Thinking With Somebody Else's Head

The Origin of Ourselves

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 12:17:00 -0300

I've talked before on this podcast about my personal journey to treading a more Judeo-Christian theology path in my life -- inspired by my almost 25 years in Brazil working with Norberto Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy.

That was a surprise. I full expected a deep psychological dive into my own psyche and a continuous analysis of my actions and motivations and successes and failures. Psychoanalysis is, of course, Keppe's field, and he's a master there.

But because Keppe deals with the inner life of the human being, that inevitably leads those who are serious about discovering what's going on with them to delving into the more spiritual parts of their lives. Those inevitable questions of purpose and meaning and even life after death.

In philosophy, that's an understanding of cause and finality. Where do you come from, and where are you going? And that journey has been banalized in our modern world.

The Origin of Ourselves, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Hidden Repugnance Toward God - Ep 12 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:19:00 -0300

The N.Y. Time, Dec. 21, 2025 edition, has an opinion piece entitled "Christianity Is a Dangerous Faith."

That might stop you in your tracks even if you're not a practicing Christian.

Dangerous faith? Really? During Christmas week?

My initial thought on seeing the headline was, "Is that really necessary?"

The article goes on to make the usual rather pedantic points about fanaticism and religious intolerance.

Which are, of course, legitimate concerns. But what causes pause, I think, is the driving force underneath the article. That things of God, in many circles, are still ridiculed and sneered at, and faith in a Creator is evidence of an "inferior mind", as some scientific thinkers would have us believe.

At this time of the year especially, maybe we should stop to consider what the man who gave rise to Christianity actually had to say. And maybe by reflecting on His example and teachings, we might just uncover the validity of his story.

The Hidden Repugnance Toward God, today on our Therapeutic Theology Series.

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Stop Eliminating Christianity from History - Ep 11 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 15:41:00 -0300

It's been impressive to see the various attempts to re-write history so it fits into a politically correct vision of reality. The New York Times 1619 Project comes to mind, the removal of statues and monuments to take out those associated with slavery or colonialism, the re-evaluation of historic personalities based on a modern view - these are all in full vigor.

And criticizable -- although not politically correctness makes them closed to much critique.

We must be careful with all of these. Our fears of winding up on the wrong side of history can lead us to slant things too far in the other direction, thereby skewing our view of history too much. After all, if we're going to expect the figures from history to be saints and totally politically correct on every social issue, we're going to find slim pickings for historical heroes.

And we need to be really careful in our evaluation of Christianity. I know lamentable things have been carried out in the name of God -- and continue to be carried out today -- but we must see what is likewise true: the values and teachings of Christ continue to form the basis of the most advanced societies on our planet.

And at this Christmas time of the year, it is important to remember that. Stop Eliminating Christianity from History, today on our Therapeutic Therapy series.

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Inverted Pleasure in Evil - Ep. 10 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:35:00 -0300

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.

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Demonic Mind Control - Ep 9 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:30:00 -0300

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.

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Silencing the Accuser - Ep 8 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 09:40:00 -0300

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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Pride and Demons - Ep 7 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 9 Oct 2025 16:41:00 -0300

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.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Choosing Evil - Ep 6 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 14:22:00 -0300

Our modern world, often driven more by reason and logic than by faith and revelation, has few answers for the mysteries that more spiritual leanings point to as evidence of God. Where the scientific materialists advocate for blind, pitiless indifference to explain the development process of life and the universe, other scientists are seeing unmistakeable evidence of design.

Design means a Designer, right? And things like digital codes in the DNA that provide instructions for building the large protein molecules that are crucial to keeping living cells alive suggests a much more intentional "hand-at-play" than just the undirected chemical process used as an explanation by the scientific materialists.

The biological realm certainly offers elegant examples of harmony of processes that point to a Designer -- a God that created everything -- but the problems of man that we are facing in our modern world certainly raise the question of how a good Designer could ever have created something so filled with evil. And in this, we enter into another perspective that our modern mind has rejected: that our world is dominated by demonic forces.

Ignoring that reality is a really big problem.

We'll address how the human being is choosing evil in this episode of Therapeutic Theology.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Certainty of God - Ep 5 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 09:26:00 -0300

There's a lot of certainty in scientific circles about how science and religion can't go together. In fact, consensus that empirical science has made God unnecessary, and that religion, with its strange elements of faith and ritual, is irrational and harmful.

If you've been listening to our series, you'll realize we don't walk down that road. While we certainly agree that superstition and fanaticism have reared their heads in religious life, we could just as easily also ascribe those unhealthy aspects to many human institutions and schools of thought.

Many of the pioneers of scientific investigation, like Galileo and Kepler and Newton, were deeply religious men after all, who embarked on a study of the natural laws under the conviction it would lead to evidence of a Divine Creator of all the phenomena in nature and the universe.

Faith, for them, then, was not blind, but reasoned analysis looking to understand God's Creation rather than challenge theological understanding.

On faith and the Certainty of God, in our episode today.

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Under the Influence of Evil - Ep 4 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 16:14:00 -0300

We've been looking at the deep spiritual questions that rise in the human breast in our series. And we've been doing that through the lens of theology, which has been so dismissed, even despised, in our modern science.

To our great detriment.

As we'll hear in this episode, Dr. Keppe accepted his clients' questions and admissions in his practice right from the beginning, thus liberating them to talk -- and be heard. We're talking experiences with angels and demons, brushes with good and evil illustrating real influences in human lives. This openness contributed formidably to Keppe's expansive psychoanalytical vision, producing practical tools for dealing with those existential questions that come to all of us at varying moments in our lives.

With Keppe's science, we manage to understand ourselves and the world we live in, which has become problematic precisely because we have not re-integrated the theological reality into our science, which is subsequently operating from a reduced, materialistic perspective because of this.

This can all be liberating for all of use, then, as it was and still is for formal clients in Keppean analysis.

Under the Influence of Evil, our episode this time on our Therapeutic Theology Series on the STOP Radio Network.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Spiritual Denial - Ep 3 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 9 Sep 2025 16:46:00 -0300

Our intention in this podcast series is to bring some consciousness about something that only a few desire knowing about: there are evil spirits organizing and guiding our lives.

Already I can hear the howls of protest. I have a young teenage student from Europe who gets very agitated if anything metaphysical gets put forward as the cause of anything. Only the scientific explanations work for him, and by scientific, he of course means what he can validate through the 5 senses.

However, anyone who works deeply with human beings will know that there are deeper currents running in the inner life that go beyond what we can see or touch or measure. Human beings long for a more complete explanation of man’s behavior than just genetics or upbringing. In fact, the continued presence of war and persecution and cruelty demands a more complete investigation.

We had a movement in a different direction at the end of the nineteenth century with the work of Sigmund Freud, who demonstrated that most of what we are lies outside our awareness and that we needed a special process to reach that part. He called this process psychoanalysis.

Norberto Keppe follows in those footsteps. But he goes much further. He embraces the metaphysical in his work, thus reintroducing philosophy and spirituality back into science. A more complete science, then. One that goes beyond the merely physical to consider the deepest questions resonating in the human soul: who are we, where do we come from, and where are we going? If we exclude the spiritual influence in human society from our quest, we become puppets of a malignant spiritual world we refuse to see. It is extremely important to perceive the level of direct influence that the human being receives in his mind from the spiritual world. This can lead him to goodness or evil; which path he takes depends on his choice.

And after all, is either God and His angels who act in the human mind, or the evil spirits who do. This series is an attempt to approach these subjects.

Click here to listen to this episode.

True Freedom - Ep 2 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 2 Sep 2025 13:23:00 -0300

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.

Theology and Science - Ep 1 - Therapeutic Theology Series

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 10:21:00 -0300

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.

Self-Improvement Requires Sacrifice

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 11:05:00 -0300

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.

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Performance and the Free Will

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 9 Jul 2025 12:04:00 -0300

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.

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Paradise as Reality, Not Imagination

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 9 Jul 2025 11:52:00 -0300

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.

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The Perils of Living Unconsciously

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 09:54:00 -0300

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.

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Love, Consciousness and the Troubled World

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 1 Apr 2025 10:15:00 -0300

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.

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Inversion in Everyday Life

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 10:57:00 -0300

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.

Why Do I Do the Things I Don't Want?

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Sat, 1 Mar 2025 09:04:00 -0300

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.

The Science of Inversion

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 10:39:00 -0300

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.

Metaphysics and the Empty Promise of AI

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:19:00 -0300

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.

Living in A Spiritual World - Therapy Online Series: Ep 8

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 10:10:00 -0300

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.

Suicide Watch - Therapy Online Series - Ep. 7

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 2 Nov 2023 13:35:00 -0300

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.

The Heart of the Matter - Therapy Online Series: Ep. 5

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 16:31:00 -0300

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.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - Therapy Online Series: Ep. 4

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 16:05:00 -0300

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.

Agoraphobia - Therapy Online Series: Ep 3

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 14:42:00 -0300

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.

Rebellious Kids - Therapy Online Series - Ep. 2

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 10:10:00 -0300

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.

Marriage Trauma - Therapy Online Series: Ep. 1

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 15:42:00 -0300

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.

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Therapy for the World Series: Ep 2 - The Terrible Trap of Inversion

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 14:59:00 -0300

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.

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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep 14 - Death and Comfort

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 11:23:00 -0300

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.

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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep. 13 - Coping with Death

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 7 Jun 2023 20:47:00 -0300

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.

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Therapy for the World Series: Ep. 1 - The Power of Communication

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 31 May 2023 14:40:00 -0300

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.

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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep 12: Materialism's Terrible Influence on Health

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 15:06:00 -0300

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.

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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep. 11: The Spirituality of Health

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 7 Sep 2022 09:15:00 -0300

In the early part of the 20^th 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.

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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep 10: Healing Without Drugs

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 10:52:00 -0300

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.

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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep. 9: Youth and Addiction

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 08:18:00 -0300

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.

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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep. 8: Understanding Suicide

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 10:35:00 -0300

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.

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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep 7: The Roots of Depression

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 10:32:00 -0300

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.

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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep 6: The Mind and the Immune System

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 11:10:00 -0300

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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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep 5: Energetic Infection

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 13:56:00 -0300

Today on Episode 5 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, we’ll tackle an alternative view of disease infections. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

We can be forgiven for following the mainstream view about the origin and treatment of infectious disease. Ever since Carnegie and Rockefeller got ahold of Pasteur’s Germ Theory as a perfect vehicle for pharmaceuticals based on oil derivatives, medical education in the west has been teaching the idea that disease comes from outside. I sometimes imagine what it would be like trying to raise money for research into alternative treatments for cancer, specifically treatments that don’t require expensive surgery or drug treatment protocols. I visualize meeting after meeting with investors ending in many shaken hands and zero signed contracts. It is very difficult to raise money for research into treatment modalities other than drugs and surgery for things like cancer.

This “invasion from the outside” perspective dominates modern medical thinking, and is pretty much the accepted view of infectious disease among most of us. But what’s not well known is that there was another prominent scientist proposing another cause for disease at the same time Pasteur was developing his Germ Theory. His name was Antoine Bechamp, and his contention was that disease was an inside condition, not an attack from external microbes. All that was explored beautifully in E. Douglas Hume's fascinating book, Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology written 100 years ago or so.

And Keppe and Pacheco have been expanding on this interior medicine for the past 50 years. And what they’ve been working with changes the way we see disease. The latest on that today, with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco.

Click here to listen to this episode.

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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep 4: Paranoia and Disease

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 12:57:00 -0300

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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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep. 3: Healing the Soul

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 5 Jul 2022 10:00:00 -0300

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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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep. 2: True Medicine

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 09:31:00 -0300

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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Healing Through Consciousness Series: Ep. 1: The Psychology of Health

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 09:40:00 -0300

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.

Click here to listen to this episode.

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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep 17: True Religion

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 08:53:00 -0300

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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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 16: Humanity's Deep Need for God

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 8 Mar 2022 09:34:00 -0300

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.

Click here to listen to this episode.

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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep.15: Resonance with Mother Mary

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 2 Mar 2022 11:19:00 -0300

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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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 14: Resonance with Jesus

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 10:59:00 -0300

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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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 13: How We Miss Paradise

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 10:43:00 -0300

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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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep.12: The Ceaseless Attack on Christian Values

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 8 Feb 2022 10:29:00 -0300

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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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 11: Are We Victims of God?

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 1 Feb 2022 10:46:00 -0300

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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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 10: The Problem with Atheism

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 08:27:00 -0300

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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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 9: The Psychotic Separation from God

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 10:35:00 -0300

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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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 8: The Origin of Evil

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 10:23:00 -0300

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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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 7: The Fall of Man Updated

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 5 Jan 2022 08:40:00 -0300

Welcome to Episode 7 of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

I was struck in re-listening to our last episode that perhaps some more explanation of the story of man might be necessary. I also realize the challenge today of Biblical references. Religious life has often been equated with fanaticism, and that conjures up images of cults and Kool Aid and suicide vests, doesn't it? But let's be careful not to fall into that dismissive mindset too quickly, because after all, the story of man! Yeah, these are rich waters to navigate. Great minds have considered these questions of religion and belief and man's place in the cosmos, and simply brushing off these considerations as simplistic, superstitious and obsolete, would be a little hasty, I think. Evidence of what Viktor Frankel called “contemporary nihilism.” In his great book, Man's Search for Meaning, Frankel writes, “Man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing.”

And one of the traditions we are collectively leaving far behind in the rearview mirror is the story of the Fall of Man, a story which is present in most, if not all, of the cultural traditions on our planet. There has to be something there. In fact, I propose that our greatest human documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Rights of Man, the constitutions of many countries, are actually reflections of this memory of a time in paradise when we lived in harmony with nature and God, when we fulfilled our purpose in the Creation. We remember these universal principles, these fingerprints of God in the human soul as Keppe calls them, and they're called forth from deep inside in moments of inspiration, like revelations. So, let's not shy away because of prejudices or dismissals of our religious traditions. Let's continue in our exploration of this spiritual life. As Jung inscribed over the door of his house, “Whether summoned or not, God will be present.”

So, for this episode, an excerpt from an interview I did for our podcast, Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco about the Fall of Man and what this story is really about.

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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 6: Trouble from the Start

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 12:50:00 -0300

Welcome to Episode 6 of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

You might have noticed in our first few episodes, I've been mentioning the importance of the wisdom of the past to our understanding of the present. And especially in our understanding of God and spirituality.

That's not been by accident. There were some smart dudes back then, and Norberto Keppe's work has been in part about going back and rescuing the correct knowledge from these great thinkers and sages throughout history. That's really not a modern view, I know that. We tend to be much more of the mind today that what went before was interesting, perhaps as an archaic allegory, but hardly relevant anymore in our digital app for that, do all your banking online, superiority. We just threw away all those guys with a dismissive shrug and a raised eyebrow. What could Aquinas or Plato or the Divine Comedy possibly teach us about the important stuff in life, like creating passive income or lowering our toxic exposure or reducing our carbon footprint?

In Mrs. Kent's English Lit 12 class way back when — not quite Middle Ages but still a long time ago — we studied Milton's Paradise Lost. Studied the language and the rhythm, the poem's epic story and heroic nature. "Bloody long thing," I thought at the time. The poem tells the story of the war for heaven and of man's expulsion from paradise. Benjamin Ramm in his recent BBC article, Why You Should Reread Milton's Paradise Lost, declares it to be a powerful meditation on rebellion, longing and the desire for redemption.

But I think we're missing a point here. Paradise Lost is not just an allegory about non-conformist, anti-establishment rebellion. It's a real story, about what really went on. A real event with real people. A story that continues right up to this present moment.

And I know how that must sound here in the 21^st century. Like I've just suggested there was no moon landing, right? Well, stay with me! In this episode, we'll introduce a scientific explanation of the Biblical story of the Fall of Man, and see if we can't rescue the story from the clutches of ancient mythology and restore it to its rightful place as the real story of Man that we ignore and banalize to our peril.

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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 5: Who Is this God We're Talking about Anyway?

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 12:30:00 -0300

Welcome to Episode five of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.

In our last episode, we looked at some of the scientists responsible for modern science's turn to materialism. Something that sought to make God irrelevant in the creation of life. English biologist, Richard Dawkins, perhaps best epitomises that point of view, opining in The God Delusion that God is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. And then swinging from the heels with a brutal list of negative adjectives describing God that to my mind, simply substantiates the discoveries of the early explorers of the psyche who showed that sickness lies in projecting our evil qualities outward onto others.

That dismissive view of God is more than obvious in countless modern art, too, that looks at the mess in the world created by man as proof that God doesn't exist. Well, I'm struck hard by that modern conceit because … well, I'm a product of it. Moving to Brazil 20 years ago with my wife at the time, Madalann, began a process of change inside me, a gradual opening to a theological reality that had simply not been part of my life ...the spirituality I delved into in the New Age movement, notwithstanding. That had been insufficient to feed this quest for truth I hungered for. It was the certainty of the existence of God that marks Brazil that began to turn the tide in me from disdain for God, picked up through modern science and art, to a budding belief in something concrete. A real God in place of that vague and simplistic notion of cosmic energy coming from New Age spirituality.

It was when I began to study Norberto Keppe's concept of inversion, which we talked about in our second episode, that I began to think, "Well, wait a minute! If we're inverted, we must be inverted from something. What would that be?" That's what we'll begin to explore in our podcast episode today with Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Who Is this God We’re Talking about Anyway?

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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 4: Some Scientific Anti-Christs

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 11:09:00 -0300

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Episode 4 of our Modern Relevance of God special podcast series on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

In our last episode, we looked at some of the consequences of materializing science, the reverberations of which we are obviously still feeling today. From elevating the bean counters to the lofty perches of power to resolving pandemics with material products, we are far from any spiritual considerations in our modern science.

We can even put some names to that process, some of the most famous names in scientific history actually. All of whom, unknowingly, led us down this mathematized trail of inverted world views that is largely responsible for the myriad seemingly unresolvable problems facing us today.

And at the same time, Cesar Soós and I will explore the tremendous healing power in nature. All of which provides more evidence that a great Designer is at work behind all this.

Welcome to Episode 4 of the Modern Relevance of God special podcast series. Cesar Soós on some scientific anti-Christs.

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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep 3: Science Turns its Back on God

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 7 Dec 2021 13:36:00 -0300

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and welcome back to our continuing series. This is Episode 3 of our special podcast series, The Modern Relevance of God.

This episode is the first of 2 parts exploring how science turned its back on God. Well, the dominant scientific view has actually never been tolerant of dissent, and we know the consequences of challenging authority, don't we? From burning at the stake to shunning to YouTube and Facebook removal to Cancel Culture, the repercussions of independent thinking can be quite drastic. The modern power structure frowns on whistleblowers, and bots and algorithms are programmed to control more and more the scientific and political discourse on our planet.

So today, we'll introduce some fundamental disagreement with the metaphysical basis of modern science, and science's part in removing considerations of God from our modern world.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, our special podcast series, The Modern Relevance of God continues with Episode 3: Science Turns its Back on God.

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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God - Ep. 2: The Fatal Flaw of Inversion

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 10:09:00 -0300

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and welcome to Episode 2 of our special podcast series, The Modern Relevance of God.

One of the fundamental problems in doing a series on God is the branding that happens of anyone broaching the subject. "Modern? God? Oh my, how 13th century of you!"

Well, religious nutters we are not. The Theology Department of the Keppe & Pacheco Trilogical College is a serious educational institution that discusses science and theology with the same weight, and while it may seem impossible for those two disciplines to live together, it is completely possible thanks to Norberto Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy.

This, then, is a scientific exploration of God and spirituality that is so very necessary in our modern world.

Today on our special podcast series on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, The Fatal Flaw of Inversion.

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Special Podcast Series: The Modern Relevance of God, Ep. 1: Why Even Do This?

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 18:20:00 -0300

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Welcome to something new on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. A podcast series on what I consider one of the most important subjects in our world today.

Spirituality. Finding meaning in this crazy, inverted world today. We could all use some of that, couldn't we?

So I've dug back through past Thinking with Somebody Else's Head podcasts and culled the best stuff I could find and put it into a 17-episode series called The Modern Relevance of God. Some deep conversations and reflections coming your way over the next 17 weeks. So ... let's get to it!

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Vaccines, Energy and Freedom

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 12:04:00 -0300

If you were watching a TV series about the pandemic lockdown we are currently suffering through, you might look at it as a phantasmagorical kind of thing. "Oh, that could never happen," you might think. "It's too much."

And, of course, they do magnify and dramatize events for dramatic purposes in those series. Real-life dystopia proceeds more glacially.

But we're seeing the elements - neighbours peering through curtains, dissenting views being cancelled, and, most chillingly, dutiful acquiescence of the good people, something Martin Luther King warned us about.

Now this is not to denigrate in any way the "make the best of it" spirit that many display during these pandemic times, but it is perhaps an admonition to keep your eyes open while you're preparing that soothing cup of tea.

Perhaps it's never been more essential for Norberto Keppe's incisive science of psycho-socio pathology to be studied and understood, and we'll certainly employ that disinverted scientific view to our topic today.

Vaccines, Energy and Freedom, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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What's Behind the Great Reset

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 4 Jan 2021 15:40:00 -0300

As we turn the page on what was surely one of the most unprecedented years in modern history, we look forward to better times in 2021. It's natural to do that - greet the new with optimism. Hope, after all, springs eternal in the human breast as Alexander Pope noted almost 300 years ago.

But this New Year, there is trepidation present in the mix, and maybe even despair in some.

Fear not, however, the genius Board of Directors at the World Economic Forum are on the case.

That's supposed to allay the angst of uncertainty, but in some of us, is even great cause for concern. Will the cure be worse than the sickness? That's a great possibility, given that the way out they'll be proposing later this month is being elaborated by the very brain trust that is responsible for leading us into the crisis in the first place. And maybe they'll be interested only in protecting their assets.

Let's consider What's Behind the Great Reset, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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The Science of Freedom

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 16:29:00 -0300

It's as old as philosophy itself. Freedom. Free will. Free choice.

We've taken it for granted in our western world. "Of course we're free," we gloat when comparing ourselves to those in the world we consider unfree.

Until we're not free. To get together in groups, or sit tight to another table at a restaurant, or even go to a basketball game.

Which should cause us to howl in protest. Except it doesn't because we're scared or mandated.

And then there are the definitions of what it is to be free anyway. Is it free to do whatever we want? Is this choice really mine or am I unknowingly following some external programming?

You can see why it's been so much debated in schools of philosophy and religion. In our modern art of persuasion, the skill of the persuader lies in getting you to do what they want but thinking that it's your choice.

What a tangled web! Is there any point in wading into those waters yet again?

I unhesitatingly say yes, for we have a science here that can begin to put it to rights.

The Science of Freedom, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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The True Spiritual Reset

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 12:02:00 -0300

It's July, and we're still in the middle of the pandemic. Actually, we've been in the middle of this for what, 4 months now? You ever seen anything like this? Of course not. Unless you're a Highlander who lived through the Plague.

This crisis feels different, doesn't it, from all the other global crises we've faced. The real ones I mean ... not the big screen inventions. Different because it's highlighting the dire situation we're experiencing in all areas of human life. Environmental, economic, health ... even the NBA ... we're all facing it. And as we work from home and avoid hugging our grandparents, the geniuses in Davos, who are largely responsible for leading us into this global mess in the first place, are now certain they can reset us out of it.

It's an unprecedented window of opportunity that's closing fast and may never open again, is how Prince Charles puts it, and those rounded Eton vowels hove in the air ominously.

I don't buy it. And if you do, I hope we can give you a better perspective. Forget their reset; let's talk about a True Spiritual Reset today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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The Inner Game of Virus Defense

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 12 May 2020 14:58:00 -0300

It's week 8 of the quarantine here in Brazil. Restaurants and shops are still closed, they're taking temperatures before they let me in to the supermarket across the street, and no end in sight to the general Big Pharma orientation to lock down everyone, high risk or no.

It's an entirely materialistic response to a health condition that is not only physically solved, showing the clearly limited science that we are following worldwide.

Which point to the desperate need for a more comprehensive science ... one that can get to the real solutions for physical health problems, not just a face-mask-and-alcohol-gel-every-15-minutes solution like we're being offered now.

Norberto Keppe has been a leading edge pioneer in the psychosomatic approach to all disease. The power of his energetic medicine is impressive and offers us hope beyond Bill Gates, the WHO and Big Pharma.

The Inner Game of Virus Defense, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Calming Pandemic Hysteria

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 17:41:00 -0300

There must have been a "Eureka!" moment back in the late 1800s when, investigating an infection in the French wine industry, Louis Pasteur happened upon the discovery of micro-organisms. He must have felt the jolt of a thrill of realizing that he'd stumbled upon something really monumental.

He was perfectly aware of the concurrent research being conducted by rival French scientists, including the extraordinary Antoine Bechamp and even his good friend, Claude Bernard.

The separator of the waters between them, something that came to be as contentious as the War of the Currents between Tesla and Edison, was that his scientific rivals had reached the opposite conclusion: the body does not get sick as a consequence of an invasion of microbes from outside, but is instead sick in the internal system of the organism. Microbes appear as a consequence, not as the cause of disease.

Pasteur's self-marketing won the day, however, and his discovery underlies all of the paranoia and fear around contagions.

Calming Pandemic Hysteria today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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The Censorship of Natural

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 12:31:00 -0300

One of the challenges in our modern philosophy lies in the difficulty of acknowledging right and wrong, good and bad. We've blurred the lines so much it's almost impossible to clarify this in any absolute way. An artist puts a glass of water on a shelf and calls it an oak tree, and defends that it's an oak tree because he says it is. And there's no argument to be used against his declaration because that would be intolerant, politically incorrect. Hate speech even in extreme cases. The pendulum has swung so far in this liberal direction that you have 50 something gender choices when signing up for a new Facebook account.

Now I'm certainly not advocating the cleaning out of the society of anyone who doesn't agree with the traditional view of things, but I also can't really see my way to endorsing any opinion whatsoever as the new normal.

Some will certainly say I'm a dinosaur stuck in the 1950s for expressing that. And that, I suggest, is exactly the problem.

Dare we try to approach this in our program today? Of course we do.

The Censorship of Natural today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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The Chaos of Evil

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 22:27:00 -0300

One of the things that's happened to me over the 18 plus years I've been in Brazil working with the science of Analytical Trilogy elaborated by Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Norberto Keppe, has been a gradual opening of the door to my spirituality. I still consider myself pretty "feet on the floor", which I guess is a nice way of saying materialistic, but there is a flicker of the flame of spiritual awareness that I can feel at times.

And that crack in the opening door has allowed some light of theology to enter my reluctant head, to the point where I now consider the catastrophic disaster awaiting us if we don't make radical changes to be emblematic of a spiritual battle on the planet - not a political or economic or even religious one. We are, in my evolving view, engaged in a battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, and as I understand it, this is taking place at our earthly level fueled by thoughts and orientations from a transcendental level.

I hope we can bring some clarity to that today.

The Chaos of Evil, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Looking After Our Eternal Assets

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 07:04:00 -0300

As we head into Christmas, we often take time to reflect on friends and family, on hopes and dreams, on plans and logistics. After all, we've got the trips to hometowns, the Christmas gift buying, the parking lot congestion to navigate. It's a time to reflect on what's happened, and how fast it's all gone by.

And in those times, we need the wisdom and dedication to commit our efforts to doing what's necessary, what we were put on this earth to do in this short time we've been granted on this planet.

But above all that, and widely forgotten in our modern, materialistic age, is the true reason for the celebration - the virgin birth that marks our western world. For believers or not, the undeniable fact remains that our civilization was, and is, formed by adherence to those Christian values that He brought a couple of millennia ago. Justice, tolerance, forgiveness, love for one's neighbour ... these are the true values that we all desire. And that's what He came to remind us of.

Looking After Our Eternal Assets, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Even Psychopaths Feel Guilt

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 14:17:00 -0300

Back when I was a kid playing street hockey in my hometown, a couple of Dutch immigrant kids came out hoping to join us. They were carrying hockey sticks their father had made by nailing a piece of wood to long broom handles. These makeshift sticks were far from the sleek, black taped, store bought babies the rest of us were sporting, and my friends were lavish in the derision they heaped on the poor guys who retreated, humiliated, back to their rented house.

It was the shattered look on their faces that I remember even to this day. I felt so guilty, I stopped playing and walked down to their house to apologize.

It’s a powerful feeling, guilt. It can keep us up at nights. It can make us sick. A police detective here in Brazil told me he thinks guilt may be the reason criminals leave clues so they get caught.

Today, though, we’re counselled to mitigate our guilt. Not being able to manage our guilt feelings is actually considered detrimental to our mental health.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Even Psychopaths Feel Guilty, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Power and Demonic Envy

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 10:20:00 -0300

In Norberto Keppe's extraordinary book, Liberation of the People, he writes, "Humankind reckons among its numbers a few individuals who are completely sick. This includes those who have succeeded in attaining positions of social power." That's why the subtitle of his book is the Pathology of Power.

He wrote that in 1984 - a good year for books like that as Orwell prophesized. But surprisingly, no one has really picked up the torch and continued that analysis. No, most explorations or powerful people are somehow in awe of their accomplishments, failing to see the pathology behind their ascent to power. They point out the wrinkles but miss the rot underneath.

Keppe, now in his '90s continues to work to make us conscious that we are driven by the sickest among us, who form secret societies and influence the social structure to serve their needs rather than the people. It's a study that he has called sociopathology, which treats the social difficulties wherein the human being becomes a victim of a sick society.

Power and Demonic Envy, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Dark Spirituality and Victimization

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 14:29:00 -0300

We're just out of the Easter period and some reflections. It was a tough week for the faithful. The burning of Notre Dame striking hard in that major center of Christian faith for 800 something years. And then the bombs exploding in Christian churches and popular hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, apparently in retaliation for those terrible attacks on mosques in New Zealand back in March.

Does this hit you at all? Maybe it all seems so far away, right? After all, there are bills to pay and potholes to fix and renovations to do right here in our own daily worlds. Like, who's got time for another act of terrorism or environmental disaster or burning building?

It's difficult to put the pieces together. And the media smotherage brings us constant updates of facts and pictures, additional images and numbers that expand exponentially and overwhelm our capacity to filter and understand. Seems we're poor human ruins tottering over the grave, as Blake described it. Testing times.

Dark Spirituality and Victimization, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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A Study of Temptation

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 9 Apr 2019 09:56:00 -0300

Temptation. Like most religious words, that one's been banalized and reduced from its original meaning. It means literally a trial or a test. A moment in your life when you have a choice to be faithful or not.

Today, that's like faithful to a diet or a spouse, to a virtue or an ideal. But the original sense was to be tested in your faith to God. Something Job-ian - no matter what life throws at you, you stay the course.

But temptation is secondarily related to allurement or seduction to sin. And here we're into a less popular usage. Nobody likes to think in terms of "can't" and "don't" anymore, do they? "Who says I can't!", goes the language of modernity. "Who are you to tell me what's right and wrong?"

These are tricky waters. "You can't do that!" has been used to control and restrict by those wanting to remain in power, for sure. But is there something to this obligation aspect of temptation that deserves a more careful consideration?

A Study of Temptation, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Seduction by Evil

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 14:16:00 -0300

"The idea of being a victim of evil is quite a comfortable one," writes Norberto Keppe in his book, Psychotherapy and Exorcism. "But what's really going on," he continues, "is that the human being actually selects the type of evil he wants in his life."

Well, that's sobering. I hope this happens unconsciously because the conscious choice for evil seems rather terrifying. Keppe's view that we summon evil contradicts the common idea that we are victimised by it. Even the exorcists, those most graphic of illustrations of possession by evil, show the possessed as being unwilling recipients of the accursed spiritual invasions.

What Keppe is trying to alert us to here is the very real presence of evil spirits in the human experience, and our considerable role in giving them so much freedom to run amok on our planet.

But there's another aspect at play in this process ... the subterfuge of the demons. And that's not a once-in-awhile thing. It's constant.

Seduction by Evil, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Man's Greatest Enemy

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Fri, 8 Feb 2019 13:08:00 -0200

All of us, if we've lived a little, have had to contend with the lure of temptation. From the mundane, "Just one more piece of chocolate cake," to the come on of a cold beer when you've got a drinking problem, to the more serious attractions to violence and crime, we all know the experience of that voice in our ear.

Our modern scientific perspective prefers evidence-based interventions as solutions, leading us to explain away vice and bad habits as weakness, upbringing, chemical imbalance, even genetic disposition. We seldom in our modern world even think of putting temptation down to influence from nefarious spirits. Reason over superstition would read the promotional literature for the modern point of view.

But are we missing something in excluding the theological view? After all, Jesus warned us time and again of our unhealthy subservience to demons, and perhaps we should listen more carefully to that advice.

Man's Greatest Enemy, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Certainty of the Divine

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 12:52:00 -0200

A belief in immaculate conception, overcoming death with resurrection, divine miracles of creation … modern thinkers complain these tenets suffer from a lack of evidence. “Faith is a great evil,” they say, “That leads gullible human beings to open their minds so much their brains fall out.”

I respectfully disagree. Faith has been shown in studies to mitigate symptoms of depression, spiritual beliefs can help us deal with loss, disease and death, and even aid recovery. We also know that it helps deal with addictions. Great things have been accomplished with perseverance in the face of impossible odds, even at the risk of loss of life, and what is that if not an act of faith?

So just dismissing conviction in something divine simply because there’s not scientific proof seems unintelligent to me. And anyway, if we just look around us at the intricate design of nature, the complex way natural processes mesh together perfectly, we really have to be slightly moronic to rule out divinity.

The Certainty of the Divine, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

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Human Resonance with Evil

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 14:27:00 -0200

The nature of good and evil. That’s a nice light topic for your next Sunday afternoon bbq! If I had a dollar for every time a friend wanted to discuss the nature of good and evil with me over the years, I’d have a cool … $3.00 in my bank account. Not a topic that comes up that often.

We’ve been considered victims of good and evil for much of our history. From the Biblical Job to history’s billions of casualties of some malfeasance or other, to the Vatican exorcists trying to free the soul of one invaded by demons, we’ve all had to suck it up in the face of circumstances we feel no control over.

A remarkable Brazilian philosopher, however, is trying to deepen our understanding of this. Norberto Keppe has proposed that evil exists, yes, but not as a natural occurrence. Rather, it is a choice. An unconscious one to be sure, and influenced by spiritual forces you have almost no knowledge of.

I know … still sounds like we’re victims, doesn’t it? Well, let’s talk.

Human Resonance with Evil, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

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Our Entangled Spiritual Reality

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 11:25:00 -0200

We are assailed in our modern world with all sorts of problems. There are money worries, health of ageing parents, stress and depression, crime and taxes. Coping with all of that can make us forget the beautiful things around us every day.

But there’s another influence no one talks about in our modern, number-crunching world, and that’s the very real influence from the spiritual world. That’s not the topic of dinner conversations these days. Well, actually, we don’t even have conversations anymore, do we? … everything being pushed into the digital world of email, chat and Instagram. Which emphasises the point – the deeper levels of the human experience are not being plumbed anymore – and to our great detriment. It’s like spirituality is something we feel at times, something we sense is important, but something we keep at arm’s length for fear of being branded weird or fanatic.

But spirits were not dismissed in the past. Shakespeare exploited the knowledge of them for great art. Let’s explore spiritual relevance more on our program.

Our Entangled Spiritual Reality, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

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Under Control of Evil

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 09:34:00 -0300

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Ferdinand, in desperation at the terrible plight of ship and crew, cries out, "Hell is empty and all the devils are here!"

And looking around at our situation today, it wouldn't be difficult to reach the same conclusion. Except that our modern materialistic science doesn't allow for that conclusion. Oh, we might utter the words, but I doubt most of us would use words like "hell" and "devils" in anything more than an illustrative sense. We almost certainly wouldn't mean them literally.

But there is a very modern science emerging here in Brazil that does consider the power of spiritual influence to inspire the human being - both for good or for evil. And yes, I do mean a science. And what the scientist responsible for this view, Dr. Norberto Keppe, maintains is that the evil is winning as long as we don't have more consciousness of it. That means, reuniting theology and philosophy again with exact science, as used to be the case. So we can really understand our situation.

Under Control of Evil, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Energy of Virtue

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 7 Aug 2017 15:02:00 -0300

Welcome to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. A couple of thousand years ago, a consideration of virtue was part of everyday, common discourse. The Greeks gave considerable attention to virtue, culminating in Aristotle's influential writings on moral and intellectual virtues. Before him, Confucius proposed personal virtue as the way to a good life. The Bible has hundreds of passages about the importance of virtue.

Today, public discourse is muted, and people lament the loss of the byproducts of virtue, like falling self-discipline and rising selfishness.

Not to mention the rampant corruption at all levels of modern society that makes us fear that virtue is, in fact, long gone. As a small indicator of this, a graph of the frequency of words occurring in books over time shows a rapid rise of the word "technology" in the past 40 years against a two-century slide in virtue.

In Norberto Keppe's Integral Psychoanalysis, though, virtue is essential for a healthy human being and society. So we'd like to go against the grain!

The Energy of Virtue, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Evil in the Modern World

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 15 May 2017 16:23:00 -0300

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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

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

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

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

Evil in the Modern World, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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True Co-Creation

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 2 May 2017 11:22:00 -0300

I was walking down the streets of Vancouver a number of years ago after I'd been living away from the west coast for some time, and I bumped into an old acquaintance of mine in Kitsilano, the old hippy neighbourhood in the '70s.

"What are you doing these days?" I asked her. "Channeling yoga," came back the straight-faced reply.

Well, she was always a little out there, but it leads into what I wanted to talk about today. The field of spiritual growth has exploded over the past 50 years, maybe beginning with the Beatles and their Maharishi experience in India in the '60s. But it's a market with a lot of choices. From the more traditional, like church and prayer, to the more trendy, like Buddhism and meditation, to the downright weird, like, well, channeling yoga.

What to make of it all? In Dr. Norberto Keppe's Analytical Trilogy, he's united theology back into science to give us a more wholistic view. And that means some universal principles. True Co-Creation, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Women and the Dark Side

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 15:10:00 -0300

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

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

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

So I think it's still relevant. Women and the Dark Side, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Big Sister is Watching

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 2 Mar 2017 14:04:00 -0300

I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. A quick word of warning right at the beginning of our program today … this is a delicate subject. In a world where speech is often paralyzed, not by an Orwelling Big Brother poised to punish us for deviations from the acceptable, but by our own individual and collective decisions as to what’s correct or now. Straying from the correct-speak causes raised eyebrows and pursed lips at best and outright shunning at worst.

It’s a politically correct world in the world, and the language has been sculpted and massaged and homogenized to remove any unwanted judgements or value statements in a total conviction that this is progress. Politically incorrect is simply not tolerated, a throwback to a time most consider downright evil.

But there’s a problem underneath all this. Unfortunately, not being able to say anything critical about anyone means real defects and problems don’t get pointed out anymore, and all this walking on eggshells means we can’t really develop. And this problem appears particularly formidable when we want to talk women’s pathology.

Big Sister is watching, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

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The Science of Real Problem Solving

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 10:21:00 -0200

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and welcome to another episode of Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Read the literature about complex problem solving and you're in for a challenging read. System structure and dynamics, facets of intelligence, positive and negative dependencies. It's mind-numbing stuff that seeks to concretize often abstract what if scenarios so popular in corporate planning departments or government games theory laboratories.

The nub of the thing is this: you've got a goal you want to reach, and a lot of variables in the way of achieving it. What do you need to put in place to transform the state of your current reality into the desired reality?

It's analytical, logical and quantifiable for flow charts and computer programmers. And its focus on solutions proves that complex problem solving is the territory of those pragmatic Americans, raised as they are on the can-do philosophy of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale.

But from the perspective of the leading edge thinking emerging from Norberto Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy, it misses a huge point: to go forward, we first have to look backward.

The science of real problem solving, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Towards a Universal Mentality

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 26 Nov 2015 11:09:00 -0200

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

In light of the Paris attacks in November of 2015, it's difficult to know the best thing to do. The French government, seemingly wanting to show off those decisive decision-making muscles so vaunted in our no nonsense, zero tolerance, "let's show 'em who's boss" business model of a society, wasted no time in declaring war.

Most of our western world commiserated concernedly and gave their approval.

Donald Trump said the French need more guns.

It's oh-so-easy to react in kind in this world. Far too simple to hit back when we've been violated, to see red and demand hard justice. That response we know well. From Travis Bickle's "You talkin' to me", to Dirty Harry's "Go ahead. Make my day" snarl, the world's full of these modern archetypes. Guys who don't back down, men and women who make sure they get even.

But is this the best response if we want to resolve this? Will this "brutality to match brutality" move us forward? Seems to me we need a different response. Something we can find in Norberto Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy.

Towards a Universal Mentality, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Healing Terrorism

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 17:28:00 -0200

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I moved to Brazil from New York in 2001, 2 1/2 months before 9/11.

Talk about timing.

But if it was timing, it was not anything conscious. My desire was to learn more about the work of an extraordinary scientist I'd become aware of a short time before moving here.

That scientist was Dr. Norberto Keppe. What Keppe proposes in his far-reaching science is, quite simply, a solution to the fundamental human problem, which is that we act in contradiction to our essence and, therefore, we act against life. This goes to the root of the issue. This Inversion is the cause of all our conflicts and crises today, so it's not a matter simply of protecting this or that species or saving this or that ecosystem or cutting our greenhouse gasses or resolving geo-political scheming. We're going to have to change virtually everything if we are to attain the well-being that we have a right to enjoy. The transformation must be basic. It must be total.

Today, we'll try to transform and transcend the mounting terrorism crisis on our planet.

Healing Terrorism, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Roots of Racism - Updated

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 14:56:00 -0300

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Well, you don't have to look far these days, do you, to find signs of sickness. A young girl is stoned in Brazil by evangelical fanatics as she's on the way to a Candomble church. Boo Haram slaughtering Nigerians in an endeavor to create its own state. And now, 9 people dead in Charleston, S.C. after a gunman opened fire on a prayer meeting.

Isn't it hard to know what to say, beyond the normal words of sorrow and sadness? We lament the seeming deterioration in humanity and civilization but horrifyingly seem at a complete loss as to what to do about it. Obama called on Martin Luther King's words when King stated the need to question the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produces the murderers.

But we seem unable to collectively embark on that. It seems really that a piece is missing from our understanding of the human being and his society. Well, I believe that missing link is here in Norberto Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy.

The Roots of Racism Updated, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Going Beyond the Dogmas of Science

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Mon, 9 Feb 2015 15:15:00 -0200

Dogma. A principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. Meaning incapable of being questioned or doubted. In the 15 and 1600s, there was the beginning of a movement against dogma that burst forth from the scientific studies of such giants as Copernicus and Keppler, Newton and Galileo. Names we know well, even if we understand little of their proposals.

But this much we can understand: the scientists of the time were engaged in replacing untestable dogmas with scientific scrutiny and experimentation.

The dogmas they were opposing, or course, were from the religious institutions of the time. Large and powerful churches not opposed to burning or drowning those who disagreed with them. Scientific experimentation, then, was a good thing that helped move us from superstition and irrationality.

But there is a danger as well when experimental science is elaborated independently from the knowledge that was available in the past. It creates another intransigent dogma.

We'll go beyond the dogmas of modern science, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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The Sanity of Interiorizing our Lives

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 6 Nov 2014 11:15:00 -0200

Welcome to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Carl Gustav Jung proposed that everything that irritates us about others can lead us to understand ourselves. For him, others were a giant mirror into our own psyches. The great German writer, Hermann Hesse, suggested that disliking something in another is disliking something that we have, too.

Freud, Kraepelin, Schopenhauer, those Germans opened the door to our psychological lies. And it was a shock at the time. Jung joked to Freud on their maiden journey to America that they were bringing the plague to American. And if you subscribe to the idea that hell comes from the others, as Sartre proposed, it is a little depressing to have to let go of that and point the finger back inside for the real source of our problems.

The consequences, however, of maintaining that outward blame are severe. From nuking plants with toxic chemicals to ethnic cleansing to executing the "evil" ones, we pay a big price for our naive exteriorization.

Let's go the other way. The Sanity of Interiorizing our Lives, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Fathers of our Inverted Science, part 2

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 07:02:00 -0300

Our thinking, our philosophies of life, these are things we take for granted most of the time. "That's just the way it is," we say, and we step out confidently upon that premise. But what extensive research in clinical study from Brazil is showing us is that we would do well to investigate a little deeper. Our thinking, as it turns out, is not always our own.

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today in Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, Fathers of our Inverted Science, part 2.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Fathers of our Inverted Science

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 2 Oct 2014 08:38:00 -0300

The truth will set you free, it is written.

OK, good. But knowing what the truth is, recognizing it when it pulls up alongside, ah, that’s a little more difficult. Especially as our materialistic worldview would tell us that truth depends. And this idea of relative truth is a lie that comes to us from somebody else’s head.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, the Fathers of the Lie.

If you’ve been tuned in to our program for awhile now, you’ll know that we’re based on the science of Analytical Trilogy, which is trilogical because of its union of philosophy, science and spirituality. And this spiritual part is an important aspect of science that was for all intents and purposes cut out of scientific consideration with the rise of positivistic science in the middle of the 19th century.

Auguste Comte, the father of Positivism, talked about the quest for truth going through 3 phases, with the theological being the first or, we could say, most primitive. The philosophical phase would be next, and the positivist the last, meaning the most mature. And this last phase states that we know the most when we base ourselves on actual sense experience.

Right away, we can find some flaws with this view in that we know many things without having experience. Recent studies at Yale and Berkley suggest that little babies have working knowledge of basic arithmetic and physics principles as well as a well developed moral sense. And all of this with with no previous sensory experience.

So, linking all our societal development to positivistic science bases us not on something superior, but inferior. And we desperately need the amalgamation again of science with philosophy and theology or spirituality, which is precisely what Keppe’s work of Analytical Trilogy does.

More about this expansive work can be found at our Trilogy portal, or write me by email for more information or observations or questions. Always great to hear from you.

Our program today will be the first of two parts exploring how the inferior sensory-based science got so entrenched in our academic institutions – and our society in general. It’s the result of a great lie perpetrated and followed by many great thinkers who were fooled into following the lie. And that lie has been inspired by the supreme liar in the Universe – Lucifer. And that’s why reintroducing the 5000-year wisdom from Judeo-Christian theology is so important. Keppe knows this, and that’s why I consider his science to be the most important science to be studied in the world today.

Cesar Soós, one of our great Keppean metaphysics scholars at the International Society of Analytical Trilogy, is my guest today for the first part of Fathers of the Lie.

Click here to listen to this episode.

The Limitations of Selfishness

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Fri, 5 Sep 2014 14:03:00 -0300

We are clearly living in a time of veneration of the individual in western society. In North America, it's part of our mythology. The strong, independent, self-sufficient person is admired, and you see this reinforced in every area. Paul Simon sang about being a rock, an island against all the rest. The Marlboro Man squints against the sun, confident in his capacity to tame that stallion and build that barn single-handed. Rambo wins the Vietnam War all on his own.

Anything that deep in our psyche commands there unchallenged. There's no option to consider since all other options get dismissed even before we really entertain them. We might flirt with alternatives like socialism and collectivism, but only when we're young and impressed by challenging the status quo.

Individualism - one man, one vote - the democracy of individual rights, obviously has its place as a worldview to govern our lives. But it can stimulate neurosis and even backwardness if not analyzed.

The Limitation of Selfishness, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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The Scandal of Drugs

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 07:09:00 -0300

We've seen a lot of good ones go way too early because of drugs, haven't we? Seemed like a new one a week back in the '60s and '70s. Janis and Jimmy. Then Elvis. Now Whitney and Amy.

In Brazil, too, some great ones exited early thanks to substance abuse. Elis Regina, Tom Jobim, Tim Maya. Those are the high profile ones, and reams have been written and spoken about them and the problem. Can there possibly be anything new to say? Without preaching or proselytizing, of course. Both the moral finger wagging of the right and the societal condemnation of the left seem wholly inadequate to provide any healing at all.

And the situation's not improving much. Easy access to drugs, more desperation and tough times, materialism and lack of spiritual connection - it's a fatal recipe for increasing abuse.

Well, I am of the mind that a deeper analysis of our entire modern mindset is in order, and this is our proposal on this show. So, let's tackle the Scandal of Drugs, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Bringing Theology and Philosophy Together with Science

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 11:19:00 -0300

I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is TWSEH.

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

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, Bringing Together Theology and Science.

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

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

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

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

In that light, I just finished reading Leonard Cohen’s biography, and was touched by the deep yearning he has had over his long career to explore the profound and the profane, so I know it’s not completely uncool to pose the deeper questions.

Well, in fact, who cares if it’s uncool to be involved in understanding the human situation. I’m not sure when displaying profundity became unmodern, but I’m all for returning to a time when the artists considered they were conversing with the beyond and a human being wanted to consider his short life as fitting within some larger purpose and design.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing Together Theology and Science, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Peeking Behind the Curtains of Power

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 15:20:00 -0300

Ever since Dorothy pulled back the curtain to reveal a perfectly ordinary Wizard of Oz manipulating switches to make him seem more powerful, the image has served to portray a reality. Somewhere, in the shadows in not behind an actual curtain, unseen forces are in control.

Perhaps when they are officially unmasked, they will show themselves to be as feeble and full of bluster as the wizard from Frank Baum's classic, but while they stay hidden they exert enormous influence, as the Wizard of Oz did actually - until Dorothy blew his cover.

The Bilderbergers, the Illuminati, the Elders of Zion - most of use have no idea what goes on in their closed meetings. Or even if some of them actually exist. This ground is ripe for the wildest imaginings of the most paranoid of conspiracy theorists, but it would be foolish to dismiss the central idea out of hand - that our world is really controlled by individuals we seldom see.

It's a nefarious world of secret influence and elite privilege that survives only on deceit.

Peeking Behind the Curtains of Power, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Recovering True Humanity

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 12:13:00 -0300

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

With so much tension and confusion in modern day life, it seems appropriate to do our show, which deals so directly with the core issues of human existence. In fact, perhaps any of us who don't feel deeply disturbed by our situation are dangerously alienated or excessively cold-hearted. That would appear to be the case with the power structure that governs our affairs today.

Norberto Keppe, whose science of Analytical Trilogy underpins our show, considers that the way power is being used today to be the biggest problem facing us. We live in a world dominated by the pathology of power, which is even more responsible for our modern crises than our individual problems. Still, we condone this abuse by not learning more about it and by following it. Ignorance is no excuse, and we must become smarter about psycho-socio pathology, the purpose of our show today.

Recovering True Humanity today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Recapturing the Flavor of Romance

rich@richjonesvoice.com (Richard Lloyd Jones) — Tue, 27 May 2014 11:34:00 -0300

Like so many words, romance has been banalized in western culture. Coming to a head in what we now know as medieval chivalry, it's become associated with more mundane items today, like chocolate and Valentine's cards. Those medieval tales talked of chivalric adventure and didn't combine the idea of love until late into the 17th century.

Romance, then, has something to do with flowers and candlelight dinners, but much more to do with tilting at windmills it appears. And it is in this latter sense that we embark on our adventure today.

And like words such as service and humility and reverence, this definition of romance can seem a little fuddy duddy in our hip and flip era where nothings is sacred and all is looked at with a jaundiced eyes from our position of bitchin' awesomeness.

But romance is anything but lame. And nowhere near as anachronistic as modern society would like to believe. Let's go a little deeper into romance today.

Recapturing the Flavor of Romance, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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