Guilt & Paranoia – 12.02.10

Student Question: What is the difference between guilt and paranoia?

“They exist at two different assemblage points: guilt is at the disillusionment point, paranoia is at the dispossession point,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Guilt is based upon an identity that has been established in a very strong and healthy way within the ego that takes its motivation from a lineage of symbolic signifiers of tradition and ideals and higher meaning. And that enables an individual, who carries that burden, to operate responsibly and with integrity in the world to fulfill their duty. Whereas paranoia does not have any of those characteristics, and it is more based on the terror that someone will take away its sensory enjoyments and its capacity to act in freedom and will impinge on its sense of autonomy and self-empowerment. And the more paranoid one is, the more [one] will project that the world is filled with enemies who want to destroy one. But this is not, then, an ethical way of responding to the other as an equal, but seeing the other in a demonized form.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.