Opinion | Education and Spirituality: Recovering the Deepest Feelings

Social crises do not affect us only economically or politically; they touch our physical, ideological, and emotional levels, and sometimes they go beyond these planes to question our existential and spiritual structure.

When they get to this point (as they do today), they end up revealing to us that the human problem is not something that originates in the economic, as other, lesser ones, make us believe, nor political nor cultural, but something deeper, something that we cannot explain, prevent, or solve with the usual criteria. When a crisis touches the spiritual, everything turns upside down and a real – and hidden – order is revealed.

It is no coincidence that a thinker of the stature of South Korean Byung-Chul Han, who for decades focused on radically critiquing the system, now takes an apparent turn and surprises us with his book On God, in which he proposes mystical contemplation as a path to a better life, both personally and socially. (Among his virtues, his publication of On God has given divinity a kind of citizenship card within the critical thinking of our times, allowing us to speak of it in academic spaces, not only as a “cultural construct” or “mental elaboration,” but as a real entity, with a clear function – that of contemplation and love – in our lives).

I have already said many times that, more than an intellectual, I am a sentimentalist. Feelings—and thoughts that are felt, so to speak—move me the most to speak up. Thus, in the context of feelings – and the “God of love,” of which Byung-Chul Han speaks – I aspire to contribute something about a very important issue in our lives, one very despised in current times: the topic of guilt.

I warn readers that it is very likely the first thing I say about guilt will offend their sensibilities, especially if they are a supporter, like many, of the idea that guilt is a useless feeling that hinders our search for a better life. The truth is that I not only refute the above with the most obvious argument, that no feeling can be considered useless (and that doing so is simply retrograde), but I take an opposite position. I am radical: for me, guilt is not only useful but inseparable from the feeling of love and, therefore, also from God, whose presence precedes and proclaims. It is crucial to understand the spiritual crisis of our times, which, I insist, is even discussed in academia.

I know that discussing this can be considered scandalous and worthy of removing my text, so I ask my readers for a little patience, hoping to show them that it is not scandalous, that it is just a matter of relaxing the terms.

But we have to go step by step, reflecting carefully on it. That is why I begin by dedicating space to the current trend of eliminating the concept of guilt and replacing it with others. The most common thing is to shift responsibility, proposing, for example, to stop saying “I am guilty of…” and instead say “I am responsible for…”.

But… immediately arises a “but,” at least for those of us who agree that the crisis of today’s world touches and even rips the spiritual. It is a matter of considering that, in the face of so many increasingly visible atrocities (we have already experienced Gaza, Ukraine, Minneapolis, and now, in the days when I write this, new terrible Epstein Files are emerging), the word responsibility can be perverted if not used correctly.

To say that someone is responsible for this or that crime is perfectly fine within a tribunal that will apply a punishment. Still, I am convinced that no punishment can make someone reconsider, in the spiritual order, acts whose magnitude he cannot recognize because of the social context surrounding him.  

Responsibility – which, according to Erich Fromm, means to answer for – is valid, in my opinion, if this answer is directed toward a transcendental question, that is, if we answer for our acts not in terms of crime and punishment, as before a court, but in terms of going astray and finding our way back to God (just for this moment, I wanted this word recovered by Byung-Chul Han!).

To speak of responsibility implies action: responding proactively to a question, in this case, that of divinity: “How are you acting, what have you done to fulfill my commission?” Yes, to be accountable to God means to act according to a mission entrusted to us by Him, or at least to try, with all our strength, to discover what our mission is here.

But that is not easy at all (that is precisely why we are discussing spirituality now). Acting is — always has been — a real problem, both in a practical and a philosophical sense, and nowadays it has reached an extreme. We can all agree that responsibility is a form of action maintained despite difficulties, is proactive, and takes effort. However, acting is increasingly associated with productivity. To be responsible is to strive to produce (i.e., to give results); hence, even responsibility to the divine is seen as accountability (which, by the way, is what many disenchanted with God actually flee). Even spiritually, one has to comply, move forward, and make an effort. Things are approaching closer to the idea of succeeding and competing to become more responsible.

Perhaps this is why people like Byung-Chul Han look for spirituality in areas opposed to action, discovering that “giving an answer” is not the only way to get closer to God. There are other ways, such as contemplation, that is, attentive passivity, that lead us to spirituality without asking questions or arriving at answers.

In some Eastern traditions, such as Buddhism, one does not ask about one’s origin or inquire why we are here, far from God’s presence. But in the Western tradition, such detachment does not seem possible. For some reason, our genes (could they be the reason?) tend to make us wonder what separated us from the source. One answer, as we have already said, is “We left His side to fulfill the mission that He Himself entrusted to us.” But there is another one that I want to mention (and almost, almost, mention), which says, “We turn away from Him by our own choice.”

The philosophy that would help us to decipher this second notion and explain this distance is complex, and we cannot delve into it here. Oh, disappointment, I know! However, we can at last—with this introduction—begin to talk about our subject: guilt.

It is important, first, to understand that when we accept guilt, we are no longer in the field of proactivity, nor in that of action or attitude, nor in that of thinking that asks itself how our actions are or should be. We are in the world of passivity, where distance from God requires no action, determination, or idea, but comes to mean hurting our deepest emotions.

Now, the dynamics of this feeling of guilt are simple: if, when it occurs, we allow ourselves to move toward God, even if only a little, the pain diminishes; if we move away, it increases. It’s like that childish game of “hot, hot/cold, cold”, in which a voice guides us towards the prize, only in this case that voice is a pain that decreases or increases.

When I started writing this, I didn’t imagine I could explain it in such simple terms. It is very easy to say that we have a sentimental radar that tells us how far or close we are to our origin! The bad thing is that, in reality, it is not the problem. The real issue is to know if we really want to stop being distant, that is, if we really want to return.

It is not easy to decide. To return to God, as to all love, means not only to enjoy Him, but to suffer again the possibility of losing Him, of being tempted again by the desire to leave.

To fall into temptation: to love or to lose ourselves. If our choice is to return, what follows is simple (although it implies extreme humility): we must abandon ourselves to the feeling of guilt, not oppose it; let ourselves go; feel it loosely, without clinging to our usual supports or trying to stop ourselves. In the end, it is a matter of renouncing that same iron will that let us decide to move away. (By the way, if the guilt is enormous and drags us down towards a bottomless pit, then we should fall with vertigo, making speed our parachute.) 

Most importantly, we must not judge ourselves, nor persecute ourselves with judges or witnesses, nor raise a court or bring all those whom “we harmed”. Guilt—this is what I never tire of defending—is not a punishment for our earthly acts or a reaction of God to our primal decision to turn away from Him. Guilt is just the natural way of reacting, with our whole being, to the distance that we voluntarily open behind us.

In addition to a feeling, guilt is also the experience of emptiness. We all know it; pardon, we feel it like a burning in the inner walls of an empty jug; as if the vessel, when spilled, had swelled our loneliness.

Ortega y Gasset —the great Spanish philosopher— affirmed that the human being is a complete being that lacks a part, which I like to associate with that primordial void.

I insist that guilt is not the only path to spirituality. However, it is a fundamental part of our culture, and we must accept that it possibly is not just an old idiom to extract from our vocabulary; not a vice to rid ourselves of in self-help groups, not a bad memory to heal with the guidance of a therapist; even, as a pillar of one of the most important spiritualities on the planet (the most central for us as “Westerners”), we must consider the possibility that it is a constitutive feeling of our essence and that perhaps we cannot renounce it without renouncing ourselves.

That is why, out of a purely precautionary principle, I wanted to rescue what I consider its positive side.

However, there is another negative side, which is perhaps the one to which some detractors of guilt refer. It is the one in which feeling guilty serves as an incentive to keep going. In this way, guilt also functions as a path, but in this case, it postpones the return, again and again.

It is simple to explain. It is a question of proposing a palliative to pain, leveraging a play on words that correlates guilt to debt: guilt = debt, or, in other words, he who suffers the guilt pays for it. In its crudest and most naïve form, this attitude is observed in the famous “chest-thumping,” gestures, and self-incriminations without feeling or reason. But it reaches a degree of sophistication of a perverse kind.

Let’s go little by little. To begin with, I already mentioned something about this dangerous aspect when I warned that responsibility can be confused with duty and, therefore, with productivity. On this path that delays the return to God, not only the feeling of guilt but also the idea of paying what you owe come into play. Thus, the word duty here carries its double meaning: one associated with debt (as in I owe money”) and the other with responsibility (as in “I must pay”).

I owe; therefore, I exist: guilt must also be settled, and acting productively can do so: I pay what I owe.

Let me clarify: it is not that the lack of productivity generates guilt; rather, if we stop producing (if we abandon this social sedative), we are left alone (as with all withdrawal syndromes): alone with ourselves, facing our guilt. Then we relapse; we produce again and find that it is the only thing capable of reassuring us.

Thus, as you can see, little by little we accumulate a series of spirit-stock market concepts that help us to accept the distance from God, with love, without regrets: duty, pay, fulfill, guilt, paying the guilt, paying the debt. Then we accept that we are in this world to suffer evils and produce good, and if possible, accumulate a mountain of “responsible” actions that, in time, will allow us to face any breakdown (spiritual breakdown, you like it?).

Now, our worst atrocities come at a price; a price, of course, we will be able to pay, no matter what, as long as we go back to being “good,” that is, to produce enough to cover our guilt (and, of course, to pray that our competitors – or even our accomplices – do not discover our fraud and send us straight to hell).

But there is a God (and this is said, pointing upwards) who reminds us of something we already know: the voids we flee from pursue us; things do not cease to exist by denying their existence; they do not remain behind just because we run from them.

Our voids must be carried with us. “Take the depths of you, with you,” said the refrain of a song in a play I wrote about a boy who wanted to abandon himself, but learned to love himself.

Yes, we are all to blame: that acute pain that many tell us we should not feel, but we feel; that absence that they repeat to us is part of an imposed culture, yet it is there, apparently forever, reminding us that we can return home.

But I’m not kidding: I know that thinking positively about guilt is not easy. Does seeing it in that light require a pain that makes us look back, showing us the lost path, a return to something we loved and loved us? No, Mr. Writer, some will object, that is not from God (as is said).

But we have already seen that it is.

I cannot end without briefly noting that, in addition to the paths of guilt and responsibility, there is a third form of spirituality that some follow. It is explained simply, but it is extremely complex, as it seeks to unite two paths that seem opposed: contemplation and action. Kierkegaard proposes it thus: “One lives forward but looks backward.” (The original phrase does not speak of looking backward but towards the past, but I like it better expressed the former way; however, in this context, they mean the same thing: to move forward looking towards the being that one day, in the past, created us). It is, it seems, a matter of going forward, of acting not in a productive way but of contemplating our original ties.

It sounds very interesting, I know; much more than this thing of going around, like me, speaking well of suffering.

Someday, I would like to expand on it.

Translated by Daniel Wetta

Andrés García Barrios Writer and communicator. His work brings together experience in numerous disciplines, almost always with an educational focus: theater, novel, short story, essay, television series and museum exhibitions. He is a contributor to the Sciences magazines of the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM; Casa del Tiempo, from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, and Tierra Adentro, from the Ministry of Culture. Contact: andresgarciabarrios@gmail.com

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