Richard Lloyd Jones: Some see our most important issues as social ones. Hunger. Injustice. The gap between rich and poor. Others see the lack of ethics in leadership as most pressing. For many, our environmental crises supersede everything else. Here in Brazil, we acknowledge it all as evidence of our inversion. And then, we go a little deeper. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
We'll look at our relationship with the deepest part of ourselves and our connection with eternity, with God. First of all, a big thanks to all of you who are writing to me about this podcast. Every week I get emails from all corners of the world thanking me or making an incisive comment or asking for more info about Norberto Keppe's work. It's always great to hear from you.
Rich at richjonesvoice.com. And by the way, I'm trying to act on some of your suggestions.
Listener Daniel Herman requested months ago now that we take a look at suicide from our trilogical perspective, and we will, Daniel.
That's a subject that I have some personal experience with, actually, so it'll be a very good one to tackle. I'll see if we can get to it soon. Do keep those emails coming. I'm thrilled to hear from you.
Rich at richjonesvoice.com. We're doing a lot of things here in Brazil that could be of interest to you. Our online course, Trilogy Online, is almost up and running. Keep listening for updates or drop me a line and I'll let you know personally when it's officially online. We're also going to be holding a great event next year, 2008, on the true American dream.
What were those founding fathers dreaming about anyway? Gilbert Gambucci and I explored this a little bit a few podcasts ago on the lost American ideals.
You can check that out through iTunes. Was all of that just a dream? We don't think so. Keppe personally has very fond feelings about the true American values to this day. And we're going to marry it to the dreams of South America, too, in our Congress next year. Kind of a Pan-American dream. We'll talk about how all of the greatest dreams of humanity are actually possible.
And there are substantial means to get there present in Keppe's work, particularly in understanding the root causes of our massive difficulties, our topic today, in a way, and providing some specific tools to get there, like new business and residence structures. All of that will be next July 4th, 5th, and 6th, 2008, here in Brazil. Make a note of it. You know, Keppe's work is different from others in this fundamental way.
Where many psychological, scientific, even philosophical orientations tell us that we're in a process of evolving from lesser to greater, from the primal ooze in biology, through many lifetimes in Eastern thought, from the need to develop our self-esteem and confidence in Western pop psychology, psychology, Keppe proposes that we already live in perfection, in eternity, in paradise, but we reject it.
This is a profound shift in how we understand reality. And I've asked Cláudia Pacheco, the vice president of Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy, in here again to help me penetrate this idea. Cláudia, I thought we should talk first about the core issue we need to address if we're going to achieve human development?
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: "I think we should start speaking about the general problems that people present when they come to analysis." "Great.
So when a person comes to analysis, they are suffering from some kind of illness. It could be psychological. It could be physical. It could be social, having problems in relating himself or herself to other people. Problems in developing in life, having success in what they do, feeling this sense of emptiness, lack of meaning for life, existential problems. They could have eating problems or disorders, some kind of addiction to some chemical substance."
They could be hooked on drugs or pills. Medicines. So when they start analysis and we start this interiorization process, as Keppe calls it, so conscientizing one's own psychopathology is incredibly effective. So people, many people, they get healed from their physical illnesses very quickly. Some of them take a little longer if they have too much censorship, too much resistance, but the tendency is to resolve the physical problems because the psychoneuroimmunological system gets very much reinforced.
We boost the immunological system of the person through this analysis, through this therapy. But then when people get better, sometimes they have insomnia and they start sleeping better or they start eating less, other kinds of questionings come to the surface. So
Richard: initially they go for like what's sort of a, not a superficial thing, but a more obvious thing.
Cláudia: Yeah, like a symptom that is hurting them. And
Richard: then as they start to progress in that, to start to see what that's about, and that symptom starts to alleviate,
Cláudia: then
Richard: they start to go another
Cláudia: layer. More in-depth. And other questionings come about this existential unsatisfaction. This is one aspect. And other kind of problems start to show up in their working place, in their family relationships, in their loving relationships, and they start seeing pathology in other people too, and in society.
So as much as I see in myself my problems, the deeper I go in my problematic, the more I see my inversion, my envy, my megalomania, the better I will see this in other people too. So I will see that the world is upside down. I will see that my my boss or my colleagues in the in the working place or my family my parents my children my wife my husband whatever they suffer from the same problem as I suffer.
But they are unaware of this most of the time and some kind of friction start to show up. Because if I tell people about this incredible help that I get from becoming conscious of my own pathology, and if they do not accept, if they are not ready to humble themselves and to get better, so sometimes these frictions may show up. And not only that, But I feel alone in the sense that, oh, my God, will I be one of the few people that really accept to see one's problems and see the truth and have a better life?
Many times I advise a friend, well, if you do a little bit of analysis, you get rid of the symptoms. You can get rid of this pill so that you are hooked on so many years. But they don't want. Some of them don't want. They are not ready to accept. And I feel this emptiness, this space in my life.
Richard: Yeah, when you first started, we think of the people coming to you only when they have like sort of serious problems.
And I was thinking, what about the people who think that they have, like they're successful, everything's going well, and now I see that you're stripping away a layer. So once those external symptoms, those initial symptoms begin to disappear or ameliorate, get better, then we start to enter this question of what is the purpose of my life? Why am I
Cláudia: here? What are human beings living for?
So what is this life about? What is society about? What are we working for? Why did I get sick? What do I sacrifice myself so much? For what purpose? So I start questioning things that I normally do not question when I have a strong symptom, organic symptom sometimes, or anguish or panic crisis. This is so much urgent that I don't pay attention to other deeper questionings.
But these questionings are, the question is that we normally should do.
We normally should do this. And we start doing them. And this emptiness, we feel like a need, a need to be resolved, a need to be fulfilled. And I start thinking, what if the world would be different? Wouldn't that be wonderful if more people would see their own pathology, if more people would disinvert themselves? What am I living for? What am I doing here?
And if I die, what will happen afterwards? Am I living just for this? I was born just for this kind of life that I'm living now it's impossible because if it would Be, then I would feel great. I would feel okay. I would not feel uncomfortable with that. So, if I feel uncomfortable with the lifestyle I'm having, it's because my essence is different from this.
So, sometimes and most of the times, the symptoms are like an alarm. They are necessary. It's like when you hurt yourself, when you hurt a finger or a toe or whatever, then you feel the pain.
It's like a warning from your organism. Watch yourself. Don't attack me. Don't go any further. Don't
Richard: go any further. You
Cláudia: are destroying yourself. It's like a warning. So panic crisis, insomnia, anxiety, depression, inorganic diseases, they are a symptom that you are not leading your life to the right direction.
Richard: Something is missing. There's this empty feeling inside. And what is it? What is the purpose of our life?
Why are we here then, Cláudia? When you deal with people in analysis, what point do you come to?
Cláudia: Yeah. So in this sense, I find this vision of Keppe, of the human being, incredible. And he based himself a lot in the first Greek philosophers. The wisdom that Aristotle brought, Socrates, Plato, Parmenides, when they studied the being. What is a being? What is a being in itself?
So, Cappi based his understanding of the human psychic in those metaphysical philosophers.
In the true metaphysics that study the being. So being in itself is beauty, goodness, and truth. Our essence is threefold, goodness, beauty, and truth. And this is the understanding of those old Greek philosophers. Not only them, but all theology, see like this, All philosophy tend to understand the being like that, and also the understand of sickness or illness as the denial of health is taken from evil being the absence of good.
Richard: Well, this is a powerful idea, and it's like a kind of an abstract thing, but if we think about it, that sickness doesn't exist on its own. Yeah. But health does. So we create sickness, but we don't create health. Health is the natural state of the human being. Talk a bit more about that.
Cláudia: And this is well grounded in biology. The latest studies of even the DNA of people, they should work just for life.
The instincts are for life, to preserve life and not for death. So if we die, it's abnormal. That's why we have difficulties in accepting this concept of dying. Because we are eternal beings. As soon as we are, we are eternal beings because we have this transcendental aspect of our lives. And if we do consider human beings just an animal, like an evolution of a monkey or something, and if we just consider ourselves as animals, a little bit more intelligent, We do not fully understand the problematic we suffer from.
We cannot address neurosis if we don't see the spiritual dimension of mankind. And when we enter the spiritual dimension and our clients, sooner or later, start to question the spiritual dimension, the meaning of life, the meaning of dying.
Richard: Meaning of eternity. The
Cláudia: meaning of eternity. Oh, this question is that many people do when they are seven, six years old.
They start questioning these things. But very soon in their adolescence, they stop questioning these things because when they go to school, they are taught that this is just theory. So our clients, they come, they get better, and they start questioning society and laws, injustice, and what do we live for? Why do we work so hard to make a few people richer? And is it worthy to live a life like that?
Dying or not, having or not an eternity after death, questioning what I do here, it's very normal. It's very healthy. And people start doing this, Richard. And if we don't get to this possibility to go deeper and to address even the spiritual questioning, which is the link of man with his creator, with God, the very source of life, the very source of energy, the very source of infinite beauty, goodness, and truth.
Everyone is searching for happiness in life. We have the right to be happy, to search for happiness, The problem is that we are searching happiness in the opposite direction. We search happiness in money, in power, prestige, material goods, sex, and we'll never get it through these objects.
Richard: This relationship then with our creator, with God, this is the fundamental relationship that every human being has to understand better.
How do we come to know better this relationship, this transcendental aspect of ourselves?
Cláudia: This seems to be a natural thing, Richard. All cultures, all civilizations, they get to a point where they confront transcendence. Even the primitive peoples. All of them have a notion of a higher energy, a higher being, an infinite being. And this is like ingrained in our universals in our psychogenetics.
So just doing analysis and being honest and going further you get you get to these ideals the idea of being happy the idea of living in truth in goodness in justice in peace. So this is the most present concept or universal inside of us, which is this universal concept, which is paradise. Everybody is looking to live in paradise. Everybody is searching paradise.
And we miss paradise. In Portuguese we say a word, which is only in Portuguese, saudades. This
Richard: is like longing in English. A deep, deep, deep longing for something.
Cláudia: Yes, a deep longing from something that you already know. Saudades. So you miss a person you know you miss a place that you know so you miss because it's too dear to you.
Richard: Yeah we could never miss um have an idea of missing something if we didn't
Cláudia: know that inside ourselves right.
And this is saudades so we have saudades we miss paradise we know what this is deep down we have this concept all cultures all civilizations.
"And if we do not address this sooner or later, or if the client by himself will come to that. And if we do not, if you are not prepared to deal with this, higher questioning, so we'll not have a full recovery, a full therapeutic result, good result." Well, you said
Richard: this on the weekend when I was talking with you, and And Keppe reiterates this a lot, that actually, this problem with our origin, who we are, is the source of all of our problems.
Like, that's the fundamental...
Cláudia: "This is the very source and the very root. God is the first being we envy." This is interesting, isn't it? "Because the first contact we have is not even with our mother. It's with God, because we come from Him. We are the result of His energy. Mother is the second contact and father. But God is the first. And this first contact determines a lot in the future of our lives."
How much do we really accept our creator? How much do we reject? And this relation between man and God is fundamental. It's essential of how we are going to develop all areas in our life. So we envy people, we envy things, we envy situations. Sometimes we envy our parents. But further on, we envy the infinite being, the infinite power, the infinite goodness, beauty, and truth.
Richard: And we have envy of God because?
Cláudia: We would like to be gods ourselves. So this is theomania. And we do not accept to be creatures. We want to do our lives the way we want. We want to decide and make our fans Fantasies make our deliriums, better saying, of how life should be and how I should live my life. And what I have, the good that I have, it's not enough.
It's never enough. I'm never beautiful enough. I'm never good enough. And this feeling of inadequacy, it's something very related to that.
"Because we don't think God did a good job in us. And so we start destroying ourselves since we are very small beings." Yeah,
Richard: we say that God made a mistake, or we say in philosophy, some philosophers have said, well, man needed to create God because he needed something to believe in, and these crazy ideas. And I've
Cláudia: been reading a lot in Brazil, and you gave me these articles from magazines here about how science wants to kill
Richard: God, how there's a new church of the new atheists, and so there's a whole movement to eliminate this aspect of our lives.
Cláudia: And do you know something in practice? "People who believe in God, they are much more prone to get better in therapy. They get better faster, much faster. They are less neurotic, much less neurotic. They recover much faster. Faith in goodness, in truth, is essential if you want to get better, if you want to heal yourself."
"This is a first step. Non-believers, they tend to have more diseases, they tend to have more difficulties in healing themselves. And another aspect is that psychotic people, they bring a lot of information on this transcendental life. Because the psychotic people, they are very much tuned to evil beings in spiritual life. And this transcendental world is very present to their experiences, and they suffer.
And this is something, Richard, that we feel very sorry because doctors are not ready to deal with this, and they tend just to cover up or to institutionalize those people who suffer so much."
Richard: Or
Cláudia: medicate them, right? Medicate them because they are not ready to deal with their spiritual problems. "Freud said something important. He said, after religion lost its strength, like churches lost their strength on people, the number of neurotic people increased a lot."
So that's a symptom that 20th century materialism led humanity to much more neurosis, psychosis, chemical dependencies, etc., etc. Maybe
Richard: we should just quickly say something about the view that you have about spirituality as opposed to organized structural dogmatic religions, because that's something I think that maybe people hear religion, they associate it with. But
Cláudia: even so, even if we can say that institutional religion is not the true spirituality, it's not a manifestation of the, not necessarily, even so, many people who went to churches and respected churches, they had this inner belief, this inner spirituality that was important and that led them to a more balanced life and less symptoms of neurotic symptoms.
I
Richard: think this is very important because we want to tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, well, organized religion is all bad, but there was some elements of faith, of the sort of the commandments.
"There
Cláudia: was the message that somehow was kept, some essential message from Moses, from Jesus, from Confucius, Buddha, even from Mohammed. And so all those religious leaders, they brought essential messages that were very much important for humanity and are, and are, if better understood now, as we do in science, they brought a lot of important messages. One of them, for instance, that sin could cause disease." Jones, we have a lot to speak about this, because we don't consider that sin can cause disease in these theological terms, but we consider that pathology causes diseases, like hatred, like envy, like arrogance, really do cause diseases.
Depression causes diseases.
Richard: Keppe says in one of his books that "if we only made ourselves conscious of our pathology, That'd be enough to save our planet." That's pretty extraordinary to think about, isn't it?
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
