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

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

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

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

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.

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Choosing Evil - Ep 6 - Therapeutic Theology Series

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.

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Certainty of God - Ep 5 - Therapeutic Theology Series

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

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.

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