Thinking With Somebody Else's Head

"The idea of being a victim of evil is quite a comfortable one," writes Norberto Keppe in his book, Psychotherapy and Exorcism . "But what's really going on," he continues, "is that the human being actually selects the type of evil he wants in his life." Well, that's sobering. I hope this happens unconsciously because the conscious choice for evil seems rather terrifying. Keppe's view that we summ...

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 solution...

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 belie...

The nature of good and evil. That’s a nice light topic for your next Sunday afternoon bbq! If I had a dollar for every time a friend wanted to discuss the nature of good and evil with me over the years, I’d have a cool … $3.00 in my bank account. Not a topic that comes up that often. We’ve been considered victims of good and evil for much of our history. From the Biblical Job to history’s billions...

We are assailed in our modern world with all sorts of problems. There are money worries, health of ageing parents, stress and depression, crime and taxes. Coping with all of that can make us forget the beautiful things around us every day. But there’s another influence no one talks about in our modern, number-crunching world, and that’s the very real influence from the spiritual world. That’s not...

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...

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...

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 pe...

I was walking down the streets of Vancouver a number of years ago after I'd been living away from the west coast for some time, and I bumped into an old acquaintance of mine in Kitsilano, the old hippy neighbourhood in the '70s. "What are you doing these days?" I asked her. "Channeling yoga," came back the straight-faced reply. Well, she was always a little out there, but it leads into what I want...

A few hundred years ago, the notions of heaven and hell, of God and Lucifer, were respected themes for composers, poets, and painters. Milton's Paradise Lost contains the idea of Lucifer endeavoring to defeat Christ and regain his former position in paradise. Raphael captured the epic battle where the Archangel Michael vanquished Satan. Beethoven wrote of the desire of man to know God . And then,...

I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. A quick word of warning right at the beginning of our program today … this is a delicate subject. In a world where speech is often paralyzed, not by an Orwelling Big Brother poised to punish us for deviations from the acceptable, but by our own individual and collective decisions as to what’s correct or now. Straying from the...

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...

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. Mo...

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...

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Well, you don't have to look far these days, do you, to find signs of sickness. A young girl is stoned in Brazil by evangelical fanatics as she's on the way to a Candomble church. Boo Haram slaughtering Nigerians in an endeavor to create its own state. And now, 9 people dead in Charleston, S.C. after a gunman opened fire on a...

Dogma. A principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. Meaning incapable of being questioned or doubted. In the 15 and 1600s, there was the beginning of a movement against dogma that burst forth from the scientific studies of such giants as Copernicus and Keppler, Newton and Galileo. Names we know well, even if we understand little of their proposals. But this...

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...

Our thinking, our philosophies of life, these are things we take for granted most of the time. "That's just the way it is," we say, and we step out confidently upon that premise. But what extensive research in clinical study from Brazil is showing us is that we would do well to investigate a little deeper. Our thinking, as it turns out, is not always our own. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today in...

The truth will set you free, it is written. OK, good. But knowing what the truth is, recognizing it when it pulls up alongside, ah, that’s a little more difficult. Especially as our materialistic worldview would tell us that truth depends. And this idea of relative truth is a lie that comes to us from somebody else’s head. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, the Fathers of the Lie. If you...

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...

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 p...

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...

Ever since Dorothy pulled back the curtain to reveal a perfectly ordinary Wizard of Oz manipulating switches to make him seem more powerful, the image has served to portray a reality. Somewhere, in the shadows in not behind an actual curtain, unseen forces are in control. Perhaps when they are officially unmasked, they will show themselves to be as feeble and full of bluster as the wizard from Fra...

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.  With so much tension and confusion in  modern day life, it seems appropriate to do our show,  which deals so directly with the core issues of human existence. In fact, perhaps any of us who don't feel deeply disturbed by our situation are dangerously alienated or excessively cold-hearted. That would appear to...

Like so many words, romance has been banalized in western culture. Coming to a head in what we now know as medieval chivalry, it's become associated with more mundane items today, like chocolate and Valentine's cards. Those medieval tales talked of chivalric adventure and didn't combine the idea of love until late into the 17th century. Romance, then, has something to do with flowers and candlelig...