The Dark Force New VO Feb 15
In this lecture Emmett Miller MD presents a dual‑track framework for understanding human suffering and its remedy. He begins by inviting listeners to experience a deep, primal feeling of love – the "urge to merge" that he argues is the original creative force of the universe, responsible for the formation of atoms, molecules, life, families, societies and the healing process that restores wholeness at every level. He then introduces the "dark force," a predatory, dualistic paradigm that divides reality into "me versus them," fostering aggression, domination, racism, war, and other forms of collective dysfunction. Miller argues that both love and the dark force reside within each person; the dark force is not inherently evil but is a survival strategy that sacrifices wholeness for efficiency. To survive as a species and to heal individually, humanity must adopt a substantially new mode of thinking – a conscious, intentional way to guide the mind away from the dark force toward love, thereby re‑establishing homeostasis. He offers practical steps, including a brief guided meditation to feel love, and outlines how this shift can transform personal leadership, community dynamics, and global relations.
Chapters
Take a moment, look around, and remember once again what a glorious paradise is the world we live in. We're immersed in such resplendent beauty, peace, love, and life. But we also see all around us the illness, the disease, the pain and dysfunction in our own lives, and in the lives of those around us, at the individual as well as at the collective and even the global level. And most of us feel helpless in the face of it all. Where does it come from, this pain, illness, and suffering? What is at the root of our many illnesses and diseases, our anxiety, our frustration and anger, our depression, and our other emotional upsets? What causes us to fail in our relationships at home, at work, in our communities, and at the global level? Why is our world in such turmoil, and what can we do about it? How can we come out of our mass denial and learn to bring healing and wholeness to our personal, national, and international dysfunctions? Paradoxical as it might sound, the source of most of these problems and miseries lies squarely within us, as does their remedy, the ability to heal and transform as individuals and at the community level. That's right, whether or not we know it, each of us has the inborn ability to intentionally heal ourselves, to use our very intelligent and creative mind to transform this world of sadness and pain. So now I'm going to show you how you can learn to guide your mind and brain to think, to think different, and how to take advantage of the powerful mind tools that you have within and use them to heal and transform your life. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, the splitting of the atom and the invention of the computer have changed everything. Except our mode of thinking.
Thus we are drifting towards catastrophe beyond conception.
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. And this is as true in each of our individual lives as it is in our nation, our communities, and our planet. I have spent my professional life exploring this new manner of thinking that Einstein spoke of and discovering its almost miraculous ability to create healing and transformative change in my patients and in the groups and teams I have coached and taught. And today I'd like to share it with you, along with some practical ways you can use it to transform the leadership of your life and of your world. First, in this world of beauty and love, it is very important to understand the nature of what I refer to as the dark force. In an earlier video, we talked about that fundamental power, that urge to merge, that is the source of life. The source of love, and the source of all healing and transformation. I called it Love with a capital L. I also invited you to actively experience this urge to merge. Take a moment and recall that feeling of wholeness, of joy, of love. We looked back to the birth of our universe and saw how that urge to merge created atoms out of the formless plasma, how carbon atoms thus formed discovered that instead of polarizing, they could share electrons through organic bonding, which soon led to protein molecules and the first living things. And then on to the bonds that created families, friendships, communities, and in time, whole nations. We saw that the urge to merge that created life is also at the heart of the healing process, the restoration of wholeness and homeostasis at every level of system. Body, mind, emotion, and behavior at the individual level and at the collective level as well. Love. Let's take a moment to recall and intensify this positive, life-giving, healing force, this urge to merge. Take a moment and feel this love. Perhaps all it takes is to let your eyelids close for a moment. Take a deep breath in, release it, relax, and let the air do the breathing for you, emptying your mind and body of all stress. And tension with each breath. And think of someone or something you love that fills you with joy, reverence, or passion. Smile. You are in touch with that deep essence, that primal force, the urge to merge. And give yourself the signal, the inner cue, the permission to feel that quality of love within. Now, this is the first step to healing and transformation. Now, clearly this force is beneficial and even wonderful for us. And if that's all there was, our lives would be all peaches and cream, love and light. Ah, but that's not how it is. And in a moment, I'm going to ask you to contrast this felt sense of this source of love, life, and healing with what you will experience as we examine the dark force. So, from the perspective of peace, safety, and wholeness, let us examine the dark force, aware that in order to understand it, we must first accept that it exists.
For as we know, there is much pain and suffering in our personal and collective lives, and many challenges to our health and happiness. Just take a look at the way we treat ourselves and the way we're treated by the stressful environment we have created around us. Very often it is obvious that we are the source of our own misery. We emotionally abuse ourselves and others, and we've created a world of stress and insecurity that is at the root of most of our illnesses and dysfunctions and that destroys our relationships, our creativity, and our happiness. And at the collective level of our families and communities and government and international relations, we see the same enormous dysfunction. Our so-called leaders and representatives operate corrupt governments and create weapons of mass destruction and mass misery that are leading us ever closer closer to catastrophe. So if love is the essence of our life, why is there all this horror? And what can we do about it? In a few moments, we'll explore what I sometimes refer to as the dark force, and we'll see how it underlies all these issues, how we can recognize neutralize, and transform it by restoring balance, or homeostasis. What I'm about to share with you is the distillation of my 50 years of dedicated work researching and practicing the art and the science of healing. It is important for you to realize that this is a very big concept deceptively simple, yet profound and powerful. I've watched it heal and transform the lives of thousands of my patients and students. Please open your mind to hear what I'm really saying and to take it in not merely through your ears, but let yourself see it and feel it at a deeper emotional and kinesthetic level. [FOREIGN] From the earliest single-celled animals, life evolved peacefully. Organisms survived by absorbing simple chemicals and oxygen from the environment, manufacturing the proteins needed to build their bodies, and evolving, guided by the integrative forces of sharing, bonding, and love. Then, at some point in life's evolution, certain of the living creatures on Earth discovered that instead of going through the painstaking process of absorbing simple chemicals and building them into complex protein molecules, they could just attack other smaller creatures, eat their body parts, then recycle and repurpose the ready-made complex carbohydrates and proteins of their bodies, a far more efficient way to nourish themselves. But with this appearance of predators, a new kind of activity for living beings made its appearance, a behavior that can often seem quite sinister in comparison to the urge to merge. Of the love force. The essence of this way of dealing with things is to divide the world into two parts. It's me versus the rest of the world, and my wants and needs are the only thing that are important. That is the essence of this paradigm of the dark force. Imagine that salmon, how far it has traveled It, fighting the rapids upstream, and now this. The dark force is predatory, dominating, uncaring. The dark force certainly does not create wholeness in the animal that is being eaten.
Quite the opposite.
Think of the unfortunate mouse. The predator has no respect for the life of its prey. Or the wildebeest. Not a very warm, loving, caring, fair attitude of the predator. Instead, it is disrespectful, aggressive, and abusive. And we have to include humans in that list of predators. There's a very loving part of each human being, yet we have evolved to be predators. So the dark forces within each of us, whether we eat vegetables or other animals. But it makes its appearance most tragically when it emerges in the form of racism and slavery, war, genocide, tyranny, the thousands of ways we dominate, hurt, and injure others. We see it all around us every day in the form of domestic abuse, corruption, propaganda, aggression, torture, imprisonment, and other forms of abuse of living things and the environment. Now I don't mean to imply that this dark force paradigm is fundamentally evil or bad per se. After all, None of us can go back to absorbing nutrients from swamp water. This is simply the way things are. Even vegetarians have to kill the poor carrot plant in order to consume its root. What I'm saying is simply that a fundamental quality of this dark force that I'm defining is simply a dualistic, black or white, me versus you or us them paradigm. It's a polarized way of approaching the world or a current problem.
If things aren't black or white, why aren't they? So said John Wayne.
And of course, the results that you get using this paradigm of the dark force are quite different from the results you get if you use the paradigm of Love, capital L. There is a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, a black and a white in this dark force world of thinking. A yin versus a yang. It's a binary kind of logic, much like the Boolean logic of a digital computer, where everything is either one or it's zero, pixel on or pixel off. There is no in-between. The behavior of the dark force does not have any empathy. There's no compassion, no soul, no spirit. It's the kill or be killed world of fang and claw. We can see the work of the dark force at the physical level in the malarial parasites that kill a million children each year. Cancer cells metastasizing through the body, or in the pain we feel from infection or injury. And we can see it in the emotional pain and the mental stress and frustration we experience when things don't work out the way we planned or hoped or expected. We can see some of the most common results of treating ourselves with this polarized approach when we see people being depressed, anxious, self-critical, resentful, frustrated, or otherwise creating stress and the diseases it causes. The virulence of the dark force becomes even more strikingly visible when we are driven by our emotions to be selfish, unfair, cruel, and even murderous to other human beings. Sometimes even those we say we love. And here again we see the binary logic of the bipolar world of ionic bonding. It's me versus you. Either you win or I win. It's a zero-sum game. It's the concept of winning isn't everything, winning is the only thing. Notice the feeling you have inside as you watch these examples of the dark force in action. Notice the way it is different from that warm, soothing, joyful feeling that comes from the love force, from healing, from life. I sometimes refer to the essence of this dark force as Violence with a capital V. Be, since its result is usually pain, injury, damage, or death. Simply put, love is that which tends to hold together, heal, and support life. Violence is that which tends to create separation, disintegration, and death. We see this in our own individual lives, as well as when we look at the major problems confronting us as a society, a culture, and a global network of human beings. At this planet-wide level, the destructive, critical, attacking, heartless nature is very obvious. There is no sympathy for the other. Now, it's important to understand these two fundamental forces, love and violence, because each one is strongly associated with a different way of thinking about the world, and both are necessary for our survival. A healthy, happy, and successful life requires that we properly balance our use of these modes of thinking at the personal as well as at the collective level. Next, we will focus upon how to create homeostasis, healing, and transformation by wisely balancing these two remarkably different but crucially important ways to process our incredibly challenging confusing, stress-ridden world. You will see how the dark force produces stress and how you can harness the energy of stress by learning how to balance two systems of thinking that we each possess—System 1 and System 2—to produce healing, success, happiness, and love at every level.
