WHAT'S WRONG?...

WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU IS THE STARTING POINT
By Richard Jones

In 1986, I began teaching radio broadcasting in Vancouver, Canada. I came to the profession believing that the most important thing was to believe all students were able and competent, willing to learn and improve. I spent time empowering and encouraging them, validating their strengths, assuring them that they too could become successful if they only applied themselves and worked hard. I gave pep talks and filled my teaching sessions with positive thinking and optimism.

And it totally stunned me when a number of them sabotaged themselves in the face of all my cheerleading. Oh, they wanted to succeed. They said they did and they consciously tried to meet the course requirements, but still they failed. Some other process was going on deep inside them that over-rode their desires for success. I think it’s important to speak about this, because I have come to see that it has been running for years like wild dogs through my life and the lives of those I know.

…

A lot of people today would say they are on a spiritual quest for answers to the great human questions: who are we and where do we fit in the universe?

Much of the New Age literature and pop culture references suggest that the way to true success and fulfillment lies in strengthening our awareness of and connection with our inner sacred and divine essence, through meditation or affirmations or positive thinking or any number of other methodologies. This is honourable and well intentioned, to be sure. But I’d like to suggest respectfully that it is dead wrong.

These are strong words I know, and lest I appear completely cold and merciless, let me take some time to explain myself.

First of all, this thought doesn’t just come first from my own head. I’m basing my ideas on the extraordinary work conducted over the last 35 years by the brilliant Brazilian psychotherapist Dr. Norberto Keppe. After years of clinical research with clients all over South America, Europe and the United States and after writing voluminously on his findings, Keppe has noted that one of our significant blind spots is that we have virtually no consciousness of the depths of the psychological sickness that has infected us. And because our psychology exerts the most powerful influence on our actions and behaviours, we need to have some understanding of our psychological state if we’re to live lives of more than quiet desperation. Our psyches rule the roost, it would appear.

Quite simply, we are not the people we think we are. Nor even by employing many of today’s popular self-realization techniques, are we becoming the people we think we’re becoming. Because rather than focussing on our inner, sacred essence, Keppe has determined that we need to spend almost all of our time focussed on our mistakes and flaws and problems.

This isn’t going to go down too well with Stuart Smalley or Norman Vincent Peale. But the fact that it’s flying in the face of much of what we have seen coming out of the New Age community or shouting at us from impressive dust jackets for the past 20 years warrants a closer look.

Because frankly, I don’t know where all that New Age stuff has gotten us anyway. After years of spending billions on self-realization, we are still sabotaging our lives and destroying the planet. We’ve read all about habits and agreements and conversations and shadow sides, and we’re conversant enough with our family patterns, our shadow beliefs and our wounded inner children that we can even talk about them at dinner parties and on blind dates. But for all this, we’re not much different than we ever were. We’re just more skilful at masking it under better spiritual rhetoric.

For one thing, we have a strong resistance to seeing problems¾especially if we’ve just spent thousands on the latest workshop designed to fix those problems. We either want to rationalize them, ignore them by focusing on something more “positive”, send them away with the kiss of affirmations or the non-judgement of meditation or see them as aberrations from our normal and decent nature.

But any technique that helps us avoid seeing the problems actually obscures the consciousness that those problems are trying to give us. For example, if I believe deep down that I’m an effective and efficient worker, I’m going to resist any feedback that shows me the contrary. I’ll blame circumstances, or someone else, or I’ll rationalize it as an aberration from my normally effective and efficient nature. And I’ll miss the consciousness that the problem is trying to show me. Maybe I’m not as effective and efficient as I think I am. It would be helpful to see that. And it would be a big mistake to cover that up with an affirmation, or replace the uncomfortable realization with the effort of positive thought.

Anything that leads us away from our problems leads us away from consciousness¾and consciousness is precisely the thing we most need. The challenge is that acceptance of consciousness brings us considerable awareness of our mistakes, our limited thinking and our problems. As Keppe puts it,

We have created tremendous opposition to wisdom and understanding, with the result that human beings and the society they have built have become sick and riddled with flaws because of faults they are unwilling to see. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that pathology¾ illness¾is the attitude of opposing consciousness.1

Because what we don’t become conscious of will rule us, as I discovered with my Radio students back in the ‘80s. What we don’t know will harm us. “The human being is what he doesn’t want to know,”2 to quote Keppe. What we try to hide from, what we try to keep from our awareness, rules us. The more we try to hide problems from ourselves, even with “good” techniques, the more they appear in our lives¾only they’ll be buried so deep we won’t be able to see them anymore. Although we will see the effects in increased obesity, drug and alcohol addiction, life threatening diseases, divorce, pollution, terrorism, and on and on.

Of course, there is a good and true basic internal structure to us. But here’s the thing … we don’t need to spend any time thinking or meditating about that. It can’t be improved, since it’s perfect already. It can’t be added to. It can’t be strengthened. It can only be prevented from appearing. We human beings are experts at that. In fact, it is precisely this tendency to stop our beautiful inner structure from emerging that is our biggest mistake and needs to be seen. This is a deep pathology that we all have to varying degrees. Our myriad and nefarious methods of stopping the emergence of our perfect structure are what need 100% of our attention. Here’s Keppe again:

You can’t do anything with pathology. You can’t solve it. You just need to accept it. And by accepting it, you will of course have a better life, because you will be able to correct lots of things that result from your particular pathology. So what the person has to see is exactly the problems that they have. Because what they have of good inside, they don’t need to see this. The biggest asset the human being can have is to see that which he doesn’t like. The bad things.” 3

That’s an admittedly big challenge. But imagine … self-awareness and fulfillment through focussing on problems and issues and difficulties. It’d make a provocative book idea. As Keppe says:

You don’t need to bolster people, to pump them up, because the ego of the person is already too elevated. He’s already up there, flying around. So the more you put a person on a pedestal, the more you encourage his own deliriums and fantasies.4

We don’t need any more books or techniques leading us away from consciousness, specifically the consciousness of our errors. We need a heavy dose of consciousness. Not consciousness of our angelic, true essence, but consciousness about how we are in reality, in practice. This may be quite different from what we think we are in our fantasies. Isn’t that perfect?


References:
1. The Origin of Illness, Norberto M. Keppe, Proton Editora Ltda. 2000, São Paulo, Brazil
2. The Human Being is What He Doesn’t Want to Know, Norberto R. Keppe, Trilogia Newsletter, January, 2002
3. Interview with Dr. Norberto Keppe, January 13, 2002
4. Ibid

http://www.trilogiaanalitica.org/

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