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DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 2 years ago
For thousands of years, humans have desired to master their life - to move beyond a survival state towards a thrival state and master both their governance within themselves and the environment around them.
Throughout the centuries and millennia, individuals, sometimes called wise men and women, have probed deeper into those mysteries and solutions than others and recorded what they learned about that mastery.
This is something I have researched and studied for the past five decades: the perennial wisdom that has been flowing for the last few thousand years, since written recorded history, that has mostly been centered around some very similar messages.
Self-actualization
Let’s look at an example from the 1900s.
A gentleman named Abraham Maslow wrote a book called Personality and Motivation. He described a state he referred to as self-actualization.
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He said that there are individuals that are in survival, then security, then socialization, then self-esteem, and then finally self-actualization.
He wrote about how he believes there is a scale of degrees of mastery that ranges from surviving (focusing on the basics such as food, water, reproduction, clothing and a secure place to live) to eventually self-actualizing (having none of those concerns and being able to do something extraordinary with your forebrain capacities).
Maslow also wrote in great detail about the reality of the senses that are hallucinative and elusive versus the actual objective truth.
He believed that self-actualization meant seeing things as they are and not as you assume they are.
And that the magnificence of the way they are is far greater than the fantasies you impose as a result of your incomplete awareness of your environment.
State of synchronicity
Carl Jung called this same path a state of synchronicity, where you integrate the pairs of opposites, the unconscious and the conscious.
In other words, where you’ve extracted out space and time from the mind and become fully present.
Many individuals had different terminology, but they mostly had something in common; the integration of opposites.
In the fifth century BC, there was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher named Empedocles, who spoke of love and strife.
Empedocles believed that the masterful individuals could perceive and act out of love, while the less masterful individuals lived in strife and caused strife because they were polarized in their view.
I often say that nothing is missing in you at the level of the true authentic self.
I was with the Bonpo Lama in Nepal when 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, meaning fullness. As the Bonpo Lama described, “There’s nothing missing; it’s full”, yet most individuals are feeling empty.
- 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, you have emptiness.
- If you put someone above you and you’re too humble to admit what you see in them, is inside you, you have emptiness.
Emptiness is often the result of disowned parts that you haven’t yet integrated into your being.
When you put those complementary opposite pairs or conscious and unconscious parts together and become aware of both sides, you’re most likely to have fullness, pleroma, and synchronicity of opposites. As such, you’ll have a self-actualized state because you’re not missing anything. You’re full.
Equanimity, transcendence, and “as it is.”
Some refer to this state as equanimity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lawrence Kohlberg called it transcendence - the highest level of moral reality.
They believed that moral actuality is the transcendent state where you transcend the moral hypocrisies of judgments, incomplete awareness, and subjective biases.
In the Bhagavad Gita, this state is referred to as Om Tat Sat, or “as it is.”
Mindfulness
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.
The things you infatuate with that you’re conscious of the upsides to and unconscious of the downsides to are unobtainable because you are highly unlikely to achieve a one-sided state in life any more than you are likely to create a one-sided magnet.
So, what I refer to as self-mastery and what others refer to as a state of synchronicity, transcendence, equanimity or self-actualization is referred to as mindfulness in Buddhism because nothing is missing.
In neuroscience, it’s referred to as the integration, synchronization and simultaneity of the firing of the brain.
In fact, if you have perfect synchronicity, you have a resulting gamma burst of realization as biophotons are born in the brain. The brain is literally enlightened.
And in the state of this integration and enlightenment, the executive center part of your forebrain self-governs.
In other words, you have the path of mastery when you’re self-governed.
Integration
In neuroscience, we know that lateralization of the brain and autonomic nervous system occurs when you’re emotional.
However, when you’re centered, you are likely to have an integration of the brain and autonomics.
Homeostasis
Walter Cannon in his Wisdom of The Body, or homeostasis and Claude Bernard in his Intérieur Milieu, both write about innate wisdom in the body that brings homeostasis or a stable internal environment.
The Wisdom of The Body describes how the body has been created to bring things back into perfect order regardless of the ever-changing external environment.
Authenticity
I believe that everything that’s going on in your life - physiological, psychological, sociological or theological - is nothing but a feedback mechanism to get you to authenticity.
Authenticity is a path of mastery because the magnificence of who you truly are is far greater than all the fantasies you’ll ever impose on yourself.
When you’re not living by the highest priority, you are likely to feel unfulfilled.
You direct your blood, glucose, and oxygen to go into your amygdala, the subcortical part of your brain, which tries to avoid predator and seek prey, avoid pain and seek pleasure, and look for immediate gratification and compulsive behaviors.
This is not life mastery.
When you live according to your highest values or top priorities, your blood, glucose and oxygen go into your forebrain, or prefrontal cortex, which is the executive center of your brain.
So, any time you fill your day with the highest priority actions and do what is most important, meaningful and inspiring in your life, you wake up the part of your brain involved in inspired vision, strategic planning, objectivity, execution of plans, and self-governance.
In other words, when you live by your highest priority and feel fulfilled doing what you really love to do, you move along the path of self-actualization.
Self-mastery and values
I speak about values in every presentation because if you live congruently with your highest values, you’re on the path to mastery.
Whenever you’re not on the path of mastery, you tend to polarize yourself instead of synthesizing yourself.
When you polarize yourself, whatever you infatuate with or resent tends to consume your mind. It’s often referred to as brain noise.
You may have experienced times when you have not been able to sleep at night because you’re preoccupied with what you’re infatuated with or resentful of.
Anytime you’re polarized with infatuation and resentments, are seeking and avoiding, and impulsive and instinctual, you’re likely distracted instead of being fully centered and present.
As I said earlier, this is when you will tend to activate the subcortical amygdala, referred to as Systems 1 thinking in the study of neurology.
- Systems 1 thinking is the basic animal part of the brain where you emotionally react before thinking.
- Systems 2 thinking is where you think before you react; in other words, where you have governance.
Systems 2 thinking is a byproduct of living by priority and synthesizing your conscious and unconscious together.
Reason, logos, pleroma, enlightenment, and presence
Your intuition continually tries to help you become fully conscious. It does this by revealing your unconscious to become equal to the conscious.
When that happens, you have what many philosophers called reason, what many mystics called the logos, what the Gnostics referred to as pleroma, what the Buddhists termed enlightenment, and what some of the Eastern mystics called presence.
So, regardless of the path through the ages, they all tend to have a common thread – the brain.
In fact, if you look at the history of this entire journey from the very esoteric, animistic and earliest religious writers, through to the mystics, shamans, mystic religious, mythologists, then on to the religious, philosophical, metaphysical and philosophical individuals, and then finally into the scientific age, you can trace the evolution of the human brain.
Your brain is doing everything it can to help you have governance, be authentic, and to be inspired.
I often say that the transcendental state is gratitude, love, inspiration, enthusiasm, certainty, and presence. These are the culmination of an authentic pathway.
Every week, I teach my signature two-day program the Breakthrough Experience program, a seminar designed to help individuals develop their executive function or Systems 2 thinking to help them progress on their path of mastery.
I developed a science that integrates all these philosophers, thinkers, mystics, scientists and neuroscientists throughout the ages to create a simple, duplicatable, reproducible, transcribable, translatable system that holds you methodically accountable to balance out your misperceptions that are keeping you from being on your path of mastery.
Let me give you an example.
Suppose you meet someone that you’re infatuated with. You are likely conscious of their upsides and unconscious of their downsides, too humble to admit what you see inside them inside you, and likely to put them on a pedestal.
Now, you’re likely conscious of your downsides and unconscious of some of your upsides, may have a false positive on their upsides and a false negative on their downsides, and have a false positive on your downsides and a false negative on your upsides. You likely skew your perceptions with a subjective bias and don’t see what’s there.
When you do, you tend to inject their values into your life.
This, in turn, may cloud the clarity of your mission in life, what you feel called and inspired to do, and the difference you want to make in life. In other words, what Marlow described as the path of self-actualization.
The moment you do that, you give them power and minimize yourself. In other words, you’re not being authentic to yourself because you’re beneath yourself.
Any time you shame and minimize yourself relative to someone else, you exaggerate them and minimize you. That’s not you. That’s not your authentic self.
Whenever you resent someone and put them down in the pit, you tend to act too proud to admit what you see in them is inside you. As such, you exaggerate yourself and minimize them.
That’s also not you.
That’s not your authentic self.
Your intuition continually tries to prompt your awareness of the downsides to the thing you’re infatuated with and the upsides of the thing you resent.
It does this to bring things back into balance, to have homeostasis, to be able to have self-actualization, to see things as they are and not as you thought they were with your senses.
When you come to that realization and bring yourself back into balance, you have equanimity within yourself.
You’re not exaggerating or minimizing yourself, and you have equity between you and other individuals. That means you now have sustainable fair exchange, maximizing your mental function and having less brain noise.
Nothing is distracting you - no infatuation, distractions or resentment that create bondage in your mind.
Instead, you are free to have spontaneous action.
You may see this sustainable fair exchange displayed in a more balanced business. Individuals may want to do business with you because you’re not trying to get something or give something for nothing.
You may find that you have more individuals wanting to be around in your social life because you exemplify authenticity.
Every human being tends to want to be around individuals who demonstrate authenticity because it’s inspiring to be around someone who is grateful, loves what they do, and who is inspired, present and certain.
Authenticity tends to magnetize and draw individuals to them.
When you live authentically, you also tend to have the greatest creativity.
When you live congruently with what’s highest on your values and most inspiring to you, you are more likely to take on challenges instead of avoiding them.
And when you pursue challenges that inspire you, you are most likely to innovate and awaken your creativity and genius.
During the Breakthrough Experience program, I teach a methodology called the Demartini Method, which is a series of questions to make you conscious of your unconscious.
In other words, specific questions to help you bring yourself back into the self-actualized and equanimity state, where you’re living in your executive function, taking command of your life, and living in fair exchange, which maximizes the empowerment of all seven areas of your life.
Other individuals will tend to overpower any area of your life that you don’t empower.
Anyone you infatuate or resent will likely run your life and overpower you.
However, when you love others and are in a state of equanimity, self-actualization and enlightenment, you are in your true objective state.
In other words, when you live by your highest values, live authentically, are in a state of equanimity, and see things as they are and not as you judge them to be, as Empedocles said, you see that there’s nothing but love; all else is an illusion.
In this way, you activate the executive center and Systems 2 thinking in your brain, function from an executive position, and rise in power because very few individuals are willing to walk the path of self-mastery.
Most individuals are not doing what they love, loving what they do, aren’t inspired by their vision, enthusiastically working, and grateful for their position. They are unlikely to be certain and present in their mastery and more likely to be caught in a life of mediocrity instead of a path of inspiration and genius.
I love helping individuals along the path of self-mastery. I love waking individuals up to the realization that nothing is missing in them.
At the level of the essence of what theologians once called 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 may see in other individuals.
If you compare yourself to other individuals, instead of comparing your daily actions to what’s truly meaningful to you and what’s priority, you’re unlikely to live the path of mastery.
The Demartini Method is designed to ask questions, see the hidden order in your apparent chaos, and see that nothing’s missing, even though you think it is. The thing that’s missing is what’s unconscious.
The Demartini Method is a science on how to dissolve some of the subconsciously stored impulses and instincts that your animal nature may keep you trapped in, which likely results in you reacting before you think and allows you to function out of your executive center, not your amygdala where you think before we react.
If you do, you are more likely to become the leader, not the follower, and more likely to build a culture instead of following a culture.
To sum up:
Throughout the centuries and millennia, individuals, sometimes called wise men and women, have probed deeper into those mysteries and solutions than others and recorded what they learned about that mastery.
This is something I have researched and studied for the past five decades: the perennial wisdom that has been flowing for the last few thousand years, since written recorded history, that has mostly been centered around some very similar messages.
Regardless of the path through the ages, they all tend to have a common thread – the brain.
Your brain does everything it can to help you have governance, be authentic and be inspired.
When you live congruently with what’s highest on your values and most inspiring, you are more likely to take on challenges and tackle problems that can serve humanity instead of avoiding them.
And when you pursue challenges that inspire you, you are most likely to innovate and awaken your creativity and genius.
During the Breakthrough Experience program, I teach a methodology called the Demartini Method, which is a series of questions to make you conscious of your unconscious. In other words, specific questions to help you bring yourself back into the self-actualized and equanimity state, where you’re living in your executive function, taking command of your life, and living in fair exchange, which maximizes the empowerment of all seven areas of your life.
P.S.
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