Human Behavior Expert: The REAL truth about achieving success | Dr. John Demartini

So I then broke life into seven areas. I've been working on it since I was 18. I'm 70 now.

Every time you read a book, it's like adding an app to your phone that has a new ability.

I've got 31,000 books in my head. All I could hear is my first grade teacher who said, I'm afraid your son will never be able to read or write or communicate.

Do you believe in things like divine guidance, or are you pure neuroscience?

There's no dice in the universe. There's a hidden order, but it's too complex. The quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask.

What is the difference between intuition, inspiration, and emotion? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today's a really cool episode because it's a chance to talk with someone who's been ahead of the curve for more than five decades. His name is Dr. John Demartini. You might have heard of him. He's got a big following online, but he's cracked the code on human behavior and developed something called the demartini method. And this is a way for you to have more control in your life. It's about emotional intelligence. It's about having your values match your emotional intelligence. And this is the part of biohacking that a lot of people don't know. They think, oh, it's red lights and cold therapy and neurofeedback and all the stuff that I've talked about since the beginning of the movement. But all of those give you more power over your biology, which gives you more energy, which, in my understanding of the world, we're motivated unconsciously to evolve, and Maslow would say to transcend. So part of biohacking is personal development. So when you get a chance to talk to someone who's spent decades working on this, working about that, working on that mind, body connection, I think it's going to be really fun. Dr. John Demartini, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I was looking forward to this.

All right, let's just get right into it. What is the demartini method? Tell me the one sentence or one paragraph elevator pitch.

It's a series of very concise questions that help people become conscious of what they have been unconscious of. That allows them to see the hidden order in their apparent chaos and allows them to transcend the emotional vicissitudes, the reactions that occupy space and time in their mind so they have a clear consciousness. I've been working on it since I was 18. I'm 70 now, so I've been working on it for a long time.

Little bit of wisdom there. Just the wisdom that comes from a lot of pondering. And it's always an honor to get to talk to someone with more mileage than me. My entire life has been learning from people who've done it before. All the longevity stuff, I know I had people in their 70s and 80s teaching me when I was in my 20s and it's been such a accelerator in life. So being able to learn from your experiences is interesting. But what's more interesting, the way you said that you had a specific inflection in the way you talked about the method and you actually changed certainly your demeanor. My sensation there is you changed your energetics behind it as well. Are you doing that consciously?

Just responding.

Just responding. All right, so the, there's a whole bunch of un, invisible things that people do. And you kind of, at least from the way I see the world, you dropped into your body and your voice lowered and you said it is about this. And so that's just your unconscious way of I guess aligning your emotions with your, with your values.

It's possibly that or I went to bed about three hours hours ago and it's 5:30 in the morning. Oh my gosh.

Well, thank you for waking up. Okay, you're 70. How much sleep do you get?

Very little on some days, I'd say for many years. For probably 35 years I did four hours. Now I'm closer to the six hour mark because I guess that's just what happens when you get close to that age. You just have to sometimes relieve your bladder a little bit more.

You have now offended all the people who say you have to get eight hours of sleep. Do you mind offending those people?

I don't really focus on that. I just focus on what the facts are.

I love that about your work. I'm the same way. All the evidence I have for longevity, and this is from millions of people over years followed. The people who live the longest get an average of six and a half hours a night. And that is much safer than eight hours a night. Not that getting less sleep makes you live longer. It's that if you're healthy and your brain works and your nervous system works, you don't need as much to recover. So I, I think if you could do it for 35 years, you look fantastic. So something is working. What's your stress level like?

I delegate all stress to other people. I, I, damn it. I started delegating When I was 27 years old, yes. And I teach, research, write, and travel, and that's it. I don't have anything else I'm responsible to do. So the things that anything that required extrinsic motivation that I felt that I got to do, have to do, should do, must do, need to do, supposed to do, ought to do, whatever, anything that I require, any form of external motivation, I hire somebody who's a specialist to take care of that so I don't have to do that. And then I just stick to what my core competence and do the one thing that I love doing, which is teaching and then researching, writing, so I have something to share and just travel around the world. So I don't have it. I don't have a lot of stresses, really. I just delegate all my crazies out to other people.

Okay. I didn't think we'd get there this soon in the interview, but I want to learn from you. When you're delegating things you don't want to do that are. That require extrinsic motivation, how do you know you're delegating to the right people?

That's a great question. I. I had to learn through trial and error on that. But I did develop a method. Okay. Nobody goes to work for the sake of a company. They go to work to fulfill what's most meaningful, most inspiring, most fulfilling to their life, which is what they value most. I have developed a methodology to identify what that is and not by what they say, but what their life demonstrates. Wow. And then what I do is I take the job description that I'm going to delegate and I ask them a series of questions. I don't personally, but I train somebody to do this. But I've trained people for doing this for decades, 46 years. And I make sure that if I ask you, how specifically is doing this action going to help you fulfill what's most important to you? The highest value. If they have to pause for even a second to come up with an answer and look in their psyche for an answer, they're not engaged. The degree of their congruency between the job description and their highest value is the speed of the fluency of the speech that they respond with. So I can narrow down. I've been doing this for companies for a long time, four and a half decades. I can narrow down what they're spontaneously inspired to act on and what they would have to be motivated to do. And I don't want to hire somebody that has to be motivated to do something I want them to be more adept than myself in doing it and they want to spontaneously look forward to doing it. Otherwise I'm going to have to micromanage them and I don't have time for that. So I basically screen people out that way and if they don't have a history of doing what I love doing, I don't hire them. I don't have them do that. So that's simple really. It's not that difficult.

That is, that is powerful advice. It reminds me of my friend Dan Sullivan, who's been coaching entrepreneurs for 40 plus years.

I've known Dan that long.

You have? Okay. I love Dan. He's in his 80s, I believe, and he, he just straight up says the things you hate doing, you gotta hire other people to do it. And there's a lot of wisdom there around the micro behaviors that tell you whether someone's real. I've been spending a lot of time on that. You looked into some unusual things for what? I guess overarching. You'd say personal development is part of what you do. But you looked at physics, you looked at neurology. How did that kind of research derive these set of questions that you ask people?

When I was 17 years old, I had a dream to travel the world and teach. Because I met this amazing teacher when I was 17 that inspired me to believe that I could someday become intelligent and overcome my learning challenges. So I had speech impediment and learning challenges as a child. When I turned 18, I was watching Kung Fu with David Carradine. I love that show. And he talked about his Shaolin master. And I thought, I want to be a master just sounded cool. And so I said, I want a master. And so I basically decided, what exactly is a master? I tried to investigate what that was. And the gentleman that inspired me when I was 17 talked about Universal laws. And so I said, okay, I want to study these universal laws, whatever they are, and I want to be a master of my life. So I then broke life into seven areas. Our intellectual quest, where we create original ideas that serve humanity. Our business quest, we create a global business. Our financial quests, we have financial independence. Our family quest, we create a global family dynamic. Our social quests, we have massive influence. Our physical vitality quest, which is our vitality in youth. And our inspired quest, where we make a contribution that inspires people in some movement. So I basically wrote out how I wanted to in my life and I started working on it in the study of the universal laws. I went right into when I was about 18 into the dictionary. What exactly is a universal law? And it referred to natural laws. And so I basically identified what they were. And it led me to a topic called the logos, which is the order and reason and intelligence of the universe. The plan of the universe, if you will. So in the process of doing that, I then realized that the logos was diversified and fragmented into all the different ologies, the disciplines you could study. So I made a list of every known discipline at the time that I could find. And then I made a commitment that I would study each of those disciplines, at least 100 books in each of those areas, which would be equivalent of like a PhD in that area. And I started to devour every imaginable field. Physics, thermodynamics and sciences and philosophy, you name it. And so I've been blessed to now devour 300 different disciplines. I've got 31,000 books in my head, and I've been able to devour that and speed, read and learn as much as I can, because I wanted to be able to build a foundation of knowledge on something that was sound. I didn't want fluffy stuff. So if I. I figured that if I could find a principle that was applied in physics and applied in. In the various sciences and also in philosophy and everything else, something that would stand through all the disciplines, I would have some sort of foundation. Because if hundreds of different scientists came to a similar conclusion, put it in different languages possibly, but they came to the same idea, I would have a higher probability of a foundation of knowledge that I could rely on. So that was the intention. So I became polymathic and sort of an autodidactic individual dedicated to the exploration of anything that might enhance the expansion of human awareness and potential and the evolvement of consciousness on the planet. That's been my dream and the master of the seven areas of life.

You mentioned someone who introduced you to the universal laws. Who was that?

His name was Paul Bragg. Some people have heard of Bragg's amino acids. But he. He came to the Sunset Recreation hall on the north shore of Oahu, November 18, 1972. And I happened to come to that yoga class. He was at a yoga class and he was a guest speaker. And I was studying yoga as of that night. And I listened to him speak. And he was such an inspiration. Very, very, very firm and, you know, knowledgeable in this area. And it was mainly about health of the body and mind at the time.

Right.

And so he introduced me to those ideas. Now I've stood on the shoulders of a Lot of people since. But he was the catalyst that initiated the beginning of me pursuing intelligence. I was told in first grade I would never be able to read or write or communicate or mount thing never go very far in life because I had dyslexia and I had a speech impediment. I had to go to a speech pathologist when I was a year and a half old and so that no one ever thought I would be able to read or write or speak properly. But when I met him, I really thought just maybe, maybe with what I just learned, I could finally overcome this. And I was a surfer. I was a long haired hippie surfer guy living in the North Shore. You know, I got into some surf magazines and surf, you know, store surf movies, even three of them. But I, I just, I was a surfer by then. I was living in a tent at the time in the jungle in Hawaii and wow. But I was led to this little health food store and this little yoga class. So all I know is that I, if it wasn't for that night, I certainly wouldn't be where I'm doing today. But I, I found out that I could read and I could learn with a lot of effort. I had to start with a dictionary and start memorizing words in the dictionary and to start to learn how to read and pronounce things, I really had to work at it hard. I used to practice a word, I used to write it 20 times, pronounce it 20 times, properly recite the meaning of it 20 times. I mean, I worked on 30 words a day, 20 times each word. And until I got my vocabulary up to where I could go back to school, because I dropped out of school when I was a young kid. I left home when I was 13 and I basically rehabbed my brain a bit and realized before it was neuroplastically understood, I realized I could change my brain if I worked on it.

Yeah, that was before neuroplasticity became a thing. I think Eric Kendall, who's been on the show, got a Nobel Prize for that sometime in the 90s. And you were 20 years ahead of that. I, I think people who have always been healthy or just been, we'll say neurotypical, underestimate how much work it is to rehab your brain like that. I, I had Asperger's when I was younger. They say I should have had dyslexia. But my eye tracking's good. Even though I have all the things that move around the letters, I just learned to track around them. And I had ADHD and ODD and ocd. There was a time when I stuttered and you can rehab all of that. And for me, with Asperger's, I had to actually learn like you did the, learn all the emotional states, like, oh, look, there's a signal in the body. I guess I should pay attention to it. And just the amount of, of intense effort that goes into that is, is something that a lot of people never do or don't know they can do. Why did you have the energy and willpower to do that?

When I first was inspired by Paul Bragg, I, I went to a health food store and grabbed my first book. In my life, I had never read a book from COVID to cover or anything like that. I had very limited vocabulary. My, my vocabulary was waves, weed, women, wow, and Whoopi. That was about it. But I, I picked up that book and there was a long haired hippie guy on the front cover of a book called Chico's Organic Gardening and Natural Living. And the only reason I got the book is because he looked like me. I thought, if that sucker can write this book, I bet I can browse it. And when I got that, I, I was encouraged that I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this. And I left Hawaii and I hitchhiked. Well, I flew to Los Angeles and I hitchhiked back to Texas and my parents asked me to take a GED test general education degree. Which is high school.

Yep.

And Paul Bragg gave me an affirmation to say to myself to help me overcome my learning problem because I told him I couldn't read and write and speak properly. And he said, that's not a problem. Just say this one statement. Say I'm a genius, and I apply my wisdom every day. Now a guy who's a dropout school student saying I'm a genius and I apply my wisdom sounds a little odd, but I did what he said. And I've never missed a day since. It, I mean, I say it every day. I would say a genius is one who listens to their inner voice and follows their inner vision and obeys and lets the voice and the vision on the inside be louder than opinions on the outside. That's. That's how I define it.

Wow.

So I came back, took a GED and passed that sucker by guessing. I just, it was one of those. One of those. I really started thinking there was some sort of divine providence on this one. Now then I decided my parents said, why don't you try take a college class? A junior college. I couldn't go to college, but I could go to a junior college. I went, okay because I was encouraged. Right. I passed this game. I took this class, English and history. And Mr. Baker's class, he was going a mile a minute. Speaking. And I'm not used to taking notes. I'm not. I'm not adept yet at this thing. I took the test two weeks into this summer school class, and I was. I thought it was going to be alphabetical. I looked up on the top of the chart. I thought, for sure it's going to, you know, demartini should be up there. And I looked down. I just didn't see a name. And it was based on scores. And all of a sudden it stopped at 72. There was nobody there. And then I looked way down at the bottom, and it was a 27. I got a 27. And I really was distraught. And I ran to my car and I sunk in the car and I just cried because all I could hear is my first grade teacher who whispered to my. To my parents and said, I'm afraid your son will never be able to read or write or communicate and never go very far in life. And that's all I could hear in my head at the time. And I cried driving home. And I curled up in a fetal position underneath this Bible stand that my mom had in the living room, silken living room. And I was really having a sulky moment. And the vision and dream of being a teacher just was shattered. And I guess I said, I guess I'm going back to surfing. At least I know I can stand on a surfboard. And my mom came home and she saw me there, and she said, what happened, son? I said, I blew the test. I guess I don't have what it takes. I guess I'll never read, write. I just recited what the first grade teacher said. And then she said something that only a mom could say. She put her hand on my shoulder and she said, son, whether you become a great teacher and philosopher and travel the world like you dream, whether you return to Hawaii and ride giant waves, which you've done, or you return to the streets and panhandle is a bum, which you've also done, I just want to let you know that your father and I are going to love you no matter what. Wow. My hand went into a fist when she said that. And I looked up and I saw the dream and the vision that I had the night I met Paul Bragg, standing on a balcony and speaking. Sort of a dissociative identity disorder, probably at the Time. And I saw that and I said to myself, I'm going to mask this thing called reading, studying and learning. I'm going to mask this thing called teaching, healing and philosophy. And I'm going to do whatever it takes. I'm going to travel whatever distance. I'm going to pay whatever price to give my service of love across this planet. I'm not going to let any human being on the face of the earth stop me, not even myself. And I got up with a determination that was hard to describe. And I hugged my mom and I went into my room and I got a Funk and Wagnall's dictionary out. Now, those days, if you went to Kroger supermarket and you bought $20 worth of food, you got a dictionary.

Back when education was the priority, right?

So I got this dictionary out, which I still have in my office in Houston, And I memorized 30 words a day. My mom would test me on them, and I would recite them 20 times, read them, and write them 20 times. And I just was methodical. And I built a vocabulary over the next two years of 20,000 words. And from the bottom of the class, I went to the top of the class. And then I just lived in books. I mean, lived in books.

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Before my 19th birthday, my mom said, what do you want for your birthday? I said, I want the greatest teachings on the face of the earth, the greatest writings, humanities ever created by the greatest minds who ever lived. She said, are you sure you don't want a T shirt? I said, no, mom, I want the greatest teachings on the face of the earth by the greatest minds, the founders of arology. So she said, well, let me see what I can do. And she had a brother who was a professor of mit. I called Uncle Ralph and she told him what I wanted. And he knew, he knew that I had learning challenges. And so he sent two giant six by six by six foot wooden crates filled with books, thousands of books on a flatbed truck to our home. And I remember they putting them on the ground. I got out with a crowbar and opened up these crates and in there were thousands of these books. I mean, physics, thermodynamics, mathematics, philosophy. I mean, it was fantastic. And I carried them all into my room and just surrounded my room around this yoga mat, this yoga sheet where I could see the sun and the sunrise. And I just went to work and I started reading 18, 20 hours a day and meditating. My sleep was meditation and my work was just reading. And if I was, if I would go to class and school, I would read on the way there and read on the way back. I just lived reading books and developing.

And you were how old?

I was going on 19. I turned 19 right when I got all that, all that books. And I just lived reading. And I just, I read every single day of my life. I write every single day of my life and I teach every day of my life.

I learned to read when I was 18 months old. That's why my eye tracking works. And people say, what? There's a book called Teacher Baby to Read. It's not a good thing to learn to read at that age. You probably should learn how to crawl. There's some physical movement and neurological stuff. Yeah, that you give up from that. That I had to learn later. But I've been trying to explain to my kids and to others. Every time you read a book, it's like adding, adding an app to your phone that has a new ability. It's a new way of looking at the world, at least if it's a book worth reading. And it. I don't, I haven't kept a full count, but it's 10,000 plus at least. And it's been so helpful for just learning how to think. And I'm a little concerned that we're learning today from things like TikTok. And it's amusing, but you just don't learn how to see things a different way. You're getting these little tiny nuggets. That would have been one paragraph of a whole book. How would you go about encouraging people to Read again. In the US especially.

People love to learn in their own highest value. Finding out what that is and giving themselves permission to allow their magnificence and expertise to emerge from that and then linking other ologies or disciplines or other information that they think is going to be useful for their life. To that. Can I share a story? I gotta share this story, please. I was in South Africa and I was doing a program called Awakening the Genius within. And there was the head of the school board there. And so he came up and approached me and says would you be willing to come in and speak to some townships in South Africa? These are really low socioeconomic, really hardly even any books or even chairs or sitting in these schools. Sometimes there's not even a floor. And so we went to the Alexander township and the pass rate from a trick was 27%. 27 out of every 100 children were passing. So I first spoke to a series of presidents of the school, principals of the school. And then I came to this particular school and they allowed me to speak about a week before school started to all the teachers and I found out what their values were. I linked the curriculum that they were going to be involved in teaching to it and their job description to it. So they would increase their engagement level while they're working and presenting. People love to present what's meaningful to them. And if they can see how what they're teaching is linked to what they value, then they find meaning in it. They're engaged and they're more inspired. And a teacher who is inspired students will listen to. But if you're not engaged, they've tuned out already.

Yeah.

Then the week of the first day, the first week in class, first day in class, I came back and you got with all the students and there's a lot of students. So it was a real, a lot of group. And I basically I helped them identify what their highest values were and what their classes they were going to take. The five or six classes they were going to be engaged in. And I then spent, this is a four hour session with the teachers, four hour session with the students. And I got with them and I linked all the classes to what was most important to them. Now some of them wanted to do video games, some of them wanted to do sports, someone to do ballet, someone to be a singer. I mean there's all kinds of things they wanted to do, someone to open up and be an entrepreneur. But whatever it is, we link the classes to it. And we spent four hours with the teachers linking four hours There just making it kind of, you might say, responses in the brain. So there is neural pathways, as Heb's rule says, you know, neurons that fire together, wire together. And we're just rewiring the brain neuroplastically. So they could see how the classes they were taking were helping them fulfill what was meaningful to them. Because then they want to go to class now. They had to. They had to buy and give people food to get kids to school. They had to feed them in the morning and feed them in the afternoon to keep them there all day because they didn't have any purpose for that. They were living in a township. And then what we did is the third time I came, we linked the values of the teachers to the students. Because in South Africa there's a lot of autocracy, there's a lot of talking down. You do what I tell you, which just turns kids off. So what I did is I took the values of the students and I linked them to the teacher's values and the values of the teacher to the students values so they could practice the art of communicating what they want the students to learn in terms of what the children want in life, in their world, and matching their world. So we did that. So a total of 12 hours of contribution, and at the end of the year, 97% passed.

Wow, what a difference. Just by seeing what's in it for them.

Because nobody wants to learn something that they can't see is going to serve them. We all have met somebody in a social setting and they've introduced themselves and they said their name. And if you think that person is important, I need to remember the name, you'll write it down, you'll ask them again, you'll make sure you get it, and you'll store it. You'll even write it down on your computer or phone or something. But if they say something, you think, there's nothing I'm ever going to do with this person. One billionth of a second later, if you walked up to them, who was that? And they'll go, hell if I know. They don't even register it because the pulmonary nuclei and the thalamus will filter out sensory information from going into the transmodal regions of the cortex. So in the process of doing it, we tune it out, we filter things out, our reticular activating system and our pulvinar nuclei, that just filters it out. So when these kids can see how this information is useful, they go into the cortex and it goes into the conscious level. Now I've trained people on how to unconsciously learn too. Because most people don't realize that when you're reading, you get conscious information, but you get unconscious. But if all of a sudden somebody asks you a question that is meaningful to you, that implies that information that was unconscious, it comes conscious too. So I've trained people how to access unconscious information and absorb information. And these kids, they change their perspective and some of them would come, you know, a few years later, I would be doing a live seminar in Johannesburg or something and someone would come and find out. They'd see me in the convention center wherever, and they come and they just come to the back of the room and say, thank you.

Wow. Talk about making a difference. If the demartini method and Ken Wilbur's integral theory got in an arm wrestling challenge, who would win?

I don't think either one of it would win. I think we just have a nice conversation like I did with Ken.

I think, I thought you'd say that.

I, I think Ken is a bright guy and he's done a lot of, you know, synthesizing and integration of information. Very bright guy. And we had about a four hour conversation and we were having some fun. He had some of his students, I had some of my students there. We were having a blast.

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that. Because you both had a similar path of kind of studying everything. And how does it all fit together? What are the biggest commonalities and biggest differences? Because this audience heard the interview with Ken Wilber as well. So like, what stood out as areas where you guys didn't have alignment or a big aha from that?

You know, I wish I could tell you that I, I think that information that's solid is, is something that's, it's like a, a mathematical thing. You don't, you don't get different answers on a math. I, I, I mean, we may have different ways of expressing the same idea. I mean, the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex is an integrative center. I believe it was the October edition of Scientific American either. September, October 2022, they talked about the integration of the information in the brain in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is a self governing center. And it basically uses GABA and glutamate to calm down the amygdalas, impulses and instincts, the valency that the amygdala signs. And if we integrate our life. The metaphor for all of what he's discussed in integration is demonstrated in our own brain function and the world around us is a reflection of our own perceptions and decisions and actions and the integration of that. So if you study various forms of philosophy and psychology and sociology and theology and like Ken has done, you're going to see universal principles that'll stand the test of time woven in between it. It's like imagine at one time there used to be a mirror of truth. And in that you could look inside and have pure reflective awareness and pure reason and see wisdom objectively. And somehow vandals came and they wanted to get access to it, and they grabbed and it broke. And everybody grabbed a little fragment of the mirror of truth and scattered it across the world. And everybody had a little piece of the mirror of truth. And gradually you're attempting to integrate the mirror of truth, the pieces back into a hole so you can see and put your hand over the fragments and seal the cracks and be able to see pure reflection. But, you know, somebody wrote, and I couldn't find it in Schopenhauer's work, but somebody said that Schopenhauer said that we become our true self to the degree that we make everyone and everything else ourselves. As Plato said in the Anima Mundi, the world soul. That when we finally integrate all the parts, we realize that everything we see out there is a reflection of who we are. And that if we love the universe, we love our being. And we realize that we're inseparable from whatever we've learned and whatever we know. There's always a mystery beyond that. And so we're constantly growing who we are as a magnificent being. So I'm a firm believer that what he was describing in integration is what our intuition and our inspirations guide us to do.

What is the difference between intuition, inspiration and emotion?

Oh, that's a great question. When you walk down the street and all of a sudden you run into an attractive person. And I don't know if to say if it's a girl or a guy today, because you never know what to say to hell. But I still have a tendency to notice girls. I don't know what it is. I'm still in the dark ages, I guess. If you see somebody that you're very attracted to and you have an impulse to seek them out, it's probably because you're conscious of the upsides, but you're unconscious of some of the downsides. Now, if you start to date them days, weeks, months or years, you'll find out the downsides and you'll eventually see both sides for who they are. And you start out with A fatal attraction a bit. But then you find out what the person is. So while you're having the impulse to seek. And you're having a ratio of perceptions that are more positive than negative, you might say you have an emotion. Energy is now in motion towards your cerebellum is coordinating the. The seeking mechanism to go after the person. And you want to. They represent prey, and you'd like to consume them. They call that the parasympathetic rest and digest. But you may take them out to dinner to jest. And then you take them to rest, take them to bed, as they say. So that's the seeking of an emotion. That's an impulse towards something. But you also may run into somebody that challenges your values. That activates stored, subconsciously stored pains that you've accumulated. And now you have a resentment to somebody. Now you're conscious of the downside, unconscious of the upside and your race as a perception. Or skewed valiantly towards the negative side, not the positive side. And now you have an avoidance instinct. So now you try to avoid that person. So anytime you seek or avoid. And something is polarized in perception. It occupies space and time in your mind. It creates an intrusive thought. It makes it difficult to sleep with soundness. And you're now preoccupied by this. And that's designed that way because you don't want to lose prey and you don't want to be eaten by predators. So it's a kind of a survival response that's subjectively skewed and distorted and extended and generalized and categorized with bias. That's an emotion. And emotions let us know when we have an incomplete awareness. They let us know when we have an emergency for survival. And they're very valuable for that purpose. Now we have impulse. And instinct is a positive feedback system that dramatizes things to accentuate the adrenaline to be able to capture the prey or avoid the predator. But now we have intuition. Intuition is the complete balance opposite of that. So intuition comes in when you're infatuated with somebody. Your intuition is trying to whisper the downside. So a woman meets a really handsome guy and she goes, too good to be true. Keep your eyes open. Don't be gullible. Don't go too fast. Be patient. Keep your eyes open for them. He's probably fooling you. So the intuition is trying to whisper the unconscious to you. That you will find out over time. But it's trying to whisper to. So you don't have the wisdom of the ages, of the aging process. You have the wisdom of the ages without it. So it's trying to whisper that. And if it's a negative prey, predator kind of thing, it tells you the upsides. There's got to be a reason why this has happened. There's got to be meaning behind it. There's got to be a purpose behind this. What are the upsides? So our intuition is trying to right the things that are imbalanced and try to bring you into a state where you're fully conscious of both sides. Now, the intuition is not inspiration, but the intuition is trying to lead you back to see both sides. And so you're fully aware, you have mindfulness, and you're fully conscious of both sides simultaneously. William Wundt called it the simultaneity of contrast in 1897 in his book. So when we see both sides simultaneously, we have full consciousness, mindfulness, fully awakened. Because whenever we're unconscious, we're partly asleep, partly in the dark. So we have ignorance, we're ignoring information. So now when you see both sides and your intuition brings you to the center, it's a dialectic, and it's trying to get you into the center, where you have a synthesis, Hegel said, which is the spiritual experience. The moment you see both sides simultaneously, you're inspired. You have gratitude, you have love, you're present, you have certainty, not uncertainty, and you're enthused. The entheos. And one of the signs of this is not a delta wave, not a beta wave, but an alpha theta junction wave, which stimulates a gamma synchronicity in the brain and synchronizes the brain function and gives you a confirmation of a moment of authenticity. You have pure reflective awareness. And now you're inspired by the magnificence of the universe and the magnificence of your role in the observation of the universe. So that's inspiration. So emotions are polarized perceptions. Intuition is trying to synthesize them with a negative feedback loop. And inspiration is a confirmation that they've now been synthesized and now you're seeing things as they are, not as we assumed they were. Just like the old saying of is versus ought. The is is what is as it is, and the odd is what we thought it should be according to our own biases.

Wow, that's. That's beautiful. And deep. So back when you were 18 and some invisible force guided you to go see Paul Bragg or to pick up that book, the first book, with a guy that looked like you, was that a thought? Was it intuition? Or was this, you know, divine guidance where did that come from when I.

Recovered from nearly dying? When I was 17, I was living in a tent, and a woman found me in the tent and heard me, I guess, moaning in the tent as she's walking through a path because I was deep in the jungle. And she took me to a health food store called Vim and Vicar in Haleiwa, north shore of Oahu. That's where I was living. And there I was drinking some carrot juice and eating this little sandwich that she got for me because she tried to help me recover. Yeah, and there was an albino African guy that looked like Jimi Hendrix with white hair sitting there at this little Helfenstar bar. And I had kind of a strychnine cyanide poisoning. And I had spasms in my fingers, locked up fingers. And he looked at me and he said, man, you need a yoga class. Man, you need mind over body. And I thought, what the hell's a yoga class? And what is the hell? What's he talking about? And as I was leaving that health food store, there was a little flyer on a door that had big letters, yoga special guest speaker Paul Cbrack. Now, if that guy had not said that, I'd have just walked right out that door. Never, never had that experience. But he said yoga. And because of that, I saw that word yoga, and I could get that word and I decided to go. Something intuitively said, go to that yoga class. There's something there for me because of what that guy said. I kind of realized, I learned when I was living on the streets that nothing was missing. Everything that you were looking for was needed. It was in a form you overlooked sometimes, but it was always there. And I kind of really trusted the universe because when you live on the streets, you learn to trust things in a different way. And I think the guy was saying a message for me and he said, go to yoga class. So I did. And my life changed because of it.

When he said that, you could have easily said that sounds like a bunch of BS and not gone.

I was too ignorant to know that was BS if it would have been bs.

You were just like, I don't know anything. I'm kind of desperate.

I knew how to stand on a surfboard. I knew how to make surfboard. I knew how to get stoned. I knew how to, you know, kiss a girl. I mean, I had the basic survival. I was in Maslow's thing, living in a tent, in a jungle.

Sometimes being near, near rock bottom can make you more curious or more open to new ideas.

The more down and out you've been, the more up and in you get to go.

That is very true. Okay, so do you think, do you believe in things like divine guidance, universe setting you up for success, Gaia, all that kind of what, what some people would call woo woo stuff, or are you pure neuroscience?

I'm both. And here's why. Because I believe that true science and true philosophical and theological ideas don't fight. It's the pseudoscience. The pseudoscience and the pseudo religions love to fight. Leibniz. Godfrey Leibniz wrote a book called the Discourse on Metaphysics. And in the first chapter, the first paragraph, he talked about that there's a perfection in the universe that few people can get to know, but no one could ever improve upon it. It was just magnificent. Of course, Voltaire made Candide and satired him and tried to make him, you know, ridiculous because he would say there was the best of all worlds, but he was, he had a depth of understanding that not everybody comprehended. And so I kind of had this sense that there was a hidden order in the apparent chaos. So I started studying 30 mode dynamics at age 18. And I remember reading a book on Brownian movement by Einstein with the help of a dictionary and many dictionaries. Even though it was a simple book, I still use Pictionaries. And he said, if you took ditch water and filtered it out and just got a few particulate matters, you could trace the movements in there. And as Pascal said, if you knew all the variables, you could figure out the order that was there. And so he said, we can figure out the order if we have two particulate matters, it's twice as complex, three particular matters, and six times complex. And it was factorial, geometrically progressive. So what happened is you get four particular matters, 24 times complex, 5, 126, 720, and just kept going up. So what, he basically was believing that there's no dice in the universe, there's a hidden order, but it's too complex. Now, Stephen Wolfram, the mathematician, he said that there's a computational boundary and we just don't have the computational skills to be able to find the hidden order in the chaos. And that the disorder, the entropic disorder, was simply missing information, as they said in information theory. And so entropy is a model out there that we believe the universe is going to entropy, thermodynamic equilibrium and heat death and entropy. But entropy is missing information. So the question is, where's it going? So I went to Institute of Advanced Studies later on and I met with Freeman Dyson, who was a panpsychic. And I said, so what happens to the information? He said, it's stored in charged particles of light in the universe. And so I started looking at the physics of charged particles of light. I started Ludford Boltzmann's work and he was never satisfied with the second law. First law was a conservation. Second law was everything was going to entropy and heat death. Right. Third law and the idea of enthalpy. So I thought, okay, he's not saying that entropy is true. He's saying that entropy is a byproduct of not knowing the information and not knowing what's happening. Exactly like Pascal, just like Leibniz, just like Wolfram. So I went out of my way. That's what created the demartini method, the thermodynamics. I said, I want to find out the hidden order. The hidden order, like the implicate order of David Bohm. The hidden order in the apparent chaos. So I started developing algorithms of thought and perception. And I'm absolutely certain that there is hidden order in people's chaos. And I love helping people see it. Now, when you add that together, then you come to the realization that based on the level of reflective awareness and the awareness of that hidden order, your construct of divinity changes.

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I was in a movie called oh my God. And it was talking about did God make man or did man make God? It's a great little movie that they did, has Seal and Ringo Starr and David Copperfield and Hugh Jackman. It's got a lot of characters in it. And they went around the world and they interviewed 23 religious organizations rather well. What is their viewpoint and they asked celebrities and things like that. I got to be in that movie. But what I asked is, this is if we're in our amygdala, we have an idea that God is protecting us from our predator. And so we live in a phobia. And we then create a philia, and we create an anthropomorphic personification, an agenticity and a patternicity form of an anthropomorphic deity or a geomorphic or zoomorphic deity in different stages of awareness. But as we go further into the study of the divine, you might say, or the hidden intelligence of the universe, it becomes more of a mathematical symmetry and a more elegant concept of what divine order meant. And it shows up in the laws of the universe. The laws of the universe are unviolatable, but the human laws are unlivable. And so we have anthropomorphic moral hypocrisies at the lowest level, and we eventually go up into the universal laws at the highest level. So the panpsychic intelligence, which we could call the divine intelligence or divine order, or the hidden order, or the perfect implicate order, is one level of awareness of the divine intelligence. And the other is that which we perceive that supports our little values that we hope and pray for to deal with our phobias. And so there's gradations from the amygdala all the way up to the executive function. So there is a neuroscience of this construct of this divine order. And I like to think of it and put it into context so we can put it. So everybody can participate in it without being wrong or right. But they all participate in their version of it based on their level of awareness. As a Buddhist says, I will teach them the illusion to the ready for truth. So people are going to be perceiving it through the filters they have, and they're all going to perceive this divine intelligence according to whatever level of awareness that they're at the highest level, awareness will be the synthesis and synchronicity of all complementary opposites simultaneously.

Do you think the human brain is big enough to know everything in the universe and stop entropy?

It's a great question. I don't know the limits of the human mind. I wish I could tell you. Socrates, you know, they consider him the wise person. But he says, I know nothing. Because he realized that whatever he knew epistemologically. See, when you infatuate something, you don't know it. You're blind to the downsides. When you're resentful, you don't know it you're blind to the upsides. When you know something, you love it, and you see both sides simultaneously. So you only know things you see the synthesis of. And so Socrates said, I know what I know and only that, and it's finite. And. But whatever I don't know is potentially infinite because we could potentially be in an infinite universe. So that means that what I know is an infinitesimal. And that's why he was the most humble. And yet they considered them wisest. So I think that whatever we know, there's always going to be a boundary of what we know and always going to be something beyond. And I think that's what gives us meaning. The pursuit of something, the pursuit of learning is something meaningful in life. And so I don't know if we can, I don't know if we have the capacity to comprehend it all, but I know that we'll keep developing that capacity as we keep emerging.

There's a recent study out of a Trinity college where we just recently figured out how to look at proton spin in living organisms. And so they said, hey, looks like let's look at a human brain. This is using a new interpretation of mri. And they said, look at that. The elect or the proton spin changes every time the heart beats throughout the brain with no lag time proving that there's an absolute quantum link between at least the heart and the brain and therefore between all the cells in the brain. Which means the brains are quantum computing, not just chemical or magnetic or light or all the other things, which to me just says there's a lot we don't know about what our brains can do, even how they work, or even how reality works. What we do know though, is when you look at quantum physics, which clearly has been part of your path, there's the observer effect. If you observe something or if there is an observer for something, then that collapses of probability into a particle, et cetera, et cetera. Question for you. What is the observer of reality? Is it your conscious mind, your unconscious mind? Is it your cells? Is it your subcellular things? How do we even know whether it's the brain?

A single celled organism will undergo endocytosis on something that's food, an exocytosis on something that's waste, tonic, toxic. Therefore, it has a seeking and avoiding mechanism which is a primitive morality. It's labeled as good and as bad. And it also has a cyto architectural structure inside the microtubules, the filaments and everything else that make up the cell that cytoarchitectural structure is responding and shaping itself pseudopodically or whatever to be able to seek and avoid. And it's responding and if you give it a toxic material, it will adapt epigenetically and respond. So there's very indication that that's more than just a reflex because there's not even a nerve, there's some sort of intelligence there. Now if we start from that perspective, and this goes back 4.2 billion years, at least their cells. The idea that a brain which is just an integration of cells and supposedly more emergent forms of conscious awareness, obviously the single cell could, it could have receptors and identify its external world. So it's got reception and it's got response. Yeah. So from that perspective now you saw recently there was a silver medal that is now self repairing. I don't know if you've seen this, but there's a self repairing metal that knows how to repair. Now we don't necessarily say that's intelligent, but at least it knows how to take the tensions and compressions on it and readjust itself. And so in a sense it's responding to its environment to some degree and atoms. Freeman Dyson, we and I talked about this and Adam, he believes it's making a decision on the electrons and the electron spins based on its environment. So there's some sort of a response at an atomic level. So I don't know if we can really how far we go down if it goes to pure panpsychism possibly looks like, but it. But it was taboo 1940s, 1930s to even consider that. But now with quantum understanding, we're now looking at the possibility that maybe intelligence is primitive. Einstein said it's enough for me on a daily basis to sit in awe and contemplate the intelligence that permeates the universe. That was his quote. So I think he comprehended panpsychism in that respect. Now, maybe not in the same as some people, you know, as Whitehead and others, but I do believe that if you then take and create quorum communications with electronic communication that bacteria had, and you start putting efaptic communication electronically inside the brain, you have entanglement inside the brain, which there's now evidence of. You have neural synapses, you've got layers of communication, of expression, of intelligence at all layers. And we keep finding more devices that allow us to find more layers to this until it's just pure entanglement, pure synchronicity, non local. And we have local. And the whole gradation from local to non local is being expressed in every cell all the way to the brain. The centrioles, as Roger Penrose described, the centrioles may be one of those microtubulers and tubular relationships that could be quantumized. So I'm not going to negate it because we don't really know with certainty at this point. But I don't want to negate the possibility that there's, at Planck's level, at the emergence and submergence of particles and antiparticles. There may be decisions, processes there that we could do, but not like we think in humans. And some people are really staunch, you know, humanists that are basically saying, well, only it's a level of the complex cortical brain. I don't think that's really fair. I don't think that really accounts for what's going on. Because when you start to see animal behavior and tree behavior and ecosystems and now microbes. I just had dinner last night with one of the greatest microbiologists. You know, he's basically looking at it and he goes, they're not dumb little creatures down there. They're knowing how to adapt at incredible speeds. And microbiome in our body is now participating in our brain function, our psychology, our physiology, our health issues and illnesses. So I tend to think it's across the spectrum from the subatomic to the astronomic. And I do kind of think that we used to have a thing called self organization, right? And we thought we had self organization and in convection cycles, et cetera. And that was the beginning of, oh, there's something that emerges into order out of chaos. But now there's self organizing meteorological systems, self organizing geological, self organizing planetary.