The idea of Creation. The new atheists rail against that. "It's not rational," they insist. The product of a weak mind.

Yes, I've heard all that before. In fact, I'm quick to admit that may have been my mind some years ago. 

I say "may" because I'm not sure what I thought about the origins of all this we see around us in the natural world. I think I didn't give it so much thought actually. I remember looking on theological discourse as something out of date somehow. Like hardly pertinent in a modern world with more sophisticated concerns.

And now I can sheepishly acknowledge that I knew nothing about something I thought I knew everything about.

Well, a little humility goes a long way after all. And in Episode 2 of our Therapeutic Theology series, we delve into the nature of a Creation that comes and is sustained by an Intelligence. By a Being actually, Who has created us in His image.

Perfect knowledge for those who have the courage to admit they don't know it all yet.

Click here to listen to this episode.

 What we're trying to do in our new series here is offer a scientific analysis of spiritual phenomena, especially looking at mental illness and demonic possession. But not the demonic possession we see in the movies. Rather, we delve into the negative diabolical influence that’s a factor for all of us everywhere in our modern society. And this is totally a new approach, because the official exorcists and exorcism protocols have not included this transdisciplinary science that Dr. Keppe has developed. Which means that we are not treating this issue in our modern world. In fact, religions all over the world are not even speaking about the devil anymore. 

Keppe entered into the area of psychotherapy to try to treat clients individually and in group sessions in scientific ways. And this meant dealing not only with their economic, health, work and relationship problems, but with their existential or spiritual problems as well. 

And to do that, Keppe found materialistic psychoanalytical theories incomplete, and so he created his own interdisciplinary science. He called Analytical Trilogy, which he named for the union of science with philosophy and theology. So this is now not something that's only theological, only philosophical, only scientific, but all three of those aspects together, which gives it a lot of capacity to understand human problems and bring solutions.

Join us on what will be a fascinating journey into the human experience.

Click here to listen to our first episode.

Anyone who's been even peripherally involved in the self-help movement will be familiar with the literature promising solutions. The three steps to this, the pathways to that, the enumerated habits that lead to accomplishment or resolution or bliss. 

Finally

The great Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Dr. Norberto Keppe, is not of that persuasion. His work is deeply psychological and spiritual and works with each individual, treating specifically the problems of each one. Because while there are general psychopathologies we all exhibit -- like envy, pride, and megalomania -- how those manifest during the individual incidents in our lives is particular. 

So no formulas for Keppe. That being said, there are universal principles of a healthy and productive life that Keppe counsels. And habits based on those principles can truly bring fulfillment. We'll touch on one aspect of this in this episode. 

Self-development Requires Sacrifice, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. The debate between talent and hard work is a dynamic one. Is it raw talent that carries the day or practice and dedication that reigns? I remember deciding when I was 11 or so, on hearing my recorded singing voice played back on my cousin's new cassette recorder, that I couldn't sing.

How that marked my life, because I thought, wrongly, that you were born with singing talent or not.

Wish I could redo that decision.

Later in life, I heard about Vladimir Horovitz’s statement late in his life that if he hadn't practiced for one day, he would hear the difference. For two days, his wife would hear the difference. Three days with no practice, and the audience would notice.

A poster child for hard work.

Because becoming good at anything requires both talent and dedication, right? And probably not in equal measure. After all, we get in the way of our own success a lot, don't we?

Performance and Free Will, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Memories of paradise. That's not just a great dream sequence or catchy movie title. That's something that resonates through almost every culture on Earth. 

The Roman poet, Tacitus, wrote in the first century A.D. about how humans lived following the prompting of their own nature, which led to righteous actions.

In India, the story has been passed on of how all humans were saintly.

The Chinese sage, Chuang Tzu, wrote about an age of perfect virtue.

And of course, the Biblical story speaks about Eden, a Garden of harmony and peace and oneness with God.

In Portugal, there is a beautiful word that doesn't really have a translation into English: saudades. It means a state of deep yearning for someone or something that's absent, and "indolent dreaming wistfulness." 

This is what we feel in relation to Paradise. That memory resonates in our hearts and somehow is behind our drives to accomplish and improve.

Paradise as Reality, not Imagination, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Freud believed we were often influenced by memories, traumas and instincts we had repressed, but they influenced our behaviors anyway. He got there by studying hypnosis, analyzing dreams and paying attention to those slips of the tongue that reveal what we try to keep hidden. 

"No mortal can keep a secret," Freud maintained. "If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore." 

Poetic language that. And the idea has weaved its way into our modern psyche. All of us have used that excuse along the way. "Man, I was completely unconscious. What was I thinking?!"

The great Brazilian psychoanalyst, Norberto Keppe, has advanced Freud significantly with his concept of inconscientization. It's not that we're naturally full of hidden indecent desires and animal instincts. For Keppe, we banish from our consciousness what we don't want to admit. That means, we know what's going on, but we deny what we know. 

And that has serious consequences.

The Perils of Living Unconsciously, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.

There's an old Chinese phrase that goes, "It's better to be a dog in peaceful times than a man in a time of chaos." 

Wishful thinking, some may call that, for it's difficult to see peaceful times at any moment in human history. Most of us with a bit of life experience hearken back to when times were easier, and end up moralizing to any who will listen that our times back then were superior. And while that may be superficially true, it's not all that helpful. And complaining doesn't make the young fold feel any better.

In fact, your and old may just end up pointing fingers at each other as to who's to blame for the world as it is.

We'd like to dip our feet into those tumultuous waters in this podcast to suggest that all those lamentations and blame apportioning miss the fundamental point: we've been on an inverted path for millennia. We've reached the end of the road in a literal sense.

Can any sense be made of the correct way to go now?

Love, Consciousness and the Troubled World, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.

I've been in Brazil going on 24 years, using Norberto Keppe's psychotherapeutic methodology in education and communications, and also as a psychoanalyst at Keppe's school. The positive results available to anyone who studies with us and accepts the consciousness that comes through our classes and therapy sessions are noteworthy. From overcoming learning blocks to resolving long-standing or acute personal or professional conflicts to curing from medical conditions, Keppe's on to something.

Where Freud initiated psychoanalysis with the idea that neurosis was caused by cultural and moral values, and Jung wanted to integrate our shadow side into our personality, and Alfred Adler helped clients with their feelings of inferiority, Keppe has reached conclusions about the human problematic with his great discovery of inversion.

The Final Frontier of the human psyche, and the way to finally understanding ourselves and resolving our greatest problems. 

Inversion in Everyday Life, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Sometimes, when I have something important to do, I must confess I feel a little resistance. It's an interesting phenomenon because it's like a general lethargy. Like the energy has drained away and there's nothing left for the job at hand. In those moments, all sorts of other activities suddenly appear infinitely more appealing. 

YouTube's a quick click away, and the algorithms have numerous suggestions that seem interesting and even, if I'm honest, urgent.

And there's research to be done, too. New equipment for the studio or books on Amazon.

And hey, I haven't played my guitar in a while!

Not that any of these things are wrong, of course. It's just that they are far from more important than the project I need to work on.

Procrastination. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only guy plagued with that.

In fact, it's historical. Even St. Paul, prodigious achiever that he was notwithstanding, lamented about that. Let's see if we can get somewhere in looking at this.

Why Do I Do the Things I Don't Want, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Being upside down. Every kid loves that. Being hoisted up by the ankles and hanging there in your father's sure hands with your head where your feet should be.

It's great as a game, but none of us could imagine going through life that way.

But Norberto Keppe's discovery that humankind is inverted shows us how we are actually living life upside down. Not physically, but philosophically, emotionally and even spiritually.

We wage wars to find peace. Science considers apes to be our relatives. We consume billions in pharmaceuticals thinking that'll make us healthy.

And what's more, we accept these inversions as if they're workable approaches to living functioning lives. 

It's not an overstatement, then, to say that the discovery of Inversion is the most important scientific finding of the 20th century. Why it's not more widely known is a phenomenon we're trying to address on our STOP Radio Network with our slogan, "Disinverting the human being and society."

So, let's go at it again. The Science of Inversion, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Working with clients in psychoanalysis, one of the hardest tasks is helping them to see the negative things they do without realizing it. Self-destructive habits, procrastination of important activities, reckless or careless behaviors -- these all have causes from deep inside that we can't get to without help.

Freud mistakenly linked these to what he called Thanatos -- a death drive -- proposing that we had a drive of destruction directed against life. Freud saw it as a complement to the life drive -- Eros -- and he saw both as part of our nature.

That's a tough one to wrap your head around.

But chew on this: Freud was an atheist. The idea of a struggle between life and nothingness was probable for him. Keppe, though, takes us back a step: we're not programmed for death, so to speak. We're infused with and immersed in life and goodness. Happiness and success is our natural inheritance then. Keppe's eminently hopeful perspective sees problems and anguish as common, but not inevitable parts of nature. 

For Keppe, what goes wrong circles back to human doings -- both individually and collectively. Our problem lies in psychological inversion; in a strange way, we're attracted to the dark side, and often repulsed by the good.

Not by nature, then, but by choice.

An even more difficult thing to wrap your head around then.

The Inverted Pleasure in Evil, our episode this time on Therapeutic Theology.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Maybe, like me when I first moved to Brazil, you have the idea that metaphysics is a kind of woo-woo field of study. That part of the bookstore with titles like Find Your Soulmate through Channelling, or Unlocking Your Invisible Power.

True metaphysics, though, is a branch of philosophy that deals with what's beyond the physical. Those elusive subjects like being and knowing, action and potential. The Greeks knew a thing or two about that, but somewhere along the way, the science of things that transcended the physical got reduced to just the things.

Norberto Keppe, the Brazilian psychoanalyst and independent physics researcher, has worked tirelessly to restore a true study of metaphysics - those universals we got from a Creator. Returning us to a transcendental vision of humanity and putting us in touch with God and Creation.

We'll look at that today. Metaphysics and the Empty Promise of AI, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this program.

Today, a conversation with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco about living in the spiritual world. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.

It was the Police back in the early '80s that approached the subject of us being spirits in a material world. A typically spare and rhythm driven track that was catchy and infectious. They were an interesting band.

But, while they were observing the bleak political situation we lived in, it may have been no more than the complaining of youth searching for an answer but with no solutions to offer.

After all, criticism is not change, is it?

I remember back in that time going through my own social protest period, writing anti-nuke radio ads and joining numerous environmental groups in the naive belief that made me part of the solution, not part of the problem.

I'm much more sophisticated about social change today, recognizing that the evil we accuse the system of power of resides in us all. And especially more cognizant that there's a formidable spiritual influence on top of us constantly. And most of us have no idea about that. So let's dive into that spiritual wisdom.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Dr. Norberto Keppe, the developer of the psychoanalytical science used by Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco on this podcast, has written extensively about sociopathology, which is the application of psychological conditions to society at large. 

Quite innovative really. So, as we might analyze an individual's neurotic response to an everyday situation, we could also recognize an equally neurotic law or institutional bureaucratic hurdle.

Our modern society is displaying psychotic tendencies even in our continued use of war and terrorism to resolve conflicts. We live on a beautiful planet that offers abundance or everything we need to live well, and we destroy it or dominate it to have power and so deprive others of it, etc. etc. All the litany of problems we see on the planet are evidence of our pathological attitudes and even institutions.

Our analysis session today deals with one person's attempts to reconcile the difficulty in trying to fit in to a very unhealthy American society. And how turning that pathology back on herself demonstrates a strong suicidal attitude.

Click here to listen to this episode.

We are always, in our programs, trying to get to the psychological and spiritual causes behind our physical and emotional problems. It's a journey that Norberto Keppe's Integral Psychoanalysis is well positioned to embark on

Keppe has synthesized Freud's psychoanalytical methodology, Melanie Klein's observations on envy and gratitude, classical German psychiatric findings on megalomania and arrogance, Socrates' dialectics, and Aquinas' discussion of the perfect inner structure of man with his own discoveries of Inversion and psycho-socio pathology that lead us to oppose what's good in and around us.

This, I think, is unique in his work: we are good by nature, by Creation, but we have attitudes against that constantly. And we need means of becoming conscious of that or it will dominate us.

In today's episode, a fascinating conversation that leads a man to see that the family abuse he suffered he's now unconsciously continuing on himself because of a total blindness to his own weakness. Here's Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco to set the table.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Our latest podcast initiative is an attempt to create a forum for people to call or write with critical recent or long-standing issues they've never been able to adequately resolve and move on from.

Those habits or patterns of response you've never fully understood. You know there's something unresolved moving below the surface that's affecting your health or relationships or professional performance - or sometimes, all three - and you just can't get a handle on, and so they operate invisibly in your life.

We're here to help you with that. In a safe and anonymous way. Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco will lead you through a psychoanalytical process that touches into those roadblocks and helps free you up. Real therapy that doesn't gloss over or offer pat formulas.

Anything burning in your experience? joneshealing@gmail.com. We're waiting for your questions and comments.

Let's join Dr. Pacheco in her online therapy session today - an important one, treating an issue that needs treatment. 

Post-traumatic stress disorder.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Are there any of us completely free of what happened in our upbringing? I was joking with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco after the therapy session you're about to listen to about how I was relating to today's client. She's dealing with fear of judgment, and I can relate to that feeling of pressure in social situations. 

As Dr. Pacheco will discuss today, there's a lot of internalization that we do of the demanding and censoring environment we grew up in that's at play here. The brilliance of the Integral Psychoanalysis we use here in our Therapy Online Series is how we are brought to see how that has become a demanding nature that we've continued in our lives.

So we're not stuck in that victim posture of being only a product of what happened to us, but a continuation. Something we now do to ourselves mostly unconsciously.

It's fascinating stuff, as you're about to hear with Dr. Pacheco and today's client.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Adolescents and their parents. Who doesn't have a story about that? I sometimes wonder how any of us survive our adolescence.

And I would extend that as I've gotten older to wondering how our parents survived our adolescence. Premature grey hair is probably the least serious consequence. 

We are embarking on this journey to discover how the therapeutic application of the science of Dr. Norberto Keppe can help people.

Like you. I mean, who of us doesn't have sometimes long-standing issues that have never been adequately resolved. Sometimes we're hyper aware of them - things like addictions or recurring psycho-somatic health problems. Sometimes we're vaguely conscious of them - there are vivid dreams or unsettling emotions gnawing at us in those quiet moments. Many times we've pushed them down firmly out of sight into the nowhere land of unconsciousness where they foment away unbeknownst to us but still impacting our lives and behaviors in subtle ways. 

These are the things we want to help you with in this podcast. Any area of your life you think is not in the shape you think it should be is grist for this therapeutic mill. Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco and I await your request to join us in our therapy for the world initiative at joneshealing@gmail.com.

Today, Dr. Pacheco talks to a mother who's been estranged from her son for the past 15 years.

Click here to listen to this episode.

A number of years ago, I initiated a series of call-in shows to deal with real life problems - from new work initiatives to relationship challenges, even to drug abuse, death and suicide. Those everyday situations that hit all of us. 

Integral Psychoanalysis is the name of the therapy we do form our clinic in São Paulo. And it goes out to the world through our psychoanalysts who attend clients in person and online, reaching people all around the world.

That's no small thing. And have been personally helped by Norberto Keppe's psychoanalytical method for the past 22 years, I have always felt there's a tremendous need to get this out to the world. So I'm re-kindling our previous idea and opening up our online therapy sessions again.

And you're invited. If you have a long-standing issue you'd like to treat anonymously, our Healing Through Consciousness call-in therapy show is for you. Just write me at joneshealing@gmail.com and I'll set it up.

Today, a listener is looking for help with traumas from past relationships that are blocking her even today.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to read the PDF.

Inversion. It's a recent 20th century discovery by the brilliant Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Dr. Norberto Keppe. 1977 to be precise. So, if you hear about our modern inversion of values, you can be sure that's come into today's lexicon because of years of effort from Keppe and his team, who work tirelessly to bring consciousness of the root psycho-social causes of human malevolence and destruction. Seems we're inverted from our original good, beautiful and true essence. And that inversion causes us to do the weirdest and most pernicious things while thinking we're acting honorable.

How else to explain why every technological development we launch causes us to creep ever closer to wiping out everything? We're inverted, so we destroy nature to make money and capture energy, we desperately look for fulfillment through possessions and mutual funds, we churn out new machines that kill and main while insisting we're looking for peace.

Understanding more about inversion gives us - finally - both an explanation for what's gone so wrong in the human experience, and a means of treating ourselves and returning to our original nature. 

Today, Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco and inversion.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to download the PDF.

Welcome to the, I suspect, final episode in our Healing Through Consciousness series. It'll be the final curtain for this series. Unless I discover more pearls from past programs that are relevant, of course.

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and I've been working through old episodes of my Thinking with Somebody Else's Head podcasts and re-editing them into shorter programs based on single themes. The first foray into that forma was on our Modern Relevance of God 17-part series, which, by the way, had been turned into an actual book now. Pretty proud of that. And I'm working on a book from this series, too. More on that to come.

Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco and I considered a painful email from a listener on our last Healing Through Consciousness episode. A woman struggling with the mortality of her dear sister. And Dr. Claudia offered some wonderful words of consolation about the passage from this mortal coil to the everlasting eternal life of the soul - words that are relevant for all of us in this temporal world. 

Today, I'd like to take another extract from that longer program to deal with another vital area of the process of death. Something we all would do well to consider. And that is that many times, we're not only suffering from the physical loss of someone dear to us, but also from the consciousness their death brings to us of something related to ourselves.

So to help our listener deal with what she referred to as the state of shock, sadness, disbelief, and blind fear and terror she feels at the impending death of her dear sister, let's turn once again to Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to read the PDF.

Back in the 1950s, the CIA and Kremlin got it into their collective heads that figuring out how to brainwash and modify human behavior was a good idea.

Totally illegally, of course. And damaging to any who were submitted to their personality control experiments.

Out of this abusive and paranoid climate came such films as The Manchurian Candidate and Wormwood and even Jason Bourne.

Some have linked various high profile murderers to mind control experiments, but it's difficult to get any final conclusions on those. The whole subject is very secretive, and you get the feeling if you go down that rabbit hole of really sleazy, dark and evil intentions masquerading as national security imperatives.

In Norberto Keppe's scientific work, there is an even more nefarious program going on here on Earth - and it's been happening since the dawn of time. Demonic Mind Control.

And just like it's difficult to find out about those shadowy CIA and Kremlin programs, it's also difficult to find out much about the shady activities occurring on the transcendental plane. And largely for the same reasons - subterfuge. For just as the security agencies hide and deny and obfuscate, so do the spiritual ones. We'll bring some of this spiritual aspect to light today.

Demonic Mind Control, our Therapeutic Theology episode today.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Welcome to our continuing Healing Through Consciousness podcast series. Just when you thought it was over. Fitting we'll be addressing death today in Episode 13. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.

Death. Such a downer, isn't it? The final curtain. The choir invisible. Kicking the bucket. 

Except it's much more complex than that, don't you think? My sister tells a story of going into the mountains for a solo picnic shortly after our dear mother died, and a huge crow stole her bag lunch, flew off a few meters, and then landed and turned to stare at her. She was convinced it was mom sending her a signal.

A student of mine tells of being followed for blocks walking down the street by a beautiful butterfly the day after his beloved grandfather died.

These are mysteries of cold coincidence for materialistic scientists, but resonate at another level for the rest of us. 

But for many, death is an unapproachable subject. As inevitable as it is, it still freaks us out. Is there anything to say about death that can be healing and comforting?

I think, "Yes!" Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco and I received an email from a listener some years ago broaching the shock, sadness and disbelief she was experiencing with the impending death of her dear - and still young - sister. What could be said to help her? For that, we turn to Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to download the PDF.

Beginning a new series today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head - Therapy for the World. In fact, this is the slogan of our Keppe & Pacheco Trilogical Colleges in Brazil, where we teach the science of Analytical Trilogy developed by Norberto Keppe and Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

Today, an interview with Susan Berkley, president of the Great Voice Co. in New York. Susan's an accomplished broadcaster, best-selling author of Speak to Influence: How to Unlock the Hidden Power of Your Voice, and coach to thousands of voiceover actors and presenters in all formats - from video to podium to online conferences and seminars. She's a leadership and training consultant, the signature voice of Citibank and, in a personal aside, the one who introduced me to Dr. Norberto Keppe's work. So, in a large and significant way, Susan's instrumental in my being here in Brazil and working at the Keppe & Pacheco Colleges. I sat down with Susan recently to talk about communication.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to download the PDF. 

We’ve been focusing on more specific health situations in our series lately, and we’ll continue that today with an expansive look at eating disorders. You may know someone dealing with this neurosis – it’s all too common today – and you’ll find an abundance of treatments for this – most of them physical and ranging from highly elaborate nutritional plans to pills to acupuncture to removing part of the stomach.

And the explanations for the problem are diverse as well. But the view explored from the psycho-somatic department of the Keppe & Pacheco Trilogical College offers a deeper perspective too often missing from the conversation.

Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco heads up that department, expertly oriented by Dr. Norberto Keppe, 94 and still active and adding to his remarkable science daily. Dr. Pacheco joins us again today.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to download the PDF.

In the early part of the 20th century, a non-medical educator was hired by the Carnegie Foundation to report on the state of medical education in North America. Abraham Flexner wrote a book concluding that there were too many bad medical schools, too much non-scientific quackery and curricula that were all over the place. Specifically, there was a lack of application of the scientific method in medical education in general.

The report led to the closing of many so-called medical schools in America – some of which were apparently no more than proprietary for-profit trade schools run by one or more doctors. Flexner’s work ended study in alternative health treatments like homeopathy, traditional osteopathy and any physio-medicine using botanical therapies that had not been scientifically tested.

And, of course, medical education came firmly under the control of the American Medical Association.

All that focus on the scientific method took spirituality out of medicine – and science – as well, something Norberto Keppe has spent a lifetime addressing in his Trilogical psychosomatics. Today, an expansive meditation on the spirituality of health, with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to download the PDF.

I’m a product of the ‘60s and ‘70s. I saw guys trying to homestead in the woods of Vancouver Island as I was walking to a favorite swimming hole. I remember the distinctive smell of those funny cigarettes permeating the summer air. I thought they were struggling to find something.

I also remember some idiot slipping a hit of acid into a friend’s brother’s drink at a party, and watching the ensuing bad trip play out horribly in front of us all.

Our question from a listener today addresses those two points. He writes, “I have classified drugs into two categories: mind numbing drugs, like cocaine, tobacco, heroin, alcohol, et cetera, and mind opening drugs, like peyote, cannabis, mushrooms, etc. While the mind-numbing drugs have been found to be dangerous and highly addictive. the mind opening drugs have been used for centuries and show no signs of addiction or even lasting health problems with repetitious use. Does Dr. Keppe acknowledge this distinction between these drugs? If so, what is Dr. K's view of the spirit worlds that the mind opening drugs seem to unlock? Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco is with us again today.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to download the PDF.

What is an addictive personality? You’ll see all sorts of definitions if you Google that! From addiction being a learning disorder, to a passion for something gone wrong, to the more serious diagnosis that it’s a character disorder, it’s difficult to get a final word on this all-too-common behavior.

I’ve been around my share of addictive behavior, including a favorite uncle who beat his battle with the bottle courageously and, I think, cold turkey, and lived out the rest of his life as a functional and responsible contributor to society. I remember him with great affection.

But it’s in the treatment of addiction that we really find out what’s going on. However, that treatment must involve helping the addicted individual move out of the modern mania of seeing all problems as having outside causes. Dr. Keppe once told me that healing only comes through interiorization, which is the process of helping people begin to have contact with what’s going on inside them. This is a prominent aspect of any psychoanalysis session with Dr. Keppe’s Integral Psychoanalysis.

We’ll see anther wonderful example of that today with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco talking to Jen, who’s trying to understand how to help her family. 

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to read the PDF.

Well, this is a relevant – and disturbing – topic for any who’ve experienced its devastating effects. The thought of someone taking his or her own life can leave us bewildered and even horrified. How could someone do that?, we wonder. And why? And when we see it happening in teenagers and young adults, we’re even more mystified. They’ve got their whole lives ahead of them, we reason. And while that’s true, it seems that opting out is becoming an increasingly common choice in many countries around the world – particularly in the so-called developed world. Lucky you are if you haven't been touched by this one. The guilt and anger that resides in the ones left behind is a real thing. 

Freud put forward that suicide was a result of aggression turned inwards, while Jung offered complex thoughts and ideas about the psyche's journey needing to go through the totality of experience, and while all of that may play a part, it doesn’t really help us in understanding and dealing with suicide. 

Norberto Keppe’s science of Integral Psychoanalysis is, in my view, uniquely equipped to deal with all psychological, emotional and spiritual crises, and in today’s program, a real-life case study with a frequent listener to our programs, Jane, who brings her particular challenge in dealing with suicide. 

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to read the PDF.

This is Episode 7 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. This time, a clinical look at a modern mental health crisis. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

We’ve been laying a foundation for a more psychological and even spiritual approach to health and healing in our first 6 episodes of this series. That’s been important. But Norberto Keppe and Claudia Pacheco’s work in psychosomatic healing is not just conceptual. There’s a vast history of clinical therapeutic treatment of a wide range of physical and mental health disease conditions at the Integral Psychoanalysis center here in Brazil. From depression – our topic today – to cancer to spiritual crises, this is a very robust treatment methodology with impressive success rates over many years. And we’ll dive into an exploration of what’s behind depression in this episode, but first, an overview of Keppe’s approach to psychoanalysis, with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to download the PDF.

Today on Episode 6 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, we’ll look at the effect our minds have on our immune system. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

One of the consequences of Louis Pasteur’s Germ Theory was the inevitable fear that outside us lurk nefarious elements waiting for their opportunity to pounce. Deadly viruses and germs in birds and pigs and now bats and monkeys are lining up to show us their stuff, and it’s possible they’ve been strengthened by genetic mutations in secret labs.

Gain of Function research is what that’s called, and it’s essentially the process of genetically altering pathogens to make them more infectious.

You heard that right. Making them more infectious. The justification given is that this will allow for the creation of effective anti-viral medicines before the virus appears from nature. So … just to get that straight: Gain of Function research means creating the virus before it even exists. 

Reminds me of the old Monty Python routine about the secret Welsh art of self-defense that counsels you to attack your enemy before the thought of attacking you has even entered his mind.

Because it’s the same rationale, isn’t it? And it’s a little disturbing, not least because the paranoia created by viewing the danger outside increases our fear, and subsequently diminishes our immune system response. 

Today, I’m joined by Cesar Soós, the lead researcher in the New Physics Department of our Keppe & Pacheco College, to look at how the mind is important in our immune system.

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This is episode 4 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones. 

From the time we're young, we're taught to protect our lives from nature. Sprays to keep off the bugs, oils to block the harmful rays, potent cleansers to ward off the offending bacteria waiting to take up residence in the bathroom.

And don’t even think about eating that bread that dropped on the floor.

Nature is often a savage place, we're shown on Discovery Channel documentaries, where evil microbes lurk expectantly, waiting for us to let down our guard for a split second before pouncing. 

You wonder where the vaunted human immune system goes in situations like these, and how hugging your grandmother came to be so dangerous. Well, there are huge financial interests behind this idea that the danger lies outside. We need vaccines to protect us from outside enemies, and some estimates put combined vaccine company profits at some $65,000 per minute. We’ve accepted toxic pesticides as necessary to deal with pesky plagues, and there are obvious implications for human and eco-system health associated with that. Our multi-billion-dollar drug industry to treat symptoms can often exacerbate serious disease conditions. 

We don’t want to branch off into conspiracy theory here, but medical education in the West today is notorious for training doctors that pharma solutions are the only option. And pharma lives on treating outside invasions or faulty hormones, chemical imbalances and deficient organs. 

However, just to throw a significant alternative spanner into the works, Drs. Keppe and Pacheco have been working for decades on treating physical, mental and even social infirmity through a potent form of psycho-socio therapy. And their work suggests strongly that disease doesn't come principally from outside us at all. In their clinic, disease is largely an interior condition, while the modern medical and drug establishment makes its money, and consolidates its hold on treatment and treatment narratives, by provoking fear of what’s going on outside. And they call the shots today. The consequences, however, make us sicker. Here’s Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

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Dr. Keppe has said many times over the more than 2 decades I've been here in Brazil studying and working with him that no one is good alone. That means we act from influencers in our lives -- and I don't mean the social media kind. Friends and family, lovers and mentors, teachers and priests and padres -- all have had their positive effect on us.

And then, since we're dealing with theology in this series, we have to consider the influence of spiritual forces, too. Those transcendental bodies, like guardian angels and souls that have passed on but reach back through the ether to inspire and direct us.

Beethoven used to say that God was shouting in his head, and the only thing that gave him any relief was to write it down.

And just look at the legacy that left us!

The other side of that statement about not being good alone, of course, is that we're not bad alone either. Negative influences are listened to in our society, from envious critique offered freely at the water cooler at work, to oft observed corruption in social institutions, to individuals demonstrating "flexible" morals. 

And then there is demonic suggestion. Much discarded in our modern world, of course, but well accepted in some theological circles.

Following those negative impulses from within and without leads us to some crazy behavior -- the kind that causes us to cringe when we look back at it. And it also causes guilt. Which is good because it shows us we still have a moral compass. 

But it doesn't feel all that great, which is why we try to rationalize it away or excuse ourselves or, more seriously, drown it in whiskey.

The voice we hear in those moments when we are tempted to fall is important to understand. Not admitting our guilt and responsibility can lead to some sleepless nights. Or even panic attacks and phobias. But maybe, accusations that are not entirely our own. 

Silencing the Accuser in this episode of Therapeutic Theology.

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From the psychosomatic department of the Keppe & Pacheco Colleges, this is episode 3 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

It’s been very interesting to live through this pandemic time, hasn’t it? In the face of a real worldwide challenge, it’s been illuminating to watch how health has taken a back seat to fear. Panic, I think we could say, has largely driven our political and social responses to infection, and this seems to have trumped any reliance on a robust immune response, which used to be the policy of choice for dealing with infectious disease situations. 

And, of course, we must always pay attention to the cynical manipulation of this fear to sell medicines and vaccines and other products to protect us from this outside danger.

In the face of all this, we’ve shifted from a faith in the robustness of human health and potent immune response to a philosophy of trying to protect the massive human population from exposure – a change from believing in the power of nature to trepidation at the dominance of disease.

This just seems inferior – tantamount to an athlete’s misguided response to challenge by playing not to lose instead of going for it with vigor and conviction.

As some progressive health professionals are acknowledging, though, disease doesn’t begin outside; the roots of physical disease lie inside. The soul, actually, gets sick before the body. Welcome to Episode 3 with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco. 

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From the psychosomatic department of the Keppe & Pacheco Colleges, this is episode 2 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

Our first episode was spent laying out some credentials of our College’s psychosomatic vision and pedigree. And I want to stress that our discussions here in these episodes are based on solid clinical case studies, as you’ll see throughout our series. And where we’re coming from is this: good health is a natural state. In philosophy, great thinkers like Augustine and Plotinus and Aquinas proposed that evil, unlike good, is insubstantial. So thinking of evil as a substantial entity is incorrect. All those years ago, the consideration was that evil is the privation of good, and even that evil is non-existent.

That’s difficult to accept, but it’s meant in the sense of the nature of life being good, and problems or pain or cruelty being nothing but attitudes against that inherent goodness. In terms of our health, then, sickness could be a kind of proof of something we’re doing against our health. Individually and collectively, of course. We can see this as attitudes or habits we adopt that work against our natural health, like a propensity for junk food or the destruction of our natural food with toxic chemicals, as I mentioned in episode 1.

Seen this way, sickness represents a distortion of health, not a naturally occurring situation at all. A challenging idea, which dramatically changes how we approach health and the treatment of disease.

Let’s tread into those exciting waters on our episode today with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

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Welcome to our new series on the Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head podcast. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

We’re calling this series Healing Through Consciousness. An abstract title, perhaps. In our western civilization, with its over-emphasis on the material solutions for disease of pills, surgery, vaccines, righting our chemical imbalances and tweaking our diets, it’s possible we’ve diminished the importance of the most crucial aspect in our human quest for health and longer life: our vast inner universe of feelings and perceptions, values and philosophy of life, intuition and consciousness.

This is the psychological life, meaning psyche or soul as the Greeks considered it. 

Now we’re not suggesting, of course, that diet and exercise and good habits have no place. That would be foolish. What we are suggesting is that those good habits come from an inner equilibrium and sanity that spring from a healthy psyche. Exploring the pathway to that inner health is what we’re attempting here in this series.

So our contention is that our outer world of laws and norms and habits is a reflection of our inner beliefs and attitudes. If we have a predominance of chemically treated, non-organic, genetically modified food, that’s coming from an inverted mentality that puts corporate profits above human health – and that’s a psychological problem long before it becomes an economic one.

Our work in this series comes from decades of scientific discoveries and practice that are a product of the great psychoanalysts and social scientists, Dr. Norberto Keppe and Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco, both of whom have a peerless pedigree in psychosomatic medicine. Keppe worked for years at the largest university hospital in Latin America, the Hospital das Clinicas in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Pacheco, the daughter of a prominent Brazilian physician, wrote a seminal book on psycho-somatic healing that give us the title for our series, Healing Through Consciousness. Both are highly sought-after international psychoanalysts and founders of the Keppe & Pacheco Trilogical Colleges that are offering cutting edge university programs in psycho-somatic medicine, environmental management, clinical theology, arts and education.

It’s a potent, transdisciplinary approach, as Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco explains here in our first episode.

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Welcome to Episode 17 – our final episode – of the Modern Relevance of God Podcast Series on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. 

You know, as I think about it, 17 is kind of an odd number for the final episode in a series about spirituality, isn't it? It's not particularly a number of completion ... although I guess adding one and seven together equals eight and eight brings balance between the material and spiritual worlds in Numerology, so maybe that's something. But I'm not much one for the esoteric in these things anyway – a holdover from an upbringing rooted in practicality-as-the-correct-path in life. I've wanted this series to be as down to Earth as possible in my desire to illustrate how God is relevant in our modern world, which has been severely stripped of spirituality through a domination of positivistic science and robust materialism and all the other things we've discussed in these episodes. In that light, our series, which considers more archaic wisdom that has been largely dismissed in modern thought, is like a throwback.

And a large part of our series has been our attempt to rescue that ancient wisdom as still relevant in our world. After all, the fundamental questions of human existence still remain don't they? And if you don't find yourself wondering about the meaning of it all from time to time, I suspect you're in the minority. Norberto Keppe though, who has not spoken directly in these episodes but whose voice echoes through every moment of them, saw very early on in his work, that human problems were profoundly spiritual, much more related to philosophy than material. After all, if we've elaborated any structures or followed any way of doing things, that's come from a way of seeing things. And if we've seen things wrongly, if we've embarked on individual or collective organization from a skewed perspective, we're going to wind up with out of whack institutions and laws and practices.

Norberto Keppe's discovery of inversion, which we discussed back in episode two, is the missing link here. The one which allows us to reintegrate theological and philosophical wisdom back into science, so that scientific practicality can expand to providing really significant understanding of our human experience. True transdisciplinarity, I think. Through understanding that we're inverted, we can admit that we've rejected God because we've mixed Him up with religious institutions and considered all that irrelevant, evidence of inferior minds, unimportant in a world that's evolved beyond these superstitions. 

But exactly the opposite is required if we're to right things on this planet and restore our society to its original state: Paradise Regained in the ancient consideration, the Promised Land. In our final episode, let's consider what practical spirituality would look like in these troubled times with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

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We've been attempting in this series to make the scientific case for the relevance of a more theological consciousness in our everyday lives. Along the way, I've been impressed with what Dr. Joseph Ghougassian elaborated in the preface he wrote to Keppe's book, Glorification that if we have religions in the world, this must be because of a metaphysical dimension in us. "Worshiping is natural to the soul," he wrote, "And not something imposed by institutions." Otherwise it wouldn't have been so practiced through the millennia, long before we built churches to formalize the ceremonies. This goes deep to the nature of faith, then, and the acknowledgement that anyone acting morally or ethically is doing it out of a belief that it's important, regardless of whether the moral practitioner is a member of any congregation or not.

And what is faith anyway? Fidelity to the truth, goodness, love, beauty for one thing, although our relativism muddies the waters with questions about who defines the truth and who has the final say on beauty? Keppe describes faith as the direct knowledge of the essence. And you have to have a metaphysical view of a correct and initial beautiful reality to grasp that abstraction, not an emergence from the primal mud and alterations over mutations in time. That latter won't arrive at any satisfactory conclusions for understanding the big religious questions that percolate in all of us, irrespective of dogma or belief. Faith, then, provides the answers that reason cannot achieve by itself. 

Tennyson wondered about that:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,

Whom we, that have not seen thy face,

By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

Believing where we cannot prove;

Now, I recognize that the "show me the money" practicalists listening might bristle at that, but I take heart that anyway, you're still listening. And that indicates another level of acceptance at work than just the grey matter between the ears. I've been there and put together this episode to try to address those tendencies of painting spirituality and religion with the same brush. Let's distinguish them in this episode, again with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

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I've been impressed in my personal journey of discovery with the rational arguments for the existence of God throughout history, by Augustine and Anselm, and more recently, as I mentioned back in episode 11, by the logical argument for Jesus elaborated by Oxford's C.S. Lewis. They all make provocative reading. 

But for me, a devout and believe-it-when-I-see-it modern materialist, it wasn't until Brazil and the surprising revelations of my latent hidden spirituality that unveiled during the psychoanalysis and study with Claudia Pacheco and Norberto Keppe that I began to understand in an elementary way the essential relevance of theology in my life. Keppe writes about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and even demons in a lucid, practical, scientific way that's very tangible - especially when accompanied by studying his profound work and exploring reactions to it through the interior exploration provided by personal psychoanalysis. 

Keppe's books, Glorification and The Universe of the Spirits were turning points for me - Glorification even being marked for publication in the U.S. before being ultimately turned down by the editorial board of a large and prestigious publishing company. Keppe wrote in Glorification that any discussion about what is obvious is a waste of time. Keppe maintains that we reject the obviousness of a creator because of our extreme envy, which causes us to invert our perception, rejecting, ignoring, or distorting reality and denying the true spiritual and material riches that God has created. Religion, after all, in the true sense of the word, which means to bind, to reconnect, religion is within us. And that inner journey can lead to some surprising revelations, let me tell you that. 

Our episode today was another eye-opener for me back when Claudia Bernhard Pacheco and I talked about it in a far-reaching discussion for this series. The importance to humanity of the Holy Mother, in today's episode. 

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Welcome to Episode 14 of the Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.

My dad used to say the problem with the human being was we were born without an owner's manual. I used to nod in agreement, but now I'm pretty sure my father was a little simplistic in his understanding. To be fair, I think he meant it in a lighthearted way, a joshing comment not meant to be scrutinized as to its theological accuracy. But like all things related to my spiritual understanding, I have to respectfully disagree with my dad's conclusion. For not only do we have numerous written documents outlining correct behavior one with another and nation to nation, we have the universal knowledge deep in us from birth guiding us to act in conformity with the principles of goodness, truth and beauty. We feel ashamed when we're caught in a lie. We recognize and feel repugnance towards injustice. We try to hide our peccadillos.

Universal knowledge, "infused" Plato called it, is in us from birth. "The one in many" is how it's defined and these universal principles come to us intact and complete. And they form the basis of everything we do in society that's right - from personal commitments, to looking after our health, to negotiating business deals. "The fingerprints of God in the human soul," is how Keppe defines it.

And we have examples to follow, too. Just in the last century, we witnessed grace and generosity in the face of injustice in Gandhi and King and Mandela. We have saints throughout history who were more virtuous than normal. So virtuous their bodies lie uncorrupted - in defiance of the usual process of returning to ashes and dust. 

And we have the greatest example of all time in the life of Jesus. More than a great moral teacher - and he was certainly that - Jesus reminded us of what it was to be a true human being, elevating us to our correct level. Let's delve into that now, with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

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Welcome to episode 13 of the Modern Relevance of God audio course here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.

As I’ve been developing this series, I have to admit I’ve been wondering about the acceptance of its premise in the English-speaking world. Living in Brazil for the past 20 years has coloured my perceptions and tastes in ways I wasn’t expecting. My Anglo-Saxon feeling of assumed superiority has been challenged here in surprising ways. I imagined the typical cultural challenges of language and bureaucracy and doing the exchange in my head about the cost of stuff. I traveled to Europe for long stretches back in my backpacking years after all, but now have come to understand the difference between those mostly tourist concerns and the deeper questionings and soul searching that mark the real existential stirring provoked by making home somewhere else.

I can characterize this with a story. One of my Brazilian colleagues at the language school I work with here in Brazil was giving a Portuguese class for foreigners one day. A diverse group: an American, a couple of Colombians, a guy from Argentina and a young woman from France. One of the Colombians was talking about his spiritual and religious beliefs in one class, openly expressing his reverence for life and God. The French woman rolled her eyes dismissively and uttered something in French about how backward this was. To her surprise, my colleague speaks French, and to her greater surprise, he jumped in immediately with a gentle rebuke. “No, no,” he said. “We’re in Brazil now. Here we don’t ridicule people for their beliefs.” 

It must have been a sobering moment for the European, a consciousness that on this question of tolerance, Brazil is light years ahead of the rest of the world.

Well, exactly that cultural arrogance has also been challenged in me. My worldview, nurtured at the breast of a secular education which indoctrinated me in modernization and often vehement criticism of religious consideration in human affairs, has been challenged here. Especially in Norberto Keppe’s science, which I’ve been deeply studying and working with. This is a science based on extensive clinical practice that doesn’t exclude philosophy or spirituality in treating human beings, and it’s brought ample opportunities to question my deep-seated biases and personal philosophies. At the end, I’ve found basic fundamentals of my philosophy of life inadequate and even profoundly wrong in the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment. 

One of these wrong ideas is corrected in this episode, with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

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This is episode 12 of the Modern Relevance of God audio course here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.

I think one of the greatest difficulties I've had in coming closer to spirituality has been a pretty common one: mixing up God with religion. If God was all the mess stirred up by the church over the centuries, I wanted nothing to do with Him. It's a frequent oversimplification, one which doesn't require that much thinking actually. Just a knee jerk generalization in the same vein as all Chinese people look the same. And just as lacking in sophistication. 

God never created a church after all. Neither did Jesus. This is something we do a lot. A phrase uttered by a politician whose party we don't like is worthless and evil, by definition. The Montreal Canadians are hated by Toronto Maple Leafs fans automatically. 

And vice versa. 

I heard a Serbian soldier in Bosnia back in the war years there say, "The Croatians are animals. I can't even bear to breathe the same air as them." And that after centuries of integration and intermarriage. 

We have this black and white mentality, which serves us well in life threatening situations: "The fire is there, so I'm going over here," but this on/off, zero/one digital mind is very poor at the more complex and subtle abstractions we require when considering meaning of life questions. So lumping God and religion together as one pathological partnership to be vehemently discarded is a little too smug. 

Anyway, I want to suggest that this attack is not only against the Church; it's against the spiritual values that the church — for all its faults — preserves for us. And that is much more problematic.

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How many times have you heard this phrase: "I don't believe in God anymore because how could a loving God allow all this misery on Earth?" Usually it's a Bruce Willis-like character in a war zone in some desolate African country squinting his eyes and muttering weightily, "God abandoned this place a long time ago."

The writers mean this to be profound. a world-weary comment on the state of Man, but it's really overly simplistic. After all, is it God’s hand working in evil and terror, or Man’s? Isn't it a little unethical of us to blame God for actions we've been taking for millennia? Like the serial killer who blames his victims for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, blaming God for our wars and cruelty also avoids the crucial missing condition: our participation. After all, if the hammer is only a tool that can be used for good or harm, aren't we the ones making the choice?

It seems we've become experts at blaming others for what we are doing. But this doesn't absolve us of blame; it merely illustrates our corruption in avoiding the responsibility. 

Are we victims of God? Episode 11 with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

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Growing up in a modern developed, secular society means limited access to theological understanding. There is some spirituality mixed into the stew of science and legislation and jurisprudence, but it's of a modern kind -- meaning a blend of concepts and ideas pulled from Eastern philosophy, New Age imaginings and Quantum physics. And as such, there's lots of talk about influences from numbers and planets and collective consciousness, and even some room for mind over matter miracles.

But there's precious little consideration of old-fashioned sin. And obviously no acknowledgement of the influence of evil in our lives.

Admittedly, sin is a loaded word in this modern environment, so a science that accepts theology -- like Norberto Keppe's Analytical Trilogy (or Integral Psychoanalysis) -- renames sin as psychopathology. However, to really understand human activity in the world, we need to expand to a consideration of spiritual influence in our personal and social lives. 

Especially to negative spiritual influence. Because we are not problematic alone. And our unwillingness to see our problems as evidence of really bad intentions rather than just unwilling mistakes or occasional infractions is seriously undermining our human society.

This illustrates a kind of hubris in the human stance towards reality. A sort of refusal to see what's really causing our problems on Earth that the ancient theologians recognized as pride. 

And there's something deeper to be understood here in our modern society. Pride and Demons, the next episode in our Therapeutic Theology Series.

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Can God and science exist together? I think that’s a fundamental question. I've heard some of the more vocal scientists proclaiming that a belief in God is the sign of a weak mind. Well, one thing I’ve discovered: the deeper I delve into the theological and philosophical knowledge, the more I encounter rather brilliant minds, actually. Some very intelligent people have speculated about, argued for, worshiped and drawn inspiration from what they believe to be a higher power. So I don't think you and I are losing any brain capacity in wandering a little down that well-trod, but increasingly abandoned, pathway.

Belief in God in many so-called developed countries is at an all-time low. Well, maybe it's more a lack of belief in organized religion that's really being expressed in any of these studies that are quoted, and I’m reminded that we mustn't confuse one with the other.

And I wonder about the real beliefs of some self-professed atheists and agnostics anyway, who profess no belief, but live their lives according to strong ideals of goodness and service. Why are they doing that? There's a belief in something being evidenced there, even though they might cringe at that being called God.

In episode 10, I explore the problem with atheism with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

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The Dark Night of the Soul. In the theological canon, this signifies a spiritual crisis in a journey towards union with God. In more secular language, that would be the transformational journey that takes place when you're suffering. 

A journey of transformation. A conversion, even. A deep repentance for a path ill chosen. And at the end, "the sudden reception of grace," as Aquinas called it. Surely that's what slave trader John Newton must have gone through on that wild stormy night as he stood on the wind-swept deck and surprisingly found himself muttering, "May God have mercy on our souls." Apparently that caused some reflection when he retreated to his captain's chambers below. An atheist, and self-avowed scoundrel appealing to divine salvation in a time of need. And a questioning that led him to repent his misspent ways in the slave trade. eventually becoming an Anglican minister and penning the unforgettable words, "I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind but now I see." Amazing grace, indeed. 

Victor Frankl talked about man's search for meaning, and he declared that this was to be found in overcoming oneself, giving oneself to a cause, or even to another to love. He speculated that being truly human meant being directed to something or someone other than ourselves. He called this "the self-transcendence of human existence" and witnessed it frequently, even in the depths of despair that was Auschwitz. 

But I'm wondering now, if the transcendence we're seeking isn't something more than just moving beyond ourselves, but is in fact a search for something, not other than ourselves, but greater than ourselves. Something to believe in certainly, but also something to explain our existence and all of this magnitude we live inside. And for this, we need theology. We can't get there through apps or economics. We need that wisdom that plums the depths of human experience to find the answers to the questions, not just more questions. 

The country of Portugal was established based on this dream of a new world, a Fifth Empire that would initiate a period of 1000 years of justice and peace and spirituality on Earth. "The Kingdom of God," they called it. It's a dream that resides like a memory inside the human breast and the desire for this signifies that we recognize the loss of it. We've become separated from it, and even from the consideration of it, and this has had enormous ramifications for our daily lives. The Psychotic Separation from God, in this episode with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

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So far in our series, we've been looking at the nature of life and God, and how that knowledge has been pushed aside from our daily considerations and from scientific inquiry, obviously. The concretization of the scientific method was an attempt to free the human being from superstition, squalor and medieval cruelty.  

The cherished ascendance of reason that emerged out of the philosophy at that time, however, while successfully challenging the corrupted church authority, also diminished the importance of the theological themes that are still relevant to our understanding. The nature of man, the struggle between good and evil - those got buried, too. 

And where does the ascendance of reason leave those iconic stories about the presence of evil in human experience? The stories from the sacred texts of all philosophies, what do we do with those now? How do we understand the depth of Dante or even Jekyll and Hyde or Faust with only reason at our side? 

Norberto Keppe's recent work has been concerned to reintroduce the analysis of evil and the evil influence in daily human life, but scientifically. The advancement he has made in seeing the spiritual battle between good and evil in more scientific terms is a huge step forward. And backward at the same time, reaching into the ancient knowledge and bringing it into the modern light, stripped of its superstition and fantasy. Welcome to Episode 8 with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

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