When you have ratios of perceptions that are black or white, highly subjectively biased, you’re using the more primitive responses in your brain, which results in you reacting before you can think. Narrow-mindedness is very black and white, but a broad-minded is more gray. Join Dr John Demartini and learn how to have a more balanced view and move up into the executive center to rewire your brain. This is the path of mind mastery and thus life mastery.

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Every time you actually ask these questions,

you're literally setting up neuroplastic pathways and moving out of the

amygdalas responses with survival and moving up into the executive center.

This particular topic today is stopping the black and white thinking

and rewiring your brain.

And so you probably have come across people in your life that have said;

'My father was not there for me.' Or, 'My mother was not there for me.

I would never do that. I'm always there for people.

They never did this for me.

They were always that way for me.' And it's very absolutist.

And these absolutisms are not true.

I had a woman one time come to my program in Florida and she said,

my mother was never there for me. And I said,

your mother was never there from you.

I'd like you to think about what you just said, never there for you.

You're a living. She must have been there for nine months. , well, yeah,

she delivered me. Did she breastfeed you? Well for a while.

Did she feed you, bathe you, clothe you, take care of you, take you places?

Yeah. So how could you make it 'never'?

So let's get more factual.

You've made broad generalities that are absolutes instead of a

specific thing. Tuesday,

you wanted her to do something and she wasn't able to do it.

She had other priorities. You gave her a short notice and she said no.

And so you've now exaggerated into 'she's never there for you'.

And I made her stop and really reflect on that.

And she started to cry and she realized, wow,

I can't believe that I've distorted my perceptions of my mom to this degree.

I made her go in there and actually look at when her mother was there.

I asked her a simple question, just the opposite.

Go to a moment where your mother was there for you in times where you wanted

her. And at first she said she was never there. And I said, no,

look again.

And we started finding all these different moments when she was there.

And again, she got tears in her eyes and she realized, why am I doing this?

Why am I exaggerating this? I said, because when you have an expectation,

and if somebody doesn't live up that expectation,

because you're expecting them to live in your values or expecting them to be

one-sided, which is not possible, no human being can do that, you're

setting yourself up for a feeling of betrayal and a feeling of let down.

And now you're angry and aggressive and you're distorting your reality with

these expectations. But you're blaming her.

You have a false attribution bias on hers thinking she's the cause of your

problems.

But really reality is you've got an unrealistic expectation on your mom and

she's trying to juggle with her value systems, her life.

And she has time for you and two other kids because you have two siblings,

and a husband, and a career, and a household.

And so let's get real.

And when she finally got past her unrealistic expectations,

she had tears in her eyes and started to appreciate her mom.

So these absolute statements I found

make you non resilient. Imagine this,

you meet somebody and you run into them and you think, wow,

you're infatuated with them.

You think that there's way more positives than negatives and you're conscious of

the upsides, you're unconscious of the downsides,

and you're highly impulsively infatuated with them and seek them out.

Then a day, a week, a month, a year, over time,

you eventually start seeing downsides to this individual that you were unaware

of initially. Your intuition was whispering it to you,

but you're unwilling to see it.

And you then exaggerated how many positives there are or benefits there are,

advantages there are, and got hooked in this infatuation.

In fact,

you got so hooked by it that occupied space and time in your mind and ran you

for a period of time while you're infatuated. But slowly but surely,

little incremental challenges came up and you started seeing the downsides and

you started to see, well, maybe it's not a hundred percent positive,

maybe it's 98, 96,

94 and eventually comes to kind of like a 50 50 where there's things I

like and things I dislike. Things that are advantage and disadvantage.

Then you start to see the individual for who they are.

And the same thing can occur when you resent somebody.

You're conscious of the downside, not conscious of the upside.

You're blind and ignorant of the upsides and you're labeling,

they're always negative. They're always critical. They're always this way,

or you can't trust them. Or they're like every other man.

These exaggerated statements.

And then over time you eventually discover that, no, that's not true either.

And you eventually get the wisdom of the ages,

hopefully without the aging process,

by looking carefully and finding the other side that you've been ignoring.

You know,

the quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask.

If you ask questions that make you aware of what you're overlooking initially,

it liberates you from the infatuations and resentments and impulses and

instincts of the amygdala,

which is a subcortical area of the brain that's involved in assigning valency

and emotional charge to things. And so you can dissolve the charges you have,

because all those emotional charges get stored in a subconscious mind and run

your life. And you're not free.

And if you're highly polarized and not balanced and synthesized,

then these things will run your life.

We've all been highly infatuated and you couldn't get the person out of your

mind. You've been highly resentful and you couldn't get them out of your mind.

So they're running you, your misperception of them is running you.

But if you balance it, you run, you. You're poised, you're present,

you're now more productive, not distracted.

The number one thing that distracts people from living purposefully is their

impulses and their instincts, their pleasures, their pains,

their things that attract them or repel them.

And then they're run from the external world.

They're extrinsically run instead of intrinsically guided.

So these black and white are absolutes. You know,

if I was to go to you and I said,

can you think of a time when you puffed yourself up? Yep.

And you ever said to yourself, I would never do that?

That's disgusting what they're doing. I would never do that. Well,

what they found in psychology, and before psychology even came about,

philosophers through the ages. I mean,

I can find stuff going back to the Egyptians and the Hebrews,

and I mean these are, this is old stuff,

that whatever we see in other people is a reflection of what we have inside

ourself.

We only resent other people cause they're reminding us of what we're ashamed of

in ourself, that we're judging in ourself and they're reminding it,

that's why we want to avoid them.

We want to live in a dissociated fantasy of from our shame to live in a fantasy

that we're the opposite. That's why we say,

when we're really shamed about something that somebody's pointing out that we're

seeing in them,

we're actually disassociated from that shame and then we go around,

'I would never do that' because we don't want to feel what it's like to actually

judge ourselves.

So we have kind of a weakness of not willing to handle the truth about our

nature so we've set up a false facade and a kind of a narcissistic fantasy that

'I would never do that.' But the truth is, you do .

I've been taking people through the Breakthrough Experience,

my signature program and through the Demartini Method, my methodology,

and taking well over a hundred thousand people just in that program through a

method where whatever they perceive in others, they find in themselves.

I went through the Oxford Dictionary and found 4,628 individual human behavioral

traits in my life. None of it was missing. I was nice,

mean and kind and cruel and positive and negative and generous and stingy and

honest and dishonest. I had every one of the things I found in that dictionary.

And when I finally looked honest at myself, I had it all.

Nothing was missing in me. But sometimes we don't want to face it.

We're too frightened of facing it because of some moral hypocrisy that we're

trying to live under that we're trying to be a one-sided individual and not both

sides. So anytime we hear ourselves saying, I would never do that,

or I always pride myself on doing this, I would never do that,

these absolutes are guaranteed to be lies, because there is no such thing.

If I went up to you and I said, you are always positive, never negative,

always kind, never cruel, always generous, never stingy,

always peaceful, never wrathful, always giving, never taking,

always considerate, never inconsiderate, your own BS meter inside,

your own psycho stat would whisper inside you moments when you've been

mean and cruel and stingy.

You'd immediately be thinking them because you know that's not completely true.

And if I said to you, you're always mean, you're never nice,

you're always cruel, you're never kind, you're always negative, never positive,

you're always the downside, wrathful, never peaceful, always inconsiderate,

never considerate,

again you would immediately think of those times when you're nice and

considerate and the opposite.

Your intuition would always point out the side that would balance out the

equation to try to get you back to the center. And you wouldn't believe that.

You wouldn't believe if I said you're always nice, you would immediately,

I've asked thousands of people, are you always nice, never mean?

They go No. Always mean, never nice? No. But if I say to you,

sometimes you're nice, sometimes you're mean, sometimes you're kind,

sometimes you're cruel, sometimes you're generous, sometimes you're stingy.

You would immediately go, yep.

You know with certainty that you got both sides.

So when we hear ourselves saying, I would never do that,

I pride myself on never doing that. I always this way.

I'm always positive.

I've had people right in front of me believe that they

after saying a whole bunch of negative things about somebody and gossip,

and they couldn't see it. They blinded themselves. Their self-reflection,

their interoception of themselves was so skewed and so subjectively

biased that they couldn't even see it.

They were out of touch with their own experience of who they are.

So those black and white thinkings are most of the sources of the conflicts in

the world.

When you have somebody that thinks they're right and the other people are wrong,

they got an in-group bias and their out-group disconfirmation bias,

you might say, an avoidance,

then what happens is they're right and the other people are wrong.

You see this in politics, you see this in religion, you see this in sociology.

You find people that think they're one-sided and they're the right ones and

these are the wrong ones.

And what's interesting is the pro-lifers think the pro-aborters are bad.

The pro-aborters think the pro-lifers are bad.

They both think that they're right, when in fact,

life and death go on in our life regardless of our beliefs,

there's life and death.

So what we do is we go through life and we go into these polarized,

highly extreme generalized statements about ourselves or other people,

and these are non resilient.

Because if you see somebody all positive and no negative,

you're going to fear their loss. If you see them all negative without positive,

you're going to fear their gain. If you see yourself all positive and proud,

you're going to fear the loss of your pride. And if you feel all shame,

you're going to fear of gain of that shame.

But we have a moral licensing effect in our brain,

the second we do something proud,

we automatically give ourselves permission to do the other side,

to get us back into the center, to bring us into that balanced state.

Our intuition's trying to get us back into that balanced state.

So if we allow ourselves to go to these extremes, we're non resilient.

We're not adaptable, we're in our amygdala, we're

We're basically doing that and the reason why we do that is very simple. Years

ago, thousands of years ago, millions of years ago potentially, animals,

when they saw prey that they wanted to eat,

the prey had a camouflage or some device to try to

avoid being eaten. And we had a thing called patternicity.

We would look in the environment and look at the pattern and try to see through

the camouflage and get the pattern.

And then we had another thing called agenticty, we wanted to see if it's alive.

And then we had another thing called pareidoilia,

which is then we'd look and we'd see a face on it,

and then we'd end up going through apophenia we'd then look at the meaning of

it, is it something predator or prey like?

And then we would end up creating a false positive and negative and a subjective

bias into our hormone system in order to get the adrenaline going to run after

the prey or run away from the predator. So when we're in survival mode,

we have to distort things. But that's not what's actually there.

That's just a survival mechanism to make sure we capture prey and avoid

predator. Our daily life isn't prey and predator all day long.

We have minor little gradations of support and challenge going on,

things that we are pleased or displeased by, but not in these absolutes.

So we don't need that type of response. But when we hear our response like that,

we're non resilient, we're not adaptable.

And we basically in a black and white and the black and white thinking like that

is the one that causes the conflict between the extremists that are the

pro-lifers are extremely going against the pro-aborters. In fact,

there was a gentleman a number of years ago that actually shot people at an

abortion clinic,

went and shot everybody there because he was tired of them killing people.

, oh you know, it's kind of a yin yang. Whatever your disowned part is,

you attract to teach you how to love that part of yourself.

So I'm not here to try to promote an extreme. I,

I think that what that does is it creates a non resilient, non-ad adaptable,

absolute illusion. And that's where most of our conflicts are,

internal or external conflicts. What I teach in the Breakthrough Experience,

my signature program is how to ask questions to see past our

survival mentality, to enter into a world where we see things as they are,

not as they first appeared. And allow us to see,

if we see something we're infatuated, to ask what are the downsides?

And if we see something we're resenting, what are the upsides?

If we are cocky and proud,

instead of waiting for hubris to come along and people to criticize us to get us

back down in equilibrium,

because if we don't control ourselves we get control from the outside,

we ask questions to humble ourselves, to get ourselves back into authenticity.

Because when we're in a state of pride, we're not authentic.

When we're in a state of shame we're not authentic. When we're infatuated,

that's not an authentic view of them. When we're resentful of them,

that's not an authentic view of them.

We're not living in a state of authenticity.

What's interesting is everybody wants to be loved for who they are,

but most of the time we're too busy judging and too busy exaggerating and

minimizing ourselves to ever experience that. So in the Breakthrough Experience,

I teach people how to ask questions to bring those polarities back

into balance.

So you see things as they are not as you generalize them and

subjectively bias them into being for survival.

And that gives you more resilience and more adaptability and more love and

appreciation for yourself as yourself. And you don't have to fix yourself.

See if you infatuate with somebody,

you're going to want to sacrifice you to be like them. When you resent somebody,

you're going to want to sacrifice them to be more like you.

Neither one of those are anything but futile. If you want to have utility,

not futility,

learn the art of loving people and having resilience and adaptability and to

appreciate their uniqueness. But no exaggerate them. They're not,

nobody's worth putting on pedestals or pits.

Nobody's an ultimate saint or sinner. I love what Abraham Lincoln said,

if they're not much of a sinner, don't expect them to be much of a saint.

There's always a pair of opposites inside people.

We've had enough heroes go down and we get to discover people we thought were

heroes they find the dark side as they call it.

But there's always two sides to people. I'm not a nice person,

I'm not a mean person. I'm a human being where if you support my values,

I can be nice. If you challenge my values, I can be mean as a tiger.

I'm a human being. And a human being has both sides, of all the traits.

You know as Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher that said that, you know,

there's pairs of opposites and they're always come in pairs and there's a unity

between them,

and a wise individual sees the synthesis and the unity between them.

And that's what I teach in the Breakthrough Experience,

how to discover the center.

If you want to be centered and you want to be poised and you want to be present,

you want to be powerful, you want to be purposeful, productive,

patient and prioritized,

it's learning how to get objective and learning how to be able to see both sides

of things simultaneously. So I ask quality questions,

in the Demartini Method at the Breakthrough Experience

quality questions to be able to see things they're blind to so they can see both

sides. So they're not reactive, they're proactive.

Because when you're infatuated, you're reactive. You got to have the person.

When you're resentful you got to get away from the person, they're running you.

The second you actually see both sides, you get to love the person,

love the individual for who they are, as an individual.

And you don't run around with absolute black and white thinkings.

You rewire the brain. Every time you actually ask these questions,

you're literally setting up neuroplastic pathways and moving out of the

amygdala's responses for survival and moving up into the executive center and

you're actually myelinating,

the glial cells in the brain are literally myelinating and stimulating new

spines and dendrites and pathways in the brain and you're rebuilding your brain

for a more productive, more accurate and more wise objective view on life.

So you're setting real expectations, in real time, with real objectives,

that give you real results.

That's why I tell people to come to the Breakthrough Experience so they can

learn the science of how to break through those subjective biases that

most people are trapped in.

Every week people come to the Breakthrough Experience,

they really resent somebody and they'll come in and say,

well my boyfriend or my ex-boyfriend is a narcissist. Well that's a label.

It's interesting, you dated him for how many years? Well 12 years. Okay,

12 years you were with a narcissist? That's kind of irrational.

You sure you want to put a label on him like that? No, he's a narcissist.

I said, well you stayed with him for 12 years,

it seems like now that you're challenged by him and now he's pushing your

buttons and now you're not getting what you want from him,

which is narcissistic,

you're now labeling him narcissistic and he's now doing that to you.

They're both labeling that now that your values are being challenged so

strongly, you sure that's who they are? Let's go looking different, more deeply.

And they go in there and identify what it is that they're judging them for and

they go find out where they've done it in their own life and they go find out

the benefits to it and they find out where the benefits of where they've done

it.

And they go in there and find out where that individual does the exact opposite

traits, to break the labels and they take the absolutes out.

And they go in and find out at the moment they're doing it,

who's doing the other side of it.

Because there's always two sides to every perception,

because all perceptions are contrast. And then they ask, I ask the question,

if they were to do it the way you hoped they'd have been,

what would've been the drawback to you,

to crack the fantasies that you were comparing them to?

Because you're holding onto your own fantasies and

can't live up to it because it's unrealistic. And then

And then once they're done,

they're sitting brought into tears and they realize that this individual is a

magnificent individual that's been a contribution to their life and they're

finally saying thank you for it.

Instead of sitting there and having a label on them.

Our psychologists out there and all kinds of people,

counselors want to put labels on people, diagnostic labels.

But I don't find those to be true.

I've taken over a hundred thousand people through the Breakthrough Experience

and done the Demartini Method on them and I ask people,

how many of you started with a label here?

And we started with the most resented individual or most admired individual they

can think of.

And when we're done it's dissolved and all of a sudden they realize it's just a

human being that's contributed to their life.

And the very individual that you thought was somebody to hate and resent,

was your teacher.

Teach you how to love yourself and to be authentic and to be able to go through

life not in survival. When you finally realize that,

you realize why I tell people to come to the Breakthrough Experience,

because there's probably in your life, I ask people,

how many of you probably have other people in your life that you probably have

skewed views like that? Every hand goes up. I said,

well if you want to live that way and be un resilient and constantly have these

people run your life and be avoiding people and seeking people and being hooked

by those things all the time and reacting and gossiping around it,

instead of getting focused on what's really meaningful to your life, fine.

But if you want to break through that and transcend that and get on with a

meaningful and inspiring life, come to the Breakthrough Experience.

Because I'm absolutely certain the methodology that

50 years is a science. It's reproduced, it's duplicatable.

If you hold yourself accountable and you answer the questions just as

instructed, you're going to dissolve those resentments, those infatuations,

those prides, those shames, those griefs,

those unrealistic expectations you've got on yourself and other people.

All those labels you've got on yourself, you know, sabotaging, limited beliefs,

all that, all that stuff is simply an incomplete awareness.

And if I ask you the right questions and hold you accountable to it,

which I do in the program, all that noise and all that, literally noise,

static in your consciousness is freed, your signal to noise ratio changes,

you start to communicate from the heart what's inspiring to you and live your

life more fully. You can live an inspired life ,

but you're not going to do it in black and white thinking.

And you'll see that the densest individuals,

the most dense individuals are usually in the legal system,

they're basically sitting there in a court of law with black and white,

right and wrong, and everything else. You'll notice it's a densest energy.

It's almost a futility and just pay,

you pay the lawyers to argue for something to hold onto your position instead of

actually learning how to lighten up and be able to love and appreciate and see

both sides and reflect.

Highest level of awareness is reflective awareness where you see whatever you

see in others you have in you, you see in yourself.

So if you want to go and transcend that dense level,

that conflict oriented level,

the internal conflict and paradox level and want to get onto something more

transcendent to that, come to the Breakthrough Experience,

because I don't care what it is,

there's nothing your mortal body can experience that your immortal,

real authentic soul, you might say, can't love.

You have the capacity to love pretty well anything that's happened in your life,

people think, well, this has happened to me and that's the reason I'm angry. No,

whatever happens to you, it's your perception, your decision,

and your action that counts.

And I can show you how to take command of your perception, decision, and action,

take no matter what's happened in your life and turn it into something that's

fuel and opportunity and see it on the way, not in the way.

Instead of having black and white thinking and being labeling things and blaming

people and being caught,

which is one of the very common things I find in cancer patients,

they're very black and white labeling oriented,

which runs the immune system down, makes them non resilient,

shuts down the advanced acquired immune system,

activates the primitive immune system, the innate immune system,

which is more primitive.

We don't have the surveillance cells on the cancer cells.

We don't have the immune system functioning as we would like to have it,

and we take a risk going through life and we basically help our physiology

create signs and symptoms to teach us how to love the people we haven't been

able to love in our lives. So I could go on for a long time on this topic,

but I think I've said pretty well enough here. But I just wanted to say that,

that if you come to the Breakthrough Experience,

I can show you a methodology that you will use the rest of your life,

that will transform a lot of the baggage you may be carrying around

unnecessarily and lighten it up,

and give yourself permission to go out and do something with your life that's

meaningful. I don't want you to be stuck in an absolute world,

black and white thinking is not where it's at. That's not,

that's not how you do it. I, when I see people that are stuck that way,

you see them very rigid. You've met them, you know what I'm talking about.

You've probably had moments, I've had moments like that too.

And we basically are lying about what's going on and we're not seeing the whole.

I'd much rather see the whole picture,

not be caught in subjective biases that are extreme and get back into the center

and center ourselves and love ourselves.

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

do the Value Determination to live by highest priority,

which increases objectivity,

which decreases the probability of that emotional extreme and learn the

Demartini Method so I can show you how to dissolve that so you can clear out the

baggage you've been carrying around for years.

I have people sometimes resenting people for years, decades,

or infatuated with fantasies,

they keep hooking themselves in the same type of relationship.

I've seen this affect our mind and our noise in our mind.

I've seen it affect business. I've seen it affect our finances.

We keep getting hooked by quick get rich schemes,

which is a symptom that we've got a black and white thinking,

we think we're going to get rich quick,

instead of immediate gratification you want a long-term vision and pay

investments and by quality companies that serve people.

So I've watched people come into the Breakthrough Experience with all kinds of

reasons in every one of the seven areas of life, their social life,

their business, their health,

and I show them how to dissolve the emotional baggage

the stresses and distresses that they're facing in their life.

You don't have to do that. So just wanted to share that for this weekend,

this week this message for the week and I just tell you,

come to the Breakthrough Experience. I spent 30 minutes with you here.

I spend literally 25 hours with you in the Breakthrough Experience.

And I help people,

one on one help them break through limitations and

the rest of their life. So take advantage of that. Come and join me for that.

And also go to the website,

make sure you do your Value Determination and go live by priority.

And I look forward to seeing you next week.

Thank you for being with me this week.

I look forward to seeing you at the next Breakthrough. Thank you.