Know Thyself - E164 - Dr. John Demartini: How To Transmute Fear into Love & Confusion into Clarity

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

When life feels confusing or heavy, it’s often because we’re living out of alignment with what truly matters to us. In this episode, world-renowned human behavior expert Dr. John Demartini explain...s how to uncover your highest values, dissolve self-sabotage, and see the hidden order behind life’s challenges.We explore why setbacks are actually stepping stones, how comparison keeps you from your unique genius, and why clarity comes from asking the right questions. From the search for meaning to the science of values, Dr. Demartini offers timeless wisdom on how to transform confusion into clarity and fear into love.Integrative Psychology Mastershttps://integpsych.org/therapyBook a One to One callhttps://integpsych.org/support20% off Pique Life Tea:https://www.piquelife.com/knowthyselfAndrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________0:00 Intro1:41 Discover the Hidden Order to Life: Transcend Infatuation & Judgement10:45 Becoming Conscious, Seeing Life Objectively17:37 Impactful Questions for Self Inquiry29:47 The Cost of Living Out of Alignment31:12 Go From Comparison to Unique Genius38:31 Discover Your Values with This Process46:22 Setbacks are not IN the way... They're ON the way.52:18 Are Our Lives Significant? Big Picture & Nihilism59:42 The Meaning of Life1:06:59 Religion, Essential Self, & The Big Bang1:11:01 How to Prioritize What Matters in Your Life1:23:24 Delegating What's NOT Meaningful to You1:30:27 Embark On Your Personal Journey of Living Aligned1:34:44 Defining the Essence of Wisdom1:38:13 Most Influential Books & Teachers for Him1:41:37 Learn How to Learn & Integrate Information1:54:17 What Is An Original Idea?2:00:05 Conclusion___________Episode Resources: https://drdemartini.comhttps://www.instagram.com/drjohndemartini/https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I was 23 years old and I asked myself a question. Why do some people walk their talk, some people limp their life? Why do some people do what they say? No, just don't. I want to know the answer to that. People talk about I sabotage. I've never seen sabotage. Impulsive, compulsive, addictive behaviors
Starting point is 00:00:15 are compensations for unfulfilled highest values. What is the direct cost of living life in the state of unawareness? In a nutshell, entropy, which we call illness. But our intuition, it is trying to whisper to us the side that we're ignoring. Now, what I've done is I've developed systems of asking questions to help us see the part that we've overlooked. I now ask the question, now you get to be authentic and you get to know thyself, you get to be yourself, you get to love yourself. When you can't wait
Starting point is 00:00:44 to get up in the morning and do something extremely inspiring and meaningful, you're not distracted by immediate gratification because you're now focusing on long-term vision. So if you don't feel your day with high-priety actions that inspire you, you'll automatically shrink your space and time horizons for a quick fix. So what you say means very little. What your life demonstrates means everything. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know This Health podcast. Our guest today is a renowned human behavior expert, international bestseller, author, speaker, someone who has supported millions of people move beyond confined and limiting beliefs that hold them back in life. And our last conversation was incredible. I loved it so much. And you guys really, really resonated with it as well. So I'm so
Starting point is 00:01:34 pleased to have back, Dr. John D. Martini. Thank you for coming back. Thank you for having me. I'd like to dive right in. You've spoken to throughout your work about this hidden order behind all life throughout the cosmos and the human developmental journey and behind every experience,
Starting point is 00:01:51 every judgment, every perception, there is a hidden order waiting to be realized. Could you set the framework for what you feel that is so that we can see how it might support us and living a more fulfilled human experience. What a great question to start up with. Thank you. There were two gentlemen that came from MIT
Starting point is 00:02:14 that created information theory. And there was another name, Claude Channon, who took that and kind of put it out on the map. And he basically said that disorder is, or randomness, was missing information. And the order was the reclaiming of that information. Another mathematician, Stephen Wolfram, said that most of us have a computational boundary
Starting point is 00:02:48 and our ability to identify information that's missing. And therefore, we tend to see things from a chaotic disorder perspective. But if we can ask questions, since equality of our lives is based on the questions we ask, if we can ask questions that make us conscious of what was unconscious and reclaim the information, that we think is missing, which is not, but we think it is because we're unconscious of it, because we filtered out with subjective bias. And we access that information. We can reclaim and discover the hidden order in the apparent chaos.
Starting point is 00:03:29 So I'll use an analogy. You have to tell me when to stop. Keep rolling. You meet somebody that you're attracted to. your amygdala assigns a valency to it as a positive experience, prey, something you want to consume and eat. So you have an impulse to seek it out. And because in order to survive, we needed false positives to assume that that was prey instead of assuming it's not, or predator, instead of assuming it's not, we err on the idea that it is more positive than negative or more negative than positive.
Starting point is 00:04:10 We tend to skew and bias our interpretation of reality. So if we see something that we're attracted to, we become conscious of the positives and unconscious and negative. Whatever we're unconscious of is missing information. We're asleep, we're in awake, we're not seeing it. So if we infatuate with something or admire something or seek something, we're partly blind to the downsides of the catch. The same thing on reverse, if we see something,
Starting point is 00:04:43 if we see something that we think is more predator, and we're conscious of the downside, unconscious of the upside. We skew again on with false positives, and to do that, primarily because we need to be able to run faster than the prey and run faster than the predator to survive. So as a survival mechanism, we skew our interpretation of reality, and we become conscious and unconscious and unconscious of the pauses,
Starting point is 00:05:10 unconscious of the pauses, unconscious of the pauses, or conscious of the pauses, or conscious of the pauses. And each time we do that, we're now in our amygdala seeking or avoiding and storing that information in our hippocampus as episodic memories of something that we can not starve by and something we can escape and something we can not be eaten by. So as long as we have these skewed views, we're missing information. we're not seeing the whole. A day, a week, a month, a year, or five years later, after we capture this prey, this person we're admiring, we start to discover some of the downsides
Starting point is 00:05:54 that we didn't see initially. And the same thing, what we thought was terrible, a day, a week, a month, a year, five years later, we can look back and go, I'm so grateful I had that experience. Seemed terrible initially, but it actually gave me a catalyst for independence or innovation or something. So our first interpretation can be skewed and we can misinformation and be unconscious of part of it.
Starting point is 00:06:18 And therefore we see chaos. We see the disorder and we're caught in kind of a cyclothymic oscillation in our perceptions and actions. But our intuition, which is nothing but negative feedback systems in our brain, trying to make us see the whole so we can be fully conscious and awakened and enlightened. and love, it is trying to whisper to us the side that we're ignoring when we're infatuated or resentful or seeking or avoiding. And so it is constantly trying to bring into our conscious awareness the part we're unconscious of so we can be fully conscious. Now, what I've done is I've developed systems of asking questions that are prompted
Starting point is 00:07:04 by what we have inside our intuition to help us see the part that we've overlooked and become fully conscious. And when we do, we discover what I call the hidden order. It was only hidden from our conscious awareness. The order was there the whole time. We could call it the implicate order if we use David Bowms terms. We could call it the divine order if we use theological terms. But it's basically where we realize that at our full conscious awareness, nothing's missing. But in our personas, our mass, our imposterous, our imposterous, our imposterous Asthma's syndromes, we have information that's missing. So disorder means missing information.
Starting point is 00:07:49 Reclaiming that information allows us to see the hidden order, the meaning behind things. We impose and project false meanings on things initially. This is good, this is bad. We get trapped in moral hypocrisies. But once we go probing deeper and discovering the information that's missing, we find the true golden mean, the real meaning behind things. And it's a synthesis and synchronicity of the complementary opposites. And we have, by definition, love. I always say love is the synthesis and synchronicity of all complementary opposites, all, the unity of opposites that Heraclytus described.
Starting point is 00:08:26 And so asking questions and become cognizant and trusting our intuition, which sometimes meditation can, you know, and bring to the surface. And then you're now clear and aware, and you don't have noise and static. You have the channel of the signal of the soul, you might say, coming through. And when you do that, you have a glimpse of knowing yourself. You have a glimpse of not, because if you put somebody on a pedestal and are attracted to them, you'll tend to minimize yourself, which is inauthenticity. And if you put somebody in the pit and exaggerate yourself, you're inauthentic.
Starting point is 00:09:03 But if you're able to be fully conscious of both sides and have pure reflective awareness, which is a true intimacy with the universe. And now you get to be authentic, and you get to know thyself. You get to be yourself. You get to love yourself. And the hidden order, I really believe that the symptoms of our physiology, psychology, sociology, and even theological feedback, business feedback, is nothing more than a feedback to guide us back to knowing the truth about our self,
Starting point is 00:09:33 our authentic self, where we have sustainable fair exchange with other people, instead of trying to get something for nothing for narcissism or trying to give something for nothing for altruism, both of which are skewed interpretations of reality. So I would much rather use the feedback from the universe and become more consciously aware and ask quality questions and become aware of the whole. Because the wear of the whole balances out the autonomic nervous system, balances out the brain waves, takes the delta from the parasympathetic and the... beta from the sympathetic and puts it into the alpha theta junction,
Starting point is 00:10:10 and then all of a sudden initiates a gamma synchronistia, eureka moment, and a aha moment where we're actually seeing the hole, and we have tears of gratitude because we've now accessed now the hidden order. Sign me up. So this is something that I feel very called and have for a while in my life, to experience life as it is, to see people as they are, to not be so identified through the lens and cognitive bias on my own rose, colored, tinted glasses to see people as who they are for how I want them to show up instead of
Starting point is 00:10:43 who they are in this moment. And so for those that strive to live with the cognizance of this hidden order, to, like you said, become a being who is in love, which is the recognition, the synthesis and synchronization of complementary opposites, which you mentioned, to have our first impressions upon life? How have you trained yourself to be aware of the upside of the downside, the complementary opposites? How have you cultivated your perception to be able to live from that place where you're seeing life in a more objective sense? I don't want to mislead people in thinking that I stay there. How have you made progress? I don't even know if it's progress. I'm going to reframe that. Okay.
Starting point is 00:11:30 Socrates was considered a wise individual, but he spoofed that because he said, I know nothing. And what he was really saying is when you infatuate with somebody, you really don't know who they are. You're blind to the downsides. When you resent somebody, you don't really know who they are. You're blind to the upsides. But when you actually get to see both sides simultaneously, as Wilhelm I want called the Law of Contrast, simultaneously, and you have the tears of gratitude and feel love for somebody, you get to know yourself.
Starting point is 00:12:03 You only have certainty when you imbalance both sides simultaneously. So I have moments where I know, but whatever I know, what I don't know is always an infinite. What I know is always a finite. It's an infinitesimal. So you have to live, as Einstein said, in holy curiosity to continually embrace the next mystery. You have the history of what you know, but you have the mystery of what's to come. And even if you're present and you're not in the state of time, you still have the mysteries of what's unknown.
Starting point is 00:12:40 Because no matter what you conceive in your infinitude, it's still finite because it's only what we know today. So I always say enlightenment is a relative term more so than I'm now enlightened. I would consider myself a relatively aware individual. That's it. Now, each time I go into the next mystery, I'm now confronted by the polarities. And so I don't have this idea that I stay there or I'm mostly there because if you're growing, you're continually confronting your next mystery.
Starting point is 00:13:14 And if you're not, you're stagnant, not really pushing yourself or allowing yourself to emerge. So I don't want to give the impression that, you know, I'm any different to anybody else because I don't think that would be fair to people. because then it would make it think, well, I need to be like that and make people look up or down at people. I don't find that productive. So, but I do, when I am confronted with that, I have accumulated a series of questions
Starting point is 00:13:40 because the questions I ask are make me more conscious of things that I'm overlooking. So I hold myself accountable by the questions. So if I now am confronted by something that I think, well, oh, wow, that's amazing. Or, you know, I don't like that. and I put a spin on it and I put a moral illusion on it or something, then I will watch my physiology respond by a seeking avoidance response.
Starting point is 00:14:05 I'm now in my amygdala. I'm not in my executive center. I'm not self-governed. I'm not knowing myself. I'm distorting myself by the law of contrast to the things that I'm exaggerating or minimizing around me. So then I just, if I find it's mild and it's not really perturbing me, I may just be patient and pass through it.
Starting point is 00:14:25 If I find that it's now distracting and occupying space and time in the mind, I may then address the questions and pull them out, maybe even on a piece of paper and start asking the questions to help me look at what I'm overlooking. Our physiology is an amazing feedback. So if you are infatuated with something and are attracted to it and impulsively seeking it, and it occupies space and time of your mind and is stored in the hippocampus, which creates the
Starting point is 00:14:56 existential world we live in, because it's putting things in space and time, which makes us existential. That occupation of space and time in the mind, that intrusive thought at night when you're sleeping preoccupies your mind, and it clouds the clarity of the mind, so when you're sleeping, it's a bit disturbing. The same thing if you're resentful. If you're highly resentful to something, it's hard to sleep. Highly infatu, it's hard to sleep. So the insomnic responses that we have at night are letting us know that we have a skewed subjectively interpretation of reality and we're not seeing things whole and objective.
Starting point is 00:15:31 And so it's guiding us to ask the questions to counterbalance the content that's occupying our mind to help us stabilize ourselves. And the second we're back to being ourselves, we sleep soundly. And the same thing. if we polarize our perception and we're seeking something, now we fear its loss. And if we're trying to avoid something, now we fear its gain.
Starting point is 00:15:56 So insomnia is basically a culmination of the accumulation of the fear of losses and fear of gains. I always say the master lives in a world of transformation and resiliency, and the masses live in the illusions of gain and loss. So when we have that, we have all this noise. And when I am aware that I do that, I will then bring up the question.
Starting point is 00:16:17 and hold myself accountable to bring back the balance sheet and see things as it is instead of as it is perceived. You know, it was David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who, when he was studying values, he said there's is and there's ought. And the Gita said as it is versus as it's not. And so what we do is we go through and we sometimes get indoctrinated and incultivate. injected values by outer authorities or normative deontological belief systems that this is the way it should be, ought to be, is supposed to be, got to be, have to be, need to be, et cetera, instead of what it is. And so if I find myself hearing imperative language inside me directed towards me or directed towards others, I know that I'm in an imposter syndrome and I know it's time to ask the questions to equilibrate to mine and
Starting point is 00:17:14 bring myself to where it is. Because what is is the magnificence and hidden order of the universe. It's always there waiting for us to become aware of it, but we tend to impose our distortions on it, only to create our symptomatology as a feedback to guide us back to seeing what is. Because the magnificence of what is far exceeds any of the fantasies we impose on it. Would you mind sharing a question or two of those? Sure. Let's say that I meet somebody that I admire and look up to a nine-firm.
Starting point is 00:17:46 I'm too humble to admit what I see in them is inside me. And I think they have figured something or known something, either intellectually or in business or in finance or in relationship or in social settings or social savvy or physical fitness or spiritual awareness or whatever. I have the illusion that there's something missing. At the level of the soul, nothing's missing. You have pluromic fulfillment. At the level of the census, things appear to be missing.
Starting point is 00:18:16 and you have conomic emptiness and unfulfillment. So if I have a moment where I'm too humble to see what I see in them, I immediately ask, what specific trait, action, or inaction do I perceive this individual displaying or demonstrating that I admire, look up to, or seek most? And I pinpoint the components. It may be multiple. And they may be composite traits or singular trait. identify what that is, so it's not nebulous.
Starting point is 00:18:50 I just identify it. And then I ask the second question, all right, John, go to a moment where and when you perceive yourself displaying or demonstrating the same specific trait, action, and action, and identify where it was, when it was, so I'm activating the hippocampus, and to whom it was, so I get the direction and location, and who perceived me so I can have reflection and transparency, and identify that where I've done it, when I've done it, until the quantity and quality are completely equal,
Starting point is 00:19:22 and there's no question I'm certain that I have reflective awareness again. And instead of having deflective awareness, where I'm too humble, I'm now reflective awareness, and I realize that it was a projection of me. Just like it said in Romans 2-1 in the New Testament, when you judge other people, beware, you've done the same thing. You're pointing a finger, it's you. But that works not only on things you dislike, but things you like. things you despise and admire.
Starting point is 00:19:47 So I go in there and I hold myself accountable until I see that. And then I even did a preemptive strike. 41 years ago, I did preemptive strike by going to the Oxford English Dictionary and identifying all possible traits found in the dictionary inside me. So I didn't have to wait and react by a reaction from hindsight. I could proactively identify all those traits inside me to realize that nothing's missing at me. But still, occasionally I'll get it from an angle that I have an identification.
Starting point is 00:20:15 identified. If I do that and I own that, I soften some of the judgment. My reflective awareness goes out. I'm more poised. And then I ask the next question. Because if I was under the assumption that there were more positives and negatives that I admired, admire means to get close and look at. I want to get close and look to it. I now ask the question, go to the moment exactly where and when I perceive this individual displaying or demonstrating the specific trait that I admire most. And at that moment, what are the downsides so I can strengthen my intuition and become aware of what I overlooked?
Starting point is 00:21:02 What are the downsides? Spiritally, what are the downsides? Intellectually are the downsides? Business, finance, family, social, physical. I go through and hold myself accountable to identify where I see the downsides to balance it. Because otherwise, if I don't, I'm going to have my valency for my amygdala run me,
Starting point is 00:21:24 instead of my executive center where I see things objectively. Instead of seeing things as it is, with both sides, I'm seeing it as it being interpreted as it, I think it should be. And in the process of doing it, once I get the quantity of the downsides, equing the upsides, and it is neither positive. I get a tear of gratitude to realize that there was the hidden order sitting there the whole time
Starting point is 00:21:50 and I had been, you know, I had skewed and distorted the reality and got caught in my illusion. I then go another question. I then go to a moment, John, back to where and when you do it. Because if you perceive them having a trait you admired, that means you were proud of yourself when you did it. And pride is your imposter syndrome. It's not who you are. Pride is an exaggeration if you are. So I go back to where I perceive myself doing it
Starting point is 00:22:21 and take each of the individuals I did it to and each of the individuals who perceive me doing it and I find out the downsides to them. And I don't allow myself to speculate. I only look at ones that I'm certain about of the downsides to them to calm down my pride for self-governed purposes and allow myself to see that
Starting point is 00:22:40 the only reason I was admired them is because I was actually proud of myself and they're bringing it out of me. And that's why, but I'm too humble at that moment to admit that I'm storing that pride and they're now reflecting it and bring it to my service. So they came into my life to help me realize of my imposter, my exaggeration myself. And when I exaggerate myself, I tend to project my values onto other people and expect them to live in my values, which is futile. It's non-sustainable.
Starting point is 00:23:08 So I go in there and I find out how it served the people that I did it to through each episode that I can identify, that I listed to balance it, and who perceived it. Because sometimes your pride is not from who you did things to, but you did it in front of people that perceived it. Once I get those level, it's quite different in how I interpret what's going on. But I go, don't stop there. I start asking the question, now go to a moment, where and when, I perceive them demonstrating that trade again.
Starting point is 00:23:41 I ask who are they demonstrating it to, in this case me, or it could be somebody else. And now I go and ask where and when do they display the exact opposite trait to the same individual. So I break my label, because sometimes we go through and build labels and say, well, they're always that way, or most of the time they're that way. So I go in there and counterbalance it and hold myself accountable to find out where they are displaying the opposite trait, the anti-trade. Because when you do things that support people's values, they respond one way.
Starting point is 00:24:11 and you do something that challenge your values, they can respond completely opposite. You support my values, I can be nice as a pussycat. You challenge my values I can be mean as a tiger. So I make sure that I hold myself accountable to rebalance the equation on what I perceive in them, or otherwise, I'm still holding on to a skewed view that they're more, they're this,
Starting point is 00:24:30 and I put a label on people instead of love people. When I do that, I'm already now in a different frame. I'm more fully aware. My intuition has been, strengthened because I've honored it by the question. But I have another question I ask. Go to the moment where and when you perceive this individual displaying and demonstrating the traits that you admired most. You there? At that moment, where are you? When are you? What exactly are they doing again? Make sure you're really clear on it. What is the context? You're in a dynamic.
Starting point is 00:25:05 You're not a victim. You've done something to initiate that response. Maybe we're proud and maybe resilient. resistant to them. Maybe you challenge their idea. Maybe that's why they were critical into you, maybe, or praise you or something. You identify what that is. You look at who they did it to, which is you. And now you go at that moment, you close your eyes and you get access to what is called the anti-memory in the brain. And you find out who is doing exactly the opposite, real or virtual, one or many, male or female, close or distant. And you find out who is actually doing the opposite, because the mind will never have a perception without the opposite perception to counterbalance the brain to keep the excitation and inhibition ratios in the brain in equilibrium.
Starting point is 00:25:50 So it'll create a virtual or real situation. So I make sure I find out where that is. So I realize now there's the hidden order there, that whatever my perception is, I couldn't perceive. No phenomenal perceptions can occur without contrast. So I then identify where was the opposite? because that perception required an opposite in order to perceive. If you infatuate with something, you have to resent its opposite,
Starting point is 00:26:17 and you have to be aware of that in order to even perceive it in the first place. So I make myself fully aware of both of those. And when I do, there's a gamma synchronicity. The autonomics come into balance. There's a resilience and adaptability. And I'm now in a more authentic state because I'm not seeing the skewed view. I'm seeing what's actually there. Actuality, not reality.
Starting point is 00:26:39 Self-actualization, if you want to call it, self-knowing. Then I go to another question. I got 80 of these. I can keep going. I have another question. Go to the moment where and when I proceed in demonstrating the trade again. And in that moment, the only reason I admired it is because in the past, when somebody does the opposite behavior, I'm avoiding that. I've associated pain in my hippocampus with it.
Starting point is 00:27:09 So that's why I'm admiring that trait. So I go in there and ask if at that moment they had done exactly the opposite behavior, the very thing I would not want them to do at the moment I admired them, what would have been the benefit? And I stack up the benefits of that in that moment if they'd done the opposite trait. No speculations. I only look for benefits I'm certain about. And I stack up the benefits to break my wound, which is making me now label that at admirable trait and making me too humble to admit where I've done it. Because our amygdlet tends to want to be
Starting point is 00:27:46 addicted to pride and fantasy and wants to be subjected away from shame and nightmare. It's just the way the migra does for survival purposes. So I go in and I crack the opposite, the nightmare, and I find the benefit of that. And when I do, I realize that there's nothing to change. my, instead of me having a desire to change me relative to them because I'm infaturate and admiring them, I have no desire to change anything. My human will now matches what is, or divine will, or the hidden order. And now I realize I'm now poised, and all the noise and the brain's gone, and now I'm clear, and I'm now in a state of presence.
Starting point is 00:28:25 And so I use the tool to ask those questions. Those are seven questions. But I can go even further. I can go in there and ask what I, The next question, go to the moment when and where they did that, and at that exact moment that they did the action, where were they in time? In other words, if they were, if they're doing something I'm admiring, are they doing something that is admiring about what they're going to do in the future or what they did in the past? I can put a temporal component on it. And since temporal has entanglement, just like space has entanglement, I can then go and find out when I'm doing the question on who's, who's,
Starting point is 00:29:05 doing the opposite. I can find out where they're doing it. And I have done this enough to know that if you're admiring something about what they're about to do in the future, you're actually despising something about what somebody did in the past to counterbalance it to make sure your mind is present. Your brain is constantly trying to keep temporal entanglement where memory and imaginations are counterbalancing each other to make sure you're present. So I go through and I ask these questions, like I said, I could do 80 of them, but those are the first eight. I love seeing the way your mind works and deciphering and creating depth around the context in which the qualities emerge and the traits emerge that you admire, despise, and what you perceive in your surroundings.
Starting point is 00:29:47 You mentioned how the masses will live in this illusion of gain and loss. What is the direct practical cost of living life in this state of unawareness? In a nutshell, entropy, the arrow of time, aging, and epigenetically and autonomically induced symptomatology to try to guide them back, which we call illness. Sounds like death. Frank Tipler called negentropy life physics and entropy death physics.
Starting point is 00:30:23 We usually call it death physics and physics. Death physics. Because it's going towards dissipation and heat death. And, yeah, it's a pessimistic death physics. instead of negentropy, which is Erwin Schrodinger's term for life physics. And so then in living in accordance with life physics, what have you seen as what becomes available to you energetically,
Starting point is 00:30:48 redefining what the aging process, quote unquote, is? You just said it. You have more vitality. Whenever you're living in your executive center and your immediate prefrontal cortex, your mitochondria are more likely to duplicate and more likely to give more energy. The oxidative fossilization process is enhanced. Whenever you're in your amygdala, you get cell death and danger responses and mitochondria are shut down. So your vitality and your energy levels go up.
Starting point is 00:31:16 And your immortality goes up because you're present. As Deepak used to say, a timeless mind aids this body, you have less literally physiological entropy. Every time you infatuate with something and activate a parasynthetic response, resent something and activate a sympathetic response, rest and digest because you want to consume it and anabolicly grow, the other one you want to avoid it and, you know, catabolicly decay. Both of those mechanisms create epigenetic responses of acetylation and methylation, and they induce responses of mitosis or apoptosis. And anytime those two systems get out of balance, we have an illness.
Starting point is 00:31:58 So illness is nothing more than a feedback mechanism to guide us if we're conscious and know what applied physiology means, it's guiding us back to the center to try to help us live, as you described, where you know yourself. We have noses of who you are. And the profoundness of who you are is more profound than I think we can comprehend. Our computational boundaries limit us from our awareness of who we really are. Yeah. Another phenomenon that pulls us away from our center, which I've heard you speak to many times, is the comparative phenomena, when especially in the age we live, we have more stimulus and opportunities for this now, maybe more than ever, through social media, where we're doing, it's such a disservice to live
Starting point is 00:32:46 life, swimming against the own tide of how our intelligence wants to express itself and trying to be secondhand versions of other people. And I've heard you mention the quote, which I love also from Einstein, about how everyone's a genius, but if you judge a fit, by its ability to climb a tree, it's going to think it's stupid. And so for you, someone who's so clearly defined their values, what's most meaningful, prioritizing that in their life, living in alignment with how life's intelligence wants to move through you, so to speak. Can you speak to the importance of recognizing how, like, our own unique intelligence and
Starting point is 00:33:24 genius and living in accordance with that, not comparing to other people? Well, each individual, and I may have mentioned this on our previous one, each individual lives by a hierarchy of values, a set of priorities. And somebody asked me just this weekend at my break-to-experience program, well, how do those come about? So maybe let me develop that and tie these together. Any time you put somebody on a pedestal and minimize yourself by the law of contrast, and you are too humble to admit what you see in them is inside you,
Starting point is 00:33:58 you have a disowned part, a missing part, a deflected part, or as Plato called it, a dismembered part. That leaves you feeling an emptiness, which is why any time you judge, you feel empty, and a void. That's the conscious enumeration. But you have an unconscious despise of that opposite at the same moment. In fact, you can't even admire something without despising its opposite simultaneously, but one you're conscious of the other and you're unconscious. When you're despising something, you're too proud to admit what you see in them is inside you, and you are disowning that part, dismembering that part, and deflecting that part. When you do, you have now an emptiness and a void.
Starting point is 00:34:54 So every time you judge, you create emptiness. The Noste is called that conoma, unfulfillment emptiness. But those voids of what you judge that you have incomplete awareness about are also great feedback mechanisms because they're letting you know what you haven't loved and giving you an opportunity to love. It's an intelligent design. It's an intelligent feedback. Empedicles, the guy that created the cosmogonic cycle of the descent of the soul into incarnation and the resurrection of the soul back in it, which most theologies of the Abrahamic religions were emerging from. He believed that there was the four elements, fire, air, water, and air, for an earth, and the synthesis of that, which is the ether. And if they're all unified, you have love.
Starting point is 00:35:43 But if they are dispersed entropically, they're now creating strife or judgment. So anytime we disperse and separate the inseparable, divide the indivisibles, label the unlabables, polarize the unpolarizable, and name the ineffables as if these are actual. and create these polarities of judgment as if they're isolated from each other instead of synthesizing. We create judgment and emptiness. And that emptiness is what gives rise to our hierarchy of values. And our hierarchy of values, particularly our highest value, the end in mind, the telos, as Aristotle called it, where the existential world ends and the essential self and soul emerges, that highest value is the most efficient and effective pathway,
Starting point is 00:36:34 Darmic pathway, to fulfill the greatest amount of voids with the greatest amount of value. Therefore, giving us pluroma, as the Gnostic said, fullness, where nothing's missing. We're now seeing things as they are, because in actuality there's nothing missing. And just in our reality of our senses, which deal with contrast and incomplete awareness and biases,
Starting point is 00:36:59 do we have that? So it's our voids that determine our values. It's our judgment determines what our hierarchy of values actually is. And that's unique to each individual because no two people have the same vantage point. The uncertainty principle of Heisenberg says no two can occupy the same, no two quantum numbers can be exactly the same and the same space time. So what we do is we have individualized ourselves and our experiences, which give rise to our voids and our judgments,
Starting point is 00:37:30 that then give rise to the hierarchy of our values, and our hierarchy of values is dictating how we perceive decide and act to make us aware of what we've overlooked and to be able to go to an objective state where we're neutral, where we're not judging, and in the moment we're not judging and loving and seeing both sides simultaneously, the voids are dissolved, and we have a moment of fulfillment.
Starting point is 00:37:50 And that's grace, because when we're in this judgment state, we're trying to change ourselves to be like somebody else, or trying to change others to be like us, which is dissipative and non-sustainable and futile. But the second we actually bring those into equilibrium and see the fullness, there's nothing to change. And now we have maximum simplicity, as the hermetics teach. And we now have sustainable fair exchange because we're all equal. We're not seeing any difference.
Starting point is 00:38:20 And we have maximum utility. And that's where we have the most fulfillment. and we've made a difference without even doing anything but being our uniqueness. What would you say is the most direct inquiry one could employ in their life to discover what that is for them? Well, I use my value determination process. I look at what their life demonstrates to find out what is most meaningful and fulfilling and purposeful for them.
Starting point is 00:38:53 What happens if their life is demonstrating things that really, actually don't have much meaning to them? Actually, that's their misperception. I'd like to address that because that's a very common thing out there. People talk about I sabotage. I've never seen sabotage. I've seen people who don't really know what their life is demonstrating as valuable to them,
Starting point is 00:39:20 who are now comparing themselves to other people, putting people on pedestals, trying to be second at being somebody else, injecting the values of those people into their lives and thinking it should be this when their actual life is demonstrating a hierarchy of values and they're living by it, but they're not honoring it. Can you give me an example of that?
Starting point is 00:39:39 Yeah. It happens every week. People say, well, I really say I want to be wealthy. I want to be abundantly wealthy. I want to have more money at the end of my month than money at the month at the end of my money. But the hierarchy of their values doesn't have deferred gratification and asset accumulation to allow them to have the passive income for what they say they want. They have a higher value on buying consumables that depreciate.
Starting point is 00:40:09 And their life values show that these things are more important than the deferred gratification and wealth accumulation. So then they beat themselves up and they think I keep sabotaging my finance and no matter what I do, I can't get ahead. and what they actually are saying they want, what they actually are demonstrating they want, two different things. So many people don't know themselves. That's why this is so important. They don't know themselves. They think they do.
Starting point is 00:40:37 But what they've done is they've inculcated and injected the values of outer authorities that they admire into their life and clouded the clarity of their own highest value in mission. And then they're basically claiming that something's important to them when their life doesn't demonstrate it. Your life demonstrates what you value.
Starting point is 00:40:54 Every decision you make, every perception, decision, action you take is based on what you value. So what you say means very little. What your life demonstrates means everything. So what happens when someone's life is demonstrating that they really value dopaminergic impulses? They just follow from pleasure to pleasure,
Starting point is 00:41:13 compulsive thing to compulsive thing. Their behavior is demonstrating that they value, quick hits, quick dopamine hits, and yet there is a deeper sense, there are deeper values that are perhaps underneath the current level of their awareness that they could discover. So how do you help delineate between what someone's behaviors are in this moment, which might say I value, you know, food, sex, and sleep in an abundance of it versus there's actually deeper values that I still have yet to discover? impulsive, compulsive, immediate gratifying, addictive behaviors are compensations for unfulfilled highest
Starting point is 00:41:59 values. So what I do is I ask that even though they're doing the behavior with their amygdala and they're looking for immediate gratification, if I go and find out what of the benefits are getting out of it, because they wouldn't be doing it. No one moves a muscle without a motive. Even the pictures have said that even the terrorists, to believe they're doing the greatnesses, is good. Yeah. Yeah, Hitler thought he was doing God's work. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:42:24 He thought he was doing what Blavatsky thought was the pure Aryan stock, right? So I go in and I help them identify what their unconscious motives are for their behavior. What they find is there's an underlying value that's really important to them, but they don't have strategies to be able to fulfill that, and the unfulfillment that's coming is making them back in their amygdala. So I can still identify what their values are that transcend what looks like their immediate gratification. And finding that is liberating because I had, I'll use an example. I had a gentleman that a consultant that asked me to intervene on one of his clients.
Starting point is 00:43:08 And it was a gentleman who just sold a company just about a year earlier and generated about a $750 million net to himself. and since he's sold his company, his drinking has skyrocketed. And he's basically staying drunk most of the day. Drinking 20-something drinks at least a day. And staying kind of sloused or whatever it is throughout the day. And so no matter what this guy is trying to do and consult with him, he can't get him to stop. He's just, he's not productive. So I asked him, when did he increase his drinking?
Starting point is 00:43:46 He said, well, since I've sold the business, I said, you sold the business because you burned out from talking to him, burned out on doing actions in there that were not meaningful and inspiring to you, that you had once delegated and then all of a sudden the person you're delegated to that was getting it done wasn't there, and then you got burned out because you were now having to do something that was uninspiring, so you decided to sell it. But what you really loved to do was doing deals. He was a dealmaker.
Starting point is 00:44:14 And as long as he's doing deals, preparing for the business. the deals, he doesn't drink. When he's doing the deals, there's no drinking. He's doing the deal. So what we did is we got him to the company he sold. He went back to the person that he sold the company to and said, if I do some deals for you, because I still got connections. If I did deals for you, could I get a fair cut and make you make sure you make even more profit and help you grow the business? And I have no intention of taking over and starting a competitive business whatever. And the guy said, I can't argue with that. Absolutely. The second he got into something that was extremely meaningful, high in his values, deeply meaningful, very inspiring. His drinking
Starting point is 00:44:59 went way down. He might have a drink, but he didn't get slashed because he had something he couldn't wait to get up in the morning and do. When you can't wait to get up in the morning and do something extremely inspiring and meaningful, you're not distracted by immediate gratification because you're now focusing on long-term vision. So if you don't fill your day with high-priority actions that inspire you and help expand the space and time horizons of your vision, you'll automatically go to the amygdala for me to gratification and shrink your space and time horizons for a quick fix. So it's an unfulfillment response. So fill your day with high-priority actions. If I'm teaching, I love teaching, right? I love researching around him. My day's filled with
Starting point is 00:45:39 that. I'm pretty inspired guy. If I'm not doing that, I can find my self being easily distracted. Distractions are the impulses and instincts that the amygdala signs valency to that catch our attention that we admire or despise or look up to or down on. And so our judgments are a feedback mechanism to let us know we're not being ourself. We stop and really get that. That's really significant. Our judgments are symptoms of not being ourselves. Because when we're actually being ourself, we're too inspired and we're focused and inspired by what we're doing and engage in doing something that's in sustainable fair exchange with other people. And we transcend the judgment world. I think that's so powerful because we often fall
Starting point is 00:46:25 into the habit of judging and shaming emotions. We don't want to feel signals and judgments we don't want to have in our experience. But you're inviting the perspective that there's an intelligent, hidden order. There's a design that is actually very useful and necessary for you to come back into your center into what you really value. So we can perceive all of these challenging experiences of life actually with a lot of grace and gratitude. They're on the way. Yeah. Not in the way. Yeah. I'd like to address this just popped in my head. So I have the opportunity to speak to all different types of groups. And a lot of them are business entrepreneurs and leaders. that have ambitions.
Starting point is 00:47:08 And the word of ambition means a condition of both-sidedness, ambidextrous. If you can see both sides simultaneously, you actually expand the space and time horizons and accomplish the most because you're objective. But sometimes people with their amygdala create a fantasy.
Starting point is 00:47:27 A fantasy is a positive without a negative. A nightmare is a negative without a positive. So our migla wants to avoid the nightmare and seek the fantasy. It wants to avoid the shame and seek the pride. So it's constantly trying to look for advantage over disadvantage, pleasure over pain. It's hedonic. So it's basically trying to set what it thinks is a goal that has more advantage and disadvantage, more positives, negatives, more pleasures and pains, more support and challenge. And by doing it, he creates a fantasy. Our intuition is designed to counterbalance that, to make us whole, to see things as they are,
Starting point is 00:48:03 not as we're skewing. So intuition brings up anxiety, fears, phobias to balance the philia. It balances it with a phobia and a nightmare and anxiety and doubt and uncertainty and feelings of self-sabotage and all those things. All of those are important feedback systems to let us know that we're not pursuing a real objective, we're pursuing a fantasy. So we think it's a weakness, but it's not. It's a flawless response to guide us to set real objectives, not fantasies. Now, the ratios of goals can skew all the way from a fantasy, which is all positive, no negative, fantasy, illusion, mania, to an objective, which is a perfect balance of positive negative.
Starting point is 00:48:54 And there's a whole spectrum in between. The more fantasy it is, the more our nightmares come to wake us up. If it's up here, you get a little bit less anxiety. But once you get to the very top, there's at the very top, there's no anxiety. Because what strategic planning and the executive center in the brain is for to mitigate the anxieties and to calm and dampen the fantasies. The executive center uses glutamate and gaba, the facilitator, inhibitory transmitter, to neutralize whatever is stimulated and inhibited in their fantasy. So it's trying to calm it down. Our intuition is counterbalancing our gut impulse to seek and our gut instinct to avoid. So our intuition is a negative feedback. Those are positive
Starting point is 00:49:45 feedbacks that dramatize and polarize. The intuition is a negative feedback to neutralize and bring things back into objectivity where you see both sides. Imagine being in a relationship with somebody and you expected them to be positive, never negative, happy, never said. You know, one-sided, they're never going to live up to that. But when you expect them to be a two-sided individual and to live according to their own highest values, you have a realistic expectation and can have a fulfilling relationship. But if not, you have a fantasy about who they're going to be. They're going to be more positive negative and they're going to live in your values, not their own. And these are distortions. The same thing with goals, just like in relationships.
Starting point is 00:50:24 We set goals that are not really goals and objectives. They're fantasies. And then we have anxieties. Anxieties and fears and phobias are not our enemy. People say, you need to get rid of that. No, they're there very precisely and deconstructed there to make sure that you're not going after delusions and fantasies to set real objectives. The executive center is designed to strategically plan to transform fantasies into objectives to maximize the potential and actualization of our potential so we can achieve. and that's what ambition really is. The ability to see both sides and have both sides in the pursuit.
Starting point is 00:51:05 When you are able to embrace the pain and the pleasure equally in the pursuit of some purpose, you're not in your passions, you're in your mission. You're not in your sufferings, you're in your servings. And that's what liberates people from a lot of the frustrations in the so-called achievement world. It makes me think how when someone has a meaningful mission
Starting point is 00:51:29 and they've declared in their life how it changes what they notice on the way and what the bandwidth for what they can take along the way. Well, when they're in their amygdala, things are more black and white. When they're in executive share, things are more gray. It's neither positive negative here. It's either positive negative here. You've mentioned the amygdala and how often we are living our life through the perception of it.
Starting point is 00:51:56 many times throughout this conversation, what do you feel like the path of evolution is as a human being? Because I see the sort of limbic lizard brain way of operating through duality and gain and loss and this kind of old paradigm that we're here to live through. And then like where are we going to as what's possible within human consciousness? I'm curious what your thoughts are. Well, this leads to an interesting slippery slope. A lot of people like to promote an old.
Starting point is 00:52:28 opium of the future, which I try to debunk iconoclastic. I'm an iconoclast in that respect. Because whatever you know, there's always the next mystery. And with that next mystery, you're going to use that part of the brain again. So we're not going to get to a point where we're done. I think that's, I mean, if you take the planet and you take this little Earth and one astronomical unit away is the sun. That's about 93 million miles. So from the sun, the earth is almost indiscernible. And on the earth, it's spinning at about 800 to 1,000 miles an hour,
Starting point is 00:53:10 you know, at the equator. And on there is a guy meditating there, and he says, I am enlightened, I'm enlightened, I'm enlightened, I'm all aware. But to the sun, which is this vast sun compared to this dot, it's almost undiscernible. Now, if we go from the sun, 26 to 28,000 light years away, 186 miles of a second, 864,000 seconds a day, times 365 times 26,000. If we go to the center of the Milky Way, and we sit in the throat of the Sagittary A black hole, And we're looking out from that, and we're following hawking radiation to kind of look at the earth, if we can imagine it. We can't see the sun.
Starting point is 00:54:04 There's too much dust and clouds. We can't see the earth. So the guy that's going around and says, I'm enlightened, I'm enlightened, I'm enlightened, that has a relative awareness based on dogma that it's been taught and observations and the paradigms and dialectics and teachings that they've accumulated. through a finite period of time of 72 to give or take years. It's a relative and darkament. Now, we have a local group of galaxies, and then we have the Virgo cluster, then we have the Lonakia supercluster,
Starting point is 00:54:41 and the great attractor. And that's part of a filament of a bigger web and a cosmic web of immensity. And that's simply the observable universe, and we don't even know what's beyond. the observable universe, we speculate. So whatever we know, I put it in perspective, is, as Socrates said, it's an infinitesimal. So we tend to think, and we try to create eschatologies at the end of the earth, at the end of our
Starting point is 00:55:14 life, at the end of times, that are anxiety-reducing eschatologies for our phobia of death. and our extinction and our insignificance. So we create things to compensate for those insignificances by creating, you know, we're going to be enlightened and we're going to be all aware or we're going to go to this eternal salvation or something in order to compensate for our anxiety. But our anxiety is basically a compensation
Starting point is 00:55:44 for all the fantasies we're still holding on to because we're still living in fear with our miglets. Our migla is the source of our mortal fears. and all of our moralities and all of our judgments and eschatologies, if all of a sudden we actually had a glimpse of a bigger picture, we realized that that's kind of trivia, a trivia pursuit. So where is it all going? This is a very interesting video I watched recently about on the pertinence or impertinence
Starting point is 00:56:23 of existence. It's a very challenging question because it creates anxiety for most people. The question of like why anything exists at all? Not so much that is what is our significance? Yeah. Let's take the most advanced human being that we know of that's been living and made a difference. They might leave a mark for three or four thousand years. We might have a text of Shabaka that may go 10,000 years.
Starting point is 00:56:53 but then it's touched to fade. And all the people that were there are just foofed. And so we have anxiety about that extinction of being. So we create these eschatologies to make us feel like we're going to do something that's immortal and great today. And I'm a believer that that's sort of a necessary aspect of our existence because it feels futile otherwise. But at the same time, if we stop and really look at that, a billion years from now, Dr. John D. Barton, is it was not probably even known about. I'm probably back to dust.
Starting point is 00:57:29 I'm cosmic dust. Now, because of information theory, and there's a conservation of information, whatever information that may have been accumulated in the experience of the Earth, that may be eventually in the cycles of the red giant phase of the solar system and eventually be engulfed and maybe eventually merge with another solar system and eventually go into a white dwarf and a black hole, that information may be then skewed back out into another solar system and continue to go on
Starting point is 00:57:59 and we may have significance that can perpetuates as an immortal expression of what contribution we made in our evolution. I can't deny it or confirm it, but I'd rather believe that because it gives me some sort of meaning and some sort of purpose than it would be to know that it was just poofed.
Starting point is 00:58:19 Yeah, I always simultaneously, when I zoom out to the degree in which you just did, and you have this cosmological perspective of the sheer insignificance of us on that scale, I both have complete awe and wonder as to how magical and how much there is unknown and yet to be discovered. And then also, like, I'm curious your thoughts
Starting point is 00:58:40 about slipping into nihilism where, like, none of this really even matters, you know? Well, this is the thing. If we go down into the subatomics and go towards planks, dimension, one times 10 negative 33 centimeters or something, we go down there, we seem very significant. So we're now vast beings compared to this thing. And so we have massive significant, relatively speaking, relativity. If we go to the vastness of the observable and beyond,
Starting point is 00:59:17 it becomes now an infinitesimal. So we both have significance and insignificance. The question is, can we wrap our head around that and become conscious of both of them at the same time? Otherwise, we have a conscious self that we exaggerate. And again, we're puffing ourselves up in pride and pertinence and or we do the other and insignificant. And I think that we're here to integrate the two and to honor both because it keeps us in check and it keeps us growing. It's interesting to see the overlay and how you probably would say they're one and the same when you look at the cosmological perspective and also the human developmental process.
Starting point is 00:59:58 Like the journey of finding back and returning back into balance from both polarities is the same. We can't prove that that giant cosmos is not starting over if we don't know. We don't know if that's a reiteration or not. It's an interesting plausible possibility. You know, in men in black, you know, there's a cat with a little thing, and it's, who knows? I don't want to say that I know that answer. I don't know that answer.
Starting point is 01:00:28 I'm curious to hear what your speculation on. When you mentioned Boehm's implicate order earlier in the conversation, you look at the Buddhist philosophy of interest net and how we are connected at levels, we are possibly only beginning to be able to comprehend. And we are fed this materialist reductionistic notion of how the world works mechanistically. and the way that you're describing life
Starting point is 01:00:54 and the intelligence of life operating within this deeper hidden order feels very exciting, but also in like a, it feels like a new paradigm that is going to be continued to be fortified with scientific rigor over the next decade and century. So I'm just curious, what do you,
Starting point is 01:01:13 is there anything that you're speculating on in terms of like how this all is working that you haven't really spoken to? much before? Okay. That's kind of a big question. No, I love that question. I do think about interesting questions sometimes since I was a kid.
Starting point is 01:01:34 When Sputnik, I was watching a movie the other day, October, the sky. I don't know if you've seen this, but a young boy looks up into the sky with his father when he's very young and he sees Sputnik go across. Sputnik had just been launched. This is 1957. And in 1957, I looked out from the backyard and I saw Sputnik go across this guy. And I thought, I want to understand that. So I started at four, going out at night, sneaking out at night, going through my window
Starting point is 01:02:09 with a Corsica coffee cat cake can and a piece of paper and some pencil. And I would draw the outline of the moon. And I watched the asterisms of the moon each night. And I tried to time it where I would go out a weird one. hours just to get to capture the asterisms of the moon and to see the star backgrounds behind it and map these things. My whole room was covered in these maps when I was four. My parents used to just look out the window and think, okay, they didn't stop me.
Starting point is 01:02:36 They were curious. But I was interested in astronomy. It's one of my areas that I've written a lot about and cosmology and physics and astrophysics and stuff. So I've been fascinated by that. But I now speculate, and I can only say speculate, that we live in a potentially infinite universe with an infinite number of complementary opposites at all scales of being in existence for eternity.
Starting point is 01:03:13 So instead of having the divine plan go from, from dark to light or from negative to positive or, you know, these amygdala-driven constructs that are anthropomorphic and geocentric and very limited. What would happen if that every moment we perceive, no matter what it is, because I, in my breakthrough experience program, as I take people through it, I take whatever perception it is, it doesn't matter what their perception is, I show them where the synthesis and synchronous of opposites and I bring them to a tier of gratitude for it. And when they do that, they realize that no matter what they're perceiving, no matter what time or space, there's the divine order there.
Starting point is 01:04:02 There's the tier of gratitude if you ask the right questions and become aware of it. So I speculate that there's an infinite number of those potential perceptions in this participatory universe that we are participating in as part of a reflective conscious being, at all scales from the subatomic plank where our mathematics begins to break down to the astronomic. And as we are expanding our awareness and becoming, you know, solarized and galacticized and continue, supergalacticized and go, that whatever we perceive, the equal and opposite was going to be will in our perception, and will give us an experience of seeing a hidden order at that scale. At all scales, it's available for eternity.
Starting point is 01:05:00 And to me, that would be the most ever-present loving view, not an idea that we're now going to go to some imperial at the edge of our solar system and then sit there and pray some insecure deity or something. I'd rather see that the entire thing is a conscious state. It's a pen psychism in that respect at all scales of existence. And we have the capacity, and it is constantly giving us the opportunity to discover the magnificent hidden order and the divine presence and love, if you want to call it that, in that moment, at any scale, no matter what the scale, a pair of opposites.
Starting point is 01:05:46 In other words, as the black hole, is taking in stars, it's simultaneously birthing new stars. The pairs of opposites are there. As the particle and antiparticles are annihilating, they're simultaneously generating at Planx level at quantum vacuum. So whether it's small or large as below or above, whatever it is, there's nothing but a synchronistic and synthesis of complementary opposites and experience of love at all scales.
Starting point is 01:06:15 If we know how to ask the right question and become present with both, And I think that we live in a universe that is going to give us the opportunity to continue it to explore that with every vehicle we have, telescope, astronomical or microscope, whatever it is. And no matter where we go, no matter what size or magnitude or any location or any of the thing, anything in the existential world is going to lead us back to the essential self. And so I think that's what the universe is really. as Plato says, for the sake of love.
Starting point is 01:06:50 And our own conscious awareness and intentions are all remodeling it, so we're constantly remodeling. It's never the same. We're all involved in a remodeling system. Do you think that essential self is something that we all share, like that being is shared? Do you think that? Although I found this quote in a text about Schopenhauer.
Starting point is 01:07:13 I was never able to find it in any of his text, but somebody quoted it, so I don't know if it's a true quote or not. we become our true self to the degree that we make everything else ourselves. So anything that separates self-another, which is a distinction, the primordial boundary from the Adam Kedman of the Kabbalistic tree into the Adam and Eve, which differentiates a duality of some form, any form of duality, that separation in self-another, the existential beginning, as pedically as described, that would actually be in a sense. a sense, a pure reflective universe. My girlfriend, Donna, is working on a book called The Reflective
Starting point is 01:07:58 Universe. It's very possible that everything that is ever observed is a reflection of us. And we really don't know the boundaries of who we are. It really resonates through the Vedic lens of the two or the one becoming two for the joy of becoming one again. That's the cosmogonic cycle. Mm-hmm. The essence going into existence and the existence returning to the essence in a cosmogonic cycle, a self-regenerating system. It feels like also from the cosmological scale, from the big vein and the expansion
Starting point is 01:08:33 to the contraction, to also like the, you could zoom out on the biological level and the same thing, the contraction and expansion that is happening pervasively throughout the universe. If that is an accurate assessment. Do you think that is? In my textbook, I wrote, let's see now, 93, I think, refutations of the Big Bang Theory that I've been accumulating for many, many years. So I don't think, there's too many ad hoc components to that to say that that's the
Starting point is 01:09:03 conclusion that we have today. And many cosmologists are questioning that and tackling that and challenging that. But that's the model we have today, just like that's the model we have in religions. and religions, Sam Harris did a nice thing as the atheist. He said, he said, the difference between a theist and an atheist is one God.
Starting point is 01:09:24 You know, the Christian doesn't believe in 900 gods that it once lived, and he's an atheist to them. And Sam said, I'm closer to you than I am different. I just don't believe in that one too. The anthropomorphic god
Starting point is 01:09:37 that Xenophane's warned against and Thales warned against are concoctions of the amygalo to avoid the phobias and to create the phileas to survive as a mortal being. And there's a much more transcendent state and in theology and in cosmology. And this cosmology we have here is got weakness. Let's put it that way. I could do a whole thing on that one.
Starting point is 01:10:05 I love speaking to you not just because of what you're saying, but the excitement in which what you're saying is coming from. I can tell the sincere passion and desire to understand reality to the degree we can. And how you're speaking to instead of moving through life through this top-down processing, like moving through each mystery one after the other, through the bottom-up processing of experience, seeing what's alive for you in each moment, is such a more beautiful, fruitful way to live life that I feel like we all get to, we all can embody more of.
Starting point is 01:10:40 and for somebody that's discovered your highest priority values and live life and according to that which is most meaningful, and yet you still have all of these other very interesting passions and explorations that maybe isn't your highest priority value of teaching and writing. I'm curious how you think about the different aspects of self that we feel most ignited by. For example, music is something that is not my highest priority value
Starting point is 01:11:10 in life, but it's something that I'm ignited by and I love studying and will probably be a lifelong journey. I'm curious, like, how do you think of these different buckets in your life, all these different passions and interests and curiosities and how you prioritize what you spend your time doing? When I was 17 and I met Paul Bragg and his presentation inspired me to believe that maybe someday I could become intelligent and overcome my learning challenges. He mentioned universal loss. And I didn't know what they met, really, but they sounded cool.
Starting point is 01:11:48 And so when I left Hawaii and I returned to Texas and began my pursuit of trying to overcome my learning challenges, speaking problems and comprehension and things, I was watching a particular show with David Karadine called Kung Fu. And he talked about his Shaolin Master. And I love the word Master. This sounded cool. Universal law, master. They somehow resonated with me. So I set out at age 18, I wanted to master my life.
Starting point is 01:12:24 I didn't know what that meant, but sounded cool. So I divided life into seven areas, spiritual, mental, vocational, financial, family, social, physical. And I made a commitment to learn everything I can about those topics and become masterful in those. I want to create original ideas that serve human beings across the planet mentally. I want to create a global business. My teaching was in every country around the world. I want to come financially independent. I wanted to have a global family.
Starting point is 01:12:57 As you know, I live on a ship called the world that goes around the world. That was because I had that dream. I want to have social influence, meet amazing people and have influence and learn from great minds. I also want to have a vital body, an energized body. I'm 71 in a couple months, and I'm still going. And I wanted to create not a new religion. I had no interest in that. I was interested in a movement that would inspire people regardless of their backgrounds.
Starting point is 01:13:27 They could be any faith of any form. And that was my dream to do that. I also had a desire to understand the laws of the universe. And so I came back, got a dictionary out, I got a encyclopedia out. What is the law of the universe? What is universal law mean? And it led me to natural laws.
Starting point is 01:13:50 And there was a distinction between natural laws of the observable universe and universal laws that are even broader. And that led me to a pursuit called the Logos. And the Logos goes back to Heraclitus. And he considered that there was an order and pattern and a plan to the universe. verse, like the Stoics and the Greeks sometimes did. And I wanted to know what this Logos was. In fact, I'm writing a text on the Logos right now.
Starting point is 01:14:23 And devouring everything I can from every angle I can on that topic and hit it. And that Logos gave rise to theologies. So I made a list of every known ology that somebody could study. Every disciplinar ology you could study in every field. And then I realized that the ologies were all wavelength-based. So you have the subatomic particles, particle physics, they're small wavelengths. You've got the astronomic that are large wavelengths. You've got myology, muscles, and physiology and psychology.
Starting point is 01:15:01 Each of these are wavelengths of structures that you're exploring that you're now finding the same laws apply to. So I thought that all the ologies are disbursements from the one to the many of the logos, the plan. And so I made a commitment to myself that I would read at least 100 books on every ology, which is why I've got 31,000 books now in my head. So I want to do that because I wanted to have a body of knowledge that would stand the test of time. and if I studied all the different disciplines and I found common themes and common principles that were universal, it would increase the probability that the material I'm presenting is
Starting point is 01:15:49 something as solid and it will stand. So I just started going from the smallest to the largest and starting with the principles of quantum mechanics when I was 18 by Paul Dirac, studying particle and antiparticles, and studying Max Planck's work on all of his Planck's principles and all of his units, plank units, and trying to figure out how he did that with five universal constants and how he put this whole structure together, which is absolutely ingenious. And I started to do whatever I could to find out what is the most common universal laws, the law of complementary opposites, the law of the one, the many,
Starting point is 01:16:30 the law of conservation, nether's theorem. of symmetries. And I started to accumulate ones that I felt at all scales of existence, there they were. Even if they're talking about strong nuclear force, the proton or the neutron with the strong nuclear force and the mesons and the quantum vacuum fluctuations and all that still apply to universe scale. So I basically tried to find that and identify those and then apply that to human behavior in the evolution, human consciousness. So that's been my thing. So there's no discipline that's not part of my mission. There's no discipline other than possibly cooking and driving.
Starting point is 01:17:11 I don't drive or cook. But if I could probably easily show the dynamics sitting in the way cars are designed and the engineering of that to the same laws, but I just haven't had an interest in those for some reason. But pretty well all the other disciplines, 300 different disciplines and ologies that I've explored and tried to devour. for one objective, the evolution of human consciousness, and one of the most fundamental principles
Starting point is 01:17:40 that I can rely on to teach. So if I'm teaching, my teachings will not be a fad, not be a trend, it'll be a classic. Very inspiring. I'm inspired by that. I think it's... Well, we probably have a resonant... Yeah.
Starting point is 01:17:54 We're both, I mean, know thyself, and that's what it's about. Yeah. And, you know, I think... I think that truth, science and true religion, don't fight. I don't believe that those are fighting. I don't know why they would ever fight. And I'm not talking about faith-based religion, because of course there'd be discrepancies, because those are things you can never have certainty about. But I believe that
Starting point is 01:18:22 we can pursue these universal laws and continue to expand our awareness and certainty, and they can be very spiritually awakening. Many people like to separate materialism and spiritualism. I see them as inseparable. Because the state of equanimity, which is all your authentic self, is also the thing that maximizes sustainable fair exchange in the material world for economics. It's also the same principle that builds engineering structures that are stable. So no matter what area we go, there's no separation in there.
Starting point is 01:18:58 So I don't believe you have to create a pseudo-anthropic, geocentric, theology, except as a stage of awareness only, I think you can go all the way to the most advanced mathematics and come to a realization of the divine. But the divine means to emanate light. And I think the thing that unites spiritual and material and science and religion is purely light, the study of optics. I think Newton was on to it. I think Newton was trying to study optics for a number reasons because he was a devout spiritual student, but he was also a scientist of the highest caliber. His Principia and his work on optics is masterpieces.
Starting point is 01:19:47 And then Maxwell, in his work on the, you know, the Ford of Differential Equations of the calculus for light is a masterpiece. I was flying from San Francisco to France. And I just happened to be sitting in the business where there were three seats in the middle and two seats on the ends. And I was sitting there, and right next to me was Carl and Stephanie Brown. And they're on their way to Geneva, and they're particle physicist. One's a theoretical, one's a practical particle physicist, married.
Starting point is 01:20:19 One's really grounded, one's esoteric. And I'm sitting next to Carl, and we had a phenomenal conversation. And it's about a nine-and-a-half-hour flight or something like that. I thought I was going to sleep because I was going to speak when I landed. So I was going to shower and get on to speak. but there's no way I'm going to stop if I got a particle physicist guy here. And so we just went down the rabbit hole.
Starting point is 01:20:41 We went down and just explored it, and he was really a cool guy. And he's passed now. So we explored those mysteries at the very depth of the particle physics world. And to me, my love of exploration and study, every time I find another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that fits in, either through linguistics,
Starting point is 01:21:08 I learn a new word that allows it to go in or just a construct that allows it to fit. I'm brought to tears, a gamma synchronicity, a eureka moment. And the moment I do that, it's almost like I'm fulfilling my mission now, and I can't wait to share that with somebody. And those are the two, those are the pinnacles of my being. Right there. Now, if you go and ask people in every country, and I've gotten to speak in 161 countries, I've met cultures of all different times, if you ask them, how many of you've had a moment where you've been brought to tears of inspiration and gratitude, that you know that you know that that is deeply meaningful, pay attention to it, and it's something about your path and your authenticity. Everybody knows that. They just know it inside. So I love maximizing those. When I did develop the Demartini method and I developed some of the questions, there's
Starting point is 01:22:11 two of the questions are designed specifically to maximize how to access and increase the frequency, intensity, and duration of that. Because that is one of the greatest guides that we have that is transcendent to the subordination or superordination of other people that can distract us and allows us to guide ourselves to a great, magnificent path of exploring the universe, which we have innately within us, no matter what our background is, there's a part of us that's wanting to explore the universe because it's us. We want to know ourselves. We want to know thyself. So that's probably the most meaningful and inspiring things that I get to do on a daily basis. I think by living in
Starting point is 01:22:55 alignment with that which brings you most joy, you also become a reference point and an inspiration for other people to discover that within themselves. The person who quoted this is escaping my mind, but to not ask what the world needs, but ask what makes you come most alive because what the world needs is people who come most alive. And discovering those, the hierarchy values,
Starting point is 01:23:17 the things that bring you most excitement in life, is just an powerful reminder. And refinement, too, of, we're living in my own life to a relative degree in alignment with those values, and the things that are most meaningful to me. And I'm just curious, because you mentioned it briefly, in the practical sense,
Starting point is 01:23:38 how do you actually delegate all that is not as meaningful to you in life? Like, how have you set up your life in a way so you can like... Easily. Yeah. I learned, I was 23 years old. I was entering into professional school, and I asked myself a question, why does some people walk their talk, some people limp their life? Why does some people do what they say,
Starting point is 01:23:59 and others don't? as McGregor did in 1960 at MIT, why does some people have spontaneous action and some people need to be intrinsically motivated with reward and punishment? I want to know the answer to that. It led me to a very obvious study called axiology, which is a study of value and worth, because that's what drives human beings. And I realized that that led me to David Hume's work, which I'm interned earlier. And David Hume's. the Scottish philosopher said that there's is versus ought. I found that those are exactly the distinctions between intrinsic drive and extrinsic drive. If you know what the hierarchy of
Starting point is 01:24:44 values actually are, the is, not what they ought to be, the conformity of society's deontological normative ethics, you access your greatest potential. You can actually actualize your potential. Ernest Becker, who wrote the denial of death, the Pulitzer Prize winner, he beautifully stated that people are confronted by their mortality and the anxiety of the eshological mystery. And so they create two mechanisms to survive it. A path of individual heroism, a path of immortality for the individual, or a path of immortality through the collective conformity. These go into oblivion and leave no mark.
Starting point is 01:25:39 These leave a mark, but they're radically opposed and offended. And, you know, as Young says, we live in a world that we want to be ourselves in a world that doesn't want us to be. And we want to make a difference. We can't make a difference conforming. You can only make a difference following an individual path. So all of the studies on axiology, there were 12 textbooks in English available at the time, only 12 that I had access to.
Starting point is 01:26:11 None of them satisfied me because it's all about how you ought to be and how people should be and how to fit into society. And it's all designed for theological and social political governance of societies to work in a system that are easily controlled. there's an individual path. The unborrowed visionary, as Ian Rand said. I was interested in that. The trailblazer.
Starting point is 01:26:41 The one with the machete walking through the thing and not following a path but creating a path. The one that had the Darmic path, not the karmic wheel. So when I did that, I realized I'm going to have to create my own value determination process to discover what it actually is, not what it...
Starting point is 01:27:03 People think it should be. Because all of it, Schwartz and the heart and all the people that were doing axiology at the time, were asking questions. If you're in this setting, how would you respond? Knowing full well that they would respond in order to not be rejected. So you can't go by what they say. You've got to go by what their life demonstrates.
Starting point is 01:27:23 So I set up a criteria to do value determination, which is on my website, to get closer to an objective what is, not what it ought to be. to be able to then find out what is intrinsically driving them. Because when you actually find that out and prioritize your life, according to that, you don't have the internal conflicts, you don't have the fantasies as much. You don't have the self-sabotaging personal development stuff. You just walk your path.
Starting point is 01:27:56 So how do I do it and delegate? I learned from a book by Alec McKinsey in 1982, October, 1982, reading The Time Trap. And in there, he basically gave all the criteria why people don't delegate. I can do it better than them. By the time I do it, I could have, I give it to them, I could have just done it. By the time I explain it to them, well, they're going to do it differently anyway. All the different reasons for doing it. But I realize that you will trap your life if you're not delegating.
Starting point is 01:28:31 You can't self-actualize your life very easily without delegation, unless you completely simplify your life and do like the cynic diogenes that live in a barrel with a dog and have nothing, no attachment, or a Gandhi approach. So I basically learned at age 27 the importance of prioritization. Because if you don't fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, your day is going to fill up a low-party distractions that don't, and the distractions that don't are going to be unfulfilling and distracting to create a frustration to go back to priority,
Starting point is 01:29:07 to get you back to yourself, because these are not you. This highest value is the ontological identity that revolves around is your highest value. Whatever your highest value is, if you ask anybody, who are they? They're going to tell you whatever's highest on their value. That's going to be their answer. Mine's teacher. If you're raising them of children and your high, highest value is of being a mother, if you ask her, who are you? She'll say I'm a mother. If you go to a
Starting point is 01:29:30 person who's a serial entrepreneur and ask him, even though he's got three or four kids, you ask him, who are you? He's not going to say, I'm a father. He's going to say I'm an entrepreneur. Because whatever is highest on one's value, their ontological identity revolves around, their teleological purpose revolves around, and their epistemological area of expertise excels there. So that's where they're most powerful. So finding that out and delegating anything else that, devalues you is what I set out to do at age 27. And within 18 months, I pretty well gave it all away. And I basically teach research, write, and travel. What's about it? Teach research, right, and travel. I don't, I'm pretty useless outside that. Technology I delegate, business administration,
Starting point is 01:30:17 I just teach research, right, travel pretty well every day. I'm pretty, like I say, I'm an idiot outside that. I'm relatively aware inside that. Yeah. I, uh, I'm, I'm like that 27, I'm 28. So I'm like, I'm at that point where I'm transitioning into that full time delegation of all the things that aren't highest priority value most meaningful to me. But is there something that just, that feel that you feel called to share about what, uh, would serve someone like myself who's embarking on the journey of life, getting to hopefully living a life that is most meaningful and aligned with my values decades down the road. I wouldn't change anything back there, but I would say that I was very grateful to go through
Starting point is 01:31:06 a few intermediate steps to get feedback on how important it is not to try to be second at being somebody else and not try to worry about whether people like or dislike you. When you, Nietzsche in his beyond good and evil and Machiavelli and his prince, say basically some overlapping ideas, that when you can embrace both sides of yourself and be the hero and the villain, the saint in the center, and realize nothing's missing in you. you're the most extreme of everything that could be even known, the most virtuous, the most vicious. When you can embrace all of that, then you're not going to be distracted by people's opinions. But as long as you're disowning any of those, the world on the outside will run you, and you'll have evoked potentials instead of spontaneous potentials guiding your life. So, you know, there was a concern in my 20s.
Starting point is 01:32:11 what will people think or what would happen if I did this. And that gradually kind of became less of priority, if that makes any sense. Because I realized that I could have the whole world against me, but the question is, do I have my soul against me? My soul being the state of unconditional love in my most authentic state. And you're going to be liked and disliked no matter what you do. I tell people you're only going to grow to the level of, of embracing of the hero and villain.
Starting point is 01:32:46 So if you can embrace this much hero, but only this much villain, you're only going to grow to that level. You have to be able to be liked and disliked by the same number of people. And if you can do that, I mean, Donald's a good example of that. Donald's got a billion people liking and disliking him, at least, maybe four billion, liking and disliking him. Who knows? So because of that, he's probably on every newspaper in every country every single day. as influence. How well can you embrace and own all your parts? If you, any part you're
Starting point is 01:33:24 disowning is emptiness. Any part that you could ever imagine in anything that you don't own is your emptiness. So that would be the journey as to learn to appreciate. Forty-one years ago, I was about 30 years old. And at the time, as I mentioned earlier, I went to the Oxford English Dictionary and I went and identified every one of the traits inside me because that was my attempt to try to own the parts and have a preemptive strike
Starting point is 01:33:57 instead of having to wait to people push my buttons and react with hindsight, I'd rather have foresight and identify it. So when I saw that and people would say things about me, I'd go, okay, that's true too. you know, somebody says, you know, you're this or that. If I can honor that and see that, I don't have a reaction. They can't control me.
Starting point is 01:34:18 If I try to disown it, they can manipulate me. And I can be influenced by them for fear of losing or gaining or something and get attached to one way or the other. These are the Buddhist attachments that stop people from being themselves. That shift from perceiving life happening to me as a victim versus for me, as me, through me, the way that you spoke to and what I really resonated with in our last conversation, too, is how you mentioned that you devoted your life to the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love. Yeah. Howard Hughes is the one that stimulated that one.
Starting point is 01:35:00 It feels like you've been speaking to it throughout this whole conversation, but how would you describe the essence of what wisdom is? It's inseparable from love. It's the synthesis and synchronicity of all opposites. The dialectic that Zeno put together, even though predated, there's predates to that. You take a proposition, you take the opposite proposition, and if you're in your amygdala, you call it a debate,
Starting point is 01:35:31 and you both want to be right and both want to be proud, and hold on to the fantasy that the other person's going to come onto your side. as you go from debate to the dialectic, you start to incorporate the other side into your awareness until eventually both become aware of both sides simultaneously. The synthesis, as Hegel described. And the synthesis and synchronicity of any complementary opposite
Starting point is 01:35:56 is going to experience love at any scale, no matter what you're perceiving. That's why whenever I'm researching, I'm always, whenever I read a piece of literature, and there's any bias to a side. I'm looking for the other literature that was written simultaneously by the Law of Aristic Escalation.
Starting point is 01:36:13 When the theory of evolution comes about, 1859 or so by Darwin, the theory of entropy came out, the path of evolution in life and the path of death. And they were entangled pairs of opposites coming out of the same city, basically. And so this is part of nature.
Starting point is 01:36:34 A unity of opposites. Will Durant did a beautiful, piece on the philosophy, history, or story of philosophy and civilizations, a beautiful rendition of the unity of opposites and the dialectic is underlying all the different cultures. So I believe that there's an evolution from taking aside and being opinionated and black and white, an absolutist, just like there isn't morality. There's absolute morality, and there's relative situational ethics and morality.
Starting point is 01:37:06 And that's the evolution from the most dense to the most eetheric, etheric or rarefied. I think that's what we're here to do to utilize that. And wisdom and love, the love of wisdom, the wisdom of love, are the same pursuit. Now, Swedenborg did a beautiful job on it. And he wrote, wisdom was the light of the sun, and love was the warmth of the sun. And I love that analogy in his books. I devoured all of Swedenborg's books and just lived and studied his books back in my 20s. And I love that little rendition of it.
Starting point is 01:37:48 It's a smaller book he did. But wisdom, the pursuit of wisdom has been, I have cufflings that say love and wisdom on them. I don't have mine today, but I carry it. They're going wherever I go, gold and silver ones. Because the wisdom of love and the love of wisdom is what I was told. by Howard Hughes to gain. And that's been pretty well the pursuit, the love of wisdom, the wisdom of love.
Starting point is 01:38:13 I don't think they're separated. Could you give me your like five, six top individuals who have influenced you most on that journey? Because I think you mentioned many throughout, and it's rare that I get to speak with somebody who's so well read across so many different disciplines. Who do you think are the best thinkers in embracing that understanding of wisdom and love?
Starting point is 01:38:35 The best writers, as best teachers you've studied? That's a good question, because I'm just... I don't know if I got an answer for that. The best. Well, the most impactful for you, perhaps. Well, there's a beautiful book I think I mentioned last time, Centopican by Mortimer Adler, that I've loved reading,
Starting point is 01:39:05 that I encourage anybody to read. It's a two-volume set, each are about 900 pages, disease. And it is a summary of the greatest minds in the Western world, from Thales all the way to modern psychologists and philosophies, summarized. Syntopicon, a synthesis of the topics that every human being are wise to study. And it starts out with A, goes all the way through the alphabet. And that's probably, those two volumes are probably the most significant volumes
Starting point is 01:39:50 that a person's probably going to read. Probably to read. And there's hundreds of philosophers sitting inside there. So, yeah, I think that that would be the, it wouldn't be a human being, one being. Although there's been many people that have influenced me. I had a gentleman named Lakishua Rahn.
Starting point is 01:40:11 who is an Indian mystic, who I met at 23, who had six PhDs, a doctor of philosophy, a doctor of osteopathy, a doctor of medicine, a doctor of chiropractic, a doctor of physiology, a doctor of divinity. Very aware guy. And I got to be his student and learned for him. And we explored the mysteries together, or he shared what he understood the mysteries. Questions, whence do we come, whether we go, why are we here, who are we, do we have free will or predestination, the basic mystery questions. And that was an influence, and he had an influence on my exploration of the mysteries, the mystery traditions, comparative religions and comparative philosophies and the sciences, and some of the arts that expressed those.
Starting point is 01:41:10 So he had an impact on me. But I'd have to say that the great books of the Western world, I got a hold of when I was 21, and more and more Adler, St. Topic in volumes 1 and 2, which are the two volumes that started off, are two, it's an introduction to a PhD on life. It's a great set of volumes, just for people to feed their mind.
Starting point is 01:41:33 How do you learn in a way that you're able to integrate and synthesized the information. How have you learned how to learn? Okay, that's a great one. Okay, now let's play with that one. I had learning problems, as you know. So as I started to learn and read at age 18, I,
Starting point is 01:41:55 anything I asked myself, what worked and what didn't work today, and I kept record of it, what allowed me to go more efficiently and what allowed me to be less efficient. I noticed a bunch of things. I noticed when I was reading a book, Some books I would get my reticter activating assist would make me fade, some topics.
Starting point is 01:42:13 And other topics I would be engaged and wouldn't want to go to sleep. And I watched that polarity. And I looked at the content and I asked, why is it doing that? This is before I knew about values. And the only way to get through that when I would read,
Starting point is 01:42:27 so I wanted to study all the disciplines, but some were less inspiring than others, is that if I read 20 minutes doing this, by the time I was fading, I would then stop and read 20 minutes over here and I would be wake up again. And I kept myself going back and forth between those to keep myself awake.
Starting point is 01:42:41 So I could read 20 hours a day because that was my objective to try to at least devour. Because I slept four hours a day for 35 years and I just read pretty well or shared. So I found that. Then I found that sitting up
Starting point is 01:42:56 did a whole lot better, you know, sitting up in a proper posture was way better at reading than slouching or sitting sideways. So I found the proper temperature. I found water. I drank water.
Starting point is 01:43:09 I found anything that caused any perturbation of blood sugar affected reading and learning. So I drank water and I did yoga breathing and I did yogic recall at night. And there were certain things that I just accumulated what was working and not working. I learned about visual guides in reading and I started using visual guides
Starting point is 01:43:33 and got faster and faster to where I could read one day 11,000 pages. I really devoured the reading. But I also learned that if I take one common theme that I tie all my reading to, when I turned 23 and I learned about values, my reading accelerated vastly. I mean, it just took off. Because then I realized, if I asked the question, how is this topic helping me fulfill what's most deeply meaningful, my highest value, what's most inspiring, what's most meaningful. If I link that and make links, the more links I do, the more photographic and autographic the information becomes.
Starting point is 01:44:13 So that was a major breakthrough on that. Then I learned another thing when I was doing a presentation to a group of 400 dentist on TMJ. I was studying carpentic and astronomy and dentistry at the same time in medicine. And so when I was doing a presentation to a group of 400 dentists, a guy asked me this challenging question, and out of my mind came literally a photographic image of Gray's Anatomy. And I was just reading it off the page to him. And then he goes, okay, okay, I got it. You gave me the answer. And then I went home that night, I'd go, how did I know that page? Because I was
Starting point is 01:44:49 not aware I had that page. I realized one of the great principles of learning that you have conscious awareness, which is 0.004%, an unconscious awareness, which is very much is very important. And unconscious awareness, which is vastly more. So when you're devouring information, you're only getting a small percentage of it. Even though I could photograph things, still got not everything. But then when I found out that the second I had a purpose for reading, the Povinaar nuclei filters the information and takes it out of the unconscious and puts it into the conscious awareness.
Starting point is 01:45:26 So when I did that, when the guy asked me the question, out of my unconscious, I didn't even know I knew that page, but my eye saw it. But my pulverineineine nucleus filtered it out as not pertinent out of the infinitude to give me what was most priority. And so that area of the brain, the top end of the reticroactivating system wakes us up and allows us to get the most pertinent information out of the infinitude that we were facing. So when you asked the question, now I had a purpose for that. It went higher on my values. and it came from the unconscious up into the conscious awareness. Well, that was a big breakthrough for me
Starting point is 01:46:05 because now I realize I can just devour volumes of volumes of material visually. And the second somebody asked me a question, it doesn't matter what it is, I got access to it. And so I then started to do presentations with Q&A to expedite my infinitude unconscious into the conscious awareness to speed up my learning. And that was really very, very eye-opening for me. So now I realized, and I also realized that why I was waking up and going to sleep originally
Starting point is 01:46:36 was value-driven. When things were linked to my values, I got the reticter activating system and the pulvernar nuclei allowed it in. If it wasn't linked, fall asleep, unimportant. So then I realized that whatever I read, every class I took is part of my speed reading program that I taught for years, I would take whatever class you were taking, whatever the topic is, and I ask how specifically is studying this topic, helping me fulfill my highest value, the most important information, which is the evolution of human consciousness and how to
Starting point is 01:47:09 maximize human awareness and potential and to help people understand the divine magnificence. So I would link whatever it is, physics, mathematics, science, I don't care what it is. I would link it, except cars and cooking. I linked it all to that objective, because I didn't want to. to take up time eating. I wanted, I wanted, I used to have all these bowls of nuts and seeds and dried fruit in a thing of water here. And my eating, and I had a thimble and a sponge that was wet. Because as I was speed reading, my fingers would get, I would lose the finger, fingerprints as I'm reading. So I had to use a thimble and I had to use a sponge to be able to
Starting point is 01:47:54 keep turning pages. And I had food there so I wouldn't lose time having to be distracted by eating. The only thing that would distract me from my reading was to go pee. You were reading so much, the literal texture up your skin was coming off. The fingers were gone. I couldn't do it because you burn, you get, the pages get hot and you end up beginning. You get burned. Your fingers get pretty hot. Oh my God. It's just an incredible visual. Wow. But I learned that the visual reading, you know, you, you know, Most people read at the speed of which they speak. And if you speak fast, you can read fast.
Starting point is 01:48:30 If you can't, you're going to read slow. Guarante it, because your phonemes as how you were taught reading. You have to break the sound barrier, go into the visual system to be able to go to faster reading. And so I just allowed myself to devour information and I didn't even care if I got it consciously. I would specifically set up questions
Starting point is 01:48:51 for people to ask me to find out what I did, read to prove to me that I could get access to the unconscious. So that's the way that you would train your recall capacity. Would you, was there a note taking or highlighting system? Yes. As I was speed reading, I used a pencil and I created a coding system, spiritual, mental, vocational, financial, family, social, and physical, because I wanted to master those areas.
Starting point is 01:49:18 And then I did spiritual SPM, spiritual meditation, S-P-A affirmations, SP-R, you know, rituals, R. So I broke every thing I was studying into these sub-components. And then as I'm speed-reading going through it with a pencil,
Starting point is 01:49:38 and you start out with you're doing a line and line-on-line, and then you end up narrowing it tighter and eventually just go down the page. But whenever I would read something that was of pertinence or a quote or something, I would immediately put out a coding on the side of the page.
Starting point is 01:49:53 And I'd underline what that thing is as I'm going through it. So then I could hand that and delegate that to a lady that typed 110 words a minute to type that out and put the reference in there and to categorize them alphabetically into my encyclopedia system. So that way I could just keep reading. And then I would have the information all sorted and all ready for me when I needed it. And it was by topics. I used syntopican idea.
Starting point is 01:50:18 And I would synthesize the topics. And then whenever I was doing a presentation, I'd pull up everything that I'd ever read from any other source or any seminar, and I did it on index cards originally. So I only put one idea per card, and I put all the cards through these topical systems and abbreviated it. And I had my own abbreviation system and kind of a shorthand. So when I took notes from classes, I developed a shorthand. I took all the vowels out, and I just put constant sends, and I shortened it down,
Starting point is 01:50:47 so I could get every single word that anybody said, and I could quote back to him. and that way had the best notes. And then I would sell those to students that would want to do it because I got the top grades. They'd want to get my notes. And I'd sell them that way I was getting paid to study. Because I always say, anytime you want to do what you love, you always going to ask, how do I get handsomely paid to do what I love?
Starting point is 01:51:07 So I got paid to study. I made $100,000 a year teaching and studying when I was in school, when I was in my early 20s. As someone who's devoured such a heap of knowledge and information, how do you delineate what's your own original idea versus information you've read? Good question. Hard. Because it's a synthesis.
Starting point is 01:51:34 Now, my methodology that I've developed is an original piece of work, but there's underlying components you can trace back. So when you're doing, where do I do the same thing? Well, that can go back to Islamic teaching. the sixth century. You can go back to Christian teachings in the first century. You can go back to Egyptian teachings on tomb in four millennium back.
Starting point is 01:52:04 And I don't know. Some earlier texts, I have a friend that's got the largest collection of private texts in the world and about almost $6 billion worth of ancient manuscripts and texts that he got out of Iraq and different places around the world.
Starting point is 01:52:18 And looking at some of his oldest texts, a lot of stuff goes back 3,000, 4,000 years. If you can decipher it and put it into English, because I couldn't decipher the cuneiform, but I could see the English translation of it. Some of these principles go way back, and some of them don't even have a name on where they originate.
Starting point is 01:52:35 So I'm an originator of a new form of combining things. Origination can be sometimes a new combination. But some of the principles don't know if we're new. Now, the complete synthesis synchronicative opposites, which I call my great discovery, which is to me the greatest discovery in psychology that I've come across. I haven't seen anywhere, but I've seen reference to it in Jung's work, but he didn't have a tool in how to do it.
Starting point is 01:53:05 I saw it as a unity of opposites in Heraclysis work, but he didn't have a tool to do it. So I was able to create the tool that allowed them to do it. I spoke at New York University to the physics department and psychology department, and there's packed room. Hot. At the end of it, the professor said, if Young was alive today, he'd be using your method. I said, I believe that.
Starting point is 01:53:26 Because he understood, and he had a framework, but he didn't have a tool to access the synchronicity and simultaneity. Wilhelm Watt, in 1897, in his principles of psychology, said that there's simultaneous contrast and sequential contrast. Sequential contrasts that creates the perturbations and the vicissitudes of perception. but the simultaneous contracts was where love and wisdom is. They said, if you have that, you got stability. But he didn't have a tool. No reference in it in his text. So I think I've developed a tool on how to do that that's methodical,
Starting point is 01:54:03 that's reproducible, that's duplicatable, that works in every culture, translatable. So that part, I think, is relatively original until I find somebody that maybe have done that earlier than I just didn't come across yet. Yeah, I always find it fascinating, even in my own life with my own writing where I come across what I think or perceive in the moment as a relatively novel idea or phrasing of wording and then come to read some sort of
Starting point is 01:54:29 ancient text or like this guy Ibn Arabi who's an amazing writer and like thousands years back saying the exact same thing and it's uh I guess it just makes me inquire about the possibility of what an original idea really even is, if it's possible, the rarity of one, if so. And then what seems like when you devour such a large heap of information and you're creating, what is a unique sort of framework or model that maybe has never been put together in the way that you have with your value system and the demartini process, for example?
Starting point is 01:55:06 Well, Herbert Spencer was trying to create kind of a universal evolutionary model. You know, the survival of the fittest, from him, Darwin kind of played with. And that has a completely different distorted meaning today. It's like aggression. The survival of the fitness has nothing to do with aggression, really, because I'll use an analogy. If you're infatuated with somebody
Starting point is 01:55:31 and they represent prey, and you had no predator, and you had only prey, you'd be gluttonous and fat and lose fitness. if you had predator and you resented somebody and they represent predator and no prey you starve in a maze shape and lose fitness but if you put the prey and predator together you maximize fitness so survival of the fitness or thrival of the fitness is really the person who is able to integrate the pair of opposite, not the person that dominates. Although they dominate because they survive, they're not having to be aggressive any more than passive. They've integrated it. Because if they're aggressive
Starting point is 01:56:19 to a predator, they may be passive to their own offspring. You know, when you're protecting your own children, you're being kind and you're being cruel. And people think you can separate to inseparable, but you can't. That's why nice and mean are not really separable. people think, well, that's a nice thing, no, it isn't. Or that's a mean thing, no, it isn't. It's neither. We've got caught in the trap of the labels and naming the ineffables. A big golden threat throughout this whole conversation
Starting point is 01:56:52 and what I think will leave more evoked within my own life is when somebody comes to me with a perceived problem or thought or on reality, a perception, a judgment when it comes up within me, it's just such a liberating, it feels something. much more spacious to have the inquiry of what is the complementary opposite, what is the other perspective that is also here coupled within this experience, and it allows, I feel like it just will continue to allow me and allow everybody who's listening to walk through life, not clinging on to our ideas of how reality should be in a dogmatic persona, but allowing the mystery
Starting point is 01:57:31 to permeate or being a bit more. That's well said. That summarizes it. Holy curiosity, Einstein said. He used to say it, and I'm paraphrasing, it's enough for me on a daily base to sit in awe, contemplating the intelligence that permeates the universe. I think that's a nice way of saying it. And, you know, whether or not somebody, the mysteries of reductionism that they've been trying to solve
Starting point is 01:58:02 on the hard problem and consciousness hasn't been solved. And believe or not, some of the Presby-Socratics already conceived the brain as the receipt of the consciousness. That was already back at the Presbycratics. And we haven't really made a whole lot of progress there. We've reduced it down to quantum levels. Now there's quantum theories, you know, in microtubules, and there's tubulin, and now there's quantum entanglement. Now there's photodissection of biomolecules and photons going. all over the body. I mean, I've had fun with it. To me, the most fundamental level of consciousness
Starting point is 01:58:44 would be the quantum vacuum, creating virtual photons and virtual particle nanoparticles. And at that level, that's one thing common panpsychically to all parts of the brain. So maybe it's going in, Now, just like a proton is actually an inner play of quarks and gluons and mesons and it's a dance out of the quantum vacuum into existence and not. And we think they're stable systems, but they're actually murky. And it's possible that the information that's sitting in there and the storage of that is the same thing as our consciousness. It's actually just emerging and submerging in the quantum vacuum into our brain and out of our brain.
Starting point is 01:59:29 and maybe looking for this pursuit of this, finding this location in the brain, right? Even though we know that it integrates in the immediate prefrontal cortex, eventual, we know that we have action potentials there. And we have different modules of the brain for different functions, because if we can destroy that area, we can alter those functions. There's still something more fundamental. And right now, with our level of understanding and our math, the quantum vacuum would probably be the most tense,
Starting point is 01:59:59 g-source that may be underlying the whole thing. But there's just speculation. I love so much of what you just shared and will need to be postponed for a third conversation at some point. But I just find it, I do find it so fascinating how I'm also in the midst of preparing for a podcast I'm doing tomorrow with Dr. Ian McGilchrist, who. Oh, he's bright. He's amazing.
Starting point is 02:00:23 Lovely guy. He understands unity of opposites. Yeah, I'm excited. This is a full week. I'm excited these conversations all bounce and fulfill off of one another. But I just bring that up because he speaks the different ways and capacities of knowing, both within the left or a left and right hemisphere and inherent asymmetry within our brain and how great innovation almost unanimously comes through letting go of priors and knowns.
Starting point is 02:00:52 And imagination and the intuition is actually where the great discoveries throughout all ages have come from. and what that could say about our own life as we come into that place of stillness and quiet and allow us to reinnovate what it means to be human in our life, you know? So it's a great balance, and I've just appreciated your awareness of the two. I loved our conversation last time, and I'd love this conversation this time, and who knows, maybe there'll be another time. I feel so honored, if so, this conversation is so fulfilling. and I can tell by the excitement and aliveness throughout the whole conversation both this time and last.
Starting point is 02:01:32 Like this is just, it's such a gift to be able to do this, to have these values, to have these curiosities, but then to be in conversation about it. It's just so meaningful for me. So thank you so much for the work. Thank you for the great questions and for the opportunity to be with you again. And whoever may be listening, just know that there's a 12-step program called Survivors. of D. Martini. So in case you didn't understand something I said, maybe I'll have the opportunity
Starting point is 02:02:03 to someday meet you and clarify it. Yeah. Yeah, thank you for mentioning. I mean, everybody linked in the description, as always, will be our guest's information of his work, his courses. We scratched the tip of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your process and being able to actually really identify our own core values and all of these things. So I encourage people to, if they feel called, take a gander.
Starting point is 02:02:29 Thank you so much. Thank you again. Everybody. Thank you. Until next time, be well. We did it. Bound it.

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