Your brain is doing everything it can to help you have governance, to be authentic and be inspired. What leads an individual to emotionally react before thinking? Join Dr John Demartini to discover how to go beyond the reacting survival state and master your own inner governance. You'll learn the role of living by priority as well as what it means to put your conscious and unconscious together, so that you're proactive, on the path of mastery where you're self-governed from within.

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I'm going to make a statement that's going to shock some of you,

but I really believe that the emotional reactions we have in life are feedback

mechanisms to let us know we're not mindful, we're not seeing things whole,

we're having a bias, and we're in our amygdala.

I think everybody has had a moment in their life where they felt that they were

very reactive. I certainly have.

And our perceptions of the external world

have been skewed, subjectively biased, imbalanced,

and initiated a reaction of seeking or avoiding.

If we perceive something with our senses, any of our senses,

or combination of senses,

where we have perceived more advantages than disadvantages,

more positives than negatives, more ups than downs, more pleasures than pains,

with some sort of subjective biased interpretation of what we're experiencing,

we

can activate a parasympathetically associated response

of an impulse to seek it,

as if it's a prey that we want to consume and eat.

And whenever we are perceiving something in that imbalanced way,

where we're conscious of the upsides and unconscious of the downsides,

we automatically initiate a cascading acceleration

of adrenaline and cortisol in order to seek it, to capture it.

And we skew it with a subjective bias.

We have a false positive on the positives and a false negative on the negatives,

a subjective confirmation bias on the positives,

a subjective disconfirmation bias on the negative.

And we are skewing it and distorting our reality.

It causes us an emotional reaction of seeking it and a wanting to consume the

prey. Now, anything that supports our hierarchy of values,

we automatically will register in the brain, in the subcortical areas as prey.

And so anytime we have that perception, we have a subjective bias like that,

we can activate the amygdala and cause that seeking of pleasure,

the nucleus accumbens

in the brain is activated and we want the pleasure of seeking and consuming.

When we actually get that,

as you probably have had in your relationship sometimes,

you had an infatuation and you had an impulse and you had a desire for something

and have an emotion,

which means you're putting your energy into motion towards something, you

can then find out days, weeks, months, years later, you find out, oops,

it's not what I thought.

And you had blinded yourself and were unconscious of the downsides

that were actually there that actually made the event balanced,

but you chose not to see it because you were subjectively biased.

And therefore you had an emotional reaction and you were ungoverned in your

behavior because you were impulsive now. And impulse is a gut response,

below the diaphragm,

the gut response from our duodenum and our intestines up

to the mouth, that's the impulse center that want to consume and take in,

because we chase prey, we want to eat it.

Or if we on the other side of the pole where we have a subjective bias,

where we see something we are withdrawing

from and resent or despise or dislike,

or we see more drawbacks than benefits. We're conscious of the downsides,

unconscious of the upsides. We have a confirmation bias on the downsides,

a disconfirmation bias on the upsides. We have false positives on the downsides,

false negatives on the upsides.

Now what we've got is an instinct, not an impulse, but an instinct to avoid it.

And again, we have an emotion that puts energy into motion to get us away.

And now from the duodenum down into the rear end, you might say,

we now have an eliminate, we want to eliminate that.

So we have food input and ways to output, something we seek,

something we're trying to avoid.

And those are emotional reactions primarily because

our reality around us.

Anytime we have an imbalanced perception we're going to seek or avoid,

we're going to have an impulse or an instinct,

we're going to have a subjective bias of our reality and not see the whole.

We're not mindful. We're mindless in a sense.

We're like an animal reacting and surviving because of these subjective

biases. Now they're necessary when you're in a situation where there's,

you know,

a real predator about to eat you or a real prey trying to get away from you.

You need those behaviors.

But 99% of our life is not under an emergency situation of survival.

I mean, there's some people that live in a very survival state,

but compared to probably who's watching this video,

you're not most of the time in that survival state where you're going to about

to be run over or eaten by something or you're going to starve.

Or you may think you're starving just because you missed a meal.

But these subjective biases, these distortions cause emotional reactions,

they're subcortically driven based on our perceptions,

going up the sending part of the spinal cord and going and stopping at the

thalamus and dividing up and going into the subcortical area of the amygdala

causing these reactions. And they're there for survival,

but they're not thrival, they're not the path of mastery.

They're the path in a sense of kind of a futility,

because if you look carefully, anything you try to avoid, you keep running into.

I always say that life is like a magnet,

and if you divide that magnet and try to get one side of the magnet,

the positive without the negative, you find out you can't do that.

You divide the magnet, you get two magnets with positive negative.

So that means that there's a downside to the thing you're seeking.

And there's an upside of the thing you're trying to avoid.

Imagine if you got prey and never got predator, you'd be gluttonous.

You'd be overweight. You'd lose your fitness.

And you'd be more likely to be a target for a predator to come and eat you

because you can't run very fast, because you're not fit,

and you got a lot of calories. So you'd be targeted and would attract even more.

So the more you're addicted to the support, the more you attract challenge,

the more you're addicted to praise, the more you attract criticism,

the more you're addicted to protection, the more you get aggression.

So nature has these pairs of opposites.

And if you try to avoid that which is unavoidable, the other pole of the magnet,

it keeps surfacing. It's like the shadow chasing you in Jungian psychology.

So I'm not here to promote a one-sided world or a lopsided perception,

which causes emotional reactions.

I'm going to make a statement that's going to shock some of you.

But I really believe that the emotional reactions we have in life are feedback

mechanisms to let us know we're not mindful, we're not seeing things whole,

we're having a bias, and we're in our amygdala.

And is there as a guide to guide us back to authenticity,

if we know how to interpret it wisely. In fact,

all the symptoms of our physical body and even our psychology are derived from

that response, those survival responses, our physiological response,

we get too much parasympathetic,

which is the eating and the searching for the food, we can also have illness,

and if we get too much of the predator and the fight or flight response,

we get illness.

Most people think that getting rid of the fight or flight and getting rid of the

predator is going to make you well, but actually you need a balance of the two.

Your resilience, adaptability,

and your physiology requires a perfect balance of the autonomics,

a perfect balance of seek and avoid, a perfect balance of pleasure and pain.

In fact, maximum growth and development occurs at the border of those two.

So seeking one and trying to avoid the other is futile.

And if you infatuate with somebody and you minimize yourself and you're too

humble to admit what you see in them is inside you,

you have a disowned part and you're also not authentic.

So that's not going to feel fulfilling nor is it going to be authentic to you.

And if you're resenting somebody and exaggerating yourself and too proud to

admit what you see in them is inside you, again,

that's an empty state of disowned parts, and inauthentic.

So you have emptiness, judgment, you have subjective bias,

you're in survival mechanism and you're not actualized and not resilient,

adaptable or authentic.

So that's the emotional state that majority of people unnecessarily run their

life by. And it's futile because when you infatuate with something,

you want to change you relative to them, when you resent something,

you want to change them relative to you, both of which futile.

You're not going to change the person,

anybody who been in marriage know you're not going to change the spouse.

And if you're trying to fit into their life and trying to sacrifice your life

for them eventually you're going to resent it and you're not going to be able to

sustain that. Both are non-sustainable and futile.

The only thing that works is to love somebody,

to appreciate them and own whatever you see in them inside you as a reflective

awareness. Now there's another state called self-governance,

where you act. And this is where values come in. And as you know,

I don't ever say a presentation without values hardly.

Everybody has a set of priorities in their life, a set of values in their life,

things that are most to least important in their life.

And whenever you're doing something that's highest on your value,

you are spontaneously acting towards it. Mine is teaching. I love teaching.

I love learning. So I'm researching and teaching throughout the day,

most every day.

But if I had to go and do something like cooking or driving or something that

wasn't high in my values, I'd procrastinate, hesitate and frustrate.

And whenever I'm not doing something high on my values, my blood, glucose,

and oxygen goes into the amygdala, the survival center,

and makes me more polarized, more subjectively biased and more erratic,

and more volatile, and more emotional,

and more vulnerable to the external world stimuli that can throw us off.

We're externally driven and become victims of history with false attribution

biases instead of actually mastering of life. You know,

in the Breakthrough Experience program that I teach every week,

I show people how to move from this animal state, this reactive state,

to an active, you know, mastery in life.

And it's simply the quality of the questions we ask ourself.

And I'll come back to that in a second.

So if we live by our highest values and prioritize our daily actions,

we all know what it's like if all of a sudden we're doing something that's

really important to us,

really high in our priorities and we knock it out of the ballpark and feel

really productive and got a lot done in the day, we're more resilient,

adaptable, and we're more grateful,

and we can handle almost anything when we come home.

But if we gotten put out fires and we're constantly distracting, and by the way,

all those impulses and all those instincts of seeking and avoiding are called

distractions. That's what a distraction is.

You won't find a distraction in life that's not something that's either an

impulse towards something,

that you think's going to give you pleasure without pain,

or something you're trying to avoid something that you

pleasure.

All distractions are nothing more than the amygdala's response to these

subjective bias interpretations of our reality.

The moment you live by priority, the moment you become more objective,

more balanced, more neutral,

and more embracing of the two sides and more aware mindfully of the two sides,

that every event has two sides, every experience has two sides,

and the more you're consciously aware of both the supportive and the challenging

nature and see them simultaneous as William Wundt described,

you liberate yourself from the emotional baggage and all the subjective biases,

and you get yourself on track with being on a mission.

The passion is down in the impulse and instinct center.

If you look up the word passion it comes from the etymology,

the root pati or passio, which means to suffer,

everybody's going around in the new age movement out there in the personal

development, talking about, get your passion, find your passion.

That is not where it's at.

I know that people like to use that and find your passion, getting excited,

but that's not where it's at. Enthusiasm is not excitement,

just like love is not infatuation. And inspiration is not,

you know, this standing on shoulders and jumping up and down.

Those are manic states. Don't confuse inspiration with manic states.

A truly poised present, purposeful, powerful,

prioritize and you know, really patient focus,

is when you live by your highest value and you're doing what you love and you're

inspired by what you do and you're acting spontaneously. Now the blood, glucose,

and oxygen goes into the forebrain. Now it activates the prefrontal cortex.

Now it activates the executive center,

which then has nerve fibers that come down into the amygdala and with glutamate

and GABA, the transmitters, it calms down and n-acetylaspartate,

it calms down the impulses and instincts and dampens the volatility and

stabilizes our life and allows us to get on a mission, which is the center,

the middle path as the Buddha says, instead of the polarities. You know,

as the Buddha says, the desire for that which is unobtainable,

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

the other side of the magnet, is the source of human suffering.

But the second we go down the middle path,

are not attached to those distractions,

not preoccupied by the things we infatuate and resent that occupy space and time

in our mind and run us from the external world,

and we become poised and present and centered.

Now we have the executive center govern the behaviors and allow us to

strategically plan true objectives, not fantasies or nightmares,

but true objectives that we can see with our inspired vision and make things

happen.

So the governed forebrain is way more powerful than the heuristics of

trial and error by the impulse and instinct center below.

The most lowest heuristic and decision making process is the amygdala.

It's always making decisions based on what it thinks is going to give it more

advantage than disadvantage.

And with these skewed subjective bias interpretations,

it's constantly going onto trial and error games.

It's not as effective as actually foreplanning and actually seeing both

sides and asking quality questions that brings your mind into balance,

so you're objective and neutral and not opinionated and reactive,

but centered.

That's why the quality of our life's based on the quality of the questions we

ask. And the most powerful questions we can ask,

which I've outlined and put together in the Demartini Method that I present in

the Breakthrough Experience,

are the ones that allow you to see what you're unconscious of.

If you infatuate with something, you're unconscious of the downside,

the quality questions, what's the upside? Pardon me,

what are the downsides to the thing you infatuate with?

And what's the upside of the thing you're resenting? If you balance them out,

you're neither infatuated or resentful. You love something.

Love's the synthesis and synchronicity of these complementary opposites.

It's the unity of pair of opposites as Heraclitus described and many of the

great philosophers through the ages have understood.

It's the synchronicity that the gestalts described,

in the acausality synchronicity that Jung described.

It's the state where pairs of opposites are joined and present at the same time.

As Wilhelm Wundt, the earliest researcher in psychology described,

that it's the simultaneous contrast instead of the sequential contrast,

oscillating back and forth with emotions. In that state,

the executive center governs the amygdala,

causes you to be poised and present and allows you to focus on what it is that

is inspiring from within, that's intrinsically driven, spontaneously.

The thing you would love to do as an undivided individual,

not as a divided persona that you wear as a mask to fit into society.

You know, when the octopus is going in the water and becoming like a rock,

it has this amazing camouflaging capacity to be almost like any environment it's

in, it's doing that for the sake of capturing prey and avoiding predator.

And we put on masks and personas just like the octopus,

as a camouflage to try to capture prey and to avoid predator,

to give us quote "advantages" when we're under distress.

But when we're actually inspired by what we do,

and we're living by priority and we're delegating lower priority things,

and we're really engaged in what we're doing,

we wake up the executive center and we're governed.

And governmentus,

one who can govern their mind is a much more powerful state than somebody that's

not. Warren Buffett says until you can manage your emotions,

don't expect to manage your money. And Robert Greene says,

until you manage your emotions, don't expect to be a great leader.

But if you stop and look at it,

all the noise in the brain in the psychology is all

impulses and instincts.

All of those things are the noise in the brain that scatter our brain and

distract us and not allow us to be present and mindful, and quiet and clear,

a clear consciousness. And in business, if we exaggerate or minimize ourselves,

narcissistically or altruistically,

we don't have sustainable fair exchange in business.

And we don't have a thing where we're inspired to go to work and the people are

inspired to get our services in equilibrium,

where there's a fair exchange immediately. And if we are in business,

if we don't know how to manage emotions,

we're probably going to buy things on leverage and overextend ourselves,

or sell at the bottom out of fear and greed. And those two emotions,

which are byproducts with these states undermine our wealth building.

That's why in the Breakthrough Experience,

I'm teaching the Demartini Method to show you how to do that,

so you can empower all these areas. And in relationships,

if you think you're superior to them, well, you'll get humbled.

And if you think you're inferior and they're going to try to lift you up,

or they're going to go find somebody else. Nature's trying to find a match,

an equanimity,

a state of equanimity within the individual and equity

And that's the same thing in society. The individual who's arrogant,

we see that in America, from previous presidents, if they get arrogant,

boy they get attacked, and it's happening right now.

So we can see that when you get cocky, you attract humbling circumstance.

When you get humble, you get lifting circumstances,

to try to get you back in equilibrium,

to try to get you governed and not emotive. And the same thing in physiology,

you have have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of homeostatic feedback

mechanisms in your psychology,

in the form of intuition and in your physiology to try to get you righted back

into, into the balanced state, the natural state of homeostasis.

So your body is trying to neutralize those vicissitudes and volatilities and

emotions.

That's why I say that emotions underly almost every illness that we can trace,

but we haven't asked the right questions to see the correlation and to see

the responses that we're making in our body.

I've been studying the relation between mind body for four plus,

five decades almost,

and I'm certain that there's way more there than most people can comprehend.

And the allopathic medicine approach of taking a pill for every ill is not going

to actually override that physiological response.

And sometimes that's actually causing certain side effects are there.

And in our spirituality, if you stop and look at our spirituality,

what is spirituality, but a state of equanimity, a state of grace,

a state of appreciation and love for life as it is,

and not trying to fix yourself relative to others or others relative to you in

the form of judgment.

Empedocles the Greek philosopher said we had love and strife.

When you integrate the elements, integrate yourself into your authentic self,

you have love.

And when you disintegrate yourself and fragment yourself into these exaggerated,

minimized, and disowned parts, you get strife.

And strife creates symptoms to try to guide you back into authenticity and love,

so you can be governed again. And the moment you govern yourself,

you're able to lead and govern other people,

which gives you a competitive advantage out there in the marketplace,

in every one of these seven areas of life.

And I've had a mission to try to empower all seven areas and help other people

empower all those areas of life.

And one thing I'm absolutely certain about is that that is doable and trainable.

And that's why I put together the Demartini Method as

questions to make you conscious of what you're unconscious of.

Because if you're infatuated and you're unconscious the downsides,

if you ask question, what are the upsides, you become conscious of it,

or what the downsides to what you're infatuate,

then you become conscious of all sides.

And the same thing when you're resenting, if you become conscious the upside,

now you've balanced it. As Aristotle said,

when you have an excess deficiency of the positives or the negatives,

you have vices, and if you find the golden mean between them, you have virtue.

The true virtue of life is the integration of pairs of opposites.

So that's why I'm a firm believer in asking the right questions and cognitively

taking command of your life. You can sit and meditate, and that's very valuable.

You can do all kinds of relaxing exercise. That's valuable.

All those modalities are helpful,

but you also can cognitively go in there and neutralize and dissolve the

emotional baggage that weighs you down and lighten up your path

and give yourself a designed life instead of a duty life.

I always say that if you're dedicated to your mission and delegate the rest and

focus on what's priority and liberate yourself from sometimes the things that

are unfulfilling,

which put you in the amygdala and makes you more vulnerable to the impulses and

instincts that causes the noise, you have a clear consciousness,

and a clear conscious allows you to have gratitude in life. You know,

it was interesting, there was a gentleman that came out in the 90s,

wrote a book, One Up on Wall Street, Peter Lynch,

who was of investment with fidelity and dealing funds and he said,

when he goes and does technical and quantitative analysis on investments,

after he is done his technical work and quantitative assessment,

he then goes and flies in and goes to the actual companies and looks at the

headquarters of the companies. And he says,

he's looking for something at the companies to find

buy the stock. He's looking for people that appreciate their job,

love what they're doing, inspired by the vision, enthusiastically working,

certain about their skills,

and present while they're with their clients and their teammates.

And that is a state of mastery. That's self-governance,

that's the executive center. That's where you're objective.

That's where you're resilient and adaptable,

that's where you expand your space and time horizons.

That's where you give yourself permission to shine, not shrink,

and to expand and not demand. And there's a freedom that comes from that.

There's a very powerful state that comes from that forebrain.

I think that's why we have a hindbrain, which is the tail and the forebrain,

which is the head you might say. And the tail is a lot narrower than the head.

And you get a narrow mind when you go towards the tail and you get a more

expanded and broader mind when you go towards the forebrain.

And that's why I believe that if you prioritize your life, you move forward.

If you don't, you move backwards. And that's why I say,

go on my website and do the Value Determination process,

determine what you really value, if you haven't done it already,

and do it again every quarter to see it,

because it's evolving and keep current with it and prioritize your life.

If you don't get up and dedicate your life to what it is that you're inspired by

so you can spontaneously act and reduce the numbers of noise to stimuli in your

brain, then you're going to have nobody to look at except yourself.

You blaming with false attribution bias on the outside world of why you're not

fulfilled doesn't work. As Epictetus said,

you blame others initially when you're on first journey on your personal

development journey, then you blame yourself,

and then you finally realize there's nothing to blame.

There's a hidden order in the things. In the Breakthrough Experience.

When I take

people through the Demartini Method and teach people how to live congruently and

inspired lives and to master all seven areas of life and help them ask

questions, to help them see that the things that they

they're actually fuel and liberate them, so they see life on the way,

not in the way.

They free themselves up to do something more extraordinary with their life.

That's one of the reasons I do what I do. I mean, this is what I love doing.

It's what I've been focused on for 50 years of my life.

How do you take an individual who's maybe not inspired by what they're doing and

transcend whatever they perceive is in the way,

which are always something that's impulsive or instinctual,

and show them how to turn it into on the way by asking the quality questions

that balance out and equilibrate the mind and liberate them from those

distractions and get on with life. You know, that's what I love doing.

I love transforming people's perceptions and therefore their actions,

because the second you change your perception, your decisions change,

your actions change. And sometimes we're sitting in phobias or philias.

I had a gentleman the other day, 'Well,

how do you get rid of your phobias?' I said,

stop being addicted to your philias.

As long as you have a fantasy about how life's supposed to be and not

appreciating the way it is,

you're going to have a nightmare in your life because it's not matching your

fantasy.

I always say depression is a comparison of your current reality to a fantasy

you're addicted to. And those are all impulse and instincts,

because we're wanting to run from the nightmares and we want to run towards our

fantasies, instead of embracing life, both sided. You know,

life has pleasures and pains and positives and negatives and kinds and cruel's,

and all pairs of opposites.

Heraclitus described that 2,500 plus years ago and it still is

the same, it's the same wisdom.

In almost all the great minds throughout the ages have understood this.

And wisdom is knowing to embrace both sides of life and stop looking for a one

sided life.

The amygdala's is always trying to get rid of half of life and seek the other.

And you don't need to get rid of half of your life to love yourself.

You don't need to get rid of people's others,

other people's half of their life to love them.

You don't need to get rid of half of the world in order to love the world.

I'm so amazed at how many people want to get rid of half of what's going on in

the world instead of understanding,

how does it fit into the journey of this beautiful planet we live on.

There's a hidden order and a magnificence that's going on that we don't see

because we don't know how to ask the right questions,

we're caught in moral hypocrisies that hold us back from actually embracing the

magnificence of what's here. And people go, oh, I don't understand that.

Well you can. And if you'd like to understand that,

join me at the Breakthrough Experience,

because I want to show you exactly how to ask those questions to help you see

things mindfully and all of a sudden be poised and realize there's nothing to

avoid and seek in the first place.

There's nothing missing and there's nothing to get rid of.

I always say the master lives in a world of transformation,

never the illusions of gain and loss. So if you think there's something missing,

you're seeking it, or something's around you that you to get rid of,

these are the illusions of life. All they do is change forms.

You cut off the hybrid and it gets five heads. It shows up in other forms.

So I'm a firm believer in learning how to love and appreciate what is, as it is,

and helping you have self-governance and mastery.

That's what the Breakthrough Experience is about.

That's what my my whole life's work is about.

So hopefully this little presentation today was an eye opener,

made you think a bit out of the box. I know I sometimes speak fast,

but you can listen to this again and again,

and possibly slow it down if you have to or speed up your brain or whatever.

But I just want you to know about the Breakthrough Experience,

where you can master your mind and master your life. There's more,

it says seven personal development tools, but there's way more than seven there,

you're going to get an abundance of tools and principles and methods that I've

been working 50 years on that's original information,

that'll help you stand the test of time and stand on the shoulders of giants.

You don't have to sit there and beat yourself up about something that you can

actually find the blessings to and turn into order.

You don't weigh yourself down and drain yourself of energy when you can have

fuel. So come and join me at the Breakthrough Experience.

I've taught it 1,150 times in countries around the world.

A hundred thousand plus people have been to this program and I know it can

change life and I want to help you change your life.

I want to be able to make it transformed, and help you see the order in it.

Transforming is not fixing it. Doesn't need fixing.

It's transforming your awareness of it so you can appreciate your life and use

what you have as fuel and, I call it being resourceful to what's happening.

Join me at the Breakthrough Experience,

that way I can help you do with your life what I've been able to blessedly do

with my life, by applying these principles and studying these principles.

Instead of sitting there taking 50 years to study and let me share with you on

the weekend and save you an enormous amount of time and

wheel. It's just an inspiring weekend of people dedicated to doing something

extraordinary with their life. So if you're ready to do that,

come and join me there.

And thank you for joining me today for this little presentation and love you.

Focus on priority. Stick to it.

Hear this again and find a way and sign up for the Breakthrough Experience

because I know it can make a difference.

I've asked thousands of people who have attended,

How many of you learned something this weekend you could not have gone,

you would've never have gotten in your life if you hadn't been here?

Every hand goes up week after week after week,

I look forward to seeing you there or next week at this presentation I do.