Richard Lloyd Jones: I remember my college roommate couldn't sleep for a week after watching The Exorcist, and we all have friends who've messed with Ouija boards in their lives, don't we? My neighbor used to receive visits from recently departed loved ones in her dreams. There's a wealth of theological knowledge on the presence and influence of spirits in our day-to-day lives, but sadly, it's been eliminated.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we'll begin to open the doors again to the universe of the spirits. That his priceless knowledge has been totally excluded from our modern so-called rational world. Norberto Keppe, in exploring the deep psychopathology of human beings, saw very early on in his work that human difficulties were much more spiritual than organic.
Much more related to the questions of who we are, where we came from, and where we're going than they were to just out-of-whack chemicals in our brains. But Keppe went a step further even by seeing that the finality of our envy and inversion would be our enormous rejection of reality and God. So he has always kept an ear tuned to the importance of theology in considering the human psyche.
His recent book, The Universe of the Spirits, is currently being translated into English and is a must-read for a world totally cut off from this spiritual wisdom and desperately in need of connecting to it again. I've invited my good friend Cesar Soós in to discuss this topic with me today. Cesar has been researching the metaphysical world, which would include this world of the spirits, for many, many years and is a really great authority on the subject.
Cesar and I will be basing our podcast today on this extraordinary book of Norberto Keppe, The Universe of the Spirits. Cesar, we probably have to begin with an overview of Keppe's work in psychopathology, before we make this connection to the spiritual world, right?
Cesar Soós: Dr. Keppe's work is all based on psychopathology studies. And through his discoveries of inversion, he could give a better explanation of what the Freudian unconscious is.
Freud considered the unconscious as something belonging to our inner structure, psychological structure. And Dr. Keppe gives a new explanation, saying that this unconscious is an attitude of rejecting consciousness. So it is completely artificial. So what this new vision leads to? It simply explains that the human being, because out of his megalomania, his deliriums of grandeur, he rejects strongly the idea that he is wrong.
So he always wanted to believe himself correct. And because he believes himself to be corrected all the time, he refuses seeing errors. And by doing that, he connects himself to evil influences. How does
Richard: the rejection or the desire to be right all the time, how does this link
Cesar: us with these? Richard, this is very interesting because the beginning of psychiatry began with this.
Psychiatrists they know the human being when he's developing a disease a mental disease. The first step is to consider himself totally right. The others are wrong and they are right. So we have a very clear connection between mental sickness and deliriums of grandeur. And it's very clear also that these patients they present the so-called paranormal phenomena around them. So there is a kind of influence a spiritual influence around these people who think they are right all the time.
When
Richard: you talk about paranormal experiences you're talking about what seeing spirits or hearing voices all
Cesar: sorts of uh non-explained phenomena which are facts and detected facts. Everybody knows they happen you know but they cannot explain. We do not have a scientific basis to explain them properly. What you're
Richard: saying and what Keppe has suggested then is that if somebody's hearing voices, then they are hearing the voices of actual entities outside
Cesar: time and space.
Exactly. This is one point very important to me made. It's not because the person is sick that he is creating a delirium in his mind. We consider this a delirium because we start from the point that these things do not exist. So we call it deliriums. But in the other way around if you consider the existence of immaterial beings these deliriums may be true and they must be studied.
They must be approached in in a scientific way. And the idea of dr capi by releasing this book the universe of spirits is to continue the studies of alan kardec the first scientist in france in the the end of the the 19th century. He wanted to make a scientific study about the manifestation of the spirits and he was very strongly rejected because of the arising philosophy of positivism who preferred to base science on material facts, on material happenings.
Because of that, the study of the spirits was discarded and called paranormal phenomena.
Richard: So this world exists of spirits, of, as Keppe says in his book, he has the title of one of his chapters in Universe of the Spirits, is we're under the influence of good and bad spirits. How do we see this in our everyday life? How do we know this to be true?
Most of us would think, I certainly understand this much better now, but when I first came here to Brazil, I had no context to understand this at all, Cesar, from my upbringing, you know. And so many people listening may not have any context to understand this either. How can you help us to see this clearer? Dr.
Cesar: Keppe explains that we enter into communication with other beings through the phenomenon of resonance.
If you resonate with some other being, resonance means synchronizing. When you are connected in terms of emotions and thoughts to somebody else, you start to transfer and receive this communication, even in a telepathic way. So according to the way you think and you feel You will communicate to beings, material or immaterial In the same level. And so, if you see your pathology Then you are a more conscious individual of yourself.
So you are more in contact with you, yourself. So you are a more balanced individual. The consequence of that is that you will present a more good phenomenon, a spiritual phenomenon around you. But if you reject seeing your pathology, you will be connected to all the beings who also reject to see their pathology. The more you reject seeing yourself, the more connected you will be to the beings like this.
I
Richard: heard one man say one time, I don't know if he was a theologian or not. And he said he believed that there was a hell, but he believed because God was a benevolent being that there was no one in it. This is a rather naive view from Keppe's point of view, right? Point of view, yes. Talk about this hell and the presence of evil in the universe.
What is this? What's going on there? Richard,
Cesar: I would like to quote the Bible. The Judeo-Christian tradition says that we fell from the paradise.
Richard: By the way, Cesar, I think every people has a paradise myth story in their vocabulary, in their folklore.
Cesar: So this means it could be an infused knowledge, right? A knowledge, intuitive knowledge, that all of us know that we came from a better state and we go towards a worse state.
And so this biblical myth, let's say, or this story tells that we lived in a paradise. We didn't have pathology. In scientific terms, we would say that. We didn't have pathology. Adam and Eve, the human race, didn't have pathology.
Richard: They had this perfect link with God.
Cesar: Perfect link with God. Everything was consciousness, everything was knowledge. And this was the infused knowledge said by Plato, more than 2,000 years ago, you know.
And then came Aristotle with the idea that we learn from the senses. Aristotle inverted, completed this Judeo-Christian idea. So, Dr. Kepes is exactly like this. We lived in the beginning, we are created perfect. But because of our pathology, we fell. And this is represented in the Adam and Eve story as the wish to be greater than God, as the wish to be like God, as the wish to be perfect.
To eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What would represent to eat from the tree of good and evil? To get something which is not created. To know something which is not possible to be known you know because to know more than God What can you know more than God? What can you know more than everything to be known?
This is an idea, obviously a crazy idea, that you find only in mental institutions. So Adam and Eve, they had an idea of a mental sick person. And by accepting this, they incorporated, they embodied pathology. And by embodying this pathology, they created what we call today in scientific terms, unconscious. So we became unconscious of reality.
Richard: In Keppe's language,
Cesar: we inconscientized. The truth.
We made ourselves unconscious of this rejection we made of paradise. Exactly that, Richard. But the problem is we were not cast out of paradise. Because there is no such place outside everything. We still are in everything. We still are in paradise. And Dr. Keppe points out this very clearly in his book. And then you would ask me, why am I not living in a paradise here on earth?
Because we created a pathological society in accordance to our rejection to the paradise. We reject seeing how much we fell from this, how much we got away from our essence, and so we created a society in accordance to that. A crazy society.
Richard: In the theological annals, there's a fall that came before the human fall, right? This would be the fall from heaven.
Yes. Of the certain angels. Talk a little bit about that. Well,
Cesar: the Holy Scriptures are very clear saying that Lucifer, he was an angel of light, the angel who had more consciousness than all the others. He was the brighter one, but he wished to be greater than God. He didn't want to serve, right? And by not wanting to serve, he didn't want to be a creature.
He wanted to be a creator, and then he became something else. But what is this something else? There is no possibility of being something that is not created by God. So he became like inside reality, but rejecting his condition. So what is to be a demon, Richard? This is very important to know in scientific terms. To be a demon is a being who rejects himself.
If you see a dog, the dog doesn't reject itself. If you see a dog wanting to be a cat, you can call him a demon dog. But human beings, they have consciousness and they can choose to accept or reject reality. And because of that, we became semi-demons because of our unconscious now. We are in this condition. And Lucifer became a complete demon because he rejected completely to serve.
But as we are unconscious we are still half and half. We accept consciously reality but unconsciously we reject reality. We are like demons in this way. That's why our actions reveal what we have inside. And if you look at the society today, the philosophies of life we follow, we choose to follow, it's very clear that we are choosing destructive things to ourselves and to the planet as well. Because our planet is in a very sick condition today, isn't it?
Richard: Yeah, this is interesting that Keppe's study of psychopathology has led to the conclusion of the destruction of the essence of life, the attempt to destroy the essence of life. But it's impossible to destroy our essence. Yes. It must be impossible for Lucifer to destroy his essence, too.
Cesar: And maybe this is the worst thing for him, because he wanted to destroy himself completely, and he cannot.
This power he doesn't have, because he was made eternal, and he will continue to be eternal.
Richard: So he will continue to exist, even while rejecting this existence.
Cesar: Yes. To be a demon is an attitude of rejecting what he was originally, what he is originally, by the hands of the creator. In Dr. Keppe's work, he made very clearly this link between mental disease and connection to spiritual entities.
For example, to be sick, to cultivate neurosis, to cultivate psychosis, is to be connected to evil spirits, because evil spirits, they are schizophrenic, they are psychopaths, they are psychotics, they believe to be what they are not. So that's why people who buy this idea have the idea that the evil is strong, is powerful, and this is the greatest illusion we live in our world today.
Richard: Keppe says in his book that this rejection of the consciousness that human beings are transcendental, this rejection of the consciousness that human beings are transcendental, has its origin in the very thing that causes disease, envy, that blinds us to knowledge. We deny transcendence in our lives, although it continues nonetheless, and needs us only to recognize it. And you've talked about this on this program many times, and we come back to this theme every time you're on the program, Cesar.
I really like the fact that you have a chance to explain this every time, that the human being is basically something good, that there is a fundamental aspect to the whole universe of goodness, truth, and beauty, and that anything that deviates from that is a rejection or a destruction of this basic essence of life. And so, human beings don't want to accept what is, but to create a new reality.
Cesar: Richard, this is consequence of suffering from this luciferitis, like I told in the other program. We have exactly the same pathology of lucifer in a lesser degree. But suppose this Richard we as human beings we are very envious and envy in the sense of Dr. Keppe's work means rejecting to see beauty rejecting the beauty to oppose to beauty. And then if you cultivate your spiritual aspects you will have to see that you are a creature and not a creator of your own reality.
And because of that we prefer to unconscious this truth. We prefer to consider ourselves creators of our lives instead of rendering honors to the one who gave this life to us. So we prefer to believe that we were not created by a superior being. And then by doing that we reject all this transcendental universe who is there for us to use.
Richard: Keppe's idea is that through the conscientization of our pathology, which is really just the rejection of this reality, through our conscientization of this, we can come to enter more in contact with this eternal world inside us and inside the universe.
Cesar: Richard, the process of conscientization is the process of all the time taking contact with your theomania all the time. When you conscientize something you have to conscientize your theomania in a deeper level because theomania was the the main pathology that took us from the paradise. All the time you will be confronted with this idea of wanting to be like god. This is psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy is to show to the client that he wants to follow a demonic orientation in his life because he rejects to see. I would
Richard: like to talk about this demonic orientation in our society specifically. Yeah for you to talk about examples of fields of ways of thinking that we see as particularly demonic.
Cesar: For example, Freudian's idea that we have destructive instincts given by nature.
By doing that, we bought the idea that God implanted in us a destructive instinct that if we have diseases, if we have wars, this is natural, there's nothing to do about it. We just have to try to deal with these things, but we will never get rid of these things. We will never get rid of hell in other terms. So it's common to see George Bush, for example, going to Iraq and destroying one of the greatest inheritances to kill thousands of children and people who are innocent, you know, and just to take control of the petrol there.
This is crazy. And we think, no, it must be like that. This is normal because wars always, we always lived with wars. And so wars is something of nature, of human nature. It's not. Other orientation is the positivistic orientation of Auguste Comte, who laid down the basis for our science. Based on this, science... Scientists discarded completely the spiritual world, and we lost a lot by not studying the spiritual world.
Which was studied before, Comte. Yes, before. But today, if you speak about God, for example, you are a sect. People do not perceive that not to speak about God is also a sectarian thought, you know? Because the same way you cannot prove in positivistic terms that God exists because you do not see him, you cannot disprove his existence. So how come people attack believers in God, right?
If they cannot prove God does not exist. And also, this orientation led the field of health to a very demonic approach. Scientists today they believe pills and medicines are responsible for the cure of our mind and the cure of our body. That every phenomena no matter if it is psychological or material or corporal they come from chemical reactions in your body and that's it.
From the food you eat if you are not eating well you will get sick or things like this. And they discard completely your system of thinking. If you are thinking wrong you can get sick. It's interesting to know Richard that before augusto conti there were there were the studies of alan kardec which created the spiritism and here in brazil for example is very strong.
But in in europe it was not considered it was discarded because of the arrival of the positivism brought by Kant. This positivism led humanity to a very materialistic approach against the studies of the spirits brought by Kardec. And we lost a lot because scientists like William James in the United States, they were very much interested in the spiritual phenomena, but they had to leave it aside because it was not considered scientific.
And many scientists who were interested in this phenomenon followed William James too because they were afraid of being called non-scientific. And so this materialistic approach was a very good weapon for the devil to hide behind this materialism that we follow today and take all of our knowledge we could possibly have this study brought by Kardec about the spirits. Keppe's work, in the sense, is very vital in this book, The Universe of Spirits, because he wants to recover the studies of Kardec with his new discoveries as well.
Richard: Another area I see a real demonic orientation is this area of money and power, right? Anybody who's struggling all their lives to get more money than somebody else. This is following a really perverse kind of idea, isn't it?
Cesar: Look, Richard, in this phenomenon Dr. Keppe discovered of inversion, people tend to believe they must have things to be happy. So they changed the being to be for to have.
You know, we want to have to be and not to be in order to have. So you only have richness if you are yourself, if you are authentic, if you are in contact with your true authentic being. If you are not in contact with that, you will be a poor person. And quoting Aristotle, he said, richness is in the use and not in the possession.
No matter how many goods you possess, if you do not use them, you are a poor person. A rich person is a person who uses the good he has.
Richard: Keppe said this in the book, actually, quoting from a session of analysis, that I have everything and nothing makes me happy, right? The person said, because this would be a person then who's looking for this satisfaction in an external way in terms of
Cesar: things.
This we come back to the question of envy. Envy is not to profit, not to enjoy the good things you have. So this is very common in the neurotic phases, the oral phase, the genital phase and the anal phase. In these phases, neurotic phases, the persons, they are too much turned to themselves. So they do not profit from the good they have.
In the case of the anal phase which is very clear a child for example when he gets the toy of another child is not to you to play with that toy but he feels pleasure because the other child cannot play. He feels pleasure when the other is stopped from enjoying that good. So human beings when they are very envious they are attached to these neurotic phases.
So they can have money but they do not use this money. This is an attitude of an envious person. He wants the things but not to use but try to fulfill something they are rejecting already. And i see this very
Richard: much in the political world where political leaders will try to deprive the people of things right. They will take away a right or put an extra tax on something or make it more difficult.
We see this in Brazil all the time, but you see this in every country. This is a form of this envy from these anal sadistic people in power who impose a set of values on people because of their own envy. They want to stop the the pleasure the enjoyment of
Cesar: others exactly. The adults attached to these neurotic phases of anal phase they replace they substitute the toy for the money.
So they wanted the money of the people so the people will suffer and their pleasure will be seeing people suffering. There are a great deal of psychotics in power today. The universe of
Richard: the spirits i know there's more to say but i sincerely hope this has been an opening for you into the spiritual world and that it whets your appetite for more.
Drop me a line. Let me know what you think. Rich at richjonesvoice.com. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
