Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Sometimes, when I have something important to do, I must confess I feel a little resistance. It's an interesting phenomenon because it's like a general lethargy, like the energy is drained away and there's nothing left for the job at hand. In those moments, all sorts of other activities suddenly appear infinitely more appealing.
YouTube's a quick click away, and the algorithms have got numerous suggestions that seem interesting, and even, if I'm honest, urgent. And there's research to be done, too. New equipment for the studio or books on Amazon. And hey, I haven't played my guitar in a while. Not that any of these things are wrong, of course. It's just that they are far from more important than the project I need to work on.
Procrastination. Well, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only guy plagued with that. In fact, it's historical. Even St. Paul, prodigious achiever that he was, notwithstanding, lamented about that. Let's see if we can get somewhere in looking at this. So why do I do the things I don't want today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head? Yeah, why do I do the things I don't want?
Of course, there's the second part to that too, isn't there? Why don't I do the things I do want? Yeah, there's a doctoral thesis in there somewhere, isn't there? An age-old question and very few answers. Some treat this logically. You're just not clear enough on what you want. Or compassionately. There's nothing really wrong. You're just getting lost in putting out fires. But Brazilian psychoanalyst and independent physics researcher Norberto Keppe has gone much deeper.
The issues in the inverted will, he maintains, a profound question of intention and choice. Susan Berkley and I brought this subject up in our free reading group recently. Let's listen in. Susan has been mentioning a number of times about how you guys are interested in this subject of procrastination, not getting done what's most important, and trying to understand it in a psychological sense, I think would be, well, we hope will be useful.
Well,
yeah, because we're bringing something that's brand new and connected to something that Rich and I have been studying on the side in Portuguese with Dr. Cláudia very early in the morning and with Dr. Keppe, this question about impasse that each one of us has, that each of us, every human being has certain areas in our life where we just can't resolve an issue.
We get stuck and we stop there. And it's much deeper than we might think. So people might say, well, I can't lose weight. I just can't manage to lose or I can't manage to stop smoking, or I'm lazier than I want to be, or they might mention things like that. But at the root of it, it's a much, much deeper issue. And I think procrastination falls into the area of an impasse.
You know, I start projects. I have so many projects that I can't finish, or I have a lot of, you know, I do a page of a screenplay I want to write, and then it ends up in a drawer, you know, that type of thing. Or I join a gym, I go once, and then I quit, you know, all of that. But what we're studying and what we're seeing through Keppe's work and even in his older books is the deeper reason behind that.
It's much deeper than the thing that we're stuck on. And the thing that the deepness of it is the universal piece that all of us have. And I think every person on this call, because every person has this, that one thing that vexes you, that you can't seem to stop or get done. And it's always one thing for each of us. I might have a few impasses, but there's one that's really at the root of it.
It's the resistance to this energy, the energy of the creator that flows through all of us, our life force, and how we manifest in the world with our talents and our abilities. So why do we do this? This is age old. This is the human dilemma since the fall. Why do we, why did Lucifer say no, and why did we follow him?
And it's, it's embedded in our DNA, you know, as the human race. And why do we stop ourselves from flourishing, really really flourishing as a human race? Why, why have we stopped ourselves? And that's the question of the impasse, and it's much deeper, and it's very serious, because it is a theological issue. And, and it's in everybody, and that's what Tepe's college is exploring.
I think that as we start to talk about procrastination, this is what we're, we all have to face. We're all procrastinating, every single one of us, on something. There is no such thing as a fully realized human being. And we have to real, and, and you know, there's techniques and things that people do, and they kind of work a little bit, or you know, you power through it, or you, you know, but there's a root
Richard: cause, Rich.
So I remembered that Cláudia Pacheco had answered a question from one of the newspapers that were produced in New York City or in Europe when they were living there. And inside were these scientific articles, including questions from readers or listeners. And I remember that she'd written this one on procrastination. Sure. And
it's short text, so we'll read it and then open the discussion.
Someone asks, I procrastinate about doing certain things. For example, when I have to write a report at work, I stop and begin doing other unimportant things. I always leave the most important for the least important.
Richard: Yeah. For the last, I guess is probably what they're
saying there. I abandon the most important for the least important. Yeah. Why do I do this? Yeah.
So she says, the reason we trade the essential for the particular, a term from philosophy that means secondary, is due to the innate problem of psychological inversion that all human beings suffer from their entire lives. Due to our inversion, we exchange the greater for the lesser. Health for illness, accomplishment for laziness, success for frustration, knowledge for ignorance and alienation, love for anger, happiness for envy, optimism for pessimism.
Richard: Yeah, now that looks like a lot, doesn't it? And we can say, no, wait a minute, I don't do that in all those areas. Of course, we're not suggesting that all of these things are true for everybody. But in general, our inversion causes us to make this exchange even unconsciously. We don't recognize it as that. But you can see, if you know anybody in your life who's a hypochondriac, for example, you'll see over and over again this attitude.
And it's not that the person thinks they're exchanging, okay, I don't want health, so I'm going to have illness. It's that the inversion causes them to see illness as the reality, as normal. Yeah, wait, stop
there, because that's really important. That's different for people. Say that sentence again.
Richard: Yeah, it's not that the person is consciously saying, I want to be ill, but because of the inversion, the person sees an advantage in being sick.
They're more focused on the sickness than they are on health. That's the inversion. And it's inconscientized. The person doesn't recognize that they're doing that. In fact, they may have a lot of excuses for it. Oh, well, I'm, you know, it's genetic or it's just the way I am. Or like, you know, I have a little bit of paranoia about things. There's, we have a lot of, we've built in a lot of excuses not to see the intention behind it, which is to, is to trade health for sickness.
Cláudia is talking about it here is a philosophical point, right? That we trade the essential for the particular. And this is one of the things we do in procrastination. We have something important to do, but we find a million other things. Not that the other things are not good things, but they're less important than the thing that we need to do. So we trade that essential for the particular, for the secondary.
And this is an inversion, psychological inversion that we don't recognize. We think that it's normal, or we have a lot of built-in excuses to justify it. Due
to our inversion, we exchange the greater for the lesser, right? And it makes perfect sense. I'll clean that garage, it's been months, and you know, years, that closet, this is the week, right, when I'm doing something important.
In fact,
Richard: if I, if I asked you a question, we use this exercise sometimes, uh, can you name some things that are not important, but very easy to do. They're not that important, but they're easy to do, and sometimes difficult to stop. Can you think of any examples of that? Things that are easy to do, they're not that important, but they're very easy to do, and sometimes they're difficult to stop, like addictions, right, would be one thing.
But can you think of some examples of that? Surfing. Surfing on the web yes okay yeah scrolling through facebook and instagram yes what else guys not that important they're okay they're not not necessarily bad but they're not that important but they're really easy to do watching The News. Yes. Watching TV generally. Making phone calls. If
you've got something that really stands out that you know you need to do and there are times it's like, oh, I forgot to call so-and-so.
Click. I got
Richard: to do that. Forgot to call my second cousin that I
haven't seen in 25 years. Eating food. Overeating. Yeah.
Richard: Especially food that's not healthy, right? Nobody craves a salad. But
what I do is like, I start, I'll cook, I'll make enough food for a dinner party for six, and, and it's wonderful, and it's gourmet, and it's just nobody's coming over.
I like get into it, and suddenly I
Richard: made a delicious risotto, healthy and wonderful. I'm like, damn, there's enough food here for six people, and three hours went by. Oh, there's only me, there's only me here, I forgot to invite. Oh well, I'll just have to eat it myself. Or you have people who say, you know, it's on, it's Friday, say, I've been good all week, yeah, I've been good all week, and now I deserve, all right.
Give some
other examples, guys, give some examples of those
Richard: things that are not that important but really easy to do. How
about sleeping, oversleeping, oversleeping? Yes,
Richard: yeah. I'm gonna
throw this one out there, because it's something that I, I catch myself doing, so I'm kind of telling on myself, but uh, sometimes it's easier to work the tech side of an issue rather than the personal side of the issue.
Yeah, I mean, it's avoidance of interaction, because you know that interaction might not be pleasant, it might not be helpful. And so it's like, oh well, but you know, I need to do this, this technical thing, because I know that it's something I need to do down the line, but it's not necessarily at this moment the most important thing to be done.
Richard: Any other examples, guys, of this? Gossip, yes. So it's easy to do these things, and they're not necessary, they can be secondary, they can even be unhealthy, but they're very easy to do. Now think of it the other way. What are those things that are really important but are really difficult to do, and easy to stop? Really important but difficult to do, difficult to get started and easy to
stop.
My
Richard: taxes, calling my boss, calling your boss, taxes, doing my taxes, all right, what else? Exercising, studying, writing your book, and
also sometimes calling the important people that we need to call,
Richard: doing the important
follow-up. Yeah, yeah. And one interesting thing is, uh, the people we, or the banks, the credit card companies, the people we owe money to, never time to call, to return.
They email you, they call you, but they don't hear from you. Can you relate
Richard: to this guy? So the things that it is, it's so interesting, because we think we want to be happy. This is the illusion that we have, that the human being wants to be happy. What drives us is happiness. But we don't do the things that would really bring fulfillment or we procrastinate on those things.
But the things that will bring pleasure, instant pleasure, but not fulfillment in that larger sense, those things are really easy to do. This is a kind of a proof of this inversion that we're inverted. We prefer to do the secondary things than the things that will really bring happiness and fulfillment. We prefer the pleasure things for sure, but also the secondary things that don't bring the fulfillment
and the accomplishment that we're looking for.
So we say we want to be happy, but because of this inconscientizing version. We end up exchanging happiness for secondary pleasure, immediate pleasure, and sometimes dissatisfaction in the end. Looking at it a little bit theologically, I find that we as human beings tend to give the mind and the ego credit for even the good things that happen, and don't want to deal with the fact that it's that divine energy, that creative energy coming through us.
You see, that is really it. So it's easier to stick with the mind, with the ego, because we fear that if we listen to that inner voice, if we listen to the divine, we'll have to do something we don't
Richard: want to do. This is pathology. This is not the ego. The ego is, we all have an ego. It could be a necessary ego.
You're talking about a pathological. Right,
pathological, yes, yeah, the
Richard: pathology that says I'm the creator of everything, and everything that we do depends on something that we didn't create, our intellectual capacity, our mind, we didn't create the brain, how the brain functions, we didn't create anything that allows us ultimately to have any kind of success. So we have this inverted idea that we are the creators of reality.
This is a big inversion. This is the fundamental aspect of procrastination. It lies right in here. It's a metaphysical problem, actually, not just a time management problem. The example from St. Paul, right? I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I don't want to do, that's what I do. He recognized, he didn't understand it. He was lamenting that, but he recognized that very problem 2,000 years ago.
And this is really, really key because when we procrastinate or when we do something that we shouldn't do, we say, why did I do that? I know I shouldn't be doing that. It's like it causes us anguish and stress, and we don't recognize it as being something inside the will, the inverted will, which we're going to talk about a little bit more here as we go through this text.
And you know, and I was just thinking, because we, we lie to ourselves, and we say okay, I'll do better tomorrow, and that's, but we never get to the root of it, and that's so serious, because of course obviously tomorrow might never come. But you do that enough and all of a sudden you, you know, you're so old and you no longer have the resources to do it, or you don't have the physical ability to do that thing, and you look back with regret, um, because we lie to ourselves around this.
Yeah, or we
Richard: say I've got to stop being lazy, I've got to stop being late. We have all this emphasis on what we need to stop doing, rather than seeing that we, we have this inverted desire to stop, right? We don't recognize that we
actually take pleasure in doing that destructive thing unconsciously. It's
Richard: funny, we take pleasure in doing things that are wrong, even though we suffer as a consequence of it.
There's kind of a pleasure to go against, you know, we're like that when we're kids, you know, eat your vegetables, no, do your homework, no, you know, brush your teeth, no, go to bed, no, and all that stuff is, you can see it in, in young kids, it's, it's prevalent. You give a kid a choice between practicing the piano and playing video games, and the kids are going to play video games, majority, right?
The discipline that it takes to practice the piano, to do what's good, the discipline it takes is notable, because of this inversion, because we have to fight against this tendency for lethargy, this tendency for nothing that we have because of this inversion.
In the field that I studied, Ayurveda, they call it, um, crimes against wisdom, crimes
Richard: against wisdom, crimes against what we know.
Look
at that, I think that a lot, that's good, crimes
Richard: against what we know, it's against the wisdom that we already have, and we act against that, and many times we justify that too. I've been good all week, right, this is my one pleasure, don't take away my pleasure. And it's a crime, because this is a form of corruption, we're corrupting the knowledge that we have, we're corrupting the health that we have, we're corrupting the goodness that we have.
This is a big corruption. This is why corruption on the outside irritates us so much, because it's consciousness of how much we corrupt ourselves in these small ways. All of us are doing this in some way or other,
you know, and wisdom, and you know, I'm also touched with crimes against wisdom, but you don't need to be older to have wisdom, I think that it's embedded in us.
Yeah, and before we were so corrupt, sometimes we get a glimpse of it in science fiction, or you know, fantasy fiction, the human race is different, and from a young age children are wise and know all this stuff, you know, and maybe we really were like that, and we've, we, we have infused knowledge, we have it, we're not a blank slate. And then we, we uh distort and we deny it and we omit it and, and it, and we're not even aware we're doing that, and it just gets deeper and more unconscious, and
Richard: our science has instituted sensory knowledge as the, is the highest level of wisdom, and taken away the philosophical and even the theological, to the point now where our science will say, well, we can do this.
So we will without thinking, wait a minute. Should we be doing that? Is this correct? Is this going to lead to problems in the future? Is this coherent with the truth and goodness and beauty of life? Because if it's not, we shouldn't even be doing it. Why are we creating toxic chemicals and all of these things that we do in the name of science that are in the end absolutely destructive?
And
entrepreneurship is so touched by, I mean, I'm talking about at the very high level, you know, venture capital money goes to projects that are so, they don't pass this test. Like I'm thinking about self-driving cars. Okay. They have no, a self-driving car has no insight. So therefore, I heard a bunch of entrepreneurs talking about this the other day. There's the trolley test.
So how would you teach a car if on one side of the street was a group, it had to swerve, let's say a self-driving car had to swerve to miss a boulder, for example. And on one side of the street was a group of six-year-olds and on the other, a group of elderly people. That's the trolley test. Like which one would the car hit?
How would you train the car to hit something? Well, the point is that the car has no ethics. We have ethics. We have that type of discernment. But because we're so materialistic, you know, entrepreneurs at this level are, they start to create something that's a folly in that sense. And it's in a way doomed to failure. That's why they haven't up to now been able to perfect self-driving cars.
I
Richard: remember before the second Iraq war, there was a big conference in Los Angeles on how to make money from war. And, you know, wow, all right, there's money to be made, but wait a minute, you know, making money on the backs of the misery of thousands of people, what kind of a business decision is that? But it's justified because it doesn't pass this ethical test.
If you're looking only at the measurement of things, well, I can make X dollars doing this and Y dollars doing that and comparing those two. If you're looking at it in a material way, then you're excluding the deeper levels, this wisdom, just excluding that from the picture.
But in fact, Richard, that has been, let's just say since World War II, probably the cause of all wars.
For
Richard: sure. I mean, war is a business and a profitable business. Well, it's profitable in the sense that some companies make money, but it's absolutely destructive for the human race. Absolutely, clearly destructive. So feeding that is a huge example of our inversion. And not just, it's a psychological inversion that becomes institutionalized inside society, and so this is, we exchange the greater for the lesser, we make money the reason for life, we make profit the, the purpose of business, and these are secondary elements, not that profit is not important, of course it is, but it's not the purpose of the business, shouldn't be the purpose of the business.
And this kind of inversion that we do is right here. It's like greater for the lesser, health for illness, accomplishment for laziness. We trade success for frustration and weakness, knowledge for ignorance, love for anger. Man, it's incredible what we do in this inverted world that we live in.
So procrastination, a much deeper problem through this way
Richard: of looking at it. Yeah, it's not just a time management problem.
It's a philosophical existential problem. Okay, go ahead, Susan.
Yeah, I just wanted to read some more. We trade good for evil, just as our ancestors, Adam and Eve, exchanged God and heaven for the devil and hell. We trade peace for war, honesty for gossip, hypocrisy, unethical acts. When man began to make this inversion, he began to suffer and fall ill. Ever since, man has been obliged to do good for himself and for others against his will.
Our inversion is so extreme that doing anything beneficial for ourselves becomes a sacrifice. And if we do the things we spontaneously feel like doing, following our whims, we will often only do that which will cause us harm. Sometimes it can seem harmless to interrupt the writing of a report, to have a cup of tea, make a phone call, go for a walk.
But if these interruptions become a pattern and the mechanism for escaping from doing that which would make our progress and the progress of others possible, these seemingly harmless acts become extremely harmful. It's a
Richard: big picture she draws, isn't it,
Susan? Sure is.
Richard: And again, it's not just a habit to overcome or a new way of using your discipline, you know, getting more discipline.
Those are useful things and things we need, right? But it's really important to see how we're attracted to what is less necessary than what is necessary. Sometimes even being attracted to what is harmful to us and to others. And the world has certainly got lots of examples of this being attracted to what's harmful, what's negative for us. I'll go
even one step further.
So we were talking about wisdom. We take pleasure in denying our wisdom. And we, that's not true, you know, come on, that's outdated, just this one more cup of tea,
Richard: we can see then, Susan, that the, the um corruption that we embark on that Saint Paul talked about, that corruption, why do I do the things that I don't want to do, that corruption that can cause us to destroy our talents, certainly causes us to destroy our health, we get old much faster than we should in many cases.
People don't maintain their health, don't maintain their outlook on life, don't maintain their intellectual capacity. People are encouraged in our North American society to retire as soon as possible, right? To stop working, stop being productive, to stop contributing. And people have that idea. Not everybody. There are many people who retire and continue to be active and continue to. This is marvelous. But many people, they just stop.
Like a running 1,000 miles an hour, they just hit the wall and stop. And we encourage that. We encourage people to be useless. This is inversion. Another example of it.
As a society.
Richard: As a society. And so what happens is we dispose of all the wisdom of people that have been working for many, many years. We just throw it away. It doesn't matter.
It doesn't count anymore. Better to stop. Enjoy your golden years. You know, lie on the
beach, push them out
Richard: of companies, yeah, seeing procrastination is a corruption of our talents and abilities. Well, that's a sobering thought, isn't it? Another reminder that it's our unconscious attitudes and behaviors running out of the surface that are driving us, and it's all the more reason why Keppe's integral psychoanalysis makes such sense for anyone wanting to free themselves a little from unhealthy habits or perspectives which are blocking the true person from coming forth.
Rich at richjonesvoice.com if you'd like to explore that further. Our program is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, found wherever fine podcasts are found. Please tell your friends. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. See you next time.
I'm Richard
Richard: Lloyd Jones, host of Thinking with Somebody Else's Head here on the Stop Radio Network.
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The main characteristic of illness is lack of awareness. Norberto Cappi, disinverting the human being and society.
