Guilt, Shame, Ecstasy
by Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D.
Everyone
has experienced guilt at one time or another. In fact, millions of people are
burdened by feelings of guilt of all sorts, especially sexual guilt. But what is
guilt? What, in particular, is sexual guilt? Where does it come from? How does
it differ from shame? What is the effect of guilt on us? Can we ever completely
rid ourselves of guilt? Should we even attempt do so?
The word guilt stems from the Old English term gylt, which refers to a
fine for an offense. Today, guilt signifies the objective state of having
done wrong, of being in breach of a law, and hence of being liable for a
penalty. In the subjective sense, guilt stands for the nagging feeling of
having done wrong, of being culpable. It is the concern over the rightness or
wrongness of one's action. This concern implies a worry that one might be found
out, or caught, and as a consequence be suitably chastised. This worry can
manifest even without a person having committed a wrongful act; the mere
intention to do so is sometimes enough to provoke feelings of guilt.
Not infrequently our guilt feelings are quite disproportionate to their
causes and any consequences arising from them. It is as if we had an inborn
guilt trigger that goes off at the slightest provocation.
Not all guilt is inappropriate and unhealthy, however. Guilt, like anger or
jealousy, is a normal emotion. Only exaggerated and persistent feelings of guilt
are a sign of neurosis. Wayne W. Dyer, in his popular book Your
Erroneous Zones, called guilt "the most useless of all erroneous zone
behaviors" and "by far the greatest waste of emotional energy."'
Psychotherapists know that even those clients who are not aware of any guilt
feelings or who deny having them soon discover, if confronted with their
unconscious, that they are in fact sitting on a Pandora's box of guilt. Guilt is
apparently a universal phenomenon in the human family. Whatever race or culture
we belong to, we are all apt to make mistakes and errors of judgment that bring
us in conflict with existing laws, mores, or etiquette and that can cause us to
feel temporary regret or remorse, perhaps mixed with fear of discovery and
punishment.
As you will shortly see, guilt has even deeper roots, which reach down into
the human condition itself. First, however, it is necessary to look at the
feeling of shame, the second stumbling block to sexual and emotional wholeness.
SHAME: THE FEELING OF BEING UNWORTHY
Guilt is closely connected with shame but must be distinguished from it.
Guilt is the painful feeling resulting from our awareness that we have done
something bad or unworthy. Shame, on the other hand, is the painful feeling that
we are bad or unworthy. The expression "I could die from shame" describes
this sense of self-abnegation well. The distinction between doing
something unworthy and being unworthy has come to play an important role
in the recent literature on addiction and recovery. In their valuable book
Letting Go of Shame, Ronald and Patricia Potter-Efron offer these
clarifying observations:
There are important differences between shame and guilt. First, shame
concerns a person's failure of being, while guilt points to a failure
of doing. Shamed people believe something is basically wrong with them
as human beings, while the guilty people believe they have done something
wrong that must be corrected...
A second major difference is that the shamed people usually are bothered by
their shortcomings, while guilty people notice their transgressions...
The third difference between shame and guilt is that the shamed person
fears abandonment, while the guilty person fears punishment. The
reason the shamed person fears abandonment is that he believes he is too
flawed to be wanted or valued by others...
Shame can be more difficult to heal than guilt, because it is about the
person rather than specific actions. The shamed person heals by changing her
self-concept so that she gains new self-respect and pride.
It is easy to see how shame may follow upon feelings of guilt or how it can
feed guilt. The two emotions can be like a revolving door that keeps the person
trapped in a perpetual spin.
SEXUAL GUILT AND SHAME
The experience of guilt and shame is especially pronounced, if not
omnipresent, in the area of sexuality. Not a few men and women feel guilty about
sex itself; they think sex is dirty or inhuman. They avoid making love, or if
they do have sex, it is in the form of a hasty encounter in the dark while
wearing pajamas and nightgown. Such people never talk about sex or their
suffering. Their sexual paranoia and frustration spills over into their marital
and family life as well as into all their other relationships and activities.
This sex-negative disposition is especially prominent in religious
fundamentalist circles.
The sexual revolution notwithstanding, we, as Westerners, are still suffering
the backwash of centuries of sexual repression under the Christian Church. Alex
Comfort, a physician who was one of the movers of the sexual revolution,
commented:
Whatever Christianity may have contributed to the growth of our culture in
other fields, it seems undeniable that in sexual morals and practice its
influence has been less healthy than that of other world religions.
Comfort also observed that the "fact of having made sex into a 'problem' is
the major negative achievement of Christendom." We do not have to be
anti-Christian to concur with this statement. Some of the finest advocates for
Christianity have rebuked the overly sex-negative attitudes of the Christian
heritage.
THE DENIAL OF THE BODY
When we inspect the Christian view of sex more closely, we find at its bottom
a stubborn denial or denigration of bodily existence. The body -- or the flesh --
is regarded as the enemy of the spirit. Kenneth Leech, an Anglican priest, has
this passionate criticism:
It is through the flesh that salvation comes. And yet so much in Christian
spirituality and Christian life is flesh-denying, flesh-despising,
flesh-devaluing. It is head-centered, ponderous, life-extinguishing, devoid of
passion. . . .
According to the classic Christian model, the body is innately impure and
thus is inimical to religious or spiritual life. This view of embodiment has
caused immense trauma among Christians, and it continues to do so. We are
supposed to feel guilty and ashamed about our body. We are meant to feel
especially guilty and ashamed about our sexual organs and their functions. And a
good many people, though they may consciously reject puritanism, have
unconsciously accepted this negative message, which comes to us across the
centuries from Platonism, Gnosticism, Christianity, and finally from the
dualistic philosophy of Descartes on which our whole scientific edifice is
built.
As historian and social critic Morris Berman has argued in his breathtaking
study
Coming to Our Senses, we in the West have lost our bodies. We are
largely out of touch with genuine somatic reality. There is a frightening
conspiracy of silence about bodily processes, including death. Because we are
"out of the body," we seek to ground ourselves by resorting to substitutes --
secondary satisfaction -- such as success, reputation, career, self-image, and
money, as well as spectator sports, nationalism, and war.
But these substitutes offer no ultimate fulfillment, and consequently, as
Berman notes, "our defeat shows in our bodies: we either 'prop ourselves up,' so
to speak, or slump in a posture of collapse." Although we disregard our own
somatic reality, we are paradoxically preoccupied with the body and how it
looks. We seek to improve it through makeup, fine clothes, hairdos, plastic
surgery, deodorants, health foods, vitamins, and jogging.
Our fear of the body is expressed in our irreverence for nature at large,
which we tend to exploit and use as a dumping ground for the discards of our
consumerist civilization. As the feminist movement has made clear, the same
alienation from the body is also evident in our disregard for the female gender,
which symbolizes nature and embodiment. The correlation
body:nature:woman:sexuality is a very important contemporary insight. Unless we
become fully cognizant of it and its many implications, we cannot understand our
postmodern world and the challenge before us, both on the personal and the
societal level.
GUILT, SHAME, AND ECSTASY
"Shame eats the soul," writes social theorist Victor J.Seidler. Guilt
likewise grinds away at our being. Both guilt and shame countermand our native
creativity and exuberance of life. People who are chronically guilty tend to be
walking "black holes." Their outlook on life is bleak. They are complainers,
blamers, and failures. They absorb the energies of others but fail to project
and share their own. They are ill-equipped for the rigors of a life dedicated to
personal growth, which demands a great deal of self-confidence, willpower,
courage, and, above all, the intent to change and grow.
Psychoanalysis has given us a rather somber but essentially correct vision of
our Western civilization as a giant template producing millions of guilty and
ashamed consciousnesses. As Sigmund Freud proposed in his classic work
Civilization and Its Discontents, civilization conspires to make us
inauthentic and anti-ecstatic. According to Freud, we are individually motivated
by the need for happiness, the pleasure principle, while civilization
perpetually seeks to direct that need along acceptable channels. Thus we end up
choosing security over self-expression and freedom. Freud speculated that
perhaps all of humanity is neurotic on this score.
Because of our ambivalent attitude toward embodiment, we are prone to
converting our innate drive for happiness into what we might style the fun
principle. To be sure, fun is as far removed from happiness as voyeurism is from
actual sexual intimacy. As psychoanalyst Alexander Lowen noted:
To the casual observer, it would seem that America is a land of pleasure.
Its people seem intent upon having a good time. They spend much of their
leisure time and money in the pursuit of pleasure... .
The question naturally arises: Do Americans really enjoy their lives? Most
serious observers of the current scene believe that the answer is no. They
feel that the obsession with fun betrays an absence of pleasure [or
happiness].
In his "passionate ethnography" entitled Culture Against Man, anthropologist
Jules Henry made the point that fun is a way of staying alive in a culture that
is riddled with boredom. Commenting on his fellow Americans, Henry remarked:
Fun, in its rather unique American form, is grim resolve. When the
foreigner observes how grimly we seem to go about our fun, he is right; we are
as determined about the pursuit of fun as a desert-wandering traveler is about
the search for water, and for the same reasons.
Henry was wrong in assuming that this grim pursuit of fun is uniquely
American -- pleasure-seekers are an integral part of other postindustrial
societies as well. He was also wrong in suggesting that fun is "a clowning
saboteur undermining the very system fun was meant to sustain." On the contrary,
fun supports the status quo. It is merely a safety valve for the pent-up
frustrations of those living in a competitive society such as ours.
We can consider ordinary life as the habit of living below our human
potential, below our capacity for experiencing genuine happiness, even ecstasy.
Psychologist Robert A. Johnson made these pertinent comments in his best-selling
work Ecstasy:
It is a great tragedy of contemporary Western society that we have
virtually lost the ability to experience the transformative power of ecstasy
and joy. This loss affects every aspect of our lives. We seek ecstasy
everywhere, and for a moment we may think we have found it. But, on a very
deep level, we remain unfulfilled.
We remain unfulfilled because, on the whole, we no longer intuit the nature
of happiness. We confuse it with spurts of pleasure or, more exactly, with fun
arrived at mechanically, whether it be through genital friction, and ingestion
of alcohol, or TV voyeurism.
AVOIDANCE OF BLISS
One form in which we express and perpetuate our personal and societal
"disease" is by our cleaving to genital sensations, especially orgasm. Through
orgasm we seek to punctuate the monotony of our life while at the same time
reducing nervous tension.
Actual sexual addiction, like nicotine, alcohol, or drug addiction, is simply
a more exaggerated and therefore more conspicuous version of that same basic
disposition to settle for short-lived thrills of the nervous system rather than
a penetrating transmutation of ourselves that attunes us to the larger reality
and fills our body-minds with the bliss "that passeth all understanding." The
addict, observed the cultural philosopher Jean Gebser, "tries to belie his own
nature with elements foreign to it."
Sexual addiction comes in many forms and guises, which have been presented by
psychotherapist Anne Wilson-Schaef in her book
Escape From Intimacy. At one end of the spectrum of addictive
behavior described by Wilson-Schaef is "Molly," who is described as a sexual
anorexic. She was the typical "prudish tease," who liked to come across as sexy
and thought incessantly about sex but was afraid of sex and men. She first had
to accept her co-dependency before she could recognize her own sexual addiction.
Next, Wilson-Schaef presented the case of "Julian," whose addiction to sexual
fantasies threatened to destroy his marriage and family. Then there is "Leslie,"
an inveterate masturbator who took greater and greater risks with her secret
habit until she started to live for the next orgasm in a socially or physically
risky situation. At the other end of the behavioral spectrum is sexual violence
-- from rape to incest to child molesting to sadomasochism.
Sexual addiction is a special way of avoiding happiness, or ecstasy. It
substitutes local pleasure or instant thrill for abiding happiness.
THE QUEST FOR TRANSCENDENCE
Civilization has always sought to inhibit and regulate our instinctual life,
and it has surrounded sex and aggression with a great variety of restrictions
and severe prohibitions, called taboos. Consequently, civilization has been a
breeding ground for pervasive feelings of guilt. Freud deserves credit for
making us aware of our pervasive guilt feelings and for exposing some of the
mechanics behind them.
However, with the hindsight of the past five or more decades, we must now
acknowledge that Freud's model of the human being was sadly deficient. It still
owed too much to the materialist ideology of the nineteenth century, which
interpreted the body-mind as a machine. A more penetrating view is today
espoused by transpersonal psychology. This young discipline maintains that
beneath our hunt for fun or fleeting pleasure there lies buried a deep desire to
realize our ecstatic potential. But to realize ecstasy means to transcend
ordinariness. In fact, it means to transcend all experiences conditioned by
space-time -- hence transpersonal, which means "beyond the personal," or
beyond the ordinary limited sense of identity.
This brings us to a consideration of the profound theme of what the religious
traditions call the spirit or the spiritual dimension of existence. The spirit
refers to that aspect of human life which participates in the larger reality
that is named God, Goddess, the Divine, Absolute, Tao, Shunya, Brahman, or
Atman.
The Chinese word tao means "way" and stands for the ultimate thing, or
process, which includes all visible and invisible processes or realities but is
not confined to them. The Buddhist Sanskrit term shunyaBrahman comes from the root brih, meaning "to grow, expand."
It is that which is infinitely large and all-comprising -- the transcendental
ground of the universe. The Sanskrit term atman means "self" and
designates the ultimate subject, or transcendental self, concealed deep within
the human personality, which is infinite and timeless. means "void" and
refers to the ultimate reality insofar as it is devoid of all characteristics
and hence is finally incomprehensible to the finite human mind. The Sanskrit
word
The Divine, or ultimate reality, is inherently sacred. That is to say, it is
set apart from conventional human life and our ordinary presumptions about
existence, and it fills us with awe. The Divine has variously been envisioned as
the Creator of the world (as in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) or as the very
foundation or essence of the universe (as in Taoism, Hinduism, and some schools
of Buddhism).
We are afraid of the sacred just as we are afraid of deep pleasure or bliss,
because they all threaten to undermine our familiar identity, which is the
ego-personality, our sense of being a particular, limited body-mind.
The ego, one might say, is the primary Atman substitute. It is responsible
for all subsequent substitutes, which are then experienced in relationship to
this artificial center of subjectivity. The ego is responsible, in other words,
for our peculiar experience of reality: we experience reality as external to
ourselves; we objectify life as a separate event. We objectify our own body and
thus separate it from the person we deem ourselves to be.
As we grow, our urges become more refined and we wean ourselves away from our
pursuit of this or that Atman substitute, until the spiritual impulse presents
itself in its purity and the Atman project comes fully into its own. It is only
then that we begin to value ecstatic self-transcendence, or spiritual
enlightenment, above all momentary satisfactions. It is only then that we fully
realize that we are the body and that the body is not external to ourselves or
separate from the rest of the world. Ecstasy is the realization of the essential
interconnectedness of all existence.
FROM SEXUAL MALAISE TO THE LOSS OF THE SACRED
In the final analysis, our sexual malaise turns out to be a spiritual
problem. We experience ourselves at odds with the universe at large, alienated
from what theologians have called the ground of being. In many ways, we have
lost sight of the sacred. Our lives are marked by an unhappy rift between the
sacred and the profane.
There is, however, a growing awareness in our Western civilization that in
order to heal our psyche and our ailing society, we must repair this multiple
breach. In particular, we must reconnect with the sacred.
Luckily, the sacred proves to be a pervasive power in the universe that
cannot be easily ignored. Suddenly -- sometimes at the oddest times -- there is a
momentary breakthrough when the spiritual or sacred dimension of existence makes
itself known to us. We may be listening to a Beethoven sonata, tending our
garden, hiking in the wilderness, or passionately making love. In that instant,
we are healed at the core of our being. There is joy, happiness, bliss, ecstasy.
 This
article was excerpted from:
Sacred Sexuality
by Georg
Feuerstein, Ph.D.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Inner Traditions Intl.ай1992,2003.
http://www.innertraditions.com
Info/Order this book.
About the Author
GEORG
FEUERSTEIN, Ph.D., is the author of over thirty books , including The Yoga
Tradition, The Philosophy of Classical Yoga, Holy Madness, Tantra:
The Path of Ecstasy, and Lucid Waking. He is the founder-president of the
Yoga Research and Education Center (www.yrec.org).
| Comments () >> |
 |
 |
