In this episode of “5 Minutes”, Dr. Robert Svoboda explores guilt and why Sanskrit has no direct word for it.

That is guilt t not gel t like bling. So guilt is a word in English that does not have an exact translation into Sanskrit. There is no exact translation in Sanskrit for guilt. There are words that suggest that you may have done some karma that was not very desirable and that you need to do something about it. You may feel regret. There is a word for regret. Past means afterwards. Tapa means burning. The burning that comes afterwards. So that’s the experience you’re having of having done some karma that was wrong and you knew it was wrong.

And there is a word like preuschitta and puschitta literally means predominant thought but it is often used as the thought of death. So the thought of the fact that you have killed a particular situation or that you might go to your death and this situation is not resolved. So a pious chitta as it has developed in the Sanskrit language means what you do to remedy a situation that you were responsible for because you have performed some papa karma some karma that is not promoting good movement forward in your own personal life.

So guilt is something that becomes egoic. It’s about how bad you feel and how you’re holding on to it because you did it and it’s bad. And it’s more about the feeling of feeling bad than it is about saying, “I did this. It was the wrong thing to do and now I need to somehow make amends about it.” You may regret it. You may find yourself looking for ways in which you can make amends, but you’re not wallowing in this egoic kind of sense of negative selfworth and how wrong you were to do it.

And I I remember a friend of mine years ago who was looking down and I asked her, “What’s wrong with you?” And she said, “I’m feeling guilty because at the moment I’m not feeling guilty.” So I thought, “Whoa, that’s extremely recursive. That’s extremely self-focused. Try not to invest so much of your attention in your own personal egoic self. Focus on how you are moving through life, how that self is moving through life, but how you are interacting with others.

And when that interaction is not up to an appropriate standard, then find a way to identify how you might make amends in some way in this regard. So do not waste your time. Do not waste your energy because that’s often what guilt is it’s a waste of energy and time. Focus instead on humility. The acknowledgment that everyone makes mistakes. Vimlan Nanda always said, “Everyone makes mistakes. The ideal thing to do is not make the same mistakes over and over again, which you’re more likely to do if you focus so much on guilt and oh, I did this and I am a bad person because I did this.”

You’re generating, you’re identifying with a personality subunit that is not going to benefit you in any identifiable kind of way. So you should be reflecting internally and rectifying externally instead of getting somehow totally and utterly immobilized in this sensation that really is not benefiting you seriously.