Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and welcome to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. If we open a discussion about civilization, we open ourselves to the possibility of particularly dull and wooden exclamations about the renunciation of instinct or the enshrinement of rights. There's been the tendency to equate the progress of civilization with technological advance, but surely we see the incompleteness of this view in our polluted and violent modern world.
Not to advocate the return to the land movement, which some suggest would solve our problems, but it must be clear to any thinking citizen that our modern world, while containing numerous labor-saving devices, is a far cry from civilized. For true civilization goes much beyond democracy and freedom to consider goodness and truth in their universal definitions. And perhaps most importantly must include beauty if it's to be a civilized world.
And herein lies the rub. We as a species have been particularly dismissive of beauty. Let's address this today. Arts and beauty as the soul of society. Today, on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. We're streaming these days on our own radio station, the Stop Radio Network, which is available through iTunes, News Talk radio stations.
You can even leave us a voice message there if you like. And one of my favorite ways to listen in on my smartphone is using the free TuneIn app. Download it, and you've got a universe of radio stations available for you. The Stop Radio Network is our name. We're one of them in there. And I'm always interested to hear from you about what we're doing.
Do drop me a line sometime and let me know how you're liking what we do and how you found us. Boy, it's always useful info in this too-virtual world we live in. That real human contact and authentic stories, man, there's no substitutes for those in this digital matrix we're lost in. So, please, don't be shy. Back in the 1980s, Norberto Keppe wrote an extraordinary book that we've yet to get properly translated into English.
It's a monumental thesis, monumental because it attempts to disinvert our fundamental philosophy of life. That's a pretty tall order. The book is called Sociopathology, the Basis for the New Civilization of the Third Millennium. Keppe's premise in this book is this. Beauty, aesthetics, is the foundation of civilization. But more than that, that appreciation and acceptance of the superiority of beauty for civilization has been nullified by the rise to predominance of mathematics.
Listen to some of his book chapters here. Mathematics is preventing humanity's development. Mathematics is responsible for a great number of mental disturbances. Mathematics destroys culture. It just about does it with mathematicians, doesn't it? Now, who else can we speak badly about? But, you know, there's a serious point to consider here about how we have essentially turned society over to the bean counters.
Don't we boil everything down to numbers at colossal damage to our souls? Arts is monetized, as is everything in life. Efficiency is mathematically graphed. Growth is seen through the tunnel vision of economic profit. All experience is categorized and summed up in top ten lists, and any who pull back from total immersion in this sea of numbers and formulae are seen as losers, unfit for survival, useless eaters in Kissinger's famous phrase.
It's led us to slavery in one of the most fanatical periods in human history, where noted scientist Rupert Sheldrake can have his TED Talk censored just for daring to question the dogmas of science, just for asking questions, mind you. Pay attention to that. Keppe's premise, and it's a beautiful one for anyone with an artistic soul, is that the sense of aesthetics is the fundamental point of contact between the human being and reality.
And do remember, as Picasso pointed out, that we're all born artists. Our difficulty is to remain so as we become adults. I would propose that one of the reasons it's so difficult to hang on to our sense of art and aesthetics is precisely because of the sadistic domination of the mathematical economic worldview. We'll develop this idea a lot more in our program today.
Arts and beauty, the soul of society, when Thinking with Somebody Else's Head returns on the Stop Radio
Susan Berkley: Network.
Back in 1986, Norberto Keppe wrote a book that predicted the worldwide economic crisis we're facing today. Liberation of the People critiques the pathology of power that lies at the base of our inverted social system and points the way out.
This is essential reading for anyone wanting to find out how we got in such a mess and how we can get out.
Richard: Richard. Yes, I'm buckled in, I have my seatbelt on, I'm prepared. Every once in a while, when we most need it.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: This subject that concerns the spiritual life attracts the biggest attention.
Richard: Comes the scientific and spiritual wisdom to change the world.
Cláudia: All of us, we are inverted, we are upside down. We see good as evil and evil as good. We see honesty as foolishness and dishonesty as smartness.
Richard: I think what we're looking to do, I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, is really offer a perspective on the world that's been lacking.
Our link with Dr. Keppe Science gives us the tools to treat the problems of the world in a way no one else can do. That makes our program extremely relevant and profoundly therapeutic.
Cláudia: And Keppe brings a light on this, that the being in itself is good, beautiful, and truthful. Evil, sickness, suffering, restriction is just a denial of the true being.
Richard: Inspired from the landmark science of Analytical Trilogy comes a radio program that explores the true human spirit, the most profound understanding of the human being in the world today.
Cláudia: So we are opening the gates for the fifth empire, which will be the true empire for humanity, wise, humble, and very energetic, a true cosmic civilization.
Richard: Available now on the Positive World Radio Network. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, with Richard Lloyd Jones and Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco. Opening our eyes to the full dimension of human possibility. If
Cláudia: we have 20% of people becoming conscious and opening their minds, their inner lives, you will see what power of consciousness is.
Richard: The most original, contemporaneous writer in the world today, says the National Scientific Research Center in France. A genuine contributor to the intellectual treasury of civilization, says former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Gugassian. For these times of uncertainty and conflict comes a work of extraordinary vision, hope, and moral clarity. Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist Norberto Keppe writes with wisdom and authority about the things that really matter.
How to heal illness, how inverted science is leading the destruction of nature and what to do about it, finding spirituality within, structuring a truly just society. There are more than 3,000 books published worldwide every day. None are more important than these. The Books of Norberto Keppe. Trilogical science leading us to a new world.
Richard: Our program is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
And Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco is back. We've been sort of in a holiday traveling mode, so we haven't done a program for a while. And it's nice to have you back, Cláudia, of course.
Bob Butler is sitting in, too, and I'll be making sure that he has some comments about this. But we were talking just before we started to record about Dr. Keppe's work in arts, Cláudia. And, you know, I mean, when we think about changing society, most people don't think about the artistic change. They think about well we need to change politics, which of course we do.
If when you see people marching in the streets, you don't see anybody saying you know up with the artists. You you see a lot of focus on how do
we change the laws, how do we change the regulations, how do we stop the corruption. All of these things are very necessary, but this focus on arts being like the soul of society dr Keppe called it in his book sociopathology The Basis of the Third Millennium Art.
Cláudia: And in his book, Liberation of the People, he has this whole chapter on the persecution of the artist, the soul of society. And he has a whole book, a thesis about statics being the foundation of civilization and
Richard: not mathematics. And certainly not economics.
Cláudia: And certainly not.
Richard: So maybe any economist listening will be kind of horrified by what we're saying because we don't think about the importance of arts.
But Keppe has addressed this directly in his work, and now you're thinking about some projects. To try to reintroduce this idea from Keppe.
Cláudia: I started with this in 92 in Europe and in Brazil when I founded STOP the Destruction of the World Association. And
Richard: your idea was to speak directly to the artists at that time, right?
Cláudia: Yeah, to invite them to join us because if we get not only a revival, a renaissance of arts, But this should be something that should be part of our everyday life, everywhere in the world, in the planet.
Every human being should become an artist, do what he has to do with arts. And Keppe brings the concept of the importance of beauty for health, for balance, for mental and physical health, social health.
Richard: So here you're making a link between beauty and art, not just art. Not just art.
Cláudia: But the concept of beauty in philosophy, right? Yeah, and beauty applied in arts.
Richard: Or applied in everything, not just in art. Applied in
Cláudia: everything. Yeah. And, you know, since the beginning, Capi noticed that artists always had more facility to understand or to live trilogy. The science, they were more open-minded, they were more intuitive. And it seems that a true artist, he is directly linked to the creator. And so Keppe brought this trilogical science. He sees everything three, right?
God is a trinity. Man is a threefold of feeling, thought, intellect, or reason, and beautiful action and beauty. So, altogether we are a being, a conscious being, with pure action as our essence. And so, everything being three, he compares God the Father with love, goodness, and God's Son with reason, intellect, thought, and the Holy Spirit with beauty. And beauty is as essential as love and as truth.
And because of the envy that dominates our lives and our inner lives as well, we tend to deny mostly beauty than even truth and goodness, even though each one cannot exist separate from the others. This
Richard: is interesting because we destroy the planet, and the planet is beautiful above all. I mean, it's everything, but it's also beautiful. But we don't hear artists talking about this.
But in the past, they did. Beethoven and these great artists, they talked directly about the experience of God and art,
Cláudia: didn't they? And they got all the inspiration directly from this transcendental source.
Richard: And they talked
Cláudia: openly. They named openly God. As if they had such an intimacy with God that God, like, whispered in their minds, in their ears, what they should compose.
God, the angels, whatever.
Richard: Beethoven said that God was shouting in his head. Yeah.
Cláudia: And the only thing that gave him relief was to write it down. He talked directly about this link, you know, that it was God that he was writing for. And Keppe writes in his books that it's so difficult for an artist to be a delinquent, a psychopath. It's really, really difficult for a true artist to be a criminal.
And it's really difficult also to get involved in arts and have a negative thinking and be paranoid and fight. So arts reconcile persons, relationships. Arts is like reconciliation in itself. You don't see any problem when you have like an audience with many people from many religions, many cultures, many races, and they get all in one resonance, in one tune with a concert, for instance, beautiful music, a beautiful performance.
They come all united in one soul, musicians, audience, everybody. Imagine the amount of energy that this brings from eternity, from outside time and space, how magnetic this is. And some scientists lately have been like trying to experiment experiment a little bit of the importance of music in terms of health and the right functioning of the brainwaves and healing processes.
Richard: Good heavens, the Japanese are even using Mozart music to ripen bananas, Cláudia.
So, you know, I mean, it's like... And
Cláudia: to make cows produce more milk.
Richard: Oh, my God. This is kind of an interesting thing. But, you know, I was thinking about it because, you know, sometimes we think artists, We see artists as kind of tortured souls in some way. And I've thought about this a lot because a lot of times when artists are writing, they're writing from an inspiration of something that happened in their life.
And it's kind of a tragedy or a problem. But, you know, I know many artists and I've written poetry. I guess every teenage boy romantic has written poetry in high school and I don't want to talk anymore about that. But, you know, what we're doing when we're writing these things from tragedy is we're linking up somehow to a universal feeling. In a way, it's a cathartic experience.
And we're writing about a human current reality between aspas, between quotes. I'm using the Portuguese words now. We're writing about like a universal feeling that we're tapping into. And it's through pain or whatever. But what we're writing about is something to try to heal that moment, to try to provide a cathartic healing energy in that moment. So these great artists who write about these tragic relationships they have, they're trying in a way to heal the situation.
So it's therapeutic.
Cláudia: And also, you can see that artists are the best psychopathologists or specialists in psychopathology. They understand the human soul and the human pathology as no one else. Many psychiatrists, many psychologists know almost nothing in front of a Shakespeare or any other big artist or unknown artist. When I speak with you, Richard, about arts and artists, I would like also to mention artistic souls that are unknown.
And it's for them that I would like to speak the most. Because known artists, well-known, they already have their fame and their support and their recognition, their finances are up. But we have so many good artists that are in the world bringing beauty to the life of people and that could bring even more if they were recognized and more valued. And the world would be much more peaceful, much healthier, because it would get much more magnetic.
Arts is like pure magnetism, and true artists are very magnetic. So they facilitate, they channel the magnetism of God to the planet. And you know, magnetism is like the living force. Life energy, energy of life is magnetism. So artists are like huge motors of magnetism in the planet. And they can bring incredible amount of people united and resonant in one only idea, one beautiful, not restrictive, but universal good feelings.
Richard: But let's talk about these artistic souls that are not recognized, Cláudia, because I think this is an area that maybe most of us have never thought about. If art were valued, if beauty were valued, then the beauty in every person's everyday experience would be given more value, not just their economic potential, but their artistic potential. So the whole world would be different.
It would see everyday common interactions artistically and not just economically.
Cláudia: Developed civilizations had always have arts like in the first plane. There is no such a thing as a country who develops itself without arts. And when it starts like…
Richard: Relegating or…
Cláudia: The importance of arts.
Richard: Relegating,
Cláudia: right? And then giving more importance to money and to economics and to finances, you see the decay established in that society.
So a society without arts is either a primitive or a decayed society.
Richard: How are you seeing this, Bob, in terms of business? Because you've dealt in business a lot. I mean, this is kind of like really speaking to my soul when Cláudia talks about this. In
this particular area, I don't think about the business perspective. I think about the opportunity for people who have these gifts to develop these gifts and share these gifts.
So I would hope that anyone who's listening to this show today, who has friends who are artists, true artists, that they contact you and you'll tell them how. And let's see if we can create this, begin this, bring it back. This used to be common in the United States, where artists would share their talents with their communities in parks, travel across the country.
And it really wasn't about money. And yet, this could be a way for some of these struggling artists to perform, to kind of make a living, not get wealthy, but who knows? But it's time to do this, because when we goodness, truth, and beauty through the arts we can save our country. And and in the United States it's hurting. Just look at the cities like detroit chicago, the crime.
We need the arts, we need it back. We
Cláudia: can take away young people from drugs with the arts. And something that is absolutely like humiliating and and perverted is the idea that artists, like they make money as beggars or something. It's so humiliating because they are on the top of civilization. They are the best individuals. They are the most qualified people. And they are seen as beggars.
Sometimes they stay on the streets begging for money. This is so unjust, unfair, humiliating. This is a perversion to think that they don't deserve to make money from arts.
Richard: Or people say, when are you going to get a real job, right? They say this
Cláudia: is a terribly derogatory thing. So this is a perversion coming from this inversion, psychological inversion. And my dream is when artists will be better recognized and qualified than economists because they deserve this.
And not only because they deserve because they are human beings, but because they are superior beings. They are
Richard: in reality superior beings. I just want to say this, too, that this doesn't mean that everybody has to be like a sculptor or, I mean, it could be art inside
our everyday
Richard: experience, artistic expression inside everything we do.
Okay, we're coming back in just a moment.
Thinking with Somebody Else's Head is on the Stop Radio Network, looking at revaluating, reconciliating arts into our modern-day society. Beautiful subject. We're back in just a moment on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Cláudia: Since the beginning of all civilizations, they had always manifested an enormous interest and knowledge about the spiritual life and spiritual beings.
Richard: It's a world of ancient wisdom that modern science has eliminated. The
Cláudia: arising philosophy of positivism prefer to base science on material happenings. So, only what you can see and touch and feel is real.
Richard: Now, spirituality is being put back into science.
Cláudia: Imagine what would happen if people start considering this as a real thing. Not only as a religious thing, but also a real scientific thing.
Imagine what would happen.
Richard: Norbert Dokepi's Universe of the Spirits, a scientific analysis.
Dot org. Tuesday in New York, and Gwen's headache is now five days old. Wednesday in London, and Ronald's left the hospital for the streets again. It's Thursday in Mogadishu, and angry students are protesting against corruption. Whether the illness is physical, psychological, or social, Norberto Keppe's The Origin of Illness is a book that gets to the bottom of it and offers a solution.
Richard: We are back. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head is on the Stop Radio Network. Richard Lloyd Jones, Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco, Bob Butler. We all have to have three names now. People have three or four names here sometimes. And we've been doing what I think is a very exciting show.
So as an artistic personality, I've had to sort of fit myself into careers where I could express a little bit of my artistry, which is why I went into radio and television along the way. And now I feel our radio programs that we do are my attempt again to try to bring artistic sensibility into the world of media. Dr. Keppe writes a lot about this in many of his books, but Liberation of the People, where he talks about the persecution of the artist, is beautiful, where he says that it's impossible to know anything without contact with aesthetics.
Look at what he's saying there, that the origin of civilization lies in the arts, for art intuitively or affectionately carries with it all of man's scientific and philosophic knowledge. So when you were speaking in the first segment of our program, second segment of our program, Cláudia, about how these great artists or great psychopathologists, great psychoanalysts, how they analyze the situation that's going on.
This is evident when you watch Shakespeare or read any of the great Russian writers. I was watching a little… Dostoevsky, for sure. Dostoevsky, for
Cláudia: sure. I was watching
Richard: a little Woody Allen movie the other day, Vicky and Christina in Barcelona or something. It's a light movie. But he has so much there about human relationships that he shows in the relationship between these two girls traveling to Barcelona and how it wakens up all of these passions and difficulties and people facing their lives and what's their real life and what does life really mean.
All of this done through art. It's extraordinary what can happen.
Cláudia: It's the only way to make people conscious is through goodness, truth, and beauty. If you perform a work without beauty, it's not good nor truthful.
Richard: We're a long way from this world in terms of the practical applications of it in our society today. Our society is so inverted that the application of beauty in the society today, everything is seen economically.
So what do we do? How do we bring this back? What's your thought
Cláudia: about that? You have to start talking and talking and talking and talking and producing shows and using Internet and this social networks to bring this concept to people.
Richard: You know, Bob had an idea today, Cláudia. He was looking at a beautiful presentation on one of our blogs that I think Angela had done with a beautiful photograph and just an expression of Dr.
Kepes. And Bob's eyes were lighting up saying, wow, this is like, this could be like a computer wallpaper, you know, these backgrounds that you have. These could be like T-shirts. There could be like postcards. There's so many things using beauty and consciousness, this combination of two things,
Cláudia: I think is lovely. People sell cars, houses, and lies through beauty. They deceive people. So we could bring some much better for the planet using beauty with the right purpose.
Richard: So let's talk about what's happening in Cambuquita because this is kind of our…
Cláudia: Yeah, we have been developing there like a school and a project called Growing with Arts. So we bring kids from the poor community to have classes of guitar, dance, performing arts, photography, piano lessons, and they grow beautifully. They grow mentally, psychologically, but we have so much to do. We need so much to do.
And all is this concept that arts is secondary. Arts is secondary. Even the parents, to make them understand that their kids, if they become artistic in their lives, they don't need to become professional artists, but bringing arts to their lives, it will develop so much better.
Richard: But this has been done many times before, Cláudia. There are many
Cláudia: people who've had this idea,
Richard: but they haven't had the social perspective that Keppe has, like the nooses.
No,
Cláudia: and the essential of the being, the essence of the being and the essence of creator. Being linked to beauty and aesthetics and arts, this is something that nobody said before, Keppe. He said, I was able to do Trilogy as a science and to develop this work because I used to be an artist before. Like he used to work on the radio station as these people that...
He
Richard: was working in the sound, the music department. Yeah, the sound.
Cláudia: Putting the music and sound on the air. Yeah. So he said, I understood better God through music. Music is the best and the quickest channel to God, in my understanding. And all the geniuses in science, they were all having some kind of artistic activity at the side of their scientific activity.
So they were always artists together. They played an instrument. They enjoyed very much some... Some kind, some part of the arts at least. They were artists in their minds because a plastic, a plastic, I don't know if we can say this, a plastic mind is much more similar to God than a... A plastic mind? You
Richard: mean like elastic? Do you mean like
Cláudia: or...
Because in Portuguese we say art is
Richard: plastic. Fine arts then. That would be a fine arts mind
Cláudia: is closer to God, yeah. Beethoven said that. And I think it was Wagner
Richard: who said that he felt that that in the universe there were vibrations from God and that an
Cláudia: artist could attach to them. If I say something, I ask you not to think I'm crazy.
Okay.
Richard: Well, I promise you I won't think you're
Cláudia: crazy. I have already told you, but this now I will bring it to the open. But when I was thinking about this project, I told you and Bob, I heard Tony Curtis speaking in my mind.
Richard: Tony Curtis,
Cláudia: who's dead now. Who's dead now, yeah. And he said, go to these old artists in Hollywood.
They were like forgotten, but they did in the past a beautiful work for the planet. Hollywood did a beautiful work for the planet. The artists, not the managers necessarily, the profit makings, but the artists of Hollywood. And I understand that Hollywood is now going to down the tubes. Down
Richard: the tubes, sure.
Cláudia: And we should make this conscious to people that another injustice is being performed in this way, in this area.
And we are losing. We are the losers. Humanity is losing. Humanity is losing because all the best performers, like the best actors of the world, went to Hollywood to perform there.
Richard: Then we have, I think, Cláudia, we have some work to do in our hearts because our modern society thinks that that's totally old-fashioned, thinks that there's no
Cláudia: relevance to that anymore. And this is a real shame.
All the internet stuff. Yeah. It's everything digital, nothing more analogical. I know. And analogical ways to bring arts is magnetic. And digital doesn't. It's electrical. So it's not a good energy in it. It's not truly beautiful. It's not truly. So all this old-fashioned, analogical way of transmitting arts is more magnetic.
Richard: Yeah. Can I tell you, some of my friends who work in video and audio, they're saying all the time, no, but you can duplicate old film with a new digital camera.
I say, BS, you can do that. There's a complete difference between a film and a digital. I don't care what the quality is like. The feeling is completely different. And I know that from analog recordings. Because if you put on a record, a vinyl disc, and you listen to it, you are going to, if you're sensitive at all, you're going to feel a complete difference in the way you listen to the
Cláudia: music as opposed to a digital recording.
So if you, that is listening to us, and if you know, if you have contact with an artist, or if you are an artist yourself, keep contact with us. I want to gather as many artists as possible.
Richard: And artistic personalities.
Cláudia: And artistic personalities and art lovers to have, we say in Portuguese, massa critica. How do you say this? Critical
Richard: mass. A critical mass of consciousness.
So we can, like, bloom. So we can bloom. Okay. We need to
Cláudia: bloom. Disinvert. Disinvert the mentality of the planet.
Richard: Yeah, and to bloom. Because I think to bloom is a very, very good thing to do. Well, we understand the spirit of what you're saying. And so, look. I
Cláudia: spoke to Diana already. She's in New Orleans. Yeah. And she said, we have good, good musicians here.
And I said, wait a little bit. I'll send you some material. And you go there and you talk to them because New Orleans is music. And this incredible city was done or developed, was known internationally through its musicians.
Richard: For sure. For sure. Okay, so
Cláudia: stay in touch with us. Life will become more beautiful.
Richard: Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait. So stay in touch with us because we're going to mount
Cláudia: websites and start campaigns here that will get us in touch.
More
with this beauty that needs to come forth. So, you know, stay in touch with us. Jones Healing. You know, that's why I got so many emails.
That's the best one.
Stay in touch with me. Get on our mailing list, and we'll make sure you know more about this. Thanks, Cláudia. The Inspiring Program. Inspiring and hopeful.
And isn't that a welcome thing in our cynical postmodern world, where we somehow adopted the idea that goodness and
Richard: kindness are kanasaki and beauty is relative. And can you imagine how life would be if arts and beauty were given more value in an official way, sort of where we institutionalized love of beauty and interiorized it too. I'm waiting for that world. That's our program for this time.
Program is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. We're on the stop radio network and always happy to be with you. Talk to you next time. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Bye for now
