The Curse of Propaganda – How to Free Our Minds. Guided Imagery Meditation & Talk [Episode 19]
In this episode of Dr. Emmett Miller’s Life Meditations webinar series, Dr. Miller opens with a brief introduction explaining that the series was created during the pandemic to offer wisdom, practical tools, and comfort. He then leads a guided imagery meditation that centers listeners in the present, cultivates feelings of love, and relaxes the body. Following the meditation, Dr. Miller delivers an extensive talk on what he calls “The Curse of Propaganda,” arguing that pervasive disinformation creates chronic stress that fuels disease, social conflict, and global crises such as pandemics, climate change, and geopolitical tension. He introduces the concept of the "Umwelt"—the limited sensory world each organism perceives—and shows how cultural, linguistic, and developmental filters shape our reality. He contrasts the brain’s fast, fear‑driven System 1 (the “monkey mind”) with the slower, analytical System 2 governed by the prefrontal cortex, explaining how stress and negative emotions (anger, anxiety, resentment) hijack cognition and lead to maladaptive behaviors. Dr. Miller proposes meditation, mindfulness, and conscious practice as the solution: by training the mind to access higher‑order wisdom, individuals can break free from propaganda’s grip. He traces the historical roots of modern propaganda to Edward Bernays, Freud, and earlier manipulative techniques, and outlines epistemological categories (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, unknown knowns) to illustrate how beliefs are formed and mis‑guided. The talk concludes with practical calls to action—links to the full webinar series, upcoming sessions, donation information, and encouragement to practice daily meditation and self‑hypnosis to heal oneself and the world.
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, or good afternoon as it may be wherever you are. This is Dr. Emmett Miller, and today we're going to be talking about The Curse of Propaganda. We live in a world where disinformation is rife, where living in the world that we live in, there's so much disinformation, so much propaganda. People are being led astray by things that are untrue, and that's at the global level, at the social level. At the personal level as well. Most of our diseases are caused directly by stress, and for those few that are not, they're made worse by stress. And yet, we don't know how to deal with stress. That same internal stress is responsible for the disaster that is our world now. 5 million people have caught this new plague, COVID-19. A quarter of a million people in this country alone have died with something that could have been very simply prevented by simply using our wisdom and our intelligence. We are standing at the edge of nuclear war in different places in the world. The number of homeless and refugees, uh, is increasing every day. Climate change is knocking at the door. And yet, we continue to do the same thing. You know, Albert Einstein said that no problem is ever solved, no problem is ever solved by approaching it with the same state of consciousness that created the problem in the first place. So if two people are fighting and they want to end the fight and have peace, You won't end it by fighting better and fighting more. It seems as though there's no solution to what's out there. But I believe there is a solution. Not only that, I believe that the solution to our personal, our family, our community, our nation, and our global problems really lies at the same place. That's what my work has been for the last 50 years. And I am most grateful for the ability to come and share with you what I have learned. And as usual, our learning will be both intellectual and scientific, because I'm at heart a scientist. But at the same time, it's going to be very experiential and will be reaching into your being. In other words, it's important for you to feel the truth or falsehood of what it is that I'm offering to you so that you can make a wise choice about it. We'll get more into that, and if you've been following along with previous webinars, I think you already have some sense of that. We're looking at The Curse of Propaganda: How to Free Our Minds and Our World. So it's a personal and global approach because there really is no dividing line between the two, in fact, that's where we go wrong, you know, where we think that we can just do what we want and we're not going to affect the world. So you just, maybe I'll say, "To hell with it, I'm not going to wear my mask on the plane," you know, and so 20 or 30 people get infected on the plane and they go home and they spread it to 60 or 80 other people, 20 of them have to go in the hospital and 5 of them die. And what we do has an effect all over. And that is just a simple and most obvious way that this is being thrust in front of us. So to begin with, we're going to start with just a little bit of centering so that you can clear your mind of any unnecessary thoughts. Give yourself permission to be present in this moment. And to know there's no other place that you need to go. There's nothing else that you need to do. There's no problem that you need to solve. And therefore, you can give yourself permission to relax, to let go, to let yourself be at peace. Take a deep breath in, and as you let that breath out, let it be a feeling of letting go completely. Relaxing. And then tune into your body and notice how you're feeling, how the different parts of your body are feeling at this moment in time. Notice which parts may feel tense. Notice which parts feel relaxed. Notice which parts feel cool or which feel warm. Behind your closed eyelids, let yourself look upward toward the back of your forehead. Picture the word relax as though it's written there on the back of your forehead, and as you do Let the muscles of your relaxed eyelids relax all the way down to the point they just don't want to open at all. When you have that relaxation in your eyelids, gently test them, and as you do, let that relaxation from your eyelids flow throughout all the rest of your body, a warm, peaceful, soothing Feeling of relaxation and calm flowing throughout your entire being, all the way down to the tips of your fingers, all the way down to the soles of your feet, releasing and letting go. Good. Now I want you to think of something that brings to your mind a feeling of love. There may be many other thoughts that come along, but those that do not deal with feeling love, let them float away from your mind. Those are unnecessary thoughts. Whenever an unnecessary thought comes along, put it on your mental blackboard and erase it. And focus on someone that you love or something that you love. It could be a pet, could be a child, could be a lover, could be a grandparent, could be one of your kids when they were very young, a baby in your arms, the moment of giving birth, or beautiful beautiful piece of music or movie, or a mountaintop watching the morning sun rise up, or resting watching the surf on a beautiful beach, or maybe surfing or skiing, or whatever brings up most strongly the feeling of love for you. Picture that image in your mind. Let the others go. Focus on it as if it's really, really important to do so. And notice where in your body you feel that love the most strongly. Allow yourself to feel it, and if it brings a tear to your eye or thrill in your body or a chill that goes through you, let yourself feel what you feel. And notice where you feel it most in your body, and breathe into that place in your body. And as you do, let that feeling grow even stronger, as if you're breathing on warm embers and they're starting to glow. And you're remembering the depth of what love is, how you feel it, and how it feels to be loved. The oneness and the connection, the peace and the security, the transcendence and even the spiritual quality in your love, that you're connected with something infinite and eternal. Everything else can just float away. This is all that's needed. Be there. And as you breathe into this part of your body where you feel it the most strongly, imagine that feeling spreading throughout all the rest of your body, spreading down into the tips of your toes, down into the tips of your fingers, and filling your arms and filling your legs and your pelvis and your belly and your chest, your shoulders and your neck and your your head and your face, your eyes, your mouth, every part of you, every cell of your being, feeling that love and remembering that love is the source of our being. Love is the source of our lives. Individually, someone may love And we arrived. Love, the source of life itself. Be in touch with it. Be one with it. Feel its peace and let that peace reside in your body. And from this place of safety and love and comfort. Gently allow yourself to return to the space around you, reawakening as if you've had a beautiful slumber, rested and calm. And allow yourself to just enjoy the things that I present, the positive things, and even the things that are negative. It's okay. It's so important to be able to look at those things that are negative. As you'll learn, that's key, key to overcoming the propaganda that continues to draw us in the wrong direction in so many ways. Good. And now I want to, I want to share with you this idea of a struggle. And there's, you know, a few struggles that we know of that have been more ongoing than the struggle between Coke and Pepsi. And it's fascinating. A while ago, they did a taste test in which people were given two glasses, two cups. One had Pepsi and the other had Coke, but they weren't told which was which, and they were asked which tasted better. Which one do you think won, Coke or Pepsi? It was Pepsi. As I understand it, Pepsi won kind of, kind of hands down, but you would have thought Coke. Why? Because Coke sells much better than Pepsi. And why? I'm going to play you this little Coke commercial and see if you can tell why. I'd like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love. Coca-Cola, cheers and happy days. Because when you are drinking Coke, you're not just drinking Coca-Cola, you're helping teach the world to sing, and they're all drinking along with you. All those Black people, all those brown people. And of course, this came out at a time when we were very much into thinking globally, acting locally, but thinking globally. And this just warmed our warm our hearts. How interesting, huh? It's not what we think. It's not— things are not really what we think they are. So, I want to talk a little bit about the concept of Umwelt, because I find it very fascinating. I think you will too. It was in the early 1900s, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll developed the concept of the Umwelt, and what he said was that in any animal, and here we have the animal being me, the Umwelt is everything that we can detect using the senses that are available to us. But there's a much bigger space called the "Umwelt," which is beyond that simple little "Umwelt" that we have. For instance, our friend the tick. That tick has two senses. It can sense butyric acid and warmth. That's it. That's its world. And some of you may have heard me say sometimes when I can't think of anything else to be grateful about, when everything is going wrong, I say, "I'm grateful I wasn't born a tick." You know, warmth and butyric acid, that's its entire Umwelt, its entire world. The black knife ghostfish is sensitive, is completely blind, but it's sensitive to electrical impulses. Given off, let's say, by the muscles of the fish or the animals that it eats. That's its whole world. The echolocating bat, blind also, but it's sensitive to bounce signals bouncing off of other objects when it squeaks. You know, you can't know what the world of like of a bat is But that's the bat's entire umfeld, but it'll never get to see the color red. Yeah, that small subset of the world that we are able to see. And not only that, but what we're able to see is limited by our, what we've learned in our family, right? If our family spoke English, then we can translate English, but then we see something that's, we hear something that's in Spanish, we have no idea what, what it means, or something that's— even if we learn writing in English, we can't understand Chinese. So there's much more out in the multicultural universe that we can't detect. And then there's the limitations of our culture, you know, our religion, you know, our rights. And I remember Early on, they would always tell me not to burp at the table, and then I learned that in China, to not burp is an insult. I tried it, but it didn't work well. And then, so those are the limitations, but then there's so much more that's out there. And yet, what you see is all there is. What you're able to perceive, that's your entire universe, and all of your decisions decisions need to be made on the basis of that. There's this experiment that they do where they raise kittens in environments where everything is either vertical lines or horizontal lines. And when the kitten— there's a certain period of time in the development of the cat's eyes where it learns to distinguish vertical and horizontal. And if you keep the kitten in their past, then they can't distinguish. So let's say if you have a cat that has been raised in a world that has only horizontal lines, it cannot see, for instance, the table of a leg, and it just walks straight into the table leg. And it's very shy. You know how cats are when they get freaked. What? What's going on? They can't see it. But that's it, forever. Their Umwelt is missing the information that's out there, yeah, in the world. Now, in a similar way, the Umwelt of a human being, or dog, house, or fly, we're referring to that set of phenomena in our environment that the animal or we are able to detect. But in the case of a human being, things are a little bit different. Like all other animals that we know of, only we as human beings are capable of imagining something that is not physically present and actually happening and respond to it. We call episodic memory, What did you have for breakfast this morning? Can you remember? You just make a picture in your mind of your breakfast, and there you know. Now you see what you had for breakfast. Others can't do this. So that's a gift, but sometimes it can get in our way. So if you're slicing tomatoes, let's say, if while you're slicing tomatoes you're thinking about the really stupid financial mistake you made yesterday, or the fact that you smashed up the fender of your new car, then we have that fantasy in our mind as we're slicing tomatoes. But that doesn't help us slice tomatoes. In fact, we're distracted enough that we may slice off the tip of our finger. So, what we're holding in our mind has a lot to do with what our experience in the world is and how well we fare in the world. And yet, a significant percentage of your Umwelt is made up of your mental images and perceptions, not only what you're smelling or feeling or tasting or seeing in the world here and now, but what else is going on back there. And so, the part of us whose job it is to remember who we are and what our goals are is the prefrontal cortex, the brain's brain, the CEO, of the brain, and that's the part that says, "Keep your mind focused on slicing your tomatoes and, you know, leave the car fender for later." That conscious mind, what we call System 2, examines things in the environment and makes a decision. Of all the things present in the Umwelt possible, then it chooses those things to focus on that can bring about success in the current situation. Now, the prefrontal cortex takes many years to come online. The prefrontal cortex isn't mature until we're in our 20s, and that's why children and teenagers can make really terrible mistakes. They really don't— the boss is not home yet. But the paleocortex where System 1 works, the monkey mind, the paleocortex, because it developed hundreds of thousands of years ago, that's busy already at birth, long before we have language skills and intellectual understanding. System 1 is busy understanding, trying to understand patterns, particularly patterns that may be portents of future pain. And so anytime that your monkey mind perceives a pattern that seems to predict pain reliably, then it tends to institute the stress response, the fight-or-flight response. So if you have a mean brother, a mean older brother, then you, that subconscious part of your mind says, okay, little boys are mean, and therefore when little boys are coming, you want to hide away and get away from them. And then you go ahead and you live and you grow, and you get older and older, older. In many cases, those messages that you learned as a child about, "This is how men are, this is how women are, this is how men are when they drink, and this is when you have to be afraid, and this is when kids will pick on you at school, and this is how, you know, this is what school is like." You know, those first few days of school, we drag people, you drag kids to school and shove them in the classroom, I'll whip you if you don't stay in the— you know, then forever they're going to have a tendency to really hate school. So, so much gets laid down in those early times, so very much. One of our biggest problems in our culture is we don't understand the delicacy and the sensitivity, the brilliance, the vulnerability of the human brain when we're born. We're born like a earlier or more premature, in fact. You know, when the baby wildebeest is born, 20 minutes later it can run 40 miles an hour. The human infant is helpless for a year, year and a half, can't do anything for itself. But if we stayed in utero any longer, our heads would grow so big we wouldn't be able to be delivered through the pelvis. So nature saw to it that we were born early, but then gave mothers and fathers the ability to love, so much that they would stay around and take care of and feed and nurture and love this little mewling, puking ball of protoplasm. And so what we do, we end up is really injuring kids. Things that kids see now on television, propaganda, they used to be that Saturday morning, but that's when kids got to watch TV. I don't know what their parents were doing, but I think I do. At any rate, the TV was carefully monitored by a board that says, we only want to put things on there that won't hurt our children. But now they don't do that. They go on the internet where there's no rules, and they are being pounded with propaganda that is teaching them fear, that is teaching them to feel insecure. Because when you're insecure, you feel needy, and when you're needy, you're ready to buy whatever product or candidate is stuck in front of you. More about that later. The creative challenge that life offers us then is the ability to look ever more deeply into the umbigong, be willing to look into the unknown. For instance, in the beginning, we weren't able to combat smallpox, and millions of people died from smallpox. You remember that? You probably have never seen smallpox. I've never seen chickenpox, you know, but I've never seen smallpox. Terrible. But we didn't just run away from it, we dealt with it. We discovered vaccination and developed skillful means of testing and isolating and treating, and we got rid of smallpox, wiped it off the face of the earth, except in the war laboratories where they're working on it to see how they can weaponize it. But aside from that, We wiped it out. And there used to be these epidemics and pandemics that came along every so often, but, you know, we've been free of it until the ridiculous craziness of recently. You know, we healed so many things and were able to make so many advances AIDS was kind of a death sentence back in the '80s, but now it's just another chronic disease. We looked into the unknown and used science and saved so many, so many lives. And so likewise, it's by confront— confronting our personal and cultural blockages and limitations using our System 2 ability to analyze and strategize. Only by doing that, that we can discover the potential that we have to set ourselves and our patients and our clients and our friends and everyone in the world free. But having the ability to use our intellectual capacity may be hijacked by our monkey mind. The monkey mind that primitive part of us, the subconscious, the limbic system, the paleocortex, driven by fear. As our colossal failure to use our wisdom, for instance, to combat the COVID-19 pandemic is proving to us day by day, fear-based politics continue to lead us to flout scientific and medical logic in the name of the freedom or the right to party with as many people as we want. Ah, you know what, uh, what a terrible situation we find ourselves in, but it's something that we can do something about. Remember this quote by Confucius: By three methods may we learn wisdom. First, by reflection, which is the noblest. Second, by imitation, which is the easiest. And third, by experience, which is the bitterest. Hopefully when the next pandemic comes along, and it will be coming along, you know, sooner than you think, probably, Now hopefully we have learned by this very, very bitter experience. Now I think that it should be clear how anxiety and anger and resentment and other negative emotions, because they inhibit cognition— now let me say it another way— those emotions, anger and anxiety, resentment, greed and lust and and jealousy and envy, all negative feelings, they are created by the unconscious part of the mind, the monkey mind, because the monkey mind thinks that you are in danger of being killed within the next few seconds. These are emergency responses, or the result of emergency responses that we have, and In addition to doing things like basically dissolving the organs of your body to turn them into glucose so that you can run or fight at this dramatic moment, creating all kinds of diseases and problems that we'll say more about. But most important is it shuts off your ability to think clearly. It inhibits cognition—that means your ability to analyze and your ability to strategize—are limited. And instead, we end up resorting to stereotypic escape patterns that give short-term gain—release of pain—but long-term pain. What's our solution? The solution—this is it— Here it is. This is what you came here for. The solution involves your being able to call on your ability to access your wisdom, to guide your behavior by the highest levels of your mind, rather than by the primitive decisions made by System 1 thinking, driven by the monkey mind. An example of how our limited Umwelt can hurt us concerns a fellow who was driving along a country road one day, and as he's approaching a curve, and around the corner is a woman in a convertible, and her car is swerving into his lane. She manages to— the two of them manage to not hit each other, but as she passes him, she screams at him, Pig! Well, the guy had just been called a chauvinist by his girlfriend, so he was furious at being criticized by some other woman who's gonna call him a pig. He's furious, so angrily he flips her the bird, stomps down on the accelerator, rounds the corner, and slams directly into a pig standing in the middle of the highway. That's because his Umwelt was limited to the thoughts he was having in his mind that had nothing to do with this woman driving out of control down the highway in front of him. So you'll notice the examples that I'm using range from the humorous to the tragic. And they're drawn from different levels of societal dysfunction and disease, all the way down to individual illness and behavior. That's because the level of thinking that I'm aiming toward is a high level of thinking. This is a systems approach. In other words, instead of blaming a germ, or a political opponent, or a system of government, I'm looking to see what there is in the very system that we use to approach our channels. Most of the time, our System 1 thinking allows us just to decide what slot we want to put our experiences into. In a systems approach, we look at the whole arrangement of slots and see, maybe there's a different way of thinking. The way I what I call new paradigm thinking. I tend to look at diseases as behaviors of the body. Headaches, backaches, asthma, high blood pressure, they're all behaviors too. Our anxieties are the result of behaviors. Our thoughts are behaviors. Your thoughts are behaviors. They belong to you, and you have the right and the power to change those thoughts. Your emotions are behaviors too. They belong to you. Nobody makes you angry. Nobody makes you afraid. And you may react that way, and you may blame other people, and you may attack other people. But the truth is, you can solve those within yourself. Because what happens when you attack other people, you're using low-level escapes from an unpleasant feeling. Then you mess up your relationships and so forth. So, what happens is that when we have a problem in our lives, let's say that we are hoping that things are going to turn out a certain way, and they don't turn out the way, they turn out this way, which is not the same. And so we have two ideas in our mind at the same time, we human beings, but they're different. In fact, they're the opposite. You know, I wanted a beautiful day for my wedding here on this beach in Fiji, and instead it's raining cats and dogs. There's a conflict between these two thoughts, what we call cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance. Dissonance within the higher brain. Well, your monkey mind is busy looking all the time, says, "Oh, conflict, conflict, wah, wah, wah, let's tell you guys it's an emergency, saber-toothed tiger attacking," or maybe it's a new disease, or maybe there's a rock falling, or maybe we're falling off a bridge or something, call in, and that's what we call the stress response. So the cognitive dissonance gives rise to stress, the stress then calls out adrenaline and corticosteroids, steroids and inflammatory chemicals that flow through our body and put us in this state of conflict, sets up diseases, makes us very uncomfortable inside, and it shuts off our ability to think clearly. Hmm? In other words, it inhibits our cognition. That's the worst thing in the world that can happen. We don't want this to happen, but it happens. So now we can't analyze and we can't strategize, and because we can't analyze and strategize, then we're left with the sort of automatic response that comes from the monkey mind. I'll give you another example of what I'm talking about, and it's the story of the fellow who's driving along, driving along a road in the country. It's a beautiful day, and he's hurrying to get to a very very important appointment, and suddenly he gets a flat tire. And so he takes the tire off, and as he takes the lug nuts off and puts them down on the ground there in the asphalt, takes his his, his flat tire, takes it around to the back of the car, um, where he's going to get his spare out and come around and put it on. Well, something happens. A truck goes by, huge truck, and the truck rolls over the lug nuts and drives them deep into the soft asphalt. And I said, oh my God, I can't get to my appointment, you know, what am I going to do? He's really upset, he's angry, angry, takes the lug wrench and throws it on the ground. Meanwhile, just so happened that he had stopped right in front of one of the state hospitals where the people were hospitalized for mental problems. And there was a guy there behind the bars looking at him from up there and watching him carry on down there. And pretty soon the guy yells down, says, hey buddy, why don't you just take one of the lug nuts off of each of the other wheels and attach the wheel that you have, and that'll hold you till you get to a gas station and get some other lug nuts to put on there. And the guy goes, wow! He suddenly realized his problem solved. It was right there all the time and he didn't see it. It was not in his umbigo until this fellow— and the guy goes, "Hey," says, "Wow, that's brilliant." He says, "What do you— what are you doing in the state hospital?" The guy says, "Huh, I'm crazy, I'm not stupid," right? That, you know, very often that What we need is right in front of us and we don't realize it. And then we get angry and we don't see it. Now, it's a simple solution. It's easy for me or anyone else to say, just relax and enter the silence and stillness of the present moment and then choose from there. But it's devilishly difficult if you haven't learned a technique to do it. And not only learned it, but practiced it. And that's what you have to do. You have to practice it until it becomes second nature. That's why your daily meditations, you take time off and go to really relaxing places on the weekend, take vacation, keep practicing going to that quiet place inside. Remember, millions of years of evolution are driving your monkey mind to say, "I can't trust you, you know, I can't allow you to be analyzing and strategizing. System 2 thinking is too slow, you'll be dead." You know, you look up and the saber-toothed tiger is attacking you, and as he is, let's say your System 2 was working, and this is, "My gosh, saber-toothed tiger's eyes are a deep emerald green." My gosh, I would have never thought of that. How beautiful. No, you don't want that. You want to run, mother. So the monkey mind takes over, and millions of years of evolution have trained your monkey mind to take care of you. So it's only natural that you have to prove to your monkey brain that you are wise enough and responsible enough that it can trust you when you say there's nowhere you have to go at this moment in time. You're totally safe. It is wise for you to pause and analyze and strategize. So, you must understand and choose to take the time to train your brain, just as you have to take the time to train your dog if you don't want a dog that's climbing over your furniture and worse. For what it's worth, I will share my 50 years of experience with thousands of patients, coaching clients, and the feedback from my many students working with our clients and patients. This works. It's a theory, but it's a theory that in fact works. You know, again, one of my favorite stories is a guy who's driving through New York and he's on his way to a really special performance at Carnegie Hall where he's going to see Isaac Stern play the violin. It's going to be incredible. But now he's lost in midtown Manhattan and there's traffic. He doesn't know where to go. So for a moment he stopped in traffic and right next to him there's a, there's a, a taxi cab driver, a New York taxi cab driver. And so he says to him, he says, He says, "Hey buddy," he says, "can you tell me how do I get to Carnegie Hall?" The cop, the taxi driver says, "Practice, practice, practice." So true. That's what it's important to do, it's practice, practice. The second key to success is being able to feel your emotions. Sufficiently to realize when your monkey mind is being overactive. Because negative emotions are uncomfortable and can be downright painful, those of us who never got to learn as children how to self-soothe— instead, to survive, because you just can't deal with those powerful emotions as a child, you learn to suppress your emotions or to quickly drown your emotions and As you grow older, you learn to drown them in anger or resentment or depression or alcohol. We'll talk more about emotions in the future because your emotions are messengers that come from your deeper mind, bringing you valuable information up to your higher levels of consciousness. They're also messengers that your higher levels of mind can use to guide the lower levels of your mind. So when you meditate or when you visualize a loving experience and you feel love, you're really using emotions to modify the behavior of the lower levels of your mind. Now, you may remember Donald Rumsfeld, who was the Secretary of Defense. For George W. As he said, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things that we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know that we don't know. His logic may be tongue-twisting, but his epistemology was quite sound. In other words, what do we know, what are the unsolved problems, and what have we failed to continue, uh, or to consider? There are known knowns, there are known unknowns, and there are unknown unknowns, but there's a fourth category that he didn't mention, but it's important to us. It's called the unknown knowns. Those are the beliefs, the things that you think you know, but what you don't know, you're not aware of the fact that you're being controlled by that. In other words, as Mark Twain said, it ain't what you know that gets you in trouble, it's what you're so dang sure of that ain't so. And we have these things that we believe. Early in my life very early. As a young man, I was enormously baffled by the way people constructed their realities. They were so different. Perhaps my earliest encounter was looking at the phenomenon, phenomena of religious beliefs that so many different people had. On one hand, someone who's raised in a Christian home and community in the Bible Belt has no doubt that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, and on the third day rose from the grave and sits at the right hand of God and will come to judge the quick and the dead. That seems reasonable. Yeah, but of a person who was born in India, that doesn't sound reasonable at all. What are you talking about? No, no, because that's not true. However, what he believes is that the god Shiva, angry at being interrupted by his young son while he was having sex, chopped off his kid's head. And then, because the mother was so distraught, Shiva showed the height of compassion by taking the head of a passing elephant and transplanting it onto his hapless son Ganesha, who is now worshiped, you know, as a god of compassion. That seems reasonable, but I don't know, coming out of graves and being born of virgins, I don't know. You know, isn't it curious is how few people that grow up in the Bible Belt believe in Ganesha, how few people in India believe in in Jesus in that same way. And then, both of them find the notion of God riding on the back of Ruda as being a reasonable description of where we all came from, and yet if you're from Bali, that's what you believe. Now I thought back then, I said, "Well, suppose there must be at least 100 easily identified religions, each with their own idiosyncratic beliefs that every— they take as absolute reality. In some cases, they'll be put to death by their community if they don't take it as absolutely reality, absolute reality. So I would imagine that, well, maybe one person of those 100 is right, and his beliefs are the correct ones. That means the other 99% are wrong? How do I know that I'm that one and not one of the 99? Everybody else is so dang sure, as Mark Twain said, if one of them's right, that makes the rest of them wrong, right? So how can you decide what reality is? And since I was a scientist, and science is at its essence organized truth, Truth must be firmly bound to reality, what I call bowling ball reality. And what bowling ball reality means is you take a bowling ball and you hold it about 3 or 4 feet above your foot, and then you philosophize about what will happen if you let the ball go. One philosophy is that the ball will float up into the air. Another philosophy is that a fairy will come down and grab the ball and gently place it on the bowling alley, etc. And then bowling ball reality is what happens if you actually let that ball go over your foot. You know what's gonna happen. That's reality. Science is about studying that kind of reality. But, but we have a problem. How do we determine just what that reality is? In a world in which things are happening the way they are, where our leaders don't agree on the same reality, where vast swaths of our culture don't agree on the simplest notions. Or you kind of take the tax cuts. You know, on one hand, the Republican says, hey, this lets you keep more of your money. And the folks at the other end, the liberal end, say, oh my God, this is Armageddon, the end is near, people are going to die. How do you find reality in that? And then if we're being exposed all the time to This news article that appeared in the mailboxes of millions of people who had been carefully selected. Horrific Hillary Clinton snuff film circulating on the dark web. An extreme snuff film featuring Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin raping and mutilating a prepubescent girl is circulating on the dark web, according to sources familiar with the material. Okay, that went out to millions of people, many of whom believed it, believed it was accurate, huh? And then there was this, seen by a whole group of people: President Trump's secret summit meeting with Putin, U.S.-Russia alliance to destroy China. And, and, and they believed it. You know, or that photograph that went around, Kavanaugh's accuser Christine Blasey Ford proudly posing with George Soros. A fake picture, and yet many, many people believe that, just as I understand the 35% of Republicans at this point still believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is not a United States citizen. So, we've been hypnotized into believing that we're free, and we're not. We're trapped. We're trapped by that part of our mind that tells us that the long— the line at the top is longer than the line at the bottom, and it is not. It's the one that tells us that the circle at the right is larger than the center circle at the left. It is not. The one that tells us that those lines going from left to right are wiggly, and they're not, they're absolutely parallel. The part of the mind that thinks that the man at the right is taller than the man to the left of him, they're not. I cut this piece out and just moved it up there so you can see, see, exactly the same size. But that's not what your senses tell you. There's a filter that filters information before you see it, and it subtracts certain things and focuses on certain other things. And so if you look at the famous, uh, Message d'Amour des Dauphins illusion, right, you see two lovers, right, very romantic picture. But children see dolphins. Young children see dolphins. That's all they see. Hmm, can you see the dolphins? Huh, where were they before? You didn't see it because your mind filtered out and showed it what it thought you ought to see. Well, back in the days of Franz Mesmer, There was a discovery that there was another kind of thinking. Sigmund Freud came along and learned hypnosis and realized that there was what we can call a subconscious mind, and he developed psychoanalysis, which is really a modified form of hypnotherapy. Then along came Edward Bernays. He's the one who discovered how to manipulate the unconscious behaviors of the masses to get them to do what he wanted to do. You may not recognize him, but he is the one who changed the behavior of our entire country, really, of the entire world in a most astounding way. The world has not been the same. Okay, what's a traditional American breakfast? Guy stops at the diner for breakfast. What's he going to order? That's right, bacon and eggs. But it wasn't always that way. The Hormel Ham Company hired Bernays, whose specialty was how to manipulate the unconscious. He sent out letters to a bunch of doctors and got back 3,000 doctors who agreed with him that a heavy breakfast was a good thing in the morning. So he put out an advertisement, said, "3,000 doctors agree a heavy breakfast in the morning is good for you." And then he said, "A great heavy breakfast is eggs and bacon," and poof, eggs and bacon became a way of doing it. Then he was hired by the— well, do you know what LSMFT means, if you're old enough? LSMFT? No, not "loose suspenders mean falling trousers." LSMFT means Lucky Strike. It's fine tobacco. Lucky Strike means fine tobacco. They hired him and they wanted to get women to smoke because they're missing half their market. And so what Bernays did was he convinced a group of young socialites to walk at the front in the— to lead the Easter parade in New York City, and he gave them all cigarettes, had them practice smoking, and at a certain a certain corner in the parade, they'd pull out their cigarettes, which he called the freedom torches, and light them. Meanwhile, they called all of the photographers of the newspapers and said a wonderful event is going to be happening at that corner. And so the socialites all got their photos taken whipping out their freedom torches. And suddenly everyone, all women now, Not only was it okay to smoke, whereas before it was shameful for a woman to smoke. If she smoked, she did it never in public, but now it was, it was okay to smoke. Yes, you could be happy and go lucky. And other cigarette manufacturers figured out how to horn in on that. Here, this one: Gee, Mommy, you sure enjoy smoking your Marlboro. Yes, you never need to feel over-smoked. That's the miracle of Marlboro. And this one, some women were smoking, but not enough of them were inhaling, I guess, to get the lung cancer figures up to where we needed them to be. So, do you inhale? Everybody's doing it. Hmm. Very interesting guy. Then he, Bernays, went to work for various presidents. He advised Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson didn't want to go into World War I. He was against it, but his friend Henry Morgan was losing his money because he was financing England and, uh, in France. So he said, you got to help me out, Woodrow. But how can I go to war when I've been against it the whole time? So Bernays came up with the notion, we're not going to war to help out, you know, these crazy kingdoms of Europe, we're going to spread democracy. And so we went to war and the rest is history. Well, he then published a book called Propaganda in which he explained how to manipulate the unconscious minds of people. And guess who read the book? Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, the Nazis, and they used the techniques of propaganda beautifully, and it worked really well. As Joseph Goebbels said, if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Oh, I thought it was one of our current politicians who said that. Joseph Goebbels, it was, who said it. And that skillful application of hypnosis changed the minds of all the good German people, and they followed him. As Edward Bernays said, now, not only there but in our government too, propaganda is the executive arm of the government. Knowing how to manipulate the unconscious minds of people. Before Bernays, it used to be that people bought things because they needed them, but since Bernays, now people started buying things because they wanted them. Okay, I want you to take a look at the movie on YouTube called The Century of the Self. It'll blow your mind. It's all about Bernays, and it gives you the details that I've just skimmed over. Because now there are hundreds of thousands of attention engineers financed by wealthy, compassionless sociopaths who've honed Bernays's tool to create chaos insecurity throughout the global computer brain. Driven by greed and the lust for more wealth and power, they control our media and the internet and create social unrest that threatens our very democracy. So, we've been doubly hijacked, not only by the monkey mind, the failure of our brain to cope with civilization in general, but by the craven interventions of our overlords controlling us. You gotta watch The Social Dilemma, which is a free movie, or you can see it on Netflix. It's as free as Netflix is. It's fantastic, and it's all about how it's happening now. And if you're curious as to how the Donald Trump, first election of Donald Trump came about, Back in '16, read Mindf*ck by Christopher Wylie. Christopher W-Y-L-I-E M-I-N-D-F asterisk C-K. And he shows you how they turned the tide for Brexit as well as in some several other ways. And he's the guy who did it. And when he looked back and saw what he was doing, he felt highly ashamed of himself. And he decided to do things differently, and he wrote this book. Okay, well, I don't want to run over time here. I know you all have much more important things to do, but I will continue there next time because I do want to go into the incredible contributions made by Daniel Kahneman and Tversky, and to really take a look at exactly how it is that we end up working against ourselves, voting against ourselves so often. So let's just take a moment and relax. Close your eyes. Breathe. I've been going kind of fast, Maybe some things I've said have shaken you up. Just relax. It's okay to know. There are some things that may be unpleasant to hear. That's okay. Allow your body and mind to relax. When an unnecessary thought comes along, just erase it from your mind and go back to your image of love. Feel yourself with your loved being. Feel the love. It is what will heal you. The love will guide you to use the new paradigm. It will relax you enough so that you can use System 1 thinking, analyze, and strategize. Trust in this. You can go back and you can watch or listen to this webinar again anytime you want to, and it's just as free as all of my webinars are being. And you can look at the other webinars in which I go into these principles more deeply. But for now, just be at peace. And maybe make a promise to yourself that you'll relax a little more often, that you'll practice, practice, practice, meditate each day, or pray deeply until you feel at one with the spirit that moves through all things. Use self-hypnosis Follow Mary Baker Eddy's ideas. Use Autogenic Training. They're all ways of coming into the present moment. Be aware of the power of your mind. Call on your wisdom. Call on your spirit. Heal yourself. Heal your relationships. And together we'll heal the world around us. That's great. Now you can watch all of these webinars at drmiller.com/life-meditations. Also, you can visit drmiller.com/covid for the free programs I have there for resisting the virus and also for healing it should you contract it, using the self-healing tools that we've talked about and will continue to talk about. For donations— yeah, I should say that— you can send a check to Post Office Box 803, Nevada City, California 95959. Just write donations or write Emmett Miller or Dr. Miller, Post Office Box 803, Nevada City, California 95959. If you prefer to use PayPal, go to accounting@drmiller.com, accounting@drmiller.com. Um, to— I will send you out, if you're registered, you'll get information on the programs that I suggest that you listen to or watch, and you can find those at shop.drmiller.com, shop.drmiller.com/donate, or without the donate, you'll just see the products that are there. Our upcoming webinars are on Thursdays at 11 every other week on the 5th of November, Healing Ourselves and Our Planet at the Same Time. And this will be right after Election Day, and votes will probably still not be counted, and we will need some healing. And I'll, I'll finish up what I didn't get to today. And then on the 19th will be The Secret Word by Which All May Be Accomplished. So Until then, be well, love yourself, love those around you, and remember: stay well, be careful, be loved. Namaste.
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