Eliminating Faith and Truth: The Failure of Psychological Science

“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. Bribery and corruption are common and there are signs the world is speedily coming to an end.” The latest doomsday prognostication from the Mayans? Not exactly. A statement allegedly lifted from an Assyrian tablet dated 2800 B.C.

It’s clear mankind has been on the wrong path for some time, but what specifically are the steps we’ve taken off the straight and narrow? At least some of the blame can be laid at the feet of Freud and Marx and other schools of psychology. Professor Karl Jaspers, arguably humanity’s greatest psychological scientist, said that some psychologies and sociologies have performed perversions in society and exerted devastating power.

Let’s look at how these ideas have helped us corrupt our planet and ourselves. Eliminating Faith and Truth: the Failure of Psychological Science, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

Join the conversation at joneshealing@gmail.com

Click here to listen to this episode.

 

Corruption: It’s Not Just Out There Anymore

Corruption. Some government official with his hand out or a doctor accepting an all expenses paid fishing trip in exchange for promoting new pharmaceuticals, or a baseball player betting on his own team. It’s part of doing business in some countries, and whispers of it are always present wherever big events, like the Olympics and the World Cup, are held.

But corruption is not reserved only for corporate boardrooms or secret meetings of the world’s power brokers – although it’s certainly in abundance there. It’s also inside all of us who corrupt ourselves without knowing how, or why.

We’ll look at corruption in all its forms today, on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

Join the conversation at joneshealing@gmail.com

Click here to listen to this episode.

 

How the Mind Influences Nature

Science has become tragically compartmentalized. A bacteriologist has little knowledge of what an endocrinologist does, much less does a paleontologist understand anything of molecular chemistry. And although all of it may be Greek to us, there is a synthesis in science that comes from disinverting the basis of the scientific disciplines.

Norberto Keppe’s work of Analytical Trilogy has accomplished that Herculean feat, and we are the lucky beneficiaries. Science that makes sense today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, and along the way, a consideration of good and evil, what’s happening in the Arab world, and how our minds influence nature – beautifully explained as always by Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco and Richard Lloyd Jones.

Join the discussion. Comments welcome at joneshealing@gmail.com

Click here to listen to this episode.

 

The Prison of Victimhood

It is enticing to follow its seductive lure. “It’s not your fault. You couldn’t help it. There was nothing you could do.” These are the beguiling voices we hear.

Victims drive the ratings on daytime TV, after all. Blaming, finger pointing, laying on the guilt – so common, so righteous, so … convenient.

And so wrong.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, freeing ourselves from the Prison of Victimhood.

Now you who are regular listeners to Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head will already have a good idea which side of this theme we’re goint to come down on, don’t you? Our program, based as it is on the cutting edge psychological research coming out of the Brazilian school of Analytical Trilogy, could do nothing other than focus the discussion inward. Because that’s where the trail inevitably leads.

Norberto Keppe, the scientist behind the profound work coming out of Analytical Trilogy these days – and it is formidable indeed, in the areas of education and medicine and economics and physics – Keppe puts forward the idea that we have contact with all the magnificence and glory of Creation through our inner selves, that beautiful atmosphere of universal knowledge and wisdom that resides within each one of us. Plato called it the world of infused knowledge, meaning intelligence and savvy that we are born with. In Keppe’s language, these universal knowings within would be divine concepts inside the human mind.

And this opens the door to a staggering thought given all the modern science that points in the opposite direction, and that is that we are not creatures who are evolving to greater intelligence and knowledge at all, but we are instead creations with all possible understanding already infused in us. And coming to re-discover that is an inner journey.

There is already evidence of the presence of this native intelligence and sense of ethics from our very beginning as babies in excellent research coming out of the Infant Cognitive Center at Yale and University of California at Berkley professor, Alison Gopnik’s studies into the Philosophical Baby, and they’ve reached fascinating conclusions about the rich and intelligent inner life of babies from the beginning.

All of this to say that it’s by treading the inner path that we really come to know reality, not through our external machinations. Not to say we don’t gain substantial wisdom from our experiences – of course we do – but I mean that it’s through this outer contact that we come to know ourselves, that self that already exists and is not simply a product of our outer experience.

Which is what Socrates was contending 2500 years ago.

So victimhood, that state of being shaped and fashioned by our outer traumas, can be re-considered, which is exactly what we’ll do today. Helena Mellander, a frequent contributor to Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, is a Swedish journalist who’s been having quite an impact with her new blog in Swedish written with our colleague, educator Sofie Bergqvist. Helena wrote about this recently to interesting discussion from the Swedish community.

If this also stirs your desire to comment, I’m always happy to hear from you. rich@richjonesvoice.com.

Now, freeing ourselves from the Prison of Victimhood.

Click here to listen to this episode.

 

Liberating Ourselves From our Free Will

Philosopher David Hume called it the most contentious issue in metaphysics. Actually, nearly every major figure in the history of philosophy has weighed in on the topic somewhere in their work.

Free will … the capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Is the issue really that complicated?

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, Liberating ourselves from our free will.

Well, Hume was right. The issue of the free will is contentious. And I’ll be diving into the controversy, too, in a moment. A fascinating subject.

But first, a number of you have been writing to ask that I let you know about the new call-in radio show I’m launching with world-renowned author and psychoanalyst, Dr. Claudia Pacheco. I’m not surprised there’s so much interest. You who’ve been listening to this Podcast over the past year and a half must’ve come to appreciate the clarity and wisdom of the science behind this show.

It’s called Analytical Trilogy, and it’s not an easy science to encapsulate in a sentence or two. Analytical Trilogy is essentially a union of theology, philosophy and science that gives us a comprehensive view of the psychology of the human being and the reflections of this human psychology on the greater social structures we live within. Our political structures, our wars, our education systems of lack thereof, our environmental challenges … all have their birthplace inside the human psyche. And no one in history has clarified that better than the man behind Analytical Trilogy, Dr. Norberto Keppe.

Whether it be something every psychologist or human potential workshop leader has weighed in on – like depression or self-esteem or self-sabotage – or something no one talks about – like the psychology behind the pathology of power – when we turn the Trilogical lens on the topic, you hear a perspective you’ve never heard before. And it lands. It feels right. It just “makes sense,” as many of you writing to me have confirmed.

And we’ll be doing that kind of analysis, live, with Dr. Pacheco and I taking your calls and emails and answering your concerns personally. Can you imagine how impactful that will be? So, I’d like to keep you informed about that. We’re projecting our first show to be on Mar. 10 at 10 a.m. ET (NY time) on BBS Radio – bbsradio.com

But do get on my mailing list to stay informed: rich@richjonesvoice.com. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Now, today, liberty and our free will. You know, we in the western world have this idea that we’re really free, and that we’re also really quite socially evolved. We have recycling programs in place, we’re advanced in our social programs. And we also think that we’re super tolerant and welcoming of all other points of view and cultural traiditons. Well, certainly we have that idea in Canada. We pride ourselves on our open-mindedness. But underneath our politically correct external persona, there is a high degree of censorship and intransigence. And all that means we’re not really so accepting after all of ideas and philosophies that stray from what we perceive as our superior beliefs and ways of doing things. Go against that, and you’ll find you’re not really free to give that opinion.

Sofie Bergqvist is a Swedish educator and lecturer and translator of a number of Norberto Keppe’s books, and she joins me today.

Click here to listen to this episode.

 

Society on the Couch

Normally we see a person with serious problems we recommend professional help. After all, we go to the gym to keep our bodies toned, we go to the driving range. Why wouldn’t we do something to address those psychological glitches that pop up in all of us?

But what do we do when our whole society is showing signs of breakdown?

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, we’ll try to put “society on the couch”.

But a couple of things first. I always appreciate hearing from you. Your feedback is really helpful in helping me shape the program, so don’t hesitate if you’ve got a point or a question to raise. I’m always available – rich@richjonesvoice.com. If it takes me a day or two to get back to you, hang in. I’m getting to it.

If you’ve listened to the Podcast for awhile, you’ll know Dr. Claudia Pacheco very well. She’s a frequent contributor here and frankly is indispensable to this program – and indeed to everything we are doing down here in Brazil at the International Society of Analytical Trilogy. Well, Claudia and I are working on something really interesting … a live, Internet call-in radio program which we’re targeting to launch in January 2009. Make sure you’re on the mailing list to learn more – rich@richjonesvoice.com

What this’ll be is an online advice show with Claudia, who has 25 years of experience in Norberto Keppe’s Analytical Trilogy – to my mind, the most innovative, effective and powerful form of psychoanalysis on the planet. Anyone who’s got any experience with Trilogical analysis knows the experience of taking a long-standing issue to a session and getting a completely fresh take on it from the analyst.

“Wow! I never saw it that way before,” is a common comment.

Keppe’s Analytical Trilogy goes to the root of the problem, which is always something deep inside us, hidden from view. This is true deep psychology, often helping us see clearly for the first time long-standing issues that have been blocking us from achieving what we feel we have the potential to achieve. And who doesn’t feel that? And after Norberto Keppe himself, Dr. Claudia Pacheco is the best in the world at helping people at this deep level. So this radio program will be very cool. To have a chance to listen to her weekly will be a great opportunity to address some of the core issues of human beings … and you’ll be able to call in personally with individual questions and issues.

We’re calling the program “Healing Through Consciousness”, and we’re both pretty excited about it. Make sure you get on the mailing list. We’ll keep you updated.

You know, we’ve had a lot of response to the last 3 podcasts looking at the roots of the economic crisis. A few thousand downloads of those programs – giving a pretty loud message that people are looking for some answers, some ways to understand what is going on.

One of the applications of Keppe’s work is in the area of social psychology – analyzing the society as we would a person’s neurosis. And why not? The corporation’s been given the same rights as a human being through some decision of Congress way back along the way. As the Federal Reserve – a mostly private institution – was created by Congress back in the early 1900s, even though they had no constitutional basis to do so. So why wouldn’t we hold society’s systems up to scrutiny?

In fact, we must. I noticed in the N.Y. Times earlier this week that European and North American political leaders admit they may not be willing to fulfill their commitments to cap harmful carbon emissions or phase out polluting factories because of the slumping economy. A European Commission spokeswoman said, “Investing in reducing emissions is more difficult to do in times of economic downturn.”

This is simply hard to believe, isn’t it? How in 2008 can we make decisions based on profits over the environment? Hard to believe unless you understand about Inversion, Keppe’s seminal psychological discovery. Keppe says in his beautiful book, Glorification, “Inversion, sickness, is the act of rejecting life, labeling it as bad; it is the attitude of denying truth, “seeing” it as negative; it is the wish to alter reality, “believing” it to be harmful – all because of the great envy, the enormous envy, we feel toward the Creator. We want to take His place by substituting what is fictitious for what is real, and we are assailed by the most terrible anxiety. If we were thankful for what is good we would be happy, but we constantly destroy all that is sound in ourselves because it was not created by any decision of our own.”

Isn’t that something to think about? Let’s bring Dr. Claudia Pacheco in here today to explore this more.

Click here to listen to this program.

 

Economic Crisis III – Psychoanalysis of Society

We’ve got change in the White House. And in the tennis ATP rankings. A change in Madonna’s marital status, too … for what that’s worth. Not that those last 2 mean much. And whether the first is truly meaningful remains to be seen, doesn’t it?

One thing is clear, though … there’s not much change in the economic picture.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, we’ll continue our series looking at the causes of the economic crisis.

Well, after a historic day at the polls, America has woken up to the same scary reality as before. Jobless rates are up, stock prices are generally down … well, you know the story. Some of you much better than me, actually. But what I’ve been trying to do in this series of podcasts over the past few weeks is investigate some of the reasons for the mess. And I don’t mean in terms of explaining how the sub-prime mortgage market suddenly went south. No. But one thing I can help with is getting at the causes of all this. This is no small feat, in reality, and can be done because of the expansive work done on the subject at the Brazilian school of Analytical Trilogy founded by Dr. Norberto Keppe.

Look, one of the hardest things about trying to get a handle on what’s really going on is the style of the media. You watch CNN or CBS, and you get volumes of information. Analysis of the sub-prime aspect, reporting of G-20 meetings with ex-president Bush (and man, does it feel good to say ex-president Bush) … you get opinions and policies and figures, and spin, glorious spin. But it’s extremely difficult to pick your way through the information.

It’s always been like this. In our Information Age, we’re bombarded with information but starving for perspective. You have to know how to understand all this, and I don’t mean in the sense of being able to debate economic policy – the benefits of government stimulus packages over tighter regulations and broader oversight, or vice versa. No, there’s got to be an overall view to be had.

And it’s exactly here that Norberto Keppe’s work does what was before him very hard to do. Because of his success at mapping the human psyche, Keppe was also able to apply those findings to the society as a whole – verifying that what the human being does outside he first does inside himself. That our external social structures are simply the reflection of ways of seeing the world, of philosophies and biases and often questionnable reasoning.

One of Keppe’s landmark discoveries is that we are inverted. We act against our nature now in favor of our inverted values. “Cash flow is more important than your mother,” as one Wall Street broker termed it. This Inversion stems from inside us. I want to start there today because understanding our psyche leads to understanding our society. And that means putting the finger on causes, so that we can take real steps to change, not just rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. As always, love to hear your thoughts … rich@richjonesvoice.com

Sari Koivukangas, a professor at the Keppe/Pacheco Educational Institute here in São Paulo joins me today.

Click here to listen to this episode.

 

Behind the Economic Crisis II

It’s still hitting us hard. Markets are down, foreclosures are up. Shanty towns are springing up in southern California. We’re officially in recession, it appears. And what got us here varies depending on which side of the political argument you listen to. The only problem with that is … it’s a little difficult to get at the real root causes.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, let’s try to understand it a little better in the second in our series of what’s going on Behind the Economic Crisis.

Depending on how long you’ve been listening to Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, you may or may not know that our work here is based on the extraordinary discoveries of Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Norberto Keppe. In a profound series of books he wrote in the 1980s, he essentially created a new branch of social science called “social pathology.” This was the application of his psychological assessment, analysis and treatment of the human psyche to the greater society in which we live.

Our society, he determined, is a reflection of the unrecognized parts of our individual psychological reality. “The cycle is centuries old,” he wrote. “Man creates an increasingly sick society as he is increasingly sickened by it.” This awareness occurred shortly after he moved to New York at the request of a number of professors and academics to introduce his work there. He went expecting American ingenuity and “can-do” attitude to take his work,and spread it worldwide, as they did with everything else – from Breton Woods economic policies to pop music.

But he encountered a country in trouble. “America has stopped working,” he noted. America was not producing anymore and was instead content to sit back and let the 3rd world do the work while they applied themselves to making money with money; that the U.S. was exploiting the globalization of the desire for a piece of the American Dream they’d so artfully perpetrated, stimulated and fed to chain everyone else to pulling the sled while they rode along behind, sucking up the profits.

Keppe saw psychological Inversion in the creation of an economic system that rewarded a company with increased stock prices for lowering costs by farming out production to Asian sweatshops. He saw a psychological condition in the hunger for power and money and consumer goods that was causing us to destroy the planet in our insatiable desire for more, more, more.

The three books I mentioned earlier were, and continue to be, extraordinarily astute and prophetic – Decay of the American People (and the U.S.), which we discussed in our last episode of Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, Liberation of the People: the Pathology of Power, and Work and Capital. These books discussed, analyzed and clarified the psychopathology of the human being that was manifesting in the social structures we had created. This was something remarkable for the time, and remains so even today. You’ll find those books totally relevant in today’s situation. Like they were written yesterday. Write me for more information: rich@richjonesvoice.com

What Keppe noticed was the break in our social structures had made from our essential nature. From philosophy, Keppe knew that the essence of life was goodness, truth and beauty. At the same time, being successful in society often meant going against those values. We can’t suggest, for example, that the richest and most powerful among us got that way by acting like Mother Theresa or Albert Schweitzer.

And we the people have bought into it all big time. We all want to throw our money into the stock market and see it double or triple or at least bring in 10 or 15% returns. And for doing what, exactly? As Warren Buffett has noted, we’re not a nation of investors anymore, we’re a nation of traders. Which conjurs up images of men and women staring for hours into laptop computer screens to squeeze dollars out of the differenc ein exchange rates between the Yen and the Euro. Surely this is not lost on us. We’ve given up our previous values of what it meant to live in a civilized society. Our leaders lie about whatever they need to to convince us we need a massive, unwillable, horrendously expensive war. They encourage huge speculative financial systems that slosh trillions of dollars around daily like giant cassinos. They throw billions of taxpayer’s dollars into shoring up totally collapsing economic models that they’ve promoted. And then, as it’s crashing down around their ears, they admonish us that “we’re all in this together,” lumping in the vast majority of the world’s population with the small minority who are actually playing the gaem.

It’s time to wake up. As Keppe writes in Liberation of the People, ”Most people believe that the powerful are needed to maintain ‘order’ among the populace and in the markets, rather than that it is precisely these powerful who cause all the social conflict and disturbance with the dishonest laws and systems they create.”

That’s where I’d like to step out from today – that this economic and social crisis has not just happened. It’s come to us as a product of our thinking and philosophy of life, if you will. Gilbert Gambucci, fresh from discussing this at our World Conference of Analytical Trilogy a couple of weeks ago, joins me today.

Click here to listen to this episode.

 

The Perils of Positive Thinking

It flows inexorably underneath the American personality. Look on the bright side. On the sunny side of the street. Let a smile be your umbrella. That positive, can-do attitude has accomplished much. Why, then, do we have so much depression?

There is much value in having a positive attitude, but the whole story is a little more complex.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, The Perils of Positive Thinking.

First, a confession. I’m an optimist. A glass is half full kind of guy. I’ve always liked to try to see the good in others and in life. When I was doing a lot of seminar and workshop leading a number of years ago with my good friend, Dennis Hilton’s company out in Vancouver, I used to use a favorite story:

Two shoe salesman were visiting a village where few people wore shoes. One wires back to his head office, “It’s no use selling here. I’m coming home. No one wears shoes.” The second salesman wires back to his head office, “Incredible opportunities here. Send more product. No one wears shoes.”

All right, kind of corny. But I loved the attitude of the second guy. Still do.

But since coming to study and work with Norberto Keppe’s International Society of Analytical Trilogy here in São Paulo, Brazil, I’ve come to look at this aspect of positive thinking in a new light. Perhaps more accurately, a more sophisticated light.

Nowadays, with all the emphasis on cognitive therapy and behavior modification and even the power of affirmations, there can be a tendency to think that having better lives is simply a matter of progressive re-programming of our attitudes and behaviors. And the current popularity of The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know propogate this notion further – I can accomplish whatever I want. Giving the idea that through our thoughts or ideas we can change the world.

Austrian/Brazilian psychoanalyst, Norberto Keppe, is quick to remind us of a philosophical point of view though: that our being, who we are, follows action, not thinking. In other words, we are what we do, not what we think. It’s our doing that governs our being.

What complicates all this, of course, is that we often do … unconsciously. I do things I didn’t want to do. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Keppe has managed to map out the human psychic life. Over 50 years of clinical experience on 3 continents, over 40 books on the subject, exhaustive study of all the foundational pillars of philosophical, theological, psychological thought. It’s expansive work, I can assure you. I’ve been studying it extensively for 7 years and I can truly say I feel I’ve penetrated only a few centimeters below the surface of this. But we will be exposing more of Keppe’s work at our World Conference of Analytical Trilogy from Sept. 24 – 27, 2008 in San Diego. More information on that momentous event is available at www.wcatus.org. Including our unveiling of the Keppe motor – a free-energy motor that Keppe has developed from his work in The New Physics. More information on that motor is available at our sister site, www.stop.org.br

But let’s penetrate the human psyche a little more today. Keppe’s book, The Origin of Illness, really lays out his psychological perspective. Write me if you’d like to know more about that book, rich@richjonesvoice.com

Selma Genzani is a psychoanalyst at Keppe’s Institute in São Paulo. She joins me today to throw som elight on the shadows cast by the sunny side up philosophy of positive thinking.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Tags: positive thinking, free energy motor, beyond cognitive therapy, Norberto Keppe

 

The Inversion Driving Substance Abuse

We’ve been seduced by them, and horrified by them. Encouraged to tune out with them, and spurn them violently as instruments of the devil. We’ve seen them reduce users to living in hovels, and elevate dealers to palacial mansions. Legal or illegal, they’re being used and abused in record numbers in our so-called evolving society.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, the Inversion Driving Substance Abuse.

Well, this is some topic to consider, let me tell you. Drug abuse is a monumental topic because there are so many aspects to consider. There’s the personal aspect first. Probably all of us have some direct experience with it – from our favorite uncle with a drinking problem, to horror stories of close friends destroying lives and familes with out-of-control substance abuse problems.

There’s the social aspect of modern life being so bereft of meaning and purpose and spiritual values.

There’s the psychopathic aspect which is always present when astronomical profits are involved.

But there is some considerable comfort to be found in the work of Brazilian-Austrian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Norberto Keppe, whose work we will be discussing in great detail at our International Conference of Analytical Trilogy (Keppe’s science), Sept. 24 – 27, 2008 in San Diego. Write me for more information on that at rich@richjonesvoice.com, or visit our website, www.wcatus.org

Shakespeare said, “How far that little candle throws his beams. So shines a good deed in a weary world.” That is a perfect description of Keppe’s work. Reaching to the core of our difficulties and offering a strong hand up and out, and into our true position as beautiful, good and true beings in a loving universe.

But we have some problems to see along the way.

Sofie Bergqvist is a teacher here at our International Society of Analytical Trilogy, and she’s been developing deep work in the roots of substance abuse for our September conference. She looks at this important topic today on our program.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Tags: substance abuse, drug abuse, roots of substance abuse, roots of drug abuse