Page 33 - The Truth Landscape Format 2020 1st Draft 19_01_2020

HAPPINESS AND GUILT

The greatest obstacle to our facing the truths of what we really want, what makes us truly happy and to finally accepting the happiness intended for us, is our
guilt, and we have plenty of it.

Simply, guilt is the belief that you do not deserve all the happiness that activity or person will bring you. It is the belief that you are ‘not good enough’, ‘wrong’,
‘bad’ and ‘nothing’. This belief is learned. It is not your natural state. All thoughts of lack such as this are born in the ego, that part of you that hopes for
happiness but ultimately has “learned to believe” that you are not really deserving of it.

We long for happiness, but we may also believe we are too guilty to accept it. We love the idea of happiness. It feels so good. But what holds us back is our
fear that maybe it’s selfish, wrong, inappropriate, and that it comes with a price. Out-of-date conditioning has taught us to believe that happiness demands
compensation of some sort – in the form of suffering, labour or sacrifice. Guilt doesn’t just rear it’s head to obstruct our happiness, however. Have you noticed,
for example, how :

“That which you desire is what you feel most guilty about!”

This is the ego at work again! In spiritual circles, a tremendous amount of emphasis is placed on releasing our ego’s for the purpose of achieving true inner
peace.

The ego creates guilty feelings everywhere it can, especially where happiness is to be found. The ego tries to make us feel guilty about anything and everything,
particularly nice, pleasurable things. Take pleasure for example. Pleasure is a happiness of the body, an enjoyment of the senses. Pleasure is about beautiful
colours, scented aromas, wonderful music, a healing touch and exotic tastes. We have also wrongly been taught to believe however, that pleasure is wicked.
What nonsense!

Somehow we’ve picked up the erroneous belief that ‘pleasure is so good it must be a sin’. We hear that too much pleasure can kill off our morals, destroy our
virtues and ruin all values. All by itself apparently, pleasure can lead to laziness, selfishness, anarchy, war, damnation, the end of the world and the downfall
of the human race!

Sex is pleasure. Sex is natural, good fun and healthy. That sounds like a really great, very logical, objective and mature approach, but most of us still feel guilt-
ridden talking about it. Remember the childhood gems of wisdom ‘play with it and it will fall off’ and ‘Do that again and you’ll go blind’ ‘That’s dirty, don’t
do it?’

Examples are plenty of how, through conditioning with irrational beliefs, we have been taught to feel guilty about everything we like. Chocolate is ‘naughty
but nice’, money is ‘the root of all evil’, peace and rest is re-written as ‘the devil making use of idle hands’, laughter ‘will end in tears’, success ‘will ruin you’. Page33