It is not any crime you have ever committed that infects your soul with
permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the
blank-out by which you attempt to evade them—it is not any sort of Original
Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic
default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think. Fear and guilt are your
chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don’t come
from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your
“selfishness,” weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your
existence: fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt,
because you know you have done it volitionally.