Why You Feel Guilty Before You've Done Anything | The Managed Sacred, Part 1 of 2

When was the last time you felt guilty before you'd even finished the thought? Most people call that their conscience. This is where a lot of it came from.

The Inherited Ladder looked at the guilt handed down by your parents. This one goes back further, to organised religion. The church took the oldest human fear and stretched it past death, where nobody can check it. It taught that the only way to God ran through its own doors, and it held the happiest and saddest days of family life inside its walls, so questioning it felt like turning your back on everyone you love. It taught that you were born guilty and kept the only relief in the confessional. Over time people learned to do the watching themselves, and it was passed down at the dinner table without a word. That is why the guilt still fires in people who stopped believing decades ago.

If you believe in God, there is no argument with you here. Reaching for something bigger than yourself belongs to all of us. What was built on top of it is the subject.

The Atlas names the pattern running your life in a single sitting. It is built from twenty years in the chair and the thirty-three books of Michael Lauria, a qualified therapist, author and philosophical mythologist. It takes about forty-five minutes, costs nothing, and ends in a written Record of that pattern, drawn from your own words. It is not therapy and not for crisis. Begin here:

A question for the comments: when you were growing up, what was the one question you knew you weren't allowed to ask?

Michael Lauria

The Architect