I've heard it said that Catholics and Jews tend to be more guilty than most. I don't know why, but that's the accepted stereotype. Well, I was raised Catholic. And whether or not that has anything to do with anything, I am noticing a lot of guilt lately surrounding my buddhist practice. Guilt is a useless emotion if it isn't serving to motivate improvement. For example, when I feel guilty about not practicing the guitar I paid $200 for (or when I feel guilty for paying $200 for something I don't practice), when I feel guilty for not working out or exercising when I have plenty of free time, these are opportunities to act differently, to do the things I have objectively deemed worthy of my time instead of being idle. I feel like the best scenario would involve doing these things without the guilty feelings serving as motivation. But the guilt is there, largely because I don't do these things way more than I do, and so I usually just end up feeling guilty. This brings up the question of whether I actually WANT to do these things, or if there is something else going on -- some neuro-peptide addiction which is gratified by guilty feelings, perhaps. It's difficult to say. But if I'm feeling guilty and NOT taking action to fix whatever I am feeling guilty about, then the guilt just ends up being somewhat masturbatory -- I get to continue being shitty but still feel kind of good for being tortured over my shittiness.
Often, though, I feel guilty about stuff that is much more subtle and nuanced than simply going to the gym vs sitting around in my room. Sometimes I feel guilt over something no rational person would feel I should have to change, like not returning the feelings of someone, for example. I have noticed I will feel guilty BOTH for giving a homeless person money and for holding back from giving a homeless person money. I feel guilty when my practice doesn't resemble that of people I look up to. That last one is really a bit silly; I mean isn't it the point of "looking up to" someone to emulate the qualities in someone more developed which one hopes to cultivate in themselves? So while it's good to feel motivated, there's no reason to feel guilty about not being a particular way NOW. I struggle immensely with this.
I still get angry, upset, or otherwise worked up -- quite often, actually. I feel guilty when I get like this. One reason is that I feel like I am misrepresenting buddhism, zen specifically. I (perhaps erroneously) feel like meditation practice should help a person be calmer, more collected. I mean, it probably does... A common fear for me (which I touched on in an earlier blog entry) is that meditation really only helps keep me at mostly-normal levels of irritation -- that without it I would be a raging psychopath or something. That's most likely not true. What IS true, maybe, is that I was more angry or prone to getting worked up before I started zen practice, that I am less so now, and that in the future these traits will be even smaller. I do need to keep reminding myself that the fruits of practice (as Darlene Cohen mentioned) are best measured in degree rather than in order of magnitude (that phrasing was co-opted from an NPR article I can't now recall). It takes more than four years to turn an intense young man into a sage, cool cucumber. In the mean time, I will persevere in noticing my failings, feeling guilty about them (if it's a failing I can rectify, like judging people or being unkind, or clinging to a small sense of self) and using that as motivation to work continually TOWARDS the idea of buddhism. If I notice masturbatory guilt, I will try to let it go. And if I can't, well at least I will do my best not to feel guilty about it.
