Yousuf Raza – I feel guilty respect to how my behaviour has affected my parents. What should I do
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses their struggles with guilt and their responsibility as a person. They emphasize the importance of their actions in helping their parents and society, and stress the need to be careful with their behavior.
AI: Summary ©
Question, I feel guilty with respect to how
I behave, how my behavior has affected my
parents.
This is holding me back from growing as
a person.
Can I do some other actions like charity
to make up for that behavior?
No.
Quite clear answer.
If their guilt pertains, if the guilt is
true, if the guilt is something that you
hold to be a value for yourself, which
is necessary for your own self-growth, then
if the action pertaining to that guilt, if
the doors for that action are open to
you, i.e. you can change whatever it
is that is messed up, whatever it is
that you've messed up, then changing it is
the first order of priority.
Trying to compensate in easier domains, in other
domains, those are defense mechanisms.
Those are ways of dispelling that guilt by
brushing the real issue under the carpet and
sooner or later, that bigger problem that we
ignored and tried to compensate by overdoing even
a smaller problem or a smaller activity.
So I have issues with my parents and
I'm not willing to address those issues.
I'm not willing to fix whatever it is
I have to fix, but I go ahead
and give a lot of charity.
My parents are suffering as a consequence of
my behavior or my siblings are suffering as
a consequence of my behavior.
I am suffering as a consequence of my
behavior.
My charity is only reinforcing my evil if
that's what it is, the way I'm behaving
with them.
And so, yes, charity is good, but charity
in itself, if it is a means of
me hiding from my true faults, true evils
that I'm doing, then I have to be
really, really careful.
And that's actually very, very common, that we
shun major responsibilities, that at some level we
recognize our major responsibilities for the roles that
we have in the society, in our families,
with respect to our belief system.
Yet we ignore those responsibilities and look to
compensate and usually overcompensate in other domains and
completely unrelated domains and sing ourselves these lullabies
that I'm really, I'm okay, I'm good, I
got this covered, I made up for it.
You made up for it in a very
different way.
You can't kill one person and then go
on to another continent and feed the hungry
and say, look, I'm doing so much good
here.
It doesn't work.
It's usually not recommended.
And we need to be really, really careful
with respect to those tendencies.