Richard Lloyd Jones: Einstein was of the opinion it was an illusion. Nietzsche stated there were no facts, only interpretations. Picasso was very far from understanding it when he expounded that everything you can imagine is real. Today, I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, a meditation on the nature of reality. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. I want to remind you of my email address, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Drop me a line about the podcast.
I always love to hear from you. Let me know what you think. And when you do, I'll send you the link to our free book offer, Liberation of the People, Dr. Norberto Keppe's Psychoanalysis of the Pathology of Power, a very concise explanation of why we don't progress the way we should in our social organization. It's essential reading, actually. It's very timely, too, even though it was written in the 1980s.
It's totally up to date in its psychological vision. A few weeks ago, I sat down with my friend Cesar Soós, a frequent contributor to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, and we began a discussion about a subject I've pondered a lot since encountering Dr. Keppe's work a few years ago. Keppe's first important psychological discovery was what he has called inversion, a process whereby humanity as a whole and individually inverts values and perceptions, seeing what's good as bad or dangerous or weak, and what's bad as advantageous in some way.
As Dr. Cláudia Pacheco said in our podcast on the pathology of power last week, "don't we see humbleness as weak, arrogant and prestigious people as strong, that we achieve development and peace through war?" These are all examples of an inverted view of life that all of us have to a greater or lesser degree.
When I first began to study this psychological phenomenon, I asked myself this. If we are inverted, which it appears we are, what are we inverted from? It stood to reason, I thought, that we must be inverted from something. That began my fascination with the nature of reality. What can be said definitively about reality? Keeping in mind what T.S. Eliot offered on the subject, that "humankind cannot bear much reality", Cesar and I set out to see if we could get reality in our sights and pin it down a little.
Cesar, one of the great philosophers, I think that's really put a finger on this in a way that supports what Keppe has talked about, was Max Scheller, the German philosopher from the late 19th, early 20th century. And he said this, he said, "there exists a real and objective world of values and eternal essences that we capture intuitively, and that they are necessary and independent of our experience."
How has this been confused, particularly by the quantum physicists? Quantum
physics came to put this idea down, and I'm sorry to say that quantum physics is misguided. Because physics is based on matter. We do not have an appropriate approach to understand the human nature, the human mind. So consciousness is not well understood, and this led physicists to believe that reality is subjective.
And that's why Werner Heisenberg came up with this uncertainty principle, thinking that nature was uncertain and not that we are uncertain. We are ignorant in relation to an objective reality. Mark Scheller belonged to a period of philosophers. They were not materialists. They had a different approach than today.
Richard: He said another very beautiful thing. He said that "goodness, truth, and beauty exist a priori." "Yes." "In other words, before us, right?"
"Yes. Objectively. And outside time and space. Yes. That they're necessary and independent of experience." That seems to me exactly
the opposite of what quantum physics is trying to tell us today. "This is it, Richard. If I can make an analogy, what's happening to physics today is exactly what happened in the 16th century with Copernicus and Galileo. At that time, people believed that the Earth was the center of the solar system.
But then Copernicus said that no, it was the opposite. The Sun was the center of the solar system and the Earth revolved around it. Today what is happening is exactly the same thing in terms of psychology. Human beings, because of a false philosophy, believe that they are the center of reality and not that we are dependent on an objective reality. This is the big confusion that is happening today, and I do not say this only in physics, but in all of the other fields."
Richard: We are dependent on reality, yeah. I think this is something very new in the scientific view offered by Keppe, although it has many precedents throughout the philosophical thinking of human history. But I'm reminded of the writing of Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1979, who advised the scientific community that a theory that would unify all the forces of nature demands the appearance of radical new ideas.
He saw that delving deeper and deeper into the quantum world wouldn't bring any real understanding of who we are and how everything fits together. Present the argument for us, then, Cesar, as to why we're dependent on reality and not the creators of it.
If you die, things continue the same way. So it means that you are dependent on the rest and not the rest dependent on you.
Okay, you may die for yourself, but reality continues to exist.
You
Richard: know everything's so relative in our world today. We, we believe that we can decide what is true, what is not true, that we can decide what is good, what is not good, that we can decide well that's bad for you
but good for me. And I think there is a universal idea, the idea of values, principles that are true for
Richard: everybody.
They're not just, um, depending on my decision or my creation but something that already exists.
So our problems as human beings, we have an enormous difficulty to be humble and see that we are not the center of reality. Reality is something objective. It exists outside the human being and inside as well. So for me to be in connection with this reality is a matter of resonance.
I must resonate in the same level as reality. Then the understanding comes.
Richard: It's interesting, isn't it? Because the megalomania idea of human beings is that everything exists because I say it exists.
The, the human-centered aspect I think is very, very important to see, because many people are interpreting the destruction of the planet, the differences that are happening in the ecology, as a sign that we're evolving to another state. Many people are choosing to use this as saying, but everything's good. Human beings are good, we're evolving, we're growing, we just have to make new decisions, change our paradigms, change our minds about what is reality, and then reality will follow our beliefs and ideas.
This is a very crazy and, I think, dangerous idea.
It's very dangerous, Richard, because if you cultivate wrong thoughts about reality and even about yourself, you end up schizophrenic. And most of these philosophers, especially in the 19th century, who gave primacy to matter, they entered in a kind of delirium.
For example, look at Auguste Comte, a French philosopher who laid down the basis for science of the 20th century. As we know today, he tried to commit suicide two times. What did he say? What was his philosophy? He is well known for the law of three states. He says that "the first kind of knowledge is metaphysical, which he identified with religion, superstition.
And this was wrong from the start. And the second stage would be the philosophical. And the third stage would be the positive stage, which is the scientific, experimental state." And he said that "the next step doesn't need the prior one." So all kind of abstraction was simply cut out of this field. Positive science, it means? Experiment, when you can touch, you can feel, you can taste.
So suppose, suppose now, Richard, if our reality is sustained, and we have all the evidence today to say that, if our physical reality is sustained by energies which are subtle to our instruments and our senses, how come we are able, with this science, to understand the basis of our physical world?
"Impossible. It's impossible, Richard. And this is exactly the point where we are now. We must make a review in our foundations of physics. Well,
Richard: of course, quantum physics says they're making this review. That they're Expanding the realm of science beyond the limited Aristotelian, Newtonian, Comte science, positivistic.
They're completely wrong in this sense, because quantum physics considers the consciousness the very factor that collapses a wave into matter, a wave of probability.
They say the world is a set of probabilities, and according to your consciousness you are going to collapse these probabilities into a physical reality. This is crazy, you see. It's like if you were the center of reality, you were God. And you, with your positive thinking or even bad thinking, you would collapse waves and make the reality happen to you that way."
But it's not like that. Reality is objective.
Richard: There's a very interesting quote from Abraham Lincoln, who was a very wise man. Yes, what is it? He said, "how many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." Exactly. And I think this is, although it's very homespun and sort of simple in that Abraham Lincoln way, it clarifies something really well, that your opinion about reality or God or my opinion about reality or God or the transcendental world makes
no difference to the transcendental world.
Exactly, Richard, it
Richard: doesn't change anything. Keppe says, "the thinkers have forgotten that the human being is incapable of building reality. No matter how much man tries to escape from reality, it remains there, sustaining him."
For example, when you eat, you are not conscious of the process involved in your digestive system that extracts all the vitamins from the food you ate, imagine if you had to think about them.
You would never be able to digest anything. So I'd
Richard: be dead in a week.
Yes, of course.
Richard: We're entering now the evolutionary question. We get a lot of flack every time we talk about evolution on this program because we're really honed on this idea. We're born and bred in this culture that believes that we're evolving to another state, and I feel quantum physics falls into this trap too.
Keppe's idea, coming from the ancient Greeks and many of the
greatest thinkers in history... Yes, an inverted metaphysics.
Richard: Yes, that it's not that we're starting from a lesser position and climbing to a superior one, but that we already occupy a superior position. We already have all knowledge. We already have all wisdom inside us, but the human being destroys that, rejects that, moves away from that.
So instead of starting from nothing and moving up in a slow process of evolution over millions of years to arrive at a new state, Keppe is saying that we have this perfection already, but we reject it, so we're going the opposite direction.
This idea, Richard, comes from an inversion Aristotle made in his metaphysics. Dr. Norberto Cappi, as you know, he made a fantastic work and he discovered that Aristotle was inverted. In these Aristotelian thoughts, the smaller creates the greater. And so the evolutionistic idea follows this pattern, This inverted metaphysical pattern. And this is very similar to physics also. Dr. Keppe says "physics is inverted and it believes that matter creates energy." When you want to heat up your house, what do you take?
You take timber. You take coal. You take gas. And this is matter. Matter being transformed into energy. If you want to move a car or a rocket, no matter what, you take what? Combustible. And combustible is matter. So our society is fundamental on this basic idea that matter creates energy. On this idea that the lesser creates the greater.
So we continue to think that we are small, we are made small by nature. And then little by little, we grow up to a certain being that we don't know where it will stop, you see. But it's the same thinking. But imagine for yourself, do you know about Nikola Tesla, the great Austrian-Hungarian electrical engineer? When Albert Einstein discovered his formula, E equals MC squared, Nikola Tesla was very concerned about that.
He was a great inventor. And he said, "no, it's not possible. Einstein, with this idea, will make scientists try to take energy out of matter. They will destroy matter even more." And today it happens in our nuclear power plants. We use uranium or thorium or plutonium to extract energy out of matter. And this process is very dangerous. But Nikola Tesla had found a way to extract this energy from this transcendental energy that keeps the universe in position.
So he found a way to extract energy not from matter, but from the field around matter, from the space, from the vacuum, if you will. If you consider that this is possible, you also have to transport this idea to the biology too. And that we are not coming from a monkey to a man, but we are man, we are made man, and we are sustained by a field around us that keeps us this way.
And if we are not better than we should be, it's because we reject, we oppose this field which is surrounding us all the time. You see, the vision is completely the opposite.
Richard: Yes, that we have to fit into this reality that exists. We have to agree with its laws and that there are laws that are definite, right?
Exactly, Richard. We are like fish trying to live outside the water.
We do not want to see that there is water around us. And we depend on this water.
We must follow the laws of this water. This is what we are trying to say. We prefer to believe in an idea of a vacuum in the place of water. Yes. Because then you are the God. You create your laws. You do not have to follow these energetic laws.
Richard: Well, a final thought, Cesar. What about relativity then? What's good for you is not good for me.
All of this kind of idea that permeates our society. How do you see that?
First of all, Richard, relativism exists only inside reality. Inside reality, you can say relativism is a law. For example, if I like more pineapples than apples, and you say, oh no, Cesar, I prefer apples than pineapples, good for you, good for me, this is a relativism inside reality.
But I cannot say to you that I prefer poison than pineapples. You see, this is not a choice, this is not relative.
Then we are arguing about being crazy or not, you understand. You can't join things that are not real, real. And also one comment in relation to what you said is this relativism can only exist if you are living inside a closed system. If you take the system of loss, system of loss is a closed system. The United States has one system which is different from Brazil, which is different from Saudi Arabia, for example, or Afghanistan.
So in this closed system you can say therefore the women that to dress short skirts is not good. Then you can argue, "no, it's not good for you, it's good for me" in a closed system. But if you go to another society, this can be different. You can only discuss between relative things inside closed systems, you know. But reality encompasses all the systems possible.
There is one common factor in relation to all of these closed systems.
And
Richard: I think the greatest human beings have always been the ones who have been linked more to these universal values, like justice for everyone, which is the same for everyone. Whether you're black or white or woman or man or you're Muslim or Christian or Hindu, justice, truth, is the same in a universal sense. We make wrong interpretations of that through our societies, and the society imposes a set of values that they say are true.
For example, slavery. "Slavery is never right, even if the society says it's right." And how do we know that? Because from the point of view of the slave, slavery is always wrong. So we can say that there is a universal. Women were restricted to vote for a long, long time, into the early 20th century. And suddenly, now it's okay for women to vote.
Well, why wasn't it okay before? Were women different?
They couldn't vote 200 years ago, but they can vote now. This relative argument doesn't hold water. If it was wrong then, it's wrong now. If it's wrong now, it was wrong then. So then I'm struck by the fact that... Very often, these crazy ideas that go against a sort of a universal value are very much created in the minds of people. But if we go inside ourselves, we know that all human beings are equal because they're human beings.
It doesn't matter their color, their sex, whether they're from Africa or Brazil or Canada, where I'm from. It makes no difference their economic background, makes no difference the height, the width of their bodies, whether the nose is bigger than the other, whether they have one arm or two arms, we all have the same psychological structure, we are the same. And this is a universal thing that we are the same, so of course we should have the same rights, you know.
If
this was not the same, Richard, it would be impossible for us to understand each other. Because when you speak and I understand and you and I speak back and you understand, it means we have the same structure, even if we were raised up in different countries, different cultures, but we are the same psychologically speaking, you see. Yeah, and
Richard: I think too that one thing we could really maybe just sort of finish on the structure on which everything is built.
If we think of human decision, yeah, human decision always comes from something prior. So I make a decision, it's based on my thinking, and my thinking is something I can't control, I can't create. I can create thoughts but I cannot create my brain. And not only can I not create my brain, but I can't create the environmental conditions within which I have my own life.
Yes, so if we go back far enough, we'll see that sooner or later every human achievement is based on something that was not created by human beings, something that existed prior to human beings. And that is the reality that we need to try to orient to, rather than creating our own reality out of our minds. Do you know what
I mean? Yes.
Uh, you mentioned something that is worth thinking a lot, because all of our inventions, for example, they are taken from natural objects. Radar, the airplane, the camera, everything comes based on something outside us. So
Richard: it's not that we can't bear reality, it's that we don't really want to see reality because we want to be the creators of it. It's an interesting way to see it, isn't it?
A long and involved program today thanks for listening
