Richard Lloyd Jones: Is it a product of your genes or your environment? Is it chemical or taut? Is yours a point on a perfect bell curve determined by standardized testing? Or is there much more and new yet to be said on it? I vote for the latter. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, let's take a trilogical look at intelligence. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. And I say a trilogical look because of our focus in this podcast on Norberto Keppe's Analytical Trilogy, which forms the basis of everything we do on this program.
Keppe's discoveries in psychopathology have given us a precise roadmap of the human psyche for the first time in our history. And this is no small feat. With Keppe's discussions of inversion, theomania, and envy, we can understand the things we couldn't before. For example, we can see human envy in action in our collective refusal to provide basic health care or food for our fellow citizens.
Understanding the process of projection is very useful. We fear the terrorists outside while we conduct economic and even military terrorism on a grand scale ourselves. We see the human desire to be God, what Keppe calls theomania, in our very ill-advised explorations into genetic modifications which have unknown and for sure destructive ramifications. And then we could mention the inversion and maliciousness involved in pushing alienating and debilitating drugs on children and adults in record amounts.
We're killing and harming people all the time with this strictly materialistic approach to everything when the psychological roots of all our problems are well understood now. That understanding comes from Keppe's work, and his work is not well understood yet because it's been kept from us. Publishers refuse his work. Media interviews are non-existent. And that's what this podcast is attempting to address. We're giving away copies of Keppe's books.
I've started a video podcast now featuring clips from Dr. Keppe's shows. It's in iTunes. It's called STOP the Destruction of the World. You can check it out and download it there. And we're having a Congress, March 16th to 23rd, 2008, here in Brazil, to explore the implications of Keppe's work in all areas of human endeavor. You can just email me for any of this information, rich at richjonesvoice.com.
It's always good to hear from you. Today, Swedish journalist Helena Melander joins me again to talk about Keppe's view of intelligence and the universals. Helena, an obvious first question, how do you see intelligence?
Helena Melander: Well, there is a kind of cliché that an intelligent person is somebody who knows a lot of formulas, mathematics, who writes a lot of strange numbers on the board that nobody can understand.
And this is like a genius. We see this in many movies, especially American movies, like this A Beautiful Mind about the mathematician John Nash. But you could even see that at the end he became mentally sick. Because this kind of intelligence, more linked to mathematics, physics, is a very reduced perception of reality. Not in all cases, of course, but we can see it's a very limited view.
And we can say that real intelligence is much more connected to having contact to what Dr. Keppe calls the universals. Universals would be like eternal ideas. It's also based on the ideas of Plato. Universal values that are always true. We can talk about goodness, truth, beauty, justice, things that there are outside time and space. And a person that has contact with this automatically will be a much more intelligent person, often charismatic, sometimes knows many languages, how to play many instruments at the same time, is good at mathematics, biology or whatever.
The person has often an ideal of doing something good, has a kind of inner wisdom of what is true, of what is right. And here we have of course the real geniuses like Leonard da Vinci, Dostoevsky, Martin Luther King, Bar Mozart. We see for example in the musical scores of Mozart there are no corrections. It was like he was receiving music from above, that he was like taking dictation almost.
So we can say he had a direct contact with a, we can say a higher world, a world of the transcendence of the universals.
Richard: Let's just talk a bit about that world. We've done this a couple of times on these podcasts looking at the nature of reality and it's something that's particularly unique to Keppe's work, I think, because we can tend to think, living in the world, that truth is like a relative thing.
You know, you have your truth, I have my truth. Television news programs are very much based on this. If we're going to look at an issue, we look at 10 different aspects of the issue. There's this aspect and there's that aspect and that one. At the end, we hopefully come up with some sort of synthesis, which never happens. But when you talk about truth, justice, goodness, how are you meaning those terms?
Helena: Well, they are actually concepts that we have inside. When we are born. And that, of course, we deny. Most of the time we deny, but all people know deep inside that it's wrong to kill, that it's good to love. We know, we have inside of us, what is the concept of justice? We know that it's bad to torture somebody. And of course, some people can question this, but if that person would be in that situation himself, of course he would agree to saying that torture is bad, love is good.
You know, in practical terms truth is not relative. Goodness is always good, happiness is always good, and evil makes bad to anyone. So these these values they are not changing with the time, with the culture, the question of politics, of tastes, for example, something very limited related to specific person, a specific country, but the universals are above that. And this is what Dr.
Kepa describes in his book, The Universal Man. So
Richard: we must be very restricted in this level of intelligence then in our world, right? Very
Helena: restricted. And this is even something that we learn at school because there is the kind of concept in science, in education, that you have to doubt of everything. So when somebody tells you something, you have to say, ah, but how can I know that that's true.
You know, even if it's something obvious or something good you have to like be suspicious about that, you have to question. I'm a journalist and I know that this is what you do all the time. As a journalist you can never take anything for granted or that something could be true by itself. You know, you have to always put yourself outside. And these cuts with this inner intelligence that we have already, that we are born with,
Richard: the link with an ideal, then you talked about that.
And you can see that in many of these great geniuses. They had a desire to show something, to do something, to invent something, to create something, that there's a strong ideal.
You know, when I ask in the classroom what motivates a genius, what motivates a painter to paint, many of them say, well, pain, suffering, these kinds of lower elements. And what you're suggesting is that this link with ideals, the desire to do something, He's part of this universal intelligence, maybe.
Helena: Absolutely, because we can see in these great people that have done so beautiful work. You can see that there is always a wish to give something to others, that the ideal is to, like, giving beauty, goodness, happiness to other people, like to bring the beauty of God, of the divine world, to earth, to other people.
We can see this in Van Gogh, for example. He had a great ideal of goodness, of human love.
Richard: We're not using all of our intelligence at all. What is stopping us from using our intelligence?
Helena: Well, there are several factors. Actually, you can say that the contact that we have with this world of the universals is something that Dr. Keppe calls intuition or abstraction.
And to have this kind of contact, we have to be in touch with ourselves. And the human being is very afraid to be in contact with himself. We are most of the time escaping from ourselves, from our inner life. We don't want to know who we really are. We are afraid of having consciousness of who we are. So when we are running away from ourselves we are at the same time not having this inner link with the higher reality or the reality of the universals.
So that's one reason we we cut with our inborn intelligence. Another thing is in our modern society we have a very materialistic view of the things. So we think that everything that we can measure is true, what is physical, what we can see with our eyes is true, but all the rest is like something that you cannot believe in. So of course things like intuition is by definition in this case totally out of question, because how could you realize something so vague as intuition, for example, or abstraction?
So this also reduces very much our intelligence. And that's also why I think... We have so few great composers today, few really good writers or poets, because this kind of knowledge or intelligence is not so much valorized any longer in our society. Another thing that we can see very clear, what Dr. Keppe calls psychopathology, we have several mental or psychological blockages, like arrogance, for example.
A person who is very arrogant will not be humble enough to receive a higher truth, so to speak. He will think that he knows everything already, that he has nothing more to learn. Only maybe in intellectual terms he studies, he reads. But, you know, he's not submissive to the truth that is coming from God, we can say.
Richard: No, he wants to impose his idea onto the reality, right?
Helena: Exactly. He wants to define the reality, change the reality and not be submissive to the reality that already exists and that is divine.
Richard: In a way, then, this pathology, because how am I going to phrase this? It's like we have this universal world that exists already, but we must have some contact with it inside because you talked about feeling with abstraction, which is a human quality.
So there's got to be
Helena: a link between the two, right? It's not only an external thing, but an internal thing too. Exactly. We can even say a kind of connection with affection and love. So if we see a student who is going to learn something, and the teacher is trying to explain this for him or for her, this student has to make a kind of affectionate connection with the teacher to be able to open for this knowledge.
And he has to accept this knowledge that is coming to him, accept it because somehow this already exists inside of him, but he has to reconnect with it. And there are some fantastic chapters from this book that I mentioned that is called The Universal Man by Norberto Cappi. He says like this, that initially the knowledge comes through feeling according to the acceptance of the individual regarding what is good, beautiful and real.
Only from this moment is when it's going to reach the intellect and then understanding. And the intellect can also be impeded by bad intentions. And I I can see this, I work as a teacher here too. I can see this very clearly, that sometimes students they don't want to understand and they say like I don't understand anything, this is impossible to understand, but they say that even before you have tried to explain it, you know.
So you can see that the person doesn't want to understand, he is blocking himself.
Richard: One fellow wrote me an email about our podcast saying that what he likes about it is, he said, it's like hearing something you always knew but had forgotten or pushed down or pushed away. And I think that has a big relevance to what you're saying now. It's like admitting, being humble enough to admit, yes, that's true.
I know that's true.
Helena: I have felt the same about Dr. Keppe's work. For example, this discovery of inversion. You know, it's like, wow, I have always known this, but I didn't have words for it, you know. And actually, there is a question of acceptance of this knowledge and even faith.
Richard: There's a word we don't talk about very much anymore.
Helena: Exactly. And I don't mean only in a religious sense of believing in God, but when somebody gives you some knowledge, some truth that you need, even if you don't understand it, you have to have faith in it.
Because after the faith comes the understanding. So you have to believe in what is said, not questioning, not doubting, and then it will come to your understanding.
Richard: There's a scene in a documentary about Leonardo da Vinci where he was working as an apprentice for a master. And this master, Verrocchio, I think, received a commission to paint something. And he painted the major figures.
It was Christ's baptism, I think. And he gave his assistants the minor characters. And Leonardo had this small angel in the corner of the painting to paint. And he made an extraordinary decision. He was just an apprentice in his early 20s, I guess. And he made a decision to paint in oil, which nobody was doing at that time. In fact, it hadn't even been introduced in that part of the world.
Somehow he knew about it. And he made an extraordinary decision to paint in oil. What would most of us do in that situation? Wait a minute, nobody else is painting in oil. Everybody else is using egg tempera paint. If I do this and it doesn't work out they're all going to laugh at me or I'm going to ruin the picture, I'll never work again, I better do what everybody else is doing.
But this young man for some reason he had the desire to really do something better, not better than others, just better, the best he could do. And so he had the courage to do this, to do the right thing. And I think this is something that's missing in our discussion many times about intelligence, the courage it takes to listen to this voice and then to follow what you know is right.
And
Helena: then you have to have that faith that that is right. We see this in all these great geniuses, exactly what you said. Also there is this Nikola Tesla and then fantastic civil engineer and he worked like that all the time. He was like observing nature, he got a feeling for how something would work and then he made his inventions. And and he also spoke about uh an energy that dr cap also writes a lot about that is called scholar energy, that would be like a kind of free energy that exists in the universe, in space, that makes everything that is, we can say the basic energy for life coming from god of course.
And I have the feeling that when you enter more in contact with universals, with yourself, it's like you enter in this flow of energy, this color energy that exists in nature, and then you grasp the truths that exist in the mind of, we can even say, of God,
Richard: of reality. Yes, because
Helena: intelligence in this definition must be based on reality, mustn't it?
Absolutely.
Richard: And so much of mathematical formulation is abstraction that's not based on reality. Exactly. Negative numbers, these are like constructs of the human mind, and although they may be useful in mathematical formula, they don't have a relationship to the real world that we work in. You're right about all these geniuses, because Mozart, if he heard this music in his head, he didn't doubt it, he didn't say, that's pretty good, but I've got a better idea.
He went with what he felt, with what he heard. And
Helena: that requires a great humility because there is another concept that Dr. Kemp introduces that is the envy of the human being, the envy that we have even towards God. So everything that comes from God, we have a tendency to say, I don't know if that's so right, I don't know if that's true, I can do better, like the science is doing today, trying to manipulate the genes in the human being, in the nature, trying to create another kind of world.
And we can see that there are many distortions in these creations that are coming only from the human being.
Richard: In human beings there seems to be, and I notice this in young people, like a rejection of intelligence. I have to study that more. I was talking to a young person recently and he's involved in a very big corporation here in Brazil. He's got a very good job.
He's a very young guy but becoming very successful. But he feels he's being eaten alive in this job, you know, like he doesn't have any sense of who he is, feeling he's losing himself. And I was talking to him about the philosophy of life, what is your purpose, why are you here, what do you want to do? And he says, well, I don't know anything about philosophy.
I need to read more about philosophy. And I said to him but you know philosophy of life is nothing you have to read about, it's more linked to this universal world you were talking about, ideals, goodness, a sense of what's right in life. Can you talk a bit more about this universal world Helena because this is a fascinating world when we're talking about
Helena: intelligence.
I think a good way to understand more what is this universal world is when you have contact with arts. For example, if you listen to the music of Bach, this is not something that you can explain or that is measurable physically, but it gives such a high sensation of beauty, of truth, of mercy, of contact with God. So then you are having a contact with this higher world that is not explainable.
There are no words for it, really. But I think that all people deep inside, they had this contact maybe when they were children, this happiness of being alive, of being a child. I can see this also when you read these big writers. There is a fantastic novel, world famous, of course, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, where he Talks about the necessity of guilt feelings, that if you do something wrong, like in the case of Raja in the book, he kills two people with a lot of justifications.
He thinks that he's right, that he has the right to do this because he needs the money that he took from this old woman that he killed, you know, but then the guilt is like eating him.
Richard: The whole second half of the book.
Helena: Yeah, and he cannot even do anything with the money because he has destroyed his own life. So this is a universal value you cannot kill.
Richard: This is like one of the Ten
Helena: Commandments. Yeah, exactly. So there are some universal truths that we cannot escape from. It doesn't matter how much we intellectualize the thing.
Richard: There's a very interesting example of that in a book that was published recently, the last couple of years, by John Perkins called Economic Hitman. And in there he has many descriptions of the expertise, the intelligence of these economic plans that are implemented in particularly developing countries to enslave them to the American economic system.
Tremendous intelligence. People have lain awake nights thinking about these schemes. But he, like, is wracked with guilt because he knows it's
Helena: wrong. And how does he know that? Because he's born with that knowledge inside, you know. We cannot escape from that. And I think it's very interesting what you said about young people not wanting to have knowledge, not wanting to have intelligence.
Because there is even a question of, to be intelligent, you have to make a big effort. It's not something that comes for free, you know. Because we have a tendency to think that these great geniuses, they were geniuses and I'm not. For they had it easy. They had a gift. Yeah, exactly. And we don't. But that's totally wrong because we can see that all of them, they were really hardworking, extremely dedicated, working day and night with always this goal of doing, of giving, of accomplishing something of a higher value.
And this is exactly what Dr. Keppe says. Even I heard his TV show the other week about this. He said that it requires an enormous effort to be intelligent. And we can see today that most people do the opposite. They are wasting their life and time watching stupid TV shows, just consuming, being lazy. Young people, at least here in Brazil, spend often the whole weekend sleeping or drinking.
So we are like throwing away our intelligence. So
Richard: you're suggesting that if we dedicate ourselves to good things, to development, to self-realization, to helping other people, this will make us more intelligent?
Helena: Guaranteed.
Richard: When you have a guarantee, that's a good thing to listen
Helena: to. But then that's a sacrifice, too, because most of the time we're not so interested in doing things for others.
We are interested more in our little universe, what is good for me, how can I become richer. How can I become happier or even how can I become more intelligent? But then we are starting in the wrong end because the intelligence will be a consequence of the attitude of the person.
Richard: You talked a bit about action. Talk a bit more about the necessity of good action, the
Helena: importance of that.
Well, this is something that Dr. Koeppe calls pure action even because action is the basis of the universe. You can see that everything in the nature moves is in action. The seeds, the birds, our heart is beating, the stars are going around, the earth is moving, you know, nothing is stopped, everything that is alive is moving. And when you enter with like a good attitude in this movement it's like then you are capturing all of this, this knowledge, this this truth that exists already.
And so the action makes the person get in contact with himself and with God.
Richard: Intelligence then is being part of something.
Helena: Exactly. It's not isolated at all. You can even say it's impossible to be... I remember once I got a question, what would you choose if you could be incredibly beautiful, incredibly good, or incredibly intelligent. I wrote a an article for a magazine for women, and then I said unfortunately I think that most women if they would be really honest they would say that they would choose to be incredibly beautiful.
But then I thought after like this that this this question doesn't make sense because it's impossible to impossible to be only good or only intelligent. They are connected. If you're extremely good you are extremely intelligent and vice versa, and probably beautiful too because beauty is a consequence of good action. I told this story before but
Richard: I did a public speaking class for blind people and there was one woman in the group who had one eye bulging out of her skull.
She was blind and little hairs growing out of moles on her face. She was very disfigured sitting in a wheelchair and when she stood up she was the same height as when she was sitting down. That's how bent and twisted she was, a grotesque figure physically. But when she began to speak, Helena, it was like a transformation in the room because she began to speak about why she wanted to be a better public speaker.
And you know what the premise was? And it was torture for her to be there. She wanted to learn to be a better speaker so that she could help other blind people to have a better life. She talked for five minutes about this, totally about other people. You know, by the time she finished, she was the most beautiful person in the room.
Helena: Beautiful. So then you see that in practice, it's true that there is a trilogy. Goodness, truth, and beauty. They are not separate. They are all together.
Richard: Keppe's Analytical Trilogy holds much valuable consciousness for human beings here in the 21st century. His work is illuminating and profound. Just write me anytime for more info, rich at richjonesvoice.com. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Thanks a lot for listening.
