If your intention is to live an amazing life and leave your mark on the world, then becoming clear on your vision and purpose and mastering your mind are the keys to achieving your dreams. In this episode, Dr John Demartini discusses how you can use the power of your mind to control your perceptions, decisions and actions so you can become a master of your destiny instead of a victim of your history.

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Living purposely means living by what is most valuable,

in a way that serves the most people, that has the most fair exchange,

which allows us to receive the income,

to be able to delegate lower priority actions, to live an inspired life.

We can be extrinsically,

externally influenced by the world around us

and be a victim of our history,

or we can be intrinsically called and driven to do something

that inspires us, as a master of destiny.

It all depends on our perception, decisions, and actions in life,

and our brain and utilizing our brain to the fullest or

what some people have called the mind. And

we have within us the capacity to govern our

perceptions, decisions, and actions.

That's the three things that we have control over in our life.

And so anybody who can master the capacity to

use their perceptions towards their objective,

to make prioritized decisions towards a high priority objective,

and to live by priority with their actions and govern those,

which we have capacity to do,

we can master our mind and master the power of our mind in influencing and

creating not only a purposeful life,

but also something meaningful and achieving oriented.

So I'm a firm believer of this.

I've been doing it for 47, almost 48 years now.

And I believe that the thing that distinguishes us

from the species,

other species is that we have a capacity to govern

our minds and not let the extrinsic world run us. Like I say,

we can be driven from the external world or we can be called from within.

I said on the movie 'The Secret' many years ago,

that when the voice and the vision on the inside is louder and more profound

than all opinions on the outside, we begin to master our life.

So mastering our mind is taking command of our perceptions,

decisions and actions,

which I would love to elaborate on which I'm sure your questions would probably

initiate. But we also have,

in our capacity of our brain mental capacities,

we have a forebrain, which is the executive center,

the medial prefrontal cortex, or sometimes called the executive center,

which is in the outermost region of the brain, the telencephalon.

And we have this area is for objective pursuits

with foresight and in a sense, strategic planning,

executing plans, inspired vision and self-governance path.

We also have the amygdala or sub-cortical areas of the brain that's involved

that is driven from the external world,

extrinsically avoiding predator and seeking prey.

Which is typically the distractions from what we feel called to do.

So knowing how to use the advanced part of our brain is what I'd like

to talk about today. So we can master our mental functions, our perceptions,

decisions, actions, so we can become masters.

I've set out on a dream when I was 18, 19,

20 years old to master my life in all seven areas of life.

And I'd like to discuss that also today.

The term purpose is associated with teleology,

the study of meaning and purpose.

And the teleology is a derivative of a term called the telos that

Aristotle used,

and Aristotle believed that the voids in our life we want to fill.

So if we perceive we don't have money,

we want to fill our lives and find a way of getting money.

If we don't have a relationship, we look for a relationship.

We don't have social influence, we look for social connections and network.

Whatever we perceive as most missing becomes the most

Important means that which we want to import into our sphere of awareness and

influence in life.

And so our highest value,

the thing that is most fulfilling, most meaningful, most inspiring,

the telos as Aristotle called it,

is the most efficient and effective pathway to fulfill the

greatest amount of voids with the greatest amount of value.

So giving ourselves permission to prioritize our life

priorities on a daily basis is one of the keys to

unveiling one, our purpose, and two, living.

Our purpose is again, the pathway that's most efficient,

effective at resolving the most amount of voids,

the things that we think are missing, and fulfilling them the most.

My highest value is teaching and researching.

And if I fill my day with that action, daily,

and I do it in a way that serves individuals

where I can be compensated and remunerated in fair exchange,

I will have the income to be able to delegate lower priority actions

that allow me to be freed of things that devalue me and distract me,

which put me in my amygdala and take me into my distractive world

and then extrinsically run. And when I live by priority,

I get back into an intrinsic calling to do something that's deeply meaningful to

me.

So I have the responsibility to prioritize my actions every day towards the

highest priority to make a decision what that is,

and to stick to it and to perceive whatever happens

as on the way to fulfilling that, not in the way.

And that's the power we have in our mind.

We have the capacity to change perception.

Because if we ask a new set of questions,

we become conscious of unconscious information that

And we're able to perceive things in a more balanced way,

in a more objective way,

which leads us back to our highest value or telos where we're most purposeful

and meaningful. So taking command of our perceptions,

decisions and actions is the key to mastery.

And living purposely means living by what is most valuable,

in a way that serves the most people, that has the most fair exchange,

which allows us to receive the income,

to be able to delegate lower priority actions, to live an inspired life.

And we are destined to do that. We have the capacity to do that.

Many people have not mastered the skill of prioritization and delegation,

and have not had a dream to be of contribution and service,

where they can be compensated or compensated fairly economically,

won't get this opportunity because they're trapped.

Unless they're either married to somebody that's doing that,

and they're now doing what they can to serve that individual as a customer in

fair exchange, and then they'll have that opportunity then they can delegate.

But if we don't delegate lower priority things that devalue us and put us in our

amygdala and put us into our extrinsically run distracted world,

if we don't transcend that through delegation and go

actions and get our executive functioning going and our foresights going,

we're not likely to live the most powerful and masterful life we can live.

Whatever's highest on our values,

everybody has a set of priorities in life, set of values in life,

and whatever's highest on that list of priorities,

we are spontaneously inspired to act upon,

and we have incredible discipline, reliability, and focus there.

And anything that goes down the list of values,

we require more extrinsic motivation to get us to do,

we'll need reward to do it or punishment if we don't do it,

if we want to stay focused on it.

You don't want to live your life requiring external motivation.

You'll have a transient, volatile, polarized existence.

But you want to find out what's really most meaningful.

And please go to my website, dr.demartini.com.

And please take a few moments of your time to go through the Value Determination

process. It's free, It's complimentary, it's private.

You can do it over and over again to make sure you're not, you know,

lying to yourself about the answers,

and get really clear about what's really important to you because

if you identify what's really most important and start

priority, accordingly,

you'll be more spontaneously inspired in your life and you will achieve more,

you'll wake up your excellence, your leadership, your genius,

you'll expand your potential. There's so many benefits of doing this.

So please do that. Go online and do that.

dr.demartini.com the Value Determination process online,

do that. Identify what's really,

what this process leads you to discover what's highest on your value and

structure your life around that.

If you fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, your life,

doesn't fill up with low priority distractions that don't.

If you fill your day with high priority actions that are deeply meaningful,

your self-worth goes up and you expand your horizons of what you believe you can

do. But if you allow yourself no priority for the day,

and you just allow yourself to kind of go through the day, whatever happens,

you have a higher probability of other people, distracting you,

opportunists,

other people projecting their values onto you and causing entropy and

distraction and disorder in your life.

Trying to put out fires and trying to please people and doing all that instead

of staying focused on what's really deeply meaningful and inspiring and highest

in priority, which is the purpose for you.

Your purpose is an expression of your highest value, and finding what that is,

why I have it on the website free for people is because it's the most important

thing I could get people to do. Every seminar that I ever present or webinar,

I talk about values,

because they underlie human drive and motivation and inspiration.

And I want people to be inspired. I want them to live an inspired life.

I've wanted to do that since I was 17, 18 years old.

And I'm absolutely certain that there's science of doing that.

And I'm trying to share it with you. I want you to have an inspired life,

and it won't happen if you're doing low priority things.

Anytime you're doing low priority things you devalue yourself and you live in

anxiety. Why? Because when you go into lower values,

you become more polarized and emotional and distracted by extrinsic things.

It's a survival region of the brain that gets activated.

And in this state,

we're looking for prey and we're trying to avoid predator and we're distracted

by all these things that support and challenge our values.

We become infatuated and resentful and they occupy space and time in our mind.

And we are distracted. And we're not focused and present.

The power of now as Eckhart Tolle said, and the presence,

the courage when you live by priority. And this has been known for centuries.

But somehow people get preoccupied trying to please things on the outside

instead of governing their life from within.

The executive function of the forebrain literally has the capacity,

neuroplastically,

to literally govern the amygdala and with Gabba,

which is a neurotransmitter, an inhibitory, and glutamate,

which is a stimulatory one,

They usually come down and dampen and calm down the

distractions in our life, if we live by priority.

That's why if you have a very busy day doing what's really meaningful and you

really got things done that were really highest priority, you're more resilient,

more adaptable, less volatile, more present,

more certain and when you come home no matter what the challenge,

you can handle it. But if you didn't get what was really important done,

and you kept having fires put out, distractions throughout the day,

and you kept, you didn't get anything done that was really important to you,

you're more volatile, you're irritable,

you're more likely to lash out on the people you love and care about.

Because those are symptoms that are feedback to let you know you weren't

authentic during the day, you weren't living by what was most important to you.

I cannot emphasize how important it is to find out what the values are and

stick to the priorities. I learned that from Mary Kay many years ago,

how important it is to identify what's the highest priority actions you can do

each day that can help you fulfill your dreams. If you do,

your executive function comes online. And that is the pathway.

That is the area of the brain that is involved in self-governance,

executive function, visionary leadership,

inspired executive action,

and the place where you do not get distracted,

and you can handle paradoxes and handle those pairs of opposites magnificently.

So,

I can tell you that filling your day with the highest priority actions is the

wisest thing you can do every day. That's the most any human being can do.

If you're doing the very highest priority thing,

the one thing that is most important, each moment,

you're doing as much as any human being can do in a day. And that is,

the mastery of that, is the mastery of life.

And the power of the mind is that we have the capacity to change our perception,

change our decision, and change our actions according to that priority.

If you link and ask how specifically is whatever's happening helping you fulfill

your highest value, you learn that question,

you have the capacity to automatically unveil this great, powerful,

purposeful, masterful mind state.

Distractions can come in two forms. As I mentioned a moment ago,

impulses towards things that we seek and instincts away from

things that we are trying to avoid. So prey and predator,

pleasure and pain sometimes called.

So anything that is extremely pleasureful or painful in our perceptions can

distract us from our mission in life.

Believe it or not our mission is an objective. And objective is neutral.

Neutral doesn't have pleasure, pain perceptions. It has

objectively.

That's why the Stoics and some of the great philosophers said that when you're

planning real objectives, you're premeditating on the so-called evils,

the downsides, the challenges, the obstacles,

in advance and preparing for them so you're not sideswiped

You have foresight, you think them through,

you think out what the repercussions are, you plan ahead,

prepare for what happens and be prepared so you're not reactive,

you're proactive. And when a person does that, when an individual does that,

they're most likely to live an objective life that's achievable.

I say that depression is a comparison of your current reality to a

fantasy that you are setting. An unrealistic expectation

If you expect others to live in your values,

or you expect you to live in other people's values,

or you expect a one-sided world or a one-sided life,

you have the keys to leading to depression. And when

you're trying to avoid pain and seek pleasure.

You're trying to avoid predator and seek prey.

You're trying to avoid challenge and seek ease,

or trying to avoid difficulty and seek ease.

And what's interesting is, those do not occur.

You're not going to get a one-sided world.

There's no way a human being is going to get a one-sided world through life.

If you look carefully in your own life, you're both sided.

And the world around you is both sided.

So the fantasy and unrealistic expectation to pursue

the ability to live outside your own values and expect

expect others to be only one sided and you to be only one-sided,

is setting you up for depression.

Because depression is a feedback mechanism to let you know that you're pursuing

something that's not highest on your value, that's to skewed towards a fantasy,

that has no strategic plan of how to do it and you're left there in the dark

kind of, and as a result of that, you're depressed.

And depression is a feedback. It's not a bad thing.

I'm amazed at how many people run to a freaking pharmaceutical company to go

take some drug that's not even proven to be effective and the stats show that,

I can guarantee I'm stating that, there's plenty of research to that.

They go run for the drug thinking that you're going to do it and the placebo

effect gives them some effect. But the reality is,

that the greatest pharmaceutical company is sitting in your brain.

Do you know that every one of the transmitters and the hormones that the

pharmaceutical company is trying to alter,

the serotonin uptake inhibitors and these kinds of things.

These all are under your control.

You have the power in your mind to control your neuro-transmitters.

If you stack up the benefits of something you've done and you build up your

pride, your serotonin goes up.

If you stack up the drawbacks of what you've done and feel ashamed,

your serotonin goes down.

If you stack up the benefits of what you're about to experience with meeting

somebody,

your serotonin will go up and your dopamine will go

go up. If you assume the drawbacks of it,

they'll go down and your cortisol and osteocalcin,

and your norepinephrine will go up.

Anytime you're perceiving more advantages than disadvantages,

certain chemistries go up. Anytime more disadvantage over advantages,

certain chemistries go down and up. You have the capacity,

but nobody's teaching you this. Nobody's teaching you applied physiology.

I think it's insane, that we go and we rely on an external world.

We blame things on the outside, which aren't really the cause of our problems.

And then we give credit to something on the outside that we think is going to be

our solution. And we dissociate from our own causality of our own reality,

and are not empowering our lives by taking command of our perceptions,

decisions, and actions, and not living by priority,

where we then automatically go into objectivity,

automatically balance out our chemistry. Our chemistry,

when we live by priority, our chemistry normalizes, it's homeostative,

the electronics in the brain and the molecular chemistry in the brain is

constantly trying to homeostate and bring it back into balance.

But every time we're living in our lower values and extrinsically perturbed by

environmental perceptions, we throw these chemistries off.

And then we store those in our subconscious mind.

And then we believe those are reality

and we hallucinate about what reality is as a result of it.

And we cause a self-deception.

Then we try to live in other people's values that we envy,

and we try to get other people to live in our values that we resent.

And we spend all this futile energy. Instead of utile energy,

utility is doing something that is deeply meaningful to you that actually serves

and fulfills deep meanings of others.

And if we stick to those priorities and we get objective with it by executive

function, we lead, and we don't have depression.

You don't have time for depression when you're doing something that's deeply

meaningful that serves another individual that they're fairly compensating you

for that you're inspired to do.

You don't get depressed unless you're comparing your current reality to a

fantasy about how it's supposed to be.

You don't get depressed unless you're expecting others to live in your values

and you're judging them,

or you're trying to live in other peoples values because you're judging them

upward.

You get inspired when all of a sudden you're allowing yourself reflective

awareness and seeing that the people on the outside are you,

and they're a reflection of you.

You only resent people because they remind you of things you feel guilty about

the past. And you're only admiring people,

it's because you're too humble to admit what you see in them is inside you and

you have it, you admire it in you, but you're too humble to admit it.

And the denial of all those sides inside you,

disempower you and keep you from being present and empowered and purposeful and

prioritized. And that's where you're productive.

And that's where you're patient also, because your space and time horizons,

grow. Depression's an option,

and depression is simply because we're comparing our current reality to a

fantasy.

I've had thousands of people in my Breakthrough Experience program that I've

taught around the world in 65 countries now. And I've had many,

many people that are supposedly under clinical depression and blow that

out of the water in one weekend. And people don't believe that's possible,

but the freaking truth is they can.

But what happens is they keep giving their power away by infatuating and

resenting things, instead of empowering their life. It's insane,

to let the world on the outside dictate your destiny when you can let the voice

and the vision and the inspiration and the calling on the inside,

determine your perception, decisions, and actions.

You have a brain that does that.

I always say that depression is letting you know that you're pursuing a

delusion, a fantasy with unrealistic expectations,

instead of being authentic to yourself.

The magnificence of who you really are is far greater than all those delusions

that you're imposing on yourself or other people. So I show people,

I have people come in there and they're clinically depressed and I outline,

there's 15 delusions I've seen in the Breakthrough Experience that I outline,

I explain,

and I have them point them out and show them where their depressions are coming

from. And when they do it, I show them exactly what to do to dissolve them.

And there's absolutely no reason they have to be sitting there and living in

that. And distractions is a by-product of that,

because when you're in your amygdala and you're trying to avoid a pain and seek

a pleasure, that's not possible to obtain,

pain and pleasure is conserved through your life.

You're going to have it all your life as Samuel Beckett,

the Nobel prize winner emphasized and Anaxagoras 2,600 years ago demonstrated.

We're not going to get a one-sided world.

Looking for pleasure without pain and peace without war and happy without sad

and kind without cruel and nice without mean and give without take,

in a world that has conservation laws, is delusional.

And I know you've been taught that,

but as Dirac said it's so we've been taught so much stuff that isn't so.

All your life you've been hoodwinkled into fantasies of one sidedness,

and then wondered why your life didn't demonstrate it.

When the Buddha said the desire for that which is unobtainable,

one side of a magnet, and the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable,

the other side of the magnet, when he said that that's the source of suffering,

it's true.

We create our own suffering because we have unrealistic expectations on

ourselves and other people and the world around us to be a one-sided world or to

live in our values as if the world's supposed to live

what to do with, according to our fantasies,

we have to ground ourselves and realize it has nothing to do with anything on

that outside, except what we decide to perceive, decide and do with it.

That's the power of it.

There's nothing your mortal body can experience that your immortal soul,

the state of unconditional love,

can't transcend and use to its greatest advantage to do something that's amazing

that contributes on the planet that serves.

So I'm a firm believer of taking command of your perception, decisions,

and actions. In my program, the Breakthrough Experience,

I train people on how to do exactly that.

I train them for hours on how to take command of their perceptions and shift,

no matter what happens in their life,

how's it helping me get what I want it life,

and how can I use it to contribute to greater numbers of people,

how to make decisions and how to be able to be called in to inspire to action,

and to prioritize your action. It hugely makes a difference in your life.

And there's no reason why you have to sit there in mediocrity when you could be

doing something extraordinary.

So I'm a firm believer that distractions are things we've chosen to see

by splitting our mind into conscious and unconscious sides.

When we're infatuated with something and get distracted by it,

it's because we're conscious of the upsides, we're

And we're not asking the question,

what's the downside of that before I get impulsively, distracted by it?

And if we're resentful to something and we're frightened it's going to come

towards us like a predator, we're conscious of the downside,

we're not conscious of the upsides. Again, we can ask the question,

what's the upsides? Neutralize it, not be distracted by it. Stay focused.

We have the capacity with the quality of our life being impacted by the quality

of the questions we ask.

In my Breakthrough Experience I have a series of questions inside the Demartini

Method on how to take no matter what happens in your life and turn it into

something you can say thank you for, no matter what.

There's nothing you can experience that you can't turn into saying thank you.

And anything you can't say thank you for, is baggage.

Anything you can say thank you for fuel in life. I've proven that, gosh,

thousands and thousands of people who've come to me and they said, 'well,

this has happened to me.' And I go, 'okay, how's it serve you?' 'Well,

but it didn't.' I said, 'okay, well, if you want to be victim of history,

stay stuck in that illusion. But if you ask the question,

I'm not asking to make anything up. I'm not asking you to lie to yourself.

I'm asking you to look.

You've been so hoodwinkled about the moral hypocrisies of the society around you

and you injected the conformity and ideals and traditions and conventions in

your mind, you've been trapped by a box about how it's supposed to be,

instead of honoring what it is. And anytime you compare what is,

your life to what isn't, people go around and they go, 'well,

my life used to be this way and I'm hoping it will be that way.'

Instead of going, 'This is the way my life is.

How can I use that to my greatest advantage?' We're not here to live in the

fantasy of the past or the fantasy of the future.

We're here to live strategically towards objectives that we are committed to,

that are deeply meaningful, that inspire us, that also help serve other people.

That's the mastery of life. That's where we have fulfillment.

Nobody's going to have fulfillment unless they're making a difference.

And that's why innately every human being that I've spoken to and I ask,

'How many of you want to make a difference in the world?' Every hand goes up,

even in prisons I've seen this. Because it's innate to want to be unique,

to live by our own hierarchy of values,

which are unique and fingerprint specific,

and contribute something original on the planet by giving ourselves permission

to shine as ourselves, authentically, instead of being somebody we're not.

So if you want depression, try to be somebody you're not.

You want to live an inspired life, give yourself permission to be you.