One can either be distracted by the many immediate gratifying passions, or inspired by a meaningful purpose or mission. Knowing and pursuing a meaningful mission is a primary and essential function for your fulfillment. Passions can transiently change with the wind. In this episode, clearly identify the difference between your passions and your primary mission and purpose. Get ready to awaken to your true north and the primary ‘why’ driving your inspired life.

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These were the passions. They were ungoverned,

uncontrolled behaviors that were the animal

nature within us.

Living as a slave to a passion or living

as an inspired missionary.

I'd like to make a difference between that because today, very commonly,

you hear the word, 'find your passion', 'get your passion', you know,

'get passion', 'I wish I had more passion', these kinds of things.

And I am an etymologist to some degree.

I love looking up the words. When I was young,

I used to live in dictionaries and I'd look up the etymology and what the words

meant. And if you pull out your

iPhone and pull out your Google and look up the word, passion-etymology,

E T Y M O L O G Y. If you look up that word, passion,

you will see that it comes from the word pati and passio,

which means to suffer. Yes,

most of your self-help people are talking about, 'get your passion,

gets some passion, I wish I had more passion, if I find my passion'.

But the word passion means to suffer.

And compassion means to suffer with somebody.

And these are so commonly used today without even

Since about 1985,

the term passion came into kind of a common use, after the book,

The Passion for Excellence. And it's basically, you know,

a high excited pursuit of something they think.

But if you look up the word passion, it means ungoverned, uncontrolled behavior.

It's an animal behavior.

It's a wild animal kind of response in its original roots.

Even in early Christianity, well, not too early,

but earlier Christianity,

they talked about the seven deadly sins, gluttony, sloth,

wrath, you know,

greed and these, and lust.

So these were the passions. They were ungoverned,

uncontrolled behaviors that were the animal

nature within us.

And that's distinguished from an inspired mission.

You've heard of the term finding your inspired purpose, your inspired mission.

So I'd like to elaborate on those two and explain them.

And the mission and its etymology means to send forth.

So in Christianity,

the Jesuits sent their people forth into the world to try to share their

mission. Those with a mission have a message,

I've said many times before.

An inspired mission is an intrinsic calling

and a passion is an extrinsic derived reaction.

So you're run extrinsically from the world around you by the passion.

Lust,

it means this stimulus over here is so intriguing that you have to have it,

and sexually. Gluttony, the food over there,

the sugar over there is something you have to eat.

But an inspired mission is intrinsic.

It's something that's a calling from within.

And theologians use that as the calling, some called it the métier,

the purpose that we drive our life by.

So I'd like to elaborate on each of these and distinguish these and show

why you can become a slave to your passions or you can become liberated

by an inspired mission, a master.

And I rarely do a presentation about talking about values.

And this is no exception. You will probably not ever hear me do a talk,

a presentation without it because it's the foundation of all human behavior.

So let's just,

let's go down the rabbit hole a bit and let's take a look at what these two

terms,

mission and passion really represent and what they can be used for in your own

mastery of life. You have,

as all people have, a set of priorities,

a set of values that you live your life by.

And this set of values, this hierarchy of values,

or set of priorities, are unique to you, they're fingerprint specific.

Whatever's highest on your value list,

the thing that's most important in your life,

you're spontaneously inspired from within to do and to

fulfill. You don't need any motivation on the outside to get you to do it.

Just like the video games for the young boy who loves video games,

he just does it. He doesn't have to be reminded. Doesn't have to be motivated.

Doesn't have to be incentivized to go do his video games.

So whatever the highest value is, which Aristotle called the telos,

the end in mind,

which the word teleology,

which is the study of meaning and purpose is derived from, your most meaningful,

most purposeful, most fulfilling, most inspiring,

most empowering thing you can do,

is to pursue and fulfill what you value most.

That's where you have fulfillment. The mind is full.

That is a spontaneously, intrinsically driven calling.

Mine happens to be, my highest value happens to be teaching. I love doing that.

I do it every single day. I'm about to start late tonight,

a seven-day program. I just finished a program yesterday.

I'm constantly doing presentations. Nobody has to motivate me to do that.

I love doing it. I love teaching. So whatever that is,

that's highest on your value, that's what your inspired mission is.

And that is something that you will embrace both pain and pleasure in the

pursuit of. In other words,

if you see a challenge in the way you won't stop. You'll go over it.

You'll go under it. You'll go around it. You'll go through it.

And you'll find how whatever happens that's an obstacle, how it's on the way,

not in the way, and you'll pursue the challenges that inspire you.

Just like a young boy who finishes his video game,

he wants to immediately go to a more advanced video game,

because that's what he loves doing. And he doesn't want to stop.

He's pursuing challenges that inspire him and extracting out of it,

creativity and innovation and waking up genius.

And that is what is the power of fulfilling a mission, the highest value.

And you want to go forth, you don't want to hesitate back.

You want to go forth and share what's inside you and express yourself.

Kind of like you want to extrovert in the highest value.

But as you go down the list of priorities in life, lower values, you

require greater degrees of motivation, to get you to do it.

And instead of the blood glucose and oxygen going into the forebrain,

where you see a vision, that's inspiring to you,

you strategically plan an action on how to get there,

you mitigate the risks so you see things on the way and no matter what happens,

you found a solution to it, you move forward on it, you execute those,

and you have self-governance because the forebrain automatically calms down the

amygdala. In that area, you automatically become master of destiny.

As an inspired missionary as a master of destiny,

you exemplify walking your talk and enduring, as a leader,

the pairs of opposites, the support, the challenge, the ease, the difficulties,

and you embrace them both forward, fulfilling what's meaningful to you.

The highest value, the Telos as Aristotle called.

But as you go down the list of values,

the blood glucose and oxygen goes into the amygdala and the hindbrain,

where hindsight, not foresight rules your life.

And that amygdala is a desire center, not the executive center,

which is the forebrain, but the desire center.

The desire center is seeking that which is pleasure and

avoiding that which is pain. Seeking prey, avoiding predator,

seeking that which you want to consume,

an impulse to eat and consume.

And that you want to avoid that which is trying to consume you.

So the amygdala,

the desire center is trying to separate pain from pleasure.

The executive center embraces them both,

and sees both of them as essential.

Imagine if you're out there in the wild and you are seeking prey, food,

and you had no predator, you had just an abundance of food.

You'd lose your fitness because you would gluttonously eat,

and you'd have a passion. But by having a predator on the spot,

you eat just enough to maintain your sustain maximum life and fitness,

but not too much where you're slow and fat,

which then makes the predator target you because of the calories and because you

can't run.

So maximum development and fitness occurs at the border of support and

challenge, prey and predator, the positives, negatives.

So when you're living in your highest value, which is your inspired mission,

you embrace both of them objectively. Objectivity means even minded,

balanced minded, neutral. But if you're down in your amygdala,

you're trying to avoid one side and seek the other,

trying to avoid the predator to seek the prey. And by the way,

if you avoided the predator and sought the prey,

you'd get gluttonous and fat as I've said, and lose your fitness.

You wouldn't maximize your potential. And you'd be looking for a fantasy,

a pleasure without a pain. And as you know in life, as the Buddha says,

the desire for that, which is unobtainable, pleasure without pain,

and the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable, pain without pleasure,

is the source of human suffering. And suffering is the source of passion.

So passion is a by-product of the amygdala's response to its environment,

trying to avoid one side and seek the other and trying to divide that which is

indivisible, to separate that which is inseparable,

to polarize that which is unpolarizable, to label that which is unlabeled,

to name that which is ineffable.

So the second we're in our amygdala and living by lower values,

we automatically are subject to the passions.

And now we are infatuated with somebody, we want food, gluttony,

we want wrath for something that challenges us.

And all the passions that are ungoverned reactions to external stimuli that we

see in an imbalanced way. Now,

when you're infatuated with something and you seek a prey, you might say,

and you're conscious of the upsides and unconscious the downsides,

you're not fully conscious.

When you're avoiding a predator and you're seeing that as something you want to

avoid, you're conscious of the downsides, unconscious of the upsides. Again,

you have a incomplete awareness. You have ignorance of what's there,

and you're unconscious of what's there, and you're not fully conscious,

but if you're living in your executive center on an inspired mission,

you're fully conscious of the pros and cons, the positives and negatives,

the advantages and disadvantages. You're managing what leadership demands,

which is paradoxes of opposites. And you're embracing them neutrally,

so you have no fear of losing the fantasy and no fear of gaining the nightmare.

You're able to see things, resiliently, adaptively,

and you're able to pursue things and wake up your genius and pursue challenges

that inspire you and accomplish something that contributes to the planet as an

inspired missioning, sending forth your message into the world.

But down in the amygdala, you're going to want to avoid pain and seek pleasure.

And the more you try to avoid that which is inevitable,

the more frightening it becomes.

And that's the difference between living in distress and eustress.

Eustress is wellness promoting,

cause you're embracing the pains and pleasures of life.

And distress is illness promoting cause you're trying to avoid half of life,

but it keeps smacking you. And you keep trying to avoid something,

but you can't avoid it. It's the unavoidable.

The moment you're in your amygdala, trying to go from avoid to seek,

you activate what I call the impulse,

the compulse, the immediate gratifying addicted behaviors.

Addictive behaviors and consumptions, which is what people do,

they consume products that are overpriced with other people's brands and then

they squander their money on immediate gratification.

And then they don't build a brand and build a mission that actually serves

people that builds a brand that makes them wealthy. And so, as a result of it,

they keep banging their head against the wall,

trying to be getting ahead but they can't.

Because they keep trying to avoid the very thing that they need to get ahead.

The challenge. So the passions,

you become a slave to. Why?

Because anything you infatuate with occupies space and time in your mind,

anything that you resent occupies space and time your mind.

So we've all been in a situation we've been highly infatuated with and tried to

sleep at night, couldn't sleep.

Or highly resentful and raged about somebody and couldn't sleep,

because they're occupying your mind. Anytime you have

you're conscious of the upsides, unconscious of the downsides,

conscious of the downsides, unconscious of the upsides.

Anytime you have a subjectively biased,

distorted perception of your reality,

it's going to occupy space and time in your mind and it's going to be stored in

your subconscious mind and your subconscious mind stores all conscious,

unconscious splits. And it causes you to avoid and seek.

And therefore you're externally driven and run.

And extrinsic motivation is a symptom, never a solution for mastery.

And you end up being a slave because when you're infatuated with something and

you minimize yourself to it,

you're going to want to change you to be more like it.

And when you're resentful to something,

you get kind of puffed up and you want to change it to be more like you.

And anytime you try to change and live outside your values,

in somebody else's values,

or try to get other people to live in your values away from their values,

you have futility. So the passions are futile,

but the missions are utile. Utile means utility. You contribute.

You go out and make a difference in the world.

And you actually awaken your highest value, which is unique to you,

which allows you to go and be the individual,

the essence of your being instead of just existing and surviving.

So if you live by your highest value, you end up thriving.

If you live by your lower values, you end up surviving.

And surviving with the passions is not where it's at.

So when you hear the gurus and the new self-help people talking about find your

passion, get your passion. You might consider what passion means,

and might replace the word.

Because sometimes what they're saying is just a confusion of etymology.

Sometimes what they're saying has wisdom,

but they're not using the word that I would use anyway. I would use the word,

inspired mission. I'm a man on a mission. I'm not a man that's got a passion.

I'm not interested in being governed from the outside world.

I'm not interested in being reactive.

I'm not interested in getting out of control and reacting.

And that takes no effort. It takes no effort to have passion.

But it does take effort to have an inspired mission.

And most people don't want to do the effort.

They want a lazy man's guide to enlightenment.

They're not willing to do the work,

but the work is worth it because the fulfillment of living by your highest

value, doing something that contributes a service,

and getting remunerated for it with sustainable fair exchange,

is one of the most fulfilling things an individual can do.

You can rest at night with a clear consciousness,

You're synthesized.

I like to think of love as a synthesis and synchronicity of all complimentary

opposites. When you're living by your inspired mission,

you're doing what you love and loving what you do.

And you're making a contribution and spreading and exemplifying that as a

possibility for human beings, which draws and synchronizes people, places,

things, ideas,

and events into your life to help you fulfill yours and inspires them to carry

on, you might say, the chain reaction of fulfilling their, the ripple effect.

But if you're living in your passions,

you're going to be run from the outside world. And I see all the time right now,

people are going around trying to find their passion and trying to get more

excited, trying immediate gratification. I see it in the media.

I see it in the news. Everything is quick, quick, quick, quick,

get to the point,

but just know that immediate gratification costs you long-term fulfillment.

You know, when it comes money management,

I see people right now looking for speculations,

trying to get rich overnight and go into the crypto world or things like that to

try to get fixes, try to get that high.

But the moment they get high and they don't see the low that's associated with

it, they end up being addicted to that and then they got to get that next high.

And that's exactly what the addicted behavior is.

It's like walking into a casino.

The passions run the casino world and the casinos got big buildings and you got

little houses. If you want to give away your potential, your energy, your money,

and everything else to the passions, fine, you'll learn your lesson.

But finding some dedicated purpose, some inspired mission,

that really deeply means something to you, the meaning.

You know what the word meaning means?

It means extracting out the mean between the pairs of opposites.

Look into Aristotle's work and look up what the true virtue is.

It's the two extreme, between the two extremes of vices,

and it's the pairs of opposites.

So true meaning is basically extracting out between the two pairs of opposites.

In the Breakthrough Experience program, which I do pretty well weekly or well,

since COVID a little less, but I do it regularly,

I've done it 1,123 times in that program,

I show people how to extract meaning out of their existence,

how to take any situation in their life and how to turn it into an opportunity

that they can fulfill their mission with it. It's never what happens to you.

It's your perception, decisions, and actions that determine that.

So when you're living by your highest values and you're living with an inspired

mission and you're purposefully driven from within, intrinsically,

you see no matter what happens to you on the way, not in the way.

You're grateful. In fact, the medial prefrontal cortex is the gratitude center.

So if you're living in your highest values and activating the medial prefrontal

cortex,

you're actually grateful for your experience and

you for is baggage, anything you can say thank you for his fuel.

But down into the amygdala,

the amygdala is letting you know what you have judge, what you haven't loved,

you have strife inside yourself. And you're trying to avoid and seek.

And you're externally run.

And you're an automaton reacting to misperceptions stored in the subconscious

mind. Now the purpose of that amygdala is survival.

The purpose of that is an emergency. It has a place. It's not a bad thing.

It's not a moral issue. It's just not a thriving mastery. See,

there's two types of stresses in life.

The perception of loss of that which you seek and the perception of gain of that

what you're trying to avoid. That's it, two stresses. And in the brain,

all biological responses, no matter what the perceived stresses are,

all go down to the same neurological responses.

So the second you're infatuated with something or resentful to something,

you're going to fear it's loss and fear it's gain.

So when you're in the amygdala, you're going to increase your fears.

And fears are feedback mechanisms to let you know that you're pursuing

fantasies. And fantasy's are trying to get a one-sided world,

a positive without a negative. And a nightmare is a by-product of doing that.

If you're depressed,

it's because you're comparing your current reality to a fantasy that you're

addicted to. And as long as you're in the amygdala striving for a fantasy,

you're going to keep creating nightmares because they come together as a pair,

like two poles of a magnet.

The master of life embraces the two sides of the magnet,

knows how both serve a purpose. The predator, just like the prey, is you can,

you can eat, but the predator keeps you fit. In fact,

it's been shown that we biologically grow and have the most fitness at the

border of support and challenge, prey and predator.

That's why there's a food chain with prey and predator that we need in the food

chain for the efficiency of usage of energy.

So our prey and predator are to be synthesized,

not polarized. You're not here to avoid one and seek the other,

that's the animal passions. You here to have an angelic mission,

something that's, I always say, an angel is a messenger,

a messenger, a man with a mission, a woman with a mission.

So give yourself permission to do something that makes a difference that's a

mission on the planet, because that's the power of it. One's an animal.

One's an angel if you will. An angel just means messenger.

One who is enlightened and has a message to the world.

I'd much rather be an enlightened individual with

to the passions of the animal and just surviving.

So if you want to thrive and you want to go out and do something amazing,

live by your highest values, prioritize your life.

If you don't live by the highest priorities and fill

actions that inspire you spontaneously,

your day keeps filling up with low priority distractions that don't.

And that's the result of the passions.

So I just want to make a distinction between inspired mission and a,

you might say, surviving passion. I know that many people talk about passion.

It's all over the lexicon, but I just want you to look it up.

Please take the time to go look up these words,

find out what their meaning is and use them,

because also another aspect of the mission is to be able to conquer your lower

animal nature.

So an individual who is on a mission who has a message and spreading that out

and getting that and disseminating that is also conquering their animal nature

that is constantly distracting them from their mission.

And I find that the people who are clear about their mission go farther in

places, achieve more, and they set real objectives, not fantasies,

and they accomplish more and achieve more and have more fulfillment.

So that's my presentation. I want you to know you to know the difference.

Please look up those words just for your own sake and appreciate those words and

use etymology to your advantage.

It's a great thing because the evolution of words have deep meaning in our lives

and they may guide us to help us discern when information on the marketplace is

actually sound or maybe misrepresented.

So I just wanted to share that. So you have now the distinction between those.

Fill your day with high priority actions, activate your executive center,

become the executive. You'll be paid more, you'll have more self worth,

you'll have more fulfillment,

you'll end up spontaneously waking up your leadership and you won't be subject

to the external world running your life. If you want to run your own life,

follow your highest values with an inspired mission.

If you want other people to run your life,

have no effort whatsoever and just allow your passions to run wild.

This is Dr. Demartini.

I just wanted to say one last thing that coming up on our next little

presentation,

we have a program coming up a demanded masterclass called Finding Meaning and

Purpose on the Path of Self-Mastery.

If you have any interest in what I shared today, I'm going to take it further.

I'm going to go in and describe what purpose is and what self-mastery is and

what meaning is,

and the etymology to these things and what they're actually trying to represent

and how you can action step your life to help help you fulfill that.

So what I shared today is just a little wetting of the appetite for what I'll be

sharing in this masterclass. And that way you can do that.

And if you come and join me on this masterclass today,

you'll actually receive a free gift,

which is Awakening Your Astronomical Vision. Those with a vision flourish.

Those without a vision perish. The amygdala doesn't have the vision,

but the forebrain does.

So if you'd like to live with an inspired mission and be a missionary and

self-mastered individual that has meaning and purpose,

I'll see you at this masterclass. Look forward to seeing you there.

Thank you for joining me today. See you next week.