Dr Demartini explains why the moral and ethical concepts of “good” and “evil” are human inventions and labels more than universal values or laws. He explains why everything that goes on in your life is a neutral event until you choose with your perceptions and subconsciously stored associations how to interpret it.

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So good and evil are in a sense,

maladaptive pathogenic states that stop people from realizing

their full potential.

For many decades, as I've traveled the world teaching,

I am asked questions relating to the moral

concepts of good and evil, and, you know,

everybody projects their assumption,

their view of the universe onto people and whatever supports

their values they typically label good,

and whatever challenge their set of values, they typically label evil.

But the fun part of life is that no two people have the same set of values,

hierarchy of values, so, as a result of it,

everybody's got a different slight version of what's good and evil.

And now imagine a world of nearly 8 billion people,

all with different ideas of what good and evil is.

Anything good is something that supports your values and survival and evil is

something that challenges your values and survival,

is the typical definition of good and evil.

But I'm just going to say that in the universe it doesn't label things

good and evil, humans label things good and evil.

In reality, everything that's going on in life is an event.

And depending on how you stack up your associations and perceptions

relating to that event,

if you see more advantages than disadvantages to that event,

you're probably going to label it a good event.

If you see more disadvantages than advantages,

you probably gonna label it evil event, But the event's event,

it's just an event.

Everything that goes on in our life is simply neutral until we choose with our

perceptions and our backs subconsciously stored

associations, how we interpret that.

We have control of our perception, decisions, and actions.

And our perceptions that are stored in the past, if we've been wounded

by something in the past, and something reminds us of that,

we'll immediately stack up associations that make it more disadvantage,

and then we'll label it as such.

When we're living by our highest values and we're more objective

and more balanced in orientation, we

kind of neutralize our interpretation and go 'Okay, here's an event.

How do I use it to my greatest advantage?' If we're not living by our highest

values and we're down in our amygdala,

and are functioning from a more subcortical area,

we tend to be more in survival and we tend to have more subjective bias.

We tend to distort our reality and generalize things, to

and then we make things good or bad,

and we make things sort of absolute perspectives. And that's absolutely bad,

and there's no good in it. Or absolutely good, and there's no bad in it.

And that makes us now, if we make it absolute good,

we're going to fear it's a loss. If we make it absolute bad,

we're going to fear its gain.

So we're adding fear into our life because we're polarizing our perceptions.

But in actuality, it's still a neutral event until we've interpreted that way.

So we're accountable for our own interpretations. You know, it's not,

what's happens to us. All those events out there are neutral.

It's not what happens to us, it's how we interpret it. That's why William James,

father of modern psychology said,

the greatest discovery of his generation is that human beings can alter their

lives by altering their perceptions and attitudes and mind.

So you change your perception and attitude about what it is, good or bad,

and then your response in your physiology is going to be different.

You can make it something that activates the parasympathetic nervous system,

that's rest and digest, or the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight.

And so we're going to respond based on our perceptions.

So knowing how to ask questions to balance our perceptions,

which is what the Demartini Method is about

helps you turn things you label good and bad back into events.

So you can be fueled and use those events to help you fulfill your life. So,

now there's many people that,

instead of just interpreting life through their own values,

they tend to subordinate to others, mothers,

fathers, preachers, teachers, conventions, you know, moralities,

you know, traditions of the society or religion or politics or something,

and they have these ideas that somebody made up,

a collective body or an individual made up these ideas,

according to their values that aren't universal.

Montaigne went around the world and showed that there are no universal value

systems. And so there's no universal, you know,

in South Africa the president,

former president had nine wives. In America, you go to prison for it.

One place it's honored and looked up to,

and the other place it's dishonored and looked down on.

And you'll see people smoke in some countries and others it's banned,

you know, and drinking and marijuana was evil and you went to jail for it in the

seventies, and now it's becoming legalized.

So the values and rules and everything else are constantly morphing and in

different parts of the world that can be morphed.

And very few are really pretty universal.

And there's no been no universal value system found.

Because it's human invention. It's something we made up.

It's basically our survival mechanisms and somebody who's really,

truly thriving in life, sees everything as an event.

And they use the event to their advantage.

Somebody who's surviving in life labels things good and bad.

You can see this in layers of religious instruction.

The more fundamental and extremist they are, they're less aware,

less experienced.

And the ones that are more university aware and more kind of unconditional

loving and appreciating, and they use things and adapt to it.

You can see the people that are a little bit more in their amygdala,

it takes cataclysmic events to get them to change,

where people that are living more in their highest value and more inspired and

more self-actualized, they just adapt briefly, quickly to changes,

and they're constantly able to adapt to them no matter what happens.

When you're objective,

you don't fear the loss of things or fear the gain of things,

you see both sides of things.

And when you see both sides of an event you use it wisely,

you stay poised and present, and that's the key.

So there is no universal. Now, some people will say, 'well,

in my religion, you know,

this book says the rules and so that's it.' I know that it's going to

sound hard to, you're not going to like hear what I'm gonna say, but,

that's your belief about it being something supernatural,

but the reality is it's still in human invention, humans write those things.

So you have to be aware and not vulnerable to

irrationality on that.

And not that those aren't having valuable insights and not that those rules

don't have application. And there's not that that's not a service.

It's just that we have to get grounded.

When we stop and look at how small the little planet is in the solar system,

the solar system in the Milky way,

the Milky way in the Virgo cluster and the Virgo cluster and the Laniakea

supercluster,

and realize that a particular monoglotic idea of a

theology is really quite insignificant when you look at the bigger

picture. At the time when some of these were beginning,

that gave rise to some of those ideas of morality, you know,

there was a belief system and Aristotle and Ptolemy that the whole universe was

wrapping around the earth and had the fixed stars and we were the center of the

universe. But we're way past that today, since Copernican revolution,

and telescopes Thomas Wright and Galileo, and we're way past that.

So we have to broaden our awareness about this so-called morality

and give ourselves permission to step out of the old boxes and take a look

at it objectively.

When you look at things objectively you can make a heaven out of a hell or a

hell out of a heaven. You can transform both sides of it. You know,

we've all had situations we thought something was terrible. And then a day,

a week, a month, a year or five years later,

it turned out to be 'thank you for that happening'. We've also gone out,

I've seen people go out and buy a house of their dreams and they're all elated

and everything else and a year later they're going,

'This frigging house and the cost of it, maintenance and things like that.' So,

these initial assumptions about things and labels on things are not the

truth. We have a built-in homeostat, an intuit stat,

our intuition that's trying to, when we're infatuated with something,

and label it good and attract to it,

the intuitions popping off and thinking of what are the downsides to bring us

back, cause otherwise it's running our life.

And if we resent something and we're conscious of the downsides,

unconscious of the upsides,

our intuition is trying to point up the upsides to get us back in homeostasis,

back into the mean, between. Even Aristotle talked about the mean,

the virtue between the two vices, of perception, the positives and negatives.

When we neutralize it, we're able to be adaptable. So,

having the willingness to let your forebrain and its

intuition and reason and objectivity override your emotional

irrationality and your polarization,

is a difference between a wise individual and someone who's a fool,

so I'm not a promoter of, when people come to me and they say, 'Well,

what about this?

And what about that?' And they come up with these things and that all bad and

all good.

I even had a woman that was involved in a negotiation and in a conflict

resolution said, 'Well, do you believe in absolute evil?' And I said, 'No,

I don't.' And said, 'Well, I do.' And I said, 'Well,

maybe that's why you're in this conflict.' You have a completely, all,

or none. One of the most unresilient state of mind is all or none.

If somebody comes and says, 'Well, you're all bad and you're not good, no good,

or all good and no bad.' You have a saint,

sinner and fantasy and nightmare and these are delusions. You know,

there is no such thing as a one-sided individual.

There's no such thing as a one-sided event.

To label it such is completely non resilient. I don't waste my time on that.

That's childish. Those are,

that's the bottom level of brain function to get into polarization like that.

The wisest thing to do is to look at both sides and balance it out. You know,

many people set fantasies instead of real objectives in life.

And then they find out the nightmares that come with it.

Why not just set an objective where you embrace both sides,

you mitigate the risk, you're prepared for both sides, you see both sides,

you know they're going to be there. Imagine if I walked up to you and I said,

'You're always positive. Never negative. Always good, never bad. Always nice,

never mean. Always kind, never cruel. Always peaceful,

never wrathful.' Your own intuition would say, 'Ah,

not always.' And you'd be immediately thinking of those times when you're the

other side. And if I said, 'You're always mean, you're always cruel.

You're always negative. You're always this. And you're never positive. And,

you know, always wrathful, never peaceful.' Your

no. I can think of times when I'm the other side.' Your intuition already knows

that.

And so to project labels onto people like that is not true.

And if I said to you, 'Sometimes you're nice. Sometimes you're mean.

When I support your values, you're nice. And you're like a pussycat.

If I challenge your values you're mean, you're like a tiger.' I certainly am.

And so are you.

So to try to polarize somebody and label events or label

people one side of the other and take one thing out,

you know, we recently had people that have ended up in, you know,

challenging situations and they,

we take a five minute act and then their whole life is evil.

When they may have spent most of their life doing something that other people

thought was good. And, the immediate labels of something like that is,

is not true. And so I always say that,

have a broader perspective. You know,

when astronauts and cosmonauts go up into space,

they develop what is called the overview effect,

a broader mind and they look back at the earth and they realize that a lot of

the trivial things that we judge down there, are just not the truth.

And they start to fall in love with the world.

The ancients believed that if you went up into space, even in Aristotle's time,

they believed the soul, the state of unconditional love,

looking back at the earth, they didn't judge it.

But down below in the world of the trial, terrestrial, terres-trial,

earth trial, down below things were good and evil.

So I like to think of that is that the broader our mind,

the more we see both sides of things, objectively and the more we love life.

And the narrower our mind, if we go closer to the earth,

the more we black and white things. Imagine a top,

if it's at a high frequency spinning, and it's half black and white it's gray.

And if it slows down and starts to wobble and it becomes black or white,

as it comes and gravitates back down.

And I'm a firm believer that if we ask quality questions and

in a sense self-govern ourselves and see both sides of things,

we'll liberate ourselves from a lot of the emotions that we get trapped in.

And by the way,

anything that we label good or bad will be stored in our subconscious mind and

make us run our life by it. And anything that we see with gratitude and love,

we create it into our superconscious mind. Our super-conscious mind,

or cosmic conscious mind, or spiritual conscious mind, or

soul or state of equanimity, or the state of objectivity,

this is a self-actualized, this is what it's actually there,

not what we just realized.

I like to think of reality is that which we realize through our senses and we

sometimes are fooled by the hallucination of our senses.

And actuality is what's actually there. And what's actually there is an event.

And you know,

when you sometimes are dating somebody and you're infatuated with somebody,

you think, 'oh my God, he's so intelligent or something.' And then you find out,

oh, but later on you find out, well,

that's the very source of the arguments and think he's knows right and doesn't

listen and talks a lot or whatever it is,

you find out the very thing you thought was the good part, is now the bad part.

So why have the wisdom of the ages with the aging process?

Why not have the wisdom of the ages without it,

by just knowing that there's two sides to life,

and have yourself intuitively look for the two sides and bring it back into

balance, so you're poised instead of poisoned.

And you're present instead of living fearful of the

and you know, guilty of the past and fear of the future kind of thing.

And instead of labeling people, black and white,

which is where the biases and racial issues and all the challenges that we see

all over the news,

it's primarily because of people not able to see both sides of life. You know,

if we take the time, and this is why I talk about value so much.

When people live by their highest values,

the blood glucose and oxygen goes into the forebrain,

and they start to think things objectively with reason.

And when people live by lower priorities,

and they're not doing things by priority, higher priority,

and they're not delegating lower priority things,

they're trapped in their amygdala, and the amygdala is an immediate,

gratifying polarizer. It's trying to avoid pain and seek pleasure.

And it automatically is where morality comes from.

Morality I'm afraid doesn't come from the gods. It comes from human beings,

living out of their amygdala,

projecting their survival mentality onto other people to protect themselves from

what they'd been wounded by,

and we call that collectively a tradition or convention.

No,

I wanna inspire people to live a self-actualized life

ask questions to neutralize things, to see it,

no matter what happens in your life, on the way. So no matter what happens,

you see both sides of it, and you're not caught by a one-sided mentality.

So good and evil are in a sense,

maladaptive pathogenic states that stop people from realizing

their full potential. And by the way, every time you transcend something,

you see both sides of it,

you kind of get promoted to the next thing you don't know. You know,

whenever you know something, you go to what you don't know.

When you go to the don't know, you then tend to have a polarized view again,

back in your amygdala.

And then eventually you look and discover and solve that mystery.

Cause that's a mystery. And then you see beyond it, then you love that.

And then you get promoted to the next one.

So we're constantly evolving our ideas of what good and evil is anyway.

And what's interesting and whenever we see one side without the other,

we have missing information and in physics missing

information is called entropy.

And that's what the source of aging and disorder is.

So if you want to live a disordered life, if you want to age,

you want to live emotionally reactive, see things black and white,

see things right and wrong, bad, good, bad, all that.

I don't waste my time on that. It's not productive.

I always said that whatever's happening in your life, look for the other side,

balance it out, use it to your advantage, don't let it run you.

Cause anything you infatuate with or resent,

occupies space and time in your mind and runs you, anything you see both sides,

you run. You're a creator to that which you love.

You're a creature reacting as an automaton to that which you judge.

So good and evil,

as I said is a kind of a pathogenic because it creates symptoms,

labeling things like that, maladaptive,

because you don't adapt when you're in black and white and state that stops

you from self-actualizing your life. Look at both sides,

discover that it's simply an event. And now the question is,

is how can you use this event to do the greatest service for others and to

fulfill the greatest rewards in your life? If you do that, you'll be resilient,

adaptable, and amazing in what you can accomplish in your life.

So I just wanted to take a few moments to talk about the idea of good and evil

and allow you to put that in maybe a new context and give yourself permission

to do it.

The reason I been teaching the Breakthrough Experience

Method is to hold people accountable to see both sides.

And I've taken a hundred thousand people through that process and shown that

whenever they come in with thinking things are black, I show them the white.

They think it's white, I show them the black. I show them that it's all,

it's all nothing but an event to help them fulfill their lives.

Anything you can't say thank you for is baggage,

anything you can say thank you for is fuel.

So that's why I teach the Demartini Method in the Breakthrough Experience,

to help people see that everything's on the way,

not in the way of their life. So,

took some time to talk about good and evil today.

Hope that was informative and I look forward to our next adventure