Richard Lloyd Jones: It's what makes us human, many say, distinct from other forms of life. I think, therefore I am. I want, therefore I have reason to want. It drives how we see ourselves and our relationship to reality in the most profound way, so deep we don't even think about it. Of course we're free to do what we want. Well, not exactly. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we'll look at the human will, this essential aspect of what we think it means to be human.
Those who've listened regularly to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head will know that I base my podcasts on the work of psychoanalyst and social scientist Norberto Keppe. I've been living and studying with Keppe and Dr. Cláudia Pacheco and many others here at Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy in São Paulo, Brazil, for just over six years now. I first came because of my excitement about Keppe's application of his psychoanalytical discoveries to an analysis of society, in particularly the pathology of power, much of which is contained in Keppe's seminal book on this subject, Liberation of the People.
By the way, I'm giving away copies of that book. Just write me at rich at richjonesvoice.com if you'd like yours. I came because of this, but I stayed because of the significance of Keppe's work in understanding the human psyche and its motivations, particularly inversion. Since so much of our lives unfolds out of our desires that we've hidden from our view, inconscientized, in Keppe's language, I wanted to understand those motivations and drives better.
I found a lot of clarity in Keppe's study of the human will, our subject on today's program. Where that other giant of human psychopathology, Freud, saw human neurosis as the battle between our indecent desires, mostly sexual, and the mores of society. Keppe sees the anguish as a fight between our essential nature and our inverted desires. This shines the spotlight then squarely on the human will, which is not unblemished and pure.
In fact, it's not the benign, infallible human capacity we've thought it to be. Let's understand this better. Joining me today is engineer Alexandre Frascari, who has just returned from delivering a fascinating lecture on Keppe's new physics to a very interested group of biophysicists in Germany. Alex, maybe the place to start is with Keppe's fundamental pillar. Disease is the negation of health. Where can you push off to from this
Alexandre Frascari: foundation?
Well, we can see this, the philosophical aspect. That means that the healthy state is our essence, means that the only thing that exists by itself is our healthy state. All the disease or sickness are an opposition that we make against this essence. So we create denial of this essential being that we have.
Richard: The idea being that health is the natural state and disease is not natural.
Yes. How can you help us to sort of understand? Well,
Alexandre: we can see that also in the physical aspect. Let's say that when you are with a disease, you are not stable physically, let's say. That you are going down, let's say. You are going into a state that we call entropy, that would be like a disorganization of our being, of our physical structure.
The only state that is stable is the health is stable. That means that there's a state that you can remain there. If we
Richard: think of nature, nature exists, if we took human beings out of it, nature, the balance of nature would always be good and right and... Yes,
Alexandre: because everything that's not in its essence tends to disappear. So our essence is action, for example.
So when we stop using one muscle, for example, this muscle tends to atrophiate it's going to disappear so everything that is not in this pure action is not stable, it's not in its essence. If you don't use your brain your connections in the nerve cells, the axons, they also will tend to disappear that's why when you come back from your vacations you have a lot of difficulties to work because you lost part of your brain already.
Richard: You're saying that because you just came back from vacation, right? Alex was just in Germany doing a very interesting lecture on Norberto Keppe's new physics for a group of biophysicists in Germany from all over the world. And they were very interested in the lecture that Alex gave because of Keppe's new way of looking at energy and matter and these kinds of things.
But maybe we could just go through this one diagram you have here, Alex, to help us explain this a bit better. It's the origin of human conduct, where you have a center circle. This comes from Keppe's work of pure energy, and then outside this inner circle of beauty and truth and love and good feeling, the essential element of pure energy. Another circle surrounding that is one of problems that the human being has, arrogance, envy, resentment, hatred.
And I'm assuming this would be what you're talking about in terms of blocking health. Go through this diagram a bit for us and to help us to understand it a little bit better.
Alexandre: Well, I'll give a physical example that I heard there in the congress. Is that you need food that will give you energy. Let's say energy is not a real energy but they say negative entropy.
But but the fact it's not only enough that you eat this good food with good energy. Your organism must be able to process this food. So this is a bit more or less the same analogy. It means what, that we are supported by this energy that exists, this essential energy, that is an energy that you can hear in many cultures with different names, like key, or in physics they call for example the energy of the vacuum, and this energy is what supports us.
But we have to be ready to receive this energy. And how this happens? Then it enters the psychological part of the human being. That means that if you are in an attitude, if you have an attitude of going against your being, like Keppe says, then you create like a shield against this energy. You don't allow this energy to flow in your body.
So what happens if your body doesn't receive energy? It starts to go into a disorder state. It goes into a state of entropy. It means that all your chemical process doesn't work perfectly. They start to have problems. The correction of your, of your DNA molecules, for example, your immune system, everything starts to work incompletely, and then the diseases appear. So in this sense you can say that consciousness is a very energetic element, because when you censor your consciousness, you block the energy.
And when you are more tolerant with the consciousness of your problems, you allow this energy to flow through your body so you keep your health.
Richard: If we take your thinking all the way or a little bit further, it means that we're blocking the energy because of our problems in our psychological state.
Alexandre: Yes, because our mind, our feelings, our thoughts, they manifest through energy.
They are energetic elements. So if we create distorted thoughts, distorted feelings, for example, I hate feelings, you create a kind of energy that will make your body not be in resonance with this energy of the universe.
Richard: You break this resonance in some way. Let's stand this idea of consciousness which you raised, because one of the differences I see in Keppe's work as opposed to these sort of new age things like the secret and a lot of what they're doing and what the bleep do we know, these kinds of things.
A lot of Keppe's orientation is for us to have consciousness of our, what he calls pathologies, our arrogance, our envy, our hate, our lack of love, not just stopping the thoughts, but actually seeing, having consciousness of those things. Can you talk a bit about that? I think that's an important part of Keppe's work.
Alexandre: Well, the censorship is the basis of our disease.
Censorship means that we don't want to see reality. And the reality consists of what is good, what is beautiful, and also in the evil things we do, let's say evil, But the errors that we do, the things that we do against reality. So when you accept consciousness, you have to see both aspects of the reality. And that's why we don't like to see.
We only want to see the good part. We don't want to see how bad we are. And there is a difference because this philosophy is based on quantum mechanics that much inspired in Indian philosophy. Believes that you can choose the reality you want. You can create your reality. And this is much more close to a pathological way of thinking. That's called theomania.
Because in a psychiatric hospital this Freud already perceived and Kraepelin, that people that are crazy, they think that they can create reality. They think they are very powerful. So you see that this idea that is being spread using quantum mechanics as a pseudo-scientific basis for this, in fact leads the people to a very dangerous way of thinking. Because it's true that your mind is very powerful, but it is powerful only if you are in reality.
It's not anything you can do, you can do what is real. So if the essence of the human being is goodness, truth and beauty, you can make it real if you are in goodness, truth and beauty. If you want to oppose yourself, as we said in the beginning, if you want to create something against truth, for example, this doesn't have an essence, so it tends to disappear.
Or it will destroy your psychological structure as well.
Richard: You talked about it at the beginning. You talked about being out of resonance maybe with this energy sense as being
Alexandre: a form of entropy. You
Richard: have a beautiful graph about that that you used from Keppe's work on entropy. Let's go through those nine steps, if you would, of what we can do that causes us to be out of resonance with this.
Using our mind in a wrong way.
Alexandre: For example, if you go into a state of entropy, when you do whatever you like, it means that you don't have any limits in yourself. You think you can do whatever you like.
Richard: And what you're saying is we shouldn't just do what we like. This, of course, is quite controversial in
Alexandre: the
Richard: New Age community, certainly,
which is like, do what you love and the money will follow.
You have to do what's in you to do, you know. And you're talking that whatever that is that we do has to be in alignment with reality
Alexandre: or it's going
Richard: to cause
Alexandre: nothing but problems. It has to be in alignment with the human structure. This is Keppe explains very well in one of his books that's called The Liberation of the Will. Because there is a difference between the free choice in reality and what you cannot choose.
Let me try to explain. For example, you can choose if you are going to eat an apple or an orange because an apple and an orange, they are real. So you are free to choose within things that are real. But you cannot choose between goodness and the opposition to goodness, that will be evil, because evil is not real, it's an opposition. So if you choose that, you destroy your being.
So that's the difference you
Richard: talk here about in this graph of Kepis. You need to impose limits on what you do. How do you understand that? How can you help us
Alexandre: to see that better? Well, the whole reality to exist must have limits. For example, if the molecules, they don't have limits, it will be like a soup of particles. There will be nothing, there'll be nothing in, in the world, there'll be just a chaotic soup of particles.
So the molecules to build something, they have limits, the way they can connect between each other. So only that allows the molecules to create, to, to be create something. So it is the same as ourselves. If we want to do anything we like, we enter in a chaotic state. Da Vinci said that
Richard: art lives from restrictions and dies from freedom. Yes, and this I think is a really beautiful explanation of what he understood.
Because one of the things Keppe talks a lot about is the inverted will, that if we leave ourselves to do what we want to do, we'll do very little in our lives. And I think that's what da Vinci is talking about here, that you need the restriction, the time limit, the limits of the canvas you're painting on, the limits of what you're trying to portray.
If you just say well I can paint anything I want on any size canvas I want, whatever colors I want, you're going to end up with almost nothing. In
Alexandre: physics for example, so you need the limits to have resonant waves. If you don't have limits, you don't have resonance. So the atom is a resonant state that's limited in space and time. If you don't have these limits, there is no atom.
But the limits for the human being is reality. We are allowed only to think in what is real. And how
Richard: do you deal with this question, if I have my reality, you have your reality, this guy has his reality, I have a series of possibilities and I'm going to choose my reality out of those series of possibilities, which they're exploring a lot in quantum mechanics now, how do you address that?
Alexandre: Well, you can choose between real things, but you cannot choose between reality and a denial of reality. The people that are defending this idea, probably they don't want to submit to reality, so they want to create another reality. That's why they use this argument. And that's a very pathological state.
Richard: The next couple of things in your graphic you use from Keppe on entropy, how we break from the resonance with this essential energy we're talking about.
Is to think anything we want and to feel anything we want. Explain that a bit for us. That's very interesting.
Alexandre: If you have a lot of hate, like if you have too much resentment, this kind of hate that you don't manifest but you cultivate inside of yourself, this will create an imbalance in your hormones and you produce a cancer, for example. If you think whatever you want, you enter in a state of entropy.
You lose your connection with this essential energy and you tend to disappear. That's in the sense that you cannot think or feel anything you like.
Richard: It's interesting because if we sort of go back to a Freudian view, the idea was that you can't repress these feelings, you have to get it out. If you feel angry or frustrated, you have to express that.
There's a lot of psychotherapy now based on that, express your feelings, pound the pillow with a tennis racket.
Alexandre: That's a misconception, because Keppe explains, and this is a very subtle point to understand, that you cannot repress the consciousness of your intentions. You have to perceive what you want to do. You have to perceive for example that sometimes you want to be dishonest with someone.
Oh, he forgot to charge me, so I will not pay, or something like that. So you have to perceive this consciousness about yourself. But it doesn't mean that you have to be dishonest. And that's the confusion they make. They think that you have to liberate your attitudes and not consciousness.
Richard: That's a very nice distinction. Because you talk, the next point on the graph is about censoring consciousness.
And you talked earlier about this, that we become sick when we censor the consciousness of our intentions. We censor the consciousness of what we really want to do. And so this censorship is what creates all the problems, not the actual attitude even, you know. Next, to have a chaotic conduct.
Alexandre: This was one point that the professor in this congress, he was very interested.
Because he said they had a patient there that was with cancer. And they perceived that through the study of biophysics, the biophotonics, that this person was losing energy, that his biological organization was chaotic. And they noticed that people that knew this person related that he had a chaotic behavior, that he had no times or no commitment to anything. No structure.
Richard: Yes, no limits,
Alexandre: anything.
And so they related this with this chaotic behavior, with this chaotic biological structure that he had. So this is very interesting, you see how, how your attitudes manifest in your body. For example, when you are in, in a cancer, all your cycles, circadian cycles, that are the cycles you have in your body during one day, they, they don't follow the right times.
And they perceive that many times when you make a person do exercises, they improve from the disease. But the thing is that is not the exercise that makes the person improve, is the fact that the person has to go there every time at a certain hour and do for one hour the exercise. This helps the cycles to reorganize again. So you see See how our attitudes, for example, a chaotic way of thinking, can manifest in your body, physically and biologically.
I
Richard: think this is beautiful in Keppe's work. It's not the material, it's not the exercise so much as the act of doing the exercise. You know, the attitude behind going to do exercise regularly. I think that's really beautiful. I think we
Alexandre: could say that it's an attitude of submitting to reality, because this chaotic behavior, this will, this wanting not to have limits, it means that you don't want to submit yourself to reality, you don't want to submit yourself to anything.
So the fact that you're obliging yourself to do something and submit a little bit to reality already helps your body to heal.
Richard: Yeah, you mentioned Emil Krappelin earlier, who was maybe the father of psychiatry, right? Who discovered that the sickest people were the ones who had this mania of grandeza, you know, they thought they were above. And the next point we have here fits right in with that on your little graph about entropy, how we break from this essential energy, is to follow our own will.
And to reject obedience also. We don't want to follow what we should follow. We don't want to do what we should do to be human beings. What's the rule, Paige? How do we know what we should do?
Alexandre: Well, for example, you have alarms in your body, let's say. For example, if you have an infection, you have a fever. The fever is a signal that you're having an organic problem.
The same way you have that in your mind. When you do something that is not according to your essence, you become anguished. So anguish is very important for us. If you take a drug when you are anguished, you take a drug to eliminate this anguish, it's like you are hiding, you are like cutting off the alarm while the building is still on fire.
So it's very important that when you feel anguished, you try to analyze what attitudes led to this situation and try to correct. Because in your inner self you know what is right and what is not. In
Richard: this book Liberation from the Will, Keppe is talking about what in this book we need to liberate ourselves from our will. But free will is what makes us human, many people would say.
How would you get into that area? Well, this is a rather, uh, it's like putting your, it's like putting a stick into a hornet's nest here. But what
Alexandre: do you think? Well, if you think, you see for example many philosophies associated to new age or many esoteric philosophies, they put as the basis of the human being have thought, feelings and the will.
And that's different from Keppe, that puts thoughts, feelings and aesthetics. So I think this idea from the new age comes from William of Oakham, that says that will is our essence. It means that translating practical terms, it means that if our will is our essence, anything we like to do is okay. But it's not like that, that's the point. Our will has to be in accordance to our essence.
For example, if you have, you have a glass jar, it's made to put water. If you throw stones inside it, you break the glass. The same happens with our psychological and physical structure. We are made for truth, beauty and goodness. If you want to put hate, dishonesty, you destroy your structure. That's the same. So that means that we have to use our will according to our essence.
But since we are inverted, we most of the time we use our will only to satisfy our immediate desires. But we don't see that this in the future will cause a lot of problems for us. So when he says to free ourselves from our will, it means that from this inverted will. Because if you do only what you like, probably you won't realize many things in your life.
That's right.
Richard: Let's talk a bit more about the influence of the thoughts and feelings on matter. This was another area you covered in your lecture in Germany very recently, conscious and unconscious. Talk a bit about how you see that, how you describe that. When you were in Germany recently, what
Alexandre: I was trying to show is that our energy, we are used to think only in terms of matter, particles and electromagnetic energy, but our mind uses a different kind of energy.
If you make an experiment, for example the Masaru Emoto that is very known actually presently.
Richard: We should talk just about Emoto, right? Masaru Emoto.
Alexandre: He works with ice crystals primarily, doesn't he?
Richard: He works with people's emotions and the influence of those emotions or those thoughts on the ice crystals that he then photographs.
Alexandre: Exactly. And depending on what the person things, if you think something bad the it will form a totally disorganized structure.
If you think something good then it forms a very beautiful crystal. And the thing is that the energies that are involved in this phenomenon are not electromagnetic and are not originated from matter. They are more in this field of essential energy that we can call scalar energy of or the energy of the vacuum for example. And there are other experiments that we can communicate even if we don't perceive telepathically with one person in one room and the other person the other.
And if we try to measure this process we don't measure anything because we only know how to measure electromagnetic waves and in this case there are no electromagnetic waves right.
Richard: So resonance with a different level of energy, with a
Alexandre: different type of energy. But the problem with our science today is that our science is based on the positivist idea that the only thing is real is what you can measure.
So for this traditional physicist this phenomenon is impossible or they say it doesn't exist or they try to give very complicated explanations and trying to avoid, to admit the existence of this energy.
So they use like explanations using potentials or virtual particles or many other things just to avoid saying that this is an energy. So if you imagine, if our mind can do that to crystals, Imagine what it can do in our body. If your thoughts are distorted, your whole body will be distorted.
Richard: What can it do to our body? I think Keppe talks about the fact that our ideas, our inverted philosophies, our aggressions, our pathologies, these can actually affect our RNA, which can then impact on our DNA.
Isn't that what he's talking about?
Alexandre: Yes. If you have an inverted way of thinking, also your genetics would be inverted and you can make your RNA affect your DNA and change your genetic structure. The good part of this is that you are not a victim of your genes. And I think this is very important because even if you have a genetic problem that you inherited from your parents, for example, if you have a correct, a good attitude in your life, you can either control the manifestation of this gene or even repair it.
Your mind, in this sense, is very powerful.
Richard: Very powerful to accept or deny reality. I like this distinction a lot. The more I study, the more I see that this highlights a fundamental issue for humankind. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
