Vineeto: … the more you allow your hidden-away-since-puberty naiveté to come to the fore …
Andrew: That naïveté was buried long before puberty. Which has been the issue. I dare say, the issue for many. I have vivid memories of the sexual confusion that abuse creates even at 4 and 5 years old. Some of my earliest memories are twisted sexual dreams.
Let’s say naïveté was already on the ropes a long time before hormones got a hold of me.
Hi Andrew,
Having read your various subsequent posts and reports I realise that your childhood naiveté was indeed very early crushed in a brutal manner long before puberty. It fully explains why you said in a previous post –
Andrew: I literally have been offered to enjoy and appreciate my way to actual freedom, for something like 14 years. I never got that part. (link)
… and appreciable success that you “got that part” now.
Andrew: What my walk really started to solidify is just how subtle shame is. I always had this deep guilt that my life wasn’t bad enough to feel bad about. Even after everything, burying my daughter, losing my first brother, my father, I was always in my own estimation pathetic and not worthy of anyone’s consideration. However, there was always that other side of human nature which would lash out for attention.
Back to the topic, shame is so very subtle. All the ways I consider people slipping into self-condemnation, even at subtle levels. The whole “sorry for taking up space”. (link)
In a way your detailed affective exploration into shame is a follow-up and (possibly) deepening of your earlier understanding of guilt, for instance when you said –
Andrew: It’s always been a huge source of guilt, that I would desire there to be something “wrong” with me. Whilst these entire time, there was indeed always something that was “off” but it was not directly those things at all. Thanks. (link)
Vineeto: Guilt is a terrible weapon of dominance, and Christianity is as responsible of wielding it as any other religion. What allowed ‘Vineeto’ to reduce and whittle down ‘her’ guilt of being alive – such as having to be useful to be allowed to take up space, apart from the guilt of being ‘bad’, sinful, disobedient, unenlightened and all the rest – was the factual understanding (confirmed by the PCE, but also via the sensible explanations from Richard who had first made sense of it) how the human condition operates. It also made it clear that ‘she’, like every other human being, is in this situation by no fault of her own. (Vineeto to Andrew, 21 Oct 2025)
Your deeper explorations into the various levels of shame may or may not be necessary or beneficent to grasp the fundamental fact that ‘you’ are not to blame, that it is not ‘your’ fault. Here is an example of what Richard says about shame and guilt –
Respondent: … I take it you are saying something similar about being ‘guilty at conception’. It is not my fault that I am born as a ‘being’. And it doesn’t help to wallow in feeling guilty, rather one should understand how to rectify one’s negligence and flawed nature. A question arises about this sort of guilt. Does it help to feel guilty?
Richard: No … which is the whole point of realising that it is not ‘my’ fault and that ‘I’ am not to blame: it makes no more sense to feel guilty about being born with the human condition in situ than it does to feel guilty about the colour of one’s skin, for example, or any other characteristic which is determined at conception.
The same would apply to feeling shame.
It is pertinent to point out at this stage that I am not advocating immorality but rather the elimination of the cause of that which requires morality to keep in check … then one is automatically amoral (neither moral nor immoral).
In a word: innocent.
Respondent: No one is to blame, so I’m assuming it doesn’t really help to ‘feel guilty’ – so you are not trying to put a ‘guilt trip’ on anyone, rather pointing out the insalubrity of being a ‘being’.
Richard: I am not only pointing out the insalubrity of being a ‘being’ but also the social reprehensibility of being insalubrious.
Respondent: I find that feeling guilt doesn’t help me at all to rectify anything, but seeing the silliness of something and aiming to be more sensible does indeed help. Maybe what is happening here is that you are using language like ‘reprehensible’ and ‘guilty’ and ‘blameworthy’ and ‘culpable’ where all these words normally imply a feeling of guilt – then you come back and say that no-one is to blame – which for me, is a bit confusing.
Richard: All I mean by the word guilty in the phrase ‘guilty at conception’ is not-innocent … and I only use the word because so many people over the years have told me that children are born innocent and that adults have lost their childhood innocence (the Tabula Rasa theory). I see that I first used the term ‘guilty at conception’ – and in that very context – in ‘Richard’s Journal’ many years ago:
• ‘None of the supposed ‘innocence of children’ comes anywhere near to the matchless purity of the innocence of the actual. Nor does the assumed ‘innocence’ in the status generously and wrongly attributed to those old men, women and children classified as ‘innocent victims of war’; for these ‘victims’ are all guilty of instinctive anger and vicious urges themselves. As much as one might be sensitively considerate about their suffering, they cannot be labelled as innocent whilst they remain being ‘human’. *They are not to blame: nobody is born innocent, all humans are already ‘guilty’ at conception*. Fear and aggression and nurture and desire are built into the ‘Human Condition’ … this is the ‘human nature’ that is said ‘cannot be changed’. These intrinsic urges and drives are known as the ‘instinct for survival’. [emphasis added]. (pages 127-7, ‘Richard’s Journal’; ©1997, The Actual Freedom Trust).
Not only did I preface it with ‘they are not to blame’ but I see that I even put the word ‘guilty’ in scare quotes to indicate that I did not mean it in the normal sense (a practice which I seem to have later dropped).
(…)
Richard: What I have observed over many years is that a normal person has a propensity to blame – to find fault rather than to find causes – when it comes to dealing with the human condition … if for no other reason than that finding the cause means the end of ‘me’ (or the beginning of the end of ‘me’).
Whereas endlessly repeating mea culpa keeps ‘me’ in existence. (Richard, AF List, No. 27c, 9 Sep 2002).
In other words, once you had enough of affectively remembering why you feel/ felt ashamed and guilty (in a negative nostalgia if you will) then you can get “back to the topic”, which is feeling good and enjoying and appreciating being alive right here, right now, and in this manner doing something beneficial for yourself and others regarding the mess which is the human condition.
Cheers Vineeto