Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Being upside down. Every kid loves that. Being hoisted up by the ankles and hanging there in your father's sure hands with your head where your feet should be. It's great as a game, but none of us would imagine going through life that way. But Norberto Keppe's discovery that humankind is inverted shows us how we are actually living life upside down.
Not physically, but philosophically, emotionally, and even spiritually. We wage wars to find peace. Science considers apes to be our relatives. We consume billions in pharmaceuticals thinking that'll make us healthy. And what's more, we accept those inversions as if they're workable approaches to living, functioning lives. It's not an overstatement to say that the discovery of inversion is the most important scientific finding of the 20th century.
Why it's not more widely known is a phenomenon we're trying to address on our stop radio network with our slogan, Disinverting the Human Being and Society. So, let's go at it again. The Science of Inversion. Today, on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I know it's a big thing to call any scientific discovery the most important one ever. We tend to automatically react with skepticism when we hear about anything that's the best, that its new and improved labeling really reflects real improvement.
The tech nerds are calling AI the greatest technological advancement of all time, which is, frankly, embarrassing. So, I get that hearing about Inversion's lofty promise can cause some raised eyebrows, but hang in there. Think about it for a second. Where's the sense in creating a society where, if there's no money to the family, a child doesn't eat, or a sick relative can't get medical treatment?
Where people do unspeakable things because they can make money. Or where people destroy their bodies and souls looking for pleasure because pleasure is more value than happiness, which requires discipline and focus and hard work, all of which are boring and too hard. And how we're destroying nature, trying to squeeze energy from matter. When disinverting this gets us focusing on getting energy from the limitless essential energy of the universe, as tesla proposed.
Humankind needs to have a more working knowledge of this inversion we suffer from, which is what Susan Berkley and i will try to illuminate in our discussion today. This recording is excerpted from a reading group susan and i conduct weekly. Let's let susan set things up for us.
Back in the day dr Cláudia used to teach a class with us and they were transcribed and this one talks about Keppe's discovery of inversion.
We could talk about this over and over so that we all really deeply understand the concept. It's really fundamental as Dr. Cláudia says here. She said, "I think we should discuss inversion first because psychological inversion is Keppe's main discovery. No psychotherapist or psychoanalyst ever spoke about this phenomenon on before. Keppe made this discovery in 1977, and this has formed the basis for all his other discoveries and applications.
He started the process of seeing inversion at an intuitive level. He used to tell us in his scientific meetings that after he understood the concept that neurosis and all human illnesses were linked to the concept of evil being the deprival of goodness, then he understood things much better. So neurosis is not something that exists by itself in human beings. Neurosis and psychosis are the result of a deprival of goodness, of health, and balance."
Our original nature should be beautiful, good, and truthful, meaning it should be healthy. We shouldn't be sick. And I'm going to stop there, Rich. I think that's plenty for us to unpack, right?
Richard: We've talked about this before, I think, but maybe for some of you, this is still a new concept that "evil doesn't exist in itself." And this is, I think this goes back to philosophy.
There's many philosophies that still believe that life is kind of this balance between good and evil, between the forces of creation and the forces of destruction, that this is the balance in the universe. Many philosophies, even some religions talk about that or spiritual practices. But that's not where Keppe is coming from. Keppe has this original Greek idea that, and Roman philosophers too, who discussed this a lot in the early theologians, that "evil doesn't have an essence."
It's not something that is in itself on the planet, that we create evil by denying goodness or distorting or depriving ourselves of goodness. And so this is kind of interesting because it means that our neurotic behaviors are kind of artificial on top of this base of sanity. And it means that we are, by nature, healthy and good. And so I was talking to a client about this the other day.
She was worried because as she's starting to see her problems, she thinks that she's getting worse. But actually, if we start to see our problems, we're getting better because consciousness of the problem returns us to our healthy nature. It's healthy. It doesn't always feel healthy, but it's healthier to see the problem than not see it. So I think this discovery of Keppe is really important because if we're inverted, we're inverted from something, that there's a base that we're problematic from this base.
And that's really important to know because otherwise everything is inverted from what? How do we know it's inverted? How do we know what the starting place is? And Keppe is giving us this starting place, goodness, health, balance, beauty, truth. This is the basis of life. And anything that's not connected to those things is a distortion or a destruction of those good things.
So that's kind of a hopeful situation, actually.
So hopeful, and it gives us like a north, you know, it gives us a lodestar, you know, something we can orient our lives toward. There is a right way and truth is not relative. There is a right way that we are inverted from and therefore we can return to health. Otherwise we'd never be well from anything.
We'd never we would never recover from anything. Healing would be impossible. I remember
Richard: one time we were talking about this and we were talking about how laziness is an attitude against action, action being the natural state of the universe.
I think we'll get to that a bit more in the text, but action, doing, producing, creating, this is the natural state of the human being. So when we're lazy, it's like an attitude we take against our natural nature of being active. Laziness as an attitude, that is a new idea. It's like it's not a nature to be any of these negative things, these vices, as Susan was saying.
Those are not natural inclinations. They're attitudes against our nature. And so by treating that, by recognizing that, we can begin to come closer to return to the natural state, which is healthy and active and productive, and all of those things. We're programmed to be successful in this sense, successful in the sense of being true to ourselves. What does that mean? What does it mean to be true to ourself?
And that's what we're discovering.
In this process of understanding inversion, we'll start to recognize how we are individually and collectively against our own nature, against our own health, against our own happiness, which is really crazy. But this is what we do. And that's the sickness of the human being, if you want to use that word, where Cláudia says we shouldn't be sick. This is the sense she's talking about.
We shouldn't be inverted from our nature, but we are.
Let's focus this idea of inversion a bit more with a reading from Dr. Keppe's book, Glorification. He wrote, "after having had some great difficulties with psychoanalysis in 1977, I began to notice something that was fundamental to neurotic attitudes, the process of inversion. From the moment we are born, we initiate a process of contact with the world and all its things in never-ending sequence."
This process, which is practically the center The first step in my perception of the origin of psychic illness was this factor of psychological inversion by which a person tries to place everything in his inner self contrary to the way it really is. Seeing fantasy as excellent, reality as harmful, love as bad, hate as good, patience as backwardness, intolerance as progress, and so on.
In my work in psychoanalysis, I have arrived at some conclusions that are opposite to those of Freud. For example, the cause of neurosis is not the repressed element itself, but the individual's attitude of trying to repress it. What causes us to be disturbed is not an unconscious, but the attitude we take of hiding consciousness. What leads to self-development is not the free use of the libido, but precisely independence from it.
These examples show that without the correct use of dialectics, we cannot perceive inversion, for only the profound individual is able to see his own superficiality, just as only a relatively sane person is able to see his insanity. It would now be a good time to give examples of inversion. He
Richard: mentions them here, right? Seeing fantasy is excellent, reality is harmful, love is bad, hate is good, patience is backwardness.
I'll give you a little example to get you started. Here in the traffic in São Paulo, we have a very interesting phenomenon that happens a lot. There's a lot of traffic in this city. It's a city of like 18, 20 million people, so there's a lot of traffic. And I noticed that ever since I came here that there's a tendency Brazilians have not to let people merge in the traffic.
There's a kind of an attitude that I'm not going to let you go in front of me.
That's changing. It's becoming more generous in that sense. But for a long time, I noticed it's very difficult to change lanes, for example, sometimes. And behind that is a kind of attitude that if I let you go in front of me, then I'm losing something. You're taking advantage of me in some way. There's a classic inversion. Rather than if I do good, I'm actually benefiting myself and benefiting the rest of the traffic.
It's seen as a negative thing. And so people will try to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. That's an inversion, example of an inversion. It's based on an idea of paranoia. If I share information, I'm going to lose something, and that guy's going to get ahead of me, or that woman is going to get ahead of me. So it's a kind of a deep paranoia that we don't even recognize.
We think it's normal.
We think it's natural to do that. But when we start to recognize, wow, we're like paranoid with sharing. We might be paranoid in how we spend our money. So there's all these inversions inside this that don't make sense. They're not logical, but they're acted out constantly. You know, if I spend my money, I'm going to lose something. I've got to save, save, save, save, save.
So we place the gold of the world deep in vaults somewhere and don't use it. We don't use it for the benefit of society, of humanity. We have all of this wealth on the planet going to very, very few people. When the world is a rich, it's a rich planet, all of us should have an abundant life. But the system that we create, it has this same mentality that Gil's talking about, this kind of paranoia.
If I share this, I'm going to lose something, right?
"If I use my talent, I'm going to waste it. It's going to be gone. So I've got to protect it. I've got to guard it. I got to keep it a little bit in abeyance here." All of this is from this idea of inversion. Keppe says in this text here that Susan was reading, right? It's the cause of neurosis is not the repressed element, not the problem.
It's the attitude of trying to repress it, not to see it. So we're not suffering from an unconscious, a natural unconscious that keeps us down. We're suffering from an attitude of hiding consciousness, not wanting to see. And the whole process of psychoanalysis is to diminish the censorship a little bit so we can see what's going on. And in that, we get more health, more sanity.
And, you know,
I just want to underscore something here, Rich, that Keppe says about the repression.
But that was an idea Freud had, everyone that we are we suffer because our anger is repressed or our sexuality is repressed or on and on and on. And so therefore it's important to put your anger out there or you'll explode. Well actually the opposite is true. When you put your anger out there everything becomes worse. Number one your blood pressure increases.
You increase your risk of heart problems stroke and other kinds of physical illnesses, you create antipathy among the people that are around you. Nobody wants to be around you. You destroy your social life. So that was a completely incorrect idea of Freud's, that we have repressed elements that should be unearthed and expressed. So just wanted to put that out there because that's very, very important.
And it's something that can be corrected in his work.
They must be conscientized, not
Richard: expressed. Sometimes we have to censor the behavior. Right. We can't just act, I want to kill my boss, okay, and probably I can't do that. But I need to be very, very conscious of the attitude I have inside. I may need to control the behavior, but I can't avoid the consciousness of the feelings that I have. Right.
This discovery of inversion brings enormous awareness to us that could really help to solve major problems here on Earth. For example, instead of being resistant to sharing valuable information in my department because I think the others are going to take advantage of me, I can begin to notice the inversion there and open up more to cooperation. Instead of basing our economic health only on money, we can begin to give more attention to meaningful production of products and services, and that alone could take steps towards resolving our bubble economy.
Well, that's our program for now. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. See you next time on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
