What does it mean to unlock and access the full potential of your mind? What are you truly capable of when you do? What does the heart have to do with the full potential of your mind? These are just some of the questions that Dr John Demartini answer in this episode.

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So in other words, if you see all black or all white, all bad, all good,

all negative, all positive and it's black and white,

the primitive part of the brain is are going to run you,

and you're not going to have very many options,

and your potential is going to be weak.

Your reality of the senses, that you realize through your world out there,

has sensory receptors, eyes, ears, nose, taste, tactile,

and about 110 senses actually, pressure, temperature, and pain,

and all kinds of, even navigational sense.

All of these senses come in through sensory neurons

and go through impulse conduction and go into the spinal cord if

it's down below or maybe into the brain STEM or into higher levels of the

brain. And then process with various interneurons,

because we have sensory neurons bringing information,

then we have an interneurons processing it.

And then we have a response in our motor actions called motor neurons

that fire away at various summations and give us a

response. So we have a stimulus response.

At the lowest, most primitive part of the brain at the spinal cord level,

or even an individual neuron has what they call a dendrite and an

axon in a cell body.

The three components of the neuron itself is for input,

processing, output. At the spinal cord,

which is one of the most primitive ones also, we have reflexes,

we have what they call monosynaptic reflex,

where you put your leg over another leg and you hit it with a deep tendon reflex

hammer and you jump, the knee jumps.

That's the stimulus response, it has very little options,

it either fires or doesn't fire, it's all or none. It's black or white.

There's no gray, there's no refined motor response. It's just black ow white.

So the more primitive we are, in our neurological structure,

the more simple we are, the more things just fire or don't fire,

black and white, all or none.

But as we go up the spinal cord and go up into the brainstem and then

finally into the brain problem, the number of processing neurons,

the interneurons go up in number geometrically.

So what they do is they process and give you a series of options on how to

respond between the stimulus.

So instead of it just a stimulus response, a monosynaptic, one synapsis,

a synapsis is a junction between input and output or between a nerve and a

nerve. Monosynaptic reflexes, if you stimulate it,

it's going to fire and that's it, or it's not going to fire, it's all or none.

But as you go up in the higher levels of the brain,

you've got more and more associative fibers.

They literally geometrically grow in numbers as you go up to the very highest

part of the brain, the most advanced part of brain.

And that allows for a series of options on how to decide.

So you have a kind of an unconditioned reflex,

but you can conditionalize it up there with the different associations you make

in your life. So for instance,

if you have an event in your life that you think is terrible and you've never

seen any benefits to it, if it happens again,

you're probably going to react and run or avoid it.

And if you see something really pleasureful and terrific,

you're probably going to seek it.

And so the most primitive part of the brain is sort of an avoidance and seeking,

all or none, survival mechanism.

It's very subjectively biased with black and white thinking, and it's very,

what they call false positive, it's accentuated,

it's seeing things that aren't necessarily there to be prepared

for the gain of food or the loss, or being eaten by predator.

So these primitive responses mean that we have a very limited potential,

it's just black or white, there's not a lot of options.

And we don't have a lot of freedom as a result of it.

But as we go into the forebrain and go all the way up to the very front of the

brain, where there's massive amount of associations in the interneurons,

we could have a stimulus be associated with a thousand different things,

a million, 10 million things,

and so instead of by the time it goes back down and causes a response in the

motor reflex, we now have reflected on it.

At the bottom most primitive level we have a reflex,

at the most advantaged part we have reflection.

So reflex and reflect. And reflection means that we stop,

we process, we think about it, we decide what we're going to do with it,

and then we control the responses down below, we have governance.

The more advanced part of the brain is governing.

The most primitive part of the brain is just firing. It's just a stimulus.

Now you probably had a situation where you had a bug coming into your you

know, a cockroach or something came there and your normal response,

and you just responded, reacted, and ran or something and dodged it.

That's the primitive response,

but you may have a little bug coming in there and you may find out that it's a

friendly bug and you may learn about it and you've may study bugs,

you may find out, Oh, it's a rare bug, I'd like to go and explore it.

Instead of just running, you may at least do it and you might capture it,

might study it, you might not react to it.

So the more primitive system is sort of an all or non reactive mode.

Whereas you go up in the more advanced part of the brain

you act and you reflect. Now,

this is sometimes called the lower mind and the higher mind by William James and

Schopenhauer.

It's called the immanent mind and the transcended mind by Immanuel Kant.

It is sometimes called the animal mind and the angelic mind by

theologians,

or sometimes it's called the one that is the human animal and the human angel

sometimes called, or could be called the human mind

and the divine mind in theologians. There have been various writers,

various psychologists that have given different terms to it.

One is called sequential and one is called simultaneous awareness.

There's different set of ways of looking at it,

but the more we move into the forebrain,

the more we move to the advanced part of the brain,

the more options we have and the more liberty we have,

the more freedom we have to, you might say,

how we're going to respond. Therefore at the bottom,

we're a by-product of what is around us.

So if our perception is prey or predator,

we seek or avoid it and we have much not much choice.

Our choices are very limited. We got to run automatically,

it's a survival mentality.

But if we go up into the areas of the higher areas of the brain and more

advanced part of the brain,

all the associations give us a series of options to act wisely and to reflect

on it and be able to see our previous experiences from our

subconscious mind and watch those responses and decide what to do.

I've been teaching in the Breakthrough Experience program for many years now,

the Demartini Method.

Demartini Method takes a stimulus and puts new associations

with it, cognitively,

and take something that we thought originally was

in it, find the upsides to it, or the things that we think are very,

very positive and very terrific and find the downsides to it.

So the world outside us is not running us, we're running us.

And every time we neutralize the polarization of

our perceptions, we liberate ourselves from the bondage of those perceptions.

In other words, if we're infatuated with somebody,

whatever we infatuate with occupies space and time in our mind and causes a

reflexes, we've been highly infatuated with somebody and did things that we go,

we don't normally do that we don't normally think about and plan on doing.

And if we're highly resentful,

we can also do something and respond with rage and go,

'I can't believe I said that.' And or 'Can't believe I said that.' when you're

infatuated. So we're externally running, so it's an extrinsic,

the world around us seems to run us when we're down in the primitive part of the

brain. But we run us, our individual self, you might say,

the real self runs us if we have reflective awareness.

Reflective awareness is a sign of higher consciousness.

And what's interesting as we do it, it becomes more abstract. We have receptors,

we have perception based on past experiences,

then we have conception,

and what William James called apperception,

the ability to take and integrate all the information and make an action.

You don't make a Shakespearian play out of a reflex.

You make a Shakespearian play out of an association of learning languages and

looking and observing it thousands of different bits of data relating to human

behavior.

So we maximize our potential to the degree that we advance our brain function.

We're in survival when we're dealing with the primitive part of the brain.

We're in thrival when we're in the advanced part of the brain. Now,

how does that relate to, you know,

I rarely talk about anything without talking about values,

but let me just tie together some values with that for a moment.

You have a set of priorities, a set of values in your life,

things that are most to least important in your life.

Whenever you're setting goals that are aligned with your highest value,

the blood glucose and oxygen goes into the forebrain.

And whenever you're setting goals that are maybe injected values from other

people, trying to be somebody you're not,

and you feel unfulfilled because you're pursuing something that's got a conflict

inside yourself, 'I would love to do this, but this is what I should do',

and then what happens is you end up in the more primitive part of the brain,

the amygdala and hind brain, where the reflexes occur,

not the reflection occurs. When you do,

you tend to go into your animal behavior instead of your angelic behavior,

if you want to call it that, and as a result of it,

you're externally run instead of internally run.

I said many times in the past, maybe on the movie, The Secret,

if you've seen it,

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

outside, you begin to master your life.

So you can't master your life being a reflex, being in the animal behavior,

you're going to be responding to everything that goes on and all the

vicissitudes around you and reactions around you, you'll be externally driven.

And so you'll be living in a sense by reactions instead of actions.

But if you live by the highest priorities and the highest values,

you activate the forebrain, you get the most associations,

the most options, the most liberty, the most freedom, the less reactions,

the less bondage, the less distractions,

the less impulses and instincts of seeking and avoiding that distract you,

and the more you take actions with foresight,

strategic planning, executing plans that are pre thought out,

seeing a vision of what's possible.

These are the areas of the brain that do that.

And you tend to mitigate all of the volatilities of the thing below,

and you have governance, and you wake up your executive center.

You have a desire center, which is the amygdala and hindbrain.

And you have the executive center, which is the forebrain.

So whenever you're living by the highest values and you're living things by what

inspires you spontaneously, you spontaneously act.

When you're living by the lower values, attempting to anyway,

you are not spontaneously acting, you are emotionally reacting.

So in systems one and two theory,

the feeling and the thinking process,

we have an emotional feeling for dealing with survival,

but we have thoughts that we plan things out and associate with our

stimulus. So it has nothing to do with the world on the outside, the stimulus,

you can have a stimulus and be associated with it and cause a reaction and

be in your primitive part, or you can take a stimulus and process it,

put in associations and neutralize it.

And when you neutralize it and balance it out, you go in the forebrain.

That's one of the why I teach the Breakthrough Experience and the Demartini

method,

because I can take any situation that you've ever perceived and take you from

that primitive response and take you into the advanced response by asking

very precise questions that allow you to balance out the mind,

balance out the perceptions. So in other words,

if you see all black or all white, all bad, all good, all negative,

all positive and is black and white,

the primitive part of the brain is going to run you.

And you're not going to have very many options and your potential is going to be

weakened. And in the process of doing that,

the second you actually go into balancing out the

mind by asking questions that allow you to see the things that you're

unconscious of. For instance, if you're infatuated,

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

if you resentful, you're conscious of the downsides, unconscious of the upsides.

If I ask you questions, when you're infatuated, what are the downsides?

And I ask you questions when you're resentful, what are the upside?

And I bring them into balance.

Once I bring them into balance and associate new perceptions to it, well,

all of a sudden the forebrain now runs the game. And all of a sudden,

you now have the freedom again, to decide how you're going to work.

You're free to act any way you want. So your potential is now infinite.

When I say infinite, in the forebrain, there are millions, billions,

and possibly trillions of associations you can make with the stimulus.

When you look at the brain, I remember dissecting out the brain many,

many years ago when I was in my twenties and studying neurology to the fullest.

And the forebrain has literally jillions of connections.

The number of connections are vast.

So that means instead of just a stimulus and a response,

one synapse and you got all or none,

you now have a billion types of options of how to respond to a stimulus.

So the more you use your forebrain, the more you use your executive center,

the more you live by your highest value,

the more you spontaneously act from within,

not be perturbed from without, and the more you know how to govern,

that same part of the brain takes those impulses and instincts that you have out

there that are running you and allows you to see both sides of them.

And when you see both sides, you're centered. When you're centered,

you act wisely. When you're off center,

you're polarized and you're emotionalized. And as Warren Buffet says,

until you can manage your emotions, don't expect to manage money. And as Greene,

Robert Greene says, until you manage your emotions,

don't expect to lead as a social leader. I can say, if you don't want to be,

if you want to be well and not ill,

you have to balance out your physiology as Pythagoras and many philosophers and

thinkers since the ages. But if you have a highly polarized state,

your physiology will do it. If you're highly,

if you see more challenge and support,

your sympathetic nervous system will come online and you'll lateralize into the

sympathetics.

If you see more support than challenge and more infatuation or seeking,

you'll end up with a parasympathetic. When any one of those dominate,

your heart rate variability gets narrower and you basically have less

resilience, less adaptability, you have more of an inflammatory response.

Because when you're highly infatuated, you feel the loss of that. And if you,

you get angry if you lose it,

and if you see this thing you resenting and you fear the gain of it,

and you get angry, if it comes near you.

So the anger causes an inflammatory response,

literally it affects your immune system and so your health suffers when you're

just dealing with that.

So all areas of your life are raised in potential the second you end up learning

how to balance out your perceptions.

So that's why I put the Demartini Method together.

If you've never been to the Breakthrough Experience,

hopefully can come to there and learn the Demartini Method because the method is

a scientific, reproducible,

duplicatable series of questions that allow you to not let the primitive

part of your brain run your life,

where your emotionally reacting and letting the world on the outside run you,

but you're allowing the vision and inspiration from the inside to guide your

life and to act with wisdom as an executive function, as a leader,

leading the way to do what you want to do in life.

That's your fullest potential.

So how to maximize our fullest potential is really the ability to stay on

priority and live by what's really most important to us,

and say no to things that distract us and take situations that we have that

normally stimulate us and cause us to seek or avoid really quickly,

to go in there and take those emotional baggage's that we have that are stored

in the past and go in there with the Demartini Method and neutralize it and go

in and take those situations. See anything that we polarize in our perception,

that's highly polarized into black and white is stored in our subconscious mind,

and it surfaces with large diameter neurons and make us fire for survival.

And they run our lives in most cases.

Most people are automatons reacting to misperceptions and subjective biases that

surround them, instead of actually stopping,

taking a perception, bringing in new associations with it, neutralizing it.

John Milton basically said, the poet said, you know,

you can make a heaven out of a hell or a hell out of heaven.

We have the capacity with our forebrain and our higher mind and our angelic

mind or in our transcendent mind,

to transcend the emotional reactions of the stimulus that's

around us. Many people since the COVID experience,

what I call Saint covid in last year and a half, you know,

they've chosen to see this as a terrible event and they never stopped to look at

the blessings and the upsides that have happened in here.

Or they see something that's terrific and they fail to see the downsides.

Anytime you have a highly polarized state,

you're going to activate that reactive mind.

And the reactive mind is not where you feel empowered. In fact,

that's where you get polarized and you lose your identity. Let me explain that,

when you infatuate with something and you minimize yourself in turn or resent

something and exaggerate yourself in turn, you're not your authentic self,

you're a minimized deflated, or maximized inflated persona,

they're masks that you wear around you because of the reaction.

And you end up feeling proud or shamed in your reactions.

And that's not what your power is.

You're never going to have certainty and power in that state.

But the second you level the playing field and balance the equation and bring in

the associations of the forebrain and neutralize them so you're now acting,

not reacting and not externally run, but internally driven,

now you're acting wisely and you're authentic.

And we all want to be loved for who we are and who we are is that authentic

self. So we maximize our potential to the degree that we're authentic.

We maximize our capacities to have foresight and to be able to create what it

is we want as co-creators of our world. And that's where the power is.

So as long as we're in judgment,

as long as we're in a reactive state and we're misperceiving things and

polarizing our perceptions, we're not going to maximize our potential,

but we are going to maximize potential if we ask the right questions.

The quality of our life is based on the quality of the questions we ask.

And the most powerful questions that I know,

which our intuition is constantly attempting to do,

is to ask the questions that neutralizes and balances out the mind so we get

back into our executive center so we can maximize our fullest potential,

fullest bouquet of our expression of our brain. When we do,

creative genius is born, innovation is born.

When we are living by our highest values and pursuing challenges that inspire

us, we activate our most innovative mind.

So if we stop every day and live by priority and ask ourself,

what is the highest priority action I can be doing today at this moment to allow

me to maximize my potential and fulfill my highest value and purpose,

and do the greatest service to other people in the most efficient,

effective way, in a way that inspires me? If you do,

you're going to maximize your potential in life.

But if you allow yourself not to, and you're doing lower priority things,

and you're subordinating to everybody else or trying to judge people and putting

people on pedestals or pits and going into shames and prides in yourself and

lose your identity, you're not going to maximize your potential.

As Empedocles said, there's love and there's strife.

And when we're living in strife, we disempower ourselves.

When we live with love, we empower ourselves.

And love means that we're actually able to love ourselves with reflective

awareness and love other people.

And that means we're not able to let the perception,

the first initial perception run us,

we neutralize the perception instead of seeing something terrible,

we've immediately find the upsides.

Our intuition is always trying to bring the unconscious conscious to make us

fully conscious and mindful about our experience.

And the moment we actually do that, we liberate it.

We liberate it from the bondage of the misperceptions that caused us to react as

an animal, as a survival mechanism in our amygdala in our desire center.

And we allow ourselves not to be impulsively,

addictive and compulsive towards immediate gratifications.

But we look for longterm visions and longterm vision pays.

Longterm vision's what opens up the doors of possibility.

And longterm visions allows us to take whatever happens in our life and turn it

on the way, not in the way.

And that's why the quality of our life is based on the quality of the questions.

We want to be able to ask questions, no matter what's happening on the outside,

how to bring it back into balance on the inside. When we do we're poised,

we're present, we're purposeful, we're patient, we're in a sense prioritized,

and we're powerful. And that's where we actually have the greatest potential.

So our mind, maximizing our mental potential in a sense,

is literally maximizing our brain function,

which is actually living by what's most priority in our life and giving

ourselves to decide what it is that we want.

And then realizing that no matter what happens,

it has nothing to do with what's out there.

It has everything to do with how you perceived what's out there.

As so many great philosophers have said,

it's not what you're actually experiencing,

it's how you interpret what you're experiencing.

You can make a heaven or hell out of it.

And William James said that the greatest discovery of his generation is human

beings can alter their lives by altering their perceptions and attitudes of

mind. So we have the ability to do that by asking new questions.

That's why I want everybody to learn the Demartini Method.

Cause it's a tool that you can use in almost every application of your life,

in all 7 areas of life, your business, your intellectual capacities,

your economics, your family relationships, your social life,

your physical health and wellbeing, and your inspirations.

If you learn how to ask those questions and liberate yourself from the

misperceptions of the external world,

you don't have to be run from the world anymore, you can be run from within.

And as I said,

if you allow yourself that voice and vision on the inside to be louder than all

opinions on the outside, you begin to master your life.

You live as a victim of history when you let your reactions run you,

you live as a master of destiny if you go by what's really,

really important to you in life. Stick to priority.

This is the most significant thing that could be done to maximize human

potential. And realize that what you feed your mind is part of that perception.

If you're sitting there reading sensational, impulsive,

sensory distractions of the social mass media and sensate,

they sell sensation. They sell black and white.

If you're filling your day with that,

you're probably going to be activating your amygdala, your desire center,

not your executive center. You're probably going to react,

and then be all engaged in that and then distracted by that,

instead of asking yourself,

is this really the highest priority thing I can be spending my life on?

You know, I'd much rather read an Emerson's,

selective writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, go feed something,

my mind with something that's meaningful.

If you don't fill your mind with something that's meaningful,

which is what your intuition is trying to do,

it's going to be meaningless stuff. Don't let the outer world distract you.

Don't let the mass media,

the mass herd instincts and everything else distract you from being a master of

your life. Give yourself permission to shine, not shrink.

Give yourself permission to lead, not follow. Give yourself to be enormous,

not conformist.

And give yourself permission to go and follow what's really in your heart,

what's truly priority to you. That's why I have on my website,

dr.demartini.com a Value Determination process that I encourage people to go to,

to go and determine what you really value in life and stick to what's priority.

If you feed your life with the highest priority things you're going to grow,

and you're going to end up being a leader of your own destiny.

If you stop and look at what you feed your mind, intellectually,

what you do in your actions, you have control over perception, decisions,

and actions. If you prioritize perception, decisions, and actions,

no matter what happens, how's it helping you get what's meaningful, if it's,

if it's an up, what's the downside? What's the down, what's the upside?

To center it back into meaning. And if you take and prioritize your actions,

you're maximizing who you are.

Your potential is going to be an extreme elevations.

And you're going to be able to do things that you didn't even know you're

capable of doing.

I've seen people that are sitting there wallowing in frustrations and blaming

the world on the outside, all of a sudden stop, stop the story,

stop the drama, get focused on what's priority.

When you're doing what's highest in priority in the day,

you're on top of the world and you get those things done, you can,

you're adaptable, you're resilient.

When you're doing lower priority things and putting fires out throughout the day

and never get around to what's really important,

you're a bear and your life is emotional reactive. It's not hard to see.

It's really not rocket science. So prioritize your life.

Live by the executive center. Not let the amygdala run your life.

You're going to have stimulus that's going to do it, but then how fast,

your real potential is how fast you're able to take and regovern yourself when

you've been perturbed by misinterpretations of life.

The moment you're able to do that, you're a master.

The speed in which you see both sides of an event,

determines the level of conscious evolution you've obtain.

If you can see both sides simultaneously, and you center yourself,

you're constantly acting wisely. If not,

you're going to let the world on the outside run you.

I'd rather have the voice and the vision on the inside run me,

than the world around me.

I'd rather have the whole world against me than my own soul, is an old proverb,

still stands today.

And also just know that there's another little tool that I want to give you as a

gift to help you on that.

Because the magnitude of your vision will determine where you go in life.

And I have a special program called Awakening Your Astronomical Vision.

You know, there's some philosophers,

Teilhard de Chardin said that we have a spiritual state and we have a physical

state and the terrestrial state and the celestial state sometimes called,

and some people think of ourselves as terrestrial beings,

having a celestial experience, a spiritual experience,

others believe we're celestial beings having a terrestrial experience.

I'd like to think of it this way,

that the magnitude of space and time in your most dominant thought will

determine the level of conscious evolution you've obtained.

And the broader the vision you have,

you will see things neither positive nor negative,

you'll see things in transcendent. In a narrower vision,

you'll see things black and white,

and you're going to live in your primitive brain.

So this cassette that I'm giving you,

this Awakening Your Astronomical Vision and it's a live presentation I did at a

planetarium in Johannesburg to a group of CEOs and YPO

members. And we talked about how to expand our influence on the world,

how to create a legacy, how to have a bigger vision.

You're only going to grow as big as your vision,

and people who are living in their forebrain, not their hind brain,

their executive center, not their desire center,

are the ones that are going to expand and go do something and make a bigger

difference in the world. So if you want to make a bigger difference,

have a bigger vision, be more inspired, more spontaneously active,

get this CD. I promise you you'll watch it more than once.

And you'll be mind blown by the information that's in there.

Cause it's conducive to help you start taking prioritized actions in your life.

So it'll dovetail perfectly what we just got through saying.

I have another program, it's called Accessing Your 7 Greatest Powers.

This is about how to take the seven areas of your life; mental genius,

business success, financial independence, family love and intimacy,

social leadership and power, physical health and wellbeing,

and spiritual immortality and truth.

How to activate and awaken empowerment in all areas.

Cause any area of your life you don't empower,

other people are going to overpower.

So this is practical applications of action steps you can do to empower

those areas relative to your values, while you're prioritizing your life.

And then you can give yourself permission to live from the voice and the vision

on the inside, not all the external distractions and mass media and

social events and all the things on the outside. Take command of your life,

it's your life. At the end of your life, you're going to be asked a question;

Did you do everything you could with everything you were given?

You want to be able to say I did. I absolutely went for it.

[Inaudible].

Thank you for joining me for this presentation today.

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