READ TIME: 16m
DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 2 years ago
To explain the Law of Conservation, a symmetry law in physics, I will begin at the subatomic level, where there’s a quantum vacuum throughout all of space and work my way up in scale.
Sub-atomic particles emerge and submerge into and out of existence – a process called the generation and annihilation of subatomic particles. There’s a beautiful and elegant symmetry that occurs at this very sub-micro level, the most subtle level that we know.
At the atomic level, you have atoms that ionize, and recombine. They break down and then recombine and build back up again. So there’s a type of building and destruction process going on.
At the molecular level, atoms and molecules are joining and forming together and breaking or separating apart. They undergo union and division as well as reduction and oxidation.
Biomolecules continually assemble and disassemble, build and destroy into and out of larger macromolecules inside your cells.
The actual cell itself undergoes mitosis – the generation of new cells, and apoptosis – the destruction of cells.
And then, of course, at the tissue level, your tissues, muscles, bones, and nerves all undergo continuous building, destroying, and remodel at all times.
In other words, your tissues and organs are actually recycling their components. Some, more slowly, like the heart and nervous system and some, more rapidly, like your intestines, lungs, and skin.
This conservation law of build or destroy can also be seen in your life where you have anabolism and catabolism, the building and the destroying of your body, governed metabolically by your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems and their influence.
You also have psychological states of pride and shame when your nervous system creates transmitters that make you perceive that you feel good and feel bad, build and destroy, taking credit and blame. So you also have times when you build and puff yourself up and then beat yourself back down again, and vice versa.
In relationships, you will have times when you support each other and other times when you challenge each other. Sometimes you may perceive that they are building you up, and other times perceive that they are tearing you down.
Your family might have times of peace and war, and other times experience times of co-operation and competition.
Think about your business and groups of people that support it and other groups that challenge it, not to mention businesses that grow and build at the expense of other companies that are being destroyed and dying.
On a larger scale, there’s also the Law of Eristic Escalation, a lesser-known law derived from chaos theory. It states that anytime you try to build something and promote something, somebody with an opposite set of values likely comes in and tries to destroy what you want to build.
So, just like your body must have building and destroying to remodel itself and adapt and be resilient to a changing environment, so too must society do that by comprising a spectrum of supporters and challengers – a form of creative destruction or destructive creation.
In geology, you can find the building of the earth and the destruction of the earth, geological plumes and plunges within the convection cycles of plate tectonics.
In the atmosphere, you have rising and heating and cooling and condensing or expansion and contraction.
At the outer atmospheres, building and destroying continually occur with ionizing and de-ionizing fluctuations with cosmic particles and atoms and molecules.
Believe it or not, the solar system itself also has a life cycle that lasts about 10 billion years, not to mention the galaxy that actually builds stars as it pulls dying stars into the black hole. So, at the moment stars are dying, others are being born – a wonderful example of the conservation law of build and destroy in action.
At this point, you may be wondering what the Law of Conservation has to do with human psychology or human behavior in your life.
In the Breakthrough Experience, my two-day signature program that I present most every week, I teach people that you cannot have one-sided situations.
Interestingly, if you go into the moment when you perceive someone that you’re consciously looking up to, you’re simultaneously comparing and contrasting and unconsciously looking down on someone else’s complementary opposite. Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of psychology, said that there’s what they call simultaneous contrast.
Your perceptions through your senses are contrasted, so you see both sides at once but are usually conscious of one and unconscious of the other.
In other words:
- When you’re infatuated with someone or something, you tend to be conscious of the upsides and blind to the downsides; and
- When you resent someone or something, you tend to be conscious of the downsides and blind to the upsides.
In that way, while both sides are actually simultaneously there, you will likely only see the one side and be blind to the other side. This is due to subjective confirmation/disconfirmation biases.
For example, when you’re proud of something, you may only be conscious of the upsides to what you’re doing and assume that everything you have done in the past had more advantages than disadvantages and more positives than negatives.
However, someone with a completely different set of values, one with an opposite set of values in the world, may see what you perceive to be constructive as being destructive – like the two views of republican and democrat.
You can see people doing things, trying to create GMOs, for instance, to give people the opportunity to have harvest in droughts and bug-resistant systems – something they perceive as being beneficial and something to be proud of.
Someone else could perceive the same situation as detrimental to the gene code and damaging people’s genetics. Somebody may build it up, and someone else may put it down. In other words, it is neutral.
ALL things are neutral until somebody with a slightly narrowed mind and a subjected bias with their own particular value system imposes a positive or negative on something and sees it as something constructive or destructive, building or destroying, good or evil, positive or negative.
In actuality, all events in life comprise or can be perceived from both sides.
At this point, you may think of a situation or event that you perceive to be completely ‘bad’ without any ‘good’ and completely ‘negative’ without any ‘positive’.
I have been teaching The Demartini Method in The Breakthrough Experience for nearly 33 years. I’ve yet to find any situation where someone has implemented the Demartini Method and cannot uncover or discover the other side – once again to reveal the conserved symmetry.
The Chinese Taoist idea of seeing both sides was a profound principle that has somehow been overlooked in our modern-day sometimes hypocritical views that tend to be very black and white.
Suppose you are sitting in an absolute moral construct that an event, person or situation is ALL bad or ALL good. In that case, you’re blind because you’re not looking at the other potential side.
Even the villains in society make it possible for the heroes. After all, you can’t have a hero without a villain. The heroes of 9/11 became a by-products of some of the villains of 9/11.
So, you really can’t separate the inseparable, divide the indivisible, label the unlabelled, polarize the unpolarizable or separate the inseparable. They’re like two poles of a magnet – you can’t have one without the other. The energy, matter and charge that compose them are conserved.
It is wise to take neither credit nor blame
For this reason, I teach people, instead of taking credit for the upsides and being blind to the downsides – look for those that blame you for the thing you took credit for. If you don’t you can become hurt by that because you’re addicted to the praise (the addiction to praise and its resultant pride is what draws in the criticism) that stops you from seeing both sides.
It is wise to take neither credit nor blame.
- If you take the credit, you puff yourself up with pride and lose your authentic self;
- If you take the blame, you put yourself down and deflate yourself with shame, and you lose your authentic self;
- Your authentic self is the CENTER of those two polarities.
It’s a transformative system.
A master lives in a world of transformation - not the illusions of gain or loss, not the illusions of pride or shame, not the illusions of build or destroy, but instead in a world of transformation where build and destroy are synchronous.
I’ve been teaching people about grief since 1984 and have taught thousands of people how you tend to only grieve the loss of things you infatuate with in people or the gain of things you resent.
You tend to only feel relief at the things you gain in people you admire or feel relief when you lose the things you despise. But suppose you are mindful of having a balanced view and realizing that every human being has something you like and dislike.
In that case, you can more readily adapt and have resilience passing through life without the illusions of relief or grief. Instead, you can put those two together and experience their synthesis or love.
Love is a complementary balance of pairs of opposites
I’m a firm believer that if you ask the right questions, for example, those outlined in The Demartini Method that I train people to use in The Breakthrough Experience, those questions can hold you accountable to see this great law of conservation and to see both sides.
Accounting means bringing your mind into account, almost like a balance sheet that shows that the assets and liabilities, the positive negatives are all accounted for.
If you take credit for something, ignore the blame, and puff yourself up as a result, the second you go above equilibrium, you attract critical or challenging events to humble you and bring you back down.
As that age-old saying says, pride comes before a fall. Then, when you go below equilibrium, you attract people to lift you back up.
I’ve also taken thousands of people through a process where I ask them to go to a moment where they felt the most proud and accomplished and identify another area of their life where they simultaneously beat themselves up and feel shame.
This often played out in the work-family space. People felt they had succeeded at work but did it at the expense of their spouse or succeeded financially at the expense of their health.
The reality is that if you take credit and puff yourself up, you are likely to lose or inflate your identity. You tend to adopt a false persona, mask or facade and inflate yourself with a self-righteous, arrogant type of falsely elevated self-esteem.
If you are receptive to all of the credit, but without any blame, you will need some blame to get you back down and deflate that expanded place and get you back in the authentic center.
It is wise to take neither credit nor blame but instead to learn and keep focused on the chief aim. The chief aim or mission is your objective and authentic path.
Everyone has a unique set of values and priorities that you live your life by. Whenever you live congruently with your true highest priority, you’re likely to be the most objective, balanced, neutral, whole, as opposed to subjective and biased.
Becoming more objective means that you embrace both sides of your life - your hero and your villain and your builder and destroyer.
Your authentic self is your state of unconditional love where you embrace your inner builder and destroyer of life, the praises and reprimands, without getting caught in the trivial pursuit of those one-sided labels.
However, when you attempt to live according to your lower values, your blood, glucose and oxygen flow more into the amygdala – the desire center of the brain, which seeks that which is perceived as pleasure and avoids that which is perceived as pain.
This is often the stage where you may become addicted to praise, pride and fantasies and “sub-dicted” from their opposite.
Embrace Both Sides
The more you get addicted to one side of life, the more you will keep attracting the other. Jung called it the shadow.
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.
You are most likely to suffer when you try to get rid of half of your life and be, do or have only one side. You don’t have to get rid of half of yourself to love yourself. You don’t have to get rid of half anybody else or the world to love the world and the people around you.
As such, it is wise to fully understand and appreciate the conservation law, that there are two sides: you can’t have building without destroying, support without challenge, kind without cruel, nice without mean, positive without negative, and peace without war.
Both sides exist in equal measure.
I often say that depression is a comparison of your current reality to a fantasy or unrealistic expectation you are addicted to.
As long as you’re looking for one side: pride without shame, positive without negative, happy without sad, as long as you’re trying to find a one-sided world and not embracing life as a whole, you won’t have a life of meaning or fulfillment.
You’ll have a hedonistic pursuit of immediate gratifying pleasure that will likely only bring you unexpected pains and suffering. And that’s a sign of ignorance because if you’re infatuated with something, you’re ignorant of the downside. If you’re resentful of something, you’re ignorant of the upsides.
Therefore, it is wise to go beyond ignorance, have a transcendent awareness, and understand that there are two sides.
Don’t see build without destroy.
Don’t see destroy without build.
See both – the transformation.
Within the body itself, when a cell dies, it releases a signal molecule which causes another cell to be birthed.
Every time there’s an apoptotic cell death, there’s another signal molecule for mitosis. And every time there’s mitosis, there’s also a chemical signal that goes out and kills another cell.
In other words, you have to have build and destroy in all aspects of life.
In fact, maximum growth and development occurs at the border of support and challenge, build and destroy.
In Conclusion:
The conservation law works at all scales of existence. It works inside your psyche. It works in your physiology. It works in your daily life.
It’s not something you can escape, so it is wise to instead use it to your advantage and honor your true, authentic, transformative self.
Take no credit and take no blame. Just keep focused on your chief aim. The name of the game is “Thank you, I love you.”
That’s what Equity Theory and equanimity is about. That’s what helps you have less noise in your brain and wakes up your genius. That’s what helps you in business transactions, in financial management, and in your daily relations with people who want to be loved and appreciated for who they are. They don’t want to be put down or built up. They want to be love for who they are and not the labels or subjective biases we want to impose.
So don’t put people on pedestals or pits. Put them in your heart. The conservation law is really an expression of love.
It is wise to take the conservation law to heart and realize that no matter what you’ve done or not done, you’re worthy of love and are participating in a transformation.
The master lives in a world of transformation, not the illusions of gain and loss.
The magnificence of the way life as it is, is far greater than any fantasies you impose on it. So give yourself permission to honor the conservation law and live masterfully in the heart with equanimity and equity.
Are you ready for the NEXT STEP?
If you’re seriously committed to your own growth, if you’re ready to make a change now and you’d love some help doing so, then book a FREE Discovery call with a member of the Demartini Team so we can take you through your mini power assessment session.
You’ll come away with a 3-step action plan and the foundation to empower your life.
Book Your TICKET for Dr Demartini's Breakthrough Experience
If you’re ready to go inwards and do the work that will clear your blockages, clarify your vision and balance your mind, then you’ve found the perfect place to start with Dr Demartini at the Breakthrough Experience.
In 2 days you’ll learn how to solve any issue you are facing, transform any emotion and reset the course of your life for greater achievement and fulfillment.
You’ll unlock your true potential and lay the groundwork to empower all 7 areas of your life.
Get ready to take your life to a whole new level of meaning and purpose.
Today is the day you step into your power and value yourself by investing in your inspired life when you sign up for Dr Demartini’s signature seminar the Breakthrough Experience:
Loading...