Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones from the International Society of Analytical Trilogy in São Paulo, Brazil. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. "Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave," Indira Gandhi said. And it must be then that we have so few courageous souls, since we seem to find forgiveness such a rare commodity for exchange in the market of the common man here in the 21st century.
Any who watched South Africans struggling to cope with the horrors and torture being exposed at the fall of apartheid, presided over by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, will remember the tears flowing unashamedly down Desmond Tutu's face as he listened and then fought with every fiber of his being to have love win out over hate, forgiveness over revenge. "Without forgiveness, there can be no hope for relationship," he stated later when responding to the inevitable questions.
And it is this courageous spirit we need to invoke today in the West to finally come to grips with the world of terrorism we have helped to create. Truth and Reconciliation, Analytical Trilogy style. This week on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Well, welcome to our program. I've invited Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco to address the powerful pull of those dark emotions of hate and revenge that are stimulating the broad outpouring of celebration in the U.S.
And to a degree in Canada, following the reported death of Osama bin Laden, we'll get to Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco in our second segment. I say reported because, well, that's what it is. We know nothing for sure in this event, as we know very little for sure about Al-Qaeda or even Osama bin Laden. What we know is what they want us to know.
And that's not the truth, probably.
Or he'd have been brought in for trial so the world would know some fact. That desire to control, by the way, is also why they hide suspected terrorists away at Guantanamo Bay. Bringing all that mess into the light of day might clarify things a little. Instead, we're left hanging, celebrating and gloating over things others have told us happened. A pernicious form of information control that has Big Brother written all over it.
But this is not so much a conspiracy rant here as it is something deeper. There is so much info out there that we should have been considering for years in our struggle to understand 9-11 and its terrible aftermath, which is not having the page turned post-Osama bin Laden, by the way. The story is not over yet. Way back in 2004, the great British documentary film producer Adam Curtis finished an extraordinary work for the BBC called "The Power of Nightmares, The Rise of the Politics of Fear."
If you've never heard of it, I'm not surprised. It sheds serious doubt on the much hyped image of Bin Laden as an all-powerful evil genius at the reins of a vast network of terror with tentacles reaching out to activities in 50 or 60 countries, as Bush and Rumsfeld would have us believe. This documentary needs to be part of the discussion, but to my knowledge, it's never been shown in the United States.
When producer Curtis approached the head of the leading networks in the United States, this network leader said he "would get slaughtered if they put this on the air." So this is all to address a spirit that I see moving. One is a spirit of no information, as I've just been addressing, but there's a deeper spirit, too, in the Western world, in the aftermath of this event.
Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco and I discussed it a little bit last week, but we want to talk about it a little bit more, I think, in the next second and third parts of our program today.
But why do you think we're always drawn in our collective experience to the lower emotions of revenge, hatred, righteousness in moments like this. Remember after September 11th, we heard the bellicose howls from talk radio to bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age? I think it was the Wall Street Journal that had either an op-ed piece or certainly a quote from a former U.S.
Army officer, Ralph Peters, declaring that this is a killing hour and we must rise to it. Boy, that's chilling stuff, isn't it? And we've seen much kind of dialogue of this going on through the media. Over the last few days, Maureen Dowd in the New York Times talked about how killing an evil person does not make us evil. Well, it's easy to justify all these things, but we need to go a little bit deeper to try to find out what's happening.
Because if we don't understand this at a deeper level, my gosh, my friends, we're never going to solve this problem in humanity.
We're going to be repeating this over and over and over again. And it's kind of a mystery to me why we don't invoke the spirit of the greater human beings from our society. Where's Martin Luther King's quotes at times like this, when he was dealing with horrible persecution and even attacks against black people during his time? Why aren't we calling forth the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, who took down the whole British Empire using peaceful means, non-violent means?
Why aren't we even calling forward the memory of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, their beautiful speeches about peace, about tolerance? These are spirits that we need to start sort of resonating with a little bit during these difficult times. It is difficult to understand all this, what's going on, what's happening. It's very easy to see that enemy outside and to gloat or celebrate in the death of that enemy, thinking that our life is much, much better now.
We're much safer now, as Obama said, which is why we've increased the terror alerts and why we've increased the security inside North America. So there's something more that's going on here, right, that needs to be considered. And we're going to do that, try to analyze that a little bit deeper in the second and third parts of our program today. But first, I want to address the situation of media control, because I think this is an essential aspect to look at too.
And my good friend, Susan Berkley, who's been doing a lot of research on this over a number of years, I've invited her today to talk to us a little bit about media control first, before we get to sort of trying to understand this whole situation and bring some healing to the situation in the second part of our program. Susan. "The old standard that I always heard when I was studying radio and television, I've heard consistently since I've been working in professional media, maybe you've heard this too, never trust what you read and hear."
And maybe that's never more true than it is today. Yes.
Susan Berkley: You know, the problem of conglomeration of media ownership has never been more strong than how it is now. In fact, we owe a lot of thanks to our friends at Project Censored at Sonoma State University, who really closely monitors this, and I have an article here. They recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the 10 big media organizations in the United States.
And they determined that only 118 people, Rich, comprised the membership of the boards of directors of the 10 big media giants. And when you think about this, 118 people, I mean, that's enough to fit in a moderate-sized university classroom. And these 118 people sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. And eight out of the 10 big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other.
So it's like one big happy family of interlocks and shared interests. Now, the New York Times has interlocking directorates with Eli Lilly, the major pharmaceutical company, which I believe, I don't have the major drugs that they, I don't even want to say it because I don't know what drugs they, I think it's diabetes drugs, but.
Richard: That's a pretty big company, though we know
Susan: that.
It is. Also the Carlyle Group. Yes. Ford.
Richard: That's the George Bush's father was one of the consultants with that group. One of their clients was the Bin Laden family, Carlyle Group.
Susan: Ford Motor Company. Johnson & Johnson, Hallmark, Lehman Brothers, financial services company, Staples, and Pepsi. And if you look at the Washington Post, there are interlocks with Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor, Coca-Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, Gillette, GE Investments, J.P.
Morgan again, and Moody's. The Knight Ritter newspaper chain has interlocks with H&R Block, Adobe Systems, Echelon. Let me just scan this for a second. The Tribune, which is in Chicago and the LA Times, with 3M, Allstate, ConocoPhillips, Kraft, McDonald's, Pepsi, Quaker Oats, Sharing Plow, Pharmaceuticals, Wells Fargo. Susan, we
Richard: could really go on and on about the connections, and this really tells us something.
But I just want to bring it back to something that Dr. Keppe said in Liberation of the People. I was studying this with my students this week, actually, that "the acquisition of money has become the ultimate goal of this material life in our capitalistic system." And so this idea is put into the minds of everybody, Keppe says in his book, Liberation of the People.
"The idea of money being the ultimate goal is put into our minds so that we have this admiration for those with economic power."
And we forget the one That we can find in science, the arts, true technology, and civilization. And Dr. Keppe's idea in Liberation of the People, the Pathology of Power, is that this is a very sick idea. That the organization of our society has become dominated by totally the powerful system, the powerful people who want power to get money for themselves. And you're showing that very clearly in what you're talking about.
That there's a direct link between the media control, who sits on the board of directors of media, and what other boards they're sitting on, these big drug companies, these arms contractors, Halliburton's, these kind of companies that are making money from all of this destruction that we're seeing of nature. Right.
Susan: So, you know, the work of Analytical Trilogy and Dr. Keppe's work and our work, because we're part of this program, has been to conscientize people, to make people aware of this, because really the media is supposed to serve the people.
And I think this point that you made is really well taken. We really, deep down inside, respect this power. We think it's a great thing and might even unconsciously want some of that for ourselves. This is the interesting thing to address and why we are so lazy, I think, about gathering information, the truth. And really, we're not to be blamed for that because it is difficult to really determine.
There is so much spin out there, Rich. I mean, what shocked me when I started to do this research is that any major company, and listen, I own a company. I'm a business owner, so I'm not against, you know, companies per se. But the really big ones that make and sell things that might have some sort of environmental or health impact, you know, say Clorox is one, the bleach company, like say one of their trains derailed and the chlorine gases were released causing an environmental impact, you know, all of these companies have PR departments that know exactly what to say and do.
They have a plan like a battle plan in the event that their company screws up. I mean we remember the Bhopal disaster so many years ago in India where there was just a terrible spill of toxic chemicals caused by a company that many were sickened and died. So these companies, they are planning for this and they have an actual emergency plan that in the event that they cause some sort of harm, environmental harm or people start dying from their products, that they've already planned exactly how they're going to spin this in their favor.
This was really chilling to me.
Richard: Yeah. We both read this book, Spin, The Social History of Spin by Stuart Ewan. And in this book, you can see very clearly that these PR companies now are being hired to create illusions. In fact, the whole public relations business is based on this idea of trying to control the thinking of society because of the fear of the rise of democracy at the end of the 19th century.
And so all of this spin industry is about keeping control. It's about keeping control for the people who have the money to hire these big public relations firms.
Susan: Yes, so I think that the populace, people in general, especially younger people now, have become cynical. And this is like not news to people that this exists. But the point is, why are people not then taking more responsibility to get the information that they want to regain control of our democracy so that we can start to build the kind of society that we deserve and that we must build if we're going to save our planet?
And this, of course, you've done endless podcasts about this, and we have that wonderful organization, the STOP the Destruction of the World Association that Dr. Cláudia Pacheco founded now almost 20 years ago. So there are pockets of people, but the point I want to get across is that it's incumbent upon us citizens, anybody who cares about this planet and about our democracy and our society, we have got to take responsibility for being better informed.
Because you cannot – you can no longer consume the media casually because there are – there's so much pressure being put on us to believe things a certain way, to support this – these socioeconomic powers that are behind the media. And it's just going to slide into your brain and it's going to help affect the way that you think and the way that you act and lead to more apathy.
And next thing we know, a lot of our freedoms and certainly our beautiful planet will be compromised and maybe even taken away from us.
Richard: Good point, Susan. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head is on the Positive World Radio Network. We're back with our main topic today. When we come back, don't go away. The program is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. We're on the Positive World Radio Network.
Wonderful to be here. I was hearing Cláudia Pacheco join me again.
I was listening to a teleconference call last week. And where a whole bunch of the hosts from this network were together. And Alan Hollander, a good friend of mine, who is the founder of this network, was saying that our program has become one of the most popular on their network. Wonderful. Many of the hosts, other hosts, are listening to the program.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Very good news.
Richard: It's nice news, isn't it? Yeah, sure. Because, you know, we sit here in our studio, our lovely studio, and we talk every week. And we sometimes wonder, you know, hello. Is anybody here?
Cláudia: But you know, Jones, this brings hope that our work is being understood. And our work being understood means that people are increasing their level of consciousness. And this is so needed for humanity to go on.
Richard: So I thought we might try today. We have a limited time today with you today.
Our program will be an hour, but with Cláudia will be a little less time today. She has other pressing engagements. You're a busy woman. I know that. And I appreciate the time that you take every week to come and talk with us.
Cláudia: It is so nice to be here with you. Wonderful. So nice, Richard.
Richard: Thank you, Cláudia. It's a great pleasure for me, of course, every week.
Cláudia: I'm sorry today I can't do the whole thing.
Richard: We'll be short but penetrating. Yes. I've been following a lot the dialogue that's going on in the media, especially the American media, around the Osama bin Laden. Some would say debacle, others would say the fact, whatever that is. There's lots of information you can get about those kinds of things. But I thought we might try and do something therapeutic today.
Because I feel inside the discourse about this a real anguish.
And we had an email from one of our good friends in the United States, I think on the Monday after the event, a good friend of ours, Bob Butler, wrote saying that he had been watching the celebration outside the White House and feeling, he didn't say vaguely uncomfortable, quite uncomfortable, but I had the feeling that he didn't understand why he felt uncomfortable.
And as I've been looking through various journalists writing about this, I've come across a sort of a common theme, which is that it's really good to kill the bad guy. That Geraldo Rivera on the Fox Network said it was a major victory by the good guys over the bad guys. This past weekend of the New York Times, Maureen Dowd in an op-ed piece, the title of her op-ed piece was "Killing Evil is Not Evil." She talked about the need for revenge, the therapeutic value of celebrating the death of an evil man.
And I thought maybe we could just talk a little bit about that for sure. Osama bin Laden was no saint. But let's try and analyze this deeper because I think there's something in the psychoanalysis of society that could be useful for people.
Cláudia: What I see right away reading these comments you selected, Richard, is that the common denominator of paranoia. So what is the technique of United States government and many other governments and dictatorships?
And what we see in society, in this earth, in this planet, leaders of society, they have the tendency to bring together their people using paranoid feelings. And this is very sad and very negative, because feeding paranoia is, in one side, an easy instrument to manipulate the masses, but this is just for a short time. So when people get afraid or when people get paranoid they are under a threat or they are instigated in their hatred in their projections in their ideas as they say here the evil is there outside, this is a danger so all those paranoid feelings, they bring people together, even people that were enemies for years.
These are life-long, like, inimizages.
Richard: An animosity between. Yeah.
Cláudia: So, when people get paranoid, they can even do alliances out of paranoia. You have seen this in countries, in the wars, during the wars. First World War, Second World War, and then you can see this very often also in smaller wars. But paranoia is the basis of all conflicts, but it's also the basis of these alliances that can bring, as Obama said, "since September 11th, there was not this sense of unity in the United
Richard: States.
This event with Osama brought
Cláudia: back this sense of unity that they hadn't had." And this is the sad part of the story, because Americans got together, Democrats, Republicans, third-party people, because of one common denominator, which is paranoia. So doing this, there is this false sense of friendliness or unity. But behind this, there are severe fractions that are just temporarily hidden, covered up.
And as soon as this paranoid feeling fades away, the differences come back as they were coming. And not only the differences, but also the true problems of American society, American economy, American
Richard: differences, American sicknesses,
Cláudia: violence, needs, poverty, the difference between poor and very rich people. So there are so many, many unresolved problems inside the United States. There's a staggering national debt that cannot be resolved.
So all these huge true enemies of American people are hidden for a time, for a period.
Richard: Because of this focus, the paranoia. So
Cláudia: they fabricate,
Richard: they fabricate
Cláudia: an enemy, a national enemy of the United States.
Just to deviate the idea of American people of treating and seeing and dealing with their own true problems. And this you can see not only amongst nations, amongst one people and its government.
You can see this inside companies, inside families.
Cláudia: You see people getting married out of paranoia so often. Like for instance you you know someone and then you tell your story to that someone you are a victim a victim of your father of your mother of society or of whatever and then the other one identifies with you another victim so oh poor guy he's so he's so nice he has so many talents and nobody gives value to him blah so i am the only friend of his and then they get together as the only friends in the world and they get really stick to each other for a short period of time.
Because then after getting married or living together, the real true problems come up to the surface. And then what will they do? You are a victim of me, of myself. Am I a victim of you or are both projecting their own problems. So dealing and seeing one's own inner problems, and this can be individually, institutionally, nationally, or internationally speaking, one must address the inner problem of that person or institution or country in order
Richard: to heal them.
I'm just having a reminder of what Dr. Keppe said in this wonderful book, Psychoanalysis of Society, that you've been teaching us in your classes recently, that this kind of fear, paranoia, is linked to weakness of character. So it leaves us unable to confront our own impulses. We transfer those outward as if the fear of being destroyed comes from outside. "Well, that's so succinctly put." "Yeah." "It's powerful, this, isn't it?"
Cláudia: "And this is universal." "And this is individual and societal."
Richard: "Societal."
Cláudia: "Societal." "And if we do not address this, there is no way to go back to some harmony.
Because if we want to have more harmonious society, there is nothing we should address in front of us in the future other than just going back and seeing and watching what went wrong in the past. Where all this mess started to see the true cause."
And this started in the psychosociopathological attitudes and tendencies that are unconscious, still, most of the time hidden, masqueraded by humanity.
Richard: What are those psychosocial tendencies, those impulses Dr. Keppe talked about? We were unable to confront our own impulses, our own psychopathology and sociopathology. Those are deep, aren't they?
Cláudia: Yeah. And the biggest one, which involves all the others, Keppe called theomania. So I find this word very interesting.
It's not only a pure, simple idea that some psychotic people have when they are institutionalized, because they claim they are Jesus Christ, or they claim they are God, or they claim they are being oriented by God, or something like that. But it is this huge megalomaniac, arrogant idea that one can be like even sometimes better than God himself. People don't even think that they need God or that they came from God or anything, but they are the creators of themselves and their own lives.
And this huge arrogance do not allow us to resonate with reality. And this goes so far, Richard.
Richard: Yeah, deep this.
Cláudia: So deep and so far. And this brings envy, this brings projection, this brings egotism, this brings veracity, stinginess, and many other vices come from this arrogance, this very very super megalomaniac attitude. And very false humble people and depressive people suffer from the same problem, which is inside each one of us.
So they are so perfect, so incredible, that they can't stand seeing their faults and their weaknesses, imperfections, whatever. So, what we see going on is an unconscientization, becoming unconscious, or bringing us a huge mask. And then we put another mask over another mask over another mask to hide our problems and on and on and on and on. So, we get lost. We lose the touch with who we really are.
Richard: And this is the thing that's so dangerous.
Cláudia: Very dangerous, because this brings psychosis, this brings psychosis, and this brings isolation, and this brings alienation, because I was attending a client yesterday, and she was more and more incapable to work. So how this started, how this started then, because when we work, Richard, working and the true work, true work means doing anything that is necessary, that is useful, that is needed.
Working, the true work is working with reality, working with nature, working with what really is, It's working not with imagination in terms of deliriums, but it's working with what is.
Richard: Including problems, including difficulties.
Cláudia: And this includes in ourselves mostly our pathologies, envy, hatred, arrogance, stinginess, vices, laziness, whatever. So, when you put yourself
Susan: in action and you want to accomplish,
Cláudia: then your consciousness starts also putting itself in action and starts, okay, so here you do bad, here you did wrong, here you aren't perfect, you don't know how to do this, you are not that capable as you think.
Richard: It's not as easy as you thought it was going to be. All these things.
Cláudia: So people give up and they prefer to invest their money in like Wall Street or in anything that could make money out of money and take that money and be doing nothing like traveling, leisure, watching TV, taking drugs, so they can preserve and keep their megalomania, their theomania for themselves.
Richard: We're doing therapy today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head with Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco. We're on the Positive World Radio Network, and we are back in just a moment. We are back. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head is on the Positive World Radio Network.
I invite you to go there. There's lots of great information. You'll find other links to other...
Trilogy-related websites, too, so you can get more information.
So
Cláudia: now imagine you, Richard, United States, in the situation that it is, with such a huge debt, and so many people sinking in their own debts, like credit cards and all the
Richard: banking loans
Cláudia: and mortgages. And so when they have to see how huge their problem became of this, when they get out of track with ergonomics, they lost their sense of working and doing things.
So how to leave aside all these medicines for their depression and all this hevotrio and all these drugs and all these legal or illegal drugs. Today in the newspaper in Brazil, they said "the first major cause of death and
Richard: absence
Cláudia: from work is psychiatric. Problems like depression, alcoholism, and all the psychiatric disturbances. And the second major cause of death is heart attack and heart-related diseases, like heart, cardiovascular problems, and respiratory problems."
And these are also linked to stress and to psychological motives. So the stress is the major cause for death amongst not only Brazilians, but all citizens of this planet.
Richard: Yeah, heart disease caused by stress. So stress being the cause of
Cláudia: this, yes. So now what to do about that? So they take advantage from this and they say, so you have to take psychiatric drugs, psychiatric treatment.
So go ahead to your doctor and you will be on medication. As if medication would heal them, and it's right the opposite. When people get to a point that they really need medication, it's because their inner lives are so suppressed, so unconscious, that to do a therapy will already be difficult.
Richard: Yeah. Dr. Keppe said that "fear, which is a huge cause of stress, paralyzes our internal organs and is the father of all physical disease."
So this constrictive attitude annihilates, diminishes, causes a psychosocial contraction that paralyzes social evolution. So in this book, Psychoanalysis of Society, he's taking the individual problem, the problem of stress, causing this constriction cardiovascularly, but also in society we're seeing this
Cláudia: reflected. Sure. And this is what's happening today. So imagine the United States now, with all these problems, economic, social, psychological, educational, philosophical problems they face today. So many immigrants, so many social differences and...
Richard: Not producing anything anymore.
Cláudia: Not producing. So what do they produce? They produce guns, weapons, and military industry. So they applied all their interests, their ingenuity,
Richard: talent,
Cláudia: to military industry.
Richard: Military industrial complex. Yes. Warned about in the 50s.
Cláudia: And also, and this is another area, but we will speak a little bit later about this, this pharmaceutical.
Richard: Yeah, the drug industry. And the
Cláudia: money industry, right? The money industry, the drug industry, the military industry. The legal and illegal drug industry. Yes, right. This is absolutely what happens in the United States. So if they have so many factories, so many huge machines to build guns and weapons and tanks and military airplanes, What will they do now if they need to start producing, industrializing real goods for humanity?
If they just deactivate it
Richard: and everything is
Susan: now inside
Cláudia: China. So China has all the power of all the production of these
Richard: goods. Producer of the world, for sure.
Cláudia: Yeah. So what really is going on is such a huge danger for the country that they prefer to hide this consciousness. They have to create an imaginary danger, imaginary enemy in order to preserve the machinery of war and to hide the true problems.
If one day they have to stay and to look and to stop projecting and to look to their real true enemies, which comes from within their own government and their own powerful people, so what will they do? So I think the United States government is really absolutely scared if American people wake up for this.
Richard: They use their paranoia, they use the paranoia and hate to get another agenda going.
Cláudia: Yeah, so look, we're not your enemies. The enemies come from outside and don't see what bad we did and we are doing against you.
Richard: And I feel this is somewhat what's been touched by a journalist writing recently in The Nation where he said that "he remembered vividly the pull of that emotion in those autumn days 10 years ago. The desire to feel something uncomplicated, pure rage or simple thirst for justice." This is what gets stimulated, I think, in these moments is this primitive thing.
I can forget all my problems and focus everything now on this one thing. Everything's gone, and all I see is this red rage, this fury, and thank God for it. In this sense, they feel that this is liberating.
Cláudia: But my God, Richard, if American people, so many millions, if one day they turn their anger against American government, as they are now against this hidden enemy, terrorism, they will not be able to control.
They are all armed. They all have guns inside their homes. So what might happen? Because American people were taught to project, not to take responsibility for their own actions or inactions or misdeeds or problems. They are all taught to put the blame on other people, so they are almost uncontrollable now. How come you can teach a whole generation of like old or middle age or even adolescence or children that they have to face to themselves, to turn their attention to their own responsibilities, to their own pathologies, like rapidly they will not be able to do this anymore and put them back to work, something that they gave up, they forgot, they forgot about how used to be United States 50 years ago, they don't remember anymore.
So now it is really a huge problem, it's really a problem for the world as well, and other countries are very like they don't know what to do, how to handle the situation, because American society became very psychotic in this sense. They need
Richard: to understand that while 86% of Americans support the killing, one study, in Germany, 64% said there's no reason to rejoice this.
And 52% in Germany said that attempts should have been made to arrest him because what would happen if he was arrested? We would have a trial. And this is why they put them all away in Guantanamo Bay, by the way. They keep them in secret so we don't find out the truth. What is al-Qaeda? It's not what we think it is. It's a name invented by the Americans, mostly.
It's used in frequent terms. This idea of a coordinated network working in 50 or 60 countries, living in caves in Afghanistan that was perpetrated.
This is all garbage.
Cláudia: They feed, they arm, they help to organize all these guerrillas. Yeah. So they help them, they form them, they create them, they feed them, they pay them in order to have this excuse like the Contras, like the Iran-Contra affair. It
Richard: was the same thing. Yeah, and so we the people, we don't have any recourse because we never know the story.
We only hear what the media perpetrates, what the government wants us to know.
Cláudia: And you will always find some crazy lunatics like in the Middle East countries. You will always find those lunatics to feed them in their hatred, for sure. So it's not difficult to find out one or two or three or ten or some thousands even. And now they get really angry, but it's not the majority and they are not so powerful as they pretend they are.
Richard: So this is so therapeutic what you're saying, because if we could begin to step back a little bit and try to cut through the enormous amount of propaganda that exists in the Western media today, especially in North America, and really try to...
Understand a little deeper what is going on here. We will see that we have been, in the Western world, we have been involved in creating an economic system that is a terrorist. There's no other way to describe it. The economic system that we have imposed on the world is terroristic. It creates terror. It imposes terror on people. And this is something that we are very, very reluctant to talk about.
And
Cláudia: we are all upside down. We are all upside down. We are all inverted. And the majority of people don't want really to understand what is all this spiritual business, like what is the spiritual thing really about? Like, what is this? What is God? What are the creatures? What is behind all this stuff? And religious institutions, they also participate in this pact of paranoia and alienation.
They do this absolutely strongly all the time.
And people are really afraid of people. And I understand that American government are really becoming to be scared about the power of paranoid people. So what are they going to do? To kill them? To find a way to create an artificial war to kill their enemies before they start blaming them? So we are in a huge danger because this is going to blow up in terms of people not being conscious of pathology.
But psychopathology, Richard, is really dangerous if we do not acknowledge it, if we hide it. Since Freud, Freudian times, this has been brought and people don't understand that this is a scientific approach. This is science, pure science. And we do not, we are so undeveloped, underdeveloped in terms of this area. How come we should be much ahead. Living in a much more harmonious kind of society.
We have the means to do this.
Richard: It takes seeing this inverted philosophy of life. That all of us have. This theomania you talked about
Cláudia: before. We are the gods and God is nothing. This is a total inversion. And God has formed natural laws. And if we deny the natural laws, psychological, spiritual, physical, we end up by destroying ourselves, we are going in the opposite direction. So
Richard: there's a spiritual aspect here that's not being addressed and a psychological one and sociopathological.
So we've tried to sort of approach this today to give us a bit more reason, we don't have a world of true reason today, we are not reasonable, we react in very unreasonable ways. So we need to be a little bit more aware of what it is, it's going on inside the human spirit. Thank you for addressing
Cláudia: that with us. I
Richard: want to just one
Cláudia: thing.
Yeah, we are not allowed to kill anyone, we are not allowed to do this, never ever killing our name and our fellow men or killing our enemies, killing ourselves, this should never happen.
So if we do that. And if we keep doing that in this planet, it's because something is very, very wrong deep down in our inner lives and in our societies. So we have to address this.
Richard: Yeah. Justifying it is not going to make that deep sin go away. You know, Dr. Kepia said, "Cláudia, that war and these conflicts that we see all around us, terrorism, etc., that These are the price that the human being has to pay.
We have to pay because of our low mental development, because our perception now is much less even than animals go." So we can start to see that the huge problem we have to deal with all of these kind of things, our perception of reality is completely distorted. We're completely inverted from that. And this is why St. Augustine said that only those who have a lot of love can manage to recognize their own problems and those of humanity.
And that really only a person who's interiorized can be a good person. Well, lots to think about there. We are back in just a moment. You are on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head on the Positive World Radio Network. We are back in a moment. Thinking with Somebody Else's Head is on the Positive World Radio Network.
Joneshealing at gmail.com, my personal email. I want to thank Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco for those fascinating and relevant ideas about what's happening around the Osama bin Laden case. But I want to shift gears a little bit now. Helena Melander is a Swedish journalist, and we are going to have a modern 21st century conversation about God. Is that possible? Sure it is. Keppe put it in one of his new books.
I'm not sure which one, but I like it very much.
He said that "original sin, and we're going to use that word because we're talking about God now, we could call this like human pathology in scientific terms, but original sin, he said, was the consequence of man's desire to be useless and also to make useless everything that exists. Thus man rejects this paradise for which he was created, polluting the air, seas and earth, destroying the forests, rivers and animals, trying however he can to eliminate any trace of divine creation." Now that is a really really powerful statement.
And I remember when I I was talking to one of our dear friends Dr Cláudia Pacheco about this, she said "can you see the competition Richard. Can you see that man competes with God, that we want to sort of be bigger than God in some way?"
Helena Melander: Very interesting, because it's like everything that we have today that is natural, we think is not good enough.
So everything in your body you have to change. So it's not okay to have normal, natural breasts. You have to have silicone breasts. Your teeth, many people, they take out the teeth and they put other teeth instead, like these kind of artificial teeth, um people
Richard: don't want their sex,
Helena: yeah exactly. And uh when you are going to have a baby maybe you will even try to find the perfect genetic code for this baby,
Richard: designer baby,
Helena: exactly.
And uh the food, I mean the the natural plants and vegetables are not good enough, you have to change them with also genetic modification. So it's so clear that it's another way, I mean also this human beings don't perceive this but it's another say way to say god what you did was not good enough, we will do this better. And and here I think it's very clear this this aspect of envy.
And this is maybe even more difficult to understand, but that there is a kind of envy in the human being towards god, like you don't want to admit um that he's so big and so good and so beautiful, so then you start to think bad things about him or even deny him.
Richard: If you think about it and Keppe talked about this in his book um glorification, which is his book directly about the man's experience with god, where he said that "in his first 25 years of working as a psychoanalyst he's he applied himself solely to to scientific principles, but then he began to perceive as he was working with clients year after year, day after day, hour after hour in his office, that people had this desire to know who they were, where they came from." And so Keppe, through his science, determined that the human being has a strong desire for religiousness.
And I don't mean religion. This desire to know where we come from, who we are, what we're part of. This is a human desire, this is not something fanatic or and we can
Helena: never find peace if we don't somehow find that answer or at least look for that answer, because uh if not if we try to forget that question, that deep existential question, why are we here, where did we come from, what's it all about, yeah is god there you know, and then what is life, what I mean, then it's totally meaningless somehow.
Then people have this deep existential crisis that we see a lot in
Richard: sweden for example, a lot of suicide. Um I mean because sweden we could say have reached a kind of perfect social uh society in terms of welfare and admirable security, it's very beautiful and organized. And but I
I see that especially young people when they come out in in the society start living their lives, you know they are completely lost because nobody tells them what is right, what is wrong, what you can believe in.
And it's even interesting because there have been some studies now saying that like because we have many immigrants in sweden that for example this muslim young people that live in sweden they have a much better psychological health than the swedish, so
Helena: why, because the muslims they have something to follow you know, they have a religion that unites them and that they can you know connect to every day.
They're
Richard: telling the same thing with the Mexicans in North America. Really? Yes, because they have this strong Catholic underpinning upbringing.
Helena: So, I mean, if you don't have any kind of even religious education you can even speak of, where are you going to go? It's like you don't have any ground to stand on. You don't have any deeper ethical values. And this, I think, is interesting, too, because in Sweden, we have a strong movement of a group that is called the humanists.
I don't know why they are called humanists, but they say that they don't believe in God. They believe in the human being and they believe in ethical values and that we can have all these values without God. But somehow, if we try to have that right and wrong, fair and unfair, good and bad without God, it's like we do not have a reference point.
I mean, so where do these values come from? What is that then, it's really like okay, but then you can really question these values somehow, I mean who who said that they are right in that case. So we can't deny that all of the values, the universal values, the the goodness, the truth has its origin in god, that's the the center of of reality, the center of of existence of and of our essence, you know.
One
Richard: of the things I see happening I feel a similar experience in Canada when I go back to visit.
There's all this material abundance. It's noteworthy. Everybody has everything. I mean, of course, there are divisions, but it's not like a country like Brazil or Ethiopia. I mean, equally, it's pretty much the same for everybody. But there, people have a different sense of desperation because with all of this material stuff, there's still a feeling of emptiness. And so then the people go, well, now what?
I've got the house and the summer house and the great vacations, but there's something missing.
Susan: And so if we're stopped from exploring this deeper part, we get sick. This is the desire inside the human being to know more.
Helena: And we're stopped from doing that by these kinds of discussions we see in our developed world. You can't talk about this, you know. It's like a thirst.
So I can see sometimes when I speak about these topics in Sweden, when I go there to give lectures or even on our blog that we have in Sweden about integral psychoanalysis, I can see that these kind of issues, people get really, you know, they want to know more.
It's like they are really thirsting for this kind of spiritual water, we can say, of talking about deeper, deeper questions, of having some kind of answer. And I think we have to try to meet that need somehow, because really, we are having a very good situation physically, materially. But if we are not well spiritually, then what are we here for? And
Richard: actually we're destroying our material wealth as well.
Helena: The material world is being destroyed by this envy, this theomania you talked about. You know, I showed in my class the other night
Richard: this movie about Nelson Mandela, Invictus. And I don't know what people who are listening think about this movie, but there's a couple of scenes in it at the very beginning, well, right throughout the whole movie. But I showed the first 20 or 30 minutes of it.
And there's a couple of scenes in there where he's sort of demonstrating some universal values, including tolerance, forgiveness.
He says at one point, he says to one of his black guards who doesn't like the fact that Mandela has mandated some white guards from the old order to help protect him. And this black guy doesn't like that at all. And he says, "you know, forgiveness starts here," Mandela said. "You know, if you have forgiveness, you liberate yourself. You liberate yourself from fear." And he said, "that's why it's such a powerful weapon." I never thought about universal values as being like a weapon.
I don't mean it in a military sense, but it's like because it speaks to something deep inside. And everybody goes, yes, of course, we need to be like that. We're not like that, but we need to be. Everybody knows that. We feel that. You can feel the goosebumps when you hear him say that. And so why does that have such power? Because that's something directly from this source you're talking about, isn't it?
Helena: And these leaders, these fantastic leaders, Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, they were so connected to God, to that source. And I never heard them being afraid of mentioning the name of God. You don't find a leader, a big leader that can, you know, really make people have this hope that you're speaking about or this sensation of goodness, of truth. If you have this kind of trying to compromise and not saying God's name and trying to be, you know, politically correct in the sense of using like softening words and like not saying what it really is.
And
Richard: it seems to me, Helena, as we're talking here at the end, that we're having a really modern conversation. Yeah. We're having like a 21st century conversation. That to consider God in the context of science is finally cool. Finally, it's like a good thing, a welcome thing for the world.
Helena: The spirituality is coming back. Like, this is something you can take away from people. And we can see this even in Russia, the communists, the old communist states, you know, when the communists was, you know, broken or when it was taken away, the spirituality is coming back. There are new churches. And of course, what is very clear in Dr. Keppe's work is that we don't need a church.
We don't need a, you know, established religion in order to have contact with God. I mean, I think the church can help sometimes for us to remember that and make that connection.
Richard: Are you prepared to talk just a little bit, Helena, about the trilogical view of God, like the difference between like being and just energy? Or is that something that we could just at the end talk about a little bit?
Helena: Yes, exactly. I think it might be a little bit dangerous to have a too loose idea of God, like it's just some kind of mystical energy in the air or some kind of spirit that is everywhere and all the trees and all the animals.
Because then it's again like you're trying to escape from the fact that God is God and God is a being. As far as I understand, Dr. Kepa's work, he is a being. And the view of Keppe, especially in this book that you mentioned, Glorification, is extremely a beautiful view of a God that is complete compassion, a God that only want us to be happy.
You know, why should ever God want us to suffer or to be sick or anything? I mean, we are creating our psychopathology and our physical sickness and all this craziness that we see in the world or all the wars and hunger. But God, of course, God wants us to come to him, to be in the same happiness that he is. And I would really like to recommend this book.
Because if you have this kind of problem with the God concept. You who are listening I'm sure that you will find peace in finding this concept of God.
This explanation of God. The scientific explanation of
Richard: God. Which is extraordinary.
Helena: "Yes, exactly. Because I can really understand, I can't say that I'm a very religious person, I didn't have a religious upbringing or anything. But as you said, this book is a scientific and very objective and clear description of what God is.
Richard: Let me just read a little paragraph from this great book, Glorification, which I love too.
Man spends his whole life searching for that which he has drawn away from and is not able to forget, God. Even though we do not clearly perceive it, all of our actions, our feelings, and our thoughts are directed in an attitude of intense desire towards the Supreme Being, simply because we, in every fiber of our bodies, have been created for the glory of the beauty, the truth, and the goodness, which are not only in the Creator, but are also in the whole of each of us."
Whether we wish it or not our destiny is glorification and it can only occur at the side of the one who possesses it forever. Marvelous isn't it.
Helena: Yeah. What more can you say. Nothing
Richard: more to say indeed. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. It's been a pleasure to have you with us. I hope you found the program valuable. It's been wonderful talking with you and talk to you again next week on the Positive World Radio Network. Bye for now.
