Shame

You should see (or intuitively feel) how shame is a trap, a labyrinth of pure abstraction and emotionally-infused imagination or half-blind fear that no rational or intelligent person should ever become ensnared by and yet we just can’t help ourselves and so easily and serially drift through regret into pity and – often enough – inadvertently replicate precisely that psychological state and behavioural pattern that led us so into suffering in the first place. Shame is a ball and chain that quite simply doesn’t exist but that teaches us to self-define through the burden and shadow it forces us to carry.

This is, of course, how others can control us but remains as only one among many methods of deception and cruelty. Finding ourselves afraid, isolated and insecure – the vultures circle. The worst part of this is that we all enter a world for which we have little preparation but that itself knows precisely how to harm and harvest us for its own malevolent purposes. Rising above this darkness we encounter is best achieved by realising that the shame we feel is only a hollow and haunted projection from others that we ourselves have internalised and mistaken as being our own and as soon as we identify with it, it all too rapidly and readily consumes us.

Your mistakes do not belong to you, they are the way the world exploits itself, through and as each and every one of us. Once you realise that you are not owned by this, that this error was never yours, you can become free. Freedom of self is freedom from self and all shame is in effect an economy of guilt that everyone engages in, shifting blame and perceived ethical impropriety from place to place and person to person and becoming so caught up in the normative, expected form and flow of cultural gossip and interpersonal spite that we fail to comprehend it is all really just so much pointless futility and vacuous bullshit.

Being or becoming free from guilt is an act of rebellion and represents a first step towards true emancipation in this life.