Admit Your Mistake

Enlightened ones say that if you perceive your mistake in the right way, despair can never arise. The reason for your sadness and despair is that you actually do not want to accept your mistake, but are compelled to do so. Your ego does not let you admit that you are filled with passions and mistakes. When you are caught red-handed and have to reluctantly admit, you develop complexes. This occurs when you intend to defend your ego and not honestly own up. The negative emotions reveal the importance you have given to your ego instead of admitting your fault.

If you are controlling your passions, say, anger, only so that you can protect your image, then the anger will keep erupting every now and then, because you continue to nurture its cause, the ego. Your suffering is not because you did what you shouldn’t have done, but because you could not protect yourself from being seen as guilty, you could not secure your self-created image.

When the image you have created gets tainted, you cannot bear to see it. He who honestly accepts his mistake, his goal is to be pure and peaceful and so he puts right efforts to remove it.

You ask for atonement but your focus remains on the deed and not on the impurity latent in your intention. Thus, by falsely repenting and taking atonement, you try saving your image but not move in the direction of transformation.The meaning of true repentance is overcoming the passion or emotion that had led you to commit the mistake, end of the intention that prompted you to sin.

Source: Economic Times, 16/08/2018