Tag: regret

My Quora Answer to the Question, “Should you feel guilty when you decline to give a dollar to a homeless person asking for money?”

Guilt isn’t a beneficial emotion for anybody involved. It’s self-judgement and self-condemnation, and judgement and condemnation are merely human follies borne of spiritual immaturity, at least on the part of culture. It’s the depriving of yourself of receiving necessary spiritual nourishment, or the ‘holding down’ of oneself, in an attempted atonement for one’s perceived wrongdoings. In Conversations with God book 3 by Neale Donald Walsch, God and Neale have the following conversation about guilt:

Seek only to be genuine. Strive to be sincere. If you wish to undo all the “damage” you imagine yourself to have done, demonstrate that in your actions. Do what you can do. Then let it rest.

That’s easier said than done. Sometimes I feel so guilty.

Guilt and fear are the only enemies of man.

Guilt is important. It tells us when we’ve done wrong.

There is no such thing as “wrong.” There is only that which does not serve you; does not speak the truth about Who You Are, and Who You Choose to Be.

Guilt is the feeling that keeps you stuck in who you are not.

But guilt is the feeling that at least lets us notice we’ve gone astray.

Awareness is what you are talking about, not guilt.

I tell you this: Guilt is a blight upon the land—the poison that kills the plant.

You will not grow through guilt, but only shrivel and die.

Awareness is what you seek. But awareness is not guilt, and love is not fear.

Fear and guilt, I say again, are your only enemies. Love and awareness are your true friends. Yet do not confuse the one with the other, for one will kill you, while the other gives you life.

Then I should not feel “guilty” about anything?

Never, ever. What good is there in that? It only al­lows you to not love yourself—and that kills any chance that you could love another.

Elsewhere in Neale’s books it mentions that regret is the feeling that tells you that you do not want to do a thing again. Regret is a normal, healthy emotion, as opposed to guilt which is often employed instead.

I wrote more about the difference between guilt and regret here: To the Decriers of Anger and Regret

As for whether you should give the homeless person a dollar or feel regret about not giving it to him, if we go by the above text, it all has to do with whether that decision reflects who you really are and who you choose to be.

But personally, I think giving money to the homeless is the ‘right’ thing to do. It signifies compassion, and it’s a better use of that dollar than whatever you would have spent it on because a dollar means a lot more to someone who has almost nothing than to someone who has a place to live, water, food, clothes, medical care, etc. The amount of wealth a non-homeless person versus the amount of wealth a homeless person has entails a huge imbalance, a travesty of justice. The least you could do is discharge that imbalance slightly by giving the man a dollar.

At least it’s a better use of that dollar than what you would spend it on for yourself if you consider other people’s well-being to be as important as yours.. and why shouldn’t you? What makes you so special in the universe? What kind of a world is it where everybody is selfish and out to please themselves even at the expense of others? (I’m not necessarily implying that declining to do something charitable is “at the expense of” another—that’s arguable—I’m just saying that selfism on a collective level makes everybody hurt.) You could say that everybody has to look out for Number One first, because nobody else will, and there is some truth that, but taking care of yourself in the ways that only you can does not preclude correcting a gross imbalance of goods between you and another, and nor does it preclude significantly caring about other people on a fundamental level.

You could argue, of course, that the homeless person should get a job, or that it’s not fair that you work for that money and he would get it for free, but I think it’s idealistic to think that the homeless should just get jobs. Do you think that they live in the atrocious conditions they live in, suffering a lack of the most basic necessities of life, being reduced to wearing rags and begging on the street all day just because they’re lazy and hence prefer that to working? No, the homeless person always has some kind of psychological (or physical, or both psychological and physical) issues that make it impractical for them to work. Not everybody is cut out for the workforce; some people slip between the cracks of capitalism, and some of those people slip between the cracks of the welfare system, insurance and other such safety nets as well.

You could argue that it’s pointless to give a homeless person money because they’ll just use it for alcohol or drugs, but 1) you don’t know for sure what they’ll use it for, everybody needs a bite to eat now and then, so it’s better to err on the side of compassion than on the side of harshness; and 2) if alcohol is really what that homeless person wants to drown the pain away, even more so than the supposedly more useful things that he could spend it on such as food or soap, then who are you to say that it’s not worth it for that homeless person to spend a dollar on alcohol? Apparently, that’s what benefits him most in his situation.

You could think that the homeless person is just going to continue to be homeless regardless of what you give him and therefore you’re not really helping anything, but regardless of that the fact is that any amount of money you give will proportionately improve that homeless person’s life, even if only for that day, and that matters.

To the Decriers of Anger and Regret

So many people these days are selling us pithy platitudes on why we shouldn’t feel anger or why we shouldn’t feel regret. Even the Dalai Lama seems to paint anger in a negative light. This is tragically misguided.

Anger and regret are both healthy and ‘useful’ emotions (I hesitate to use the term ‘useful’ there, because emotions are not mere things to be manipulated, they’re more intimate than that). To quote one of Neale Donald Walsch’s books, “Expressed with love, anger is the discharge of disharmony, not the creator of it.” A book of his also says anger is ‘the tool you have which allows you to say, “No, thank you.”‘

The problem is that anger is often expressed harshly, searingly, without much restraint or refinement.  To quote Neale’s book, “Anger that is not wonderfully expressed, but expressed through verbal or physical violence, does not heal, but inflicts injury.”

Since the most common way in which people express anger is to do it with the intent to damage the other, people tend to think of anger as being inherently an unvirtuous thing to be avoided or overcome. But anger is actually one of the five natural emotions that serve us, having legitimate purposes.

Anger also has the unfortunate association with hatred, which is a vile emotion and should be avoided. Anger is not hatred, however. I would say that hatred is a distortion of love that arises when one is not able to adequately express strong feelings of anger toward another.

I always think of the quintessential example of expressing anger with gravity but without malice as the part on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf says to Bilbo, “I am not trying to rob you!” Here’s a link to it: https://youtu.be/4Yy0pPTrHlk?t=120

Regret (not to be confused with guilt—more on that later), to paraphrase one of Neale’s books, is the feeling that tells you that you do not want to do a thing again. People who advocate having “no regrets” are effectively advocating sociopathy. Everyone who’s human does something at some point that they shouldn’t have (or, to put it more accurately, that does not reflect who they really want to be) that harms someone else, and it’s impertinent to pretend otherwise or to avoid feeling the repercussions of this.

Some may reason that it’s unnecessary to feel regret because one can simply choose not to do something again they did wrong instead. But I think this line of reasoning may arise from the false assumption that regret is inherently a negative thing. As with the case of anger, people assume that regret is wholly negative because, on the surface, its effects are uncomfortable.

So why should we feel regret if we can simply choose not to do a thing again? Because not all of our behavior is or should be calculated; a lot of it arises from our emotional system. We are emotional beings, and acting from emotions is healthy. If we do not feel the emotion of regret, perhaps we won’t properly integrate the update to our behavior. Maybe we’ll forget later when it comes time to heed the results of the previous time we did something. Or maybe we’ll sometimes act rashly or purely out of emotion without the proper mental check being put on our actions. Or maybe we’ll fail to properly generalize the bad thing we did and regard new situations as irrelevant to that thing when they really aren’t. And learning something on an emotional level rather than just remembering it should certainly carry over better to future lives, if you believe in that sorta thing.

Guilt, however, is not regret. Guilt is essentially self-punishment, or internalization of others’ condemnation. When we feel guilt, we deny ourselves necessary spiritual nourishment or sort of ‘hold ourselves down’ for the sake of some kind of atonement, and that doesn’t help anybody. I believe in one of Neale’s books it says that with guilt, we will only wither and die, and also that guilt and fear are the only enemies of man.

(“But we need fear to stop us from doing something stupid that gets us harmed or killed,” you say. No, I’d say, fear isn’t necessary for this; caution is.)

I wrote more about guilt here [https://www.quora.com/Should-Christians-feel-guilty-if-they-experience-constant-lustful-thoughts/answer/Richard-A-Nichols-III] and here [https://www.quora.com/Should-you-feel-guilty-when-you-decline-to-give-a-dollar-to-a-homeless-person-asking-for-money/answer/Richard-A-Nichols-III].

More on what Neale’s books have to say about anger and the five natural emotions can be seen here [https://meaningfulponderings.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/anger-is-a-healer-from-the-new-revelations-by-neale-donald-walsch/] and here [http://spiritlibrary.com/neale-donald-walsch/five-natural-emotions].