilt merely the dog of pride, on a leash, with a strong nose and the willingness to bark at bad ideas.

            When one can both say “never again,” and also “Good for the time,” he will have mastered the crime. For the crime will always have been, is history, and thus cannot be washed, erased, forgotten. It is incorporated. It is penetrated and opened up. It is unleashed. One grows powerful through crime, assuming that he at least has the power to understand it.

** 12 **

            Guilts are the chains of the weak. When a genius enters the world he laughs in the face of those who claim he owes them a thing. I am a god. Count yourself blessed that you were allowed to look upon me. What I do, every second of my work, is divine. Look upon those like me, the great inventors of history, the great writers, the great law-makers. Were they ever paid in full for how they benefitted mankind? No, not all. Some of them were in fact paid nothing, you scorned and spit on them. I am of their race. You owe me everything you have, everything you took, because I demand reparations. My people, the geniuses and greats, made every thread of your clothing, the bend of your ceiling, the thoughts in you head. Oh tedious mediocrity, what do I care about your guilts and will? I owe you nothing. When I take from you, you will pray gratitude to the universe that you contributed to such a noble cause. And then, get out of my way. I don’t have time to think about you. Think about yourself.

            The guilty of the world are ever the intellectuals. The stupid, the hard-working, the laborers, are too simple to bother with guilt. Guilt is a subtle taste, a thick poison, an intoxicant of Saints who brag like a man exposing himself on the bus: “I am the greatest of sinners!”

            Of course you are. We don’t care. Enjoy your hell. You will by no means escape it. For do you know that what they call heaven – a place made up of repentant sinners – is by any sane and noble measure called hell. For us great men, our heaven is Valhalla, and here we enjoy the radiance of history’s greats, before we turn inwards – and we are the first able to turn inwards.

            Listen carefully to the intellectuals of our times. You must have a tongue sensitive to poisons able to taste the slightest depressant. They do not any longer say things in tune of the most corrupt of men: “Nobody is good, no not one.” But if you listen long to the pulse of these men, you will know what Emerson meant when he said that some men are plus-men, are the creative, and others merely the receptive; what Nietzsche meant when he called some men overmen, who create from abundance, and the others last men, who create from exhaustion; what Blake meant when he said some men are the giants who create all that is good, the productive, and the rest are the devourers, who make moral chains to bound and bleed those titans. You will soon be able to see what men have soul, and what men are hollow, what human beings are Gods, and which are merely folds of mud, animated, and perhaps even enthusiastic and zealous, always as followers, supporters, believers in others. But these followers are good, because they belong to the Gods. Whoever receives my breath is forever a part of me, and joins me in my own Valhalla. Happy are you among men! But the guilt-sniffers and Cain-marked I call the suicidals. They are the most educated, most read scholars of our time, the most influential. You can fathom them out. Under the expert rhetoric, you will hear this:

Isn’t life absurd?

Isn’t sex absurd?

Isn’t my nation, my race, my religion, my gender bad, gross, and corrupt?

Does not history shame us?

Isn’t mankind horrible?

Are not our times horrible?

            They are no longer like the Christians who were straight about it: “damned are the beautiful, the rich, the smart, the happy, damned the healthy, the witty, the bold, damned the masters, the self-respecting, the self-loving, the independent, and therefore, blessed us the ugly, sinful, disgusting, worst of sinners.” That is past, they don’t talk to me that way. Instead they say, “We are bad, we are guilty, consider the sins of our forefathers, we are the ethnocentric, the racist, the presumptuous.” Let us forbid the alcoholic and the children of alcoholics the pen! And of those who wish to gut themselves publicly, let us insist they be decent and die in solitude.

            What black-hearted intellectuals, those singing corpses. “Not now, but some other time” they say, “Not here, but somewhere else.”

            The greatest truth the Jewish Mythman was, “Pluck out your tongue if it offend, for it is better to be tongueless in paradise than a blatherer in hell.” That is, the metaphorical mutilation we cause ourselves is eternal. The blind man is eternally blind. The mad man eternally mad. You can never hope for things to be better than they are now, suicide will put you back where you started: live with it. Live your life and love it. Your longest heaven and longest hell will be living with yourself and those like yourself.

** 13 **

            A clue to the nature of guilt shines from the Kinsey report. Kinsey reported that “sexual deviance” in the mid 20^th century America wasn’t deviance at all, but actually the hidden norm. And then the sexual revolution. Thus the greatest clue to the nature of guilt is that guilt is individuality. Once we can see our individuality as pride, every last ounce of it, than we will have comprehended. Not that individuality is good for the whole, but because it is good irrespective of the whole. It needs no justification. I need no justification.

            If I did it, it is divine.

            The most important virtue is vitality, power, crea. We have what we have, but we reinforce it with our habits.

           Essential expression is courage. Courage is a form of fear. Anger makes fear unconscious, whereas courage is only possible where fear is conscious. Thus fearlessness is a different virtue, and a lesser one, than courage.

            The world is round. Yes, and so is the heart: mundus mundi. If we look at its brightness, we must see also its shadow. Every side has an opposite. There is no good or evil in any passion, but only in circumstance.

            Every mood is a puzzle. The birds from the heavens of reason puzzle over the delights of passion’s garden. They will sing it out. Finding the use of every mood enables you to be ever surprised by a new strength.

            Sadness is happiness pulled too tight. And while we are sad, we yet feel a layer of happiness. The heart is layered like an onion, so that we feel layers of primary emotions, some superficial and easy to communicate, others deeper and unknown even to us.

 

** 14 **

            The actors of life, usually those initiated too early into sex or death, or otherwise made to feel that they are different from their peers – this feeling of difference itself is the only real difference between them and others, and afterwards makes all the differences, gaining this initial separate prejudice makes a man forever different – should try some psychological experiments. Look guilty. Believe yourself to be guilty, trying to hide it, and others who don’t even know you will mistrust you, punish you, or manipulate you, according to their ability, even if you prove you were mistaken, and there was nothing real to be guilty about. The exploiters of guilt use those burdened by guilt, and have a series of code words to introject into or summon the guilt from others. This is the magical arts of politics and religion.

            I have often wondered after those who speak so languidly about guilt, as if she were in love with her guilt, as if her guilt stayed and spoke. My guilts are so fleeting – they always have business elsewhere, they are usually borrowed from other people, and as quickly return to them. To sustain a guilt is unnatural, and thus requires an artificial language to sustain, and to sustain a language, a few guiding symbols, and to sustain the symbols, a few primary traumas.

            Therefore, you will recognize the greatest man, the best man, your finest benefactor on earth in heaven, the one who cares nothing about making you more like him—certainly not!—but always and ever more like yourself, more perfectly yourself, more deeply the unrepeatable name and mind you are; no easy journey this, to become yourself; sometimes a shock or a gift from a God is necessary to show you where your own God-nature is to be found. A friend is one who can hold you to your task.

            “If God is not, then all is permitted,” and this is true, so long as “all” stands for “all that is good for man,” for man and mankind permits nothing else to itself, and opposes it by instinct when a detriment gains power. Man is ever and always just, justice, order, beauty, and goodness are normal, expected, a matter of course. Only in the name of “Gods” (but not the original God, Odin), is life no longer permitted, natural goodness no longer permitted, instinctual perfection and animal sublimity no longer permitted.

            I oppose unnecessary violence, and with the strongest contempt, but I boast the struggle, the wrestle, the grapple with enemies worthy of my hands, and not those skeletons , leprous emaciated.

            Adam gained this wisdom from the tree: my naked is too great for the eyes of one such as Yahweh: I will cover my beauty and save it for those worthy thereof. For Adam is the Elohim whom Yahweh breathed into man.

            I am often amazed at how the soul-less regulars in my life tell me of their great concern of Africa. What is Africa to me? A breeding ground and trying out of the latest pandemic—hardly more. And if their stupidity brings them plagues the way Europe’s stupidity brought them plagues, what is that to me? Did Europe guilt some greater nation to bail them out? No, they didn’t even have God to help them. Everything they gained they gained from their own flesh and blood. Do not talk to me of respect for my fellow man and then expect me not to re-spect his actual stature. America, beauty yourself, perfect your people, become something glorious, and then, what is glorious in Africa and in all men will rise to you.