Question: What about recurring thoughts and negative feelings about past actions that just come up every day? Specific incidences.
Venerable: Give me an example – just a general example, not necessarily your own experience, I don’t want to be personal about you. What do you mean by that?
Q: Let’s say if I’ve hurt a family member by things I’ve said.
A: Oh, some action you’ve done in the past. Okay, okay, okay.
Q: Yeah, I feel guilty all the time.
A: Is it still happening?
Q: No, it’s happened in the past, but the residual guilt is . . .
A: Okay, good. I hear you, darling. I hear you, I hear you.
Buddha says we’ve got two types of states of mind: those that are neurotic, delusional, disturbing, non-virtuous, negative, and then we have the positive, optimistic, valid, reasonable states of mind – not delusional – and virtuous.
So here, with what you’re talking about, there are two things going on. There would be guilt, which is in the first category. It’s a neurotic, deluded state of mind, the guilt, but it’s also mixed with a valid one, which is a genuine sorrow that you’ve done something to harm another, based on compassion.
First you’ve got to recognize they’re both there together, like love and attachment are mixed together – you’ve got to see the difference. This is the part that’s really hard. It’s marvelous that you can look at an action that you did that did harm another, and you can be sorry that you did it, but the trouble is it gets polluted by the negative, neurotic, I-based state of mind, which is guilt, which is really just internalized anger, which kind of gets stuck.
What anger does, in general, is overexaggerate the bad qualities of somebody: “You did this, and you did that, and you did this, and you’re a bad person.” Well, that’s what guilt is doing, inside you – it’s saying, “I did this, and I did that,” and then it’s concluding, “I’m a bad person.” But it’s all so quick you can’t notice those thoughts.
Guilt is destructive, useless, but we can’t distinguish it from a valid attitude, which is a genuine conscience and a recognition we harmed somebody. That comes out of compassion – and that’s fantastic, that part.
This is why it’s so important to do the purification practice: It’s a really practical, down-to-earth process that we do at the end of the day. Lama Zopa says we’re insane not to do it every day.
Given that everything we think and do and say leaves seeds in our mind, programs our mind, then doing purification at the end of the day puts atomic bombs under these tendencies we have.
They lead this purification practice every evening at Thubten Norbu Ling in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They do it at nine o’clock – someone leads it for thirty minutes, so you might like to join it one day: Vajrasattva practice.
We can think of the process as the four Rs: 1. REGRET: acknowledging it and regretting it because you’re sick of suffering: this is like compassion for yourself; 2. RELIANCE: having compassion for the person you harmed, and relying on the Buddha, basically the doctor who gives us the methods to heal ourselves; 3. REMEDY: you’d do a little visualization to purify it; 4. RESOLVE: the determination not to do it again.
There’s way more to it than this. It’s all based upon the philosophy of karma, and there’s a way of describing in more depth these steps, but, in general, this is the attitude. And there’s no karma you can’t purify: there’s nothing in our mind that’s set in stone.
So, it’s great if you have sincere regret, both for your own sake and the sake of the other. Perfect.
So how to deal with the guilt? Now, if you’ve done the above process, you need to know there’s no reason to continue to be mad at yourself.
Even more so if the person has forgiven you. Now, if you haven’t asked them for forgiveness, if they’re not dead, it’s good to do so.
But this is the point about how, in the Buddhist view, there’s two parts: 1. you changing your own mind and purifying your own mind – if you like, forgiving yourself; 2. and you can also have compassion and fix it with the other person.
Now, maybe you can fix it, maybe you can’t. If you have asked the person to forgive you, but they’re still angry with you and won’t forgive you, that often leaves us feeling devastated because, I think, in our culture, we rely upon another person making us feel better to feel that we’ve fixed it.
It’s like this for my friends in prison: they will be devastated because what can you do if you’ve killed a person? You can’t get them to forgive you – they’re dead.
But forgiveness is not what fixes us. What purifies us, what fixes us, is our own regret, our compassion, and our determination to change. You’ve got to fix it in your own mind first, and then it’s a bonus if somebody else forgives you. You understand what I’m saying? Are we communicating?
If your continuing to feel guilty is because they haven’t forgiven you, yes it’s difficult. But we need to know that others’ opinions of us do not define us.
This guilt actually points to the deepest attachment we have, which is attachment to being approved of. It’s very hard to see this, it’s so primordial.
So look deep inside, and go one step at a time. And practice catching the guilty thoughts and arguing with them – because your negative actions do not define you: they’re not the whole story.
We need to remember this! Then we can move forward.