Thinking With Somebody Else's Head

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. Click here to listen to this episode.

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. Click here to listen to this program.

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. Click here to listen to this episode

Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE 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. Click here to listen to this episode.

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. Click here to listen to this episode.

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. Click here to listen to this episode.

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. Click here to listen to this episode.

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. Click here to listen to this episode.

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. Click here to listen to this program.

"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. Click here to listen to this episode.

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. Click here to listen to this episode.

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. Click here to listen to this episode.

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. Click here to listen to this program.

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. Click here to listen to this program.

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. Click here to listen to this episode.