Healing Ourselves and Our Planet at the Same Time – Guided Imagery and Talk [Episode 20]
In this episode of Dr. Emmett Miller’s Life Meditations series, Dr. Miller argues that personal healing and planetary healing require the same mind tools—deep relaxation, meditation, self‑hypnosis, and guided imagery. He opens with a guided relaxation exercise that moves listeners from physical grounding to a state of inner peace, love, and gratitude. He then explains the evolutionary purpose of the human brain as a relational organ, emphasizing that our large neocortex exists to connect with others. Miller critiques modern society’s manipulation through propaganda and “attention engineers,” detailing historical examples from Edward Bernays, the Panama Canal labor campaign, and Nazi use of mass hypnosis. He describes how social media platforms turn users into products, hijacking attention with fear and anxiety. Drawing on his medical background, he shares how hypnosis and meditation can access the source of many illnesses, contrasting symptom‑focused treatment with mind‑body approaches. He introduces Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 (fast, emotional) and System 2 (slow, analytical) thinking, illustrating how unconscious cues bias judgments. Miller links these cognitive patterns to learned helplessness, urging a shift toward learned optimism and higher‑mind guidance. He calls for a collective paradigm shift from a dualistic, zero‑sum worldview to one rooted in compassion, integration, and oneness, suggesting that such a shift can heal both individuals and society. The talk concludes with a second brief meditation, gratitude practice, and invitations to explore his DVDs, books, and the full webinar series.
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The show you're about to hear is a recording from Dr. Miller's webinar series titled Life Meditations. He began this series in response to the pandemic, and his goal has been to provide wisdom, practical tools, and comfort to people during these stressful times. Watch the entire series at drmiller.com/lifemeditations. That's drmiller.com/lifemeditations. Good morning, everyone. So good to be with you here today on this, on this very, very special day. And this is Dr. Emmett Miller. Miller, and the title of our talk today is Healing Ourselves and Our World at the Same Time. Our world desperately needs healing, and although we would like very much to depend upon our elected leaders and unelected leaders to take the ball and run with it and to bring about the healing. Somehow it looks like they've dropped the ball a few dozen times and it's time for us to begin to do something about it. You know, lately I find myself quoting Mark Twain a lot. I don't know what that means. Mark Twain said, sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it. I also have been pointing out numerous times in the last few weeks his other quote, which is, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you're so dang sure of." that just ain't so. And so today, we're going to look at how we go about healing ourselves and how we can actually heal the planet at the same time, because it requires exactly the same tools, the same mind tools to do that. The mind tools that we've talked about have to do with deep relaxation, meditation, prayer, self-hypnosis, —imagery, and our ability to access the highest levels of our consciousness. When we look around at the struggles that are going on, we look around at the vituperation, we look at the conflict, we look at the disrespect that's going on, the black and white thinking, us versus them, and We're right and you're a stupid idiot. You know, used to be a time when I respect my worthy opponent's ideas and I see that they have some value. However, I think that I have something to add to that that might make things more clear, or I think I might know of a better way and I'd like to offer that for our consideration. No, it's not that. You're a dummy, you're stupid, you're a loser. That's not what E Pluribus Unum is about, out of many, one. We are dissolving, we're falling apart. Look up destruction and democracy, you know, look at that on Google or Bing or whatever search engine. There's thousands of articles now going to point out why it is that our democracy is falling apart. It's being destroyed by who? By them! That's not us. We're helpless. We're— there's nothing we could do. I'm just a little somebody here. I just kind of do my little thing over here in the corner. Yeah. Oh no, what are they doing now? The big joke. Your mind has been hijacked, and you think you're helpless, and you're not. You think you're helpless to heal yourself, you're not. You have the tools to heal yourself. You think that you're helpless to heal this planet, this world, you're not. No, I am— I, I'm in the process of doing it, and you can begin to be in the process of doing it at the same time that you heal your physical body, your mind, your body your emotion, your spirit, your behavior, and your relationships. One of the reasons we have this big brain is not so that we can fly to the moon or build a supercomputer or, mm, make a 75,000-megaton bomb. Those are interesting sidelights. We have a big brain so that we can relate to people. Look at brains, particularly neocortex, in animals. The more relationships that animal has to deal with in the herd or the tribe, the bigger the brain has to be, you see, because we're intended to relate to people. So that I have to relate to you and I have to relate to him. So I got two relationships that's going on already. Well, not only that, I have to be aware of what your relationship to him is, how you think about him, and then how he thinks about you. And then I need to think about how the two of you think about me when you're together, as well as how you think about me individually. And then when Tom comes, of course, he has relationship with you and relationship with him and relationship with me, and he knows that I have a relationship relationship with you, and he thinks about that and how that relates to my relationship with him and his relationship with you or with me. And this is just the beginning. You need a big brain to think about all of that, and we do. You start thinking about the people— each person you think about, a whole sense of that person's relationship to you and other people comes along. That's why we've got this big brain. But the goal of having this big brain is so that we can come together with other people. And that's how humanity has survived. And that's how we've grown to the most powerful source on this planet. We can blow it up in a blink of an eye. That's one of the powers that we have. We have another power, however. It is to come together and to connect with each other with love. With understanding, with an appreciation of the truth of who we are as individuals and as a group. Life is not a matter of figuring out how your— who your opponent is and screaming at them or demonstrating against them, or I don't know, fun things like flowing flaming bottles of gasoline through their window, things like that. Mm. So, let's take a moment and go inside. Let's relax. And I want to offer you a little meditation to explore, to see how you feel as you go through this, as I describe each step. I like for you to just visualize. So one second, let me see if I can Hmm, I guess I'm not going to be able to do that anyway. Okay, so I was going to give you something nice to be looking at. Instead, let yourself be in a comfortable position. Allow your eyelids to close. Allow your body to rest and become aware that there's no other place that you need to go. There's nothing else that you need to be doing. There's no problem that you have to solve. Take a deep breath in. And as you let it out, feel yourself becoming more grounded. Feel the surface beneath you. Bring your awareness in from the television, from the internet, from all that hubbub that's going on outside. It's all there just to distract you. Choose to not be distracted for a little while now. Feel the surface beneath you and feel your connection to that surface beneath you. And be aware that there's nothing else that you need to be focusing on at this moment. Feel that magnificent force of gravity that is drawing you toward the center of this huge planet. And to realize that this moment right now is the only moment that actually exists. The past doesn't exist, not even one second of the past. Can never come back again. Likewise, the future doesn't exist and never has. Therefore, there's no need to be distracted by it. When thoughts of these other imaginary places come along, just let them go. Allow yourself to be here in this moment. Because this is the only moment that exists— here and now. Everything that exists in the world exists right now. Anything that doesn't exist right now doesn't exist. Take another deep breath in, and as you let it out, feel a sense of letting go. And imagine with each breath out, your body is releasing unnecessary stress and tension, anxiety, frustration. Feel each breath in as if you're breathing in peace and beauty and love that surrounds you everywhere. Good. Albert Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge, and that's fortunate because you are filled with imagination, whether or not you've learned how to use it or whether other forces in the world have been controlling your imagination. You still have it. With each breath, as you let go, imagine you're releasing any holding on, releasing tension, release stress, release anything or any idea or feeling that you've been grasping onto or that you felt attached to or addicted to right here. With the next breath in, Let it cleanse your mind. Breathe in the love of that higher power, of that infinite wisdom that brought you into being, that brought me into being. And be aware of that presence all around you. You might call it Spirit. You might call it that sacred oneness. There are those who believe that there is within you a place of peace and calm and love and light and beauty. And there's a place in me of love and calm and warmth and light and beauty. And when you're in that place in you and I'm in that place in me, there is only one of us. Let yourself go to that place, letting the air breathe you. Letting every sound that you hear be a signal that you can be present now. Clear your mind of any unnecessary thoughts. Beware of any fragrances in the air that you smell, the coolness of the air as it enters through your nostrils and its warmth As you breathe out, as you breathe out, with each breath out, think, "It breathes me. It breathes me." And sink down into that little pause after you breathed out and before the next breath comes in, the quietest time of all. Place of silence and peace and love. Good. Allowing your eyelids to relax all the way down to the point like they feel like they just don't want to open at all. You can test your eyelids, and as you test them, you can feel they just don't want to budge. It's so relaxing to be at this peaceful place. And as you you test your eyelids, let that relaxation from your eyelids flow throughout all the rest of your body as it sinks deeper and deeper into peace and calm, into presence. And anytime any unnecessary thoughts come along, breathe them out. And as your body becomes more and more quiet, It's almost as if your body can dissolve into the space around you, and you can let it dissolve into that space around you and allow yourself to go to that central place within you and realize that you have a body, but you are not your body. Think to yourself, I have a body, but I'm not my body. I have a mind, but I am not my mind. I am a spiritual being experiencing the physical world. Think that even if the word spiritual doesn't even have a meaning for you. Just for fun: I am a spiritual being experiencing the physical world. I am a soul. I am not any of the roles I play or have played in the past. I am a soul. Allow yourself to feel that quality, that transcendent quality. And even though there may be sounds around you, even though, even though there may be sensations in your body, even though there are random thoughts that come along every once in a while, you choose not to engage. Huh, what a wonderful power! I choose not to engage. A power that you can use anytime you realize that it is wise to not engage with that person, not engage with that conversation, not engage in that argument. Not to engage with that pop-up on your screen. I can choose to not engage. That's it. And you can allow yourself to remember what your goal is. What is your intention? What are you doing here? Are you here to make money? Are you here to win? Are you here to be the cock of the walk? Are you here to be the loudest voice in the room? Are you here to dominate others? What is your intention? Happiness? Joy? Peace. Freedom. Love. Oneness. Compassion. Connection with a higher power. What comes closest to what your true intention is. And right now, realize that nothing is holding you and nothing is holding you back, and you are not holding on to anything or anybody at this moment, and instead simply allowing yourself to be more fully aware of that love that is deep inside of you. A love for nature, for oneness, for your higher power, for God, for spirit. That spirit that moves through all things, whatever it might be, at your center. More and more fully aware as you sink into that pause. After each breath out, your love for the life that has been gifted you. And recall some of those gifts in your life right now for which you feel gratitude. Gratitude for the love in your life. Think of those that love you and those that you love. Those that have loved you and those that you have loved. Deep gratitude for the loves in your life, and perhaps even gratitude for some of the challenges that you've been through that have guided you to become this more mature person, to develop this more enlightened awareness. That you have here, now, at this moment. Feel that gratitude and that love within you. Good. And feel your willingness to turn over whatever needs to be turned over, to release whatever it is time for you to release, whatever it is that needs to be released. So that you can become more completely, fully, totally the person that you came here to be. You have a purpose. Perhaps you know what it is. Perhaps it's just dawning on you. Perhaps it's just an urge or a feeling. Know that it is there. Become aware of your ability to feel love, even for those experiences that have been unpleasant in your life, because some of those unpleasant experiences have been your greatest teachers. Be aware of your ability to feel love for parts of you that in the past you may have disliked. Or felt hatred toward. Feel a deep sense of acceptance, a willingness to be present and to learn the lesson that's here for you to be learned in this moment. To feel yourself able to be in the flow. To be able to accept accept and learn and let that gratitude overflow until it spills out of your heart, through all the cells of your body. Breathe it throughout every cell of your being. Imagine that gratitude and love flow out of you with each breath, and that as you speak, each word is loving and each expression is one of celebration of that higher power of beauty, of life. Imagine that each thing that you touch feels love and gratitude in your touch. And imagine, as you go forward toward the future, that you might carry this with you into the next thing that you choose today. And with the next and the next, to walk in beauty, to share love, to trust that higher power and truly become that person you came here to be. Good. Gradually allowing your awareness to return to the space around you, coming back feeling relaxed and peaceful. And present. Great. And take a few moments and notice how you feel. Notice how comfortable you're willing to allow yourself to feel. Notice how relaxed Notice how much you were able to let go of unnecessary thoughts and embrace thoughts of a higher place. Those who've been in our webinars up until now, I think this is a familiar thing. For some, it may be a little unfamiliar, but we'll do a little bit more, you know, by the end of this hour. But I'd like to share a couple of other thoughts with you about healing yourself. As Nikos Kazantzakis said, by believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. And that goes for your health, it goes for your relationships, it goes for the world around you, and it goes for the nation that we live in. Do you really want things to change? Well, believe in it. Isn't it fascinating that it's much easier to deceive someone than it is to convince someone that they've been deceived. That's what makes the internet run. Isn't it fascinating? Google, Facebook, and Twitter are like the biggest companies around. What's their product? I mean, General Motors made cars, United Steel made iron and steel. McDonald's makes fried chicken and hamburgers. What does Twitter and Facebook make? What do they do? What is their product? Well, of course, most of you know by now, if you're getting something from free out there and you think it's free, think again. You are the product. Because what they figured out how to do is to use this incredible information tool, this information highway, um, unlike anything that humanity has ever had before. It overwhelms us. We're going to talk a little bit about how, how that happens, what the tricks are that have been used. And I'm continuing, I'm going to review just a little bit of what we've talked about. As you may know, as a general practitioner, as a physician and a scientist and a mathematician, I went into private practice only to realize that by far most of the illnesses I was seeing, I could not treat the source of. I could only treat the symptoms. The source not being treated, of course, just keeps on working, and the illness gets worse. And then I discovered hypnotherapy. I discovered hypnosis, which was a tool that allowed us for a short period of time to create amazing differences in people's health and feeling. We could even induce an anesthetic state to the point that we could do major surgery on a person without giving them any drugs, and it would, it would last that way all the way through the operation. We could relieve headaches, we could, you know, all kinds of things. But often the those things didn't last very long. They would fade away, and so people said, "Oh yeah, hypnosis only gives temporary relief." What are you talking about? Temporary? In fact, what I discovered was that what hypnotherapy, or meditation, or prayer could do, if it's used properly, is to enable us to actually contact the source of most of our illnesses. The source of our illnesses, I mean, right now there's a pandemic around, there's a little virus, coronavirus, around. Okay, all right, for once we have something that actually comes in and causes the illness. But if we're talking about asthma and backaches and headaches and Talking about upset stomach and spastic bowel, on and on and on, and all of the things that we see all the time. We're looking at the addictions that we have, massive people. Every 90 seconds somebody dies of an addiction in this, in this country. It's on and on. All of those have to do with what's going on within us, with how we're how poorly we're dealing with the stress of what's going on. And those tools—meditation, hypnosis, deep relaxation, etc.—they allow us to get into a state of mind that can allow us to reprogram that monkey mind that's within us that is at the source of all of these illnesses. I'll show you a little bit more about that. Well, and of course, what's happening around us, in the world around us, is that we have been hypnotized by all of these ads, pop-up ads, on and on and on. We've been convinced by very powerful propaganda to believe and act and vote against our own interests, to make us even, even sicker. One of the cleverest applications of this I heard of was when the Panama Canal was being built. They hired the natives to come in to dig, and the natives came in and they digged and they dug, and they were paid money. Whoa! They showed up by the hundreds to work. Haha, we're getting cash! And the Panama Canal got half built, and all of a sudden nobody showed up for work. So they looked into it and they said, why aren't you coming back to work? They said, well, I have the money and I have it hidden, so if I ever need it, I can use it. I'll just spend a little for what I need. Well, the Panama Canal needed to be built. Somebody had— how are we going to do this? So somebody had this fantastic idea and they sent each of the workers a Sears Roebuck catalog. Guess what? Everybody came back to work. And as I pointed out last week, there was a time when we bought things that we actually needed, but ever since the days of advertising came upon us, we started buying stuff that we wanted. It's a profound difference. It's something that you know, most people hardly ever think about it, but what's the difference between what you need and what you feel like you want? Well, Dr. Franz Mesmer discovered that he could, by using different techniques, guide people into an altered state of consciousness in which there was a possibility of getting in touch with something that usually was not available to the person in terms of their memory, in terms of their behavior, their capacity to do things, and so forth. Sigmund Freud learned hypnosis because it was quite popular at that time, and he used it for a while, but he had some false beliefs about it. He believed that people had to be amnestic, that everything that happened while you were in hypnosis, the person had to forget it when they came out of hypnosis. "When you awaken, you will forget everything I've said to you, but your body will behave exactly as I have described," something like that. Well, that's not true, and people were shocking Freud by remembering things that had happened during the trance state. So he cleverly developed a technique where people would lay down, lie down, looking away from him. He would sit at the head of the table so he didn't have to to confront people, and he basically allowed people to induce their own hypnotic state. And that's— and as they were in that state, they would talk, and he would then gather that information and use it in his psychoanalysis. And what he taught us was that there is an unconscious part of our mind, a part of our mind that is not available to our consciousness, but it can hold thoughts and ideas and patterns, and it can drive beliefs and behaviors and feelings, and that was a profound discovery. And then along came Edward Bernays, who was his nephew. He's probably done as much to impact the behavior of our entire country and the entire world as Homer, Shakespeare, or Gandhi. This Freud's nephew, who believed in Freud's ideas, But he decided to use them in a different way, to convince people to do things a certain way. A company that made bacon wanted to increase their sales, and they hired Bernays, and he used techniques to manipulate people's unconscious. He sent out letters to 5,000 doctors saying, um, do you think it's probably a good idea for people to eat a heavy breakfast in the morning so that they're fully equipped to deal with the work and the cold at different temperatures of the day, and 3,000 of the doctors wrote back and said yes. And so he put out an ad, "3,000 doctors agree, a heavy breakfast is best." And that's where eggs and bacon came about, because he then says eggs and bacon is a perfect example of that. Before that, people would have a little yogurt, maybe a little fruit, a piece of toast. And then Lucky Strike wanted to get women to smoke because they're missing half the market. And so they hired Bernays, and Bernays got a bunch of socialites to walk at the front of the Easter parade down Fifth Avenue. He had told photographers and reporters that something special was going to happen on a certain corner at a certain time. The cameras were there, and at a certain signal Each of the debutantes then pulled out their cigarettes that he renamed Freedom Torches. Freedom Torches. And they lit them and smoked them. People looked. Up until that time, it was shameful for a woman to be seen smoking, but not after that. That's what Edward Bernays did. He got women smoking, and now You know, their levels of bronchitis and emphysema and lung cancer begin to approach those of men, and they sell a lot of cigarettes. And then he worked with several presidents to manipulate how the people of the country thought— U.S. presidents. And he said propaganda is the executive arm The Invisible Government. And you know who really loved his work? Were the Nazis. Yes, and they strictly put to work his techniques of propaganda, which I'm telling you is mass hypnosis, just another name for mass hypnosis. And you know what the Nazis did? I mean, they convinced perfectly normal, caring, sensitive German people to believe that their problems were due to Jewish people and that it was okay that Jewish people be rounded up and sent who knows where, you know, and in fact to kill them and kill millions of people. Something the Germans later looked back on, "My God, we can't believe we fell into that. How did we do that?" That was the power of propaganda. Well, that shocked Bernays. He wasn't a bad guy. He thought propaganda was good. He thought he was protecting people by not letting them go off in their, in whatever direction, give more government to the power and not let people take over and destroy themselves. And so he wrote the book that was called Propaganda, as a matter of fact, the first book of that kind, but he renamed the field into public relations. How about that? And now we have a world filled with attention engineers, people who are brilliant people, who've been trained to attract your attention and to sell you on things and ideas and products. And they've been selling you on dislike, on rejection, on difference. So we've been hijacked. One is by our monkey mind, as we talked about before, designed to deal with ancient stressors, the kind of things that would lead to death within seconds, bringing up anxiety and fear and frustration, anger, rage, but those things are not useful in solving our problems. Instead, they dissolve the organs of our body in a hurry to turn them into glucose so that we can run like hell for the next few seconds. Instead, we're creating disease in our body, we're creating addictions in our body, we're creating fears, withdrawal, social withdrawal, withdrawal, emotional blocks, all of that. That's how the monkey mind has hijacked our thoughts. Thank you, Mr. Monkey. And then there's the craven inventions of our attention engineers, financed by our overlords. The key to the whole thing, the key to the control, they say it again and again and again, is fear and anxiety. Now, it may show up as anger or rage or attack or conflict, but you're not angry and rageful and interested in going out and being in conflict because that's your nature, that's what you want, that that's really what you enjoy. It's not that. You feel anxiety. They've convinced you the attention engineers that those people over there are bad, and so you had better be careful because they're going to rape you and they're going to rob you and they're going to cheat you. And the only way you can stop them from doing that is either kick them out of your country or beat them up or get a gang and throw them out or form a voting bloc, and, and on and on and on. And that's basically what controls us, fear and anxiety. Or if it's not turning you against other people, it turns you against yourself. You're not, you're not cute enough, you're not strong enough, you're not thin enough, you don't make enough money, your thumbs or your whatever is not big enough, or whatever it might be. And you Therefore, you should be afraid. You should be very afraid. And once you feel anxious, that anxiety opens up the unconscious mind to uncritically accept the solution that's stuck in front of you. And if you want to see how effective that is, look at some of the propaganda of the political party that you're against. It's hard for you to see it in your party, you know, because you're in the trance. But see, look at how those idiots— look, look at what they're falling for. I can't believe it. So that's how they control you. And as we said, the key to getting out of that is your ability to reach deep relaxation. So that system has become a matrix that controls the information that it allows us to think. The internet is a crucial part of it for managing and controlling our thoughts. Now I want to get on to some of Dr. Kahneman's work, as I promised I would get on to this. Dr. Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize, about what motivates people to make the choices they make. He's an economist and a psychologist. He won the prize for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. How do you decide when you're uncertain? Huh? Well, his work is super important. System 1, that's our automatic chooser. That's pretty much being driven by the monkey mind— unconscious, effortless, automatic, without self-awareness or control. It looks at the situation and comes up with a solution, an automatic solution. System 2 is the conscious part of your mind. It's deliberate, conscious, it's effortful, it's a controlled mental process that requires self-awareness. It's logical and skeptical, it seeks new and missing information, makes decisions, looks for patterns, but it operates much more slowly. System 1 goes much faster. And if System 1 feels fear, it will trigger thoughts and behaviors that are online and that have you believing and acting in a certain way even before System 2 gets a chance to catch up and think about it. I talked about that experience where people are given a cup of coffee to hold in a psychological experiment They hold that cup because they're trying to help out the experimenter. The experimenter takes the cup back from them, finishes whatever the questionnaire is, and he leaves, and somebody else comes in and says, did you notice whether the experimenter had a warm or a cool personality? And if the person was given a warm cup of coffee, 70% of them say he had a warm personality. If they were given iced coffee, They'll say he had a cool personality. Judges were given a case to say, how would you rule on this case? But before each judge was given the case, he was asked to throw the dice, just a pair of dice. He didn't know why, they just said it's a part of the experiment. And they recorded the number and put the dice away, and that was the end of it, and then gave them the case. And it was about a shoplifter who needed to be sentenced. Well, what the judges didn't know, that the dice were loaded, and they would either come up 11 or 3. And those who threw 11, they gave the shoplifter 7 months in jail. Those who threw the 3 gave 4 months in jail, on the average. And, and the experiment's been repeated. They asked the judge, did throwing the dice affect your judgment? They say no. They didn't believe that it's true. This is how we're being manipulated. They had people sit in the waiting room, supposedly waiting for the experimenter to come in, and while they're sitting there, there's a number of computers that are on in the office, and there's a screensaver on, and sometimes there was some of the screensavers had dollar bills floating down, just as a way of saving the screen. The others had other kinds of information. People who saw the dollar bills, when the experimenter came in and said, "Pull your chair up and let's work," they didn't come as close to the experimenter if they saw the dollar bills. If the experimenter dropped some pencils on the floor by mistake, If they saw the dollar bills, they were less likely to offer to help that experimenter. On their way out of the library, some people, as they used their library card, the librarian would just touch them ever so briefly. Some people, and other people she made sure that she didn't touch their finger or their hand as she held, gave them back their card. They interviewed those people on the way out and said, "How was the atmosphere in the library today?" Those who were touched said, "Ah, it was much quieter, much more comfortable today," than people who weren't touched. And then they said, "Did you happen to notice whether the librarian was smiling or not when she handed you your card?" And by the way, the librarian was strictly instructed to not smile. People who were touched thought that she had smiled. Okay, so that's our System 1. It's filtering everything that reaches our consciousness, and it changes how we're seeing things. And what we want to be able to do is when we're making important decisions, we want to be using our prefrontal cortex. When emotions come along, their goal is to ready us for an instant attack. They inhibit our ability to analyze or strategize. They inhibit cognition and they make us behave in stereotyped ways and to have traditional cognitive biases. And so it's by using those emotions that we've been trained to feel helpless, like that elephant that's tied to a stake, been tied there ever since he was a little baby elephant, but he has no idea that a simple tug could pull that stake out of the ground. Learned helplessness. And so, we end up hiding from the world. So, there's a piece that's missing, and that is our ability to create learned optimism. To get away from this learned helplessness and to make sure that we guide ourselves using our higher mind, not our emotional mind. We— that part should be in control and guidance. The lower mind should be feeding information to the higher mind. That's the way systems work. Because as you go up in the hierarchy, there are abilities that arise in the higher levels of your mind that the lower levels of your mind don't have. You see, your lower levels of mind, your monkey mind, it has no sense of time. Everything is in the present. And that's why people who were, who developed PTSD in Vietnam back in 1970, still almost jump out of their skin every time a truck backfires. For them, you know, for the monkey mind, they're still back there. So it is by relaxation that we can overcome this old paradigm of how the world has dealt with things. The old paradigm, the old way of thinking, the way so much of the world works, It sees black and white. It's us versus them, the zero-sum game. In order for me to win, you have to lose. That's the way capitalist warriors and competitors tend to think. Brutal, unkind, non-empathetic, non-compassionate. It's dualistic in its thinking. It uses either-or kinds of logic. Very unfortunate how much of our world runs that way. And it is the source of the problems out there in the world. At the individual level, it gives rise to internal conflict, cognitive dissonance, stress, inflammation, disease, illness, and dysfunction. At the collective level, it leads to dysfunction. It shows up as racism, nationalism, panic-driven decisions, mob violence, civil discord, misguided revolutions, war, anxiety and tension, and like the kind of anxiety and tension we felt leading up to the most recent election, if you can remember that. That's what we're seeing in our nation, in the world as a whole. This old paradigm is not bad. You should always use it if you see a Mack truck coming for you. Feel fear and run like hell. But you'll have much better luck dealing with the problems of today if you shift to a System 2 kind of thinking. That's supposed to be a number 2. That old way of thinking is analytical, either/or, black or white, fragmenting, good/bad, critical, contemptuous, rejecting, attacking, debating. All of those ways I call violence with a capital V, because there's an emotional violence. There's a violence to the integrity of the other person. That's the paradigm that the world has been using, the underlying theories and strategy and methodology. Now it's time for a paradigm shift. And that paradigm shift is a change from one way of thinking to another. It's a revolution, a transformation, a metamorphosis. It doesn't just happen. It's driven by a catalyst. For a little giraffe to become a big giraffe, that's not a transformation. It's really a translation. It's just a growth. But the kind of change that happens when there's a transformation, a second-order change, you move up the hierarchy, there's a paradigm shift. You take a caterpillar, its whole goal is to eat and eat and eat and get as fat as it possibly can. And that caterpillar, no matter how fat it gets, it's not a transformation. It's just more of the same. But when that caterpillar decides it's going to cover itself with a cocoon, and then inside of its cocoon something happens, a little group of cells inside of that caterpillar takes over, and it basically eats all the other cells of the caterpillar and turns into a strikingly different being, the butterfly. And that's what our challenge is now, is for us to stop being caterpillars. And it's not about eating and getting more and being bigger and winning. It's to shift to a new paradigm. That new paradigm adds something. Instead of violence, it adds love. Instead of fragmentation, You have unification. Sometimes there's dominance, but a lot of times there's cooperation. Sometimes there's defensive, but a lot more often it's creative. You're more often being integrative instead of differentiating. You look for both-and solutions, not us versus them. You look for all of us together. And that is what we want to look for in the new paradigm. Is to look for this other side of things. That's what makes the difference. That's what heals us individually, and that's what can heal us as a community. It's a holistic system of thinking about things. It uses an organic and creative kind of logic, and it looks for holes as well as differences, and looks for us to be guided by this new paradigm. So let's take a moment and go within once again to relax into your— where you're sitting or lying and become aware there's no other place that you need to go at this moment in time, that there's nothing else that you need to do. There's no problem that you have to solve. You can give yourself permission to relax. Permission to relax. Take a deep breath in. As you let it out, allow your eyelids to close. Let your eyelids relax to the point they don't want to open at all. When you have that relaxation, test them and send that relaxation throughout all the rest of your body. Bring all of your awareness inside. You've heard many things and you've had many thoughts over the last hour. They're safe within you now. Whatever was of value there, whatever you touched upon in your thinking and feeling, be aware of it right now. Be aware of that part of you that loves, that can love deeply, fully. Be aware of those you love and that have loved you. Be aware that by thinking in this new way of seeing yourself in others, feeling your connection, looking for holes, looking for goodness, looking for the light, giving people positive, unconditionally positive regard, and remembering your true goal: happiness, joy, freedom, love. Feel the love for the life that has been gifted you. Feel gratitude for all things that have come your way. Gratitude for how you've allowed yourself to grow and learn and become more enlightened with each experience. Feel the gratitude and love at the center of your being. And imagine with each breath out that you're breathing that gratitude out. It's overflowing until it spills out of your heart into all the cells of your body, and out of your body into everything that you touch. Imagine that gratitude and love flow out with each breath, that as you speak, each word is loving and each expression is one celebration of wholeness, of oneness, of that spirit that moves through all things, of beauty in life. And imagine that each thing you touch feels the love and gratitude that are within you. And imagine as you go on toward the future, you might carry this with you into the next thing that you choose today. And to the next and the next and with the next. Give yourself permission to walk in beauty, to share love, to trust the Spirit and be the person you came here to be. And when you're ready, Guide yourself back to an awareness of the space around you with a clear intention to do things in a way that support that deepest aspect of yourself. Good. My goodness, time flies. It's been so good to be with you here. Hope the transmission has worked well today. We'll pick up what we talked about today next time. We'll talk a little bit about awakening that leader inside. That leader out there is not going to lead you where you need to go and where we need to go. We're going to awaken that, that inner leader that you have inside. Take really good care of yourself. Couple of things that would be useful for you to look up on shop.drmiller.com is Deep Healing the Universe. That's a DVD. There's a set of DVDs called The Power of Your Mind to Achieve Peak Performance, and then there is Empowering Leadership, and my book book, Our Culture on the Couch, in which I predicted the tumult that we're having in our world. Did that back in 2009. I think you might find the thinking really interesting. Thank you so much for being here today. It's been a pleasure to serve you, to be with you, and I look forward to our next time together. If you enjoyed this video and found its information helpful, please like, comment, and subscribe to Dr. Miller's YouTube channel. Doing this will help to get Dr. Miller's content to more and more people. If you would like to watch the entire webinar series, you can do so at drmiller.com/webinars. Com/lifemeditations. That's drmiller.com/lifemeditations. Be present, be kind, and be well.
