Richard Lloyd Jones: Welcome to Episode 17, our final episode of the Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. You know, as I think about it, 17 is kind of an odd number for the final episode in a series about spirituality, isn't it? It's not particularly a number of completion, although I guess adding 1 and 7 together, equaling 8, and 8 does signify balance between the material and spiritual worlds in numerology, so maybe that's something.
But I'm not much one for the esoteric in these things anyway. It's kind of a holdover from an upbringing rooted in practicality as the correct path in life. But I've wanted this series to be as down-to-earth as possible in my desire to illustrate how God is relevant in our modern world. Which has been severely stripped of spirituality through a domination of positivistic science and robust materialism and all the other things we've discussed in these episodes.
In that light, our series, which considers more archaic wisdom that has been largely dismissed in modern thought, is like a throwback. And a large part of our series has been our attempt to rescue that ancient wisdom as still relevant in our world. After all, the fundamental questions of human existence still remain, don't they? And if you don't find yourself wondering about the meaning of it all from time to time, I suspect you're in the minority.
Norberto Keppe, though, who has not spoken directly in these episodes, but whose voice echoes through every moment of them, saw very early on in his work that human problems were profoundly spiritual, much more related to philosophy than material. After all, if we've elaborated any structures or followed any way of doing things, that's come from a way of seeing things. And if we've seen things wrongly, if we've embarked on individual or collective organization from a skewed perspective, we're going to wind up with out-of-whack institutions and laws and practices.
Norberto Keppe's discovery of inversion, which we discussed way back in Episode 2, is the missing link here. The one which allows us to reintegrate theological and philosophical wisdom back into science, so that scientific practicality can expand to providing really significant understanding of our human experience. True transdisciplinarity, I think. Through understanding that we're inverted, we can admit that we've rejected God because we've mixed Him up with religious institutions and considered all that irrelevant, evidence of inferior minds, unimportant in a world that's evolved beyond these superstitions.
But exactly the opposite is required if we're to right things on this planet and restore our society to its original state, paradise regained in the ancient consideration, the promised land. In our final episode, let's consider what practical spirituality would look like in these troubled times with Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Yes, and here we can bring a subject, Richard, which is about spirituality, the true spirituality, the true religion, and what we started to understand about what is religion about or ethics a long, long time ago.
And it went, most of it, in the inverted direction. So what we think about religion today, ethics today, it's not really what ethics is really about, and spirituality. And I would like to touch this area, because starting from the trilogical point of view that Keppe brought, ethics is linked to goodness, to God, and to love. In the triangle he places about the essence of the human being, he puts feeling of love in one
Richard: of these
Cláudia: corners, reason and the true intellectual life, the other one, the
Richard: true reason, and
Cláudia: up, like harmony, ethics, or a good action.
Richard: At the peak of the pyramid of the triangle, yeah. It
Cláudia: is not the will. The will is something that is inverted in us. It can destroy everything. So if we place the will on the top of the pyramid, generally we follow not the true will, which would be ethical in the human being. We follow a distorted will.
Richard: Because of our inversion.
Cláudia: Because of our inversion.
So people who dislike this idea of materialism and consumerism and this hard world with war and etc. They try to bring inside the companies the concept of spirituality. So you have many, many, many seminars and lectures and programs how to bring spirituality to a company. And this is a challenge because what is really spirituality then? What is this about? So we see in the past times when people started to receive some orientation by some contacts established with the prophets or through the prophets or through the enlightened ones.
For instance, Moses, he brought the Ten Commandments. So what happened with the Ten Commandments? Moses' followers, they never followed or they never obeyed the Ten
Richard: Commandments. They didn't like it very much.
Cláudia: And Moses even broke this tablet because he got angry because nobody wanted to follow the orientation.
Richard: Didn't they replace, they tried to replace God with an animal head or something?
Cláudia: Yes, and golden symbols and golden statues, and they adored golden statues.
So this idolatry, like the idolatry for gold and for material power, was since the beginning of civilization. So you see, Richard, that human beings suffer from a very severe inversion. And they worship evil and what is inferior, what is less important. And they despise the best, the best in life, the best in themselves.
Richard: This is our will that you were talking about.
If we put that at the top of the pyramid, we're in big trouble. And
Cláudia: Dr. Keppe's work in this way is quite revolutionary because the basis of life for Keppe is goodness, not freedom. So society was built totally upside down. And what people call ethics and spirituality nowadays have very little to do with true spirituality and true ethics. So spirituality is something that must come along this triangle, love, reason, and harmony and good action, doing good, pure action.
So spirituality, you could name it as the synonym of pure action. So this thing of being happy, it's a very complicated subject. It's not only a matter of material goods, but it counts. It counts, okay, having a fair situation, economic situation. But there must be something linked to the meaning of life. If we are satisfied with the existence we have, if we realize what is good, beautiful and truthful in accordance to our essence.
If we can accomplish the best ideals we bring inside of us, so you can say that you are happy because you are accomplishing, you feel realized. I
Richard: was doing a presentation yesterday, maybe you heard about this, for a leadership seminar we are doing very soon that I'm still hoping you'll be able to help us with, if not physically, certainly spiritually. And I was using a quote from Dr.
Keppe where he was lifting something from Heidegger which said that a human life makes no sense if it's separated from its essence.
Cláudia: Absolutely, right.
Richard: So happiness has to be something connected to the essence of life and the essence of life cannot be injustice.
Cláudia: And cannot be far from goodness, beauty and truth. No, of course not. And it's universal. It's not determined by those who teach us inside the churches or schools.
This is an inborn, universal concept. He had the experience in science, and he brought proofs, physical proofs, like material proofs, that this concept, just one phrase concept, just one phrase, encompasses a whole philosophy and science, which Jesus Christ said. So he brought just one law. Love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself. And if you say you love me, but you mistreat your neighbor, you don't love me.
What you do to your fellow man, you will do to yourself, and you will do to me. So doing good... Being good, doing the best for our fellow man is the law, because then the good energy we give or
Richard: we... We emit into the world. Yeah. In
Cláudia: practice, we emanate in action, through actions. This will absolutely come back to us in abundance.
In abundance. Even if the other person does not accept the good that you are doing. So the world must change its philosophy. If we don't put the philosophy in the right position, like changing egotism to altruism, like changing greed to generosity, competition to cooperation, we will not have a happy, healthy, spiritual, developed, even scientifically developed world.
Richard: Changing all those things, disinverting them as the way to a true science.
It's so interesting, even refreshing maybe, to think of science reunited with spirituality. What are the possibilities of that? Well, I hope you've been able to reflect on those questions during these episodes and that they've helped you understand yourself and the world a little bit more. If you can make sense of things, I'm content. Maybe even more than that. Maybe you've even come closer to an understanding of God and why that's so relevant and necessary today.
And if we've provoked questions along the way, that's all good. Just write us with those, and we can consider them in future recordings, either for Part 2 of this series, The Modern Relevance of God 2, the sequel, or in our regular Thinking with Somebody Else's Head podcast. Let me know what you think about all this joneshealing at gmail.com. It's been great to have you along for the experience and I hope it's been of real value to you.
And I hope that we'll hear more from you and that you'll study more and learn more and be more interested in Norberto Keppe's incredible work of Analytical Trilogy.
