Tuesday, December 23, 2008

True Meaning of Christmas

We put up the decorations. We send out the cards with the heartfelt wishes for peace and goodwill. We sometimes sing the songs.

But the desires for peace on earth and remembrances of the real meaning have long been obscured in the frustration of finding a blasted parking spot. Joyous Christmas time is not much of that anymore.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, let's re-visit the True Meaning of Christmas.

I remember in my youth waiting for the Christmas spirit. That elusive feeling of peace and spirituality that would kick in at some point in the holiday season. It could be a cold evening visit from a group of carollers that did it. Or a visit from a much-loved but little-seen relative. Or maybe Scrooge's transformation in the annual family viewing of Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

And now I'm dating myself, aren't I? It even starts to sound like I'm talking about the 19th Century!

But it was something that did take over at some point: the Christmas spirit. For a short time, all would really be calm, all would really be bright.

But around 2:00 pm on Christmas Day, we'd all start to feel the restlessness kick in. No stores to go to. Nothing open. Nothing to do. Actually, maybe that's why they instituted Christmas Day NBA games. Everyone just go too bored.

And I don't think it's any coincidence either that the 26th - Boxing Day in Canada - is the biggest sales day of the year in my country. People are so jumpy they'll start lining up at 5:30 in the cold morning to be the first to slap credit cards on the counter to get the deeply discounted Blu-Ray DVD player or next year's Christmas wrap.

But let's try to return today if we can to remember the true spirit of Christmas. Let's see if we can't overcome our materialism a little to have a new spirit this year - and one that is much needed.

Dr. Norberto Keppe's Analytical Trilogy gives us a beautiful perspective - a theological, philosophical and even scientific insight into what should be our most precious and spiritual time of the year.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Roots of, and Solutions for, our Destruction

Everybody has theories about what's causing our current economic breakdown. Those raised on the French philosophy of Sartre and Voltaire might lay the blame at the feet of society. More existential thinking would point the finger at individual responsibility. But only Norberto Keppe's new science gives us the tools to do a more complete analysis.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we'll look at the roots of our destruction, and what we have to know about ourselves in order to stop, which is the crux of the thing, isn't it? I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.

Well, one of the very clear problems we run into when tackling the issue of what's going on these days is that we always wind up in the same place. There's this theory over here, that one over there, 3 more somewhere in the middle. How in the world does the ordinary citizen make sense of it all? There are so many problems in so many areas.

The Comptroller General of the U.S. shocks us on 60 Minutes by talking about fiscal cancer and all that entails.

Al Gore's excellent documentray warns us that the catastrophic deep freeze produced by special effects wizards in The Day After Tomorrow movie could actually happen.

Fanatics talk about Divine retribution.

You can get an earful in whichever direction you turn. But is there any way to boil all this chaos and crisis down to something chewable? Is there any way to point to an overarching and principal problem? And perhaps more importantly, if there is a defining explanation, can it also offer us a solution or two?

I think "yes" on all those counts. You see, our difficulties begin in our way of seeing and relating to the world. We and the society we live in are products of what's going on in our philosophies of life, in our psyches.

And there's one point from which we must start in considering this: we are not the latest editions of the human species standing on the most recent rung of the evolutionary ladder. We're not like software upgrades - the latest version with considerable improvements over Zinzanthropus Man from several million years ago.

This is a key aspect of Brazilian psychoanalyst, Norberto Keppe's work: that we have all perfection inside us. As nature is complets, so are we. Our problem is that we deny and even destroy what we are. This makes our problem not one of not having arrived, of not knowing any better. No. It's more serious. We know what is right, what we should do individually and collectively to have a better world, to have the paradise we should live in. We know ... but we don't do it. This is something deep inside the human psyche, which is why it took a psychoanalyst to discover it. Dr. Norberto Keppe's work is totally about helping us understand this dynamic.

And it's what we explore all the time in this Podcast. And what we'll be expanding into an Internet radio show coming in January. Make sure you get on the mailing list to be informed about that: rich@richjonesvoice.com

That show will be conducted with psychoanalyst, Dr. Claudia Pacheco, who joins me on today's podcast as well.

Click here to listen to this episode.