This is episode 4 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.From the time we're young, we're taught to protect our lives from nature. Sprays to keep off the bugs, oils to block the harmful rays, potent cleansers to ward off the offending bacteria waiting to take up residence in the bathroom. And don’t even think about eating that bread that dropped on the floor. Nature is often a savage place, we're shown on Discovery Channel documentaries, where evil microbes lurk expectantly, waiting for us to let down our guard for a split second before pouncing. You wonder where the vaunted human immune system goes in situations like these, and how hugging your grandmother came to be so dangerous. Well, there are huge financial interests behind this idea that the danger lies outside. We need vaccines to protect us from outside enemies, and some estimates put combined vaccine company profits at some $65,000 per minute. We’ve accepted toxic pesticides as necessary to deal with pesky plagues, and there are obvious implications for human and eco-system health associated with that. Our multi-billion-dollar drug industry to treat symptoms can often exacerbate serious disease conditions. We don’t want to branch off into conspiracy theory here, but medical education in the West today is notorious for training doctors that pharma solutions are the only option. And pharma lives on treating outside invasions or faulty hormones, chemical imbalances and deficient organs. However, just to throw a significant alternative spanner into the works, Drs. Keppe and Pacheco have been working for decades on treating physical, mental and even social infirmity through a potent form of psycho-socio therapy. And their work suggests strongly that disease doesn't come principally from outside us at all. In their clinic, disease is largely an interior condition, while the modern medical and drug establishment makes its money, and consolidates its hold on treatment and treatment narratives, by provoking fear of what’s going on outside. And they call the shots today. The consequences, however, make us sicker. Here’s Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco. Click here to listen to this episode. Click here to download the PDF.
From the psychosomatic department of the Keppe & Pacheco Colleges, this is episode 3 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones. It’s been very interesting to live through this pandemic time, hasn’t it? In the face of a real worldwide challenge, it’s been illuminating to watch how health has taken a back seat to fear. Panic, I think we could say, has largely driven our political and social responses to infection, and this seems to have trumped any reliance on a robust immune response, which used to be the policy of choice for dealing with infectious disease situations. And, of course, we must always pay attention to the cynical manipulation of this fear to sell medicines and vaccines and other products to protect us from this outside danger. In the face of all this, we’ve shifted from a faith in the robustness of human health and potent immune response to a philosophy of trying to protect the massive human populat...
From the psychosomatic department of the Keppe & Pacheco Colleges, this is episode 2 of the Healing Through Consciousness series on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.Our first episode was spent laying out some credentials of our College’s psychosomatic vision and pedigree. And I want to stress that our discussions here in these episodes are based on solid clinical case studies, as you’ll see throughout our series. And where we’re coming from is this: good health is a natural state. In philosophy, great thinkers like Augustine and Plotinus and Aquinas proposed that evil, unlike good, is insubstantial. So thinking of evil as a substantial entity is incorrect. All those years ago, the consideration was that evil is the privation of good, and even that evil is non-existent. That’s difficult to accept, but it’s meant in the sense of the nature of life being good, and problems or pain or cruelty being nothing but attitudes against that inherent goodness. I...
Welcome to our new series on the Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head podcast. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.We’re calling this series Healing Through Consciousness. An abstract title, perhaps. In our western civilization, with its over-emphasis on the material solutions for disease of pills, surgery, vaccines, righting our chemical imbalances and tweaking our diets, it’s possible we’ve diminished the importance of the most crucial aspect in our human quest for health and longer life: our vast inner universe of feelings and perceptions, values and philosophy of life, intuition and consciousness. This is the psychological life, meaning psyche or soul as the Greeks considered it. Now we’re not suggesting, of course, that diet and exercise and good habits have no place. That would be foolish. What we are suggesting is that those good habits come from an inner equilibrium and sanity that spring from a healthy psyche. Exploring the pathway to that inner health is what we’re attempting her...
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 arc...
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 t...
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 S...
Welcome to Episode 14 of the Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.My dad used to say the problem with the human being was we were born without an owner's manual. I used to nod in agreement, but now I'm pretty sure my father was a little simplistic in his understanding. To be fair, I think he meant it in a lighthearted way, a joshing comment not meant to be scrutinized as to its theological accuracy. But like all things related to my spiritual understanding, I have to respectfully disagree with my dad's conclusion. For not only do we have numerous written documents outlining correct behavior one with another and nation to nation, we have the universal knowledge deep in us from birth guiding us to act in conformity with the principles of goodness, truth and beauty. We feel ashamed when we're caught in a lie. We recognize and feel repugnance towards injustice. We try to hide our peccadillos. Universal knowledge, "inf...
Welcome to episode 13 of the Modern Relevance of God audio course here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.As I’ve been developing this series, I have to admit I’ve been wondering about the acceptance of its premise in the English-speaking world. Living in Brazil for the past 20 years has coloured my perceptions and tastes in ways I wasn’t expecting. My Anglo-Saxon feeling of assumed superiority has been challenged here in surprising ways. I imagined the typical cultural challenges of language and bureaucracy and doing the exchange in my head about the cost of stuff. I traveled to Europe for long stretches back in my backpacking years after all, but now have come to understand the difference between those mostly tourist concerns and the deeper questionings and soul searching that mark the real existential stirring provoked by making home somewhere else. I can characterize this with a story. One of my Brazilian colleagues at the language school I work wi...
This is episode 12 of the Modern Relevance of God audio course here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.I think one of the greatest difficulties I've had in coming closer to spirituality has been a pretty common one: mixing up God with religion. If God was all the mess stirred up by the church over the centuries, I wanted nothing to do with Him. It's a frequent oversimplification, one which doesn't require that much thinking actually. Just a knee jerk generalization in the same vein as all Chinese people look the same. And just as lacking in sophistication. God never created a church after all. Neither did Jesus. This is something we do a lot. A phrase uttered by a politician whose party we don't like is worthless and evil, by definition. The Montreal Canadians are hated by Toronto Maple Leafs fans automatically. And vice versa. I heard a Serbian soldier in Bosnia back in the war years there say, "The Croatians are animals. I can't even bear to breathe the...