Nature of Guilt 2: The Illusion of Becoming and the Myth of the Will

Guilt and Its Unspoken Premise

Every experience of guilt, whether mild remorse or crushing regret, rests on a single, powerful assumption:

That I could have acted otherwise.

This belief is rarely questioned. It is embedded not just in religion or psychology, but in the entire way modern humanity conceives of freedom, responsibility, and the self. Without it, guilt cannot survive.

But what if this assumption is false?

Not just mistaken in this or that case, but impossible; an illusion built into our very way of thinking?

If so, then guilt is not simply a reaction to wrongdoing. It is a symptom of a deeper error: a contradiction in the way we think about ourselves and the world.

The Myth of the Will

We have been taught that we are willing beings, agents moving through time, choosing between options, deciding our paths.

From this view, the self is like a god in miniature: it stands before an open future and shapes it through its decisions. If it chooses well, it is praised. If it chooses poorly, it is blamed. This is the moral structure of almost every culture in history.

But this view depends on a hidden idea: that reality is made of possibilities, and that the self is free to turn one possibility into actuality while leaving the others behind.

In other words, it assumes becoming: that things emerge from nothing, pass through time, and vanish again; that the past was once unreal, that the future does not yet exist, and that we exist as fragile choosers in the middle of it all.

But what if this story is not just flawed, but incoherent?

The Crumbling Illusion: Becoming as the Core Assumption of the West

At the heart of guilt lies a metaphysical assumption: that the self is moving through time, that the past was once nothing and is now something, that the future does not yet exist and might be shaped by will.

This is not just a psychological or theological view. It is the fundamental framework of Western thought for millennia: the belief in becoming, in the constant flux of things arising from nothing and disappearing into nothing.

But this framework is beginning to crack.

Across diverse fields — from theoretical physics to metaphysics, from mysticism to mathematics — voices are converging on a different picture:

• In modern physics, theories like block universe models and certain interpretations of relativity suggest that all events in time (past, present, and future) already exist. The universe does not “unfold”; it is.
• In cosmology, time is increasingly viewed not as a flowing river, but as a coordinate, an axis of already-real phenomena.
• In philosophy, thinkers like Parmenides, Spinoza, and more recently Emanuele Severino have argued that nothing that is can ever not be, that Being is eternal, and becoming is the illusion of appearance.
• In spiritual experience, mystics, contemplatives, and near-death experiencers speak of timelessness, of all things known at once, of a presence where nothing is lost and nothing is becoming.

What all these strands suggest is something deeply counter to our ordinary way of thinking:

That the real is not a flow of change, but a field of necessary appearances.
That nothing truly “happens” — rather, all that is,

is eternally so.

This vision, though emerging from many paths, converges in one silent clarity: that nothing that is can become nothing, and nothing can arise from what is not.

The Self as Appearance, Not Origin

In this light, the self is not a detached chooser, floating above events. It is not a source of action standing outside of Being.

The self is an appearance within Being. It is a configuration of the eternal; not a cause of what happens, but a place where the eternal unfolds.

This means:

• You did not “cause” your past in the way you thought.
• You were not the origin of your failures.
• You were the place where they appeared — necessarily, and eternally.

This is not to deny responsibility. It is to redefine it.
You are not a little god in time. You are the necessary appearance of a structure that cannot not be.

Guilt as Contradiction

Now we can see more clearly:

Guilt arises when we believe two incompatible things:

1. That something happened.
2. That it should not have happened, or could have been avoided.

But these cannot both be true.

If what-is cannot not be, then there is no “should-have-been-otherwise.” The idea that the past was a mistake is itself the mistake.

Guilt is not just emotional pain.

It is the pain of a metaphysical contradiction.

This is why guilt endures: not because it is true, but because we continue to hold the impossible as real. We try to live in a world where Being might not be, where our past was a choice between illusions, and where we failed to choose the right one.

The Necessity of Guilt (and Its End)

Even guilt itself, this terrible weight, is part of the necessity of Being. It had to appear, because we believed in becoming. And that belief had to unfold until it broke.

Guilt is not an error to be avoided. It is a contradiction that must appear in order to be resolved.

It is the burning of the false in the presence of the true.

The purpose of guilt is not to torment you forever. Its purpose is to reach the limit of illusion, until you see that what you blame yourself for was never yours to create or avoid.

What comes next is not escape, but revelation.

A Glimpse Ahead

In the next article, we will walk into that revelation.
We will ask: If what-is is eternal, if the self is not the origin of action, and if nothing could have been otherwise—then what becomes of guilt? What becomes of the self?

Not erased. Not forgotten.
But transfigured in the light of Being.