You have control over your perceptions, decisions and actions and no matter what happens in your life you have a choice on how you respond. Join Dr Demartini and discover how no matter what you’ve been through; no matter what you are going through; you can make a heaven out of your hell or a hell out of your heaven if you know how to balance your perceptions and extract the deeper meaning and the hidden order out of each event you perceive.

This content is for educational and personal development purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any psychological or medical conditions. The information and processes shared are for general educational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional mental-health or medical advice. If you are experiencing acute distress or ongoing clinical concerns, please consult a licensed health-care provider.

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Anytime we become synthesized and balanced in our perception,

the more advanced part of the brain comes online. So the question is,

would you like to be master of your destiny or do you want to be a victim of

your history?

If we look very carefully at our nervous system,

we have what is called a primitive nervous system,

which is what's called the diffuse nervous system and the central nervous

system.

The peripheral sensory input from the world around us

and the peripheral motor output to the world around us is

the diffuse, primitive, old nervous system, you might say,

from the epithelium and subdermal areas of the brain and of the skin.

Then there's a central nervous system, which is primarily interneurons.

You have sensory neurons coming in,

interneurons and motor neurons,

and they're primarily for sensory perception and

decision, and motor actions.

So those are the three basic types of neurons that we have.

And the central nervous system is the one that we are here to design to be able

to govern our perceptions and actions.

The most primitive nervous system was a,

what they called like a deep tendon reflex

when somebody puts their leg over each other and hits it with a little reflex

hammer, a reflex that just goes without having any control.

So if you put your knee over it and hit it with that reflex hammer and it just

jerks, that's what is called a mono synaptic reflex.

That means you have a sensory nerve going in, it goes right onto a motor nerve,

there's no interneurons, there's no central nervous system really involved,

it's just a two peripheral nerves coming in, one sensory, one motor,

one the back, one the front of the brain or the spinal cord,

and you get this reaction. It's all or none, either fires or doesn't fire.

That's why you got to hit a bunch of times. Sometimes it fires,

sometimes it doesn't.

And you kind of don't have much control over that.

You can sit there and try to overrule it, but your knee's going to jerk.

And that's where you don't have control over your perceptions and your actions.

But when information comes in and then goes up the spinal cord,

up these tracks and goes into the brain stem and up into the brain itself,

as it does, the number of interneurons grows exponentially.

And when you do, you now have new associations you make with the stimulus.

And because of the most advanced part of the brain can govern the motor

response, you can now decide how you're going to respond.

So you have these evoked potentials coming in from sensory and motor

responses, like deep tendon reflex,

and you have spontaneous responses inside the brain where you're

basically taking command of what you see or sense and what you decide to do

with it. I always say that when we're living in the most primitive one,

we're kind of like victims of our environment, victims of our history.

But when we let the more advanced central nervous system,

the integrator take command, we become masters of our destiny.

So if you want to awaken your mastery and take command of your perceptions,

decisions, and actions, you want to go up into the higher areas of the brain.

Now this is an interesting phenomenon.

Why do we have such a stimulus response,

a conditioned reflex, or an unconditioned reflex, and then,

how do we then add to it condition reflex,

like Pavlov had put or Skinner had put, upper conditioning,

where you take a stimulus and you add new associations on it,

change the perceptions of it and then decide, okay,

I'm not going to react that way, I'm going to act a different way.

For many years now, three and a half decades almost,

I have been teaching a program called the Breakthrough Experience.

And in there I've been doing what I've introduced what is called the Demartini

Method, where we take perceptions and change the perceptions,

change the ratios of perceptions,

change the levels of the brain that are firing and change our response to a

stimuli.

I always say that there's nothing your mortal body can experience that your

immortal soul, the authentic you, the unconditionally loving you,

can't transcend and govern. So the more we go up in the brain,

the more governance we have,

the more we go down to the primitive part of the brain,

the more we're victims of our world around us.

We're either a follower and run by the world externally or we're a leader and

run from within.

I always say that a master listens to their physiology and intuition,

introspectively, instead of having to listen,

extrospectively to the outside world, to politics and religion,

which runs people's life, the moralities of that.

And most people are subordinating to that and letting the outside stimuli run

them, the news, the tv, the magazines, the newspapers, et cetera,

instead of actually running from within.

Living by design instead of living by reaction.

We actually have two parts of our brain as we go up the brain.

We have a subcortical area of the brain called systems 1 thinking that's

involved in immediate fast conducting emotional reactions from stimuli.

And then we have the more advanced part of the brain, prefrontal cortex,

which is systems 2 thinking, which is more governed, a little slower,

where we think before we react.

We have a choice in our life to think before we react or react before we think.

If we're in survival, we typically react before we think. If we're in thrival,

we tend to think before we react.

So what is it that makes the difference between having a diffuse primitive

nervous system and reactions run our life vs an advanced mastery?

Okay, so listen carefully and take the notes.

The ratios of your perception determine what areas of the brain and what

neurotransmitters and what parts of the interneurons are firing.

So if you have an event to come along,

let's say you meet somebody that you're enamored with,

infatuated with and look up to,

and all of a sudden you are conscious of the upsides and unconscious of any

downsides, highly infatuated. Well,

the ratio of perception is most all positive and no negative,

or more positive and less negative.

The stronger that reaction, the more it's all positive and no negative,

or mostly positive and very little negative,

the more the primitive response goes off.

Because now it represents prey and our brain sets up impulses because of this

subjectively biased interpretation of our reality,

sets up impulses with adrenaline to capture the prey to eat,

because it's something we want to eat.

That's why when we are infatuated with people,

we want to kiss them or we want to hug them, we want to consume them,

if you will. But we can also have the other side of the equation.

We could have something that represents a predator to us,

that we're conscious of the downsides and unconscious of the upsides and

it's all negative and no positive or mostly negative and less positive.

And now we have an instinct that fires off,

a gut instinct just like we had a gut impulse when we were consuming it,

a gut instinct to avoid it and to get the adrenaline going to get the heck out

of there. And this is a survival response.

So anytime we have a subjectively bias, skew, distorted,

exaggerated, or minimized perception,

where we're conscious of the positives and unconscious of the negatives or

unconscious of the negatives, conscious of the negatives,

unconscious of the positives,

we automatically fire off the diffuse and the primitive part of the nervous

system. And when it's all positive and no negative,

it's like a mono synaptic reflex. We have no control over it,

because we got to get out of it or we got to get it.

But if it's more balanced and we bring it into a balanced state,

it goes past the primitive system goes up into the most advanced part of the

brain, we now think logically,

objectively with reason and we now act without

reacting. Because we're now not in emergency.

We're not starving for food and fearing the loss of food or frightened about

predator, about to be eaten. So anytime we're in a highly polarized state,

the primitive system comes online and anytime we become synthesized and balanced

in our perception, the more advanced part of the brain comes onine.

So the question is would you like to be master of your destiny or do you want to

be a victim of your history?

Do you want to have systems 2 running your life where you're thinking before

reacting or systems 1, where you're reacting before thinking,

do you you want to act reasonable or emotional? Now some might say,

Well I'm going to probably do both. Most likely you will in your life.

And if you are overrun by your emotional reactions,

you'll have a dramatic life, highly polarized,

dramatic life and people that are extremely dramatic end up being labeled

bipolar, unstable, emotional with volatility.

And as you know, that's not the way to master your life. As Warren Buffet says,

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

Robert Greene says, until you can manage your emotions,

don't expect to be a leader. If you can't manage your emotions,

don't expect to have a stable health wellbeing.

So anytime we can bring our mind back into balance,

our perceptions back into balance, we help our most advanced part of our brain,

the blood, glucose,

and oxygen goes into the forebrain when we have a balanced perspective and it

goes into the amygdala and down into the hindbrain and into the spinal cord when

we don't. So one is survival, as I said, and the other's thrival,

you decide where you want play, this is it.

You can awaken up the most advanced part and take command and master your life

or you can just let yourself, you know, without any effort, just keep reacting.

So I developed in the Breakthrough Experience a methodology that I've

incorporated in it called the Demartini Method.

And so I want you to just listen really carefully to some of the language and

the wording of the questions because the quality of your life's based on the

quality of the questions you ask.

Questions bring unconscious information conscious.

If you want to write something, write that down.

The questions you ask in your life is what makes you concentrate on what you're

focused on.

So if you ask quality questions and make unconscious information conscious,

you can take the polarized perspective and become fully conscious.

Because if you're infatuated, you're conscious of the upsides,

unconscious of the downside, if you're resentful,

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

When you're in love, you're conscious of both sides.

True love is not an emotion of polarity,

although most people think infatuation and confuse it with love.

Infatuation is seeing all the positives, not the negatives.

And resentment's seeing all the negatives, not the positives,

but true love is embracing both. So if you want more love in life,

if you want true gratitude in life or grace in life,

it's knowing how to ask the question to make you conscious of the part you're

unconscious of to balance out the perceptions,

so you go into the forebrain so you can take command of your life,

the path of mastery. The forebrain is called the executive center.

If you want to be an executive and paid like an executive and function like an

executive and rise up the social game,

it's to your advantage to learn how to balance your perspective.

So in the Breakthrough Experience, when I teach the Demartini Method,

I basically ask people the question,

let's say you're highly resentful to somebody and you're conscious of the

downsides, unconscious of the upsides. You ask a question; What specific trait,

action,

or inaction do I perceive this individual displaying or demonstrating

that I despise, dislike, hate, most or want to avoid most?

And I define it, instead of nebulous. By the way,

you never have fear of the unknown,

you have fear of the content that's in your mind.

So if you actually have a resentment,

you have content in the mind that's giving you that feeling,

that emotional response. So what you do is you go back and what specific trait,

action,

inaction do you perceive this individual displaying or demonstrating that you

despise, dislike or hate or want to avoid most? And get it clear what that is,

what exactly is it? And it can't be something somebody

It can't be broad, vague generalities and labels,

like terrible person or abusive.

That's not a specific action.

Specific action is they verbally criticized me Tuesday.

And and you don't want to write down you know how it made you feel,

because that's your feeling, and you're in control of your feelings, not,

I want to know what their actions are.

And then you don't want to put down something that's

You want to have something that's emotional in your language.

So what you do is you basically write down what they did. Then,

that makes you now conscious of what you're reacting to.

And if you're not conscious of it and you're just unconsciously reacting to

things, we call it anxiety.

But if you become conscious of what's actually triggering a reaction,

that's because most of our reactions are because of past experiences from

childhood to all the way to where we are today that are stored in the

subconscious mind that are impulses and instincts that are there because of

imbalanced perspectives in the past that this is now reminding us of.

Once we identify what it is, we go to the second question,

and you say this to yourself, All right John,

go to a moment where and when I perceive myself displaying or

demonstrating that same or similar specific trait, action,

or inaction that I disliked in them.

And at first you're going to be too proud to want to admit that you do that.

But as it's been stated for thousands of years in biblical writings and

philosophers and now in psychology,

you will not resent somebody on the outside unless they're reminding you of

something you have on the inside that you feel ashamed of.

Just like you will not admire somebody on the outside unless they're reminding

you of something you're too humble to admit,

but you actually have that you admire in yourself that you're proud of.

You only see on the outside parts of what's going on on the inside.

So if you go in there and identify where you did it, when you did it,

to whom you did it to and who perceived you doing it,

as you accumulate that until the quantity and quality of where you've done it is

equal to theirs,

you start to realize that you got a finger pointing at them and three back at

yourself who are you to judge that individual. When you do,

you calm down some of the reaction,

you now identify what the reaction is stimulated by, that reflex,

you now look at what you're doing, because the second you do it,

you're a little less judging and you take out some of the polarity,

some of the highly conscious and unconscious content

balance. Then you go one step further.

You ask now go to a moment where and when you perceive this individual

displaying or demonstrating the specific trait, action,

or in action that you dislike or despise most, are you there?

Make sure you're there in that moment,

because in the moment of perception is where conscious and unconscious content

splits and we then been become unconscious of things and we just get

subjectively biased distorting things.

We create an opinion instead of a fact about what's happening.

And we distort our reality. So the moment we go there at that moment,

from that moment till now, how is their behavior a service to you,

a benefit to you? What's the advantages? The upsides?

You see any trait that's on this planet,

it would've gone extinct if it didn't have some function or service on the

planet. Just because you haven't seen it,

just because you've inculcated maybe some moral hypocrisies about how life's

supposed to be and fantasies about people are supposed to be one-sided and never

both sided, doesn't mean that that behavior doesn't serve.

So I've been doing this now for nearly four decades,

three and a half decades and more,

and I am certain that if you look and you don't make anything up,

but if you look carefully you can find the blessings and benefits to anything.

And if you look at it and I've taken people through most horrendous stuff and

found the blessings in it, turned it into an opportunity,

instead of having reaction and having post traumatic stress disorder,

they're now going back and you might say post traumatic bless disorder or

order, because now you're seeing the upsides.

If you stack up the advantages and make the advantages and keep going and keep

going and find the advantages and see how it helps you spiritually,

intellectually, in business, in your finances, in your family, in your health,

in your social life,

in your spiritual quest and look at how it's serving your highest values and

what's most important to you and what you feel your mission in life is.

If you ask and keep stacking up the benefits,

when the benefits equal the drawbacks,

it's no longer something that you're conscious of the negatives on and not

conscious of the positives on, you're now fully conscious of both.

And all of a sudden the thing,

instead of having a reaction where you're now got an instinct to avoid it,

and it's running you and you have no choice over it

you now have given yourself permission to take command of your life.

Now if you go a further step and you now go to a moment where and when you

perceive yourself displaying or demonstrating it,

to who you've demonstrated to and who perceives you doing it,

and then look at how it served those individuals.

Because otherwise you're carrying around shame and guilt and anything you feel

shame and guilt about is stored in your subconscious mind is going to keep

bringing in people into your life that push your button. It's your button,

their action is their action, but your button is your button.

And your button is stored imbalance perspectives,

stored as reverberating circuits in the brain that haven't been balanced and

that automatically make you like an animal reacting from that subconscious

state. And you're now like that reflex hammer, you have no control,

you keep reacting,

this person pushes my buttons and you want to falsely attribute they're the

cause of the way you're reacting,

but they're not the cause because you can take command of your life by asking

the quality questions and balance out your perceptions and change your reactions

to whatever's happening in your life. And the moment you do,

you change the area of the brain and you go up into it.

And the more associations you make, the higher the brain areas you go.

When you do,

you now have a governed behavior and your actions are refined like a dimmer

switch instead of all or none, it's now graced.

And now you're functioning from a graceful state.

There's what they call the cortical spinal track,

which is a track of nerves that go all the way from the very peripheral area of

the cortex all the way down to the front of the brain where the motor neurons

are.

And what's interesting if all of a sudden you have a balanced orientation that

fires and it brings fine governed refined

skills in your motor actions, grace.

But if not you have a spastic reflex, get the heck out of there quick, impulse,

instinct, jerk responses.

So by asking the question and finding out how what you did served others,

you dissolve the shame and guilt.

Now if you go a step further and ask the question,

go to a moment where and when you perceive this individual that you are judging

and resenting, displaying or demonstrating the exact opposite behavior to you.

Because the truth is they have both sides. You support them,

they can be nice to you, you challenge them, they can be mean, you support them,

they can be generous to you, challenge them, they can be you know,

stingy to you. They're going to have both sides.

And to label somebody one side and not see both sides is not to fully appreciate

the wholeness of another individual.

So if you balance out that equation and see both sides,

all of a sudden your reaction to them again, calms down.

You're bringing things back into homeostasis, back into balance.

As Walter Cannon, his book, The Wisdom of Body,

the second we do our physiology emerges more effectively

and we start having wellness, we start having less reaction.

We start to have governance mastery.

We start to be inspired by our life instead of reactive to the outside

circumstances, victim of our history.

Then if we go a step further and find out at that exact moment when they're

doing this, who in our life,

in our mind or in reality is playing out the opposite role?

Nature has a balancing act.

When I was in my twenties I wrote a book on the Illusional Basis of Man's Health

and Disease and how perception illusions created illness.

And I found out that all perceptions are contrast.

Wilhelm Wundt around 130 years ago wrote about simultaneous and

sequential contrast in the brain. Every perceptions compared to its opposite.

If you infatuate something you resent its opposite.

If you resent something you infatuate with its opposite.

They're simultaneous in the brain,

the brain has memory and anti-memory to balance things.

If you find that out and find the opposite at the same moment that it's being

compared to because you can't,

you can't have a reaction to something unless you compare it to its opposite.

The moment you find that out and balance that and see them simultaneously,

you'll realize there was nothing there except a great opportunity to teach you

how to be authentic. Because when you resent something,

you puff yourself up in pride and that's inauthentic.

When you infatuate with something,

you minimize yourself in shame and that's inauthentic.

But if you balance out the equation,

you get to be authentic and every human being wants to be loved and appreciate

for who they are, not for the fantasies we make on ourselves.

And then we have one last question and another question.

I actually have a whole series of them, about 80 questions,

but these are the first series of them, first octave.

Go to the moment where and when you perceived them displaying this trait,

at that moment, if they had done the opposite of what they did,

and they'd been verbally crying to you, for instance,

instead of verbally critical, what would've been the drawback?

Because as long as you're addicted and have a fantasy about how life's supposed

to be, one sided,

you're not going to appreciate the other side that comes with it.

Life has two sides, like a yin and yang sign.

And if you don't appreciate that Taoist understanding of the pair of opposites

in life,

you're going to constantly be trying to avoid something in life and seek

something in life.

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

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

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

So I go through and I have people ask those seven questions in the Breakthrough

Experience, and they take resentments that they've had for days, weeks, months,

years, or decades, and it dissolves away. We dissolve it.

And we also take infatuations dissolve it.

We take prides within ourselves and dissolve it.

Shames in ourselves and dissolve it.

All the emotions that are stored in the subconscious mind that are causing

impulse and instincts and causing us to react from the external world are all

dissolvable.

And that's why I want you to know that you have the power to awaken your mastery

and take command of your perceptions, decisions, and actions.

That's what this message is about.

And if for some reason you would like to master that skill, man,

I love helping people do that.

That's what I love teaching in the Breakthrough Experience.

The Demartini Method.

HI've been developing it for five decades and the method has been incorporated

in the Breakthrough Experience for 30 something years now.

So if you would love to master your life,

come and join me at what I call the Breakthrough Experience.

It's my signature program that I've done in 1154 times in many,

many countries around the world to over a hundred thousand people. And,

I just know that if an individual is to apply the method,

they could use that the rest of their life to dissolve the baggage that

accumulates. And if you're in a deep,

intimate relationship and that accumulates,

you know what happens in relationships, if that happens at work,

if it happens in your social life, it's affecting your health.

Everything you judge on the outside is making you judge something on the inside

at the same time.

And that's you weighing yourself down with gravitational baggage instead of

lifting yourself up with radiational wisdom.

So if you'd like to have systems 2 thinking run your

come to the Breakthrough Experience.

The Breakthrough Experience is the path of mastery. You master your mind,

you master your life. And in the process of doing it,

I can teach you a whole bunch of new advantage principles that you can do that

can help you master your life,

help you identify what your values are and help you get clear about what's

priority to you and help you learn how to communicate effectively in other

people's values, what's important to you, how to delegate things,

how to take command,

how to increase your self worth so you can have more deserve and more wealth in

your life. How to have more effective,

respectful communication to the people you interact with.

How to have equanimity and equity when you're dealing with transactions and

people in business and in financial matters.

There's so many benefits from coming to the Breakthrough Experience and how to

not sit there and put people on pedestals and pits, the questions to ask.

The first seven I just gave you is just seven of many.

There's just literally 80 questions in that method that allows you to master

your life. So if you would love to master your life,

come and join me at the Breakthrough Experience.

I'm absolutely certain it can make a difference in your life.

I've asked people all these years since I've been teaching at the end of the

program,

How many of you learned something this weekend that you could have gone your

whole life and not learn if you hadn't been here? Every hand goes up.

Because it's 24 hours with me. You just got about 30 minutes with me.

But 24 hours going through and practically applying new questions,

the quality of your life's based on the quality of the questions you ask.

If you're ready to go and transform your life and not be victim of history and

be a master of destiny and take command of your perceptions,

decisions and actions and take command of your brain so you can live in the

executive function instead of just the amygdala function,

then come and join me at the Breakthrough Experience.

I'm absolutely certain it can make a difference in your life.

Let me help you do that exact thing for your life. And until next week,

this is Dr. Demartini. I love you.

Make sure you take command of your perceptions, decisions,

and actions starting today. I'll see you at the Breakthrough.