Our Hijacked Lives – How to Regain Power and Health. Guided Imagery Meditation & Talk [Episode 17]

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. Hello, good morning, or good afternoon as it may be. I'm Emmett Miller, or if you like, Dr. Emmett Miller. I always like to identify my checker de past of study of medicine and of which I still practice, but not nearly as much as I used to. But I'm really trying to spend much more of my time reaching people in this way, over webinars and and various other places where you can find people who are marketing the different recordings that I've produced and so forth. In 2 weeks when we come back again, we're doing a special series of webinars, and this, I guess, is around the 8th in the series, and this one really has to do with our hijacked lives. I want to talk a little bit about how our lives have been hijacked and have some experiences because I want people to, to really understand, and also some ways that, that we can get free of that hijacking, how we can foment the revolution and seize control of our lives. Today is, of course, I'll be following up on what we talked about last week, but I'm also going to review some of the material this week, simply because what we're talking about is making intentional changes in our lives. And to make those intentional changes, we need to be intentional, and we have to understand what it is that we're changing, and we have to learn new ideas and concepts. And sometimes they're not learned in just one sweep. So repetition is a very important thing. So I'm going to ask you to begin by experiencing some relaxation. And again, I want to start by pointing out some of the issues that we're addressing and that we all need to deal with. And those issues are kind of uncomfortable for us to have to deal with or to think about. And so we want to think about things from a place of relaxation. As we talk about many, many times, in order to use the higher levels of our brain, we need to quiet the lower levels of our brain. I can't exaggerate too much how important that is. So If you like, you can just enjoy this underwater photograph that's on your screen now, or simply allow your eyelids to close and become aware that there is no other place that you need to go at this moment in time. There's nothing else that you need to do, and there's no problem that you need to solve, and therefore you can give yourself permission to relax, let go, to come into the present moment, because this present moment is the only moment that actually exists. Take a deep breath in. As you let it out, let it be a feeling of letting go, and let yourself sink into a little pause after you've breathed out and before you breathe in again. Because that's the quietest time of all for all your mind and body. Let yourself sink deeply into that pause. Imagine with each breath out you're emptying your body of all unnecessary tension, breathing out carbon dioxide and other toxins. And then notice how each breath breathes in for you. You don't have to do it. Relax, be still, serene, and feel this miracle of the air breathing you, that there's some wisdom deep within that knows to take in another breath, to breathe more life into your body. And with each breath out, empty your mind. Whatever thought is in your mind, with your next breath out Breathe it out, right out through your nostrils. And by unnecessary thoughts, I mean doubts or questions or judgments or criticisms, thoughts about the past or the future that don't exist. Be here in the moment. This is the only moment that exists. Breathe that thought out and experience that moment of silence and stillness. And peace. Good. And go to that place within you right now that is capable of experiencing gratitude, thankfulness. What can you think of to be grateful for today? Today, for almost the first time in a month, the air here is clear. Ah, I am so grateful for that. The sun is shining, the leaves are still green, the air has a little touch of chilliness in it, hinting that fall is on its way, and I feel deeply grateful for that. I feel deeply grateful for those that love me. I feel deeply grateful for my legs that can carry me from place to place, for my ears that can hear sounds and music, and my voice that can make music and sing. Ah, so much to be grateful for. And at this moment, there's no room for anything else except gratitude in your mind, in your being, as you empty out all distractions. Breathing. Good. And allow yourself to remain relaxed as I reflect for a minute or two on just where we are at this point in time and a little bit about what we're dealing with at this moment in time, because this is quite, quite a remarkable time in the history of humanity and of the planet. In fact, I'll say it's time to come out of denial. And get real. So as you allow your eyelids to open, and if you have a screen with images on it, you may want to enjoy those images as they pass by on the screen, or allow your eyelids to be closed, or just focused in some neutral place, because it's time to come out of denial and to get real. It's time to take a serious look at the world that we live in and at the suffering that's all around us and within us. What the hell happened? The world wasn't like this 5, 10, 20 years ago. What happened to that— what we experienced in the '60s, that The hopefulness, better living through chemistry, you know, the arrival of the information highway. Yes, we've done wonderful things. We're brilliant with our powerful minds. We're on the moon. We've invented computers. We have the information highway. We have so many amazing things that we've accomplished. And yet there's so much unhappiness. The world seems so much more dangerous. Yeah, we're beset by deadly communicable diseases that the scientists tell us are just beginning to dawn on us, you know, including the particular disease that we have right now that has us doing social distancing. If there was ever a time that we needed to be close to each other and to feel the warmth and touch of other human beings, and yet here we're being forced to stand apart from each other, and our emotions are showing it. Just our general emotions of frustration with everything that's going on out there, and the healthcare workers who will sometimes see 3 or 4 people a day dying from from an illness that we really did not have to be suffering from. Families are falling apart because we're all tense. We're beset with all kinds of misinformation and disinformation, which is designed to create confusion, to make us lose trust. You don't trust your government, you don't trust your political party, you don't even trust The CDC, of all things, you know, what can you trust? All of this creates that tension inside of us. And then there's everything that the media is hitting us with, the upcoming depression, the trade war, the tumbling markets, and all of that. Then, and of course, there's this climate change. Can we ever come out of denial? Does the entire West Coast of the United States need to go up in flames before we believe it? Or how many tornadoes do— hurricanes do we need to have in a row? They're lining up now, not coming once in a while. They're lining up. What's going on? What can we do about this? Millions of refugees, more than ever, living in horrible conditions. And, and even now we're talking about climate refugees. There are people now who are moving from their homes on the West Coast because they just don't want to deal with what's going on. But where are they going to go? They're going to go into other cities. You know, there are towns that, you know, don't really want their population increasing. You know, whatever are we going to be able to do given that situation? And the slavery that we have around the world— we didn't make a better world— including the sex trafficking, which is so much greater than most of us know and that the media tells us about. From what I hear from people on the inside, at the medical level, it's horrendous what's happening there. And then of course, there's the pollution that we have, and nuclear threats that we have. There's the riots in the street, the armed confrontations that are going on, the toppling of statues, and the people who are fighting against the toppling of statues. And then the anger and cruelty and meanness and contempt and vituperation corporation, even at the highest levels of government. Don't you just sometimes want to scream? You know, I know that I do, and I know that a lot of other people do too. Well, what I want to say is that there are things that we can do about that, as terrible as it is. But in order to do something about it, We have to first understand what it is that we're fighting. You know, most of us and most of our governments are busy rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic instead of dealing with the fact is that we're just about to crash into about a dozen icebergs. There are things that we can do, however, but not if we're so busy wasting our time in the way that we have been doing it. What I want to talk about is what I feel is the key to it. It's the result of my 50 years of studying this. I've been writing about and teaching about it for decades. And what I want to say is that our lives have been hijacked, and that's what we're talking about here today. Our lives have been hijacked. They have been doubly hijacked. First of all, by our 500,000-year-old monkey brain that is reacting with illness-producing stress in this world. But that stress that we're experiencing, in the way that we're reacting, is not helpful to us. It's hurtful to us. Secondly, on top of that, our lives have been hijacked by our cultural overlords and their thousands of attention engineers. Using mass hypnotic techniques to steal our peace of mind, to sell us products and candidates, not by addressing our conscious mind, but by manipulating us at the unconscious level. And that's what I'm here to talk about, because my work for so many decades has been to teach people how to enter a state of mind which allows them to take charge of that subconscious part of our mind that our media and now the internet has taken charge of and is in control of. We have been hypnotized into believing that we are free. We've been convinced by propaganda to believe and act and vote against our interests. Have you noticed? Some thoughts from David Gruder, who wrote a book called The New IQ a few years back. You can find him if you go to drmiller.com and write Gruder, G-R-U-D-E-R, and you can find our conversation. And they have hijacked our happiness. They made us believe or have led us to believe that if we have more, then we'll be happy. We believe that. We may not think we believe that. We may think that we've transcended that, but hmm. Few of us have. That our prosperity has been hijacked because we believe that it's by going into debt that we will find prosperity. Our health has been hijacked. We're given a system that does not teach us health, does not teach us to go to the source of our illness, but simply gives us symptomatic therapy. It's sick care system. The system loves you if you're sick because then it can give you symptomatic therapy and you may be taking that for the rest of your life, but it doesn't go to the source, with the exception of bacterial diseases for which we have a direct cure, the antibiotic to which that disease is specifically sensitive, and surgery. That's a cure. If you have a cancer that has not spread through your body and the surgeon goes in and pops that out, you're cured. Outside of that, there's no cures in medicine. We're just treating symptoms. The traditional kind of medicine that our system has given us. Our patriotism has been hijacked by fear and propaganda. And, you know, my goodness, as I said before, just want to repeat it, that the forces out there right now, their goal is to create insecurity, to make us not trust our doctor, don't trust the CDC, don't trust your government, don't trust your democracy. You know, no wonder Iran and Mainland China and Vladimir Putin, I mean, they're just having a ball, you know, joining with the attention engineers that work for the corporations, because the more anxiety they can produce, the more disruption they can produce, the more they will be able to push us unconsciously towards the ends that they desire. It's not being done for us. We've been hijacked, folks, and our thinking has been hijacked because we've been tricked into using the old paradigm. I talked a little bit about that last time. I want to go more into it this time because this is the critical piece. We simply need to change our way of thinking in a way that most of us don't even understand how. Who's blame for all of this that's going on. I'd like to borrow a phrase that's been modulated from Bill Clinton's, it's the system, stupid. The system has evolved a matrix that controls us through the information that it allows us. And media, and particularly now the internet, social media, form an essential part of the Matrix and is a primary tool for managing and controlling our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors. So let's talk a little bit about how this works. What's the basis of how all of this works on us? To review, we have two brains, two brains that I want to talk about. There's several brains that go down starting at the level of the simple reflex arc and the spinal cord, but at the higher level, we see two brains that are really important. You know, one is the brain that exists in the paleocortex, the old cortex, the monkey brain. That's a brain that evolved perfectly for the world we lived in a half million years ago. Then, but that brain reacts with strong emotions, because those strong emotions prepared us for instant physical action, fight, flight, freeze, or faint. That was it. And that was great, half million years ago. That's what we call System 1 thinking. Now, there's another brain on top of that, that has grown since then, and that is the neocortex. And that's a part that really human beings have, that vast neocortex, which gives us the ability to think in a different way, System 2 thinking. And that System 1, the monkey brain, when it reacts to today's issues like climate change, or COVID-19, or social isolation, or an unhappy family, its responses actually make us sick. Most of our diseases come from that, and I stand ready to defend that. I'm serious about that. And I'm saying that as a scientist, a physician, and a mathematician. Most of our illnesses come from that. And What's doubly terrible about it is that when we react with those emotions, whether or not we allow ourselves to be consciously aware of the fact that we're feeling the emotions, we can suppress them so they don't come to awareness, but they still have their effect. They make us sick and they control our behaviors. And one of the ways it does that is because it shuts off the higher mind. Your limbic system, your amygdala, your hippocampus, all of those structures in the paleocortex, your subconscious mind, your monkey mind, whatever you want to call it, your emotional brain, it shuts off. Because if you are running from a saber-toothed tiger, you don't want to be writing a poem or thinking of long-term solutions. It's like, act now. So your brain is shut off. And that's why you do so many stupid things when you're upset. You say things and you go, "Oh my God, why did I say that?" You drink things, "Oh, why did I drink that much?" You smoke things, you know, "Why did I do that?" Well, the reason you did it is because you weren't in your right mind, because your subconscious mind, your paleocortex, your monkey mind hijacks your thinking. That's the first way that it happens. And that's the really important piece that I like to, to talk about, that even when people talk about stress, we often don't stress enough this aspect of it, that it shuts off your higher thinking. In other words, limbic system arousal produces cortical inhibition, LSA-PCI, if you like initials. Now, our goal is to learn how to use the higher part of our brain. We have the ability to get out of the mess. Global warming is, ah, you know, we missed it. If we had done something, let's say, back when I wrote my book, Our Culture on the Couch, 10 years ago, we still could have stopped it. We can't stop it now, but we can slow it down a lot. and we can save hundreds of thousands of lives and homes. And if we learn to use the higher part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, the brain's brain, that's what I'm talking about teaching you how to use. It's what's transformed my life and the tens of thousands that have worked with my materials in the last 40 or 50 years. It requires a little thought. You need to use some wisdom, and you need to practice, because you've been trained. Pablo would be thrilled to see how we've all been programmed. What we want to do is to tap into our intelligence, into our wisdom, into our creativity, and our ability to touch our spiritual guidance. If we change then the functioning of our mind, of our body, our emotions, our behaviors. Our goal is healing and wholeness. And another way of talking about this is for us to look at the fast thinking of that subconscious part of the mind and how we need to replace it with the slow thinking. And by that, what I mean is that System 1 thinking is fast and It's unconscious, it's automatic. All day long we're making those decisions, and you know, you know, usually they're right, but sometimes they're horribly wrong. They're very error-prone because there's no consciousness. System 2 is slow, but it's conscious, it's intentional, it's effortful. You know, if I say, "What color is an apple?" you can tell me, "Red." Didn't require any thinking, that was automatic. And if I say, how much is 37 times 45? You have to use System 2 thinking, because you have to go to that higher level of your mind. So the issue here, and what can trick us, is that System 1 jumps in there and makes decisions before System 2 comes online. And often after we make the wrong decision, then we defend that wrong decision because we don't want to be wrong. We end up arguing for things that are ridiculous, then we get ourselves in deeper trouble. This is how System 1 hijacks our thought processes. And this is the prefrontal cortex there in red, which is what we want to bring online. As we talked about last week, there is a system in which the higher levels of the mind— and what I call mind there is really the neocortical and prefrontal cortex. What I'm saying, calling emotion there, that's really governed by the monkey mind, by the limbic system. And then finally, there's the body underneath that says the things that we say, drinks the things that we drink, et cetera. And how it should work is that the higher levels should control the lower levels, and the lower levels should give clear information to the higher levels. But that's not what's going on. The way we make ourselves sick and the way we screw up our lives is because we allow our emotion to affect the thoughts that are in our mind. And the reason we have to go in that direction is there's a hierarchy, and there are things that emerge, abilities that emerge as you go up in the system. And so for certain decisions, you really need to go to your conscious mind because only your conscious mind has the ability to understand it. We talked about the old paradigm, which sees things as black and white. Us versus them. It believes in the zero-sum game. In order for me to win, you have to lose. It's the way capitalists and warriors and competitors tend to think. And at the highest levels of government, you know, I'm gonna bring this person in to work, is the greatest, this is the greatest guy, he's going to do a wonderful job. You know, 6 months later, he's a jerk, he's a fool, he's a disgruntled, you know, black or white. It's brutal. It's unkind. It's non-empathetic. It's non-compassionate. It's a dualistic, either-or kind of logic. And unfortunately, it's how our world seems to specialize in thinking now. I sometimes call this violence, violent thinking, but I'm saying violence with a capital V. Because it's a special kind of violence. When I don't treat you as a human being, when I treat you as a thing, when I feel contempt for you, when I attack you because of your color or because of your national origin or because your beliefs are different than mine, I'm not treating you like a human being. I'm being violent to you. When I don't hire you because of a prejudice, I'm being violent to you. If I don't give you a chance to say your piece, I'm being violent. If I get angry and attack you and suppress you through anger, or even through yelling at you, what right do I have to do that? I'm being violent to you. So that violent approach to the world is analytical, black or white, either or. It's exclusive, judgmental, contemptuous, rejecting, debating, and attacking. Whew! Well, it has brought us to this crisis point. And I'm saying that crisis, the crisis in our physical diseases, because most of our diseases are about stress, but we're not looking at stress, we don't know what stress is. We're trying to numb out stress and beat down the symptoms of stress without looking at the true cause, which of course we've talked about before. And then at the same time, at the cultural level, at the global level, at the national level, at the community level, at all the collective levels, our systems are breaking down because we're using the wrong kind of thinking. What we need is a paradigm shift. Ooh, what's a paradigm shift? It's a shift, a fundamental shift in how we think about things. It's a transformation, a metamorphosis. It doesn't just happen, paradigm shifts, and we talked about some paradigm shifts in the past. Uh, and we talked about how we shifted from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers. We talked about shifts from Newtonian physics to the physics of Einstein. We talked about going from creationism, where we thought rotting meat created bacteria and insects, to Darwinism, where we see where creatures come from, and it's a kind of second-order change that we want to look at, a different way of thinking, in addition to, sometimes it's important to analyze, sometimes it is important to get the hell out of Dodge, or punch somebody in the nose, Can I tell you, you know, mess with my kids, I'm gonna punch you in the nose, dude. That's just how it goes. That's how it needs to be, right? You need cops. I'm not for defunding the police. I mean, I'm for constraining them to doing the job they should be doing, right? You know, to protect and defend and serve. You know, sometimes you need that, but we use that thinking exclusively. There's another way of thinking. It's kind of the way the world has been thinking, kind of like a caterpillar. Its logic is it eats, and as it eats, it grows bigger and bigger and bigger. It protects itself from animals and enemies by maybe painting a funny face on its butt. We make it look like a flower, but its job is to continue to eat and eat and eat and consume. That's its logic. But then something happens. There's a group of cells within that caterpillar that make it curl up and knit a cocoon around. Some of them do a pure silk cocoon around them. Isn't that nice? And within that cocoon, there's something inside of it called the imaginal, a group of cells that take over, and inside of that cocoon, the caterpillar turns into green slime, and a new creature grows out of it. And that new creature is very different. It's not about crawling around and getting fat. It has beautiful wings. It flies, and it spends its time drinking sweet nectar. From flowers and making love. That's a paradigm shift, and that's what we need to do. We need to shift our paradigm and stop being these consuming caterpillars constantly on the defense of what we have and move to this other kind of thinking that emerges at higher levels of the mind that's unifying, inclusive, accepting. It seeks wholes and wholeness. That's why we call it holistic. It's a systems approach. And for those, I'm talking, of course, over and over about the systems approach. If you go to, on my website, to drmiller.com/?s=systems, all in lowercase, There's about a 3 or 4 page history of human thought and the emergence of systems thinking. And systems thinking allows us to think about things in a way that's not present in any other logical or scientific approach. We need this kind of thinking to deal with the world that we're in. We need a thinking where we can be together and connect with each other. We need both/and. We need to look at wholeness and how we can serve each other. It's not about somebody winning and somebody losing. It's about how we can do it all together. And it's about a deep feeling, a feeling of connection that we see around us so clearly in animals and In 2 weeks, I'm going to show you— we're going to go more deeply into this, exactly what that connection is, because it's fundamental to life itself. But I digress. So, you know that feeling, a feeling of closeness, of sharing. There's a oneness. Feel it. That's why I'm showing you the images, or asking you to imagine them in your mind, of the kind of connections that we have in families, in close-knit groups, in many different cultures. Yet we have our families and we have our connections. We have our ways of praying and celebrating. That's the energy that we're missing. Even the energy of a concert with Jimi Hendrix, huh? Yeah, all of us like one huge meta-organism. Yeah. Now, this kind of feeling, approaching the world in this way, I call love with a capital L. I don't just mean erotic love. We'll talk about the different kinds of love next week, but I'm talking about love with a capital L. I mean shared values, inclusiveness, both/and. If you, if you think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it's kind of the things that she talked about as a, as a justice in the Supreme Court. Caring, intimacy, balance, harmony, empathy, compassion, wholeness, collective intelligence, coherence, and harmony. You don't get those through System 1 thinking. That's all either-or, me or you, I win, you lose, I'm a great guy and you're a jerk. So let's compare these two kinds of thinking. A lot of people have trouble with my calling it love. They say, well, why don't you just call call it systems thinking. Well, I want to emphasize the emotional part of it. But synthesis versus analysis. Instead of taking things apart, we put things together. Instead of dispersion and fragmentation, we have unity and holism. Instead of being polar and the polarized world that we're living in now, how incredible polarization that is destroying our country, right? I mean, let's see, um, those of you who are listening to this after the election of 2020, did we have an armed revolution? Were people shooting each other in the streets? Did our democracy collapse? Because right now, while I'm speaking, we don't really know. But to be organic versus polar or bipolar or polarized. Integration instead of differentiation and prejudice. Thinking locally rather than being purely locally focused. As Gandhi said, think globally and act locally. The new paradigm is not figuring out which pigeonhole a particular observation goes into, Are you Black or Latino? Or are you Canadian? You know, are you male? Are you female? Are you gay? Are you lesbian? Are you trans? Or which bathroom do you use? Or you're right or wrong? Or who's elected? And who— that's all the old paradigm. But the new paradigm is not just about what— and this new way, this additional way of thinking, this love way of thinking It's not about figuring which pigeonhole to stick an observation into. It's about changing the whole shape and structure of the whole framework of pigeonholes. And therefore, instead of opposition, we can have collaboration. Instead of debate, we have dialogue. Instead of yin versus yang, we have the middle way, which includes both. Instead of a fixed mindset, we have a growth mindset. It's more of a wave motion instead of a particle motion that we want to have. We want to assimilate, and we want to have anabolism. We want growth and not breaking apart. We want union and not division. Now, love and violence are not really opposite. I want to make that point again. At least they're not in higher orders of thinking. They're complementary. There's a part of me that fights. There's a part of me that makes decisions. I'm going to buy this car, not that car. I'm going to call this person, or I'm not going to call that person. Yeah, so you need to be able to think that way, but there's this additional way that we need to think, and that's what's crucial. How do we think that way? Some simple examples. Of course, my favorite. Two sisters come into the kitchen, they arrive in the kitchen at the same time, and there's a ripe orange in the middle of the table. And then both the sisters jump for the orange and a big fight ensues. And the father comes in and says, "Wait a minute, you know, you're both sisters, we share and share alike, but cut the orange in half, each of you have a half." Eh, well, the sisters, okay, they stop fighting, at least the other one didn't get something. But you know, the mother comes in and says, "What did you want the orange for?" One sister says, "Oh, I wanted the flesh of the orange to make a fruit salad." And she said to the other, "What did you want it for?" She says, "I wanted the rind of the orange to make marmalade." Hmm, so she took the same orange and divided it differently, and both girls ended up getting more. How interesting. That's using this higher level of thinking. It's not just making it equal, but of solving the problem in a special, in a higher level kind of way. Or the other story that always comes first to my mind is in the Second World War, when there was a captain who was living in the second— sorry, in the French Revolution, The captain lived in this town for several years. He knew the people in there, but the revolution was happening and the people in the town square were rioting. So word went to the general that the people were rioting, and the general says, "Well, order your men to fire into the rabble." And well, the captain says, "My goodness, I know all these people. I'm friends with them, and yet I have these 10 soldiers, I'm going to have them fire into them and just willy-nilly kill them? But on the other hand, if you don't obey your general, what is he, a guillotine or worse? So, he was stuck, or seemingly stuck, in an impossible situation, but then he thought about it, and he turned to his men and said, "Point your rifles at the sky, and on my command, fire simultaneously," which they did. Which created this huge noise that echoed through the plaza, the town square, and everybody froze and stopped and was silent, like, what was that? And in that moment of silence, the captain said, I've been ordered by my general to have my men fire into the rabble, but as I look into the town square, I see some fine upstanding citizens of our town, so I will allow 3 minutes to pass, during which those fine upstanding citizens may leave the town plaza, and my men will commence firing into the rabble. And 3 minutes later, he ordered the men to fire into the rabble, which now was an empty town square. Um, so things that seem polarized and that seem, um, insoluble, there's no way to, to really satisfy all of your needs, sometimes you're wrong. And you can be right more often if you learn how to think differently, or think different, as Steve Jobs would say, a different way of thinking. And what if we allow ourselves to imagine that there is a different way of thinking? There's a way we can mature our thinking and nurture our healing potential instead of fighting the dark force, or worse still, taking part in the dark force. So we want to talk about, once more, about the unconscious levels of our mind and the classic example of The limited way of thinking of the blind men and the elephant. Each one sees only part of the elephant. One thinks it's a rock, the other thinks it's a tree, the other thinks it's a leaf from a tree, another one thinks— and so forth. That's because they can't see the whole elephant. And you know this one, these are stairs. You notice you can see them going up in one way with the someone going up the stairs would step on the white part, but you can also see it so that a guy going upstairs would step on the black part. Can you make that shift in your mind? It'll do that if you just stare at it. So there's two ways of seeing that. The reason I put that there is to say you can't see it both ways at the same time. That's how our minds are created. Once we commit to a certain way of seeing it, We can't see it another way. Okay, draw 4 straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper, 4 straight lines such that you pass through every point at least once. Try that. You can just do it in the air. Very difficult. You can do that on a piece of paper and do it. I'm going to give you the answer in a few moment's one way to do it, but if you like puzzles, you might want to try that. Okay, now we have an orange dot in the middle of some black dots. Which of the orange dots is larger than the other? Uh-huh. Are you right? Well, no, they're actually the same size. I erased the black dots so you could see. There they are. They're the same size. Same size. Okay, read this out loud right away when you see it. Read it out loud. Now go back and proofread it. The word 'the' is repeated, but you didn't see it because your unconscious mind decides what it felt the meaning of the sentence was, and it showed you that meaning. And rather, so you didn't read it, you took the meaning your subconscious mind had put there. What do you see here? Well, most of us watching this will say, I see a romantic couple embracing. But children don't see that. Little children say they see dolphins. What, you say? Dolphins? Where are the dolphins? There are the dolphins. Now you see the dolphins? Hmm. Because your, your unconscious mind is programmed to see this couple instead of the dolphins. Whereas that couple is not a familiar thought to a child, and they immediately see the dolphins. Okay, let's go back to the 9-dot problem. Here's a solution: 1, 2, 3, 4 lines pass through all the dots. Ha! Why didn't you get it? Because you didn't think outside the box. You tried to stay within an imaginary box. I didn't say stay in the box, But that is what your unconscious mind decided it must mean, and it was wrong, and so you were misled. Okay, now do you see a great leader or a dangerous terrorist? The most dangerous man in America. That's what J. Edgar Hoover felt, that Martin Luther King was the most dangerous man in America, you know. Okay, and here, do you see America's greatest president or a dim-witted buffoon? It's George Bush. It depends on who you ask, and it depends on what channel you get your news from. Two very intelligent people, but they vary completely in terms of what, of what they see. Okay, what's this, huh? Think of the Star of David. There are people who are willing to die for that, who are willing to, to defend it with their life. Then there are others who are willing to defend the swastika with their life and who are willing to go out and kill people in the name of that swastika. In fact, what, 6 million people were killed for that. Then there's a hammer and sickle. Stalin killed 50— 5-0— 50 million people, you know, because people were lining up behind that. And there we have the, the cross that many of us believe in. But on the other hand, look at the atrocities that were created in the name of Jesus. Look at the hundreds of thousands of little children abused by priests. You know, look at the Crusades, all done in the name of the Prince of Peace. Well, and yet there's a lot of people who believe in this. It's a very strange world we live in. It really depends a lot on where you grew up, what you learned, basically what was programmed into your unconscious. You were programmed to see the world in certain ways. Now, Sigmund Freud came along and taught us about the unconscious mind. Some of us believed it, but others couldn't understand it or didn't believe it. But there was one person who did believe it, and that was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and that was Edward Bernays. Edward Bernays believed in that, and his work has done an enormous amount to change the behavior of of our world. For instance, here we go, the standard American breakfast, eggs and bacon. It hasn't always been that way. Nobody ate eggs and bacon before Bernays came along with the Hormel Ham Company, hired him to promote their product. So he sent out letters to 5 or 10,000 doctors saying, do you feel it's a good idea for people to have a nice heavy breakfast in the morning so they can work better? And 3,000 of the doctors answered him yes. So he put out the advertising that 3,000 doctors recommend that you have a heavy breakfast. And here's an excellent example of a heavy breakfast: bacon and eggs. And our habits changed. You're accustomed seeing women smoke cigarettes, right? But prior to Bernays' time, no woman smoked, and if she did smoke, she would never do it in public. But the Lucky Strike company figured, hey, we're missing out on a lot of people who could be buying our cigarettes. So what Bernays did was he enlisted several members of the fashionistas, high-class culture girls in New York, and worked it out so they would be marching at the front of the Easter parade down Fifth Avenue. And at a certain signal, he was going to have all of them pull out their cigarettes and light them. Meanwhile, he called the newspapers and said there's a culturally very important event going to be happen at such-and-such a corner along Fifth Avenue. So of course the newspapers were there to see what this incredible culture event was, and what it was, was these young ladies whipping out their, what Bernays called them, freedom torches. Ladies, you're gonna be free, you can smoke your Freedom Torches. Well, they were successful. Look at them with their Freedom Torches. Isn't that great? And so pretty soon, ah, we had to teach them to inhale. Do you inhale? Well, everybody's doing it. Yes, you've got to learn to inhale. Hmm? Until Bernays came along, people bought things because they thought they needed them. But Nays came along and got people to buy things because they desired them. Changed our world. He advised Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson had been against the war, but because his friend J.P. Morgan was losing, gonna lose money if England and France lost the war, because he had invested in their armies, he came to Wilson, says, hey, you gotta help us out, but you just couldn't say, okay, America, go to war to help out England. Instead, he hired Bernays, who said, no, we were going to bring democracy to all of Europe. Yay! Wrap ourselves in flags and go to war. And we went to war. Wow. And he went on to work for many other presidents. He worked for 3 or 4 other presidents along the way, doing what he did, which was manipulating the unconscious. He said propaganda— he invented or started using that word— is the executive arm of the invisible government. He wrote the book called Propaganda, and Adolf Hitler and Göring and Goebbels read the book and they applied those techniques with enormous skill, created the Nazi army. All this inspired by the principle, says Adolf Hitler, which is quite true in itself, that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily. And thus, in the primitive simplicity of their minds— he's talking about the monkey mind— they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, right? It's like, what? Yes. Since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. And so, we see politicians who lie. Go to Politico, and they will add up how many lies Obama told every month or per year. They did it for Trump, they do it for all of the bigwigs out there. Go and look at the number of lies. You think the more lies a person told, the less popular they'd be? Ah, Hitler must be laughing. It would never come into the heads of normal people to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be true may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there must be some other explanation. If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Joseph Goebbels, who was in charge of propaganda for Adolf. And their success was enormous. And if it hadn't been for a gay guy who figured out how to make a computer work for us, they may have taken over the world. And we're still doing that. Okay, you can read more about Bernays' full-on movie called "The Century of the Self." You won't— if you don't know about it, it's incredible. But it's really crucial that you learn what's going on in your mind. And right now, media, and especially social media, Go and see that movie I told you about. It's on Netflix, The Social Dilemma. Go and see it right now. You've got to understand what's been happening. Okay, take a moment and breathe. Take a moment and relax. All of this is true. Much of it is new. But you're safe right now. Right at this moment, you can relax. Go back to that deep place within you, that place that's capable of gratitude for the things you really care about. Think of those you love. Think about the miracle of life itself. Understand that you have a brilliant mind, and that you can best access this mind when you relax, when you become aware of what you really care about. What's your purpose in life? Are you an accident, or are you here for a purpose? Are you here to love? Are you here to give? Are you here to serve? Or maybe it's occurring to you that you're here to Get together with others and join together to do something meaningful. What are your skills? What are your talents? Yeah, let's just suppose that you decided that you're going to live a life of meaning. What does your spirit tell you? Open to the spiritual level of your being. Go to your special place. Be at peace. Resting calmly. If you had the power to do so, what would you want to direct yourself to do? Understand that you have the power to calm your mind and body, that each time you relax deeply or go into meditation, each time you go into deep prayer and quiet yourself, eliminate the anxiety, the tension, the stress, the frustration, the anger. They're all behaviors. You don't have to do it. You don't need them. They only hurt you, and you can tame them by relaxing. And once you've relaxed, now your full mind is available to you, and you can think, and you can create a strategy. I just want you to imagine yourself going forth, and each time you find your emotions getting worked up Each time you find yourself going to, to one of those addictive behaviors, going for a quick solution, attacking, thinking either/or, bad, good, black and white, relax. Within you it is vast, vast spaciousness. As Emerson said, Within me there are multitudes. Embrace all that you are. See your connection with those and with everything around you, and imagine yourself living with love and making choices that reflect love and integration and wholeness and healing and life. Imagine yourself doing that, looking to do it first. If necessary to use the old paradigm, go back to it, or use System 1 thinking. But imagine yourself using your higher mind. Practice that this week, and you can use any of the imagery that we've talked about before. Gradually allow yourself to return in time when you're ready. No hurry. I'm not going to do anything very interesting except to tell you how wonderful-bolide it's been to be with you here today, and how sincerely I hope that you've been able to receive what I'm trying to put out there. I know that this is what we need, and if there's a way to spread this information, we can change it. They're not going to do it. They are not going to do it. But you and I, we can do it together, and we have to gain more people. So share this with as many people as you know. Share this webinar and this series of webinar with people who you think are at a place where they can understand it and benefit and may come and join with us. Find other groups and people to join with who are leading in the same direction, teaching the same material, guiding in the same way, but find a way to to do it. And please find a way to come back next week. So until then, be well, stay safe, and keep loving. 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'd like to watch the entire webinar series, you can do so at drmiller.com/life-meditations. That's drmiller.com/life-meditations. Be present, be kind, And be well.