The reality is that everlasting happiness doesn’t exist. Throughout your life you will experience natural cycles of highs and lows. Life is like a coin inherently having two sides. Attempting to get rid of one side of life’s coin will be an act of futility.

Discover the secret to a rewarding life lies in the ability to appreciate all of life’s experiences (happy and sad), and how you can grow from both in a fulfilling way.

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The Breakthrough Experience

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The immediate gratification makes you go out and buy impulsively and then you

have no money left over, and then you're working from paycheck to paycheck.

And that's a classical symptom.

People who are pursuing happiness and some of the saddest people I know are the

ones that addicted to the fantasy of happiness all the time.

They think they're supposed to have a, you know,

pleasure without pain and happy without sad,

and positive without negative and one-sided lives. And of course,

as the Buddha said in one of his statements,

at least that's what so many claims,

was that the pursuit of that which is unavailable and the pursuit

to avoid that which is unavoidable, is the source of human suffering.

So if you're attempting to get a one-sided life where there's just bliss and

pleasure and happiness all the time and not have some of the challenges that

go with life,

you're going to be even more sad because you're going to be expecting something

that's not going to happen.

Imagine a magnet and trying to cut in half and trying to get one side without

the other. It's not very easy to do, and you'll find out it's futile in fact.

All you'll do is cut the magnet in half and two positive and negatives and two

positive and negatives, and same with happy and sad. So why do we do that?

Why do we pursue something that's unobtainable?

And why do we keep trying to avoid something that's unavoidable? Very simple.

So get your paper out. May take some notes,

and I'm going to do a little brain research for you

bit about neurology. Your brain has, you might say,

layers in it and levels in it.

It has the telencephalon,

which is the very fore and advanced part of the brain,

the outer part of the brain, and then it has a diencephalon,

and then it has a mesencephalon, a metencephalon, and a myelencephalon,

and then it has the spinal cord, then it has peripheral nerves.

There's layers of the brain. And of course,

the most advanced part that's most expanded where the

is the most advanced. But anywhere you go inside that you get more,

you might say, less complex.

One of the regions of the brain that many people function under

quite often is the subcortical area of the brain. It's still the telencephalon,

it's semi advanced, but it's got a subcortical area,

and it's called the amygdala. It's a portion of the limbic brain.

And the amygdala assigns what is called valency to events and

perceptions. So it assigns, you might say,

a positive charge or a negative charge on something.

If it assigns a positive charge from all the associations we have from our past

experiences as we filter new sensory experiences,

if it assigns a positive one,

it activates a certain reason in the,

into the basal ganglia and into the amygdala that actually gives it a pleasure

and it makes it seek it and it represents prey.

Prey not in the sense of prayer like a church,

but prey in the sense of a prey and predator,

an animal that's trying to eat something and consumes something and go after

something and chase something. And that is the seeking of prey.

If it assigns a valency of negative to it,

it will assign it and see it as predator and it will want to avoid it.

So it seeks that which it sees positively and it avoids that which is negative.

But in nature, you're going to have prey and predator. In fact,

it's been shown that maximum growth and development occurs at the border of

support and challenge, prey and predator, positive and negative,

the pairs of opposites when they're joined and balanced,

we maximize our fulfillment in life. Now,

when we assign a positive to it and we activate the nucleus accumbens,

the pleasure center you might say in this amygdala area,

we also activate the parasympathetic nervous system,

which is the one for rest and digest.

So once we assign it's a positive thing and the pleasureful thing,

we are going seek it and we're going to be ready to consume it and rest and

digest, relax and just have an enjoyable dinner, you might say.

If we assign a negative to it,

it's going to be assigning the sympathetic nervous system to it,

which is fight or flight.

That means you're going to run from it or you're going to attack it back,

if it's something attacking you. And so that's a challenge component.

If you seek only support,

that's like seeking somebody in your life that you are infatuated with and you

become juveniley dependent on them and you don't grow.

And if you get only challenged,

you become precociously independent and you grow rapidly.

So one is juveniley dependence,

the other is precocious independence from too much support or too much

challenge, too much prey or too much predator.

But nature it needs both. That's why we have a food chain.

And our brain knows that, and it must have both.

And the second it goes and tries to seek one and get a pleasure without a pain,

we increase the probability of attracting the other into our life.

Let me use the analogy.

If we go and are searching for prey and we're an animal and we go and

eat something and there's no predator around and we just gobble up and really

overeat, then what happens is we're now gluttonous, we're overfed,

we're slow, we're not sharp and alert, and we gain weight,

and so the predator that does come along sees kind of a fat slow one

there and says, let's target that, I can outrun that and capture it.

So you increase the probability of having the predator attack you.

So the more you get the pleasure, the more you attract the pain you might say,

because the pain of being eaten is pretty painful.

And what's interesting is the hedonistic pursuit is searching

for a quick, immediate gratifying pleasure. Now,

I can't do justice to this topic without just like any topic with human behavior

without discussing values.

So let's superimpose now the value system that I talk about normally on top of

this prey and predator game. Whenever you're, you have a set of values,

set of priorities in your life and whenever you're living by the highest

priority, the blood, glucose, and oxygen goes into the telencephalon,

into the medial prefrontal cortex and activates the executive center,

where you see both sides simultaneously and you are more objective and

balanced and neutral and resilient and adaptable.

And you have strategic planning and you execute the plans and you have

self-governance and you're more empowered and you're less likely to be swayed by

impulses or instincts or hedonistic behavior. You have self-governance.

But if you're doing something that's low on your value,

doing lower priority things,

the unfulfillment from doing lower priority things automatically makes the

blood, glucose, and oxygen goes into the amygdala, it goes there.

And when it goes into the amygdala, we now get prey and predator mentality.

What's interesting is if you're in high priority actions and you get the blood,

glucose, and oxygen into the medial prefrontal cortex,

the executive center and you get objective,

you get what is called a systems 2 thinking where you think before you

emotionally react. But if you're not doing high priority things and the blood,

glucose, and oxygen goes down to the amygdala, you react before you think.

So you're more impulsive or instinctual to seek or avoid and

react emotional before you think.

As a result of it you're vulnerable to hedonism.

Aristotle said that there's hedonism and eudaimonia.

Eudaimonia is the path of the executive center where you have self-governance

and you have wellbeing and wholeness and you have a pursuit

of a mission, a purpose in life, something that's meaningful as he called it.

But when you're going to hedonism, you're looking for immediate gratification,

a quick fix.

When you're living in your executive center in the forebrain and you're living

in high priorities,

you have long-term vision and you start thinking of your immortality quotient.

What do you want to contribute to the planet? The difference you want to make.

What's the legacy you want to do? What is the purpose in life?

But if you're sitting down into the amygdala,

you look for immediate gratification.

Your space and time horizons in which you live shrink,

and you just look for a quick fix.

And I like to think of it as if you're living by your highest values,

you move towards philanthropy. If you live by the lower values,

you move towards debauchery. And debauchery is over eating and consuming,

over drinking, over sex, over party, over consuming, over buying,

over shopping, you know, you're looking for immediate gratification. And,

you minimize yourself, your self worth is down, and you tend to think, well,

if I buy other people's brands,

I'll live vicariously through them and then I'll be somebody.

Instead of actually living in the executive function and being somebody,

you're now trying to be somebody by over consuming. And,

when we're not fulfilled in our highest values,

we automatically fill ourselves full with food or things.

The average person that buys a house when they first buy the house,

they got a nice clean open house,

but over the years they typically accumulate things, stuff.

I mean they once parked a car in the garage,

now they can't get the car in the garage because they got so much stuff.

The same thing in the closets.

A quarter of your house is just storing stuff that you get.

And the more you store stuff, the more you're buying stuff that's depreciating.

And it's not really appreciating.

Is a devaluation of self and a vicariously living through other people's brands.

And the cost of hedonism is that.

I teach a class that's called the Breakthrough Experience,

not every week but quite a bit. ,

I've done up to 43 in a year and I've done about 1,166 of these

things. And I see them every week.

I see people that are overwhelmed by the consumption of immediate gratifying

consumables that depreciate and they can't get ahead financially and they end up

being immediate gratifying in their relationships and so they got demands that

are unrealistic in timeframes. They don't have a long-term mission,

they don't have a long-term vision. They just living day to day,

paycheck to paycheck,

instead of actually planning and and deferring gratification.

Deferred gratification is the key to wealth building.

Deferred gratification is the key to a family.

Almost every area of your life is empowered by deferred gratification,

but immediate gratification cost and deferred gratification

pays. You know, if you have compound interest on investments,

if you use immediate gratification and keep buying things and never have an

investment and accumulate compound interest,

you're going to be working your life as a slave for money all your life. If not,

it works for you. So if you save and invest and think long-term and have,

you know,

wellbeing and focus long term on there and can foresee with the executive center

in the telencephalon, you end up thinking more long term.

If not the immediate gratification makes you go out and buy impulsively and then

you have no money left over and then you're working from paycheck to paycheck.

And that's a classical symptom. It's the same thing in relationships.

You're looking for that quick fix.

I've seen people that are married and all of a sudden they realize that the

dopamine fixation of the first few months of of being together is starting to

wane off and so they're now looking for that fix again.

And so they go and have affairs and look for the next person to give them this

fix. And if again a few months later,

then that one's over and you go to the next one. And this can be trapping.

And if we don't have self-governance by living by higher priority,

we end up being caught in this immediate gratification, hedonistic,

you know, quick fix mentality.

And so that's why in the Breakthrough Experience that I'm teaching that's one of

the reasons I'm helping people identify what their values are.

Because I'm certain, I've been doing it 45 years on, I've been teaching 50,

but I've been 45 years on the research of human values and behavior.

And I'm certain that if you will live by your highest priorities and fill your

day with the most important highest priority,

most meaningful and inspiring spontaneous things that you love doing and

delegate lower priority things, you automatically go

you automatically start valuing yourself.

You automatically have self-governance,

you automatically move towards self-mastery.

You automatically feel more authentic. You're more objective, less emotional,

more sustainable fair exchange oriented.

But if you're not living by priority and you're doing low priority things and

you're feeling overwhelmed doing something you don't love doing,

you're automatically going to be getting the amygdala turned on and the amygdala

is going to cost. Because now you're going to look for immediate gratification.

You're going to be looking for that which is unobtainable and trying to avoid

that which is unavoidable. And that's a survival mode.

And that survival mode is definitely going to cost,

because you're not going to get a pleasure without a pain. You know,

think about the fatal attractions in your life.

Think about the people that you were infatuated with in your life and then days

or weeks later you found out they weren't quite who you thought,

and then you kind of went, whoa, l I didn't, I was blind to that.

See the amygdala has subjective bias interpretations of our reality and it

starts to see false positives on the positives,

where it means it sees positives in something that's not.

And it also doesn't see the negatives. And so it gets blinded by that,

by its unconscious awareness of the negatives.

And it ends up going after and impulsively seeking it and getting wants more of

it, more of it, more of it, gets addicted.

And then what happens is we fear the loss of that which we get addicted to and

so now we're in anxiety. And the same thing on the instinct.

We fear the gain of something we don't want. And so we're living in anxiety,

we end up having distress, we end up running our immune system down,

we end up having immediate gratification,

we end up having subjective biases in our interpretation.

We get addicted to pride and being right in our opinion,

projecting that onto other people or minimizing ourselves and injecting other

people's values into our life and trying to live other people's values,

both of which are disempowering. It pays to prioritize,

it pays to delegate, it pays to know your real value structure.

That's why in the Breakthrough Experience,

that's the first thing I do in the morning is make sure,

after I give you some principles about human behavior and how it works,

the first thing I do is make you go in and identify what you really value.

Because if you're not living according to what you value most,

you're guaranteed to go into the amygdala, search for immediate gratification,

let hedonism rule your life,

and I guarantee you every area of your life is going to go down from that.

It's going to be self depreciative and you're going to live vicariously through

other people's brands instead of build your own brand.

That's why in the Breakthrough Experience I do that because I want you to be

able to be empowered and you can't empower yourself from the amygdala.

It's a survival mode, not a thrival mode.

And then in the latter half of the day in the Breakthrough Experience,

I'm teaching you the Demartini Method on how to dissolve all the impulses and

instincts that you're trapped in. All the prides and shames,

all the infatuation resentments,

all the skewed half aware perceptions.

And I help you get mindful and see both sides. So you're now,

which is a sign of living by highest values.

Anytime you're living by highest values,

you become more objective and more able to see both sides.

Anytime you see both sides, you move up in the higher priorities.

They work as a team. So no matter what happens,

in the Breakthrough Experience I show you how to dissolve the distractions that

keep you from being disempowered.

I hope you see the hidden order in the apparent chaos.

The chaos and the disorder is simply missing information.

And the real you, the real authentic you that's living by highest values,

that's pro oriented and spontaneously inspired to act is the one that

goes and achieves mastery of life. But if not,

you're going to be in the amygdala and immediate gratification is going to cost

you your life, and it's not going to lead lasting fulfillment.

Fulfillment is realizing nothing's missing.

But the second you're infatuated with something you're missing the awareness of

the downsides. The second you're resentful to something,

you're missing the upsides. So something's automatically empty,

unfulfilling and missing the second you judge,

which is what exactly what the amygdala does.

It assigns valency and judgment to things.

It makes you make decisions irrationally to avoid pain and seek pleasure under

emergency situations. But your life doesn't have to be emergency situation.

It can be living by priority and can be organized.

It can be disciplined and you can live by design, not by duty.

And the one of the things that stop people from actually living inspired lives

is they compare themselves to other people.

Anytime you put somebody on a pedestal and minimize yourself,

anytime you put somebody in a pit and exaggerate yourself,

the inauthentic of the minimized and exaggerated self, the inauthentic you,

automatically is down in the amygdala. The amygdala is the judging center.

The executive center is actually intuitively neutralizing

bringing you back into objectivity so you can set primary objectives in life,

not emotional reactions and fantasies and nightmares in life.

All the impulses and instincts are carried over from the animals that we still

have within us in that part of the brain,

it's a kind of a older brain you might say.

And this part of the brain is basically there for surviving,

seeking prey so you don't starve, and avoiding predator so you don't get eaten.

So the fear of loss of food and the fear of being eaten are the two basic fears

and stresses that we have in life.

The number one distress that we have is the fear of loss of that which we seek.

And the second number on the distress is the fear of gaining that which you're

trying to avoid.

And that's exactly why in the Breakthrough Experience I teach you how to

dissolve those, how to get present, how to get focused, how to get prioritized,

how to get on track with who you are, the authentic you. And when you do,

you're not caught in this hedonistic pursuit.

The hedonistic pursuit can show up in many forms as I said,

I've seen people and I tell people,

if you're doing a job that's not inspiring to you and it has no meaning,

then you'll get money without meaning.

And money without meaning will get you into the amygdala and get you down into

the debauchery center. I call the amygdala the debauchery center.

That's where all the crazy debauchery activities occur.

But the second you're doing something that's meaningful and you're feeling

fulfilled in it, you become philanthropic. You love human beings,

you're loving yourself, you're being yourself, and you're knowing yourself.

Because your epistemological knowledge of who you are revolves around what you

value most. Your purpose,

your teleological purpose revolves around what you value most. And,

your ontological identity revolves around what you value most.

So to know yourself, to love yourself, to be yourself, and to empower yourself,

it's prioritizing your daily life. And if you do,

you're not going to be caught in hedonism.

You're going to be caught in long-term vision.

That's one of the purposes of the Breakthrough Experience,

to help you master your life, to help you go from survival to thrival,

to help you go from the amygdala to the executive function,

to help you not let impulses and instincts and things on the outside run your

life,

but to let the dreams and voice and the vision on the inside run your life.

When I said that on The Secret in 2006 or 7, I said,

when the voice and the vision on the inside is louder than all opinions on the

outside, the external world, you've mastered your life.

But if you're sitting there going into a mall and letting the impulse shopping

run you and so-called retail therapy,

if it's running your life and you're not going in there with a plan of what

you're going to buy and you're just impulse buying,

then the world around you is running you. You want to run you.

Because you are going to basically be prioritizing what you want in life if

you're going to be a master.

So I just wanted to take some time to go over how hedonism is going to cost you

long-term fulfillment, but how living by priority can help you have it.

And why I tell people to do the Breakthrough Experience

an enormous amounts of time.

Why reinvent a wheel on the mastery of the skills and how to move from the

hedonism to fulfillment and how to go from immediate gratification to long-term

vision,

and how to go from survival to thrival and how to go from the world on the

outside running you, as a slave, to you being running you, as a master.

You know, if you see life on the way, you're masterful,

if you see things in the way you're not.

And if you're striving for that which is unobtainable and trying to avoid that

which is unavoidable,

you're going to live in futility and you're going to feel life's in the way.

So that's why I tell people to come to the Breakthrough Experience,

so they can transcend that mentality and give themselves permission to shine,

not shrink. And to expand, not contract. And to radiate,

not gravitate.

And to actually go and pursue what's deeply meaningful to them instead of just

surviving and letting impulses run their life. The impulses, as I said,

are costly.

So I wanted to take the time to go over the importance of living by design,

not duty, and living by priority, not low priority, high priority,

not low priority. And to live by the executive function, not the amygdala.

So you can live as a human being,

an angelic human being instead of an animal surviving in the fields

trying to avoid predators and seeking prey all day long.

So I just wanted to get that message across and I wanted to let you know how

important it is and I hope you join me for the Breakthrough Experience because I

really love transforming people's lives and helping people break through the

boxes. If you're sitting there feeling you're sabotaging,

feeling you have limited beliefs, feeling like you're holding yourself back,

you feel that no matter what you do,

you keep screwing it up and you're beating yourself up,

that's a sign of trying to live by lower values and other people's values and

not being authentic to you.

Because when you're really back on priority and you're

meaningful to you, you don't have those feelings, you're grateful for your life.

The executive center is the gratitude center,

but the amygdala is the seeking of immediate gratification because you're

unfulfilled. And so that's why you get trapped.

So if you want to get out of the trap and want to be free and you know,

have foresight, not hindsight,

and live by an expanded vision instead of a contracted frustration,

come to the Breakthrough Experience.

If you got something out of this little presentation I gave you here for these

few minutes, I am certain that 24 hours with me is going to be mind blowing.

I've been doing that program for over 34 years now, right at 34 years.

And I've watched thousands of lives change and I've seen people break through

it.

And I was just doing a program this week on my Master Planning for Life program

and there were some people there,

it was about 65% of them had been to the Breakthrough Experience and there was a

few that hadn't. And somebody who hadn't asked,

well would this Breakthrough Experience make a difference in my life?

And I just turned to the audience, I said,

anybody here want to say anything about it? And all the hands went up,

they all wanted to say, and they said, just do it. And I tell people that,

just do it. Come, join me. As Richard Branson said, screw it,

just do it.

I really believe that if you want to make a difference and go to another level

in your life,

spending 24 hours at the Breakthrough Experience can help you do it.

If you're ready to get past hedonism and get on with doing something and making

a difference in life and having a bigger vision for your life, come and join me.

24 hours at the Breakthrough Experience,

it's impossible to come there without having a change in your trajectory.

So I just wanted to share that.

I appreciate you for joining me tonight or today or whatever time it is,

and I look forward to seeing you next week. But more than anything,

I look forward to seeing the Breakthrough Experience because then I can really

make a difference in your life. And I love doing that. But be ready to work.

It's not just a spectator program. It's not just the rah-rah program.

It's not where you just sit and listen.

You're going to actually break through things. I'm going to show you a method,

the Demartini Method that's going to be valuable for the rest of your life and

you're going to use it from there on out.

I'm going to show you how to prioritize your life and organize it and give

yourself empowerment again. Any area of your life you don't empower,

other people are going to overpower you.

So come and join me for 24 hours and watch what life change you're going to

have, a new trajectory. So hedonism or long-term fulfillment,