Vaccines, Energy and Freedom

 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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The True Spiritual Reset

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

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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The Censorship of Natural

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

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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Power and Demonic Envy

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

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

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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Man's Greatest Enemy

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

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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Under Control of Evil

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

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

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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The Science of Real Problem Solving

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.

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Towards a Universal Mentality

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

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.

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The Sanity of Interiorizing our Lives

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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The Limitations of Selfishness

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

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

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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