Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and welcome to Something New on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, a podcast series on what I consider one of the most important subjects in our world today, spirituality, finding meaning in this crazy inverted world we live in. Man, we could all use some of that, couldn't we? So I've dug back through past Thinking with Somebody Else's Head podcasts and culled the best stuff I could find and put it together into a 17-episode series called The Modern Relevance of God.
Some deep conversations and reflections coming your way over the next 17 weeks. So let's get to it. Episode 1. Why even do this? Man, that is such a relevant question. I produce a podcast called Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, and I had a listener to that podcast one time write me asking, why do you have to use the word God?
I understand the concern. I think our historical religious power struggles and fanaticism have given God a bad name to the point where the word itself has become, "how to say this," loaded. But you know, that's one of the things I'd like to do in this course, actually, is unload the word God and spirituality and all that goes with it. Because I believe people are looking for answers, trying to make their way through this increasingly complicated world.
They're searching for meaning. And my contention is that there's much of meaning to be found in discussions about God and purpose and the why and how of it all. So that's relevant. Then there's the three-year study from Oxford in over 20 countries and multiple cultures that shows that we human beings are predisposed to believe in gods and an afterlife. Let me hold that up to my friends and family, and perhaps even if necessary to you too, as further proof of the relevance of what we're embarking on here.
Now, just to reassure you, there'll be no New Testament Bible thumping here. No, if you don't believe what we're talking about, you're going straight to hell, finger wagging. No, this will be a scientific view of spirituality and God that just may be thrilling. I think in the least it will be interesting and relevant. Now, who am I and who are we to approach this weighty topic?
Well, these classes will be culled from my podcasts, which I've been producing since 2006. These are based on my research and teaching at the Keppe and Pacheco College in Brazil, which teaches the science of Analytical Trilogy developed by psychoanalyst and social scientist Dr. Norberto Keppe and his closest assistant, fellow psychoanalyst and writer, Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco. Dr. Pacheco will feature prominently in these classes.
Norberto Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy has been around since the late 70s. Keppe is 93 now and still working and producing, adding to his formidable body of work. And I want to give you a sense of who he is at the beginning of our course today. So here's a short excerpt from a podcast where I spoke with Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco about Keppe's approach to treating his patients in psychoanalysis.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Well, you know Dr. Keppe is a pure psychoanalyst. Yes. He's a scientist. He began his work on this area of the human psyche A long time ago in the hospital of the University of São Paulo mostly. But he went to Vienna. He studied there with the psychoanalytical groups. And some of those psychoanalytical groups considered the Freudian psychoanalysis too materialistic, too linked to the senses.
And this seems to be something that is against the principle of psychoanalysis because analysis is analysis of the psyche.
And psyche is soul in Greek. So most of our psychological life, Richard, is not pertaining to the field of the senses. Feelings of love, intuition, consciousness, ethics, feelings, emotions, they are mostly not visible, not tangible. And they belong to the majority of things that we accomplish in society. Society is based 90% on invisible things, on laws and ethics and morals and habits and conducts and wishes and the wish to be happy.
Desires. Desires that are a lot linked to the psychological life, not physical.
Richard: And what you're talking about is so true because if we get sick, the immediate thing we start to question is what has my life been for? What have I been doing? I've been chasing after money or women or houses or something. And now, as I have this health challenge, I'm realizing that all of that was for naught, was not important.
Cláudia: And even for atheistic people that think they die and they just finish, they end, they're over. Life is over when people die. Even those people, they live 90% based on invisible values and aspirations and sensations and emotions.
Richard: "Desires," you said.
Cláudia: "Values." So all this invisible world is very important, very important for humanity. Even though people say, "no, what I don't touch, I don't believe." But they then would not believe in affection, in loyalty, in truth, in lying to people, in not lying, being betrayed or not being betrayed.
All of this belonged to this invisible world. When he started to see patients, he also realized that the majority of the problems they manifested had very little to do with material needs. So the majority of the problems were related to the soul in terms of psyche. Even to spiritual subjects, to metaphysical subjects.
He started to perceive that most of the torments, neurosis, psychosis, even organic illnesses, they were connected to the torments in the spiritual dimension of the beings, his clients. And then he started to listen seriously and take them seriously. You know, the results were so promising, so liberating for those clients, for those patients. Results
Richard: in terms of cure for them,
Cláudia: resolving issues. Yes, leaving crisis behind and healing diseases and getting back to normal lives.
So it's incredible what we can discover through these studies.
Richard: Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco talking about Dr. Norberto Keppe's perspective on treating and healing our problems, which are, in large part, problems of the soul. Viktor Frankl, whom Keppe worked with back in Vienna in the early 60s, wrote about man's search for meaning. And I think this theme of searching might be an important one as we begin our journey to discover the modern relevance of God.
My thought is that the sense of meaning has been weakened by our modern tendency to exclude God from the equation. Well, we'll explore that more in upcoming episodes. But next, I'd like to take you on an inside journey into Norberto Keppe's monumental discovery of inversion, which explains why things are so upside down, especially on this path to discover true spirituality and, dare I say it, God. So, Inversion, in our next episode of The Modern Relevance of God, a special podcast series on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
