READ TIME: 11m
DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 2 days ago
Have you ever experienced a night when you were trying to go to sleep but kept thinking about something that was highly infatuating or highly exciting that day? Perhaps you met someone who was really attractive and couldn't sleep because you were preoccupied with a fantasy that you had created in your mind about them.
Anything you infatuate with occupies space and time in your mind and runs you – for example, those intrusive thoughts that come into your mind, making it hard to sleep.
Perhaps you can also recall a time when you were resentful of or angry with someone and experienced the same thing: intrusive thoughts that occupied space and time in your mind and again, you found that you couldn’t sleep.
Most people have had these polarized experiences distract their minds – that so-called noise in the brain that you wish you could turn off so you could sleep.
What you may not yet know is that anything that is highly positive or highly negative - where you're conscious of the upsides and unconscious of the downsides, or conscious of the downsides and unconscious of the upsides - activates the amygdala in the inner subcortical region of your brain.
This inner, subcortical part of your brain, the amygdala, assigns valency or emotional charge to these perceptions, and then stores that information in episodic memories in your hippocampus, often resulting in these intrusive thoughts.
If you think about it, those intrusive thoughts mostly represent either PREY-like or PREDATOR-like stimuli.
- When you're infatuated with someone, you want to consume them or capture them (prey)
- When you resent someone, you want to avoid them or escape them (predator)
These imbalanced ratios of perceptions of the world around you “run you” instead of you being run from within. As a result, you will tend to be subjective, biased and reactive instead of objective, neutral and proactive.
This is your SURVIVAL SELF as opposed to your THRIVAL or SELF-GOVERNED self.
Anytime you experience imbalanced perceptions to mild, moderate, or extreme degrees, your mind will likely have mild, moderate, or extreme distractive intrusions, and you will not be present. You will be in a survival mode and subjectively biased in your interpretation of your surrounding reality.
But there's a more balanced state that goes beyond that.
Buddhists call it a detached state, or unattached, or the middle path, where you're not elated or depressed, infatuated or resentful, conscious of the upsides and unconscious of the downsides, or conscious of the downsides and unconscious of the upsides. It's fully conscious, fully aware. Immanuel Kant called it the transcendent state. It's known by many names: moksha, liberation, enlightenment, or a spiritual cosmic state, but it’s also the most extraordinary and authentic you when you have these things balanced – and where you are not futilily attempting to change you into being like others or attempting to change others into being like you.
Here's one way you can balance your perceptions and become the transcended you – the Demartini Method.
This is a reproducible method that I teach as part of my signature 2-day Breakthrough Experience program that I teach most every week.
I can take a situation that’s preoccupying your mind, that you're resenting and having difficulty sleeping over, and identify what specific trait, action, or inaction you perceive a particular individual displaying or demonstrating that you despise, dislike, or hate most and that you're resenting. I help you identify that charged behavior and go to the moment of perception and ask, "What's the upside?" because you're likely conscious of the downside, unconscious of the upside.
If I help you become conscious of the upside, and hold you accountable to finding an upside because everything has two sides, you can discover the terrific in what you think is terrible – like the head side of a two sided coin.
When you balance out that equation, the intrusive thought disappears, and you can enter into an altered, more transcendent state – the non-attached middle path, you might say - where you're poised and present, back on purpose, and not distracted.
The same process works on the other side. If you're really infatuated with someone, I can have you identify what specific trait, action, or inaction you perceive this individual displaying or demonstrating that you admire most, that you look up to most, or think is most positive. Then I ask, "What are the downsides?" If I hold you accountable and help you identify the downsides that are there and bring your perceptions back into balance, those intrusive thoughts disappear – like the tail side of a two sided coin.
What's interesting is that subcortical your amygdala and hippocampus STORE all those impulses and instincts, seekings and avoidances, and positive and negative perceptions - your imbalanced perceptions. When you do the work to balance these imbalanced perceptions, you liberate them, and the awareness of those intrusive thoughts goes away. As such, you can become present because you’re no longer storing those emotions or being run by them; you’ve integrated them. You transcend and rise above the paradox, as Einstein would call it, entering a transcendent state.
Once your perceptions are in perfect balance, you can enter a state of gratitude and realize nothing was out of order.
Claude Shannon, in his work on information theory, said that any time you have an imbalanced ratio of perception, you have a disorder – which results in mental or mood instability - cyclothymia – which means that you have mood swings as you go from one pole or side to the other. But the second you bring those into balance and ask the questions your intuition is trying to whisper to you to try to help bring you into full consciousness and see both sides simultaneously, not as positive or negative but as NEUTRAL.
At that moment, you are able to see the hidden order instead of the disorder, and can start to feel gratitude for that hidden order. In other words, you experience what the brain wave state called gamma synchronicity - an aha moment or a eureka moment. Your autonomic nervous system, with its seeking and avoiding, parasympathetic and sympathetic responses, comes into balance, you have the most resilience, adaptability, and order. And you’re fully present.
In that state, you’ll also tend to have gratitude and love because true love is the synthesis of all pairs of opposites. You’ll feel inspiration because you’ll tend to see the hidden order in what’s happening, and instead of judging someone that’s running you, you’re now running you. You’ll also likely realize there is magnificence to that instead of something that caused you infatuation or resentment because infatuation and resentment are signs of incomplete awareness or subjective bias. They are both a result of perceptual distortions of what's actually occuring.
You know, when you are infatuated with somebody, you perceive they're going to have more positives than negatives, but over the next few weeks or months, you’ll likely find out it wasn't what you thought. The same thing happens with things you resent – over time, you’ll tend to discover there were upsides to it, and you might not have been aware of it immediately, but you eventually discover it.
So, when you have the wisdom of the ages without the aging process by looking and asking quality questions to see both sides equally, simultaneously, you enter into a transcendent state.
This is your most authentic self, because when you infatuate with somebody, you'll minimize yourself, and that's not you.
When you resent somebody, you'll exaggerate yourself by the law of contrast, and that's also not you.
But when you bring those into balance and just appreciate and love somebody, and instead of putting them on pedestals or in pits, you put them in your heart, you have gratitude and love. You'll be inspired. You’ll have entheos or enthusiasm. (Entheos is not excitement, as some people misinterpret. It's the “divine” equanimity within. It's the perfection of the balance within.)
You’ll also have more certainty because you're not having emotional wavering, and you're present. Gratitude and love of the heart, inspiration of the mind, enthusiasm of the body, certainty of the mind, and presence is the transcendent state.
I've been teaching people the Breakthrough Experience, which, is my signature program, for almost 35 years. I guide people through what I call the Demartini Method, a series of very precise questions that help you become aware of what you're unconscious of, making you fully conscious and able to balance out those ratios of perceptions. I've literally taken over 125,000 people through that process, and each time, when they balance their perceptions - and I hold them accountable until they do - they enter into this transcendental state once they perceive others or their events more fully and discover what they initially overlooked.
There experience tears of gratitude. They have love for the individual and inspiration about the contribution their actions have made to their life. They're enthused about what they perceive it’s going to do for them now that they more fully understand it. They're certain about it and present with the individual and have feelings of love for them.
They also love a part of themselves because you can't judge others without judging a part of yourself. Whatever you resent in others reflects the things you're ashamed of in yourself but are too proud to admit.
Similarly, the things you admire in others represent the qualities you possess but are too humble to acknowledge.
When you fully see both sides, have reflective awareness, and become mindful instead of mindless, you enter into this transcendental state.
This transcendental state brings wellness, resilience, and adaptability. It enhances creativity, allows you to be inspired by your life, and helps you see the hidden order. It trains you to see both sides simultaneously instead of being fooled by misinterpretations of reality, and allows you to maximize your awareness and your potential.
What’s interesting is that if your perceptions are balanced, you are more likely to respond with balance, and your physiology tends to return to homeostasis. As a result, your wellness quotient goes up as does your resilience. Why? Because, whoever you're infatuated with, you tend to fear their loss. And whoever you are resentful to, you tend to fear their gain. If you have a perfectly balanced state, you don’t fear their gain or loss. Instead, you're more adaptable and resilient, and your heart rate variability actively demonstrates this.
The transcendental state is also where you are the most authentic.
In this authentic state, where you're not proud looking down, or shamed looking up to other people, but open-hearted looking across, you tend to have equanimity within yourself, and have equity between yourself and others where you’re not judging them but instead feel love for them.
You're designed to have intrusive thoughts and be distracted with emotional baggage and survival impulses and instincts whenever you have an imbalanced ratio of perception.
The intrusive thoughts are valuable FEEDBACK to let you know you likely don't have full conscious awareness, and aren’t seeing things as they are, but instead as you misinterpret them.
If you hold yourself accountable to balance your perceptions , you’ll be able to see everything in your life as being ON the way instead of IN the way, and be able to appreciate, love, feel grateful, inspired, enthused, certain, and present – in other words, enter the authentic and transcendental state.
You have the capacity to awaken that state by asking quality questions to help balance your perceptions and bring you into a transcendent state. And that's the authentic you. The magnificence of who you are authentically is far greater than any fantasies you'll impose on yourself.
To Sum Up
When you get infatuated or resentful and have those intrusive thoughts that keep you up at night, it's not a flaw or a weakness. It's your body's feedback trying to let you know that your perceptions are not completely balanced. These perceptions and their emotions activate your amygdala, leading to impulses towards or instincts away that run you from the outside, instead of you having self-mastery and running yourself from within.
Your body creates symptoms as feedback to let you know that you have missing information that results from your perceptions being imbalanced. In other words, to become conscious of upsides if all you perceive are downsides, and conscious of downsides if all you perceive are upsides.
No matter what you're going through or have experienced, everything has the potential to be transformed if you ask the right mind balancing questions. The quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask. By asking quality questions, such as those in the Demartini Method that I teach in the Breakthrough Experience program, you can dissolve emotional baggage, balance lopsided perceptions, and become your true authentic and transcended self.
After all, would you prefer to be like an animal in the wild running after prey and avoiding predator, reacting to the world outside you, or would you prefer to be proactive, balanced, objective, neutral, inspired, vitalized and in the driver’s seat of your own life?
This is why I love teaching the Breakthrough Experience. I guide people through the Demartini Method to bring balance to their perceptions, leading them to tears of gratitude for the way life truly is.
The magnificence of life is far greater than the fantasies you impose on it. By embracing this process, you can feel gratitude, inspiration, and love, achieving a state of resilience and adaptability that maximizes your potential and well-being.
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 click on the LIVE chat button bottom right of your screen and chat to us now.
Alternatively, you can book a FREE Discovery call with a member of the Demartini Team.
Interested in the Breakthrough Experience seminar?
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 and reset the course of your life for greater achievement and fulfillment.
Loading...