Richard Lloyd Jones: Welcome to Episode 2 of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series, The Modern Relevance of God. You know, even as I say those words, I imagine some listeners' reactions, eye-rolling in that dismissive huffing of, modern? God? How 13th century of you. But I think this points to a fundamental problem in our modern world, although it's actually an old issue. The wisdom and knowledge from 5,000 years of Judeo-Christian tradition has simply been sheared away from our scientific worldview, which has become the default knowledge base for explaining, well, everything.
To the point where even suggesting the importance of a theological perspective on the situation can get you branded as a religious nutter with nothing remotely relevant to contribute. There's an important pathological process going on underneath this scientific fanaticism, which Norberto Keppe, the brilliant Brazilian psychoanalyst, has identified as psychological inversion.
In this excerpt from our Thinking with Somebody Else's Head podcast, Therapy to Heal Society, Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco explores the concept of inversion, which is so crucial to understanding our spiritual life and how we're so distant from it.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Society is in a dead end, Richard. All the fields of knowledge, humanity, society, civilization is kind of shrinking because we don't understand the inversion of humanity.
What Keppe brings, which is very new, is the concept that all disciplines, all endeavors, they suffer from huge restrictions of our psychopathology. So if we want to continue with civilization, if we want to stop its destruction, the suicidal attitude, we need to address the problem of inversion, which is a psychological problem, mostly, that we have, and we are not aware of.
Richard: Do you have a practical example of inversion that might just help us to understand this concept a little better
Cláudia: before we...
Like in medicine, medical doctors and psychiatrists, psychologists, they see problems coming from organic symptoms, from the body, from society, from culture, and they don't see the main problem which relies on our psychological transcendental life, which is the inner life of people. So all illnesses, they come from our inner selves, our inner life, and they are psychological in origin, and we do not address the psychopathology properly.
Even Freud, he was a genius in methodology, But he made a big mistake in the theory because he also saw the source of neurosis, psychosis, coming from sexual problems, which are more related to our instincts, to our body. And not to what we might call the soul of humanity, the psychological aspect, spiritual aspects, problems related to envy, to inversion, to narcissism, to egocentrism.
Richard: And this restricted, inverted view, you said a few moments ago, is causing great suffering and limitation. We
Cláudia: need to see that humanity is sick. The human being is sick, but not in his body. The body suffers the consequences of his psychological sicknesses. So humanity never wanted to address its own psychopathology. And I think that this new science that Keppe developed, that is a psychosociopathology and even psychosocioecology.
"Why do we pollute so much? Why do we mistreat so much nature and creation, which is the biggest gift we have, the gift of life? So why do we mistreat that? Why don't we care? Why we don't treat it as the best gift, as our enormous richness?" We don't do that. We destroy everything. So this is a psychological problem. It's a psychopathology present in all humanity.
So what do we destroy ourselves and the planet to have a bigger bank account.
It's all psychological, Richard. We need the science being brought to all schools. Since the children are small, up to professionals, this understanding must be brought very quickly to society as a whole. We are in a crossroad now. Either we go to this annihilation or we start a true big, big civilization, which is the civilization we should have built since the beginning. But because of the inversion, we failed.
So we directed civilization to its opposite direction, inverted direction. And if now we perceive, we will see a booster of all sciences, arts, education, family life, relationships in society, cosmic vision. All sciences will benefit, economics, social sciences, natural sciences, a more tolerant, a more ecumenic kind of religion, the view of God as one God for all peoples and all nations. So we will see an enormous cosmic even development.
We will integrate, we will resonate with the universe, with other planets, other civilizations, more advanced than ourselves. We will go back and rescue everything that was beautiful, truthful, and good in humanity so far. What
Richard: a beautiful vision, and something really to remember. We are, after all, part of something universal. We're not products of single-celled organisms struggling out of the primal ooze for no reason, programmed only to survive.
I was rereading Darwin's Ghost by Steve Jones, no relation, in preparation for this audio course and came across this telling sentence, quote, Nature does not favor beauty or strength or ferocity. All it can do is advance those best able to multiply themselves. End of quote. But you know, as I contemplate the miracle of life, the subtle nuances of creativity and order to everything, I'm forced to disagree fundamentally with Dr.
Jones. There is intelligence in the processes of nature, design, deep layers of meaning and significance that transcend the single instinct for survival. And this is the journey we're embarking on in our consideration of the modern relevance of God. We look at how science turned its back on all that miracle and wonder and design, in our next episode.
