Spirit-Based Healing – Guided Imagery Meditation & Talk with Emmett Miller MD [Episode 14]

Okay, so Spirit-Based Healing, the power of the Spirit to heal, and I haven't said much about my view on spirituality publicly, although people who work with me individually, generally, generally we, well, usually we touch on that because it's such a It's such an important aspect of, of, of deep healing. And let's start with a couple of quotes. The first one's by Albert Einstein, one of my favorite teachers and mentor models from back in the day. Albert said, the ancients knew something that we seem to have forgotten. All means prove but a blunt instrument if they have not behind them a living spirit. And then this from Paracelsus, a German-Swiss physician who lived back in the 16th century: The spirit is the master. Imagination is the tool, and the body is the plastic material. The power of the imagination is a great factor in medicine. It may produce diseases in man and in animals, and it may cure them. Ills of the body may be cured by physical remedies or by the power of the spirit acting through the soul. Of course, Paracelsus is the man who established the role of chemistry in medicine, sort of early father of biochemistry. And so, I'd like to begin with a little experience so that we can get centered on this wonderful day. So, to Allow your body to be in a comfortable position where you don't have to support yourself in any way that is difficult or uncomfortable. And give yourself a few moments to relax and experience some letting go, to let go of what you don't need to be carrying with you.

Anymore at this moment in time, to really relax and to settle into that space that is in the middle of each moment, to settle into that silence that is there in the center of each breath, that place of peace and safety, that place of utter calm. That place of deep love and warmth, a place that has always been and will always be. Take a deep breath in. As you let it out, let your eyelids close and let yourself sink into that little pause after you breathe out and before the next breath comes in. With each breath out, think to yourself the words, 'It breathes me,' and let the breathing do itself. Sink into that pause after each breath out and let that space of silence surround you, and let all unnecessary thoughts melt away. Like wisps of clouds. Allow each breath to guide you effortlessly toward that part of you that cares, that part of you that knows, that is capable of love and empathy and compassion. A place that you may know of as your center. The essence of yourself, the deepest aspect of yourself that you can become aware of, the wisest, most honest, and most deeply spiritual of all those parts of you. And if you have a sense of the spiritual in your life. Or if you're willing to allow yourself to just imagine, imagine that deep within you is a place of profound knowing, of deep clarity, a place of wholeness and love. Of healing and of wisdom. Imagine there that there's a beautiful fountain that you might visualize, a beautiful fountain you may have seen in the past or one you can just imagine, a fountain of wisdom, a fountain of light, a fountain of love and wholeness and healing. That flows forth, bringing you wise guidance, a spiritual guide that you can know and understand and choose to follow if you desire. Imagine there's a constant river of wisdom, wise teachings, that flow into you at all times, even though you might be distracted. And you get worried about this and afraid of that and frustrated with that and annoyed with that and irritated with that. And that simply distracts you from this flow. Of peace and calm and wisdom, this deep bottomless reservoir of love and relaxation. Spiritual awareness flows into you, a river of energy and beauty and color and life flowing into you. And imagine that you can decide to devote a certain amount of your life energy, of your focus, of your awareness, of your passion and your spirit to serving this deep cause this deep sense of value, your sense of personal purpose or mission. Imagine right now you may decide, and perhaps you'd like to give it more of your energy, to be more aware of it. Perhaps you'd like to give yourself permission to open your mind and your heart to the possibility of there being something deeper, something greater, something greater than yourself. And then let us explore these together. And then, when you're ready, Just allow your eyelids to open and bring yourself back. But your body can stay relaxed and your being can stay open. And when you went inside, if you achieved some image of peace or love or spirit or sacredness or God or the Holy Spirit or whatever, What image came up for you? Write it in your chat there. What image comes up for you?

And I'd like to kind of share a little bit of my own story because It may reflect some of what some of you have been experiencing.

I was a militant agnostic.

Oh, by the way, when you put things up on the chat, make sure you share it not only with the panelists, but also with the attendees. You have a choice there.

Please do that so everybody gets a chance to see it and feel free to comment.

Comment at any time you want. As I wander off into some of my boring diversions, you can kind of write things in there and chat back and forth. That's what it's for. Some people saw the Sacred Heart.

For others, there was a light, a faceless woman on a horse with strength and beauty, letting go, a flowing river. Ah, beautiful fountain that you know of yourself. Anyway, what do I mean by a militant agnostic?

An agnostic is someone who, uh, you know, you know what a theist is, or a believer, uh, one who believes in a higher power, believes in God or something like that. And then he— and then there's the atheists who believe there is no God. And then in sort of in the middle is the agnostic, when we— I don't really know. And my feeling was nobody else really knew, but everybody seemed to pretend that they knew, but no one could really tell me. I could understand math and physics and, uh, chemistry and all kinds of things, but You know, how come no one could get me to understand what it is that they felt that they knew? How come they couldn't make me know? And I was militant because anyone who felt that they could, that they believed in the metaphysical or God or something like that, or was religious in any way, I used to like to get together with them. And you know, in college you get together and do that and You know, I would regularly devastate people just by bringing my clear logic and intellectual power to say, now you don't really know, you know, you don't have any proof of that, and so forth. So I was pretty good at that, a militant agnostic. Um, and you know, I'd like to, like to share with you a little bit about how it was that I some of the ways, the ways that I saw things, that, and you know why, why it was that I was the agnostic person that I was.

Um, let's see.

And I saw all these different people, and everyone had their own idea what God was and what the right religion was. And I sensed that there was something special going on, but It seemed to me that they were like the wise men, the 5 blind men and the elephant. You know, one feels the side and says, "Oh, it's a rock," another feels its tusk and says, "Oh no, it's a spear," and another feels the trunk and says, "No, it's a snake." And so, you know, the Christians would say one thing, the Jews would say another, and the Hindus would say another, and each person was certain that they were right and that the others were wrong. Well, you know, maybe they're like the blind men and the elephant, maybe there is something but they don't know what it is. Do you remember this? You've probably seen it before, there's a horizontal line above and below and they have two little arrowy things on the ends of it. Which of these two lines is the longest?

What does your sense tell you?

If you look at this, it tells you that the upper one is longer. You've seen this before, and you know, you get a ruler, you find out they're both the same length, but they don't look that way. These three chaps walking down the street, which man is the tallest? Hard to believe, but the guy at the top is the same size as the guy at the bottom. The surroundings cause you to see it differently. You've seen this one, this, this is a stairway. You could walk up the stairs using the white steps, if you're stepping on the white part going up, but then you could look at it a different way and imagine that the black part are the steps and you're walking up in that direction. And if you look at it long enough, it'll flip from one to another. And if you practice it, or if you happen to be naturally good at it, you can cause it to flip in one direction or the other. Kind of hard to say how you're doing it, but you can do it. And what this represents is that, so are they going up, you know, to the right, or are they going up to the left? And the There, of course, is no answer. It's all in, in how you look at it. But if you look at it in one way, you can't see it the other way. So if you see the white as being the treads that you stand on, you can't see the black as being the tread at the same time, if it's a stairway. So what happens is that when your brain interprets things in a certain way, and we're talking about your monkey mind now, we're talking about your subconscious, that part of the mind that processes information before it reaches your awareness, and it processed it, and that's why this guy at the top looks like he's taller. Okay, here's another one. Just imagine you have a pencil and you want to draw 4 straight lines, and you want to make sure you pass through every one of those points at least once. You want to touch each of those points with 4 straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper. Can you do it? 4 straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper or your finger from your screen?

It's really hard to do, huh?

You can jot it down and keep practicing it if you want to. I'll come back to that and give you the answer, or a answer. Again, that dot in the middle on the left and there's a dot in the middle on the right. Which is larger, right? They're actually the same size, of course. And in this one, the sort of horizontal lines, are they parallel? They don't look that way. They look going up and down, but they're actually totally parallel. I'll show you a video, video in another another presentation where you'll be able to, uh, where I actually show you with a ruler that they're parallel. Okay, read this quickly, read it out loud, and then go back and, and proofread it. See a bird in the, the bush, but you didn't see it the first time through because you didn't really see what was there. You saw what your unconscious mind told you was there. And okay, take a look at this. What have we here? What do you see? You see a couple, like a man and a woman. Well, you do, but of course, if you're a child, you see dolphins. If you're a child, you see dolphins. Hmm? Because, and of course the point that I'm making is that you don't really see what's there, you see what your mind interprets is there. And now, these are really simplistic examples, but I'm going to bring it up to a more macro scale, for instance, in this next slide. Do you see a great leader, or do you see a fellow who has been known as the most dangerous man in America? The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was convinced that this was the most dangerous man in America, and yet there are many people who feel respect and honor for him as a leader. Interesting, huh? Same picture interpreted differently. And in this next picture, do you see America's greatest president or a narcissistic con man? It all depends on which channel you watch, which channel you get your news from, which echo chamber you read in when you look at the— and when you look at look at the internet. Okay, so have you figured out the 9-dot problem yet? Well, here's your answer: 4 straight lines passing through each of the 9 dots. And then you look— oh, you tricked me! I didn't trick you. You thought that there was a box that you had to stay inside of, and you didn't think to have your line go outside the box, unless you're one of the rare 10% that goes outside the box ordinarily. And this is how life is and how our perceptions of the world are, that we tend to be trapped inside of a box that has been created, uh, that is formed of the beliefs in the unconscious part of the mind, in the monkey mind. And then that's what you see. Okay, here's, here's a symbol, and, and that's a symbol that you've, you know, undoubtedly seen before. Well, there are people who are willing to sacrifice their lives to serve what this symbolizes. There are those who are willing to blow up a busload of children believing that they're serving the god represented by that symbol. There are those who believe that the swastika represented their right to impose their will and to systematically kill and exterminate people by the millions They believed that was right. And under this sign, Joseph Stalin murdered over 50 million people and figured he was doing the right thing. There are still many for whom this symbol represents racial superiority and is positive. It's very negative for other people. Again, each of these is just an image, just a symbol, just an idea, but each of these ideas or symbols evokes something different in different people. I mean, and in the name of this symbol, in the name of Jesus the Prince of Peace, thousands of witches were burned at the stake. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were slaughtered in the Crusades. and then of course, there are the tens of thousands of altar boys raped by priests who claim to have been the servants of the god represented by that cross. There are people who believe that this is the way women should dress at all times, and if they misbehave, then it's appropriate to bury them up to their waist and stone them to death. And they're— the god that they say is the main god is the one that says that this is okay. So beliefs. And then there are 30 to 35% of one of our major political parties who actually believes that our former president, was a Muslim traitor who had been snuck illegally into the United States to kill Sarah Palin's baby and convert us all to Sharia law. There are other people who believe that's utter nonsense. But curiously enough, these are intelligent people on both sides, good people on both sides. That's how the fellow likes to say. So that's how I saw religion. You know, it's in the Roman Catholic priests used to say, may still say it as far as I know, said, "Give me a child before the age of 7 and I will give you a Catholic." Now I guess after the age of 7 you have ideas about the world that conflict very strongly with the notion of a virgin birth, for instance, or resurrection from death. It's much harder to convert people, you know, after that time. Science, science gets in the way. And I was a scientist, I was a mathematician, and I was a scientist because, uh, because I found that the predictions that I made when I used my science turned out to be correct predictions about the world. And yet, when I, in my, by the time I went to medical school and spent 7 very harsh years studying to know the body and to know the mind to the degree that our current Science described them to us. After 7 years of that in my clinical practice, I learned about hypnosis, how to use hypnosis in my practice, and I learned about how to use meditation in my practice, and I realized that meditation and hypnosis shared common neurological and linguistic tools. That caused them to work. In my study of the different religious systems, I found they use the same neurological and linguistic tools, and they also produced amazing changes. And in my practice, of course, people know you could— knew you could get changes in hypnosis, but they sort of faded away after a few days. But When the audio cassette was invented, I said, ah, this is perfect, perfect, because what I saw, the, the changes from hypnotherapy is really, um, the brain has learned something, but it doesn't learn it well. It's kind of like you study for a test and next day you know all the answers, and two weeks later, oh, I don't know any of them. I said, maybe hypnosis is like that. So what I would do in my practice is give people recordings of the hypnotic induction and the imagery that they use. I began to call it guided imagery or mental image rehearsal. And if people rehearsed it at home like you were rehearsing a musical instrument or a speech, then you could impress it upon the brain that the brain would actually change. It wasn't a popular thing back in those days, but I believe that the brain could change. We now know that it can. At any rate, so these are the tools I used through the '70s. And then I began to notice that people who had a spiritual life, people who believed in some kind of God, I mean, it could be Shiva, it could be Jesus, it could be it could be Moses, you know, it could be Allah. If you had that faith, those people were able to heal themselves much faster and much more profoundly than people like me, like militant agnostics. I say militant agnostic, I would also say I was ready to argue with your atheists too, because let's say the atheist says, you know, there's no greater wisdom than all of this just happened by accident. Right. Seems to me it takes an awful lot of faith to believe that a series of accidents could cause this wondrous place that we live in. It's like, you know, you land on a a little desert island in an unexplored quadrant of the ocean, and there's a single palm tree growing on this island, and hanging on one of the branches of the palm tree is an, is an Apple Watch. Okay, well, that Apple Watch is made up of all kinds of different atoms, of different elements and molecules. All of which are represented to some degree in the seawater. And so your theory is that the atoms and the molecules in the seawater just happen to come together in such a way as to create, by accident, an Apple Watch.

That takes a lot of faith.

So theists didn't have a great time with me, but now here I was stuck because people who believed in this God or something like that were healing, and I couldn't figure out what was going on. And not only that, but they were able to do things that I wasn't able to do for myself. I used to smoke cigarettes. People would come to me in order to learn how to stop smoking, and I was very effective at helping them give up cigarettes, but I couldn't help myself. And I was particularly good at helping people who I had a spiritual belief. So, I started to believe in belief itself. Now, give you an example. We have again a little town, let's say a Pacific island, and in this town, all the people in this town believe that the big banyan tree in the center of town was sacred. And so each morning the town would gather around the tree and they would all pray and give their offerings to the tree and pray to receive strength and help back from the tree. There were two brothers living in the town, twin brothers, and one of these brothers was a true believer and he got up every morning and he prayed to that tree, said prayers to it every night before he went to bed, and the other one said, "This is ridiculous." I'm gonna get an extra 15 minutes of sleep in the morning, an extra 15 minutes of sleep at night, not waste my time praying to a banyan tree. I mean, give me a break. So one day, each of these brothers is out walking on his own path on the island, and just by accident, they're at the same moment, each one is attacked by a mountain lion. At the same moment. What happens? Well, the guy who prays to the tree each morning, he realizes here comes a mountain lion. He thinks, "Oh, great tree, give me strength to fight off this lion." And he feels his strength and he subdues the lion. And the other twin, when he sees the lion, he goes, "Oh shit, a lion, ah!" Huh? Hmm. I heard a story about a soldier who, I guess he won a Silver Star and a Purple Cross for doing these amazing things, and he felt protected because of the magic rabbit foot that he had in his pocket. All he would think about is magic rabbit foot, and he was just doing all these things. And he gets back after doing all these wondrous things, and he reaches in to take his rabbit's foot out and think it, and the rabbit's foot wasn't there, right? What you believe to be true can become true. That's what I began to recognize. So I had my belief in belief, and that led me to thinking back into my own life, back to the time, uh, when, when I was in medical school. And where— actually, before medical school, when I was in college, the first time I peered into a microscope and saw all these living creatures swimming around in there, and I was awestruck. And to me, this was a wondrous phenomenon.

That these things were alive in the same way that I was alive.

And every day I would come in and fish out my pond water and take a look at it to see how my little friends were doing in there. It was amazing. I just, I mean, I felt close to them in a way, the way you might to a dog or something. It's like these were living beings even though they were invisible. Then I took my class in comparative embryology. And if you look at the embryos, here we have the fish and the salamander, a chicken, a rabbit, and a human being. And look how very similar they look, very early on. See these little ridges that, underneath the eye, those are the gill arches, they become the gills of the fish. By the time you get to the human being, those same arches turn into your jaw, your hyoid bone, your thyroid thyroid cartilage. The similarity is amazing. And then further along, when you look at the anatomy of these different animals— there's the human being, the cat, and the whale, and the bat— look how similar they all have a radius and an ulna in their arm. But the radius and ulna look differently in each of the animals, you know, and even down to the details of the fingers. You see, we all have that same digits, but they're— they look just very different in the different animals. And so I was very interested in the teachings of evolution, what evolution could teach us. And you've all seen this, the standard little drawing of evolution, our common ancestor with the chimpanzee who went on to evolve and evolve all the way up to the fully evolved human being of today. Yeah, sometimes, sometimes we get devolution as well as evolution, depending upon how, depending upon how you look at it. Now, if we take a look at the brain, and if we take a look at the brain of the fish, of the frog the reptilian brain, the crocodile, the rat, the rhesus monkey, chimpanzee, and the human being, and they all consist of the same basic fundamental parts, you know, just like looking at the, the arm bones, but things have a different size, shape, and function in each of them, but still, it's as if there's some plastic material that's being molded into the different kinds of animals, you know, that we are. And this, what's known as the triune brain in the human being, is the one that's most important. And that is, we have the reptilian complex, which is what we share with the reptiles, then we have the limbic system or the emotional brain, what's called the paleomammalian cortex, which is what we share with other mammals in that emotional brain, the monkey brain, and the home of the subconscious or unconscious mind, that part that's doing this interpretation of the world. And what, again, what we see is not what's there. What we see is the interpretation that that mind gives to us. Finally, on the top we have the neocortex. And story, story about the fellow who's looking for a job, so he gets a job as a woodcutter, and the foreman takes him over and shows him a section of forest, says, "Okay, you cut the trees down here, you cut cut off the limbs of the trees, and then cut the logs into 18-inch lengths, stack them here. At the end of the day, I'll come and count the number of cords of wood you've cut, and you get $50 for each cord of wood that you've cut. Well, the fellow comes back at the end of the day, the foreman comes back, and the fellow has cut down exactly one tree and has maybe a quarter of a cord of wood. Cut and neatly stacked. And he looks at the guy, so you've been goofing off all day, but the guy's obviously exhausted, drenched in sweat. And the foreman says, gee, there must be, must be something wrong. It must be something wrong with your, with your chainsaw. Just give me your chainsaw. So he takes the chainsaw and he pulls the chain and starts up, and the guy goes, ah, what's that noise? All right, if you don't understand how a system works, then it's difficult to get the best results out of it. Of course, the system that is of most interest to us, the human system, uh, we have the physical level, we have the emotional level, We have the mental level, and we have the spiritual level of system. Systems thinking was something I was always very interested in as, as a mathematician, because systems thinking enables you to understand very complex phenomena, and if you go to drmiller.com, drmiller.com, and search for systems, S-Y-S-T-E-M-S, and you'll see a paper that I have written there that's simple, which I review the forms of thinking that mankind has used, all the way up to systems thinking and how it's different from other ways of thinking, and yet why it's absolutely necessary to understand the world that we're in. Um, systems, just like, you know, Russian dolls, is one inside of the other, inside the other. That's the way our systems are too, that each is whole and complete in itself, and yet it is a subsystem of another. A system being a set of connected things or parts working together as part of a mechanism or an interconnecting network. The product of this working together is a complex whole beyond what any single part could produce. And of course, it was looking at the human being as a system that enabled me to create this field of mind-body medicine, psychophysiological medicine, and to develop those tools like guided imagery and this medically-based meditation techniques, and we're working with the mind part of the system, but we're healing the body part of it. So let's take a look at the hierarchical levels of thinking. Hierarchy, like the little Russian dolls, they go from the small ones up into the larger, to the larger. And so, if we look, let's look at the capacity of each level of thinking. And if you imagine that you have a chain-link fence like this, and you have on one side is a chicken, and you throw some corn down on the other side of the fence, the chicken will stick its head through and peck, peck, peck all the corn it can reach, and when it can't reach anymore, just keeps struggling to try to maybe get another quarter of an inch, but it doesn't do anything other than that. But if instead you had a dog and you threw some meat on the other side of that fence, the dog will run down to the fence, to the end of the fence, run around to the other side and get that meat. And if it can't run around the fence, it'll climb over the fence, and if it can't climb over the fence, it'll go underneath the fence. The dog has a better brain than the chicken. But, you know, if you put a latch on the fence, the dog doesn't figure out how to open the latch. And if it can't jump or crawl under, it's stuck. But if you go up to an animal with a higher brain, like Mr. Monkey, Mr. Monkey will see you open the latch and say, "I can do that." He'll open the latch and get through. Okay, I'm talking about these higher hierarchical levels of being able to think. But if you put a lock on the fence, Mr. Monkey's not going to be able to figure out how to open a combination lock. But if you take a higher level of being, yeah, Georgie can figure it out. He has the ability to do that. And so it goes, higher and higher levels of, higher and higher levels of thinking. It's another way to look at the hierarchical levels is if you go to the doctor and they tap on your knee and boop, the knee kicks. That's called a simple reflex arc. And all it takes is two nerves, an afferent nerve that brings the information to the spinal cord where it triggers the tightening of the muscle through the efferent nerve that goes out, and that's your basic reflex arc. Then, you know, but if you stick a person with a pin, it takes more than just a simple reflex arc, you actually have to use more than one level of the spinal cord. So this is like a little brain already, even that simple reflex arc is the simplest brain we know of, But then the spinal cord itself is like a little brain. If you've ever seen, unfortunately, a chicken who's had his head chopped off, you see that chicken gets up on his feet and runs around the barnyard because he doesn't have any access to the brain, and yet the spinal cord has him run around because those reflexes are in the spinal cord. Then we too have the spinal cord brain that reaches up and, and the reptilian level of the brain is what we have. And then on top of that, we have our limbic system, the paleocortex, especially the hippocampus and the amygdala. And those are the parts that are responsible for the stress response, which in turn is response for the vast majority of all of our illnesses. And on top of that, we have the neocortex, this highest part of the brain. But there's even a higher part than that, and there's a prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex, that's where your personality lives, that your ability to analyze the situation properly, your ability to look forward into the future and look at the past, to know you're looking at the, looking at the future and the past. You can create a strategy and you can decide to follow that strategy, and you can stay focused on that strategy and follow through, and you have the ability to screen out distractions. And when people have attention deficit disorder, it's this part of the brain that isn't functioning well enough. And that's why they can't screen out the distractions. And because they're distracted, they can't keep their attention where it needs to be, so they do poorly in school and so forth. Give them medication that wakes up that part of the brain and they function, and they function much better. We'll talk more about the brain, um, in another —another presentation. And the reason I talk about all of that is because when you get— it's the prefrontal cortex of the brain that is capable now of beginning to imagine that there's a still higher level. And I'll give you an example of what I mean. A man came to see me, he was a scientist who worked out of Stanford. And he was actually the man, brilliant man, who created the theory of the tectonic plates. We didn't know that those existed until just a few decades ago, and he was the person who had that theory and went out in a mutual exploration with the Russians and proved, in fact, that we do have these tectonic plates. Unfortunately, he developed a very painful cancer, and there was no— nothing we could do that could cure that cancer. But he was in terrible pain and was very depressed. And one of the reasons for that, one of the reasons for a lot of depression, is he had no spiritual belief. This was it. He was going to die. This was the end of his life, and he was going to he was going to die in great pain. I read a book that was called A Guide for the Perplexed, and I gave him this book to read. It was written by E.M. Schumacher, the one who wrote Small is Beautiful. And basically what he says in the book is, if you came to the planet when it was just all molten lava, or even after it cooled down and all you saw was sand and rocks and all these minerals were here, no matter where you went and looked, you would never— it would never bring to mind that it's possible for flowers to exist. No hint of it. And yet, life, you have no idea that plants and ferns and that trees could exist, and yet they can, and in fact, they evolved out of what was there. But if you looked at every plant that existed in the world, you would have no idea that such a thing as an animal— there's no hint in all of the plant world, and so you wouldn't believe in animals existed if all you had ever seen was plants. And you might look at all the animals in the world and all the different kinds of animals, you know, intelligent though they might be, and you'd never think, you'd never imagine that there would be an animal that could create with their imagination, that could develop the levels of moral judgment that are possible, that could build machines that could take them to another land, to another world, or up to the moon. And so if that's how it is, even though we don't see God, and even though there's nothing that gives us any direct proof of the spiritual level, the way things, the way things happen in this world is there are these levels.

What makes you think there's not another level beyond this level?

And he does such a good job of presenting it in this book that it gave my patient an opportunity to say, huh, even though I don't see any scientific proof, that doesn't mean it can't exist. And the moment he gave himself The, the ability to imagine that it might exist in this life changed. He actually went out and bought me a copy of the book and gave it back to me, and he inscribed on the title page, 'To Dr. Miller, with enormous gratitude for teaching me to fly.' It was just, uh It was an amazing experience, you know, and I'm learning from all this, and I, you know, and I did, and I did learn. Oh yeah, that's— and I'll say a little bit, a little bit more about the system that we have, because this is— I'm getting to the end of what I want to share with you. And that is the system works like this. We have a conscious mind, we have a limbic system in the middle where the emotions— so our thoughts are up there in the conscious, emotions in the middle, and then our behavior, our thoughts, words, actions, blood pressure, amount of cortisol, adrenaline, etc., um, are what happen at the behavioral level. So these are three levels of system. And these are in a hierarchy. In other words, that the conscious mind can do things that the emotional mind can't. When we talked about the chicken and the monkey and the human being, we were looking at a hierarchy of intelligence and ability. And so, the— how it should work— my slide's reversed here— how it should work is that control should come from above to below. So if your emotions say, "Oh, you know, go ahead and dive in the water, that water looks so good and there's a silver dollar that's gleaming on the bottom," but the mind says, "Wait a minute, there are sharks in the water, don't do it," the mind needs to give the control and guidance. So control and guidance should come from the top down, Information and feedback should come from the body upward. That's the way the system is designed to work. This is characteristic of all systems. One direction is control, the other direction for information and feedback. And because there are qualities and abilities that emerge as you go higher in the system, as you go higher in the hierarchy. There's a hierarchy with abilities that emerge as you go ever higher in the system. And so if we look at our system, our experience are that we have thoughts, which is a kind of an electrostatic phenomenon. Thoughts come, there's a thought, another thought, another thought, this, that, and the other. And that's happening up in the prefrontal cortex, those thoughts. Now, the next thing that happens is if we relax and we create images, we create images in our minds, these images are represented by neuropeptides and are present there in the neocortex. Next comes the emotions. And now these are hormones, which are much larger molecules of chemistry, because what I'm talking about is mind over matter, that our thoughts we turn into images, and that's what guided imagery is about. You focus your thoughts to create images, those images create emotions, those emotions create change. In your body, in your mind, your emotions, in your way of thinking. And that's the essence of what guided imagery meditation do for you, starting up at that level. Could we start with our thoughts? That's the only thing you can control is your thoughts, your awareness. But how do you control your thoughts?

What chooses the next thought that's in your mind?

That has to do with your beliefs, and that's at the top level. So your beliefs exist in what I call the spiritual or philosophical level, and those beliefs guide your thoughts, which in turn guide your images, which in turn guide your emotions, which in turn determine your faith, and determine the quality of your life, and, and so many other things. And so that's how, for me, I began to see how to place the notion of spirituality and spirit in the system that I knew existed from my scientific experiences. And so what I found myself doing is looking at the different spiritual traditions, and I found that each one taught me something. They all seem to be teaching the same thing. They teach the Golden Rule, they teach respect for other human beings, uh, it tells you to honor some greater spirit, to honor your father and mother, etc. They're very similar teachings even though they take on different qualities. But from Buddhism, for instance, I got this, that the source of all suffering is wanting things to be different from how they are.

The source of all suffering is wanting things to be different from how they are.

So if you ask a normal person, how much is 2 and 2? They say 4. If you ask a psychotic person, how much is 2 and 2? They say purpose. They'll say purple. Or Marilyn Monroe. If you ask a neurotic person how much is 2 and 2, they say 4, but it really pisses me off. It's an old joke that we used to tell. 2 and 2 is 4. It, it doesn't— why waste your time liking it or being upset about it? You know, we're in the middle of a pandemic right now. You can like it or not like it, so what? If you create anxiety about it, or you create frustration about it, or if you create despair about it, that's what you're doing.

It is what it is.

And what it is that we can learn to do is to be free of that suffering by stop wanting things to be different. And not only that, but the moment you stop wanting things to be different, then it opens up this higher level of your mind. You're able to be in touch with your spiritual level, and you're able to be creative. Especially, I've appreciated the teaching of Zen, which really teaches us to get into the present moment.

The Zen saying is, "The truth is not far away." It is nearer than near.

There's no need to attain it since not one of your steps leads away from it. Or as Yasutani Roshi said, The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. And then there's that saying, Namaste, Namaste, which the Buddhists and the Hindus will say, meaning that there's a place of love and beauty and light in me, and there's a place of love and beauty and light in you.

And when you're in that place in you and I'm in that place in me, then there's only one of us. Namaste is to honor that place.

And what I learned from Sufism, the branch of the Islamic faith, is the sort of passion for the world. And Rumi, I think, is the greatest teacher. A little Rumi saying is, "Come to the orchard in spring.

There's light and wine and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter. If you do come, these do not matter." And he said, "Out beyond right doing and wrong doing, there's a field I'll meet you there. That'd be a good message for our politicians, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it be? Um, so, okay, we're running out of time, and of course I'd never get to the end, but I do want to leave you with some imagery, um, that maybe, maybe my sharing with you may have awakened some thoughts, some feelings, and I'd like to share with you some imagery just to end with, building a little bit on what we did, what we talked about in the beginning. So take a moment and allow your body to relax gently into the present moment, into the peaceful surroundings. Allow your eyelids to close and surrender to the darkness.

Feel the air as it breathe you in and out and sink into that pause after each breath out. Good.

And notice at the end of that pause, there's a little spark that starts the next breath.

Feel that little spark of energy. That starts the next breath in, like a little light. And even as you sink into the darkness of that pause, of that quiet place, there's a light that comes that brings you back to being awake once again. Awaken alive inside. And then you sink into the darkness again. Trust that that little spark of light, of life, is like a small candle in the darkness, the vast endless darkness. And yet each new breath relights that candle for you. Experience the light of that candle-like river, a river of light flowing into you. Branching into many little fine branches of light flowing throughout all the rest of your body. Whenever an unnecessary thought comes along, allow your next breath out to breathe that unnecessary thought out of your mind and go back to that fountain that is the source of this river of light flowing into your body with each breath in, breathing love and healing and spirit throughout all of your being, throughout every cell, throughout every fiber of light that spreads out into every cell and every organ of your body. And feel the peace And if you like, you can travel to one of those moments in the past when you felt the spirit most clearly, most vividly, even if it was just for a second, where you knew you were connected to everything. You felt the oneness, or the oneness of yourself with another human being, a partner, a child, a newborn infant. A pet, a beautiful sunset, a beloved teacher, a moment of epiphany. Go back to it. It's there within you always, and you can find it through that fountain of light. That spark of energy that allows a little burst of that light and sacredness into your body as the air breathes you. And you feel a sense of reverence for the spirit that moves through all things, for the gift of your life, your light. And all the wonderful things around you. And allow yourself to feel gratitude.

Feel gratitude for all these gifts—

the physical gifts, the emotional gifts, Feel the gratitude. Feel gratitude for those that you love in your life and those that you have loved and those that have loved you. Feel gratitude for the ability to be in touch with your deeper values. And your ability to translate your values through your purpose, your mission in life, as it becomes clearer to you, to give to the world what you came here to give to the world. Give yourself permission to do that. Good. And allow yourself to imagine that whenever you choose, you can bring yourself back. To being in touch with this. Maybe make a promise to yourself to touch into this place a little more often than you have been in the future. Good. Then when you're ready, just allow yourself to return to being wide awake, feeling alert and refreshed and clear.

Well, I'd like to thank you all for being here. It's been wonderful-bolide. And in terms of what you might do to follow up on what we've done today, you can always watch past webinars at that link that you see on your screen now, drmiller.com/life-meditation. So if you want to hear this one again, watch it again, or, uh, experience some of the others, you can see them here. And I'll— you want to share it with other people, and, uh, be great for you to do that. The more, uh, the more people find out that they can gain something of value by tuning in every other week here on our 11 AM Pacific Time webinar. The more that do that, the more likely we are to be able to continue this, what, maybe final phase of my life. I don't know, my sharing, but I'm loving being with you. And if you go to shop.drmiller.com. There's several products that might be interesting. You can search for spirit, but the ones I think that are most appropriate— there's one that's called Serenity Prayer. It's based on the Serenity Prayer, but I really break it down to show you what I think is really at the core of it. And, um, and the core is the wisdom to know the difference So there's a couple of, uh, um, a couple of really interesting things on there, including meditations. There's meditations on all my programs because it's through meditations that we can really reach that level of the mind that needs to learn in order for us to take charge of our lives. There's a video called The Power of Your Mind to Nurture Your Spirit. That's a good one. To look that up. There's one that's called I Am Awakening Self-Acceptance and Rainbow Butterfly. So those are the ones that might— you might find interesting. I don't know if it's possible for you to see these. They're backward on my screen. I hope they're not backward on your screen. Nurture Your Spirit video and Serenity Prayer, Rainbow Butterfly, and I Am. Thanks so much for being here. Have a Have a wonderful 2 weeks. Do leave a few comments on our chat board up there, and I'll see you in 2 weeks. And as they say, namaste.