We all want to enjoy loving relationships full of empathy and acts of kindness. But what options do we have to get there, when we face hatred, greed or cruelty instead?
Conventional strategies for dealing with conflict, all the way from our family relationships to international politics, are solely based on the assumption that humans are fundamentally selfish and thus require agreement about morality and fear of shame, punishment or social exclusion in order to act socially. What keeps societies dominated by guilt is that guilt-based strategies are indeed the best we can do from a mental-emotional state of separateness. They mitigate the worst of suffering in the short term, while at the same time closing a vicious circle by further promoting ideas of separateness and guilt, making us vulnerable to be ruled by division.
"The Guilt Delusion: A Recipe for Love that Dissolves Hatred, Greed and Cruelty" offers an alternative explanatory, predictive and protective framework of reasoning about human motives and behaviour, unifying ideas from Carl Jung, Laozi, Carl Rogers, Marshall Rosenberg and many others, and grounded in the assumption of oneness and our natural capacity for love. Rather than a plea against guilt and blame, this book is a resource for respecting the dynamics of guilt, and for supporting ourselves and others to invite and nurture love without resisting blame.
Once we have entered a mental-emotional state of separateness and rely on guilt for our security, there is no way back through reason alone. Somehow, our brains seem to be hard-wired in a way that we can only trust on the infectious power of love after going through a compassionate process of self-empathy for our own feelings and needs.
Paradoxically, the only way to overcome blame is by respecting its necessity in a way that lets us recognise our loving nature hidden underneath. Blind faith is not required, nor recommended, to begin leveraging love's security within yourself and others at any time, because it only takes one tiny step along the direction you're already headed.
