There is an innate wisdom that has passed down through the ages and many people on the path to self mastery have found their unique path, unaware of the parallel path they share with fellow life mastery seekers. In this episode, Dr John Demartini will weave together the perennial wisdom of the ages. You’ll come away with an appreciation of the broader terms that all lead in the same direction. Like multiple languages all saying the same thing.

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The cortex is design, particularly the cortical spinal tract,

is to govern and take these vicissitudes and these volatilities and these

instabilities and these inequities and integrate them, so we have governance.

For thousands of years,

humans have had a desire

to master their life.

And what that means is to go beyond just survival,

to master their own governance within their own body,

for health purposes, and also master their environment around them.

And throughout the centuries and millennia, there have been individuals,

sometimes called wise men and women,

who probe deeper into those mysteries and solutions than others,

and they with English language and other languages,

put together what they had learned on that mastery.

And I'd like to discuss that perennial wisdom that has been flowing for the last

few thousand years, since written recorded history.

And so this is why you wanna take a note maybe.

Because there's been parallel paths in various

call cultures over different times really saying very similar messages.

I'll use somebody local and I'll go back in time, forward and backward.

There was a gentleman named Abraham Maslow,

who wrote a book called Personality and Motivation.

And he described a state called self actualization.

And he said that there were people that were in survival

and security and socialization,

and then self-esteem, and self-actualization.

And he said that there was a scale of degrees of mastery,

from surviving and basically not having, you know,

oxygen and water and food and this types of thing,

reproduction and clothing and security of a secure place to live

in, to eventually self-actualizing,

to have none of those concerns and to be able to do something extraordinary with

your, forebrain capacities. So he called the term,

self-actualization, what I'm calling self mastery. That was his term.

He said there was the reality of the senses,

that were hallucinative and elusive,

and then there was the actual objective truth out there.

And self-actualization was coming to the realization where you actually see

things as they are, not as you assume they are.

And the magnificence of the way they are is far greater than the fantasies we

impose as a result of our incomplete awarenesses of our environment.

Carl Jung called this same path in a sense, a state of synchronicity,

where you are integrating the pairs of opposites,

the unconscious and the conscious sometimes called.

Leibniz used the same term in his times.

He's the one that kind of coined the idea of the unconscious and conscious.

But Jung put that together in his Mysterium Coniunctionis text.

And he said the path of synchronicity,

where you've extracted out space and time from the mind and become present,

that's another term for that same path.

And each of these individuals had ways of doing it,

but they all had something in common; the integration of opposites.

In the fifth century BC, there was a guy named Empedocles,

I don't know if that's the proper spelling, the proper statement,

but I'd call Empedocles.

And he said there was love and strife,

and people that were masterful were able to perceive and

act out of love.

And the people that were less masterful lived in strife and caused strife,

they were polarized in their view and exaggerating and minimizing themselves.

I always say that, at the level of the true,

authentic self nothing's missing in you.

I was with the Bonpo lama in Nepal and he said 'nothing missing,

nothing missing'. At the level of the soul,

the state of unconditional love, the state of authenticity,

we have that awareness., The gnostics called it pleroma, fullness.

But the Bonpo lama was describing, 'there's nothing missing, it's full',

but majority of people are feeling empty.

And every time you judge another individual and perceive them beneath

you, and you're too proud to admit what you see in them is inside you,

have emptiness.

And if you put them above you and you're too humble to admit what you see in

them inside you, you have emptiness. Disowned parts we called it,

you haven't integrated all your parts. So what one person calls integration,

another person calls self-actualization, another person called synchronicity.

Cause when you actually put those pairs of conscious and unconscious parts

together,

because when you're infatuated with somebody you're conscious of the upside's,

unconscious of the downsides.

When you're resentful to somebody you're conscious of the downside's,

unconscious of the upsides. When you put the conscious and unconscious together,

you're aware of both sides, you have fullness, pleroma,

and synchronicity of opposites. And you have now, self-actualized states,

because you're now not missing anything. And you're full.

Some have actually called it equanimity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson called it transcendence. Kohlberg

The highest level of moral reality, if you will,

moral actuality is the transcendent state where you've transcended the moral

hypocrisies of the judgements below of incomplete awarenesses, subjective bias.

In the Gita, they called it as it is,

om tat sat, as it is.

And Krishna was the individual who represented that in the incarnation

and taught Arjuna which represented the part that was unaware,

not masterful yet, listening to the master.

In Buddhism they call it mindfulness, because nothing's missing.

The Buddha says the desire for that which is unobtainable,

and the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable,

is the source of human suffering.

But the things we infatuate with that we're conscious of the upsides to and

unconscious of the downsides to, is unobtainable.

We can't get a one sided state in life.

It's like taking a magnet and dividing in half and expecting to get a one sided

magnet. In magnetism or in chemistry, it's the pursuit of neutrality.

And all of chemistry is trying to look for the octet rule to be able to have a

neutral, rare noble gas state. It's called a rare nobility,

in chemistry. And I think of love as the balance of those two.

So the pursuit of love is actually that.

So in every field,

in another field it's called equanimity and equity,

in the Christian writings,

they said Christ represented a state of equanimity and sin was the

inequities, again, the the polarities,

the subjective biases instead of being objectively true. In neuroscience,

we call the integration and the synchronization and

simultaneity of the firing of the brain. In fact, if we have a perfect

synchronicity, you get a gamma burst of realization,

and photons are born in the brain, you get literally enlightenment in the brain,

biophotons. And in the state of this integration,

this executive center is self-governed.

So you have the path of mastery when you're self-governed.

If you look at the works of prioritization,

you'll see that under studies of priority,

you'll find out that when people live by their highest value,

as Aristotle called the telos, they awaken the blood, glucose,

and oxygen into the forebrain and awaken the executive center. And the executive

center's the one that governs all that below and is involved in inspired vision,

strategic planning,

to anticipate what's with the future and imagination,

what could go wrong and prepare for it so you're not reactive, you're proactive,

the path of mastery, executing the plans and self-governance.

So whether you're in business and you call it prioritization and delegation of

lower priority things, to be able to become a great executive,

it's the same story.

In neuroscience we know that there's what they call lateralization of the brain

when you're emotional, but when you're centered,

you have an integration of the brain. So we could call again, integration.

So no matter what field we go into, neuroscience, we go into neurology,

go into endocrinology, endocrinology we have a balance of hormones.

In neurotransmitter studies, we have a balance of neurotransmitters.

And then Wisdom Of The Body by Walter Cannon and Claude Bernard in his Intérieur

Milieu said that there's an innate wisdom in the body that brings homeostasis,

to bring things back into perfect order.

I'm a firm believer that everything that's going on in your life,

no matter what it is, physiological, psychological,

sociological or theological,

is nothing but a feedback mechanism to get you to authenticity.

The term that's authenticity today is really this state of mastery,

the path of mastery. Because the magnificence of who you truly are,

is far greater than all the fantasies you'll impose on yourself.

When you're not living by highest priority you feel unfulfilled.

When you're unfulfilled,

you then look for me to gratification to fulfill yourself,

and you activate your blood, glucose, and oxygen into the amygdala.

The amygdala then tries to avoid predator and seek prey, avoid pain,

seek pleasure and look for immediate gratification, and pursues hedonistic,

immediate gratification, addictive, impulsive, and compulsive behaviors,

which is not mastery.

But when you live by highest priority and you feel fulfilled doing what you

really love to do, you are moving in the path of self-actualization.

That's why in every class I talk about, I talk about values.

Because if you live by your highest value, you're on the path of mastery.

Whenever you're not in the path of mastery,

you tend to polarize yourself instead of synthesize yourself.

And when you polarize yourself, when you're infatuate,

whatever you infatuate with, literally consumes your mind.

It's called brain noise. It's literally called static in the brain.

It's called evoke potentials.

There's hundreds of writers referring to these in different terms.

And the second you do, when you're highly infatuated,

you can barely sleep at night because you're preoccupied by that what you're

infatuated with. And if you're highly resentful, the same thing.

So anytime you're polarized with infatuation, resentments,

and seeking and avoiding, and impulsive and instinctual,

and you're basically distracted, you're not present, you're not centered,

you're not self-actualizing, you're in you might say the animal mind,

reacting. In the study of neurology there used to be a systems 1 and

a system 2 type of thinking system.

1 is like this animal brain where you're emotionally reacting before you're

thinking. System 2 is thinking before you react and having governance.

System 2 is a byproduct of living by priority.

And it's a byproduct of putting your conscious and unconscious together.

Your intuition is actually trying to reveal to you your unconscious

to make it equal to the conscious so you could be fully conscious.

And when you do, you have now reason. So the philosophers called it reason,

some of the mystics called it the logos. It was called pleroma by the gnostics.

It was called enlightenment by the Buddhists and by

It was called presence. Just like in quantum physics,

if you have a particle of light, which is timeless, spaceless, massless,

and chargeless, and divided into its particle and antiparticles,

a positron electron, they're spending forward in time, backward in time,

an imaginary particle, a memory particle, and they're both polarized,

and when you're spinning forward in time and you're positive or negative,

you're only seeing half the equation, instead of neutral.

When you have a neutral mind, which is objectivity, you have enlightenment.

So you take the positron and electron mentality, positive and negative emotions,

and integrate them, You have enlightenment. So no

in mathematics it's the integration versus the differentiation,

breaking things down and integrating things up, in space and time.

When you extract out the space and time from the mind you become present.

In ontology, it's becoming, we call it the essence of being.

And when we're not in integrated state and we're in a disintegrated state,

we're in the existence of becoming, where we wear personas and masks,

instead of actually awakening our inner being.

We call it asleep when we're not alive to both sides,

we are unconscious of things, and we call it awakened.

We're in the flow because we're effective and efficient in our nerve conduction

pathways. We call it myelinization, the glials in the brain,

the glial cells myelinate in the forebrain when we're in a self-actualized

state, and when we're not, we're under a highly emotional state,

a distress state, we're myelinating that amygdala again.

Distress is the perception of fear of that which we seek,

and a fear of gain of what we,

the loss of what we seek and a fear of gain of what we're trying to avoid.

So we are under a stress mode and not in master mode,

whenever we're in that polarization.

It's called in a sense unity consciousness by some writers.

And in a sense, it's a science.

So whether you study it by philosophy and called it integration,

or you use the dialectic in philosophy by Zeno and you integrate, or Hegel,

when you take the thesis and the anti thesis,

and you synthesize that and create the synthesis,

which is a spiritual awareness according to Hegel.

A God consciousness, if you will, if you want to think by the theologians.

Or if you go by a, perfectly by Sy Augustine,

he called the will of God was equilibrium,

and when the will of man matches the will of God, he's equilibrated,

he's present with the divine nature.

The divine nature was an enlightened state where you're fully aware about the,

an omnipresent awareness, if you will,

or at least a relative one to what you experience.

So no matter what pathway we've taken through the ages, no matter what the path,

there is a common thread to it.

And this led me in this pursuit studying thousands of different writers over the

last, nearly 50 years now, what is the common thread to them?

You know, when Empedocles talked about, he talked about the four elements,

he said when the four elements are integrated,

you have the quintessence fifth element, which is love.

When they're disintegrated, you have the four elements,

which break things down and everything that's in the existential world is broken

down into those parts. Now, the question is,

is what's the science of integrating all these parts?

How do we actually self actualize the path of that?

That's what I've been interested in. And one thing's common,

it's about the brain. In fact,

if you look at the history of this entire journey from the very esoteric and

animistic, earliest religious writers, to the mystics,

to the shamans, to eventually the mystic religious, the mythologists,

and the religious people,

and then the philosophical people and the metaphysical and philosophical people,

then finally into the scientific age, no matter what we do,

you can see it's an evolution of the brain.

So anything we can do in neuroscience today,

they can evolve the brain and help us integrate the brain,

which is what the brain is designed to do. It's it's designed to,

in the thalamus,

which is kind of the filtering gating mechanism for all the sensory experience,

before it goes into the cortex, it basically is there to integrate it.

And the cortex is designed,

particularly the cortical spinal tract is to govern and take these

vicissitudes and these volatilities and these instabilities and these inequities

and integrate them, so we have governance in our life.

Our brain is doing everything it can to help us have governance and to be

authentic and be inspired. An inspired path.

I always say the transcendental state is gratitude, love, inspiration,

enthusiasm, certainty, and presence.

These are the culmination of an authentic pathway.

And every week when I teach the Breakthrough Experience program,

which is my seminar designed to help people do that exact thing,

to help them on the path of mastery.

I developed a science that integrates all these philosophers and thinkers and

mystics throughout the ages, and the scientists and neuroscientists,

to try to make a simple, duplicatable, reproducible, transcribable,

translatable system,

and holds you methodically accountable to perceptions that

are keeping you from being on your path of mastery. Let me give you an example.

You meet somebody and maybe you're enamored with them,

and maybe you're infatuated with them,

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

Well, when you do that, you tend to,

are too humble to admit what you see in them inside you,

you put them on a pedestal.

And now you are now conscious of your downsides and unconscious of some of your

upsides.

You have a false positive on their upsides and a false negative on their

downsides.

And then you have a false positive on your downsides and a false negative on

your upsides.

And so you skew it with a subjective and you're not really seeing what's

actually there. And whenever you do,

you tend to inject their values into your life.

It tends to cloud the clarity of your own mission in life,

what you feel called and inspired, the difference you wanna make in life,

the inspiration, the path of self-actualization as

And the moment you do that, you give them power and you minimize you.

And when you do,

you're not being authentic to yourself because you're now beneath yourself.

Anytime you're shamed and minimizing yourself relative to somebody else,

you're exaggerating them and minimizing you, and that's not you,

that's not your authentic self.

And this time you resent somebody and you put 'em down in the pit and you tend

to act too proud to admit what I see in them inside me, I would never do that,

I pride myself in never being that way.

Now you exaggerate yourself and you're not being authentic.

When you minimize yourself, that's inauthentic. When you exaggerate yourself,

that's inauthentic. When you come back into balance, then you become authentic.

So your intuition is trying to ask you prompt in your awareness,

the downsides to the things you're infatuated with and

you're resentful to, to bring things back into balance, to have homeostasis,

to be able to have self actualization, to see things as they actually are,

not as you thought they were with your senses in reality,

the realization of your senses which are hallucinative and elusive at best,

and see things as they really are.

When you actually come to that realization and bring yourself back into balance,

you have equanimity within yourself. You're not exaggerating or minimizing,

you have equity between you and other people.

That means you now have sustainable fair exchange,

which allows you to maximize your mental function, less noise,

because there's nothing distracting you, no infatuation, resentment,

making up the bondage in the mind, and distractions, the evoked potentials.

Now you have spontaneous action.

And that takes you to your highest value where you're in spontaneously acting

out of inspiration. And now you have, you know,

sustainable fair exchange. You now have a more balanced business.

You have more of a way of making income. People wanna do business with you,

because you're not trying to get something for nothing or trying to give

something for nothing. If you try to give something for nothing,

you're gonna try to not want to continue business with somebody.

If you try to get something for nothing,

they're not gonna wanna do business with you.

But if you give a fair exchange that's sustainable, we both want to continue,

which maximizes economics,

maximizes your potential in business and allows equity theory to maximize.

These are all things that occur on your path of mastery.

And in your social life, the same thing, you know,

you can either be a follower of a culture or you can lead a culture.

If you lead a culture, it's because you're exemplifying authenticity.

And every human being wants to be around people that are demonstrating this

authenticity, because it's inspiring, it's enthusiastic,

it's literally somebody who's grateful,

somebody who's loving what they're doing,

somebody who's inspired and present and certain about what they're doing.

That magnetizes and draws people to them.

So whenever you're living authentically, you get to maximize your social life.

You get to take out the noise of your brain.

You get to have the greatest creativity,

because when you're living by what's highest on your value inspired you end up

taking on challenges instead of avoiding 'em.

And when you pursue challenges that inspire you, you create innovation,

creativity and genius. So you wake up your genius,

you have more stable business development,

you have more income in relationships when you're in authentic state,

you communicate in fair exchange with them.

They wanna be with you because that's what they wanna be loved through,

who they are.

Not who you wanna make them by changing them or changing you relative to them.

You automatically your physiology and your autonomic nervous system,

the prefrontal cortex activates the hypothalamus,

the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the brain.

The hypothalamus runs the autonomics to bring homeostasis to physiology,

balances out the complementary opposites,

sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. The suprachiasmatic nucleus,

which is the circadian rhythm center and the pineal gland,

they keep melatonin and keep the circadian rhythms in balance.

You literally get a homeostatic mechanism physiologically.

And when you do, you're inspired.

Cause when you're doing something you really love and you're inspired by it and

you're not judging things, you're not in strife as Empedocles said,

you now have the path of self mastery.

On the Breakthrough Experience program that I teach well, not every week,

but almost every week, I I develop this methodology,

I call it the Demartini Method,

which is a series of questions to make you conscious of the unconscious.

When you're infatuated,

you need to be conscious of the downsides to calm yourself down and lift

yourself up to them. When you're resentful to somebody,

you need to lift them up and you need to bring yourself down to bring things

back in equilibrium. So it's the exact questions to ask,

to make you conscious of what you were unconscious of,

so you can bring yourself back into the self actualized and

equanimity state, where you're now living in your executive function,

where you're now taking command of your life,

you're not trying to get something for nothing or give something for nothing.

You're in fair exchange,

which maximizes the empowerment of all seven areas of your life.

Any area of your life you don't empower, people are gonna overpower you.

And anybody you infatuate or resent is gonna run your life,

they're gonna overpower you. But the second you love somebody,

as Empedocles said, you're not in the world of strife,

strife within yourself because you're not in a state of equanimity and strife

between you and others, because you're not in a state of equity.

When you're there, you're in your self-actualized state,

you're in your enlightened state.

You're now your objective true state.

Objectivity means neutral state. You're now resilient and adaptable.

Your heart rate variability is maximized physiologically for resilience and

adaptability. Your immune system is maximized.

Your microbiome comes back into balance.

They used to think that the immune system was something that was there to attack

invaders. That's an antiquated idea.

They now know that the immune system is basically part of the sensory system and

is measuring the microorganisms in your body and letting the brain know

so it can regulate through autonomic and epigenetic changes in physiology to

maximize the homeostasis in the body.

It's another extension of the homeostatic feedback system. In other words,

when we're living by our highest values, we're living authentically,

when we're actually being in a state of equanimity and we're actually seeing

things as they are, not as we judge them to be, as Empedocles said,

we see that there's nothing but love, all else was illusion.

We activate the executive center.

You now function from an executive position and you get that in your life.

You rise up in power because very few people are willing to walk the path of

self mastery. Most people who are not doing what they love, loving what they do,

aren't inspired by their vision, enthusiastically working,

grateful for their position, aren't certain and present in their mastery,

because they've got an epistemological study in that area that they wanna master

and express,

are basically sitting there caught in a life of mediocrity instead of a path

of inspiration and genius.

And I love helping people go on that path.

I love waking people up to the realization they have, and believe it or not,

as the Bonpo lama taught me and shared, nothing's missing in you,

at the level of the essence of your soul, the authentic self,

nothing's missing in you. At the level of the senses,

things appear to be missing in you.

The things that appear to be missing in you are the things you're too proud or

too humble to admit you have that you see in other people.

So if we compare ourselves to other people,

instead of compare our daily actions to what's truly meaningful to us and what's

really priority to us, we're not gonna live the path of mastery.

So the Demartini Method is designed to ask questions,

to see the hidden order in your apparent chaos, to see that nothing's missing,

even though you think it is. And the thing that's missing is what's unconscious.

And so you can literally take the synthesis and synchronicities of opposites

that Jung was describing, and

the Gestalt was describing in psychology and Wilhem Wundt was describing in the

symmetry of opposites, the simultaneous contrast as he called it.

These are all terms for the very path of self mastery. And the method,

the Demartini Method is a science on how to integrate all that knowledge and be

able to practically apply it to dissolve some of the subconsciously stored

impulses and instincts that our animal nature keeps us trapped in,

which makes us react before we think,

and allows us to go into the executive center,

out of the amygdala into the executive center, where we think before we react.

And if we do, we now the leader, not the follower,

we build our culture instead of follow a culture.

And we give ourselves permission to shine, not shrink.

And that I believe is what the path of self-mastery has been stated throughout

the centuries, literally from the Eastern mystics, from,

they called it the path of the sun in Egypt,

and the mystics, the occults writers described it as the path of the sun.

That means that those individuals that were not of the multitude,

that rose out and transcended and looked towards the sun and became enlightened

and a reflection of the sun, they were the children of the sun.

So on the Eastern mystics or the Western scientists, it doesn't matter.

They're all pointing to a similar overlapping theme.

And that's why I put together the Demartini Method and the Breakthrough

Experience to help people do that path,

regardless of their source of starting points,

whether it be religious or scientific, or whether it be in mathematical studies,

integration,

or whether it be purely a neuroscience or whether it be in the area of the field

of philosophy, it doesn't matter where they start.

I've integrated all the different writings and I put it together so you could

have this path available to you. And I just wanted to take a few moments,

this moment,

this 30 minutes or so that I'm taking here and share that that's available to

you. That's something that I've worked on for nearly 50 years,

because I wanted in my own life, I've wanted to, you know, master my life.

I wanted to be able to, you know,

do some extraordinary and have original ideas that serve human beings on the

planet. I wanted to have a, you know, a global business.

I wanna have a financial independence. I wanted to have a global family dynamic.

I wanna have social influence.

I wanted to be able to have physical vitality and energy.

I wanna be able to have an inspired path where I could honor and

appreciate any religious or philosophical or perennial wisdom or teachings

through the ages, but not be trapped by any of 'em, but incorporate 'em all,

inclusive, not exclusive. That's the path that I wanted.

And not everybody's interested in that whole path.

They may be interested in building their business and mastering the business

game or mastering their economic game and wealth,

or they want to master their field of intellectual pursuits or maybe their

spiritual quest,

or maybe just their physical fitness or maybe relationship dynamics or social

leadership skills.

It doesn't matter where you have on your hierarchy of values that's priority.

The path of mastery is the same.

And I can show you how to integrate all of them so you can master all of them.

Because the reality is when you're looking for a mate,

you're looking for somebody that's got something to offer in all of 'em.

When a woman's looking for a guy she's looking for somebody that's, you know,

fit, somebody that's intelligent, somebody that's ambitious,

somebody that's got resources,

somebody that wants to be with her and love her and appreciate her and have a

family with her possibly.

They're there to have social influence and get along with the people they care

about. Again, and be inspired by something.

You're looking for somebody that's empowered in all areas.

And they're looking for somebody empowered in all areas.

So why not empower 'em all? Why not, on the path of mastery,

empower all areas of your life? And doesn't matter which one it is,

the principles are the same. I love teaching those principles.

And then we spill it over,

and show you how to super task that path of all of them.

That's what the Breakthrough Experience is about.

And that's exactly what my Demartini Method's about.

It's a science on how to awaken that for people who are receptive to that.

It's not the lazy man's guide to enlightenment. It's the path of mastery.

It's the path of empowerment, or enlightenment, whatever you wanna call it.

So I just wanted to take some time to share that.

And I do wanna mention something that,

hope you enjoyed this little free presentation. I spoke a bit fast,

but you can listen to it slower on your thing if you want to.

But in addition to this message I'm saying tonight,

I want you to know that there's a free on-demand masterclass called Finding

Meaning and Purpose on the Path of Self Mastery,

this is about the path of living by what I call the telos,

an Aristotelian term for the end in mind,

the very highest priority objective in life,

and identifying what that is and being clear about what you're committed to in

life. And this is a very powerful on-demand masterclass.

You got something outta this little presentation now,

you'll get something out of what I'll be saying on this masterclass.

So take advantage of that and thank you for joining me today.

And I look forward to seeing you next week.

But I think you can listen to this again,

if you need to listen to it more than once, but this is what I love doing.

I love, I love teaching,

researching and writing and sharing with people anything that can help them

master their life and do something, evolve into their consciousness,

into awareness of about the magnificence of who they are.

So if you're not appreciating yourself, join me at the Breakthrough Experience,

learn the Demartini Method.

And let me share with you what I know will make a difference in your,

your journey. So thank you until next week.