The Myth Of Selfless Service

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. 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. Thanks for inviting me and have me on your podcast.

Speaker 1 · 1:11A 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. 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 · 2:02Well, 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 it's 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 said, No, I deserve better than that. 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 it. 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 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 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

Speaker 2 · 5:20not? 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. It may take weeks or months or years. Who cares? You're still moving. It's the journey, not just the destination anyway.

Speaker 1 · 6:30Suppose 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 · 6:41Well, 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 something. 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 intelligence 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 that 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 · 8:15You 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 itself? Or are you speaking towards sort of an attitude of curiosity, of sincerity and humility to all the above.

Speaker 2 · 8:47I 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 · 10:33That's a multidisciplinary approach. A random question, kind of tied to that. You've

Speaker 1 · 10:39been 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 our mental energy may relate to either or both of those?

Speaker 2 · 11:02I 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 and 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 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 · 14:07Some 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 · 14:40It's an adaptability to the changing

Speaker 2 · 14:42world. When somebody perceives somebody with more positives and negatives, they activate the amygdala, which assigns a valency, a positive valency to it. It's stored in the hippocampus as an episodic memory. It then creates an impulse to seek. It activates dopamine and nucleos 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 to 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 in 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 or 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've noticed all the noise in the brain that we start out our meditation with is nothing but preoccupations with the things that we're polarizing or 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 · 17:43You 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

Speaker 1 · 18:38days.

Speaker 2 · 18:38I've 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 they're 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 · 20:01Yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 · 20:02I 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.

Speaker 2 · 21:43And 42 years ago, I went to the 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 the 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 and negatives, and I found I had them all. I was nice and mean and kind and cruel and positive and negative and peaceful and wrathful and considerate, 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 · 23:34Yeah, and the full integration.

Speaker 2 · 23:36It's the integration. That's what the medial prefrontal cortex is attempting to do in our brain. That's why they call it the seed of the self in Scientific American in 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 Bompal Lama in Nepal, I spent time with the Bompal Lama. I went to his little temple there in Nepal in Kathmandu area. And we had a conversation about the state. He says nothing missing. We all become aware that nothing missing. Fulfillment. He said it really well.

Speaker 1 · 24:34Well, that was a pretty good impression. I felt that.