Good. Evil. What’s the difference? Some think “Hey, each to his own poison.” But there are universal laws we break when we do something nasty. And it pays for us to know that.

Dr. Claudia Pacheco sums up the essential purpose of Keppe’s Analytical Trilogy. No small matter. And vitally important.

Jesus was a healer and teacher. But perhaps we’ve never really understood the complete message He brought.

All throughout Keppe’s work is the reminder that consciousness is our greatest asset. That’s made even more clearer in this article.

Keppe has asserted that we are never good – or bad – alone. This spiritual influence in our day-to-day lives is much more prevalent than we have thought.

We are not operating alone. Not only psychotics are influenced by malicious spirits. This will make us think.

Why is our human society in such bad shape? Analytical Trilogy has a particularly important take that must become part of the global discussion.

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Finally, a conversation about God that doesn’t proselytize or evangelize or preach or sell. A scientific and rational view of God and our need to connect again, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

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The murky world of shadows that constitutes modern leadership is not a new thing, of course. The TV mini-series “The Tudors” lays out in all its deceit and subterfuge the nest of vipers that was the British Royal Court of the 15th and 16th centuries. Ancient Rome was no picnic either from all accounts. And Chinese warlords scheming to be Taipan operated within complex webs of treachery.

Not much has changed. We’re inverted, so we still practice to deceive and think, in our boundless delusion, that it will all come out ok in the end.

It’s been that way for centuries. So prevalent is it that we could be excused for thinking that political gamesmanship is just human nature – whether it’s office competitors vying for the bosses favor, or contestants on a reality TV show pacting to get another sent home, or unelected bank leaders meeting in secret to decide world monetary policy.

Treachery and cunning, though, in all their proliferation, are far from what it means to be truly human, and this disinverted view deserves more headlines than it’s gotten.

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Nowadays, a conversation about spirits is looked upon in most of our western world with a high degree of suspicion. Five hundred years or so of materialistic, positivistic science has pretty much kicked the stuffing out of the philosophy that included spirituality in its precepts.

But some formidable literary and philosophical figures included the spirit world in their canon – including Shakespeare and Dickens. Some great artists even considered the purpose of arts to be a transcendental one, and included subjects like spirits and God in their everyday conversations.

It is mostly we moderns who now, in our smug self-assuredness, pooh-pooh the idea of spiritual influence as being old fashioned and passé, and dismiss any such views as superstitious and childlike.

But maybe these past geniuses had a better grasp on reality than we do. Maybe there is something from the vast pre-modern worldview that bears a further look, and could be brought back now to help us make sense of our complex and confusing modern world.

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Welcome to our highlights version of A Study of the Divine. A perfect answer to the annual debate about how we can be true to the spirit of Christmas. Here, in the midst of the running about, a reminder of that true spirit.

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There is a deep thirst inside us all for understanding of the most important part of the being – the metaphysical aspect. It is exactly this that differentiates us from animals, and if we do not consider our spiritual aspect, we are actually mutilating our understanding of ourselves.

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The Great Spirit. Jahweh. Jehovah. The Almighty. God. Whatever name He goes by, He’s been honoured and worshipped by the greatest human beings in history. Only in our modern times have we systematically acted to remove the Creator of the universe – and of ourselves – from our human institutions. At great damage to ourselves.

Well, it’s a beautiful topic today because it speaks to something deep in all of us – even if we don’t acknowledge it. The sense of meaning we all look for and have such difficulties finding in our modern philosophy. God is largely out of the picture in human affairs today, and we’ve removed Him at great expense to our collective well being.

The modern scientists and thinkers have elaborated theories that try to explain existence and all the magnificence and immensity of the universe in materialistic ways, as not needing the “Immovable Mover”, as Aristotle called Him. And the pathological powerful who often held the reins of the churches have contributed to the modern day aversion to God as well. After all, who wants to consider a God who is intoned from high places as the bringer of pestilence and war and famine.

Those things have nothing to do with God but blaming Him for them marks an enormous projection into God of what we do. I am not talking about that vision of God at all, but of the infinitely beautiful and loving creator of all of this – and it’s this One we would like to talk about in our program today.

Just let me say one more thing before we begin. Buried in the release of all those diplomatic cables recently on the WikiLeaks site is some clear admissions from the U.S. Military and CIA that they are engaging in a series of actions designed to increase apathy among the world’s population so that leaders can ignore voters and a very nefarious agenda can be implemented.

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I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. When I published our most recent program, Glorification and the Christmas Spirit, I mentioned that it would be our last program of 2012.

And so I thought. But my dear friend, Bob Butler, sent along an article the other day about the quite advanced movement to take Christ out of Christmas, and I felt obligated to step into the fray to address this unnecessary and imprudent tendency.

I say unnecessary because forbidding a school to call a tree the mount in the hallway in December a Christmas tree is not in support of the tolerant and pluralistic society we say we live in. My contention is that if that’s all it takes to offend someone, then I think that person’s problems are a little more serious than simple indignation.

And imprudent because the psychological and social consequences of eliminating humankind’s spiritual dimension are grave. As we’ll discover on the journey you’ll embark on in our program today.

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We go deep to the source of humanity’s problems on our show today, which we can do thanks to the science of Norberto Keppe, who is a master of human psycho and socio pathology. Join host Richard Lloyd Jones and special guest, Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco in an expansive and thrilling discussion that looks at how the desire to be like gods manifests in every area from politics and business to the spiritual world. We’ll also have a special report from the field with Gilbert Gambucci discussing the true basis of civilization.

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A listener asked me recently, “Why is it necessary to speak of God.” Then she went on, “We have to see this God or whatever it is in relation to all that is valid and workable in science.”

I agree. Because whatever you call Him – God, energy, the Great Spirit – the world is poorer by excluding Him.

And as I launch into this program, I am fully aware of the heat this will cause in some circles. One of the distinguishing aspects of our modern society is the almost certain guarantee that if you talk openly about the need to introduce God into human affairs, you are sure to raise howls of protest and derision in many circles. God, it seems, is considered at best old fashioned and quaint, as if talking about Him suggests you’re a child who needs the comfort of fairy-tale proverbs about miracles and salvation to help you sleep at night, and at worst like you are a dangerous Bible thumping lunatic spouting Biblical scripture in answer to any dilemma and leading any who follow into a mind-controlling cult.

I feel this keenly whenever I enter into this subject here on the program. I’m a modern Canadian, after all … a baby-booming WASP raised with the requisite Darwinian scientific education. I remember well how I felt when listening to the religuous people who came knowcking on my door on Saturday morning.

I do believe we have been fed a very distorted story about God, and that we are very out of touch with a meaningful understanding of God and the nature of Man and the universe. To the point where we now have knee-jerk reactions when we face this issuethat have nothing to do with reason. My colleague, Sofie Bergqvist, talked in a previous podcast, Liberating Ourselves From our Free Will, about this when she told a sotry about an immigrant student in her Swedish high school who innocently stated in Biology class that she didn’t hold to Darwin’s theory and instead believed that God had created the world and all in it. Sofie’s classmates were predictably cruel in meting out their justice for this heresy. They simply shunned the girl. No one talked to her, no one invited her to parties, no one had anything to do with her.

It’s not difficult for me to see the same thing happening in my native Canada. And we are countries, Canada and Sweden, who consider ourselves paragons of tolerance. But let me tell you, my dear, northern, first-world, modern compatriots – that primitive shunning and ex-communication would never happen in Brazil.

Another of my colleagues, a Brazilian, was conducting a Portuguese class for a group of foreigners trying to learn the language when the subject of belief came up. One of the students started to speak about his belief in God and how he thought it was important for the human being to have contact with this spirituality. A fellow student – from France – rose up in protest and started the standard put-down that I don’t need to describe.

“Whoa, hold on a minute,” my colleague said firmly. “You’re in Brazil now. Here, we don’t attack others for their beliefs or lack of belief. We’re not like you in the first world. Here, we respect a person’s right to have his beliefs, even if they’re different from ours.”

Dead silence from the French woman. Message received.

When I came to Brazil 9 years ago, I remember teaching an English class where one of the students began to speak about his faith, and I said, “You mean, you can talk about these things here?!” The students laughed good-naturedly. Another ignorant foreigner lost in political correctness and censorship.

The good news today is, my dear listener, that we can begin again to consider a scientific view of God through the remarkable work of Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Dr. Norberto Keppe, whose science of Analytical Trilogy is a re-union of science with philosophy and, can you believe it, theology to give us a vast, deep and comprehensive view of the human being and the society in which he lives. Keppe’s work is a vital contribution to the intellectual treasure of human civilization.

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Some see our most important issues as social ones. Hunger. Injustice. The gap between rich and poor.

Others see the lack of ethics in leadership as most pressing. While for many, our environmental crises supercede everything else.

Here in Brazil, we acknowledge it all as evidence of our inversion. And then … we go a little deeper.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, we’ll look at our relationship with the deepest part of ourselves and our connection with eternity, even God.

First of all, thanks for all your wonderful e-mails over the past few weeks. Great to hear from you as always. rich@richjonesvoice.com

We’re doing a lot of things here that could be of interest to you. Our online course, Trilogy Online, is almost up and running. Keep listening for updates, or drop me a line and I’ll let you know personally when it’s officially online.

We’re going to be holding a great event next year – 2008 – on the True American Dream. What were those Founding Fathers dreaming about anyway? And was it just a dream? I don’t think so. Norberto Keppe, the inspiration for all we do on this Podcast, has fond feelings for the true American values to this day.

We’re going to marry the American dream to the dreams of South America, too – kind of a Pan-American dream maybe – and talk about how all of these greatest dreams of humanity are possible. And there are substantial means to get there present in Keppe’s work. Particularly in understanding the root causes of our massive difficulties – our topic today in a way – and providing some specific tools to get there, like new business and residence structures.

You know, Keppe’s work is different from others in this fundamental way: where many psychological, scientific, even philosophical orientations tell us that we’re in a process of evolving from lesser to greater – from the primal ooze in biology, through many lifetimes in Eastern thought, from the need to develop our self-esteem in Western pop-psychology – Keppe proposes that we already live in perfection, in eternity, in paradise. But we reject it. This is a profound shift in how we understand reality, and I’ve asked Claudia Pacheco, vice-president of Keppe’s International Society of Analytical Trilogy, to help me penetrate this idea. Join me for her illuminating and provocative thoughts.

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In the philosophy of religion, evil has always been a thorny issue. Is evil something inherent in the essence of man and nature? Or is it a willful act of ill-intentioned human beings?

And then there’s the whole confusion of natural disasters – the presence of which have even caused some thinkers to deny the existence of a perfectly good God. If hurricanes exist, this argument goes, perfect goodness doesn’t exist.

And I think it’s also safe to say that the theological concept of the existence of a being of evil as described in Judeo-Christian scripture is also controversial. A rebellion in heaven led by one of God’s brightest angels, Lucifer, is today treated mostly as allegorical or metaphorical – tales told to illustrate moral truth but not meant to be taken literally.

But in Norberto Keppe‘s deep science of Analytical Trilogy, spiritual influences in the myriad psycho-social crises we face today are considered. In fact, in Keppe’s experience, the spiritual component is more necessary.

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A few hundred years ago, the notions of heaven and hell, of God and Lucifer, were respected themes for composers, poets, and painters. Milton’s Paradise Lost contains the idea of Lucifer endeavoring to defeat Christ and regain his former position in paradise. Raphael captured the epic battle where the Archangel Michael vanquished Satan. Beethoven wrote of the desire of man to know God.

And then, somewhere along the way, the devil became largely erased as a factor in popular culture. Any modern educated person who considers the battle between the forces of dark and the forces of light as anything but a mythical allegory is considered … well, not modern today.

But of course, it still persists. The rumors of rock stars making the Faustian bargain still abound, the Rolling Stones had dire repercussions to Sympathy for the Devil at Altamont, and many modern pageants have demonic idolatry built right into their ceremonies.

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Oil and water. Black cats and white sweaters. Neckties and bowls of soup. Some things just aren’t made to go together. Like being given plastic cutlery at a Brazilian barbecue restaurant, they’re all a bit difficult to reconcile. Some more profound examples could include faith and doubt, humility and self-confidence. And what about God and science?

This is a prickly subject I’m embarking on here, I’m aware of that. But I feel I would be doing a dis-service if I didn’t address the subject. I say this because of the fundamental questions that can only be addressed if we wade into these controversial waters.

Questions like, what is the origin of life and the universe? What is the purpose of life anyway? And more existential even … why am I here? We can’t begin to tackle these questions without a consideration of today’s topic.

These questions don’t occupy our conversations much these days, if they ever did. The Facebook posts we read seldom broach the existential beyond the collective questioning we embark on after a tragedy occurs or a famous person dies. I was recently visiting my aging parents in Canada and their diminished quality of life has caused no small reflection on my own life and purpose. So there are times when we venture into the reverie that generates this discussion. Although it’s rare. Especially in recent years it appears. We’re not much for the deeper considerations in our materialistic and consumerist society of today, and I don’t think this has been positive. “What’s it all about, Alfie?” seems a faintly anachronistic and old-fashioned question today, doesn’t it?

Or is it that we’re just embarrassed to admit that we ponder those questions, admittedly late at night when no one’s watching? There’s precious little reflection of life’s mysteries in our modern art. The poets and song writers mostly seem intent on considering love only from the “how am I going to live without him or her?” position.

In that light, I just finished reading Leonard Cohen’s biography, and was touched by the deep yearning he has had over his long career to explore the profound and the profane, so I know it’s not completely uncool to pose the deeper questions.
Well, in fact, who cares if it’s uncool to be involved in understanding the human situation. I’m not sure when displaying profundity became unmodern, but I’m all for returning to a time when the artists considered they were conversing with the beyond and a human being wanted to consider his short life as fitting within some larger purpose and design.

In large part, I think what’s going on here is a result of the splitting of science from theology and philosophy over the past 500 years or so – culminating in our 20th Century position that there’s no way to marry the three. Science has become a strictly materialistic pursuit perfectly represented in Einstein’s famous formula – the most famous of the 20th Century – that E=mc2. In other words, no matter, no energy, making Einstein’s theory arguably one of the most materialistic in the history of science. I’m sure that wasn’t his intention, of course, but it’s hard to escape the stark materialism of his proposal.

It’s also difficult to distill a coherent spiritual philosophy from the Quantum Physics camp. Parallel realities. Alternate universes. Unlimited realities awaiting your choice to come into being. How to make sense of that in any practical way? I watched What the Bleep do we Know a couple of times and, I must confess, couldn’t make head or tails of it. It seems sexy to consider that universe a series of possibilities awaiting my choice before unfolding reality, but I somehow can’t quite conclude that reality actually bends to my will despite my wishing it so.

The Architect’s speech from Matrix Reloaded is a classic example of how confused we’ve become by this separation of science and theology. Critics call it “profound” but “confusing”. And it is that. Listen:

“The first matrix was perfect … flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure.”

What does that mean? And since when did confusing become profound? No, we need a better starting point than this. A starting place that can be found in the work of Norberto Keppe. His Analytical Trilogy is the synthesis of science, philosophy and theology that has been missing. Keppe considers philosophy to be the mother of science and theology the grandmother, and it’s very illuminating to look at reality through Analytical Trilogy eyes.

Let’s do that today … try to bring the incredible wisdom from 5000 years of theological and philosophical study back into science. Or at least, start the process of understanding that. Keppe’s books will fill out the knowledge. If you’re interested in more, write me at rich@richjonesvoice.com.

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One is kindly and bearded and knows your behavior for the whole year. He’s also present in the minds of millions of young ones by the time December rolls around.

The other is the definition of kindly. He’s also bearded and all knowing.

But here the comparison ends. Because, unfortunately for our souls, we don’t remember Jesus all that well.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, the True Father Christmas.

Like many born in Christian countries perhaps, I grew up with a clear knowledge of the Nativity story. I even played the black Wise Man in my Sunday School’s presentation many years ago where we used black shoe polish to tint my lily white skin. It was an unremarkable production, probably, that nobody but me and the odd other participant even remembers. But it was highly significant nonetheless because it was a version of a story that was being rehearsed and presented in churches large and small at around the same time all around the world. We were remembering in our humble ways the true reason for Christmas. And that made it beautiful.

I don’t even know if they still go to all that trouble in St. Peter’s Anglican Church in my hometown of Victoria, but I hope they haven’t given in to the politically correct mania of excising all the Christian customs in an attempt to make the people from other cultures feel more at home. It is, after all, our customs that make us unique from other cultures. If I’m traveling in Europe, I’m not there to experience Canadian ways of life after all. The ideal is cultural diversity, isn’t it? Not cultural homogenization.

Like I never understood all those British tourists going to the south of Spain and requesting egg and chips.

But this I’m talking about speaks to a bigger point, for it’s not the customs only that are in peril. It’s Christmas itself. Or at least the true Christmas, for the frantic, stressed, commercial, no-parking-in-sight one continues unabated.

So let’s try to explore the real Christmas spirit. And remember if we still can what the Being whose birthday we celebrate at this time was trying to teach us.

At a time in our history when our latest Nobel Peace Prize recipient brazenly prepares us to accept war by stating that we would not see an end to violent conflict in our lifetimes and that he was unable to be guided by the powerful and peaceful examples of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, we can do no better than to call on the example of the greatest of Beings … Jesus Christ.

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