Question: Can guilt be a helpful/healthy emotion? When is guilt most/least helpful in your experience?
Answer: First of all we would need to examine what the guilt is for.
For example guilt presumes that the person is actually guilty, meaning had a free choice about one’s actions and purposefully, intentionally choose to commit a crime.
If one didn’t have free choice about one’s actions, didn’t purposefully, internally commit a crime, what is the sense of guilt for?!
By default none of us have any free choice, as we are all blindly, instinctively following our inherently self-serving, self-justifying, egotistic, hateful and greedy nature. Of course we are all causing a lot of harm, we are on a reckless path of mutual self-destruction, but we are not guilty since we had no free choice about the nature were born with!
In order to guilt make any sense we would need to reach a state of free choice. This means fully, consciously recognizing our inherent nature as destructive, harmful; and at the same time having access to a unique, purposeful, practical method that could help us change, upgrade our inherent nature.
Today we are standing at this point, thus from now on we can start feeling guilty, ashamed if we didn’t use the chance to acquire a second, better, benevolent nature that can neutralise our inherent ego and help us towards a better Human society.