Richard Lloyd Jones: Welcome to Episode 6 of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. You might have noticed in our first few episodes I've been mentioning the importance of the wisdom of the past to our understanding of the present, and especially to our understanding of God and spirituality. That's not been by accident. There were some smart dudes back then, and Norberto Keppe's work has been in part about going back and rescuing the correct knowledge from these great thinkers and sages throughout history.
That's really not a modern view, I know that. We tend to be much more of the mind today that what went before was interesting, perhaps, as an archaic allegory, but hardly relevant anymore in our digital app for that do-all-your-banking-online superiority.
We just threw away all those guys with a dismissive shrug and a raised eyebrow. What could Aquinas or Plato or the Divine Comedy possibly teach us about the important stuff in life, like creating passive income, or lowering our toxic exposure, or reducing our carbon footprint? In Mrs. Kent's English Lit 12 class way back when, not quite Middle Ages, but still a long time ago, we studied Milton's Paradise Lost, studied the language and the rhythm, the poem's epic story and heroic nature.
Bloody long thing, I thought at the time. The poem tells the story of the war for heaven and of man's expulsion from paradise. Benjamin Ram, in his recent BBC article, Why You Should Reread Milton's Paradise Lost, declares it to be a powerful meditation on rebellion, longing, and the desire for redemption. But I think we're missing a point here.
Paradise Lost is not just an allegory about nonconformist anti-establishment rebellion. It's a real story about what really went on, a real event with real people, a story that continues right up to this present moment. And I know how that must sound here in the 21st century, like I've just suggested there was no moon landing, right? Well, stay with me. In this episode, we'll introduce a scientific explanation of the biblical story of the fall of man.
And see if we can't rescue the story from the clutches of ancient mythology and restore it to its rightful place as the real story of man that we ignore and banalize to our peril. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco once again leads us on this journey, beginning with an important discovery. I
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: consider the discovery of inversion the most important scientific discovery of the century, if not of all times.
Keppe was able to discover how human beings perceive reality upside down, how human beings created a society upside down, created laws that are upside down, the style of life, the way we perceive the universe. Everything is upside down. We think upside down. So what is this? Feeling attracted to evil and to what religious people call sin and what we call pathology. Because in science we call it pathology, but it's the same thing as sin in religion.
Inversion in man, in the psychological level, social level, and the inversion in the spiritual world. So looking and reading Genesis 3rd, we have some important... The
Richard: fall of man, yes. Well, first of all, the
Cláudia: fall of man relates to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Right away we have a clue.
Richard: Right away we have a clue here. And if we think about Lucifer, and I want to stress that this is an enormous development for me to understand this, Cláudia, because the idea of Lucifer as a being never entered my kind of education.
It was always like a mythological fairy tale, you know, that you tell the kids to scare them into being good. I never thought of it as being a real thing. And with Dr. Keppe's discovery of inversion, his study of psychopathology, relating to sociopathology and then to the spiritual world, it actually starts to make sense.
Cláudia: So, looking here in this Genesis 3, I would like you to read these two paragraphs.
Richard: "Sure." "The woman said to the serpent, We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden. But God did say you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die."
Cláudia: So, first thing here, very important. We have printed inside of ourselves, as God said in the beginning, evil is not to be touched.
We cannot eat from this. We cannot feed or get fed, energized, or anything good from evil.
So evil is something that causes death, period. Brings sickness and death. But, just continue. The serpent.
Richard: "You will not surely die, the serpent said to the woman. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened. And you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Here
Cláudia: starts the deception that Satan or Lucifer did to Eve and Adam.
When it said, if you eat this fruit, your eyes will be opened. And it's the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Saying that if they do, if they eat, if they accept evil and good, they will have something plus, an advantage, and they would be like God that knows good and evil. So here we see many, many important things that are deceptive and that Keppe realized when he started to study psychopathology And, as a consequence, applied the psychopathology to spirit pathology.
So, in metaphysics, Keppe follows the Greeks, who said, "evil does not exist by itself." So, you cannot have any knowledge about evil in itself, because evil has no existence in itself. Evil is the absence of good, is the absence of knowledge, is blindness. When they said, invertedly, the eyes of Adam and Eve opened and they saw. As if before they were blind.
Because being only in good, they were blinded. And being in good and evil, they would see better things. And it's totally the opposite. Because evil is the absence of knowledge, is the absence of consciousness, is the absence of wisdom, is the absence of anything. All evil, the fruit of evil, is always always destructive and never ever give any advantage for the person.
But the deception was big and Eve as a representative of the human race she fell in this big lie by Satan and Lucifer.
But she was not obedient to God's advice. So our situation in our everyday life, any person all over the planet has the same situation. Buddhists, Hindu, atheists, Christians, non-Christians, Jewish, Muslim, all we are in the same boat. We have the same problem innerly, which is this problem of inversion, seeing
Richard: advantage and pleasure in evil and seeing something negative, restrictive, limited in goodness, like a partial thing.
Yeah. I'm not free. I'm a prisoner.
Cláudia: Yes. So that we don't even realize that prisoners we become when we get addicted to evil. So then we are really, really, really not free anymore. We become slaves of pathology. This is absolutely, absolutely true.
Richard: Keppe's disinverted metaphysics reinforces the philosophical view that Cláudia is outlining here that goodness is the basis of life and of the creator of life and all that is contained in the universe of life.
As the early Christians Augustine and Tatian argued, evil has no essence, no natural place in life, but is only the result of the denial of goodness, the absence of good. And that action against what is good brings evil consequently into existence. Our modern philosophy seems to consider good and evil as a dualistic dynamic. You can't have one without the other and that's a decayed idea that weakens our understanding of ourselves and our society. We'll look more at evil in episode 8 but first let's continue with our exploration of the real fall of man and how that's still totally relevant today.
That's coming up in Episode 7.
