Guilt, regret and repair under the Spiritist perspective  Part 2 and final
Claudia Gelernter

 
Today, the issue of guilt has become even more extensive, according to the current ideology. In Capitalism, we are guilty if we don’t accumulate capital. Failure consists of not being successful in business, in studies, in consuming. For women, it’s more than that: failures are the ones who cannot keep up with the standard of beauty spread by the ever-so skinny catwalk models.

Jean-Yves Leloup, the French priest, author of the book “Normosis, the Pathology of Normality” created an interesting concept to define today’s context. He called “normosis” all that is socially accepted as being normal, but, nevertheless, causes suffering or even death.

Shallow relationships, exacerbated consumerism, the quest for the ideal standard of beauty, for success, for power, etc., makes a noticeable part of population suffer, generating symptoms of difficult solution. We are guilty of not achieving our set goals, within this pattern of current normosis. And, in order to disguise the guilt, we wear social masks that make us seem. We seem not to make mistakes, we seem to own, we seem to be. But we only seem. We all make mistakes, we own nothing (once that all belongs to God and can be taken away at any moment) and, in this way, we don’t even have the knowledge of who we really are.

We emphasize that, if on the one hand we have the issue of guilt as a social product, on the other hand it is not less true that we have had, for over two thousand years, other ways of thinking that bring a reflection about the situation of the affection to matter and the negligence with the questions of the Spirit. Therefore, although we are immersed in a remarkable and oppressive ideology, there’s no lack of philosophical and religious options in this context for us to analyze our behavior in the world and its possible consequences. 

Remorse as a mechanism of self-punishment 

Guilt is the consequence of a mistake which caused some harm (either material or moral) to oneself or to others. The awareness of such mistake causes us to suffer. And such feeling can be experienced in two ways: healthily or pathologically.

Let’s call a healthy guilt the one that leads us to a sincere regret and that, although dressed as pain, propels one to reparation.

In the core of the word, regret means a change of attitude, that is, a contrary attitude, or opposed to the one taken previously. It stems from the Greek metanoia (meta=change, noia=in this way). Regret means, therefore, a change of mentality.

We have then, in the healthy process, first the diagnosis of the mistake. Without this, it’s impossible to go on without accumulating more debts. People who have their consciousness dormant, when waking up, face harder pains, accumulated due to their spiritual blindness. It’s worth mentioning that no son is at the margin of the Love of the Heavenly Father. We all are, in different occasions and in various contexts, in touch with the truths of the Greater World. Good will must be present, otherwise we risk sliding off the evolutionary road more than necessary, gathering pains along the way. There must be a sincere regret. That is, a change of mentality. We diagnose the mistake and no longer wish to make it. However, we won’t just struggle not to repeat the evil. We’ll go beyond: in the third (and essential) step, we’ll move towards reparation.

Allan Kardec, in the book Heaven and Hell, in the penal code of future life, states that “regret, as long as being the first step towards regeneration, is not enough in itself; expiation and reparation are a must. (…) Regret, expiation and reparation constitute, therefore, the three conditions necessary in order to erase the traces of a fault and its consequences”.

In the pathological guilt we have, as a result, just remorse, in a closed circuit type of thinking, in which one believes (wrongly) that, when feeling a repeated pain, one is paying for the mistakes he’s made and redeeming his debts. Sad illusion, in which the person who suffers stays in a state of hypnosis, self inflicting pain, without being able to set himself free or evolve.

We have here a process of evolutionary freeze, a psychological deadlock that leads to serious pathologies of the mind and the body if not treated in time.

In remorse the subject locks himself up in his pain, howling, believing that he’s not worth of anything good, giving up the fight to repair and free himself. He cannot realize the role of mistake and pain in his own evolution, getting stuck in tormented waters, in a never-ending and senseless suffering. Remorse makes him suffer, but does not set him free. The person feels comfortable with complaining and whining. Psychologically more mature, he’d move towards self-forgiveness and reparation. 

Many lives and unconscious guilt 

With the arrival of Spiritualism, we acquired important knowledge, such as reincarnation. We learned through it, that we experience successive existences, in an evolutionary continuum, in which experiences appear as precious tools, propelling to constant improvement. In this process, pain can be compared to a fever in the organic vessel, which warns about an infectious problem that needs to be diagnosed in order to be treated. In the soul, pain plays the important role of warning us about something that is going well in the moral realm.

We must escape the prosecution state in which we find ourselves in, seeing pain as an enemy. Very much on the contrary, it must be deemed as an opportunity for knowledge, for understanding ourselves, enabling a real intimate improvement.

What happens is that, addicted to this ‘evil suffering’, we go on accumulating regrets, distancing ourselves from the higher objective, which is to learn from our mistakes, repairing them and moving on, free.

We continue accumulating in our unconscious psyche emotions related to pathological guilt, carrying, to other lives, problems of difficult solutions. Neurotic syndromes may be closely related to those past memories, but not accessible to our consciousness. For instance: the horrible fear that some people show when put in a position of leadership may reflect mistakes of the past, when they needed to deal with the experience of having power and failed, due to their arrogant, abusive or untimely personalities.

The Spiritualistic Doctrine helps us extraordinarily in the understanding or all this process, for it reveals the anteriority of the Being, where in many instances reside the disorders of today. We begin to understand ourselves as lords of our actions and tend, therefore, to change. Freeing ourselves from the pathological regret and learning to live more responsibly. 

What about those who have just entered Spiritualism? 

Another point that we would like to mention are the newcomers, the ones who enter the Spiritualistic Doctrine and start drinking from its fountains. They soon realize the grandiosity of its revealing message and in many cases get scared and dodge learning more, frightened by the possibility of never achieving its teachings.

Others, who persist longer, but still don’t grasp the message in all its extension, begin a complex process of self-punishment, suffering extensively a pain that originates from a complicated past.

One example: people who use drugs (even the ‘so-called’ legal ones), when they learn what happens to your spiritual body (perispirit), may start to experience huge intimate difficulties.

We need to be aware that it does not matter the size of the problem or mistake, but our healthy endeavor in the choices we make today will pay off in the future.

We are no longer in control of what we have done. This belongs to the past. But we may control our own future, which really depends on us alone.

Mistakes help us deeply to understand the paths we should follow. They are rather important for our evolution. Certain choices would not make any sense for us, if we don’t understand why. Faith must be rationalized. We must know why we need to change, how to change and when. And even IF we cannot reform ourselves in certain aspects, what we learn is that we must try again and again… seventy times seven, if that’s necessary…

What if we don’t have the opportunity to repair the harm we’ve done to a certain person directly?

Let’s try not to repeat the same mistake and love deeply. The Apostle Peter said that “Love covers over a multitude of sins” (Peter, 4:8). That’s it.

Let’s remember that from the mistake of Rousseau and Mary of Magdala wonderful fruit have sprung. Although not receiving direct reparation with the ones harmed in that incarnation (in the case of Rousseau, the five children abandoned by him), both opted by the exercise of unselfish love and by doing so left a beautiful and important legacy which, if observed and put into action, helps us in our journey, freeing us from remorse, propelling us to making it right, to the good path, according to what already pointed us, two thousand years ago, Jesus, the Master by excellence.

Even if we have to wait a longer time to have the opportunity to repair directly, let’s not doubt that, strengthened by love in action, we will be able to overcome our intimate barriers, and turn ourselves, at last, into benefactors of not only those, but the many others who cross our paths.
 

Bibliographical References: 

LELOUP: J. Y; WEILL, P.; CREMA, R. Normose: a patologia da normalidade. São Paulo, Thot, 1997.  

KARDEC, A. O Céu e o Inferno, Código da Vida Futura, p.94, Tradução de Manuel Justiniano Quintão, 42ª edição; FEB; Rio de Janeiro, 1998. 

O Livro dos Espíritos, 1ª edição comemorativa do sesquicentenário, Tradução de Evandro Noleto Bezerra, FEB, Rio de Janeiro, 2006. 

ROUSSEAU, J.J.; Emílio ou Da Educação; tradução Roberto Leal Ferreira, 3ª edição, São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 2004. 

WEBER, Max. A Ética Protestante e o Espírito do Capitalismo. São Paulo, Martin Claret. 4ª edição, 2001. 

XAVIER, F.C.; Boa Nova, capítulo Maria de Magdala, pelo Espírito Humberto de Campos; FEB; 3ª edição, Rio de Janeiro, 2008.