Richard Lloyd Jones: Millions were killed senselessly in the Middle Ages. They couldn't vote for decades. Their bodies sell everything from perfume to piston rings. There are mothers and sisters, bosses, colleagues, and maybe soon presidents. They've caused wars and yet are the biggest champions of peace. And talking about their pathology can get you in trouble. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we'll explore the strengths of the weaker sex.
Of course, calling them that reveals our inversion in considering only the in considering strength only in the size and amount of muscles. More in a minute. Just wanted to remind you of our International Congress on Analytical Trilogy coming up next March 2008 here in Brazil. Perfect opportunity for you to learn more about the work of Norberto Keppe and how Analytical Trilogy can be applied to all areas of human endeavor.
Through our trilogical lens, we'll be investigating the areas of health and psychosomatics, education, media, psychotherapy, economics, arts, science and metaphysics, ufology, ecology, philosophy, sociopathology, spirituality. It will be a state of the union, so to speak, on where we are in humanity and understanding how the human being works. This goes deep to the root of all our problems. So any of you involved in social activism of any stripe, you'll want to be there to get a handle on the key reasons why we've come so unstuck in so many areas all at the same time.
Because we're seeing the impact now of the centuries of inverted human values. Make a note and start planning for the Easter week, March 20th to 23rd, 2008. Just write me if you're interested in more information about this, rich at richjonesvoice.com.
Our topic today is a hot one, but beautiful in how we can analyze it through Analytical Trilogy. Trilogy, by the way, stands for the union between philosophy, theology, and science, or thought, feeling, and action in the human being. And it's necessary to consider all three if we're to have a complete view of anything. Modern science has cut away the two pillars of philosophy and theology and so wobbles incompletely on its own, trying to make sense of the world and its phenomena and failing.
You see, without the upward view into the abstraction and consideration of being and spirituality, science condemns itself to a strictly material view and its incomplete and inadequate conclusions suffer as a result. Back in the 1990s, Dr. Cláudia Pacheco wrote a courageous book called Women on the Couch, an analysis of women's psychopathology.
Some women were not happy. But I found the book illuminating in highlighting the problems in relationships and life of both men and women. And Dr. Pacheco has been developing her views since. Let's find out the latest. Cláudia, there's so much focus on the fact that women have been oppressed in society that to come out and talk about what women have done to deny their true essence is maybe controversial.
But I think you'd like to help us understand this deeper, right?
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Richard, when we speak about women, we have the tendency to think about us as a minority. In reality, we are the majority of humanity. And we are, believe it or not, the most influential beings in the planet. And this major influence we have on people, on society, on the destiny of humanity is so big.
The influence is so important that we must take a look to focus on what have we been doing so far.
If we consider the situation of the planet, the situation of our children, of our men, of our parents or any relations that we might quote here that women have and have influence on, we would see that our role has not been that good. Because we see humanity falling apart. And women have an enormous influence in what is happening to the planet in all this destruction.
And I would be very pleased to talk further on this subject with you today.
Richard: Yeah, fantastic. Because here you said a couple of things from your first book about women, Women on the Couch, Analysis of the Psychopathology of Women. "In this book, I do not intend to analyze the many injustices and barbarities perpetrated against women over the course of history. A great deal has already been written about this.
My purpose is to try to alert the reader to the even more serious problem of how women contribute to the maintenance and fortification of the power structure."
Yes. That's a strong statement, I think. Yes.
Cláudia: Talk a bit about that for us. Yes, Jones. I have been researching on what kind of consuming attitude women have in society. And most of what is bought in society, this consumerism business and how we are consuming the planet, we see how women have been playing the role in this. How women enjoy shopping, and shopping unnecessary things, and how much voracious women can be.
If we look in the statistics, we see starting from this makeup things, and perfumes, and clothing, and cars, and houses, and not only what we buy, but the pressure we put in men to buy new things, and new houses and bigger things and spending and spending. There is a common saying in Brazil that men learn how to make money and women how to spend it, since they are children.
But we see this huge problem of women consuming the planet.
And powerful people enjoy this a lot because they make a profit out of our stupidity. Because this is a big inversion women have. We think that we value for what we have, the way we look, the good mask we have, if we have the brand or the latest in fashion. And in reality, the true value, our true richnesses, which are mostly inner richnesses, and they don't show that much in society.
They don't show up that much because our values are not really taken seriously. Not only by man, but mostly by us.
Richard: Which values are you talking about? You're talking about these internal values, I'm assuming. Of
Cláudia: what? Richard, think a little bit about the way, for instance, Capi analyzed the structure of man. He compares the structure of man with the structure of God.
And he sees God as threefold existences in one essence, which is love, truth, and beauty.
This would be compared with God Father which would be love and goodness, God Son which would be truth and reason, and God Spirit which would be beauty, aesthetics. The three of them are pure action. The threefold is beautiful, truthful, and good action because we are energies. We are intense vibrational energy, and this is action, it's pure action. Now, if we consider that even Jungian studies that see the right side of the brain as the correspondent to feelings, to intuition, spirituality, emotion, and a feminine side of the brain, and the left side of the brain, the male sort of side of the brain because it's logical-oriented, rational, intellectual.
Richard: Seeing specifics.
Cláudia: Yes. And we see that women are more connected to the fields of emotions and feelings. We are very clever in this area, Richard. We are very much capable to touch people.
You see the big romances, understanding the human soul and taking care of children and being affectionate. This is very much a quality that women should have. Of course, to be an integral person, we must unite both sides of the brain in both aspects of our souls, which is love and truth. And they have the same essence. If we see a loving action, it must be rational.
And a rational attitude must be loving, we cannot consider both things separately. Let
Richard: me just make a point about that first, though, Cláudia, because that means that if something is rational, logical, I can justify it, but it's not good, then we can say that it's a wrong.
Cláudia: Yeah, it's a lie.
Richard: It's a lie. A misconception. So all of this crazy sort of...
Terrorism. These kinds of justified things that we see in life. Because they're not loving, then they must be wrong behaviors.
Cláudia: They are. And they are philosophically wrong.
Richard: So coming back to women then. And also
Cláudia: if you have a loving attitude or passionate or emotional, but it's not logical, it doesn't fit with the common sense, you can't say that this is love. Love is only when it's rational and it's constructive and it's beautiful. If it brings destruction of any kind, it's not loving and it's not love.
Richard: Going back to this structure of the human being then being similar to the structure of God, you know, this truth and beauty and goodness
Cláudia: and these three-part aspects, for women it would be, how would we see the structure of the human being? How would we understand this? It would be the same as man, but we are more prone to deal with the emotional life.
It is the same as in God. The three persons of God are essentially the same, and God is one.
But God has three persons or three existences or three expressions. And we are like this too. We are essentially the same as man and as our children are. But we are more expressive in the area of the feelings and men in the area of accomplishments, reason, logic. So we would be and we should be the foundation of society as love is the foundation of men and women, the mankind.
We women should be the foundation of society, the foundation of anything, of nature, of anything that happens here on this planet. But, Jones, you know, our pathology is present. We are not original beings anymore. We suffer from many illnesses and problems. And as Keppe puts it, we are envious beings. We have envy in the basis of our personality. So instead of love, most of the time people put envy or they block love.
So what they think after is a disaster because it's based on envy.
The powerful people, for instance, they do such a disaster because they have means to accomplish their envy. So let's go back to women. If women would be more conscious of their envy they would have an enormous impact. Because when we raise our children for instance we raise them based either on our pathological structure of thought which is envious egotistic inverted and we teach our children to be dishonest, to exploit and to suck the good of other people, but never, never let anyone take advantage from you, my child.
This is something that women do a lot, and they spoil the children. And these children are going to be adults one day, and they will do in society the same as they do when they are a child with their, well, with their friends and family and so forth.
Richard: Define a little bit envy as Keppe sees it, because this is a much larger concept than we, if we look in the dictionary, look for the definition of envy.
It's a pretty mundane thing. In this sense, you're talking about it in what way?
Cláudia: In the sense of denying, the denial of goodness, the denial of beauty, the denial of happiness, the denial of joy, and even the denial of the true spirituality. You see very frequently women being pessimistic, negative, jealous, egotistic, isolated, lazy. Oh, this comes from envy. So when we think that women are not accomplishing that much, we can all understand this through two perspectives.
One, if the person, if the woman is too envious, she will be always behind other men and other women, like being unhappy and destroyed when they see other people's accomplishments and happiness. And envy among women is a serious case, very serious case. And envy of women against men, too. And sometimes envy of women against their children. So what women do is to destroy their own happiness and the happiness of those who are around them without realizing we're not born to be like these unknown creatures in the world.
If we are like this, it's a lot because of our unconscious envy.
Richard: Which we then, according to Keppe's book, The Origin of Illness, he talks a lot about this triangle of neurosis, that if we have this envy that we don't want to see, this destruction, this desire to destroy things that are good, to not see what's good, if we censor the consciousness of that.
We will immediately project the problem outside. So are
Cláudia: you saying that if a person has a lot of envy, then the projection will be to blame
Richard: other things in society?
Cláudia: Right, right, right on the spot, Jones, because we women see society and men pushing us down. And we do this with our lives. We have been doing this to our lives. And here comes a tricky thing, Jones, because love is a kind of covered thing in society.
Love is the basis. Love is the foundation. Love is the only law that Jesus brought to us.
So love is the most important thing in life. Godfather is love. We could say that he is feminine in a sense. But love is always like the foundation. It's like supporting other accomplishments. Love gives life and energy to your thoughts. Love leads you to the right, to the bigger reason. And in the opposite, if you have envy instead of love, love being blocked, it will produce ignorance, lying, underdevelopment, destructivity.
So women are really the decision of everything. Because we are the loving creatures mostly in the world. So if love is missing in the world, we have an enormous
Richard: part in this
Cláudia: situation.
Richard: You could say that women are sort of the bigger link to love. And therefore, if love is missing, then this is something that women need to step up to express more into the world.
Cláudia: Yes. And not only this, but to see value in love.
Because women, women don't see value in being loving creatures, because love is always sort of hidden. It doesn't show up in society or in a situation. So we don't want to be under anything. We want to be above and showing up all the time. We are very narcissistic beings. You understand? So we think, why should man take the credits for everything? And I'm here, and I'm being unknown, etc.
Etc. But love is the foundation. You can say men are the head and we are the neck, right? Neck is under the head, but we lead the head where we want to.
Richard: There's a very funny scene in a movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, where the women want a decision to be made, but they have to convince the man that it was his decision.
It's a very funny, it's just totally superficial what we're talking about, but it's this kind of idea that you're talking about now.
But I want to come back to something else, Cláudia, you said in your book, because I think maybe women and men have substituted love for power. You said in your book that "women's greatest problem is that their life goal has been the same as that of men. When a woman chooses a partner, a profession, or an institution to join, she's looking for a way to acquire some kind of power." And this seems to me to speak very deeply to the problem of men and women, this inversion.
We look for power, not justice, not goodness, not truth. How can you talk about inversion in this sense?
Cláudia: Yeah, Jones, and this is very much linked to our envy too because we never envied men in their qualities like being hardworking, being honest, supportive, tolerant, patient, because fathers generally are very much supportive and hardworking and patient.
So we don't envy them in this area. We envy men in an inverted way. So we envy the right that men, we think men have, to do whatever they want to. Freedom to do whatever they please. And this is an imagination. This is an envious imagination. Because the life of man, it's not that pleasurable as women normally think. This comes from Our envy.
Richard: You're saying that women have thought that men have had advantages.
Cláudia: Yeah. So that's what we fought for. Freedom to have sex as many times as we please, as many partners as we please, to drink as men, to smoke as men, and to be powerful and to be ruling this sick society, an oppressive society. You have probably seen that many women that went to higher places of power, president of nations, or any political powerful attitude, or in being like in top positions in corporations, they can be even more evil than men many times.
Because women envy this side of men, the pathological side.
Richard: It's a sad thing to say, but when I ask many of my students if they'd rather work for a man or a woman, it's almost unanimous that they would much prefer to work for a man. And, you know, I have to be very careful here because I'm a guy talking about women, so it's much better if you say these kind of things than
Cláudia: me.
Yeah, and I see that you're stepping on nags, Jones, and I understand it totally because you will have many angry women calling you or writing to us, complaining. I hope not that many, because if we become more conscious of our pathology, we will have such a tremendous development. If we realize that normally we are enemies of the best friends, we are choosing the wrong man to make an alliance with, We normally give more value to aggressive and nasty, powerful, destructive men.
And the good ones that are caring and loving and honest, we despise. And many women do like that. It's like seeing the good man as dumb, as foolish or weak, unexpressive. And the bad guys, oh, women, you know, those criminals, those serial killers, they receive thousands of letters of women that fall in love with them. This is something, don't you think so?
Richard: The bad boy.
Cláudia: So behind a criminal, there is always a woman that fed this criminality. And behind a hero or a saint, there is always an incredible woman. So if we want to make the change of the world and STOP the Destruction of the World, we'll have to look at our envy and take advantage from our real power, our real power, which is loving power, ethics, intuition, spirituality.
You know, Jones, we know what to do with men. If we want to punish men or make them understand what we want, we have our means to do this, and we know that.
We know that.
Richard: What could, if women were more in touch with this love, unhampered by the envy that you say, what could it be like in our society? What could women be doing?
Cláudia: We would bring paradise back. I'm sure, Richard, if the third millennium will be the feminine millennium, it's not that much because we are going to accomplish incredible things. But we will control our envy and stop destroying that much as we have been doing.
Because we have two symbols of women in life in general. We have Eve that brought humanity away from paradise. And there is Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was the opposite and was very much loving and obedient to the will of God. And brought the chance to go back to paradise. And now women of the present time can choose. If we follow the example of Eve, which is like a competitor against men and envious and self-destructive and denying her own capacities and destroying her happiness, or we can choose the way to bring back paradise to humanity.
And we can do this, Richard. I'm sure we have the power to start teaching children and men how life should be. We are the majority. We are weak in terms of muscles or weapons, but we have other means, we have other capacities, which are very subtle, and we can use them in the right way instead of intriguing, using our capacity to speak, to gossip, and to do intrigues.
You were saying
Richard: recently that the women are the key in a sense.
Cláudia: Yes, yes. We should start using our capacity to speak the truth, to bring ethics to humanity and see that the true power is love. And humanity does not believe in this, Richard. Jesus was killed because of this. And everybody thinks, oh, if I'm loving, I'll be killed, I'll be destroyed, and I'll be denied, and I'll have no power.
This is what have been maintaining the pathology in position of power in humanity.
Because the true power relies on love. And everything that humanity has that is valuable and lasting comes from love. You have to go
Richard: in a minute, but talk just a bit about true power a little more because true power as opposed to the power we think is power yeah is this other element of much much more inner much more beautiful linked to these values you were talking about at the very beginning of truth and goodness and beauty and aesthetics and justice these kinds of qualities.
True power how do you see this in the world and women in this respect.
Cláudia: Women are beautiful they should be beautiful. Children are beautiful and they should be always beautiful. Life is beautiful nature is beautiful and every all the beauty that we see in arts in women in children in nature is based on love and truth. So this threefold elements must be always together they cannot be separate.
And women have been serving the powerful the evil powerful to use their beauty. I'm not here speaking about this thing of women being sexually abused exploited. I would not enjoy
Richard: going through
Cláudia: this perspective but I see more that the beauty it has been undervalued as a whole in life and in society and we should preserve this more. Even women should preserve. You know, Jones, every negative thought destroys our beauty.
Women should take much more care of their inner beauty because this would be expressed in their lives. And beautiful deeds do good things to do beautiful things in society. Not only take care of their own little family or their own little house, their own little interests, but taking care of the planet because we are a whole organism. Every woman is should see the world as our family society is our family to be taken care of so we should take the responsibility.
So I think that if we would pay more attention to our inner life we would keep longer our beauty and not doing plastic surgeries or using special creams or special makeup or diets which are not effective.
Richard: Which is not to say we shouldn't look after ourselves physically but you're talking about something going beyond just the physical appearance and seeing.
Cláudia: I'm saying that all bad thoughts we have about other people it makes us a little bit uglier and older each day.
I'm being very direct. That each negative, each envious, each egotistic, each time we feel angry at men or the women or whatever, we are making ourselves a little bit uglier and older.
Richard: Didn't Keppe say recently that until age 40 you have the face that God gave you and after 40 you have the results of your…
Cláudia: We deserve, the face we deserve. Yes, yes.
So we see women that are older, and we see they grow older, but they have this, like this dignity, this beauty that transcends any age. And this is very important.
Richard: It's a very beautiful vision of the importance of love, an essential human quality, to be expressed into the world. And in this area, women, maybe, are our leaders. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
