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

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

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

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

Tennyson wondered about that:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,

Whom we, that have not seen thy face,

By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

Believing where we cannot prove;

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

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

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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