Metaphysically and psychologically, guilt is the opposite of remorse. Guilt is founded on the illusory premise that we should have and could have acted differently in this or that situation, with this or that person or in the light of this or that ideal. Remorse, on the other hand, is rooted in the objective perception that it is the state of our being that has been revealed, that this is what we are—contrary to what we have believed about our moral capacities.
In guilt we may vow to do better—which is often a way the ego has of "quarantining" the momentary impression of deep-seated moral incapacity and preventing it from entering into us as truth. Remorse, on the other hand, brings with it no external or internal promises to do anything, but only the profoundly sorrowful acceptance of what we are, together with the physical and metaphysical relaxation of the ego's condition of tension, a relaxation that opens the heart and the body to receive a new quality of attention—an attention, or conscious energy, that in the Eastern Orthodox tradition has been called "the attention that comes from God."
It is imperative that we study this difference in ourselves, for it is such emotions as guilt and fear, with their reflexes of self-pity and anger, that arise in us with such force outside the theater of the mind, in the 'streets' of our everyday life; it is such emotions that we need to understand if there is to be any hope of manifesting in our actions the good that we discover in ourselves - even if it be only in "the theater of the mind"—when we try to touch or sustain in ourselves the power to love, which is the ultimate basis of all ethical action and principles.
Such ideas about human evil and its reconciliation in ourselves through the action of remorse may without difficulty be found in the discourses and writings of teachers and guides in all the great spiritual traditions, East and West, throughout the ages. But in this context there is one element in these teachings that is not often noticed, an element which in a strange way seems to have concealed itself even as it is expressed time and again in the literary and artistic transmissions that have come down to us. And it is safe to say that it is this that is perhaps the chief missing element in all our struggles to live according to what we know is good. It is an element that has been forgotten in most Western religions; ... And yet, without this element, ethics must ultimately remain what it has been in so much of human history and in our individual lives: little more than a grand self-deception, the dream of doing—an unrealizable ideal that at best enables society to function, but which in a deeper sense only masks our collective and individual moral impotence, to the point that now the world of nature and man is in real danger of complete destruction. ... We identify this missing element as the work of establishing a relationship between the mind and the body.
