Changing Your PERCEPTION Will Change Your Life | Dr. John Demartini

The quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask. Questions make unconscious information conscious. People think they miss out and they think they need improvement, but maybe they just need.

This is a very life changing, practical tool that will allow us to actually remember who we are.

If you ask the question, why did this happen to me? Why am I a victim of this? You get a different world than if you ask how did what happened help me fulfill something meaningful in my life, my highest priorities? All of a sudden you realize that that challenging situation is the opportunity for greatness.

The severity of the event does not essentially matter. What matters most is the awareness and the perception of the event.

Your perception, decisions and actions and what you decide to do with it. So if you know how to ask the right questions and become aware of what you've been unconscious of, you can play with your neurochemistry and then take command of your pharmaceutical business inside your head.

What are the most important things for someone on a journey of self development? For someone on a journey of spiritual growth?

We've been indoctrinated by the moral hypocrisies about how we're supposed to be instead of who we are. Look in the mirror and own all of you. The level of the essence of the soul. Nothing's missing in you. The things that appear to be missing you are all the things you're too proud or too humble to admit. What you see in others inside you. And the moment you see that everything out there is you, it's a projection and there's a reflection. Then all of a sudden you realize there's nothing there to avoid or seek. You don't need to get rid of any part of yourself to love yourself. Love it.

Hey, it's Josh. Before we get into this episode, I have a small yet powerful favor to ask of you. The community has been growing by thousands lately and the bigger the tribe, the bigger names of world class guests we can have on this podcast that I can bring to you from my heart, from my curiosity so you can have more wellness and wisdom in your life. Would you please be so kind as to hit the subscribe button wherever you're watching or listening to this podcast. It'll allow us to rise naturally in the algorithms based on your 2 second act of generosity by you just tapping that little subscribe button wherever you're viewing or hearing this episode. Thank you so much. It means the world to me and our entire team here at Wellness and Wisdom. Now enjoy the podcast. John, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you thank you. I'm the one that's thankful. Thank you.

You are on a ship in the middle of the ocean right now. Where exactly are you? You live on a ship for the past 20 plus years, which is an amazing lifestyle. You're a man of movement, you're a man of language, you're a man that's a polymath, a man of many talents and many understandings. And I'm just utterly fascinated, John, by the way that you've encoded meaning out of some of the false narratives that are out there, starting with maybe the place you're even born. Right here in my state, Texas, in Houston. A good place to start, actually, for me would be with so much that you've done. One of the challenges and also the benefits of me being a podcast host for almost a decade is, is I look at the massive amount of work that someone like yourself has completed and also will complete, and I ask myself, what are the most important things for someone on a journey of self development, for someone on a journey of spiritual growth? And I really found that it was almost a paradox and really fun that you were born on Thanksgiving Day. I think that's beautiful because so much of your teachings have gratitude infused in them. Many people think of Thanksgiving as like, you know, Plymouth Rock and, you know, the Native Americans, and eating food with baskets on the table. Thanksgiving, or to give thanks, is really about gratitude. Have you ever made that connection for yourself as a child growing up and going to Hawaii and, And furthermore, which we'll talk about your whole incredible life journey. But that, that birthday, Thanksgiving, does that hold any significance for you?

Absolutely. I was around 4, and my mom was putting me to sleep, and she said, son, before you go to actually sleep, count your blessings. Because those who count their blessings and are grateful for what they have, they get more to be grateful for. So I have most likely the largest collection of documented gratitudes, probably of anybody you've ever met.

Where do you keep them?

Right on my computer. In fact. You're already on there.

Amazing.

I could pull it up and show you. You. Every day. Everything I get to do, I document and I code and I, you know, I. I had the opportunity to be interviewed by someone. I had the opportunity to write this article, I had the opportunity to publish this book, had the opportunity to meet this celebrity or whatever it may be. Yeah, I document everything that I've had the opportunity, where I've traveled, everything. And I have a. It's thousands. I mean, it's. It's on its way to being 10,000 pages of documented, that's what, 10 point print, 1 inch margins, you know, good old normal size paper. I, I print that and document that every single day of my life. So I do have gratitude as the cornerstone of, of whatever doing.

Yeah, I can feel that from you. And now it's been five decades plus that you have been teaching so many people across the world. And it's just, it's a testament to really the origin of your story. And John, I know that you've probably told your story a lot, so I'd love to actually go into how I found your work. It was through the Secret. I'm sure a lot of people talk to you about that. The Secret, the law of attraction. But there are many other laws, John, that's not just about the law of attraction. And this is what I'm most fascinated by here. I think about the way epigenetically that I have moved through my life. And I know epigenetics is something that you talk about quite frequently. I'm curious if you could go on just a quick memory machine with me for a moment if you were to go back to the origin of Houston, born on Thanksgiving Day in gratitude with what you shared about your mom as well, and you think about the way that you have really gone on this journey of maximizing human potential and teaching others to do the same. Have you ever connected the dots between your own epigenetic expression to where you came from through the parental models of your mother and father? What do you believe personally is being epigenetically expressed through you as a speaker and a leader?

Well, epigenetics is a byproduct of autonomic neurotransmitters affecting cell walls, second messengers, cascading enzymes to go through the nuclear pores into the nucleus to affect the histones and DNA to alter the expression of genetic genes. So anytime we have an emotion or a meme that's basically, you know, a message, it's going to be encoded in our, in our perceptions and feelings and it's going to be encoded. So at least in my vertical transmission of DNA that's been impacting my children, but probably through other influences, lateral gene transfer and just memes that ideas that, you know, you bring out into the world, you know, you have an impact. I mean, you're having an impact on millions of people every day. So you know that you're having their epigenetics impact because they're changing their perceptions and their, their ratios of perceptions and their autonomics and their messengers, primary and secondary Messengers and genetic expression. So you can't do your show without impacting millions of people. I mean, not just, you know, intellectually, but genetically and epigenetically. We're impacting people. They've recently found out that even the duplications, deletions, transpositions of DNA are impacted by epigenetics. So we're actually changing DNA's expression and arrangement by our perceptions, decisions, and actions we take. So there's no way we cannot do some sort of epigenetic impact on the world by just being who we are on a mission.

I love that so much. Epigenetics, emotional epigenetics is something that I've personally and my audience has been exploring lately. This way that we feel energy in motion. Right, Something you've talked about many times before. Energy can't be created. It can only be transmuted. And so I think about the energy that's tied to all the things, John, that in my life I choose at times to allow to weigh me down. And I wonder for you if you could go just one more time for us in the memory machine. Go back to Hawaii, before Paul Bragg, before you being in the tent, before everything, you had a teacher that told you you would never read, you would never amount to anything. And you also had an issue with walking. So things were not set up for you in a perfect platform of personal growth. Or were they?

Well, anything you can't say thank you for is baggage. Anything you can say thank you for is fuel. And I. I don't see anything I would change. I look back now and I go, the first grade teacher that, you know, tried to help me learn, and no matter what I did, it wasn't working. I didn't really read TILL I was 18. She met, you know, the best for me. She wanted me to. She said, look, he's not going to make it. School put him into sports or something. That's why I went off, became a surfer. But he. She basically said that, you know, you're never going to be able to read or never going to be right, communicate, never amount to. Never go very far in life. And I had a speech impediment from about age one and a half. I was putting button. Buttons and strings in my mouth to exercise my mouth. Speech pathologist. And I also had an arm that was. And leg turned in when I was a child, so I had to wear braces on my left side, which constrained me, which probably was the perfect thing for me to be traveling. I mean, I've traveled over 21 million miles now. So that's perfect. So I don't. Anything. You look back in there and you can't say thank you for is, is because you haven't taken the time to see the hidden order in the apparent chaos. And knowing how to ask quality questions, to see the things you're overlooking so you can see it on the way, not in the way, is liberating and empowering. And that's, I'm, I'm all about finding questions because I was, you know, learned, challenged. I had to ask smart kids questions. So I, I learned questions as a child and my life is about questions today. My method's about questions. Everything I do is about questions. So I'm grateful. I, I don't think if, if you look through your life and you don't see the magnificence of what's happened to help you do something extraordinary, look again. It's time to look again because you're not really looking with your eyes. You're looking from a moral hypocrisy and some sort of judgment instead of an open heart. When you look from an open heart, you see that it's just a feedback mechanism to guide you to authenticity and greatness.

What do you believe is the moral hypocrisy that most people fall prey to, especially in your seminars and across the world? This moral hypocrisy? What do you mean by that?

Well, moral hypocrisy is, you know, you have an amygdala which is a subcortical area of the brain, part of the limbic system that has a nucleus accumuls, that has an impulse for seeking pleasure and an instinct to avoid pain. And you know, so we're looking for prey and avoiding predators because we don't want to be without food, we don't want to be eaten. So that's a survival mechanism that we have inside us that skews and subjectively biases and distorts and generalize our misperceptions of reality. And we also have an executive center that allows us to see things from an objective view and more balanced view. And anytime we're in a thought of trying to get a one sided world and trying to avoid the other side, we've got a moral hypocrisy. I'm trying to be nice, never mean, kind, never cruel, positive, never negative, peaceful, never wrathful, generous, never stingy, all one sided. In Buddhism there was a Buddhist statement that says the desire for that which is unobtainable, which is the positive pull of a magnet and the Desire to avoid that which is unavoidable, which is a negative pull of the magnet is the source of human suffering because you're striving for that which is not going to occur. Imagine getting in a relationship. I don't know what your relationship dynamic is, but imagine getting into one and you had an expectation. Now you're going to be nice. Never mean, kind, never cruel, positive, never negative, peaceful, never wrathful, generous, never stingy, giving, never taking, considered, never inconsiderate. Okay, if you had that expectation, you'd be bitter and angry and resentful within a very short period of time. Because the person you're with is going to be nice if you support their values and mean if you don't. And if you, you know, they be nice as a pussycat if you support their values, they could be mean as a tiger if you challenge them. So you can't expect a one sided human being and if you do, you have an unrealistic expectation on human beings. Well, the same thing occurs for our fantasies and our real objectives in life. A fantasy is a one sided reality. An objective is willing to embrace the two sides, the pain and pleasure in the pursuit of something meaningful and purposeful. So I'm a firm believer in not, not being caught in moral hypocrisies which are based on trying to be a one sided world and then feeling guilty because I can't sustain it and angry because they can't sustain it. And put a balanced view and realize that human beings have both sides and love all parts of yourself. You don't need to get rid of any part of yourself to love yourself.

Love it all that is timeless and also timely. Look what's happening with Israel and Palestine. I mean that's literally playing out right now on planet Earth. And it plays out by the way you asked.

Yeah.

I have two children, Nova and Nias. I'm a father of two. You're also a father. As a father I think about how can I protect, but also how can I have the spiritual, mental, emotional maturity in order to do so, where I'm not projecting my stuff like you so eloquently explained onto my partner, onto my children. You have a video, John, that's fascinating. We're going to link it right here where everyone's listening. What you condemn, you either breed, attract or become. I think this is a beautiful speaking point right here because you are echoing what I've heard from many guests on the show, from many spiritual and emotional intelligence teachers. And that is when I hold a seed of resentment in my hand that's burning. I'm the one that continues to get burned. Can you expand on that, please? Because this is so pivotal when we go into what emotional intelligence actually is.

Yeah. Well, about 40 years ago, maybe even longer than that, I noticed that I was talking to people, and sometimes I would emphasize something. Did you hear that? You know, and. And then I was thinking, I'm talking to myself. I didn't hear that. Yeah. And. And I. And I would point my finger, and it's. And I'm. It's like there's a way more coming back to me. And I don't even know if I was talking to them. I. Talking to me, using them as my. My boomerang. And then I started thinking, well, you know, what I'm judging in other people is me. And so I decided instead of. I thought of a preemptive strike, instead of waiting for people to push my buttons with stuff, I just decided to go to the Oxford Dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, which is the biggest dictionary, and go through and underline every possible human behavioral trait. I found 4628 traits then. And I underlined them. And then I thought, who do I know that displays that trait more than anybody? And I put their initials where I would understand the initials. And then I thought, okay, John, go to a moment where. And when you perceive yourself displaying or demonstrating that particular trait, action or inaction, whatever, I'm admired, despising in them because some are positive, some are negative. And then I looked in my life and I went, where did I do it? When did I do it? Who did I do it to? And who perceived me doing that? And I kept going until I perceived it as much as the most extreme example of somebody I could identify with. So who is the most extreme person that does that behavior? And where do I have that? I went through 4,628 traits. I found out I had everything. There was not one thing missing. I was nice and mean and kind and cruel and considerate and considerate and generous and stingy and open and closed and honest and dishonest. I had every frigging trait that I was in when I really looked at it. And then I realized it's only the traits you're too proud or too shamed, too humble to admit you have that are the buttons that people hook you with. They hook you with some infatuation, or they hook you with some resentment. And it's. You know, there's a biblical statement in Romans 2, one that says, you know, beware, judge not because whoever you judge, you do the same thing. And it's true. Now, I've taken over 120,000 personally through, in my Breakthrough Experience program, which I'm about to do tomorrow in Cape Town here, I took through 120,000 people and had them take the traits that they resented most or admired most in people and had them go in there and identified until it was quantitatively, qualitatively equal. And I've not had anybody that couldn't do that. Now, there's been a couple people that ran out and didn't want to do it, but anybody that stayed to it finished it. And when they did, they realized that real reflective awareness, when you're not too proud or too humble to admit what you see in others inside you, pure reflective awareness liberates people from the judgment. And as Empedocles, a Greek philosopher, 6th century, 5th century BC said, you know, there's love and strife, and when you feel a strife, you have emptiness, unfulfillment. When you have love, you have fulfillment. And the second, you own the traits and have pure reflective awareness. And you don't put yourself above or below and don't try to change them into you or change you into them. And there's nothing to change. There's just your will, matching divine will, if you will, or the way the perfectionist. You see a hidden order. You have the magnificence, and you're sitting there in grace, and you have grace, gratitude and love and inspiration and enthusiasm and certainty and presence. And you're liberated transcendently from the emotional bondage that you have when you sit and judge those people, because anything you infatuate with or resent occupies space and time in your mind and runs your life extrinsically until you transcend that, neutralize it, have reflective awareness, and then realize everybody in my life is there to try to guide me as an intuitive feedback mechanism into my authentic self is trying to get me to be able to be inspired and live authentically, which is where the most power is. So I. I'm. The moral hypocrisies block that. They make you think you're supposed to be one side and get rid of half of yourself? You don't need to do that.

Do you feel that many people get stuck in that moment where they might have some awareness of what you're speaking of and then in comes self judgment, self shame, and they get caught in a shame spiral? In other words, I'm recognizing what John is saying. It's playing out in my life. And Then they allow the emotion of, let's say, self hatred or self judgment or shame to stop their progress in continuing the expansion of that awareness. Have you seen that play out?

Oh yeah, every week I see it. But what's interesting is the moment you compare yourself to somebody else by the law of contrast and put some in a pedestal, you'll minimize yourself in turn. Almost everybody's been out there and met somebody you think is more intelligent or more, you know, achieving in business, or more wealthy or more, you know, stable relationships, are more socially connected and networked, you know, social media, more physically beautiful, more spiritually aware. And the second you put them on a pedestal and minimize yourself, you will inject some of their values into your life which will cloud the clarity of your own highest value, which is your mission. And you will then self depreciate because you're not, you're off your mission because you're trying to be somebody you're not. Anytime you try to live in other people's values, you're going to self depreciate. And you're designed to, because the reason you're designed to do is it's inauthentic. And you're designed to self depreciate because it's not the true you, it's an imposter. The moment you go back to priority, go back to yourself, not judge them, not put them pedestals, don't put yourself in the pit, have reflective awareness, you re empower yourself, your self depreciation just dissolves. And the second you set up a fantasy to live in somebody else's values instead of your own, you're going to automatically beat yourself up. You're designed to as a feedback to let you know again, you're off track, you're not being authentic. Get back to what's your highest value, what's truly important to you, what's truly meaningful, what inspires you spontaneously and quit trying to be second at being somebody else and quit trying to, you know, think you can improve upon the magnificence of who you are.

I just got a full body chill because I was reminded maybe five years ago. I know you've studied very deep in the depths of Greek philosophy. And the river leaf is where we all drink from, the river of forgetfulness.

Right?

We forget who we are in Greek philosophy and mythology. And I feel like what you're sharing with us is a practical tool. This is not a pie in the sky tool. This is a very life changing, practical tool that'll allow us to actually remember who we are. How does that concept play out in you from your studies in Greek mythology?

Perfect. It's an exact thing as Plato says. It's not that we, you know, we don't need to learn something. We need to forget the bull, the bull out there that we've detached. You know, the Nobel Prize winner Paul Dirac. I remember I was 18 years old and I read the Principles of Quantum Mechanics by Paul Dirac. And he. And he said, it's not that we don't know so much, we know so much that. And so. And we have to shed the illusions. We've been indoctrinated by the moral hypocrisies about how we're supposed to be instead of who we are. And we're trying to live in the ought to's instead of the is. And we're not realizing that the is or who we are is more magnificent than the ought to's that we're supposed to be. Alistair McIntyre, who wrote the book on history of ethics, and he basically showed that most of the immoral hypocrisies are things that nobody lives by, but people think they're supposed to. And then the universal laws, nobody violates but the human laws, nobody lives. So I. I try to look at the universal laws and incorporate in my life. And that's where symmetry and elegant beauty of perception is reigning. That's when we see things both sides. You really don't. When you infatuate with somebody, you don't really know them. When you resent somebody, you don't really know them. When you love somebody, you get to know both sides of them simultaneously. And that's where the power is, is to love people and love yourself, look in the mirror and own all of you. So I always say, at the level of the essence of the soul, nothing's missing in you. And at the level of the existence of the senses, things appear to be missing in you. The things that appear to be missing you are all the things you're too proud or too humble to admit. What you see in others inside you. And the moment you see that everything out there is you, it's a projection and there's a reflection. Then all of a sudden you realize there's nothing there to avoid or seek. You don't need to be sitting in an animal survival mentality. You can actually just embrace it and love it. And then all of a sudden you're now in command of it because you're not extrinsically driven. You're intrinsically called. And that's where the Power is, and we all have it. Nobody's see it. People think they miss out and they think they need improvement, but maybe they just need to wake up to their magnificence.

They need to. They need to stop drinking from the river of forgetfulness and actually remember in this 3D reality who they are. But we get caught, John, and you talk about this in your work, they get polarized in their perspective and they get in this dynamic with this false dichotomy of seeking and avoiding. Can you expand on that?

Oh, yeah. The amygdala, the subcortical amygdala, part of the limbic system, has a nucleus accumbens, which is a pleasure seeking system, and has a habenula in the pallidum. That's basically a part of the pain system. And so it's looking for prey for food. And it's pleasureful and it's anabolic and it builds you, right? And then there's pain and it's catabolic and it's a predator eating you. And so it's basically in order to survive, it fears the loss of food and it fears the gain of predator. So it lives in survival when it does, in order to capture the prey, to avoid the predator, it has to accentuate and distort things and generalize it to create enough adrenaline to be able to run fast enough to capture it and run away from something. So we distort our reality with the amygdala and we basically sit there in survival. And the amygdala is designed to assign valencies and misperceptions to things. And it keeps us in this bondage. And anything that you infatuate with again will occupy space and time, your mind and run. You think about a time when you're really, really infatuated with some babe, right? And then you couldn't sleep at night, or very resentful to somebody, you couldn't sleep at night. So any degree of distortion of extreme attraction or impulsion distracts you and is the impulses and instincts that survival that keep you from being graced, inspired, present, loving and really enthused about what you're doing. Peter lynch went up on Wall Road, book one up on Wall street back in the 90s. And he said, after I do quantitative and technical analysis on my stocks, I then go visit the companies that I'm considering buying stock in. And I go visit them. And when I go there and I introduce myself to all the people that work in the place, I'm looking for people who are grateful for their job Loving what they're doing, inspired by the vision, enthused in their work, present when they're working and certain about their skill. He said, if I see that throughout the company, I invest in it because I know it's going to go up in value because it's engaged and we all can be engaged and go up in value and raise our magnificent self worth and contribute and exemplify what's possible if we take the time to be authentic. And the authentic us is when we live by priority and dedicate to the highest priorities and not other people's, but our highest priorities and delegate the rest and give job opportunities to others who love doing what we want to delegate and then do what we love in a way that has sustainable fair exchange and fair exchange with people so we're reiterated and rewarded economically so we can delegate and live an inspired life. I teach people that every day and I basically teach research, write and travel. That's it. Everything else is delegate. I haven't cooked since I was, you know, God cooked since I was 24, haven't driven a car in 33 years. You know, I have, I have everything. I even, I tell my girlfriend, I said, look, if I delegate lovemaking to George Clooney, we used to love me. And she says, I'll love you even more.

Okay. It's so interesting because I think about the young man that was in the tent and the vision that you had. Paul C. Bragg met with you. And y' all know this because the Bragg is really the most powerful ACV on the planet. And so when Paul Bragg was inspiring you, you had a vision, John. And that vision allowed you to see in some way, maybe not completely, John, but in some way where you would be now. You saw yourself speaking, you saw yourself teaching about the magnet of two sides, about people getting stuck in the seeking and avoiding. Did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine that it would be you here in this moment now and all the things that you've accomplished? Was that real for you back then? Just as it is now?

What I saw, I just pulled it up. That's why I was flipping through some here. When I was in Melbourne, Australia, probably about 12 years ago, I was speaking to about 1600 people there in Melbourne at one of the high Hiltons, I think it was. And after I did, I shared a story about what it was like when I was 17, when I nearly died and I met Paul Bragg and I got really inspired and I got teary eyed when I shared the message. And afterwards I was signing books and, you know, getting pictures and stuff. And this guy comes up to me and says, Dr. Demartini, I really was affected by your speech today. Would you be willing to let me paint your vision? And I said, sure. He says, I'm a painter. And I didn't know who the caliber of this guy, but he's a very famous painter. He said, I like to paint your vision. So he did, and he captured the vision that I said that day. When I said it, he. He saw it, and he sent me a sketch, and I was like. I got brought to tears, like, going, he did it. The only thing that he did different on the vision is he stuck me in it in the vision of where I was at the time he saw me. But this is the vision he gave. He painted. Wow.

So there's a massive. For those of you listening, there's a massive. Almost looks like Spain or some huge courtyard with hundreds of thousands of people. And then. Is that you speaking?

Yeah, that's me. And what it is, it's. It's a million people in a giant square, about 40 people on a balcony 40ft above it. And there's an iconic building from every major city around the world. And the name of the painting is A man on a mission with a vision and a message. It's five foot by four foot, and it sits in my office. That's what he painted for me and sent that to me on that in that frame as a gift.

So beautiful. And what is his name?

His name is Andrew Tischler.

Andrew Tischler. Okay, shout out to Andrew Tischler. I want to go back because I think in pictures, like when I listen to your speeches, I close my eyes. When I was going through your work in prep for the show, I closed my eyes because that's how I process information. I'm sure you could describe the neurology of that to me and us. But what's most fascinating is that when we hear the truth in our soul, it's trusted in a way that doesn't necessarily need any more words. There's very few words that revolve around truth. And so when you talk about this polarization of our perspective, that hit me like a ton of bricks. I mean, my heart expanded. I could see the ways that I've been showing up with my. My lady and even my children and even my business and. And my employees. Like, what are the ways that we can actually step out of this polarization? It was such a truthful moment. So I want to thank you for that. On a personal Level. Because really it's between these opposites that you describe that we can find the meaning. It's not by polarizing and saying, it's us versus them or I know the best way to do it. How do we hold both of those worlds, John? How do we hold those worlds within us?

Well, our impulse and instincts try to separate the inseparable divide, the indivisible label the unlabelable name the ineffable and polarizing, unpolarizable. That's what our subconscious subcortical amygdala is doing. Trying to separate, trying to avoid the pain, seek the pleasure, separate. Our intuition is trying to whisper the other side. So when you're infatuated, your intuition is saying, don't be gullible, don't be scared, don't be a little bit skeptical, cautious, don't go too fast. It's whispering, trying to keep the downsides to calm down, allow you to see both sides of that relationship. Because if you're in that relationship for a period of time, you're going to find out there's both sides, things you like and dislike. There's never going to be a one sided relationship. And the same thing, you have this thing that you resent at first you think, well that's terrible. But then it's trying to show there's got to be meaning to it, there's got to be a benefits, there's got to be upsides. And over the time you'll get the wisdom of the ages with the aging process over time. But you could have the wisdom of the ages without the aging process by asking quality questions and seeing the upside to the downs and the downs to the ups. And our intuition is trying to reveal whatever we're ignoring. Because when we're infatuated with somebody, we're conscious, the upsides, unconscious of the downsides. We're resentful to somebody. We're conscious of the downsides, unconscious, the upsides. When we love somebody, we're fully conscious of both sides simultaneous. And when we see both sides simultaneous, we enter into an integrated transcendent state where we are no longer able to judge. All we can sit there is see the hidden order. Claude Shannon in his information theory from MIT said that when you see information missing, like if I'm infatuated, I'm ignorant of the downside. You have a disorder. But when you have no missing information, you have order, the hidden order, the divine order some people call it. And that's what I'm interested in. That's what I'M dedicated to doing, helping people see that there's no matter what's happening in their life, it's on the way, not in the way. And you can be a master of destiny, not a victim of history. If you ask the right question and reveal to you whatever side you're ignoring in that experience until they're balanced, until you have grace. And then you get a gamma synchronicity in the brain. The moment you do your autonomous come into balance, you get resilience, adaptability and heart rate variability goes up. You automatically now have a tier of gratitude and I recommend and an inspired state to confirm authenticity. And in that integrated authentic state is where the power is. And that's an unstoppable, incremental momentum building state for people.

The, the gamma in which you speak, it's a very rare state for many people. I don't know if you know the numbers on that, you being a polymath, but think about how fleeting gamma can be. Now you talked about that gamma state. When someone's in between making the means of what they're resenting and what they're seeking or what they're going against and going for, that gamma state is really crucial. Can you explain the neurology for that? For all the science heads?

You have an autonomic nervous system divided into parasympathetic, sympathetic. The parasympathetic is mainly repressed and digest and is. And it stimulates the white blood cells which have large nuclei for the nighttime. And the sympathetic is mainly oxidizing and daytime activation. For fight or flight, one goes into delta waves at night, one goes into beta waves during the day, one's three, one's 13. You put them together and put them in perfect balance. You get an alpha theta wave right at the junction of alpha theta, which is a alpha gamma stimulus. All of a sudden you see both sides. You synchronize the frontal and parietal cord and precunious everything else. These things synchronize phase, lock in their rhythms and all of a sudden this synchronicity occurs and you can't stop it. The autonomic bring a tear of gratitude, can't stop it. I've developed a science on how to wake that up in people. And I love helping them, show them how to do it. When they do it, they repeatedly get a tear of gratitude. No matter what their perceptions. I can show them how to find where the opposite is. And the synthesis and synchronicity of complementary opposite simultaneously automatically gives them that synchronicity. And Gives it. So it's a reproducible, duplicatable science I've been doing thousands and thousands of people. And when they realize that, they go, man, I can take no matter what happens in my life, and I can turn into something I'm grateful for. There's nothing your mortal body can experience, your mortal soul can't love. And I've had every imaginable thing that people want to come to me. You know, beatings and rapes and you name it. There's nothing their mortal body can experience at the mortal soul can't level. And that's hard to comprehend for most people. But they haven't learned to ask the right question. And they're caught in moral hypocrisies about what's bad or terrible or whatever. And they want to run their story, be victims of history instead of masters of destiny. But if you want to run, you want to really master your life. Transcend this, the narrative of the story about being the victim and get on with finding the other side of the equation and liberate yourself from the bondage and get on past the baggage and turn it into fuel and. And take off. That's what I'm interested. I love doing that with people.

I love experiencing that. I mean, a life well lived for me, John, would be every single day. Can I have one or more moments where I'm crying with gratitude? That's an amazing life. Who doesn't want that life?

If you're not doing that on a daily basis, you're missing out in life. You've been living in a quiet life of desperate. A life of inspiration. Everybody here is capable of having a life of inspiration. I've seen people who live in townships, extreme poverty, extreme deaths in the family, beatings. I don't care what it is. It's not what happens to you. It's your perception, decisions and actions and what you decide to do with it. And when you turn that into an opportunity and know how to be resourceful and turn yourself back to the source, whoa. All of a sudden you realize that that challenging situation is the opportunity for greatness.

This is such a great. I want to go a little deeper into this because most people, John and I say most very reductionistically, but I would assume that most people that are on the beginning of their spiritual journey, the beginning of their personal get caught. They literally allow. They choose to allow their emotions of depression, emotions of anxiety to stick. To basically stick them exactly where they are. They get stuck in these energy and motions. And so I want to ask you this question about what you said because it's so pivotal. It's not that you're bypassing. It's not that you're trying to just wax over the things that have occurred. There is a process that you teach where you actually go to what has happened and. And you tactically, spiritually, and practically move through it. This is not bypassing what occurred. Right.

No dissociation at all. It's just seeing what you are obviously not seeing. You know? Can I share some stories and examples, please?

Stories are the best.

Yeah. So I had this lady in Florida who came to my signature program, which I'm about to do tomorrow morning, called the Breakthrough Experience. I've done it 1,203 times. And she comes there and she's in Florida, and she's, you know, really playing the story of being a victim. You know, I was unwanted. My mother abandoned me. You know, I've been beaten, I've been raped. I've been this. I'm just running into story, story, story. And I said, all right, let's start from the first one. She said, I've been abandoned. Okay, good. Let's. Let's. Let's go to what you thought. You're abandoned. Yeah. My mom didn't walk me, and she abandoned me. Okay. What trait specifically did you think you missed out on because of that? Well, I didn't have somebody that gave me affection and didn't guide me and didn't, you know, tell me she loved me, and this that said, okay, so let's take each one of those. Who is it that guided you in your life instead? Because nothing's missing. Who took on that role? It says nobody. I said, look again. That's what the story you've been running. Look again. Nothing's missing. Look again. She finally, after a few promptings, she said, my aunt, my mom's sister. Great. Who else? A best friend's mom. Great. Who else? My grandmother. And who else? A teacher. And who else? My aunt's best friend who's to hang out at the house. I said, so did they provide what you thought your mother was to provide in your life? Yes, now that I look, yes. And then I took each of the trades she thought she missed out, and I found out who is providing it in her life because nothing's missing. I learned that when I was 14, living on the street, I realized everybody's changing hands and becoming parents and becoming these people. And I learned that way back then.

Yes.

And so all of a sudden, I said, now the next question now that you see that everything you thought is missing, wasn't missing. It was in a variety of other people's forms. What would been the drawback if it had been your mother? You never asked that you hold on to a fantasy. See, depression is a comparison of your current reality to a fantasy you get addicted to and hold on to. You had a fantasy. If your mom had done this, life would have been happier. What have been the drawback if your mom had done that? One by one, we went through them. If your mom had done that. All of a sudden she went blank and stared and started to cry. I said, so what is it? She said, she shook and she said something. My aunt said, so what is it? She goes, she started crying. She said, wow, she got chills all of a sudden. She said, when I was very young, it just came back to me. And I ignored what my aunt said. My aunt said, your mother gave you up to me because she had bipolar condition. And she put you in the bath and forgot you were there. And you nearly drowned and you nearly burned to death because the water was too scalding. And when she found that out, she thought she was so feeling so bad that she almost killed her daughter, that she says, my condition, I can't do this. I'm not. She deserves a better life than what I can provide. And when she all of a sudden heard that she's now 47 years old, the story and the psychologist that promoted the story had been going on all these years and been a victim of her history. And I said, so what was the benefit? What would the drawback if your mom did? She says, I would be die. I would have died. I wouldn't be here. And what was the benefit of your aunt doing it? She taught me a new language. What was the benefit of their teacher there? She was like a mother. And she would keep me at the school until my mother would come home. She started looking at this and she started bawling and she goes, I've been angry with my mother because I was not willing to hear even what my aunt said at the time. But right now, all of a sudden, it's just clear and I'm just in tears and all. All I want to do is thank my mom for giving me what happened. I never saw it. See, the quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask. If you ask the question, why did this happen to me? Why am I a victim of this? You get a different world than if you ask, how did what happened help me fulfill something meaningful? In my life, my. My highest priorities. Where have I done this in my life? Whatever I'm judging, if they hadn't done it, what would the drawback to crack the fantasy. If you ask a new set of questions and you turn this experience into something you're now as fuel and gratitude. She was in such gratitude. At the end of the program, people gave her a standing ovation for the most transformed because her story. Because she felt unworthy, right? So she hung out with guys that basically took advantage because she didn't feel worthy of a guy, great guy, so guys would take advantage of her. And she didn't want to turn down sexuality with him because that was the only thing she thought she had that would give them value. I mean, her whole story stemmed from a. From an incomplete awareness that she started with as a child. And all that just dissolved. She changed her perspective, changed the way she looked, she changed her hairstyle, she dropped weight. She started writing a book. She said, people need to know. This changed her whole direction. A trajectory change from asking the right question. And most people don't. They get caught in moral hypocrisy. That was bad. And I'm an innocent victim. They're the perpetrator. And I'm this victim. That zoological psychological babble stops people from mastering their life. Because it's not what happens to you, that some of the most challenged people are the ones did the most amazing things. I had another boy. I got to share this story. This boy comes to me and this. This mother says, please try to help my son. And he's suicidal and he just doesn't want to live and he doesn't feel worthy of anything. And I. And I said, so. And this is the foster mother because he had been. He'd been abandoned, right? And orphaned. And. And I said, so what? What's the deal here? And he said. He said, first of all, I was given up and rejected and unwanted. And I regressed him back right to his birth. And when he did, he saw his mother crying in a window in a. In a. And she was. He was in a hospital and crying in a window and the father taking her away. She didn't want to let go of the baby. Turned out, this was in Mumbai, India, which I was just at a few days ago. And the mother was in a slum and believed this boy deserved more than what they could offer in a slum. So when he all of a sudden saw that his whole perspective, that she. It's not that she rejected him, she wanted him, but felt he deserved More than that. And the moment he did, he started to realize. I went over and pulled out people who had been abandoned and orphaned on the Internet. Celebrities and famous people that were orphaned and abandoned. Go look them up. It's worth it. It's a hundred. There's hundreds of them. You know, Sir Isaac Newton, right? And. And I just started going down the list, and I said, do you know these people? We looked up each of these famous people and their accomplishments on the Internet while on his phone, and I said, they're all orphans. They were all left. And look at what they've accomplished. You're in that category. So we. In. In. In 30 minutes, we transformed the perception of what he had over there and the idea that he was abandoned and unwanted to. I'm now in that category of people that do extraordinary things. The trajectory in his life and his desire to want to do something for his mother to prove that he was, you know, that she. Because she did that, gave him that chance. The guy just took off, and the story changed. And. And a lot of times, if we're not. If we don't have a story of thankfulness, we don't have the true story. We have a. We have a story that's incomplete in awareness. We're not seeing the hidden order. We're seeing the chaos. And, and to me, asking the right question to see the whole, whole picture where you can be thankful is liberating and energizing and vitalizing to human experience. Wow.

I got so much from that share. Maybe this somebody's watching this for the third time because we all learn the most through story. So thank you for those two stories. What a pivotal moment in both of these people's lives. And, John, on a personal level, you just described what I went through in a vision quest in 20. 2022, in a vision quest, I sat and I was going through all this anger with my father, and it was like a lot of young memories coming through. Because I'm. I'm sure you're familiar with vision quest, where you go and fast for 100 hours, just you and nature and water. And I stood up in the sharing circle and I screamed as loud as I could. I said, my father didn't want me. He didn't want me. And then once that energy had released and we sat down and there was sharing with the ego completely out of the way, my mentor, Mark, said to me, have you ever considered that maybe the greatest gift your father could have ever given you was the absence of his presence? And I feel it in my Throat my heart right now, just the same. It's really the question and the perception based on a new awareness. But that new awareness can only come with certain ingredients. What do you believe those ingredients are for that awareness to be present, because the healing and transformation is profound for all of us.

Well, the magnificence of questions. Questions make unconscious information conscious. So if somebody says to me, like, I had a lady the other day just a few days ago, today's Friday, isn't it? I think Friday, so this is like Wednesday a couple days ago. And she basically said her father was violent and used to hit the mother and hit her, right? And the brother. And I said, okay, so who is the overprotector in the family? Because you never attract violence unless you got an overprotector. They overprotect you, makes you juvenile dependent, and then you need the aggressive person to break you free of the dependency so you can become independent, because that's what makes you more entrepreneurial, independent. The. The assertiveness. It's like why we have bullies and we got overprotective kids sometimes. And all of a sudden she stopped. I said, go to the moment when he's actually doing this. Who's the overprotector? And she said, my aunt, my mom, my grandma, my dog, my brother, my aunt's friend, the next door neighbor. They're all sitting there keeping me juvenile, making me not grow up, over protecting me, not giving me accountabilities. And my mom is playing that role and my dad is playing the opposite. And she saw it for the first time in her life because I asked her the question and then she said. I said, what do you do for a living? I laughed because I knew where it was going. She said, I'm a parent counselor. I said, I said, how much money do you make? And she said, I make about $125,000 a year. I said, how much do you give to your dad for making sure you became a parent counselor? Because if it wasn't for that, you wouldn't have been independent, you wouldn't have been a leader, you wouldn't have been outspoken, you wouldn't have had the desire to create a book that you've written. And she goes, you're absolutely right. I said, if you had been surrounded by your. Your mom and only your protection and protection, where would you be today? She said, I would be. Yeah, I'd be living in a small town doing nothing. I said, it's your dad that helped you challenge you, made you independent, stand on your own Two feet, be defiant, speak out and go out and do it. She goes. She started getting tears in her eyes and she said, I never saw that. I was in a. Moral hypocrisy. Kind, good, cruel, bad. Ah, but kind and cruel make up love. In fact, if you love somebody, anybody you're married to, if you stay with them long enough, there's going to be moments when they're kind. Times where they're cruel. Oh, yeah. Give you hugs and slugs. And you need them. Because if you're going, if you get cocky, they need to bring you down. If you get humble, they lift you up and they're going to do both sides to kind of keep you and get you authentic. The purpose of marriage is not happiness. The purpose of marriage is to get you authentic. That's the fantasy people live in. They get addicted to the fantasy and then they think, well, it's not working. No, it is working. Teaching you how to love both sides of yourself.

I want to ask you about the fantasy you talked about. Fantasy and depression is the comparison of your current reality to a fantasy that you're reaching for. But what causes the fantasy with anxiety? Specifically people that are having overwhelming anxiety. Can you speak to the audience about people that are experiencing overwhelming anxiety? What is the fantasy model there?

So I'll use a story again. So this boy, he was, I think about almost 11 months old. And he was scampering around on the ground. And the father, mother started a big fight and the father got really aggressive and violent. And the boy was frightened and wanted to protect the mom. But, you know, intellectually in the brain of the child, it's like, I would protect mommy, protect mommy. But was. Yeah. And scampered off into the room, got underneath the bunk bed, put pillows around it to protect itself, and eventually shut off its ears, shut off its sight. It didn't want to see or hear mommy. And it just went into a kinesthetic mode. And so we fell asleep. Well, mom and dad calmed down, you know, because they fight sometimes they calm down. The next morning, dad goes off to work. Mommy gets up, make sure the boy gets dressed and everything else and eats and stuff and takes him to the grocery store. So he goes to the grocery store and he's in the basket because he's not even a year old, he's in the basket, you know, and they're going down the aisle and all of a sudden a guy comes down the aisle. The dad had blue jeans and a white shirt, brown hair and a brown mustache. Father, a guy comes down the Aisle with blue jeans, white shirt, brown hair, brown mustache. The moment this child spotted it, the child had two responses. Either to get behind dad and mommy and protect it, or get in front of mommy and turn back and look over at children and try to protect mommy. Because the brain associated blue jeans, white shirt, brown hair, brown busters with aggression and violence. And so the fight or flight response came in to try to protect mommy or to protect itself. So then all of a sudden the guy goes by, and the second the guy goes by, walks by, doesn't hurt mommy. He calms down. Mommy's going, why is this reacting? Is there? Why? What's this about? So they go down the next aisle, and all of a sudden they see a guy with blue jeans, yellow shirt, brown hair, brown mustache. So the child now associates blue jeans, white shirt, brown hair, brown mustache. But now yellow is associated. It's not strong, but it's a secondary association associated with brown hair and blue jeans. So they go down there, and there's this little bit of anxiety, a little bit of response, not as strong as the first one. Then they go down another aisle, and they finally see a guy that's got blonde hair, no mustache, white shirt, blue jeans. And so now the baby has another association because the blue jeans and white shirt, but not the yellow hair. So it's a little bit less of an anxiety. So anxiety is a compounding, a secondary tertiary and quarter compounding of one event that's been assumed to be traumatic and traumatic, more pain and pleasure that you're running around storing in the hippocampus, in the subconscious mind, the amygdala signed it, and it's stored there. And so all the associations that remind you of it, any sound or sight or anything that reminds you of the original event can trigger it. And after a while, secondary things can trigger it and tertiary, and eventually hundreds of things are stimulating that response. And you're wondering, why are you having anxiety around? It could just been secondary, tertiary and quaternary stimuli are stimulating a response. It's a fight or flight response from an original event. If I go back to that original event, that original event, and neutralize that original event, the whole cascade disappears. We had a lady in London, she was 16 years old, she was standing on a street corner, and she had four other friends, I believe, or five other friends gathered around and they were smoking pot and they were just getting stoned, standing on the corner and everything else, you know, like teenagers sometimes do. And all of a sudden a car comes up to the corner and where they were the sidewalk was. There was a little knoll down to the street. It was like a little bit of an angle. And this person pulls up, rolls down the window and says, excuse me, we're kind of lost. Can you tell us where this. Instruct us where to go to get this thing. There were four guys in that car, teenagers, probably 18, 19, 20, something like that. So the girl knew where the street was and walked down, didn't think anything of it. Walks down towards the car, gets down close to the car and says, it's about two blocks this way and about two blocks that way. You're close, you're not too far. And he does. The guy gets out to say, well, can I thank you, and opens the door, grabs her and starts to grab her in the car. And the moment she does, she just gets in the car. They start to drive off, but they're trying to pull her in the car. The people that run off to her and grab her, and this big guy reached down and literally grabbed her legs and held her. And they were dragging them along like that. And finally they let her go and drove off. And she got scraped up and bruised and kind of hurt, but this guy grabbed her. So she was in shock and went to the hospital, and they had to get some stitches and scrapes and stuff done. And she was in shock, and she was. Because she was stoned, she made this association. And she started an anxiety disorder. And the specialists that she went to said, well, you have an anxiety disorder, you take this med, right? Classical med thing, sure. So the mother brings her to me, and I said, go to the moment at that exact moment where you felt the change occurred, where you felt safe. And all of a sudden you went, oh, my God, this guy's trying to hurt me. And at that exact moment, go get present in that moment. Because the mind automatically, for every memory it has an anti memory. It will dissociate from anything that's painful and create an artificial, counterbalancing reality in the mind as a dissociation. So at that moment when he's pulling you down, who in your mind is pulling you up? She said, he says, the guy that I had the hots for, that I was hoping would be interested in me, he's the one that lunged forward and grabbed me and came to the hospital with me and spent the evening with me and came home to my parents and stayed in the house to make sure I was okay. I said, so what you're saying is at the moment somebody's pulling you down, he was trying to hold you up, pull you up? Yep. And the moment this person is trying to harm you, he's trying to keep you safe. Yep. And the moment you're sitting there being dragged, he's trying to lift you off the ground and then he carried you? Yep. Are these pairs of opposites? Yeah. And did you have a desire to want to be with this guy? Yeah. Did these guys help you get the guy that you wanted? And you were too, you were a little anxious about talking to him and you were quiet, you weren't speaking up and these guys made it where you end up having him stay with you and. Yeah. He's your boyfriend. Yup. Do you really think you would have got scored him that night? Nope. So did these guys help you get your boyfriend? And she, she goes, I never thought of that. So at that exact moment that you thought you had trauma and tragedy, you also had ecstasy? And she goes, yeah. I said the moment you see the pairs of opposite simultaneously and synchronous in the brain, as we'll have one father of experimental psychology demonstrate, you liberate yourself from the emotional bondage of these things that you infatuate or resent and they synchronize and synthesize and the gamma burst occurs in the brain, the gambling synchronicity occurs. And all of a sudden she's in tears and she all of a sudden wasn't angry at the people and she was now grateful for what happened because now she's got the guy in her life that she knew and that was a confirmation that he's the guy. And since that time he's there. So anyway, once we finished that the anxiety was gone and there was no medication and I was speaking, that was a Friday afternoon evening. And the following Tuesday I was doing a program at the Bloomsbury Hotel in London and there was the mother in her. And I'm there in the front row and I was getting up on stage and I looked down, I saw him and I came down the steps, I gave them both a hug and the mother said, she says head and head anxiety. Since you chatted with her, it just cleared it because you transformed the misperception that she had. She saw a one sided world. Tragedy without comedy, negative without positive. And you helped her ask questions, make her conscious of both sides simultaneously liberated it. And now she's there. And I said, where's the boyfriend? It says, well, he's working tonight. I said, well, next time I come to London, I want to meet you. And the boyfriend says, no problem. But she said there the anxiety is gone. The medication wasn't needed. Medication is a symptom. You know, it's a palliative thing. Instead of actually going in there and dissolving the very illusion that we get trapped in sometimes. And I'm not denying that the guy tried to steal her and tried to hurt her, tries to possibly rape her. But the truth is, in that exact moment, there was a pair of opposites. And the mind will automatically make a pair of opposites to create a homeostatic system. It's an interoceptive homeostatic system in the brain, to maintain homeostasis in the brain. But we ignore it in psychology. I'm a guy. Neurology. I finished a textbook last year on neurology, and I watched those subtle changes in there. And if we go ask the right questions, we can wake them up and liberate ourselves from these misperceptions that we store in our subconscious mind. Run these stories for decades on and just dissolve them. There's nothing your mortal body can experience. Your mortal soul can't. Love. The mortal soul is the state of unconditional love when you see the hidden order and the various things are going on in life, and then you see life on the way, not in the way. You don't have the baggage that weighs you down and ages you. You have the thing that lightens you up and inspires you.

You have such passion, and this passion is literally infectious. And it's because you've spent your life figuring out what are the best questions to ask. Like you said, if you want different results, ask better questions. The insight that those stories gave us just by the teaching and the medium of story, is so profound. So I just want to have this be a call for anyone that's struggling with depression or anxiety. Rewind that. Share this podcast with someone. John, as we say goodbye, there's something I get to ask you. I've been wanting to ask you this ever since we got on the podcast today. The severity of the event does not essentially matter. What matters most is the awareness and the perception of the event. In other words, it could be someone falling down, skinning their knee, or someone going through rape, or someone going through physical trauma, abuse. They all are essentially stories. They're events. And then we create these stories about the events. On one intellectual level, I get that. But what about the spiritual side of your work? So much of your work is neurology and mindset and language and perception and changing how we associate to the event. But how does spirituality play a role in your work?

It's all spiritual. Get out of the idea that this is spiritual. And that's not. That's. That's.

I'm glad you said that. I was curious. I was curious.

Yeah. I mean, you know, people. I. I got two more stories I got to share. I know I'm probably okay, but. So I have this. This lady. This lady comes up to me and she says, what do you do? She's in my breakthrough experience. She says, what do you do when you have a husband that's not spiritual? I said, there is no such thing. She said, what do you mean there's no such thing? He's not spiritual. I said, no, no, no, no, no. Well, you know, I said, what do you think is spiritual? She says, well, I meditate and I chant and I, you know, contemplate and I go to retreats and I, you know, I. I call in the goddesses and, I mean, all this stuff she was doing. And I said, okay, so what. What does he do? He says, well, he owns an IT company, and all he does is work and make money, and he's focused on into spiritual things. I said, so let me make sure I get this right. Do you work? And she goes, no. I said, so he works. He has a company. How many employees? 200. An ID company that sells stuff around the world. He's employing 200 people. He's paying millions in taxes. He's employing people and serving, I mean, millions of people with his company. And. And. And then he's making an income providing a great life while you can sit and go and contemplate your navel. What? Because you're not working and yet you're doing what you think is spiritual, but he's inspired by what he's doing. What? Spiritual is whatever inspires somebody. If it's raising beautiful children, if it's running a major business, it's me teaching, you know, pole jumping, whatever it may be, you know, pole vaulting or whatever. I met a lady that was pole vaulting, and she felt it was her calling at a young age, and she had three gold medals and everything else, and I'd worked with her in my program, and she just absolutely inspired people, and she saw that as her spiritual path. Some people think, well, it's. You got to go to a temple or a mosque or. No, that's. That's. That's also spiritual. It's not less, but it's not more. I mean, you can sit, meditate and. And contemplate the. The universe and have spirituality, or you can be doing something. I met A guy. I got a picture of a guy that started at age 3, playing the piano. At 9, he was a concert pianist around the world. I mean, amazing player. He's 80 now. And I asked him, had lunch with him and dinner with him. I said, how many hours do you put into your practice? And I was expecting, you know, a few hours a day or something like that. 13 hours a day for 77 years. You tell him that that's not his spiritual path. You'd be slapped. It's all spiritual. Where's God? Not, as Guru Nanak used to say, where's the divine? Not where's the main. You see, we go around and we impose this moral hypocrisy and this idea about how it's supposed to be based on some local religious, you know, very narrow construct. You know, when you stop and think of the planet Earth, it's a little dot. And if you go to the sun, it's 93 million miles away, right? And if you look at the Earth, it's hard. You can't see it unless you got a telescope. And if you go to the Milky Way, 26,000 light years, you can't even see our solar system. The dust is too much. It's insignificant. You go to the Local Group and the Virgo Cluster and the Lanika super cluster and go into the cosmic web. You can't even. You don't even know where this exists. And so what we think is the spiritual thing is a really infinitesimal. And I think I'd say blow past that and give yourself permission to live with holy curiosity and see the divine magnificence of everything that's going on and find it and use it to your advantage. Because it's not unless you make it. So, you know, you make it hell or heaven out of it. As John Dewey said, you can make a heaven out of a hell or a hell of a heaven by asking questions and deciding. Plato in his dialogues used to do that with his students, right? The guy would say, this is terrible. And he said he'd ask, what about this, this, this and this? He goes, no, it's actually terrific. And then he turned around. He goes, what about this and this and now it's terrible. And he made him go back and forth until he realized, well, if it's. Is it terrible or terrific? He said, thinking makes it so. If you ask new questions, you become aware of things you didn't see and you didn't see two sides of things at the highest level of the soul. It's neither Good nor evil at the bottom level of the barrel, the gravitational pull of the earth and your senses that are living in this little plane here. Everything is either good or evil. But ultimately we're here to have a transcendent awareness, not some imminent narrow minded idea about what it is. It's local to a particular group at this time and somewhere in space and time. Get past that, see a bigger picture and realize that it's not what happens to you, it's your perception of it. Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is the choice of your perceptions of what happened to you.

So many people that I know here in Austin that are in the spiritual world, even some of the most popular spiritual teachers in the world that I've had the pleasure to interview off camera, they don't always seem happy, they don't always seem fulfilled. And I feel like, John, I'm curious how you feel about this. As we say goodbye sometimes putting all your efforts myopically on spiritual growth. You miss the self, you miss the person. What do you make of that?

Yeah, well, I, I'm, I set out when I was 18 years old to empower all seven areas of life. I, I believe that a, you know, well lived life is one that is in having an inspired mission, that you really are inspired by whatever that is and that your spiritual quest, climbing. I mean I had a friend, Pat Falby, that, that's climbed Mount Everest four times, the, the top seven peaks twice. You walked to the north and South Pole. He swam the Amazon River. That's his spiritual quest. He's a, he's, he says he wakes up. Is there anything I have fear about today? If it is, let me go conquer that. You know, to try to transcend. So yeah, I mean we're here to, to get past the delusions in our life. And I don't think that, you know, the, the little boxes that we get caught in are traditions that we subordinate to instead of actually superordinate and get beyond. And I'm a firm believer that whatever you see, look for its opposite. Because sometimes we get caught and trapped and this is spiritual and that's not. And as far as I'm concerned, everything, every perception has an equal and opposite. And the synthesis of that is, is our spiritual. As Hegel said in his dialectic, that's the spiritual, the thing, the synthesis of all opposites. And you can't have a perception without the opposite. You can't. If you're in complete white, you can't perceive you're complete black, you can't Perceive, you have to have a contrast to perceive. And the law of contrast. If they're imbalanced, you now have subjective biases and you label things positive or negative. If you see them completely objectively and you see them synchronously, all you're sitting there is in tears of gratitude, speechless. And you realize that there was a hidden order and a divine perfection or a magnificent, you know, implicate order, if you want to call it by bone, whatever you want to call it. There's an implicate order sitting there. And that's the. That's the elegant mathematical equation that. I love the story when Russell Crowe is finishing in the Beautiful Mind and you know he's doing his Nobel Prize. Great movie. Yeah. It's not the real thing. The guy says, because I've gone through all the Nobel Prize winners. That's not what was actually said. That was just a movie. But what a great line, you know, it's in the mysterious equation called love. Mathematical equation called love where everything is elegantly, beautifully symmetrical at the same time. When you see both sides and you don't get pulled to illusions of one sidedness and that's transcending the moral hypocrisies. That's spirituality at its finest. The lowest level of spirituality is anthropomorphic judgments. The highest level of spirituality is the mathematical abstraction of the elegant beauty and symmetry of awareness in your own life.

And maybe in the lives of people that you've coached and reached. Has there ever been a time or a place where it's appropriate or efficacious to be able to use plant medicines for spiritual or personal growth?

Well, I. I kind of did that when I was a teenager.

Did you do it consciously or unconsciously?

Well, I don't know what you called it.

Teenager.

Yeah. Yeah. But I can't say that once I learned about the power of my mind and the power of asking questions and meditation and. And being present and gradually learned science of being present. I can't say I ever had a need for it or desire for it. But there's some people that have had their lives impacted by it in a magnificent way waking them up. But I did that as a teenager when I was. I mean as a young teenager. I did that till I was almost 18. Right. Right before I died. I had, you know, LS. What do you call love? Service and dedication, you know, and it was a plant that grew there on Hawaii, the wood rose plant. So then I experimented with that when I was a teenager. But I can't say I've ever needed to or desired to since. But I know people that have, they've definitely been impacted, but some have gone too far. You know, they made it part of a life and I've seen them and I've had to actually try to bring them back. They went off and split apart. But many people had great experiences and moved forward and expanded, made them realize there's more in their brain than they ever thought. But they're playing a little of a gamble with their chemistry. I'd rather see. I, I learned, I studied all the transmitter signal molecules from embryology all the way to the current brain. The best as we know. We're learning new ones all the time. And I, I'm certain that you can change any one of those neurochemistries by asking the right question. I can make your serotonin go up by asking you questions and make you feel proud. I can make your dopamine go down by asking you questions that make you into anxiety again. I mean, I can make any one of those chemistries, cortisol go up, testosterone go up by asking the right question. So if you know how to ask the right questions and become aware of what you've been unconscious of, you can play with your neurochemistry and then take command of your pharmaceutical business inside your head. And I'd much rather train people on doing that than take something outside, which is a bit of a gambler. Wow.

Wow, love that so much. We've explored some beautiful areas. Thank you for your wisdom. You know the podcast is wellness and wisdom, right? So in order to be well, I believe we have to take that wisdom and apply it to life experience. Right. It's no knock on 21 year old life coaches. They just haven't had your life experience or the life experience to actually embody that wisdom. What I heard from you, by the way, before we say goodbye, is you don't need plant medicine, but there may be a time and a place for it if you have the neurochemistry to be able to handle it.

Well, it's not a matter of whether you need it or not. You know, I believe that if people have the experience, I think that will open up a door in their life. But I don't know if it's the most efficient way of life itself. But the experience I think is valuable because I know some people have gone to extremes on that and they paid a price. But sure, you know, like moderation, you know, it's like kissing. If you try to kiss a woman non stop for about a week it's not really. It's too much. Yeah. Yes. Hedonic adaptation will adapt.

John, what a great conversation. Thank you for sharing. You know, you said you've done tens of thousands of interviews at this point. You know, what is something that's on your heart right now in this current moment in your life experience as it pertains to wholeness and wellness? You know, wellness is really what I talked about, the embodiment of that wisdom for my own life. Wellness is an amalgamation of many different things. But I'm curious for you, what does wellness actually mean to you? What is the, the meaning that you place upon wellness? And how do you define wellness in your own personal life?

Well, illness is I Wellness is we. When I am too proud or too humble to admit what I see and anything around me as me, I have illness. When I see that whatever I see in others is me, I have we illness. Because everything is us. Schopenhauer says that we become the, the true self to the degree we make everything else ourselves. So anything that we think is not a reflection of our own projection wise to go back and look again. And once we realize that whatever we see, it's us, it's liberating. And then we realize there's a wholeness there. And wholeness and wellness come from the same thing, comes from the root will wheel, which is also the source of wealth. Wealth and wellness come from the same root wheel. W e a o so your wellness in life and your, you might say your wealth in life, wealth of life, abundance of life are the same. And so the second we see that nothing's missing in our life, we have wellness. And I have a new book called that's coming out soon. It's called balance your mind, heal the body. Right, and balance mind wellness with the body. And it's, it's all about that mechanism and it goes to the epigenetics, neurology and how it all works and everything else. And so I'm a firm believer. I've been studying healing for 50 plus years now. And we, we don't know the limits of our value ability to heal. I've seen so many amazing transformations in people's lives when they transform their perceptions and attitudes mind. So that's the greatest discovery we got.

Thank you. Well, to bring it back to the very beginning, you know, your birthday. Thank you. Born on Thanksgiving day. Thank you for being here. Thank you for doing what you do in the world. We all see you. People across the world see you and we appreciate you. You could have chosen a different path. But we are very grateful that you chose this one. So thank you for being here.

Thank you. I appreciate the being on your show and whoever's listening out there, no matter what you've done or not done, you're worthy of love. And don't compare yourself to others. Compare your daily actions to your own highest values. Don't be living by subordinating to other people. Being second, being somebody else. Be first to being you.

Okay, everyone, until we see you again, another podcast. John and I are both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk with you soon.