The Essence of Life, Love, Healing Part 4, Introduction to Higher Mind Thinking and Transformation
In this hour‑long presentation Dr. Emmett Miller blends storytelling, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, and guided meditation to introduce the concept of higher‑order (second‑order) thinking and its role in personal transformation. He opens with a donation request and a parable about a prince, a magician, and the search for truth, illustrating how belief shapes perception. Miller then discusses the common embryological patterns among vertebrates, using this evolutionary unity to argue that all life shares a basic structural template. He outlines a hierarchical model of the brain – reptilian brain, limbic system, neocortex, and prefrontal cortex – and explains how higher brain regions should guide lower ones, whereas mis‑alignment leads to unhealthy behaviors (e.g., overeating, anger). A chainsaw‑worker anecdote demonstrates the consequences of misunderstanding system dynamics. The talk transitions into a guided love meditation that encourages listeners to relax, focus on gratitude, and connect with an inner spiritual source. Miller introduces the philosophical concept of "Umwelt" – the sensory world each organism experiences – and shows how our limited perception, combined with unconscious biases, leads to systematic errors. He reviews classic cognitive‑bias experiments (temperature of coffee influencing personality judgments, dice rolls affecting judges’ sentencing, anchoring and priming effects) to illustrate Kahneman’s System 1 (fast, automatic) and System 2 (slow, deliberative) thinking. Building on this, he proposes a third level, System 3, representing spiritual, philosophical, or value‑based guidance that can re‑orient the mind toward healing and purpose. Miller identifies four major challenges for humanity: misunderstanding exponential growth, dominance of the primitive "monkey mind," pervasive propaganda that exploits cognitive biases, and chronic stress that hijacks System 1. He argues that these forces produce physical and mental illness. He then presents two clinical anecdotes – a young woman with ulcerative colitis and a scientist with metastatic cancer – showing how belief, meditation, and accessing System 3 can facilitate profound healing, even when conventional medicine offers limited options. The presentation concludes with practical resources (meditations, audio programs, DVDs) and an invitation to future sessions that will explore new paradigms, deeper spiritual practices, and second‑order thinking techniques. Listeners are encouraged to share the program, donate, and engage in upcoming live Q&A sessions.
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Hello, this is Dr. Emmett Miller. You know, we all have spiritual resources, although many of us are unaware of this fact, and many more don't know how to make use of them. In this hour-long free presentation, we will begin our exploration of second-order thinking, the kind of higher creativity that produces true transformational change. When we open to wisdom and the potential of a healthy spiritual or philosophical system and use the meditative guided imagery process, a portal into high-level wellness, peace, love, and happiness opens. Welcome to The Essence of Life, Love, and Healing, Part 4: Higher Mind Thinking and Transformation.
Let me start off by saying thank you so much for those who have contributed. It's been delightful. Some of you very generous. I'm just stunned. Thank you so much. I would say I'm a little disappointed that there are still some who don't feel it's worth contributing to. If you want to participate, I'd really appreciate it. You can send your check to Emmett Miller, Post Office Box 803, Nevada City, California 95959. And in the memo line on the check, just write donation so we'll know what it's about. You can also donate at PayPal by going to accountant— I'm sorry, accounting@drmiller.com. That's drmiller.com. Again, this is Dr. Emmett Miller, and I'd like to begin with a little story. And that story concerns a certain prince who lived in a castle with his father and his family, had never been out of the castle. And one day Father came to him and said, "You know, you've reached 18 years old. It's time for you to go out into the world and seek your fame and fortune. It's time for you to go and learn." "Very well," says the prince, and he takes off in his carriage with his retinue of guards. And he had scarcely traveled a half hour beyond the walls of the castle, and he met a man on the road. And the man says to him, "Where are you going, young fellow?" He says, "Well, I am the prince, and I'm out to learn about the world." The man says, "Huh, what makes you think you're prepared to learn about the world? What do you know of the world?" The prince says, 'I know only what I have learned from my father in the castle.' And the man said, 'Well, and what has he taught you?' He says, 'Well, he taught me three things: there's no such thing as islands, there's no such thing as princesses, and there is no God.' The man laughed and says, 'Well, surely your father has deceived you, for look, And he waved his arm, and islands were there. And on the islands were these strange and troubling creatures that the prince dared not even name. He turned to the man and said, "Am God?" And the man said, "I am God." Wow! Wow! The prince was pretty disturbed. By this, so he immediately headed back again toward the castle, went to his father, and he says, "Father, I met a man on the road and he showed me highlands and princesses." "And God?" said the king. "Why, why, he said he was God." "Hmm," said the king. 'Was he wearing mourning clothes with the sleeves rolled up?' The princess: 'Why, why, yes, he was.' 'Ah,' said the king, 'why, you have met a magician. He merely had you under his spell and made you think you saw those things.' Well, the princess hopped back in his carriage and rode out again. You know, much more fortified against the world. And sure enough, he ran into the same man once again on the road. And he said to him, says, "I am wise to you. My father has told me that you are a magician, and your father is really the magician." And he said, "What? What do you mean?" He says, "Well, when you are in his castle, There are none of these things, and therefore he has you under his spell when you're there. When you come out here, I show you the world as it really is. It is your father who is the magician. The king immediately rode back again to see his father. Father, Father, he said, I met the man on the road and he says that you are the magician. The father says, "Yes, and I am a magician." And the son, "Well, then the man on the road is God?" And the father said, "No, the man on the road is another magician." And the prince says, "I can't take it anymore." He says, "I must know the truth beyond the magic." The father says, "There is no truth." beyond magic. "Then I would rather die," said the prince, "than live in a world where there's no truth beyond magic." "Very well," said the father, and he waved his arm, and Death appeared and started toward the prince. He came closer and closer, lifted up his cape, and was just about to sweep it across the prince. The prince looked into the vacant emptiness of that face of death. And he said, "Wait, wait, wait a moment. I think I can do it. I think I can believe." And the father said, "Ah, and now you do become a magician." You can be a magician. If you're not willing to be a magician, then you're not really equipped to live this life and see the truth of what's there. Now in my work I rely a great deal upon evolutionary thinking. Of course, you know, simply put, there we are in the ancient past, these common ancestor with the chimpanzee gradually modifying itself through various cavemen, Cro-Magnon man, all the way to early man. And so evolution continues. That evolution continues even unto this day. It was when I studied comparative anatomy and embryology in my preparation for medical school, and I looked at the embryos of all these different animals. When you look at the early embryos of these animals, whether it's a fish, a salamander, a chicken, a rabbit, or a human, you see that they all look the same. You can see those sort of ridges on the belly— those are the gill arches. In the fish, they will go on to become the gills. In the human being, they become the hyoid bone, the thyroid cartilage, the mandible, and so forth. But look at how similar they are in the beginning. They just develop further, as you can see, in the upper row become very, very specifically different, different animals, but there's a similarity. Then when you look at the hands and the arms, you look at the bones of the hands and the arms of different animals, and then the comparison of the human, the cat, the whale, and the bat, and how similar You know, they all have a humerus, the upper arm bone. The forearm consists of two bones, the radius and the ulna, all the way down to the pat. And then there's the tarsal bones, the yellow bones that are in the wrist, and then the fingers. And they all have similar joints. They may differ in number, they're different in size and shape, but there's a similarity. And even when we look at the central nervous system, take a look then at the fish, the frog, the crocodile, rhesus monkey, chimpanzee, and the human, it's all the same basic style of brain. It's just as you get to the higher animals, you get more and more growth of the brain, and as you get into the human being of course, the neocortex. But it's the similarity that struck me. So it was almost as if I could see life, all life, as being one, but different animals. As if we, we are a chunk of clay, and you can stretch the clay into the hand of a bat, or the wing of a bird, or the hand of a human being. And so we're all exactly the same thing, we're just pulled in different directions. As in human beings, one becomes a male and the other's a female. You know, all exactly the same except for little differences that you may have noticed. Then take a look at another form of evolution, which is the central nervous system. Let's start with a simple reflex arc, like when the doctor taps your knee and it goes boing. It only requires a single arc, an afferent nerve and an efferent nerve that go to the spinal cord. You hit the afferent nerve and it triggers a response in the efferent nerve. And you only need one spinal section to do that, only one division of the spinal cord. Very primitive brain. Now, if you want to carry on a little bit more difficult situation like withdrawal, like if you step on a tack, it requires at least 2 spinal segments for that withdrawal arc to happen. And then all the way up the spinal cord are all of these connections. You know, I remember I spent some time on the farm as a child, and the way they killed their chickens was to chop the head off. And you chop the head off, and that chicken would run around the yard for a while until it lost enough blood that it had to collapse. That was pretty amazing. It didn't have a head. How come it was able to run around? Because the spinal cord is its own brain, a bigger brain than the simple reflex arc or the withdrawal, but still just a spinal cord. And that spinal cord brain goes all the way up and becomes the reptilian brain, which are all of the very basic things that are managed, like your blood pressure and immune function, digestion of your food, hunting reflexes, sex, and that sort of thing. It's all the reptilian level. You don't have any direct conscious control over it. You can't decide whether to put a little more stomach acid out now, but your reptilian brain will do that. The next level, you have the limbic system, the monkey brain. This is what we share, this level, with all of the other primates and other animals, and that's the emotional brain. And then up on top of that is the neocortex, which is involved in higher functions such as sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought. And in human beings, we have the biggest neocortex. That's where language exists for us. And there's a special part of the neocortex, and that's the prefrontal cortex. And that's the place that we're always aiming to in the work that we do here. It is the level that is capable of new paradigm thinking. It's the executive level of the brain, the brain's brain. It's the conscious part of your brain, and it's involved in executive functionings such as planning, goals, actions, executive functions, control reflexive behaviors, to take— takes part in things like planning, decision-making, problem-solving, self-control, acting with long-term goals in mind. These are higher-level cognitive processes, and human beings are better at this than any other animal, as you know. So there's a brain within a brain within the brain within a brain within a brain. Get the picture? Higher— what we would call higher levels of your brain, more complex, more conscious as you go up. And paralleling this neural arrangement is this diagrammatic arrangement. The same systemic principles hold in this system as in all— as in all systems. And that is that the high— that as you go up the level, um, or as you go up the level, you go up a hierarchy. Because we think a lot better than the monkey brain. Monkey brain's much better than the reptilian brain, and so forth. So as you go higher up, new abilities arise that cannot be found at the lower level. Like you won't find a snake that can count to 10. Okay, so there's a hierarchy that exists. When we think of the conscious mind at the top, the emotions under that, and then the behavior. You think, "Oh my gosh, a new variant of COVID!" And your emotional level reacts to that imagination that you have. It pumps chemicals into your bloodstream and your behavior changes. Your body tenses up, your heart beats faster, you breathe into the upper part of your chest, and so forth down the line. You show the symptoms of stress. That the way the system works well is when control and guidance come from the higher levels to the lower level, whereas information comes up from the lower level to the higher level. So if you step on a tack, information comes up: "Ah, something's sticking in your foot!" And the control that you get from the top is: "Reach down and pull that tack out of your foot." Yeah. You get into trouble when it goes in the other directions. Poor life choices, failure, and unhappiness are the result of not having upgraded our brains so that lower levels take over. That is to say, you know, perhaps you're a few pounds overweight, but your stomach says, "Mmm, chocolate chip cookies, better eat some of those," and you do it. You know, why would you do that when you certainly don't need those chocolate chip cookies in your body? Well, your stomach is control. At other times your genitals may be in control. And other times other parts of you, your anger may be in control. And you find yourself saying, doing, thinking, and feeling things that you don't want to say, look, feel, think. You don't want to be envious. You don't want to be jealous. You don't want to be furious. You don't want to be rageful. You You don't want to be, and yet it happens. And of course, that is your monkey mind operating, and you are not in control of it, it's in control of you. This is not the right way to operate a system. Whether it's a system in your body, or whether it's the system of your government, or what. So a little story. Of a fellow who decided he wanted to go to work, so he got a job working the chainsaw. He was cutting this area of the forest, and foreman says, 'Here, you come in, you cut each day, you take your chainsaw, I want you to cut down the tree, stack the wood in cords of wood. At the end of the day, I come and I count the cords.' "and I pay you on the basis of how many cords you've cut." Guy comes back at the other end of the day, and the fellow has cut 3 pieces of wood. "What? Have you been goofing off all day?" And he looks, the fellow's exhausted, sweating, hanging. He says, "Wait a minute, must be something wrong with your chainsaw." So he takes his chainsaw from him and he grabs the pull chain and he pulls it. The chainsaw starts up and the guy's, "Oh, what's that noise? What's that noise?" Yeah, if you don't understand how the system works, you can have enormous problems. And that's why you want to have guidance from the higher levels of system. So let's open up to some higher guidance from within. Find yourself a comfortable place to sit in or lie back and give yourself permission. Permission to relax, to be calm, to be peaceful. Begin by realizing that there's no other place you need to go at this moment in time, 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, permission to relax deeply and comfortably. Just be aware that you're in a safe place. Take a deep breath in, let it out. And let the air do the breathing for you here in this comfortable place. Good. Allow your focus to go within as each breath relaxes you even more, and as you erase every unnecessary thought from your mind, or just let it bubble away, allow you to allow yourself to enter this present moment. To spiral in deeper, becoming more and more calm and more and more comfortable with each breath. Allow your eyelids to close. Feel the warm, moist feeling of relaxation behind your closed eyelids. Roll them gently upward behind your closed eyelids and guide yourself toward that safe place within, traveling within place of safety, and become more aware of the deepest levels of yourself, sensing that love that is always there at your center. And after each breath out, allow yourself to sink into that love at the center. At the end of each breath out, sink into that pause before the next breath comes in. Feel that little spark of energy, spark of life, that starts each new breath in. Then let that life and love flow throughout every cell of your body. And allow yourself to know in your heart that you are deeply connected to those that you love and those that love you, and that at your core you are a deeply spiritual person, a deeply spiritual being. If you're willing to imagine that that's true, imagine yourself making contact with that deeper level, that spiritual source within, that spirit that moves through all things, that allows you to feel empathy and compassion and gratitude. And allow yourself to float back through time to some time within the recent, recent past, perhaps back a few days or weeks or even months ago, to one of those experiences that has enriched your life, one of those moments that you feel thankful for, a time of closeness and love. With another person, maybe, or maybe with your dog or cat or horse, or a beautiful piece of music, or glorious sunrise, sweet sunset, wonderful feeling of trotting along the lane, taking a peaceful walk. In deep meditation, wherever it's the deepest, closest, most beautiful experience you can be in touch with. You can be in touch with your connection to something greater than self. Open and allow yourself to feel it. Not just think it, not just see it, but feel it emotionally, physically, and let it flow through your body with each breath. Let yourself be doing it— loving or dancing or walking or fishing, doing your sports, singing, skiing, Whatever it is, hear the sounds and allow yourself to feel a deep gratitude for this wonderful gift of life, love, of joy, beauty. And imagine yourself drifting back in that time and just feeling it, making it present, and breathe that feeling throughout your entire body. Good. Beginning at that place of gratitude is a wonderful place to begin because it begins to open you up to the source. Allow yourself to feel gratitude to the source of these beautiful experiences in your life in whatever way feels appropriate to to you, and to express your gratitude in any way that feels appropriate. Carry these feelings with you as you come back to feeling wide awake, alert and clear, comfortable here in that place that we call here and now. Good. We're going to talk about faith. When I talk about faith, I like Saint Augustine's definition of faith: faith is to believe that which you do not see, and the reward of faith is to see that in which you have believed. We're going to talk a little bit about Umwelt. I'm going to review some of what we talked about before briefly. The Umwelt is that— those things that an animal is capable of experiencing its world. That's a small area, of course, and then outside of that is what's called the "umbigum." Now if we take a look at the tick, in the deaf and blind world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid, and that's about it, man. That's life. Whereas the black ghost knife fish is sensitive to electrical fields, and that's how it maneuvers. The echolocating bat feels air compression waves, and that's how it navigates. And so for each of us, we have only what we can see and what we can be aware of, and what you see is all there is for you. In other words, you can and use your reasoning only on what you can be aware of. But our awareness is often blocked, not just because we don't have echolocation or sensing electrical fields, but by behaviors of System 1, of the limbic system, that can block you from seeing truths that are around you all the time. Now, almost like, you know, they do these studies where they raise they raise kittens in a room or in a, in a barrel where there are only vertical lines or only horizontal lines, and there's a period of time, I think around 3 weeks old, that if a cat has not experienced the vertical lines by then, it will never be able to see vertical lines. And if you put it down on the floor in a room, it walks into the legs of shares, and so forth. And it's really freaked out, of course. As Mark Twain said, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you're so dang sure of that just ain't so." We're going to talk about 4 main problems for humanity. and that is exponential growth being one of the first. You've heard the story about the man who did something wonderful for the king there in India, and the king said, "You can have anything you want as a reward." And the fellow says, "Okay, now what I like is that you give me 1 grain of rice for the first grain on the checkerboard, for the first square, 2 grains for the second square, 3 grains, and so forth. And the king said, "Oh sure, of course, no problem." What the king didn't realize is that there's not enough rice in all of India before he gets to the other end of the checkerboard. In fact, you could fill up the entire country of India a foot deep in rice and still not have enough. People don't understand the exponential curve. We're seeing some of the results of that when we read the news out there, and we're seeing that in many ways. Also, A second major problem is we don't realize that there's another part of the brain, the monkey mind. This is Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for pointing out that there are two systems of thinking: System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, and this is, this is related to the limbic system, to the monkey mind. The monkey brain. Its defining characteristics: it's unconscious, it's effortless, it's automatic, it doesn't have self-awareness or control, and its role is to assess situations and react. And of course, that's where our stress comes from. That's one of the reasons it's important, but there are other reasons. System 2— now we're talking about the higher cortex. This is deliberate and conscious, effortful. You have to work. You know, when you drive your car, you reach a red light, you don't have to think very much. Your foot automatically goes to the brake, and you don't even have to stop your conversation. But if you want to park, parallel park in a tight parking space, you have to pay attention. Because you need System 2, otherwise you're going to smack up your car. System 2 is a controlled mental process. There is self-awareness and control. It's logical, it's skeptical, it doesn't accept everything at face value, and it seeks new missing information and makes wise decisions. In fact, that's how we contact wisdom. And System 1 gets out there first, but System 2 is slower, but sometimes we need to wait. Well, one of the experiments they do is where people come in for psychological test, and as the experimenter comes in, he's really loaded up and he's got a cup of coffee, and he says to your— to the subject, so would you mind holding this for a moment while I put these things on my desk? And he lets the people hold it for 30 seconds, and he takes his cup back, and then he gives them some silly test or whatever. And what, what the real question is has to do with the fact that half of the time, the person, when he gives them the cup of coffee, it's iced coffee, and the other half of the time it's warm, hot coffee. And then at the end when the person leaves, on their way out, they ask them a few questions and they say, "By the way, did you notice whether the experimenter had a warm personality or a cool personality?" And if the person had warm cup of coffee, they will say, "Oh, he had a warm cup of coffee, he had a warm personality." If it was a cool cup, then there were— and I mean, you know, not 100%, but, you know, 80 or 85% of the time they would say cool whole personality, and they would believe that they were telling the truth of what their experience was. Another experiment, they gave a judge, a whole bunch of judges, individually a story of a certain woman who had been a shoplifter, and the whole point was he had to read the case and to say how how much time he was going to give this person. But before they gave him the case, they had him roll a pair of dice, see what the number was, record it, put the dice away, and then he gave him the case. This was her third time of shoplifting, so they had to give her some time in jail. How much time? Well, depended upon the roll of the dice. The dice were loaded. They would come up either 11 or 3. When the dice came up 11, the judges gave an average of 8 months sentence. When it came up 3, they gave an average of 4 months sentence. Weird. And then I asked the judge, did you think rolling the dice, that number, changed what your sentence was? And they thought, no, not at all. You see, there's something going on here that System 1 is operating and we don't know about it. In fact, if you look at the sentences that the judges— all judges in the studies that they've done— just before lunch when they're hungry, they give much longer sentences than they do for exactly the same kind of crime if it was a half hour after lunch. They have no knowledge of doing this, of course. So these are the kinds of experiments that he did. He wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. It's a transformative book in my thinking. They have people wait in a waiting room where there's monitors, several of them, computers on in the room, and there's pictures of money falling to the ground. Another group of people, as they come in one by one, and the monitors there have something silly like bouncing balls. And then the real test is when the experimenter comes in, sits at his desk, and says, "Please bring your chair over and sit next to me." The people will sit twice as close to the experimenter when there were balls bouncing. But when there was money falling, they sat back further. It actually caused people to create more distance between them and the experimenter. Amazing. Oh, there are just hundreds of experiences— of experiments like this that they've done, and you can read about them. But, and even though they're These are experiments. The same things happen in our everyday life. We're constantly being anchored and primed by things. This process is called anchoring and priming. And what happens is we live in the world where there are attention engineers and propagandists who are using these facts about our brain that we're not in touch with. In fact, the majority of the decisions that we make, we are making out of being primed and anchored rather than making real thoughtful decisions. So what we need to do is take charge of our thinking. We have to practice seeing the positive daily. As I've said so many times, the way our advertisers program us to buy their product and their candidate is they give us negative things, scary things, and while we're anxious, they deliver the message, and that gets recorded by the monkey brain, and you believe it. Our brains have a built-in negative bias, and so we'll have a tendency to see more negatives rather than to have a balanced perspective. We have to learn how to spot propaganda. And not only from the other team, you look, look at your political opponents out there, you can see the propaganda and the lies, but you don't see the stuff that's coming out to you, and you don't want to believe it, but it's probably there. We've talked before about stress as a major factor in so many of our illnesses. System 1, when it's triggered by stress, hijacks the mind and closes down our system. So those things that Dr. Kahneman studied, you know, those were just things like if the coffee cup was warm or how many dots were on the dice. But when we put stress into the system, it's even more profound, the degree to which our thinking can be controlled. That's because your brain believes that it lives in a primitive world and that there's death looming at every moment. But the only time we react is when we're under attack. When we're not, then we sit back and we relax. And over time, this balances out, and there's a there's a stability. But if we look at the modern-day caveman, we're constantly being thrown things that are confusing, things that we can't attack, that we have no power over, like the pandemic or the monetary system or global warming. And but our system keeps reacting with stress, and it builds up, and gradually through time we begin to develop symptoms. Tension, headaches, anger, insomnia, allergies, addictions, unhappiness, broken relationships, and on and on. So I talk about healing. When I talk about healing, I look at the word heal that comes from the Old English word heilen, which is also the root of whole, hale, hardy, and holy. And healing is the process of becoming more whole. And deep healing is becoming more whole at every level of system. And so we've talked about systems right up through the level of the conscious mind. Now, what if there is another level, an even higher level? I'm going to say a little bit about mind over matter. How life is. We have our thoughts, our thoughts lead to our having images, those images evoke emotions, and the emotions evoke change in our body. And thereby 80%, 90% of all our physical diseases, emotional disturbances, mental problems, physical issues, everything And again, that's because our conscious mind is not being wisely guided to be in control and to gather the information. So we end up like the chainsaw guy, where we don't know how to operate the system, and it's, it's awful. So when I went into medicine, I had a unique experience. My My patients taught me that the healing power could be accessed from within. And I had some very good positive experiences early on. This is a young woman. They called me to the hospital. She, I guess she must have weighed around 60 pounds or so, and she had ulcerative colitis and constant diarrhea. And there's nothing they felt they could do other than take out a huge section, almost her entire colon, which would have destroyed her life. They called me in. I worked with her on a number of occasions, helped her deal with the stress that she had inside, the anxiety about her life, and she was restored to full health. And there she is. This is about 6 months later, healthy and happy. In fact, I talked to her, and this is— I talked to her a couple of weeks ago. That was like some, I think, 30 or 35 years since we worked together, and she's still doing fine. So I learned that that healing power could be accessed from within, and that crucial to that was belief. Another patient I'd like— another patient I'd like to share with you is a fellow who was a very important experimenter in tectonic plates. He was a fellow who took a mission to all the way over across the ocean to, to Asia, and they drilled through one tectonic plate and hit the other tectonic plate, and they could tell that's where the Asia plate and the American Plate came together. Anyway, while he was there, he developed a severe cancer. When I saw him, he had bone metastasis. He was in a great deal of pain. There's nothing to be done for him medically. He had a great deal of pain, and he was a scientist. He didn't believe— he had no spiritual beliefs, and it's that he was not responsive to any pain reduction techniques. But I had an idea, and I recommended for him E.F. Schumacher's book, A Guide for the Perplexed. And he read the book, and we talked about it. And this had to do with imagining that someone came to Earth when Earth was in its primitive stage, like somebody from another dimension. You could look around, around the Earth You'd see stone, you'd see water, but you would never imagine flowers and plants. There's nothing to make you think flowers and plants, and yet flowers and plants are made of the same stuff as was on your Earth and on that primitive Earth. But looking at all of those flowers you would never imagine animals that could see and think and, and run around. And yet every atom that's in those animals was already present in the flowers and in the plants. And as long as you look at all of the animals, would you ever imagine that something like the human being with its powers of creativity. This is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Amazing. Tallest building in the world. This is one of our astronauts fooling around on the moon. And the point was, so that looking around, we look around, we don't see clear evidence of a higher level. We don't see God, you know. Jesus doesn't come and have lunch with us, at least not most of us. But since this is the way the world works, isn't it more logical to think, "Ah, maybe there is a level beyond just the human being and the brain of the human being." And I call that System 3. Well, my patient got it, and he was inspired, and I was able to use his belief in that higher level to relieve him of a great deal of his pain. He went on to die, but not before he gave me a gift of Sri Ramana Maharshi's book, in which he wrote in on the title page of the book, to Dr. Miller, many thanks for teaching me to fly. So System 3, the next level up. System 3 is the realm of the spiritual, philosophical, or deeply held principles and values. In other words, something has to tell your thinking brain what's right and what's wrong. And that is what we can call the spiritual level. And spiritual is not the same as religious. That's like a little story that I'll share with you about Sister Mary Elizabeth, who was a nun. She taught the early grades, I think the third grade or so, and she asked the kids, she said, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And Mary raised her and said, "What would you want to be, Mary?" She says, "I want to be a nurse when I grow up." And the sister said, "Oh, that's really, that's wonderful. You can help so many people. And Tommy, what do you want to be?" He says, "I want to be a fireman." She said, "Tommy, that is a wonderful thing for you to be. That's so helpful to people. And Gloria, what about you?" And she says, "I want to be a prostitute." The nun goes, "What? You want to be a what?" Gloria kind of like was a little scared, but she says, "A prostitute." And the nun says, "Oh, I thought you said Protestant. Oh." Sorry, I couldn't resist it. But I mean, let's face it, the religions aren't always as holy and pure as they are supposed to be. And sometimes people are much more into the power trips than really teaching that spiritual word, which is precious. I like better a story that's always been so valuable to me. Someone asked Mother Teresa, "You take care of the poorest of the poor." The sickest of the sick, they're dying every day. Don't you get depressed? She said, depressed? How could I get depressed? I look in their eyes and I see Jesus. I could never be depressed. So I heard that and I said, I want some of what she's drinking. You know, not to say that everybody has to choose Jesus as their pathway. There are many different pathways by which we can reach beyond and find that which can keep us happy, joyful, healthy, wise, and successful. And loving. Okay, well, I'm going to stop there, and what I'm going to ask you to do is just to consider some of those things that we've talked about. We started with that meditation on love. I want you to keep, keep up with that meditation. Or you can go to shop.drmiller.com, and there's a nice meditation on love you can find there. You can also look at the DVD program called Nurture Your Spirit: The Power of Your Mind to Nurture Your Spirit. Inspired Imagery, which are advanced imagery techniques for professionals, but you can use it You're a professional, you, so you get to do it yourself. Healer: Creating Your Inner Island of Peace. That's at shop.drmiller.com. The Love Meditation. And for those of you who still know how to— I mean, who still like to read, there's an audiobook of that classic by Dr. Miller called Deep Healing. You can get it as an MP3 download, and you can use it to go to sleep tonight because I'm reading it. And next week we're going to go on, we're going to again review the essence of life and love We're going to look at the new paradigm, look at the old paradigm and the new paradigm— polarity minus versus love— and then we'll see how that is expressed in all of the religious traditions that there are, and how to use that state of deep relaxation and meditation in order to contact the spiritual level more directly. And then we're going to explore second-order thinking more in detail, how to create magic in your lives, and how to transform your health, relationships, and how we can all transform the world around you. We'll be back in 2 weeks. And I would mention that you can go to drmiller.com/lifemeditations. That's drmiller.com/lifemeditations, all in one word, no spaces. And then you can see all of the programs that we've done. We've got a year's worth of programs there now. And I'm just getting into the stuff that I really love. I hope you enjoy this. If you go to, go to my Facebook page, it'll probably take a couple of hours, but this entire presentation will be there. Again, thank you so much for your kind words, your donations, and especially for telling other people about the show. They go to the website, they'll be offered an opportunity to get the newsletter, and they'll learn about the show. Invite other people. That's how we can make big-time change, is when we have a lot of people listening. Coming up soon we're going to be a little more two-way. I'll be asking you to share your questions with me, and I'll answer them live online. So you can tell people that that's coming in the future. So again, thank you so much. Namaste. Have a wonderful week.
