The Benign Reality, a book by Harvey Jackins, won’t be reprinted for a while, so we are printing parts of it in Present Time. The following is a short chapter from the book. You can read another chapter on pages 24 to 28 of the October 2019 Present Time.
A Possible Source of Guilt
A firm, consistent stand against guilt has proven necessary for the discharge of oppression patterns, particularly for members of groups cast in oppressor roles by the society.
No guilt is ever justified if we remember our basic dictum: that each of us has, in the past, always done the very best he or she could do. Yet we RCers, let alone the rest of the world, must keep a constant watch that we not fall back into dealing with others by the use of blame, reproach, fault-finding, and criticism. These have never once, in all human experience, resulted in anyone being “better” or more human. But the tremendous dead momentum of pattern contagion from the past, and the manipulative pressure of the society, keeps us all surrounded by an atmosphere of constant blame and counter-blame.
This atmosphere and the pervasive reproach dramatizations might seem enough to explain the accumulation of guilt that we find surrounding every client. Yet in working with many clients to help them discharge their guilt, I run into [encounter] or sense a more basic source of guilt or self-blame that furnishes a foundation for the acceptance of all the later reproaches from others.
Speculation: That each new human starts out with complete confidence in her or his complete power to control the Universe and make it proceed in the ways she or he desires. (This confidence would be confirmed if the infant found rational humans waiting to cooperate in her or his plans.) When the patterned situation erupts in irrationalities, injuries, cruelties, losses, deaths, and so on, the infant, having assumed her or his possession of complete power, blames herself or himself for all the bad things that are happening, and this lays in a huge foundation of guilt to which all later reproaches can attach.
What do your memories of your early experiences say to this speculation?
Reprinted from pages 233 to 234 of The Benign Reality
(Present Time 198, January 2020)