The Essence of Life, Love & Healing 3 – Paradigm Shift & Second Order Thinking

Good morning. I am Dr. Emmett Miller, and I welcome you to Life Meditations. The title of today's presentation is The Essence of Life, Love, and Healing. Part 3: Violence, Paradigm Shift, and Second Order Thinking. And by the way, Parts 1 and 2 are still available free at drmiller.com. That's drmiller.com/life-meditations. And this one will be posted up there in a few days too if you want to share it with your friends. So as we often do, we begin with some deep relaxation. Allow your body to be in a comfortable position. Take a deep breath in. As you let it out, begin to allow yourself to relax. Become aware that at this moment in time, there's no other place to— you need to go, nothing else you need to do. There's no problem that you have to solve. Take a point in the distance to look at. Focus on it for now as you relax. And have you noticed how weird the world has been lately? It seems much more weird. Billionaires orbit the Earth as a weekend bash while the rest of us stand around bewildered, feeling powerless, watching as our climate collapses, our oceans acidify, Our air becomes toxic, millions of poor children starve daily, 26 million refugees including now climate refugees, and we even watch in stunned silence as our very democracy withers under seemingly purposeful attack by extremists. Notice how it feels when you just think about it. That's if you still dare to feel. Sad, yes. But take a deep breath in, and as you let it out, empty these thoughts and feelings from your mind. Allow yourself for a moment to be aware that that kind of paralysis is exactly what they want you to feel, and be aware that it does not have to continue. To be this way, that we really can do something about it. Another deep breath in and let it out. And remember, we've all been skillfully trained to feel this helplessness by legions of highly paid attention engineers applying advanced hypnotic and propaganda techniques, directing them at us through modern social communication technology working for the sociopathic corporations who virtually own our government through their overwhelming financial support of our politicians. Indeed, we have the best government that money can buy. And again, I want to remind us all that we really can do something about this. And just as those techniques have been used to disempower us, we can use the same techniques ourselves to empower us, become our own ad agencies. This is Bertrand Russell, whose quote I just read to you a few moments ago. So what many of us do is we tuck our head in the sand. The anxiety that all these problems create for us out there in the world make us want to run away. And so as we kind of watch this terrible charade that, that unfolds in, in front of us out there, we in the underclass hide our anxiety behind ever-increasing anger, abuse, death threats and Twitter attacks aimed at our brothers and sisters. We seem to have forgotten that this is our country and our world, and we possess the power to change it, but only if we work together. The tools we have— these are the mind tools that can break through the paralysis, harness the power of stress, and enable us to access our personal and collective wisdom to heal ourselves and our planet. These are the tools that I have developed and taught for the past half century. I will continue to do so as long as I can, or at least that until, until there's peace throughout the world. So today our goal will be to review experientially the use of the meditative process to enter the moment and free ourselves from the sorrows of the past and anxiety about the future. Number 2, to re-examine the old paradigm of conflict, opposition, fragmentation, and violence— that violence with a capital V— and reflect upon the new paradigm that tempers and balances these animal forces with a higher mind's acceptance, wisdom, cooperation, wholeness, and love with a capital L. Number 3: to learn something about the transformational power of second-order thinking, the power to transcend apparent conflicts and polarities, to function at a more expansive level that sees that apparent opposites are actually vital parts of a greater whole. Number 4, to use mental image rehearsal to integrate and embody these healing techniques for use in our daily lives, individually and in all our relationships. Those who do not believe a thing can be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it. That's, that's called the Roman rule. I like to kind of keep that in mind, keep the Roman rule in mind. Let's go ahead and go to our next experience. So again, allowing yourself to be in that comfortable position, peaceful and calm, realizing there's nowhere that you need to go, nothing that you need to do, no problem that you have to solve. Let yourself breathe, and as you breathe in, think to yourself, breathing in As you breathe out, think breathing out. Give yourself permission to let go of the outside world and direct your awareness within. And if you'd like, you can allow your eyelids to fall closed. Roll your eyes gently upward behind your closed eyelids. To look up toward the back of your forehead, where you're really looking up toward your prefrontal cortex, the brain's brain, and allow your body to relax. You can relax your eyelids down to the point they don't want to open at all. And then when you have that relaxation, test them and feel how heavy and peaceful they feel. And as you test them, send that relaxation from your eyelids flowing throughout all the rest of your body, through your face and your neck and your shoulders and arms, your chest and your back and your abdomen, down through your pelvis and thighs, your knees, legs, and ankles and feet, all the way down to the very tips of your toes. More and more peaceful, more and more calm. Good. And allow yourself to gently begin to float away, floating on your magic carpet through space and time, leaving behind all unnecessary thoughts. And if any unnecessary thoughts come along, just put them on your mental blackboard And as you gently test your eyelids, imagine you're drawing an eraser across your mental blackboard, erasing the unnecessary thoughts and sending another wave of deep relaxation flowing throughout all the rest of your body and really enjoying the feeling. How peaceful. And as you float on your magic carpet, let it carry, carry you to your special place of relaxation, to that beautiful beach or that serene mountaintop, that sacred chapel, that beautiful garden. Again, if any thoughts of the past or future come along that don't fit, just erase them. Remember, this is your mind, and you have the right and the power to choose where to focus your attention. Be in this relaxed place. See the colors and shapes around you. Hear the sounds of the breezes. Smell the fragrance in the air. Feel the texture of anything you may be touching. And now let yourself go to that place of love within. If you already have a cue, a signal, or an anchor like the squeezing of your fingers or placing your hands on your heart or one hand on your heart, how do you anchor that sense of love within you? Travel to that time in the past that you most associate with love. The birth of a child, or being with a lover, being with a beloved friend, being on a meditation retreat, or wherever you've touched that love. Touch it now within and notice where in yourself you feel that quality of love. If you like, you can imagine bringing a loved one here to your special place now, touching them or embracing them or looking into their eyes. Whatever makes you feel the feeling of love that's always within you. That's it. Enjoying that feeling of love and peace. And now we're going to travel to your control room. I want you to imagine there's kind of like a tower, almost like a lighthouse. In fact, it could look like a lighthouse that rises up high above the earth. And you're going to go all the way up to the top because that's where your control room is. That's where you can take complete control of your mind, your body, your emotions, your behavior. Let's go up. I'm going to count from 1 to 10, and as I do, you can ascend in your tower. Maybe there's a spiral staircase that you can go up. Pacing up, passing a window every now and then. Or perhaps you have a beautiful elevator that's going to take you up from floor number 1 to floor number 10, and you can be in your elevator looking at those numbers: 1, and feel as you begin to go up, 2, 3, round and round. If you go up the stairs 4, or just float up as if you're filled with helium. 5, 6, feeling lighter and lighter, leaving all heaviness behind. 7, 8, 9, coming all the way up. 10, you reach the top flight. The elevator pauses, stops. The door opens and here you are in their control room. There are windows around so you can see everything for miles. There are display monitors like televisions all around you so you can tune in any time in your past or in your future. There's a keyboard in front of you that responds to your touch. Any place that you want to travel to. And there's a throttle, or maybe several throttles. Particularly, there is an emotional throttle, and with this emotional throttle, you can increase or decrease the intensity of any emotion you might feel. Picture that throttle now. And imagine you can put your hand on it. You are in control of your anxiety or anger or sadness or impulsiveness, and as well your happiness, your joyfulness, and your lovingness. You can increase any of these feelings or decrease them by pulling gently back on the throttle. If any emotion is too intense, focus on that emotion and decide what you want. Anytime you're being distracted by emotion, you can now control it. By focusing on desirable qualities, you can intensify those feelings let's say empowerment, or feeling that you are loved, that you are safe, that there is a spiritual wholeness there. There is a deep guide within you, a deep feeling of joyfulness and independence, a sense of being connected to your higher power always, even when you forget momentarily, for instance. Imagine that here in your control room you can look into the past or into the future and intentionally adjust your emotions, your reactions, your thoughts, words, and actions based upon the wisdom and higher guidance you get from the neocortex, the prefrontal cortex, and even from higher sources. Within and around you. The deep relaxation tools of meditation, prayer, and self-hypnosis permit you to calm emotions that are more extreme than they need to be. The relaxation grounds you, like grounding an electrical circuit, bringing you back here into this precious present moment where future obstacles or victories for the moment become unimportant. And so too is what happened yesterday unimportant, 2 seconds ago, 2 hours ago, or years ago. Instead, you now choose to enter into the peace, serenity and spaciousness of the eternal presence of now. Good. Secondly, this wonderful meditative mind tool of deep relaxation enables you to access your strengths, your gifts, your talents and skills, those that you have discovered in the past and those you will discover in the future, and gives you a reliable way to make the connection with the higher levels of your mind—System 2—and your deeper, deeper spiritual level. You can then use the image visualization techniques of guided imagery and mental image rehearsal, number 3, to awaken the feelings of safety, well-being, inspiration, and empowerment that will support your success and happiness. And you will be able to practice mental image rehearsal to reprogram your mind and rewire your nervous system through what we call Neuroplasticity. Good. And anytime you want to re-establish your center here, your control center, and be in control of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, you can simply relax right up to your control room as you count from 1 to 10, and here you are again in the tower. By picturing it in your mind and counting to 10, you can always return. Good. And now just allow yourself to ride back to where your body is resting comfortably. We'll return to that control room in a little while. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. You may allow your eyes to open if you have chosen to let them close. See, when you're up in your tower, you can look down, sort of like if you're riding in that, in that Goodyear blimp, you know, very up high above, you can look down into the stadium. There's a lot going on, but you're not stuck in it, and so you can see, think more clearly by doing that than if you were down there on the field. Getting knocked around by the issues of the world. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the headlines of this week because there's— that is an excellent example of how the world is really needing these tools that we're learning to develop, of why we need to relax and consider carefully before we act, before we can cause major problems. One story Very recently was a story of Mr. Fairlam, who's a boxing coach and a former mixed martial arts fighter, who was just sentenced to a little more than 3 years in prison for punching one of the Capitol guards on January 6th when the Capitol was being invaded. He apologized and expressed remorse for the actions that he just— that he made, that he described as irresponsible. And reckless. Quotes: "I take full responsibility for what I did that day. That's not who I am. That's not who I was raised to be." Well, if that's not who he is, why did he do it? Hmm. Perhaps 90% of all of our problems and our illnesses— I mean it— are the result of thoughtless, impulsive behaviors triggered by poorly controlled emotional states. But when you go up into your control room, it's like being up there in your Goodyear blimp, and you can look down on those events, and you can see things more objectively since your monkey mind, System 1, is not feeling the threat when you're looking down from that height. And then using balance, clarity, and the empowerment that we can get in our control room, we can emphasize the positives and do the things that we really want to do and subdue the negatives. So in spite of all of the bad news that's out there, let's talk a little bit about some of that good news. That we have. And again, when we touch on the love, when we practice gratitude as we have in our pre— previous sessions, then we are focusing on the good and the beauty that's around us. Steven Pinker is a well-known author who's wrote a book called Better Angels, and what he talked about is the positive things that are going on that we don't hear about so much. That actually greenhouse gas emissions have actually been falling for more than 10 years in the United States, in Japan, and Europe. Two decades ago, the world was on pace to warm by about 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Now the number is closer to 5.5. Not quite where we want to be, Not enough, but any progress is good news. We got to think about that. The central thesis of Pinker's Better Angels is that our era is less violent, less cruel, and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. This is his book. The decline in violence holds for violence in the family and neighborhoods, between tribes and states. People living now are actually less likely to meet meet a violent death or suffer from violence or cruelty at the hands of others than people living in any other century. He— Pinker spends 6 substantial chapters documenting all of his facts. For instance, 15% of prehistoric humans met a violent death at the hands of another person. In the Aztec Mexico, in which 5% of people were killed by others. In Europe, during the bloodiest periods, the 17th century and first half of the 20th, the deaths in war were only 3%. And right now in Europe, your chance of being murdered is now less than 1/10, and in some countries only 1/50 of what it would have been had you lived 500, 500 years ago. American rates of killing have also fallen steeply in the last 3 centuries, although, although you wouldn't know it. And then during the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th century Europe, people began to look askance at forms of violence that had previously been taken for granted: slavery, torture, despotism, dueling, and extreme forms of cruel punishment. Voices even began to be raised against cruelty to animals. Pinker refers to this as the humanitarian revolution. He calls it what's called the long peace. For 66 years now, the great powers and developed nations in general have not fought wars against each other like World War I and World War II. There's been a decline in all kinds of organized conflicts, including civil wars, genocides, repression, and terrorism. Followers of the news media will have particular difficulty in believing it, but as usual, look at Pinker's work. He's a scientist and he presents his evidence. He also talks about the rights revolution, the revulsion against the violence inflicted on ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals that has developed over the past half century. From the days when lynchings were commonplace in the South domestic violence was tolerated so much that even in the 1950s, that's where you could— it was not unusual to find advertisers featuring ads such as this one. They said, you can see your wife— your husband's going to spank you if you don't give him Chase and Sanborn coffee. What, do you still beat your wife? Well, maybe you never should have stopped. Read why in the rollicking yet educational booklet entitled "Why You Should Beat Your Wife." Ah, it's a man's world. Van Heusen shirts. She'll kneel at your feet and even love your shoes. Yes, Indeed, it's nice to have a girl around the house. I mean, this is the 1950s. I mean, it was okay for things like that to be published, for you to put those things out there. And then I played some of that video. War on Christmas. A war on Thanksgiving. This war on fun. The war on straws. War on meat. Joe Biden declared war on freedom yesterday. It's a war The war on small businesses. The war on dogs. There is a war on parents. The left's war on children. War on privacy and Middle America. It's a war on business, a war on building, a war on growth. This is a war on police now. It's a war on achievement. There is a war on hot dogs. A war on white journalists. Right. Hats. Biden's war on tradition. War on YouTube conservatives. War on knives. There's a war on us. And that way we don't— so we don't think about the beautiful things that are there. And why is that? Because when we're tense— I'll explain this in some of our future experiences— then you will, because of the anxiety inside, your higher mind shuts off, and you will be likely to accept as true whatever is told to you at that time. And so we can be sold their products, we can be sold their, their attitudes, we can be sold their candidates, and that's really, that's how it happens. So what's important is for us to see that there are positives It's a beautiful world. Fantastic things are going on. We have things like the internet, like the computers. We have ways to communicate with social media. They're being misused now because it's sort of like the Wild West, but we can tame it and we can change it. We have everything that we need. So it's crucial that we face the facts of what's going on in the world, and that there are a lot of negatives that are out there, but only after we have brought our automatic emotions under control. Because only by seeing the truth of what we have to deal with can we bring in the power of the higher mind. That's the purpose, purpose of the meditative state that you go into, which is step number 1. Step number 2 is contact your power, contact your love. Remember what you've been capable of doing in the past and know that you can still do it in the future. Here is a set of affirmations that some of you might find useful, especially you Dune fans. It's the Bene Gesserit litany against fear. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. No army can stop an idea whose time has come, said Victor Hugo. And then there is the Cree proverb from the Cree tribe of American Indians. When the earth is ravaged and the animals are dying, a new tribe of people will come into the earth from many colors, many classes, many creeds, and who by their actions and deeds shall make the earth green again. They will be known as the Warriors of the Rainbow. So what we've talked about are the negatives, the way that the monkey mind, the limbic system of the brain, overreacts with anxiety, fear, anger, frustration, takes away our ability to think clearly. Produces disease and causes us to get addicted to things, as well as causing impulsive, inappropriate behavior. And that's what I call a kind of violence. But then from the depths of the carbon atom comes a message of wholeness, because the carbon atom learned how to share atoms rather than to just have everything be bipolar, but covalent sharing. And so there was an urge to merge, to get together. And so large molecules, and in time life forms begin to appear— single cell forms, multi-celled forms. All of those wanted to join together. So again, the urge to merge created higher-order animals like jellyfish, all the way up to really high orders like horses, and all the way up to the human being, capable of all the amazing things that we're capable with our beautiful minds and bodies and brains that we still own But then not only the individuals were a sign of this urge to merge, but then it bonded individuals together in couples and pairs, in groups, in flocks. And that quality that we know of when we're in love or in close proximity to someone that we really care about That is the ultimate feeling of merging. And all of this merging I call love with a capital L, not just what these young people are feeling being together. Maybe the highest form is that love of a mother for her child, or certain fathers for a child. Remember that love inside of you. Access it now and realize that that love can go beyond the family, can go into the community, can even go into the level of large groups of people where we can share together and love together, really enjoy the experience. In other words, the goal of all of these relationships is to stay connected. If the integrity of the group is broken, it must be repaired. This is called healing, and the healing of a group is healing at the collective level. Life is about wholeness, healing, sharing, sustainability, community. Many, many years ago, Lao Tzu said, "If there is peace in the heart, there will be beauty in the person. If there be beauty in the person, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. When there's order in the nation, there will be peace in the world." Why not? So to review, love is shared values, integration, inclusiveness, both/and, caring, intimacy, balance, harmony, empathy, compassion, wholeness, collective intelligence, and coherence. Love is one with life and healing. They're all representative of the same deeper quality. Then on the other hand, there's that other force that I sometimes call the dark force, and that force makes little or no attempt to be fair or respectful. No sharing or appreciation or integration. It's binary, black and white, like a computer. No soul, no spirit, no empathy. No compassion. You don't get lunch. She thought I was you and fed me twice. I call it violence with a capital V. It is anything that is analytical, either/or, black or white, differentiating, fragmenting, good or bad, exclusive, critical, judgmental, contemptuous, rejecting, debating, contrasting. Attacking. Those two— that's two ways that we have approaching things in life. Love compared to violence. Synthesis versus analysis. Unity versus dispersion. Holism versus fragmentation. Organic versus bipolar, ionic. Integration versus differentiation, globally versus locally focused, right? So again, by violence I mean not just physical violence, but blocking someone's happiness, hurting them for any reason, criticizing, judging, mocking, treating them with contempt, othering them, doing unto others or creating experiences for others that you would not like it if they would create for you. That's what I mean by violence. And it's true, these violences affect our lives. The younger we are when we experience them, the more deeply they affect us and the more difficult it is to recover from them. But love and violence with a capital L are not really opposites, at least not at the higher orders of thinking. In fact, they are complementary, and together they make up the whole, like the yin and the yang. And so what I'm talking about is the new paradigm of thinking, not the old paradigm which is primarily just violence. I can beat you up, so I'm going to take over your land. I'm bigger than you, so I'm going to knock you down and score a goal. I have more money in my campaign war chest than you do, so I'm going to beat you, you know, in the next election. That's violence. That's the old paradigm. The new paradigm integrates the love perspective, indeed makes it the dominant one in most of the situations in which we often feel anxiety and anger and and frustration and jealousy and envy and all of those kinds of feelings. That love needs to be balanced with the analytic, the violence, because sometimes there's an emergency. Sometimes you just have to punch somebody in the nose. You just have to. As they say in Texas, he needed killing. But very few Instead, we should focus mostly on love. I mean, after all, if you're a meat eater, some animal has to die every time you have a meal. And if you're a vegetarian, you kill a stalk of celery or pay somebody else to kill it so you can eat it, or a carrot or a bean. So it's about a balance. It's about the paradigm shift And the paradigm shift means that we're using a higher and higher order of our brain and our thinking to deal with things. So we're upgrading our thinking. Metaphorically, it's like upgrading the system in your computer. When we use the higher levels of the operating system, patterns appear that were invisible on the lower level. You see solutions that were invisible. We have the potential to shift from the old paradigm to the new paradigm, not only to get rid of competition and conflict where it doesn't need to be there, but to create harmony. And when we shift to this new kind of thinking, we're capable of what's called second-order thinking. Transformative thinking. Transformative thinking has to do with putting our conscious mind in control, because there are abilities that arise as you go higher up toward your higher mind— emergence of higher ways of thinking. And the goal of the higher mind is to give instructions to the lower part of the mind, because there is a hierarchy in this sense between the conscious mind, the limbic system, and the behavior, which is at the other end. Control goes from your higher mind down and information comes up. The mistakes that we make are when control is coming from below, like when you get angry, when you yell at somebody, when you insult someone, when you take a drink when you shouldn't, when you stick a needle in your arm, and I go on and on and on and on. You're not being guided by your higher mind, you're being guided by your monkey mind, which is very confused. How do we transform? Through meditation to quiet the emotions, number one. Number two, mindfulness to analyze the situation from that quiet perspective, your control tower. Three, through deep self-awareness to seek wise guidance. From within or even externally. Through imagery, then you direct to your imagination to visualize your future that you want, and then you apply intention and commitment to act decisively. New paradigm— what a paradigm is, is a worldview that underlies the theory, strategy, and methodology of a particular subject or process. How do we, how do we look at the world? Is our paradigm that someone is Black, that person is not capable of anything creative or positive? You can believe that, that's your paradigm, but then you're going to see a very difficult world than someone who sees the people who are really living in the world. Now every change getting bigger is not a paradigm change. A baby giraffe becomes a grown-up giraffe, but it doesn't transform. It just grows its legs longer, its neck longer, and so forth. On the other hand, if you have a caterpillar, it grows for a while— that's trans— that's change, but it's not transformation. It's when it crawls into the cocoon or creates the cocoon around it and allows certain elements within it called the imaginal. Can you imagine that? The imaginal is a group of cells that then begins to grow, and it uses the rest of the cells of the caterpillar to create a very new organism, the butterfly. And so we want to create a shift in paradigm for changing the world, but also a shift in the paradigm for how we deal with our own lives. Let me give you a couple of examples of the use of second-order thinking. Old stories of, uh, during the French Revolution, there was a captain who was a head of a contingent of men in a certain, certain town in France. And the people in town begin to riot because they didn't have enough food. So word was sent up to the general that the people were rioting, and the general sent back the order: fire into the rabble. And the captain says, geez, I know these people, I've lived here for years, I can't fire and kill them. And yet if he doesn't kill them, he's going to be killed. You know, you know the problem, you've probably seen that before. Well, what did he do? He got a brainstorm. He ordered everyone to point their rifles into the air, and he said, "Fire!" And they fired, and it was a tremendous thundering sound echoing through the town square, and everyone just froze. "What?" And in the silence, he yelled out, "I have been ordered by my general to fire into the rabble, and I will." do so, but first I will allow there to pass 2 minutes so that as, as I look into the group out there, I see that everyone is not rabble. So I see fine upstanding people of our town, so I will allow 2 minutes for those fine upstanding people to leave, and then I will commence firing into the rabble. He waited 2 minutes and then ordered his men to fire into the empty town square. In old Greece, the young women— you know how young girls kind of get this, getting, have these fads— and so they had a fad of committing suicide. And the more they did try to keep them from committing suicide, the more of a fad it becomes. You know how it is with teenagers. And they were really stuck. And one wise man had an idea. And so what they did was they passed a law and they printed big signs and spread the word throughout town that all women who died by suicide, their naked bodies would be carried through town on the top of a, of a board where everyone would be able to see them. And no more suicides. And then there's a story I've told this before, but It's a fellow who's driving his car and he gets a flat tire. He takes— he goes in the trunk, gets his spare out and gets his jack, jacks up his car, takes the nuts off, and as he goes around to put the old flat tire back in, um, into the trunk of his car, a truck comes by, rolls over the lug nuts and drives them down into the asphalt so he can't retrieve them. And he's late, he's kind of, how am I going to get to my apartment? He's pacing up and down. They didn't realize it at first, but suddenly someone calls out from above because he was parked right in front of the state hospital. And one of the inmates in the hospital said, hey buddy, why don't you just take one of the nuts off of each of the other wheels and put them on that, and it will hold that wheel until you can get to a gas station and buy some more lug nuts. And the guy says, fantastic! I can't believe it. He does it, it works like a charm. He says, he says, what are you doing in the hospital? That's brilliant. The guy says, I'm crazy, I'm not stupid. But it's a transformational process. Mark Twain said, you can't depend upon your judgment when your imagination's out of focus. This is about getting your imagination into a focus. A samurai went to the wisest man in all of Japan, a great teacher, and he says, "Oh teacher," he says, "I've come to you because no one can tell me this. I want to know what is the difference between heaven and hell." Wise man looked at him and said, "You? A samurai? Someone who goes around killing people for money? You want to know the difference between heaven and hell?" Well, the samurai gets furious and he draws his sword and says, "Prepare to die, monk!" And the old man stops laughing and says, "That is hell." And the samurai gets it. Kensho. Enlightenment. He lowers his sword and, "Huh?" And the old man says, and that is heaven. Okay, what we're talking about is heaven and hell is in every single moment. Nobody wants you to know that because then you would have the power to choose. Remember what Gandhi said? The ally you must always seek is the part of your adversary that knows what is right. In whatever situations it works. Somebody who's against you, or whoever it might be in the world, your husband, wife, kids, whatever, and you're arguing, and stop, think, go to your control tower. The ally that I need to sync is the part of that person or that group of people that knows what is right. And then approach it in that way. Requires some skill to do that, but you'll never do it if you don't use your imagination. Our imagination allows us to choose. Some things have to be believed in order to be seen, right? It's like one day you look at your tires and you notice they're getting worn down. And you say, ah, one of the days I've got to get new tires. Not today. And yet for the next 3 or 4 days you're driving, tire sale, tire sale, tire sale, tires everywhere you look. It's like all of a sudden every tire company in the world is trying to sell you their tires. You didn't see them before, but something inside you wanted it. And that is when you really want something and set it loose in your imagination then your mind can work for you in that way. You have the power to believe what you choose to believe. Belief is a behavior. And to be able to move out of System 1's way of imagining the world and moving up into a higher way of looking at things. The Buddha said the source of all suffering, the source of all suffering, is wanting things to be different from the way they are right now. Right now. Of course things can't be different from how they are right now, otherwise it wouldn't be right now. Things can be different in the future. But right now you have to accept the moment as it is. Find strength, beauty, love, power, inspiration in the moment, and then you can use your imagination to make some changes. Those are a few possibilities for transformative thinking. I'll continue next time as we'll go further into transformative thinking, creating second-order change. We'll get into the essence of healing— physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, relational healing— including exactly the neurophysiology of what makes healing take place. Um, to follow up on what we've talked about today, go to drmiller.com, or better still, shop.drmiller.com. Look up Healing Our Planet, Awakening the Leader Within. Those are two CDs or MP3s. This is a video called Empowering Leadership. Another video which is called Deep Healing the Universe. And then the book, Our Culture on the Couch: 7 Steps to Global Healing, which is also available as an audiobook. And they're all available at shop.drmiller.com. You can see this show today by going to drmiller.com/life-meditations. Again, thank you very much for your donations. They're very appreciated. Um, and as well as donating some cash to us If you tell your friends about what's going on, tell them so that they can tune in, go back and look at some of the past meditation webinars, and join us next time, because that's probably just about as good as actual money for donation. Tell everybody you know. Again, this is Dr. Emmett Miller. It's been wonderful to be with you here. And let me know how it was for you. Use your chat box. I'll stick around for a while. Until next week, namaste. I say next week, it's actually next month. It'll be 4 weeks. Until our next webinar. Take care.