Godehard Oepen

Conscience, Spirituality, and Religion

Philosophy

“This book provides an all-encompassing overview and offers concrete practical tools that are demonstrated to help misguided individuals and crowds to rediscover the essential ingredients of a healthy, meaningful, and rewarding life. Through observation, empathic listening, and fearless thinking he has identified distorted or absent spiritual concepts as a major source of individual and collective suffering which he faced in encounters with his patients. He describes a practical approach to helping people and society to recover from our contemporary ailments of anger, hate, addictions, egocentricity, and group-think, to name a few, which all seem to be fed by illusions. Using St. Paul’s discrimination between ‘works of the flesh’ (basically ‘sin,’ addictions, self-centeredness) and ‘fruits of the Spirit,’ he defines the latter as positive spiritual attributes and forces that help individuals and groups of people alike to ‘snap out of illusions,’ redirect their life goals, and apply the tools presented. This includes faith, hope, love, compassion, and forgiveness, among others. These tools are distilled from an encyclopedic array of historical, religious, philosophical, psychiatric, and literary sources, which make his book a joy to read.”