Nothing's Missing: Dr. John Demartini on Mindfulness as Wholeness

Speaker 1 · 0:00Welcome everyone. Thank you for listening to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. Today I'm honored to welcome Dr. John DiMartini to the podcast. Dr. Di Martini is a world-renowned human behavior expert, educator, researcher, best-selling author, speaker, whose work has helped people around the world better understand the relationship between perception, purpose, values, and personal transformation. He's the creator of the DiMartini Method, a practical approach for helping people dissolve limiting perceptions, clarify what matters most, and move towards greater resilience and meaning and inspired action. Over the past five decades, Dr. DiMartini has studied across many disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, human performance, leadership, and well-being. And he's shared his work with audiences around the world through books, many books that have been translated into quite a few languages. Seminars, including one that he's going to be doing here in San Francisco soon. Documentaries, interviews, and educational programs. I appreciate the work that he does inviting us to look more deeply at how our perceptions shape our lives, how our values guide our behavior, and how even our challenges can become gateways to greater wisdom and purpose and service. Dr. Di Martini, thank you so much for being here. It's an honor to have you here, and I'm looking forward to our conversation today.

Speaker 2 · 1:47Well, thank you.

Speaker 1 · 1:47Thanks for inviting me and have me on your podcast. For listeners who are new to your work, what is the DiMartini method and what kinds of shifts is it designed to help people experience?

Speaker 2 · 2:00Well, the DiMartini method is a cognitive series of questions that allow you to see what you've been unconscious of, to help you see the hidden order and the apparent chaos that you may be running your life with. Always say the quality of your life based on the quality of the questions you ask. And some of the greatest questions are the ones that make you equilibrate your perceptions, liberate you from the polarizations that we have in our perceptions, allow us to access unconscious information that's been sitting there that's intuitively trying to reveal itself. And now it comes to the surface by asking the right question. Then we're able to see things. For instance, let's say you meet somebody, then you're highly infatuated with them initially, you know, like a man meets a girl, a girl meets a man, or whatever your sex gender is. You are a little infatuated, like Michael Douglas with Glenn Close initially, and fatal attraction. And you're conscious of the upsides but unconscious of the downsides, and blind, ignorant, and unconscious of those things that are about to come to the surface over the next weeks and months. But you can have the wisdom of the ages without the aging process by asking quality questions initially to find out what they are, because your intuition is trying to whisper them to you, but you're ignoring them with your impulses. By asking quality questions and making you aware of it, you're less likely to be vulnerable and gullible to the initial perception that can fool you. And the same thing on things you resent, or anybody you put on a pedestal or put in a pit. Di Martini method is a series of questions, very concise questions. I've been developing it over the last 50 plus years. Millions of people are using it, and it's basically a tool to help you be present and see a hidden order and see things on the way, not in the way. So you're a master of your destiny more than a victim of your history.

Speaker 1 · 3:46Beautiful. I know you do a lot of work in helping people identify their highest values and helping people to live according to those values. Would you say that the questions help one to discern or discover what their highest values are?

Speaker 2 · 4:04Well, in 1978, as I was entering the professional school, I asked a question: why do some people walk to talk, some people limp their life? Why do some people thirst, some people flounder? Why do some people do what they say and others don't? And I identified that what drives human beings in the study of axiology, which is a study of value and worth. And I found that people have a hierarchy of value that's unique, like a fingerprint. It's evolving and changing, but at any moment it's unique. And whatever's highest on your value structure, you spontaneously are inspired to do. You don't require external motivation to do it. So that's where you're most effective and efficient at achieving something if you set your aim congruently with it. But as you go down the list of values and priorities, you progressively require more external motivation, reward to do it, punishment if you don't, to keep yourself on track with it. So it's less efficient, effective. So one is inspired from within, it's intrinsic. One is externally motivated, it's extrinsic. So when people set a goals, if they're aligned with the highest values, they're higher in probability of achieving them. They also have a higher self-worth if they do. But if they try to set goals that are not, they're going to need constant reminders and out external motivation. If you need motivation to do what you say is important, it's not important. And external motivation. So I have a value determination process that I've developed back in 78 that has been used again by millions of people. It's free on my website if anybody wants to go there, drdmartine.com, and go on there and use it. A lot of companies, a lot of individuals, organizations, even governments use it. But it's a tool to help you discern what's really priority. Because many people, when they meet people and they meet somebody that they look up to, without realizing if they inject the values of those individuals into their life, and they try to envy them and try to imitate them and try to be second at being somebody else instead of first at being themselves, and they lose their authenticity and they create an incongruency. Floyd called it the superego, which is an internalization of some outer authority's value. And this distracts you and it moralizes you and makes you judge yourself with pride or shame, which are inauthentic expressions of your real self. So I a firm believer that if we identify what's really valuable to us, and I put down 13 questions that I've discerned over the years to help people narrow that down. Once we do, it's kind of like an aha moment. You kind of realize, well, no wonder my life's excelling there and not doing well there. And then you end up starting to set goals congruently. Because when you fill your day with high priority actions that are congruent with your highest values, your day doesn't fill up with low priority distractions. It don't. You create neg entropy, which is life physics, instead of entropy, which is death physics. And you tend to have uh more fulfillment in life when you're living by priority, and you don't have all those distractions. So if you're not dedicated to what's really important and delegating what's not, you're gonna be trapped and you're gonna be basically distracted and require external motivation and you're gonna self-depreciate and many people trapped there. So that's why knowing what your true values are, what's really important to you, instead of the ideals that society expects, the normative ethics that you're subordinated to, the moral hypocrisies that you're sometimes taught, it gives you what David Hume called the is versus the ought. What are you really instead of what you would think you ought to be? That authenticity liberates people from a lot of bondage, baggage, and emotional distress.

Speaker 1 · 7:20My next question is a lot of us have these shoulds in our lives. Like I should be helping others, I should do what my parents want me to do. The list goes on. And I wonder if in your experience

Speaker 1 · 7:40as people go through their questions, is service always part of people's paths? I think some of our audience, we have a lot of mindfulness teachers as a part of our community. They feel like they should be sharing mindfulness with others. And there's often a fear of feeling selfish if if service is not inherently a part of our path. Can you talk about whether service is always inherently part of our path?

Speaker 2 · 8:13Well, I've been uh helping people discern what they believe is their mission or purpose in life for more than 50 years, actually. And we have a sensory cortex, a motor cortex. And so sensory input, affection, and motor output effection is part of that. We're not here to be uh sacrificing altruistically our life for service to others at the expense of self, which is a minimization of self and exaggeration of others, eventually that's non-sustainable futility. You eventually get frustrated and say, damn it, I deserve more than that. And is not also wise to uh narcissistically expect rewards without a service. That's again non-sustainable futility. And that eventually gets you humbled because if you're not creating a sustainable fair exchange with people and you're righteously projecting onto what you think is important, but it's not meeting your needs, they withdraw until you get humbled and bring it back into equilibrium. If you're sacrificing yourself for somebody else and minimizing yourself, you eventually start to withdraw because you're not getting rewarded for it. And so you eventually say, No, I deserve better than that. And you come back up and bring it back into equilibrium. Nature and society gives us feedback to try to get us back into sustainable fair exchange where we're not judging somebody above and below us, and we're not priding ourselves for shaming ourselves, which is being ourselves, where we have sustainable fair exchange, equanimity, and equity between ourselves and other people. So nature forces that. So that means that in every purpose in life that's going to be fulfilling, it's going to be fulfilling to the degree that it has a balance of success, well, service and reward. You know, you want to have a balance. It's sustainable fair exchange, because then you can't wait to get up in the morning and be of service, and people can't wait to get your service. And that creates a sustainable objective. I've been teaching that as Stacey Adams has told it, equity theory. I've been teaching that for decades in corporations. When people find that balance, the supply-demand system maximizes efficiency. But if they try to go to one side or the other, it eventually creates symptoms. I really believe that the symptoms in our life, in our relationship life, our social life, our physiology, our autonomic feedback, and our business life is constantly trying to get us into equanimity where we're authentic. And that's where we're really mindful. We're mindful of both sides of ourself. We're not the hero or the villain. We're the hero villain. I learned a long time ago, miss most people are trying to get rid of half themselves and only to get one-sided. But in Buddhism, the Buddha said the desire for that which is unobtainable and the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable is a source of human suffering. So that's like trying to get a one-sided magnet or trying to get something for nothing or give something for nothing. It's non-sustainable. So the purpose, a mission for people will require a fulfillment of both sensory and motor, receiving and giving. That requires reward and service. And when those are in perfect balance, then people want to continue to do business with this. They want to keep being in relationship. Every relationship, even in an intimate relationship, is striving for a sustainable fair exchange. If they don't feel that they're getting as much out of it, they withdraw or they start retaliating to try to get it back in equilibrium. So I think that service is half of the equation, but reward is also half. Why not do what you love it and get handsomely paid for it? Why not provide a service that you truly value that other people value and have a sustainable fair exchange so you have a perpetuation of growth? Why not? I asked myself many years ago seven questions, and these have been with me for a long time. What is it I would absolutely love to do in life? Well, I wanted to travel the world and teach. So I'm traveling the world teaching today. And I asked, how do I get handsomely and beautifully paid to do that? I didn't want to say, how can I afford to do that? Because that's basically a costing to do what you love. How do I get handsomely and beautifully paid to do that? Then I asked, what are the highest priority actions I can do today to move me one step closer to that reality? Then next question is what obstacles might I run into and how do I solve them in advance? So I mitigate the obstacles, so I increase the probabilities of going after what I really love. Why have a quiet life of desperation? You can have a life of inspiration. It's totally up to us. And then I asked, what worked and what didn't work today when I as I go down that path? And how do I do it more effectively and efficiently tomorrow? And then no matter what happened today, how did it get me one step closer to my objective? Whether I was supported or challenged, it doesn't matter. How did whatever happened today get me one step closer to this objective? If you master those seven questions and did those every day, there's no way you're not going to get your movement towards the outcome. May take weeks or months or years. Who cares? You're still moving. It's the journey, not just the destination anyway.

Speaker 1 · 12:41Suppose you do get to the destination like you have, do you then redo it to come up with something new? Or do you just enjoy where you are?

Speaker 2 · 12:52Well, I've been teaching for November will be 54 years. That's my thing. I love it. I can't wait to get up in the morning and do it. I think that the population growth is still exceeding my ability to reach everybody. So it keeps me busy. If I see a country that needs humanitarian service to try to procreate because of population declining, I figure that maybe I can offer service there too. I'm joking, that's a bad joke. But the point is that I can't wait to get up and learn some. No matter what you know, what you know is an infinitesimal compared to what you don't know. And so what you don't know is an infinite. To penetrate new mysteries and to keep growing with holy curiosity, keep expanding awareness and potential, I think is the fulfillment of life. Might as well do that every day of our life. So I don't have an end to what I'm gonna do. I have no possible way I'm gonna know it, other than a small speck of the universe. So I might as well do that. Einstein inspired me when I was young. He said it's enough for me on a daily basis to contemplate and try to penetrate another mystery and uncover the intelligence in the universe, the intelligent that permeates the universe, as they said. He believed that there was some sort of rational order, as the logos of Heraclitus described, and there's an inherent rational order in the universe. Let's go and research it. Science wouldn't exist if they didn't believe that there was some sort of rational order. They wouldn't create the scientific system to try to uncover it. So I'm a firm believer as a scientist to find a hidden order in the apparent chaos and penetrate the mysteries. Information theory says a disorder is missing information and order is reclaiming it. So let's go and use our brain, use our mind to continue to expand. I hope to do that every day of my life.

Speaker 1 · 14:26You mentioned the phrase holy curiosity. Is that what you mean when you talk about, you know, Einstein's interest in discovering, say, the fabric of the universe or the order of the way things are, in discovering what this world is, and that there's like a sacredness to it or a holiness of the universe

Speaker 1 · 14:50itself? Or are you speaking towards sort of an attitude of curiosity, of sincerity and humility to all the above.

Speaker 2 · 14:58I think you've said it perfectly. In information theory, as I said, the universe has a tendency to go to disorder. Material universe tends to go to disorder, but there's a self-organizing system that's going towards order at the same time, life. Uh-schrödinger in 1944 wrote a book, What is life? And he described it as negative entropy. And so I believe that if we are unconscious of things and we're in the dark and we're not awake and asleep, you might say, and ignorant of information, we're undergoing entropy. We usually then have a biased, subjective, biased interpretation of reality, and we have kind of an emotional bias, and we're polarized with our opinions and we're opinionated, end up with in-group, out-group bias on information and our perceptions of people and our environment. But if we learn to ask questions that help us balance that, like Hegel did with the dialectic and Zeno did, to try to find the synthesis of opposites, the unity of opposites, it helps us accountable, be more accountable and not biased in our interpretation. And we get closer to a whole instead of just a part. That's why in the research I've done, you find people propose something, and then you find somebody propose the opposite and challenge it, and it goes back and forth like a dialectic. But there's some synthesis that's there that's worthy of both sides. And my way of trying to screen out the illusions is to study. I'm a polymath, so I basically studied 300 different disciplines, about 31,000 books. I basically go through there and study various disciplines to try to find common threads in the principles that underlie them, because the more the disciplines have the same principle, the higher the probability that that might be meaningful. And I try to build a body of knowledge on that which is cross-disciplinary. So that doesn't guarantee that I've got anything that's true. It just increases the probability that I've got something I can build a foundation on.

Speaker 1 · 16:44That's a multidisciplinary approach. A random question, kind of tied to that. You've been referencing, say, physics and negative entropy. I'm wondering if you happen to have a theory around the synthesis of like macrophysics and microphysics, the large and the ultra-tiny, or how our minds or mental energy may relate to either or both of those?

Speaker 2 · 17:13I love the question. Thank you. Well, that's tying together general relativity and quantum, right? That's the big paradox that they've been trying to solve. Quantum loop gravity is an attempt to try to do that, trying to take a general theory and distortion of the fabric of space-time and put it into some quantum bits of information. This is an approximation of it, whether it's to be true and gravitational entropy is another one. These are very approximations to that objective. Some believe that there's a kind of a panpsychic field of consciousness that is mediating between these two. And when we're at a level of mystery, in basically uncertainty and probability, we're looking at quantum events. And when we have something that's more clarity, we can look at more classical events. And that's the boundary of our computational awareness that's differentiating those two. There's all kinds of theories. I've been devouring those theories for decades. I can't say that I've come to an absolute conclusion, but I do believe that there's some really practical tools in the quantum principles that can apply to conscious behavior. That's been my area. That's where I started. I read the Principles of Quantum Mechanics by Paul Dirac when I was 18, and that really inspired me. And I also read Leibniz's work on the discourse on metaphysics, and that put me on a journey to try to find the hidden order and the apparent chaos. And so I took that to particle physics and I took that out to thermodynamics, and I took that over to philosophy and the idea of continuity and discontinuity. I went every direction with that. And I believe that there are some universal principles that we can create a framework to be able to explain not necessarily consciousness, but the dynamic applications of consciousness in the world, which is practical. And so I think that there is a way of unifying that. We're trying to put it into a mathematical proof has been puzzling, but I believe that there's a way of doing it. And I really believe that, believe it or not, Wheeler had said love is part of that. Freeman Dyson at the Institute of Advanced Studies, I had a conversation with him at Princeton, and we were discussing that. And Wheeler, who was across the hall from him, he believed that that was the foundation of it all. Not love in the sense of romanticism, not Cooleridge's idea, but love in the sense of the synthesis and synchronicity of all compromise opposites that are entangled, that are not really separated except in our mind when we measure things with some sort of bias. I think that that we have the capacity to uncover this unifying field of love that's there. And now it sounds kind of romantic, but it's not. It really is what Heraclitus was described in the logos back in the ancient times, a unification of opposites. I think that that is the where the actual unification of opposites at Planck's length is the junction between the classical and the quantum. And that's bits of information that are unified in sort of a basonic state. So I think we have access to that. As the closest we got in the language we have today, we may have new language in decades to come and we'll get even more approximate. But that's a very close approximation to it today. It has practical application in human psychology, philosophy, theology, and in science, and in neuroscience, and in also AI science.

Speaker 1 · 20:18Some people talk about mindfulness as loving awareness. Sure. I think it works. And it it sounds like, you know, a lot of love. Maybe this is a little bit more in the romantic sense, but perhaps in more senses, there's an attitude or just an awareness of things as they are. There's a say a sense of acceptance and fluidity of moving with the moment, meeting it as it unfolds.

Speaker 2 · 20:51An adaptability to the changing world. When somebody perceives somebody with more positives and negatives, they activate the amygdala, which assigns a valency, a positive aliency to it. It's stored in the hippocampus as an episodic memory. It then creates an impulse to seek. It activates dopamine and nucleus acumens and gets the pleasure compounds out. And we either go seeking it, and we're actually blind to the downsides. And that seeking creates intrusive thoughts that occupy space and time in the mind. And we now have a fantasy about it. We try to sleep at night with insomnia. We can't sleep because we're fantasizing about this thing that's about to happen. And this is not love. This is an infatuation. It's not a romantic love, as Kurid says in romanticism, it's a lopsided perception that's giving us the symptomatology to let us know that we're incomplete

Speaker 2 · 21:40in our awareness and we're not listening to our intuition to what are the downsides, and we're becoming impulsive and gullible. On the other side, if we're now resentful to somebody and we're conscious the downsides and unconscious the upsides, now we've got an instinct of avoidance. We activate the sympathetic nervous system. It now occupies space and time of mind. Now we have intrusive thoughts. Now we have a Nightmare and we can't sleep at night. So the insomniatic state that keeps us from sleeping is basically let us know we're fearing the loss of something we're seeking and fearing the gain of something we're trying to avoid, and it's creating an autonomic dysregulation. And this is not love. This is the distortion, this is the mindlessness. It's also missing information because it's unconscious. So it's a lot of entropy and a lot of aging, a lot of symptomatology. But if we're able to see both sides simultaneously, when you get to know somebody and love somebody for 60 years of marriage, you know the things you like, the things you dislike, and you see them simultaneously, and you're just present with them and you embrace them as a whole. That kind of love, which is not seeking or avoiding, it's just present with. To me, that's mindfulness. Mindfulness is when you're full and you're not missing with unconscious information. You're fully conscious of both sides simultaneously, and you feel the love for that individual, or for the universe, or for the goal, or for anything. And now you have a clear consciousness. It's not having intrusive thoughts. You're present. I started doing meditation in 72 and I taught meditation and yoga and all kinds of stuff for years. I noticed all the noise in the brain that we start out our meditation with is nothing but preoccupations with the things that we're polarized and are valent in our amygdala that are occupying space and time of mind to let us know what we haven't loved and getting us an opportunity to love it. And as we meditate, we eventually transcend that, not attached to those distractions, and start to see it and able to see both sides. And then we become mindful. And I think that that is love. Love is the synthesis and synchronicity of compromise opposites that the mind is striving intuitively with feedback systems to obtain. It's doing what it can to master that in our life. I think that everything that's going on in our life is a feedback to guide us to that. It's trying to do that. Our physiology, our sociology, our psychology, our relationships, our businesses are trying to get us back to that state of awareness.

Speaker 1 · 23:54You talked about, you know, how our minds often veer towards fear or seeking. And I think that's a helpful question for a lot of people when they sit down to meditate or when they're just going about their day. Is there fear here? Is there seeking here? Not to judge it per se, but just to be aware of it and sense into it and then meet it, maybe embrace it and practice our meditation or our mindfulness and maybe go through some questions about how to proceed. I'm curious about your meditation practice these days, if you incline towards a loving awareness of what's here, or are you sensing into next steps of your path? Just curious what your meditation looks like these days.

Speaker 2 · 24:49I had the blessing to explore various tools and methodologies of meditation. I can't say I'm attached to any of them. I use them all. I've done breathing meditations and mantra meditation, sound meditations, you know, they've all been there. They all have a place and they all have use and they all serve. But ultimately, anything that integrates the mind. Some people do meditation to escape and they dissociate. And I find that as like an early stage of meditational experience. But real meditation is not seeking or avoiding. It's finding the pairs of opposites. So there you're poised and present instead of trying to seek or avoid. So when somebody says, well, that person's stressful and I don't want to be around that. I need to go meditate and escape that and get over that. I would go into meditation in that case and I would say, What am I perceiving? And I would ask, what specific trait or action or inaction do I perceive this individual displaying or demonstrating that I disliked or despised or reacted to or want to avoid most and really define what it is that I have a button on, that I'm judging and that I'm have from past experience stored in my subconscious mind, which is my hippocampus, a wound of, because they're coming into my life to help me see that. And then I go in there and I go, where go to a moment, John, where and when I perceive myself displaying or demonstrating that. And I do reflective awareness and I ask, where do I do the same thing? And I assure you, I've been doing that for a long time.

Speaker 1 · 26:12Yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 · 26:13I haven't seen anything on the outside that I'm not doing on the inside. So when I go in there and I look at that, just me realizing that and realizing that I'm judging myself and I'm drawing this individual into my life to help me see that is part of the meditation process. And then when I do, it calms down my judgment because who am I to point my finger? And then I go one step further and I go, at the very moment they did the behavior that I judged, how did it serve me? Because if I saw only the negatives in it, I didn't look for the upsides. And if I go in and hold myself accountable to equilibrate the upsides and bring myself into equanimity, once I have an equanimity between myself and them, an equanimity of the positive and negative valency on it, there's nothing there except thank you. And your heart opens. And then you realize that they're you and they're they've brought into your life to help you love a part of you that you've been disowning. And so then there's nothing there. Then all the noise in the brain that you're needing to meditation to escape is gone. And now you're just present and realizing there was a hidden order in their presence, and you're thankful, and there's nothing to be phobic about. You only have two types of fear: the fear of loss of something you're seeking, or the fear of gain of something you're avoiding. If you're not highly polarized and there's no seek and avoid, the filias and phobias dissolve and you're present. I have a methodical cognitive system that I can do in the meditation to neutralize that in minutes. So then the noise that normally takes a while to get into that meditative state calms down as quick as I'm able to do that. I'm present. And then I feel love for the person and myself. There's nothing there to judge in the first place. I bought into some sort of moral hypocrisy about me being a half person. You don't need to get rid of half of yourself to love yourself. You got to be able to embrace the hero and the villain. And 42 years ago, I went to an Oxford English dictionary and I went through every page of that dictionary. It's the biggest dictionary I was able to find. And I underlined every word that was a human behavioral trait. And out to the little tiny edge of the page, I wrote the initials of the people who I thought was the most extreme example of that behavior. I went, okay, inconsiderate language or something, or verbal criticism. And then I would go out, who do I know that was the most verbal critical in my life? And I'd put their initial. And then I'd go in there and ask, where and when do I display and demonstrate that until it was equal in quantity and quality to the individual that I saw the most extreme on. And as I was doing this, I went through 4,628 traits over a couple of years. When I got through, I realized it's all me. There was nothing missing. At the level of the most essential self, some people in theology called it the soul. Nothing's missing in you. That's what pleuromic fulfillment was about to the Gnostics. That's what equanimity is about. That's what

Speaker 2 · 28:50the middle path, the fulfillment and the low disposition, if you want to call it, that was mindfulness, because the mind is nothing missing. And in that state, I went through all the pros and cons, the positive negatives. I found I had them all. I was nice and mean and kind and cruel and positive and negative and peaceful and wrathful and considered, inconsiderate, and generous and stingy. Every single trait at different moments in my life to the degree that I was projecting. And that was an amazing experience to realize I don't need to get rid of anything. All of it was serving. If I thought there was a negative to it, I found the upsides. If I thought it was a positive, I found the downsides. And I leveled the playing field until I realized I'm a human being with all of it. Instead of trying to get rid of half of me, to be supposedly me, which is a facade, I was able to be able to be with the whole. That's mindfulness. When you can love all parts of yourself, that's mindfulness. There's no disowned parts that cause that occupy space and time in your mind that you're seeking and avoiding anymore.

Speaker 1 · 29:44Yeah, and the full integration.

Speaker 2 · 29:47It's the integration. That's what the medial prefrontal cortex is attempting to do in our brain. That's why they call it the seat of the self in Scientific American 2022. And I think that that's what all the homeostatic mechanisms in the brain, biochemically as well as neurochemically, that's what it's trying to accomplish. It's trying to help us be the most magnificent, fulfilled individual we can possibly be, but we are indoctrinated by all kinds of moral hypocrisies about how we're to be that's interfering with us being mindful. We're trying to get rid of parts of ourselves and trying to be only one-sided. And that's why the Buddha said the search for that which is unobtainable and the avoidance of that which is unavoidable is a source of human suffering. There's nothing to avoid, nothing to seek. It's all present, nothing's missing. The Bompa Lama in Nepal, I spent time with the Bompal Lama, went to his little temple there in Nepal in Kathmandu area, and we had a conversation about the state. He had a big smile on his face. He says nothing missing. We all become aware that nothing missing. Fulfillment.

Speaker 1 · 30:44He said it really well. Well, that was a pretty good impression. I felt that. You talk about perception in your work. Do you use the phrase like mastering perception? And if so, like what does that mean in practical, everyday terms?

Speaker 2 · 30:59Well, you have sensory receptors, tactile, taste, smell, etc. There are many, many, many senses that most people don't know about, not just the five senses. But to each of these have specialized receptors that transduce the stimuli, whether it be sound or color or whatever, into action potentials in the brain, or in the nervous system, peripheral nervous system first. They go into the brain stem or the spinal cord, ascend up some tracks up to specialized tracts, go into the thalamus and go up to the conscious awareness. A very tiny portion never makes it to conscious awareness. Most of it is unconscious. Most of it is there, but we don't know it unless we really have a purpose. When something's really meaningful and high in our values, the pulmonar nuclei filters it into the conscious awareness, and anything other than that gets filtered out. Otherwise, we'd be overwhelmed by infinity. So we couldn't possibly take it all in. We'd be overwhelmed by the multitude of stimuli. So we filtered out, and our hierarchy of values dictates what we perceive and what we allow in. And so we're creating our own model of the world. Our perception is based on our past experiences stored in our hippocampus, our new receptors, and all the associations of nerves are going up the tracks. They're all influencing what we perceive. I wrote a book called The Illusional Basis of Man's Health and Disease when I was 23, many years ago, 48 years ago. And it was on how perceptual illusions create illness and how they create entropy in the physics of the body. I really believe that perception is a malleable game. The quality of our lives based on the questions we ask. If we ask really quality questions and become aware of the unconscious, we can modify any perception. We can cognitively appraise any perception and make a heaven out of a hell or a hell out of heaven, as Milton says. And so to me, as William James said, that's the greatest discovery of his generations. People can alter their lives by alternate perceptions and attitudes of mind. So if we can ask questions that equilibrate the mind to neutralize all the valency that occupies space and time of mind and causes intrusive thoughts, we can become poised and very powerful individuals, uh, really clear on our mission and have a feeling of love for what we do every day. I've been studying these self-mastery, self-actualization, and those kind of terminologies all these years. There's no doubt in my mind that we have the capacity to do something extraordinary with our lives. There's no reason why we can't. It's just our own perceptions in the way. We bought in, we've subordinated to outer authorities and sort of let the voice and the vision on the inside take command. Trying to be second at being somebody else instead of first at being ourselves is futile. Envious ignorance imitation is suicide, as Emerson said.

Speaker 1 · 33:29I usually come in like 30th when I try to be others. Come in last on that race.

Speaker 2 · 33:36I really believe that we're not here to compare ourselves to other people. We're here to compare our daily actions to what we value most. How congruent are you on a daily basis? If you're living by priority and dedicated to what's highest in priority and delegating what's others, you're giving other people an opportunity to do what they love, it that helps you do what you love. And you can be grateful for your life and grateful for the people that help you fulfill it. That's mindfulness.

Speaker 1 · 33:57Yeah. Well said. You talk about valence and moral hypocrisy and noticing our judgments of the external world and reflecting back. How do I have that within me? I'm wondering if some people may have some difficulty asking themselves, well, what do I really want, or what are my highest values? I'm wondering if you see a correlation between what we don't like or what we judge, or where is our moral hypocrisy by identifying that? Can knowing that correlate to what we do want by knowing what we don't like or what we judge externally? Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 · 34:43Let me develop that. Back when I was 23 and I asked those questions, why do some people do what they say and others don't? I studied axiology. And there was only 12 textbooks available in English at the time on it. And I was not satisfied with any of the text because most of the discernments they were doing on identifying values for people were very subjective. There was no objective way of doing it at the time. And there was a problem, as David Hume said, the is versus the ought. Instead of going what the values ought to be, which most people live by, what are the values? And so I learned that there, your life demonstrates your values, but because you are living in a society that you subordinate to often, and there's normative ethics you're surrounded by, you're now going and having a conflict between what you feel you would love to do and what you think you ought to be doing. And the is versus the ought becomes a paradox. How do you live in a world and be yourself in a world

Speaker 2 · 35:40that doesn't want you to be? They want, you know, everybody around you is imposing their values onto you about what you should do and ought to do and supposed to do and got to do and have to do and must do and need to do, all the imperatives. And you're trying to be yourself inside that. And so if you subordinate and put them on a pedestal, you're going to inject some of those values and cloud the clarity of what you're really called to do. And so if you're ever judging another person, putting them above you, you're going to inject them. If you put them below you, you're going to project them. And those both of those are non-sustainable futilities. If you try to get others to live in your values, you won't. Any marriage knows that when they get married, they both try to get the other person to live in their values, but eventually give up on it because it doesn't work. No one can sustain that. And eventually you learn to appreciate that individual's values and how it serves your values, and then you appreciate people who they are and they turn into who you would love. So I asked, what are the how do we discern values in people? And I found in um that one of the key indicators was how you fill your space. If I give you something and if it has very, very little value to you or no value to you, if I give it to you as a gift, you toss it the trash. You'd want it out of your space. If it's very valuable to you, you keep it close to you. And the study of proxemics is you have intimate space, individual space, social space, public space. And you, if it's really important to you, bring it into your intimate space. So if I give you something really important to you and you really value it, you won't let it out of your sight, kind of thing. So space is an indication of what you value. And if you look at what you engage in in your intimate space most frequently, it tells you what you value most in your life. So I'm not interested in what the subjective ideals of society are. I'm interested in what is your life demonstrating? Your actions speak louder than your words. And I've asked, God, millions of people over the years doing the value determinations. I mean, we do thousands in a day. Um so you know what it is, and I assure you, 99% of the people don't know what their values are. They're telling you the ideals of what society is expecting and they're subordinating to outer authorities and the moral hypocrisies that trap them in the guilt trip that they're living in and the limiting beliefs that they're trust, they're they're they're they're stuck in because they're trying to be something they're not. They're envying somebody else and trying to be like somebody else instead of honoring who they are. So then I look at the the next one is is not besides space, is time. You find time, make time, spend time on things that are really valuable. You figure out a way of organizing and structuring your life to get to what is really important, and you run out of time and can't get the time for the others. If somebody calls you up and says, hey, I'd like you to come and do this thing, and it's really low on your values, you go, I won't be able to do it. I've got something else more important. You say no to it. But you'll make time if it's somebody gives you an opportunity. If somebody gave you an opportunity to do an interview on somebody you've always wanted to do an interview on it, you'll figure out a way of strategizing to get that interview done because it's really important to you. And to learn from them and to share what you know and to get it out to the people you care about, you're probably being figure out a way of getting that done. So when it's really important to you, you spend time on it and you fill your space with it. The third thing is energy. The mitochondria and the medial prefrontal cortex skyrocket with increased mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation the second you're doing something that's really important to you. So when you're doing something you really love doing, your energy levels go up. And whenever you're doing something that's low, it shuts down. Just like your particular activating system turns on or off and wakes you up or puts you to sleep if it's high or low on your values. And then the next one is money. If I give you money, you're going to spend your money according to your hierarchy of values. And whenever you spend money, obviously where most of your value is. What you don't have money for, that's where it's low on values. So that's a fourth indicator. And I have 13 indicators. The next one is where do you have the most order and organization? Where do you have the most discipline? What do you think about, visualize, affirm, internally dialogue with yourself about how you would love your life to be that shows evidence of coming true? What do you keep wanting to bring conversations to with other people? What inspires you and brings tears to your eyes of inspiration? And what's common to the people who inspire you? What are the most consistent, persistent goals that you've had that are coming true, that you really wanted to come true? And what is it you spontaneously want to learn? All these give indications objectively of what really is important to you and what your life demonstrates. And I start there because if you're not structuring it with something objective, you're going to be inundated by the subjective expectations of the authorities around you. Once you find out what that is and start prioritizing your life according to that, your energy goes up, your creativity goes up, your innovation, your drive, everything is intrinsic, not extrinsic. And that's where you have most effective and efficiency achievement levels. Companies use that, leaders of companies use that tool to hire people according to that. When you hire somebody, nobody's dedicated to a business. They're dedicated to the fulfillment of what they value most. If you don't know what their values are, you're going to be betrayed, expecting them to live in your values and not their own.

Speaker 1 · 40:39Yeah, I actually didn't get a job because of that. And I'm really grateful. I interviewed with Jack Canfeld, the author of Kitchen Soup for the Soul. Kitchen Soup for the Soul. Yeah. I met him, spent some time with him, and I wanted to work for him. But the role I knew internally it wasn't like the most fulfilling role for me. And after a lot of questions, he discovered that. He's like, you know, I think you're best suited for something else. And at the time I was really disappointed, but retrospective, I'm really caring about you.

Speaker 2 · 41:14You know, when somebody can't wait to get up in the morning and be of service to people and can't wait to do it in a way that they're rewarded. And it's not highest on their value. They're holding the company back, they're holding their life back, they're creating symptomatology, they're going to take it out on their loved ones. You're going to get less productivity. You're going to have to micromanage them. That's not caring about the person. Caring about somebody is helping them find out what they're inspired to do and helping them find a pathway to get that done. That's what I love doing every day. That's my main thrust of every single day of my life.

Speaker 1 · 41:45Beautiful. In my circles, there's two words that often come up, or two feelings or emotions, which are burnout and shame. And as I hear you talk about aligning with your values, and I love it when you use the word efficient, like efficiently adding energy and moving forward with your life purpose. You know, things become more efficient. I'm sensing into when we really know our deepest values and get into that 1% of people who really understand ourselves to this degree, that perhaps shame and burnout naturally dissolve. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 · 42:35When you're living in lower values, the blood glucose and oxygen goes into the amygdala. The amygdala wants to avoid pain, seek pleasure, avoid predators, seek prey, avoid challenge, seek ease. So the second you strive for that which is unobtainable, just ease without difficulty, the difficulty now becomes accentuated. And when you are striving for just the ease and the difficulty comes, you can get burned out because you have a fantasy expectation of a one-sided world. But when you're living by your highest values, you embrace pain and pleasure in the pursuit of a purpose. You embrace challenge and support as feedback and guidance to mitigate the risk, to dampen the fantasies, and to get on with what's really objective and get things accomplished. So when somebody is living by their highest values, they see challenge as feedback to help refine their path and to master the path. Where people living in their amygdala and their lower values, they see challenge as an obstacle. They see it in the way, not on the way. And as a result of it, they burn out and they get bored if they get only support. It's like in prey and predator constructs. If you have prey without predator, you get fat and gluttonous and you lose fitness. If you get predator without prey, you get starved and emaciated, you lose fitness. But if you put prey and predator together, support and challenge and pleasure and pain and the unity of opposites, the pair of opposites together, which is real mindfulness, you get maximum productivity, growth, and development. And that's been proven. It's at the border of order and chaos that we have the Greatest growth. People that are striving for a one-sided world, a monopole, are going to get smacked by the other side of the magnet. And then they're going to be distressed by it and they're going to have burnout by it because they're striving for a one-sided world. But the individual that embraces the two sides of life, the two sides of a human being, the two sides of themselves, doesn't have burnout because they understand that both sides are necessary to maximize their potential. In fact, when I spoke at the UN, I talked about on innovation that when you pursue challenges that inspire you, you maximize your creativity, innovation, and original thinking. Pursue challenges. The greatest achievers out there are not people shrinking from challenge. They're going, what is the greatest challenge on the planet that I would love to solve? You know, what's the biggest problem out there? When you're running from problems, you're going to keep running back into them. But if you go and take them on and find the problems that you would love to work on and make a difference solving those problems and tanking on those challenges, that's where innovation, creativity, and fulfillment come about. I'm a firm believer in your highest value. You don't see challenges and obstacle, you see challenges and opportunity.

Speaker 1 · 45:04The research on what they call flow is that you need both that challenge. That's the true flow. Right. On your website at drdimartini.com, we'll post links in the show notes for everybody. You have a breakthrough movie. You have breakthrough experiences. I'm wondering what you mean by breakthrough and how you offer that to people.

Speaker 2 · 45:31Well, I jokingly tell people when we start the program. I've done it 1,264 times, so I've done it quite a few times. I tell people the reason it's called the breakthrough experience because there's no breakthrough the experience. That's a joke. Because we go, we're just full on. It's an inspiring two days. I just finished it. But the breakthrough experience, when I was 17 years old, I met a teacher named Paul C. Bragg one night at a little recreation hall on the north shore of Oahu. At the time, I was a long-haired hippie surfer living and surfing big waves on the North Shore. I was a high school dropout. I left home when I was 13 and I nearly died. And this man, in one hour, in one message, in one meditation, that's my first

Speaker 2 · 46:10time I ever meditated with him. He inspired me, and that was the night I believed that maybe I could overcome my learning problems, my speech impediment, and I could someday become intelligent. I saw a really beautiful vision that night. Ever since that night, I've had a dream to do what that man did for me for as many people as I could. The breakthrough experience, it's two days I introduce people to values and my DiMartini method on how to sort through and take whatever happens to you and how to turn it into opportunity and help them get clear about what they want to do. So they're intrinsically driven to go after things. I'm there to teach them how to appreciate and love all of them. People are beating themselves up and comparing themselves to people and thinking they got this and that, and they got labels on them, and none of those mean anything to me. All those labels are just incomplete awarenesses because inside a human being, there's a tremendously powerful potential to do things, and it's accessible. And the quality of our life is basically quality of the questions. So if we ask the right questions, we can unveil that and liberate that and get it moving again. I've had celebrities in there that have gone and done amazing things even further. I've seen people that are six-year-olds that start businesses. I mean, I've had all kinds of people, every imaginable people, 94-year-olds. Everybody's been to the breaks expense, a couple hundred thousand people. But I don't know of anybody that can't benefit from that information. I mean, I've been studying 54 years almost on human behavior, and I try to download as much as I can to help him. And each individual has a different thing. The whole purpose is to break to whatever's going on in you. And I don't know what that is until they're there. Some people have financial barriers, some people have relationships, things are stuck, some people have health issues, some people they've just been in a legal issue. I mean, I don't know what it's going to be. I just know that there's a way through it, and we can come out and turn it into an opportunity. So that's what the breakthrough experience is about. I love doing it. It's one of my favorite things to do. That's why I've done it 1,264 times. Here's canting there. I'm a metric freak. I keep a record of everything. I've already got you mentioned on my document. I had the opportunity to be interviewed by you on your podcast. That's already documented before I even got to you. I document everything. You know, I'm a firm believer if you have a goal, it's worth metricing. With a metric, you can see if you're making progress or not, and if it's real or not, or if it's a fantasy. And if you're making progress and you can modify your strategies and you can know what works and what doesn't work. I've got a 10,000 page document that I work on on a daily basis that keeps going on all my goals and objectives. And some people look at that and they go, that's insane. And I go, well, then I'm insane. I'll take that on. I'll own that one too. But I'm a firm believer in achieving what you set out to achieve in life and you're capable of doing it. I don't care what you've been through, I don't care what you're going through. I just know that you have the capacity to transform whatever that is into something great.

Speaker 1 · 48:46When you said that when you were 13, you had a like a speech impediment. I was in a speech pathologist when I was a year and a half old. Yeah. So in terms of learning and speaking, I would never have guessed that you had those.

Speaker 2 · 49:02When I was 18, I came back and took a GED, high school equivalency, because I had dropped out. And I guessed and I passed. I said, I don't know how I had passed that thing. Then I tried to go to college and I failed. And then I was very distraught, crying on a living room floor. And my mom came home from shopping and she said, son, what happened? I said I got a 27 on a test. A first grade teacher told me I would never be able to read, write, or communicate, never mount a thing, never go very far in life. And so that's what came back to me. And I told my mom that. And she said, son, whether you become a great teacher like you dream about, whether you go back and ride big waves, or you return to the street and panhandle, which you've also done, because I did that as a kid. I just want to let you know your father and I are going to love you no matter what. No matter what you do, we just love you. My hand went into a fist. I looked up, I saw the vision the night I was with Paul Prag, and I said, I'm going to mass this thing called reading and study and learning. I'm going to mass this thing teaching healing philosophy. I'm going to do whatever it takes, trouble whatever distance, pay whatever price to give my service of love across the planet. I'm not going to let any human being on this planet stop me, not even myself. I got up, I hugged my mom, I went into my room, I got a Funk and Wagnell's dictionary, and I started memorizing 30 words a day. And I memorized the 30 words a day by reciting them 20 times, writing the definition 20 times, saying the word 20 times, pronouncing them properly 20 times, putting them in a sentence 20 times. And I grew my vocabulary 20,000 words in two years by doing 30 words a day. And my mom tested me every single night. And I went from the bottom of the class to the top of the class and I practiced speech. And I mean hours and hours and hours of speech until it's clear today.

Speaker 1 · 50:33So I was gonna ask about that first meditation you did with your teachers and ask what you remember from it or what made it so powerful in terms of the guidance, not just like what you went through, but how it was shared, if there was a memory of a feeling or an energy. I wonder if there's a parallel there in the sense that your first meditation guide may have exuded some sort of love or acceptance that helped you to then dream or vision or see, say, like a North Star for your life.

Speaker 2 · 51:23While you were speaking, I was trying to find something on my phone that was the vision I saw that night. Because it's been painted by a famous painter in Mel Melbourne, Australia, and it sits in my office. It's a four by five foot painting today. He took us through this guided imagery meditation. He had us sit and breathe. We kind of all were sitting in a Tater fashion, or Lotus physician in our yoga position. And then he took us through this guided imagery kind of experience. And then he had us open our eyes, and he had this mandala, and he had us then look at this mandala and then close our eyes, a couple more breathings, and then we kind of went off and really got present. Within about, I'm gonna guess 10 minutes or so, you could hear people starting to

Speaker 2 · 52:00cry all through the room, including me. I had tears of inspiration. It was like a visionary thing. I'll show you what I got because it was painted, because I did a presentation in Melbourne, Australia. There was a famous painter there, and he asked if he could paint my vision. He modified it just slightly to put my new version of me inside it, but that's what I saw.

Speaker 1 · 52:18Okay.

Speaker 2 · 52:19It was me standing on a balcony speaking before a million people with an iconic building from every major city around the world. And the name of the painting was A Man on a Mission with a Vision and a Message. That was what I saw, and that's been in my mind since I was 17. I've gotten now to speak in 174 countries. So my dream is to go to every country in the world and to share a message. So I do that. That's what I do. I live on a ship so I can go country to country to country as I travel or fly on the jet. So I'm constantly in motion, traveling and speaking today.

Speaker 1 · 52:49Sorry, he showed you a mandala. Do you remember what the mandala was?

Speaker 2 · 52:53Or it was like a Tibetan mandala. I don't know. It wasn't a classical one. Possibly he went to Tibet and got an actual painted mandala. It wasn't that big. He held it just on a little thing and he just put it in front of everybody as he walked person to person to person. Beautiful little mandala.

Speaker 1 · 53:08Just a centering mechanism. Well, it's a beautiful vision. I'm really happy that you're in it. I'm living it. It's my life. Yeah. Dr. Di Martini, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your wisdom with us. I do invite everyone to go to drgmartini.com. We'll have the link in the show notes. But I'm curious if there's anything that you haven't shared that you'd like to share, or what would you like our community to know about you or about them?

Speaker 2 · 53:41Well, we mentioned values on the website, drdmartini.com, is there's a little thing that you can say, determine your values, find it. And it's free, it's private. Be honest with yourself, answer the questions. It'll be helpful. It'll be eye-opening and helpful. And read about it. On the website is literally hundreds and hundreds of interviews and YouTube and everything else. It's an educational website for people. Let them take advantage of it. That's all.

Speaker 1 · 54:08I've watched a few of your YouTube videos from other podcasts and whatnot. And I must say I was really looking forward to meeting you, and you did not disappoint. And I'm really grateful for you inspiring me to continue learning and aligning and integrating. So thank you, thank you, thank you, Dr. DiMartini, for your work. And for everyone listening, please check out drdemartini.com. The links in the show notes will post a link to the values exercise and check out his books too. Dr. Dumartini, thanks again and wish you a wonderful future.

Speaker 2 · 54:49Thank you. Thank you for the great interview. I appreciate it.