Natural Guilt

Loose your mind and come to your senses!

As long as the body remains as object to the ego, it may fulfill the ego’s pride, but it will never provide the joy and satisfaction that the “alive” body offers.

In ego therapies it is hoped that a person can consciously accept the irrational in his personality, he will be free to respond naturally and spontaneously to life situations. The weakness in this concept is that the conscious acceptance of a feeling does not lead, necessarily to the ability to express this feeling. It is one thing to recognize one is sad, it is another to be able to cry. To know that one is angry is not the same as to feel angry.

On some level people are aware that the body is a repository of their repressed feelings and while they would very much like to know about these repressed feelings, they are loathe to encounter them in the flesh.

The first thought about loosing our mind comes from Fritz Perls, the 20th century psychiatrist and psychotherapist.

Alexander Lowen, the American psychotherapist and a student of Wilhelm Reich, expanded that thought in his 1967 book Betrayal of the Body. Being a fragment of something else is taught by most religions. Political beliefs are experienced in fragments, and just about everything we experience is a fragment of something else. Artificial guilt is a fragment of natural guilt. Natural guilt surfaced when humans recognized the concept of the past, prsent and future. Guilt is connected to memory. It is a perventive measure. Guilt needs an advanced memory to judge new experiences against recalled ones. We then evaluate those experiences in moments of reflection.

Natural guilt does not harness any connection with punishment. Any violation against nature would trigger a sense of guilt so when a similar situation presented itself in the future we would, in our moment of reflection, not repeat the same action. As man progressed within our time-space reality artificial guilt developed using our projections as well as our memory. Our collection of artificial guilts has accumualted through the years, and the result is an abundance of repressed energy. That energy is released through violent actions and hatred. Hatred is fueled by artificial guilt. Wars, for example, develop through the release of repressed energy generated by artificial guilt.

Biologically speaking death is a hidden aspect of life, and life is a hidden aspect of death. We have a tendency to ignore that fact just like we ignore natural guilt. We choose to personify artificial guilt in order to feel the physical violation it produces. We loathe those feelings, but our beliefs make them a reality.