E164 - Dr. John Demartini: How To Transmute Fear into Love & Confusion into Clarity

When life feels confusing or heavy, it’s often because we’re living out of alignment with what truly matters to us. In this episode, world-renowned human behavior expert Dr. John Demartini explains how to uncover your highest values, dissolve self-sabotage, and see the hidden order behind life’s challenges. We explore why setbacks are actually stepping stones, how comparison keeps you from your unique genius, and why clarity comes from asking the right questions. From the search for meaning to the science of values, Dr. Demartini offers timeless wisdom on how to transform confusion into clarity and fear into love. Integrative Psychology Masters https://integpsych.org/therapy Book a One to One call https://integpsych.org/support 20% off Pique Life Tea: https://www.piquelife.com/knowthyself Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list ___________ 0:00 Intro 1:41 Discover the Hidden Order to Life: Transcend Infatuation & Judgement 10:45 Becoming Conscious, Seeing Life Objectively 17:37 Impactful Questions for Self Inquiry 29:47 The Cost of Living Out of Alignment 31:12 Go From Comparison to Unique Genius 38:31 Discover Your Values with This Process 46:22 Setbacks are not IN the way... They're ON the way. 52:18 Are Our Lives Significant? Big Picture & Nihilism 59:42 The Meaning of Life 1:06:59 Religion, Essential Self, & The Big Bang 1:11:01 How to Prioritize What Matters in Your Life 1:23:24 Delegating What's NOT Meaningful to You 1:30:27 Embark On Your Personal Journey of Living Aligned 1:34:44 Defining the Essence of Wisdom 1:38:13 Most Influential Books & Teachers for Him 1:41:37 Learn How to Learn & Integrate Information 1:54:17 What Is An Original Idea? 2:00:05 Conclusion ___________ Episode Resources: https://drdemartini.com https://www.instagram.com/drjohndemartini/ https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I was 23 years old and I asked myself a question. Why do some people walk or talk, some people live their life? Why do some people do what they say no one does? I want to know the answer to that. People talk about sabotage. I've never seen sabotage. Impulsive, compulsive, addictive behaviors are compensations for unfulfilled highest values.

• 0:18André Duqum?

  What is the direct cost of living life in this state of unawareness?

• 0:23Speaker 00

  In a nutshell, entropy, which we call illness. But our intuition, it is trying to whisper to us the side that we're ignoring. Now, what I've done is I've developed systems of asking questions to help us see the part that we've overlooked. I now ask the question, now you get to be authentic and you get to know thyself. You get to be yourself. You get to love yourself. When you can't wait to get up in the morning and do something extremely inspiring and meaningful, you're not distracted by immediate gratification because you're now focusing on long-term vision. So if you don't fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, you will automatically shrink your space and time horizons for a quick fix. So what you say means very little. What your life demonstrates means everything.

• 1:10André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know thyself Podcast. Our guest today is a renowned human behavior expert, international bestseller, author, speaker, someone who has supported millions of people move beyond confined, limiting beliefs that hold them back in life. And our last conversation was incredible. I loved it so much and you guys really, really resonated with it as well. So I'm so pleased to have back Dr. John D. Martini. Thank you for coming back.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:40André Duqum?

  I like to dive right in. You've spoken to, throughout your work, about this hidden order behind all life, throughout the cosmos and the human developmental journey. And behind every experience, every judgment, every perception, there is a hidden order waiting to be realized. Could you set the framework for what you feel that is so that we can see how it might support us in living a more fulfilled human experience?

• 2:06Speaker 00

  What a great question to start off with. Thank you.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  There were two gentlemen that came from MIT that created information theory. And there was another named Claude Shannon, who took that and kind of put it out on the map. And he basically said that disorder is, or randomness, was missing information. And the order was the reclaiming of that information. Another mathematician, Stephen Wolfram, said that most of us have a computational boundary in our ability to identify information that's missing.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  And therefore, we tend to see things from a chaotic, disordered perspective. But if we can ask questions, since the quality of our lives is based on the questions we ask, if we can ask questions that make us conscious of what was unconscious and reclaim the information that we think is missing, which is not, but we think it is because we're unconscious of it, because we filtered out with subjective bias, and we access that information, we can reclaim and discover the hidden order in the apparent chaos. So I'll use an analogy. You have to tell me when to stop, because I'll keep going.

• 3:33André Duqum?

  Keep rolling.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  You meet somebody that you're attracted to. Your amygdala assigns availability to it as a positive experience, prey, something you want to consume and eat. So you have an impulse to seek it out. And because, in order to survive, we needed false positives to assume that that was prey instead of assuming it's not, or predator instead of assuming it's not, we err on the idea that it is more positive than negative or more negative than positive. We tend to skew and bias our interpretation of reality.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  So if we see something that we're attracted to, we become conscious of the positives and unconscious of the negatives. Whatever we're unconscious of is missing information. We're asleep, we're unawake, we're not seeing it.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  So if we infatuate with something, or admire something, or seek something, we're partly blind to the downsides of the catch. The same thing on reverse. If we see something that we think is more predator, and we're conscious of the downside, unconscious of the upside, we skew again on with false positives, and to do that, primarily because we need to be able to run faster than the prey, and run faster than the predator to survive. So as a survival mechanism, we skew our interpretation of reality, and we become conscious and unconscious. Conscious of the positives, unconscious of the negatives, or conscious of the negatives, unconscious of the positives.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  And each time we do that, we're now in our amygdala, seeking or avoiding, and storing that information in our hippocampus as episodic memories of something that we can not starve by, and something we can escape, and something we can not be eaten by. So as long as we have these skewed views, we're missing information. We're not seeing the whole. A day, a week, a month, a year, or five years later, after we capture this prey, this person we're admiring, we start to discover some of the downsides that we didn't see initially. And the same thing, what we thought was terrible, a day, a week, a month, a year, or five years later,

• 6:00Speaker 00

  we can look back and go, "I'm so grateful I had that experience." It seemed terrible initially, but it actually gave me a catalyst for independence, or innovation, or something. So our first interpretation can be skewed, and we can miss information, and be unconscious of part of it. And therefore, we see chaos, we see the disorder, and we're caught in a kind of a cyclothymic oscillation in our perceptions and actions. But our intuition, which is nothing but negative feedback systems in our brain, trying to make us see the whole, so we can be fully conscious and awakened and enlightened, and love, it is trying to whisper to us

• 6:44Speaker 00

  the side that we're ignoring when we're infatuated, or resentful, or seeking or avoiding. And so it is constantly trying to bring into our conscious awareness the part we're unconscious of, so we can be fully conscious.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Now, what I've done is I've developed systems of asking questions that are prompted by what we have inside our intuition to help us see the part that we've overlooked and become fully conscious. And when we do, we discover what I call the hidden order. It was only hidden from our conscious awareness. The order was there the whole time. We could call it the implicit order if we use David Bohm's terms. We could call it the divine order if we use theological terms. But it's basically where we realize that at our full conscious awareness, nothing's missing. But in our personas, our masks, our imposter syndromes,

• 7:43Speaker 00

  we have information that's missing. So disorder means missing information. Reclaiming that information allows us to see the hidden order, the meaning behind things. We impose and project false meanings on things initially. This is good, this is bad. And we get trapped in moral hypocrisies. But once we go probing deeper and discovering the information that's missing, we find the true golden mean, the real meaning behind things. And it's a synthesis and synchronicity of the complementary opposites. And we have, by definition, love. I always say love is the synthesis and synchronicity of all complementary opposites, the unity of opposites that Heraclitus described.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  And so, asking questions and become cognizant and trusting our intuition, which sometimes meditation can, you know, percolate and bring to the surface. And then you're now clear and aware, and you don't have noise and static. You have the channel of the signal of the soul, you might say, coming through. And when you do that, you have a glimpse of knowing yourself. You have a glimpse of not... Because if you put somebody on a pedestal and are attracted to them, you'll tend to minimize yourself, which is inauthenticity. And if you put somebody in the pit and exaggerate yourself, you're inauthentic. But if you're able to be fully conscious of both sides and have pure reflective awareness, which is a true intimacy with the universe...

• 9:09Speaker 00

  And now you get to be authentic and you get to know thyself. You get to be yourself. You get to love yourself. And the hidden order, I really believe that the symptoms of our physiology, psychology, sociology, and even theological feedback, business feedback, is nothing more than a feedback to guide us back to knowing the truth about ourself, our authentic self, where we have sustainable, fair exchange with other people instead of trying to get something for nothing for narcissism, or trying to give something for nothing for altruism, both of which are skewed interpretations of reality. So I would much rather use the feedback from the universe and become more consciously

• 9:52Speaker 00

  aware and ask quality questions and become aware of the whole. Because the aware of the whole balances out the autonomic nervous system, balances out the brainwaves, takes the delta from the parasympathetic and the beta from the sympathetic and puts it into the alpha theta junction, and then all of a sudden initiates a gamma synchronesthesia, eureka moment, an aha moment where we're actually seeing the whole, and we have tears of gratitude because we've now accessed now the hidden order.

• 10:22André Duqum?

  Sign me up. So this is something that I feel very called and have for a while in my life, to experience life as it is, to see people as they are, to not be so identified through the lens and cognitive bias of my own rose-colored tinted glasses, to see people as who they are for how I want them to show up instead of who they are in this moment. And so for those that strive to live with the cognizance of this hidden order, to, like you said, become a being who is in love, which is the recognition, the synthesis and synchronization of complementary opposites, which you mentioned, to have our first impressions upon life, how have you trained yourself to be aware of the upside of the downside,

• 11:07André Duqum?

  the complementary opposites? How have you cultivated your perception to be able to live from that place where you're seeing life in a more objective sense?

• 11:18Speaker 00

  I don't want to mislead people in thinking that I stay there.

• 11:21André Duqum?

  How have you made progress?

• 11:23Speaker 00

  I don't even know if it's progress. I'm going to reframe that.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  Socrates was considered a wise individual, but he spoofed that because he said, "I know nothing." And what he was really saying is, when you infatuate with somebody, you really don't know who they are. You're blind to their downsides. When you resent somebody, you don't really know who they are. You're blind to the upsides. But when you actually get to see both sides simultaneously, as Wilhelm Wont called the law of contrast, simultaneously, and you have the tears of gratitude and feel love for somebody, you get to know yourself. You only have certainty when you embounce both sides simultaneously. So I have moments where I know,

• 12:14Speaker 00

  but whatever I know, what I don't know is always an infinite. What I know is always a finite, an infinitesimal. So you have to live, as Einstein said, in holy curiosity to continually embrace the next mystery. You have the history of what you know, but you have the mystery of what's to come. And even if you're present and you're not in the state of time, you still have the mysteries of what's unknown. Because no matter what you conceive in your infinitude, it's still finite because it's only what we know today. So I always say enlightenment is a relative term, more so than "I'm now enlightened." I would consider myself a relatively aware individual. That's it. Now, each time I go into the next mystery,

• 12:59Speaker 00

  I'm now confronted by the polarities. And so I don't have this idea that I stay there or I'm mostly there. Because if you're growing, you're continually confronting your next mystery. And if you're not, you're stagnant. You're not really pushing yourself or allowing yourself to emerge. So I don't want to give the impression that I'm any different than anybody else because I don't think that would be fair to people. Because then it would make it think, "Well, I need to be like that," or it'd make people look up or down at people. I don't find that productive.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  So, but I do, when I am confronted with that, I have accumulated a series of questions because the questions I ask make me more conscious of things that I'm overlooking. So I hold myself accountable by the questions. So if I now am confronted by something that I think, well, oh, wow, that's amazing, or, you know, I don't like that, and I put a spin on it, and I, and I put a moral illusion on it or something, then I will watch my physiology respond by a seeking avoidance response. I'm now in my amygdala. I'm not in my executive center. I'm not self-governed. I'm not knowing myself. I'm distorting myself by the law of contrast to things that I'm exaggerating or minimizing around me.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  So then I just, if I find it's mild and it's not really perturbing me, I may just be patient and pass through it. If I find that it's now distracting and occupying space and time in the mind, I may then address the questions and pull them out, maybe even on a piece of paper, and start asking the questions to help me look at what I'm overlooking. Our physiology is an amazing feedback. So if you are infatuated with something and are attracted to it and impulsively seeking it, and it occupies space and time in your mind and is stored in the hippocampus, which creates the existential world we live in because it's putting things in space and time,

• 15:00Speaker 00

  which makes us existential. That occupation of space and time in the mind, that intrusive thought at night when you're sleeping preoccupies your mind, and it clouds the clarity of the mind so when you're sleeping, it's a bit disturbing. The same thing if you're resentful. If you're highly resentful to something, it's hard to sleep. Highly infatuated, it's hard to sleep. So the insomniac, you know, responses that we have at night are letting us know that we have a skewed, subjective interpretation of reality, and we're not seeing things whole and objective. And so it's guiding us to ask the questions to counterbalance the content that's occupying our mind to help us stabilize ourselves. And the second we're back to being ourselves, we sleep soundly.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  And the same thing, if we polarize our perception and we're seeking something, now we fear its loss. And if we're trying to avoid something, now we fear its gain. So insomnia is basically a culmination of the accumulation of the fear of losses and fear of gains. I always say the master lives in a world of transformation and resiliency, and the masters live in the illusions of gain and loss. So when we have that, we have all this noise. And when I am aware that I do that, I will then bring up the questions and hold myself accountable to bring back the balance sheet and see things as it is instead of as it is perceived. You know, it was David Hume, a Scottish philosopher,

• 16:31Speaker 00

  who, when he was studying values, he said, there's is and there's ought. And the Gita said, as it is, versus as it's not. And so what we do is we go through and we sometimes get indoctrinated and inculcated, injected values by outer authorities or normative deontological belief systems that this is the way it should be, ought to be, supposed to be, got to be, have to be, need to be, etc., instead of what it is. And so if I find myself hearing imperative language inside me, directed towards me or directed towards others, I know that I'm in an imposter syndrome, and I know it's time to ask the questions

• 17:13Speaker 00

  to corroborate the mine and bring myself to what it is. Because what is is the magnificence and hidden order of the universe. It's always there, waiting for us to become aware of it, but we tend to impose our distortions on it, only to create our symptomatology as a feedback to guide us back to seeing what is. Because the magnificence of what is far exceeds any of the fantasies we impose on it.

• 17:37André Duqum?

  Would you mind sharing a question or two of those?

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Let's say that I meet somebody that I admire and look up to and I infatuate. And I'm too humble to admit what I see in them is inside me. And I think they have figured something or known something, either intellectually, or in business, or in finance, or in relationship, or in social settings, or social savvy, or physical fitness, or spiritual awareness, or whatever. I have the illusion that there's something missing. At the level of the soul, nothing's missing. You have pleuronic fulfillment. At the level of the senses, things appear to be missing. And you have kynomic emptiness and unfulfillment. So if I have a moment where I'm too humble to see what I see in them,

• 18:25Speaker 00

  I immediately ask, what specific trait, action or inaction, do I perceive this individual displaying or demonstrating that I admire, look up to, or seek most? And I pinpoint the components. It may be multiple.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  And they may be composite traits or singular traits. Identify what that is, so it's not nebulous. I just identify it. And then I ask the second question. All right, John, go to a moment where and when you perceive yourself displaying or demonstrating the same specific trait, action or inaction, and identify where it was, when it was. So I'm activating the hippocampus. And to whom it was, so I get the direction and location. And who perceived me, so I can have reflection and transparency, and identify that where I've done it, when I've done it, until the quantity and quality are completely equal and there's no question, I'm certain, that I have reflective awareness again.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  And instead of having deflective awareness, for I'm too humble, I'm now reflective awareness, and I realize that it was a projection of me. Just like it said in Romans 2:1 in the New Testament, "When you judge other people, beware, you've done the same thing. You're pointing a finger, it's you. But that works not only on things you dislike, but things you like, things you despise and admire." So I go in there and I hold myself accountable until I see that. And then I even did a preemptive strike 41 years ago. I did preemptive strike by going to the Oxford English Dictionary and identifying all possible traits found in the dictionary inside me. So I didn't have to wait and react by, you know, a reaction from hindsight. I could proactively identify all those traits inside me to realize that nothing's missing in me.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  But still, occasionally, I'll get it from an angle that I haven't identified. If I do that, and I own that, I soften some of the judgment. My reflective awareness goes out. I'm more poised. And then I ask the next question. Because if I was under the assumption that there were more pauses and negatives that I admired, admire means to get close and look at. I want to get close and look to it. I now ask the question, "Go to the moment, exactly where and when I perceive this individual displaying or demonstrating the specific trait that I admire most. And at that moment, what are the downsides?

• 20:57Speaker 00

  So I can strengthen my intuition and become aware of what I overlooked. What are the downsides? Spiritually, what are the downsides? Intellectually, what are the downsides? Business, finance, family, social, physical? I go through and hold myself accountable to identify where I see the downsides to balance it. Because otherwise, if I don't, I'm going to have my valency from my amygdala run me instead of my executive center where I see things objectively. Instead of seeing things as it is, with both sides, I'm seeing it as it is it being interpreted, as it, I think it should be. And in the process of doing it, once I get the quantity of the downsides equaling the upsides,

• 21:42Speaker 00

  and it is neither positive nor negative, I get a tier of gratitude to realize that there was the hidden order sitting there the whole time, and I had been, you know, that I had skewed and distorted the reality and got caught in my illusion. I then go another question. I then go, go to a moment, John, back to where and when you do it. Because if you perceive them having a trait you admired, that means you were proud of yourself when you did it. And pride is your impostor syndrome. It's not who you are. Pride is an exaggeration of who you are. So I go back to where I perceived myself doing it and take each of the individuals I did it to and each of the individuals who perceived me doing it, and I find out the

• 22:27Speaker 00

  downsides to them. And I don't allow myself to speculate. I only look at ones that I'm certain about of the downsides to them to calm down my pride for self-governant purposes and allow myself to see that the only reason I was admiring them is because I was actually proud of myself and they're bringing it out of me. And that's why, but I'm too humble at that moment to admit that I'm storing that pride and they're now reflecting it and bringing it to my service. So they came into my life to help me realize that of my impostor, my exaggeration of myself. And when I exaggerate myself, I tend to project my values onto other people and expect them to live in my values, which is futile. It's non-sustainable. So I go in there and I find out how it served the people that I did it to through each

• 23:12Speaker 00

  episode that I can identify, that I listed, to balance it and who perceived it. Because sometimes your pride is not from who you did things to, but you did it in front of people that perceived it. Once I get those level, it's quite different in how I interpret what's going on. But I go, don't stop there. I start asking the question, now go to a moment, where and when I perceive them demonstrating that trait again. I ask, who are they demonstrating it to? In this case, me, or it could be somebody else. And now I go and ask where and when do they display the exact opposite trait to the same individual? So I break my label because sometimes we go through and build labels and say, well,

• 23:57Speaker 00

  they're always that way, or most of the time they're that way. So I go in there and counterbalance it and hold myself accountable to find out where they are displaying the opposite trait, the anti-trait. Because when you do things that support people's values, they respond one way, and you do something that challenges values, they can respond completely opposite. You support my values, I can be nice as a pussycat. You challenge my values, I can be mean as a tiger. So I make sure that I hold myself accountable to rebalance the equation on what I perceive in them, or otherwise I'm still holding on to a skewed view that they're more, they're this, and I put a label on people instead of love people. When I do that, I'm already now in a different frame. I'm more fully aware.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  My intuition has been strengthened because I've honored it by the question, but I have another question I ask. Go to the moment where and when you perceive this individual displaying and demonstrating the trait that you admired most. You there? At that moment, where are you? When are you? What exactly are they doing again? Make sure you're really clear on it. What is the context? You're in a dynamic, you're not a victim. You've done something to initiate that response. Maybe you were proud and maybe resilient, resistant to them. Maybe you challenged their idea, maybe that's why they were critical to you, maybe, or praised you or something. You identify what that is. You look at who they did it to, which is you.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  And now you go at that moment, you close your eyes, and you get access to what is called the anti-memory in the brain. And you find out who is doing exactly the opposite, real or virtual, one or many, male or female, close or distant. And you find out who is actually doing the opposite, because the mind will never have a perception without the opposite perception to counterbalance the brain, to keep the excitation and inhibition ratios in the brain in equilibrium. So it'll create a virtual or real situation. So I make sure I find out where that is. So I realize now there's the hidden order there. That whatever my perception is, I couldn't perceive. No phenomenal perceptions can occur without contrast.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  So I then identify where was the opposite, because that perception required an opposite in order to perceive. If you are infatuate with something, you have to resent its opposite. And you have to be aware of that in order to even perceive it in the first place. So I make myself fully aware of both of those. And when I do, there's a gamma synchronicity. The autonomic's come into balance. There's a resilience and adaptability. And I'm now in a more authentic state. Because I'm not seeing the skewed view, I'm seeing what's actually there. Actuality, not reality. Self-actualization, if you want to call it. Self-knowing. Egnosis. Then I go to another question. And I got 80 of these, I could keep going.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  I have another question. Go to the moment, where and when I perceived them demonstrating the trait again. And in that moment, the only reason I admired it is because in the past, when somebody does the opposite behavior, I'm avoiding that. I've associated pain in my hippocampus with it. So that's why I'm admiring that trait. So I go in there and ask if at that moment, they had done exactly the opposite behavior. The very thing I would not want them to do at the moment I admired them. What would have been the benefit? And I stack up the benefits of that in that moment if they'd done the opposite trait. No speculations, I only look for benefits I'm certain about. I stack up the benefits to break my wound,

• 27:36Speaker 00

  which is making me now label that as admirable trait. And making me too humble to admit that where I've done it. Because our Migla tends to want to be addicted to pride and fantasy and wants to be subjected away from shame and nightmare. It's just the way the Migla does for survival purposes. So I go in there and I crack the opposite, the nightmare, and I find the benefits to that. And when I do, I realize that there's nothing to change. Instead of me having a desire to change me relative to them because I'm infatuated and admiring them, I have no desire to change anything. My human will now matches what is, or divine will, or the hidden order.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  And now I realize I'm now poised and all the noise in the brain's gone and now I'm clear and I'm now in a state of presence. And so I use the tool to ask those questions. Those are seven questions. But I can go even further. I can go in there and ask the next question, go to the moment where they did that, and at that exact moment that they did the action, where were they in time? In other words, if they're doing something I'm admiring, are they doing something that is admiring about what they're going to do in the future or what they did in the past? I can put a temporal component on it. And since temporal has entanglement, just like space has entanglement, I can then go

• 29:01Speaker 00

  and find out, when I'm doing the question on who's doing the opposite, I can find out where they're doing it. And I have done this enough to know that if you're admiring something about what they're about to do in the future, you're actually despising something about what somebody did in the past to counterbalance it, to make sure your mind is present. Your brain is constantly trying to keep temporal entanglement where memory and imaginations are counterbalancing each other to make sure you're present. So I go through and I ask these questions. Like I said, I could do 80 of them, but those are the first eight.

• 29:32André Duqum?

  I love seeing the way your mind works and deciphering and creating depth around the context in which the qualities emerge and the traits emerge that you admire, despise, and what you perceive in your surroundings. You mentioned how the masses will live in this illusion of gain and loss. What is the direct, practical cost of living life in this state of unawareness?

• 29:57Speaker 00

  In a nutshell, entropy, the arrow of time, aging, and epigenetically and autonomically induced symptomatology to try to guide them back, which we call illness.

• 30:14André Duqum?

  Sounds like, like death.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Entropy, Frank Tipler called neg-entropy life physics and entropy death physics. We usually call it death physics in physics.

• 30:25André Duqum?

  Death physics.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Because it's going towards dissipation and heat death. And yeah, it's, it's a pessimistic death physics instead of neg-entropy, which is Erwin Schrodinger's term for life physics.

• 30:39André Duqum?

  And so then in living in accordance with life physics, what have you seen as what becomes available to you energetically, redefining what the aging process quote unquote is?

• 30:52Speaker 00

  You just said it. You have, you have more vitality. Whenever you're living in your executive center and your medioprefonal cortex, your mitochondria are more likely to duplicate and more likely to give more energy. The oxidative phosphorylation process is enhanced. Whenever you're in your amygdala, you get cell death and danger responses and mitochondria are shut down. So your vitality and your energy levels go up and your immortality goes up because you're present. As Deepak used to say, a timeless mind aids this body. You have less literally physiological entropy. Every time you infatuate with something and activate a parasympathetic response or resent something and activate a sympathetic response, rest and digest because you want to consume

• 31:37Speaker 00

  it anabolic, you grow. The other one, you want to avoid it and you know, catabolically decay. Both of those mechanisms create epigenetic responses of acetylation and methylation and they induce responses of mitosis or apoptosis. And anytime those, those two systems get out of balance, we have an illness. So illness is nothing more than a feedback mechanism to guide us if we're conscious and know what applied physiology means. It's guiding us back to the center to try to help us live as you described, where you know yourself. We have no sense of who you are and, and the profoundness of who you are is more profound than I think we can comprehend.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Our computational boundaries limit us from our awareness of who we really are.

• 32:27André Duqum?

  Yeah. Another phenomenon that pulls us away from our center, which I've heard you speak to many times, is the comparative phenomenon, when, especially in the age we live, we have more stimulus and opportunities for this now, maybe more than ever, through social media, where we're doing, it's such a disservice to live life swimming against the own tide of how our intelligence wants to express itself and trying to be secondhand versions of other people. And I've heard you mention the quote, which I love also, from Einstein about how everyone's a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it's going to think it's stupid. And so, for you, who's someone who's so clearly defined their values, what's most meaningful,

• 33:10André Duqum?

  prioritizing that in their life, living in alignment with how life's intelligence wants to move through you, so to speak, can you speak to the importance of recognizing how, like, our own unique intelligence and genius and living in accordance with that, not comparing to other people?

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Well, each individual, and I may have mentioned this on our previous one, each individual lives by a hierarchy of values, a set of priorities. And somebody asked me just this weekend at my Break to Experience program, how do those come about? So maybe let me develop that and tie these together. Anytime you put somebody on a pedestal and minimize yourself by the law of contrast, and you are too humble to admit what you see in them is inside you, you have a disowned part, a missing part, a deflected part, or as Plato called it, a dismembered part.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  That leaves you feeling an emptiness, which is why anytime you judge, you feel empty and avoid.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  That's the conscious enamoration. But you have an unconscious despise of that opposite at the same moment. In fact, you can't even admire something without despising its opposite simultaneously. But one, you're conscious of, the other, you're unconscious of. When you're despising something, you're too proud to admit what you see in them is inside you. And you are disowning that part, dismembering that part, and deflecting that part. When you do, you have now an emptiness, a void. So every time you judge, you create emptiness. The Nazis called that kenoma, unfulfillment emptiness.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  But those voids of what you judge, that you have incomplete awareness about, are also great feedback mechanisms because they're letting you know what you haven't loved and giving you an opportunity to love.

• 35:17André Duqum?

  It's an intelligent design.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  It's an intelligent feedback. And Peddicles, the guy that created the cosmogonic cycle of the descent of the soul into incarnation and the resurrection of the soul back ended, which most theologies of the Abrahamic religions were emerging from. He believed that there was the four elements, fire, air, water, and earth, and the synthesis of that, which is the ether. And if they're all unified, you have love. But if they are dispersed entropically, they're now creating strife or judgment. So anytime we disperse and separate the inseparables, divide the indivisibles, label the unlabelables, polarize the unpolarables, and name the ineffables as if these are actual,

• 36:03Speaker 00

  and create these polarities of judgment as if they're isolated from each other, instead of synthesizing it, we create judgment and emptiness. And that emptiness...

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Is what gives rise to our hierarchy of values. And our hierarchy of values, particularly our highest value, the end in mind, the telos, as Aristotle called it, where the existential world ends and the essential self and soul emerges. That highest value is the most efficient and effective pathway, dharmic pathway, to fulfill the greatest amount of voids with the greatest amount of value. Therefore, giving us pleroma, as the Nostric said, fullness, where nothing's missing. We're now seeing things as they are, because in actuality, there's nothing missing. And just in our reality of our senses, which deal with contrast and incomplete awareness

• 36:58Speaker 00

  and biases, do we have that. So it's our voids that determine our values. It's our judgment determines what our hierarchy of values actually is. And that's unique to each individual, because they, no two people have the same vantage point. The uncertainty principle, by Heisenberg says it, no two can occupy the same, no two quantum numbers can be exactly the same in the same spacetime. So what we do is we have individualized our self and our experiences, which give rise to our voids and our judgments, that then give rise to the hierarchy of our values. And our hierarchy of values is dictating how we perceive, decide, and act, to make us aware of what we've overlooked, and to be able to go to an objective state where we're neutral, where we're not judging.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  And in the moment, we're not judging and loving and seeing both sides simultaneously, the voids are dissolved and we have a moment of fulfillment. And that's grace, because when we're in this judgment state, we're trying to change ourselves to be like somebody else, or trying to change others to be like us, which is dissipative and non-sustainable and futile. But the second we actually bring those into equilibrium and see the fullness, there's nothing to change. And now we have maximum simplicity, as the heretics teach, and we now have sustainable, fair exchange, because we're all equal, we're not seeing any difference, and we have maximum utility. And that's where we have the most fulfillment and we've made a difference, without even

• 38:27Speaker 00

  doing anything but being our uniqueness.

• 38:33André Duqum?

  What would you say is the most direct inquiry one could employ in their life to discover what that is for them?

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Well, I use my value determination process. I look at what their life demonstrates to find out what is most meaningful and fulfilling and purposeful for them.

• 38:53André Duqum?

  What happens if their life is demonstrating things that really actually don't have much meaning to them?

• 39:00Speaker 00

  Actually, that's their misperception.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  I'd like to address that because that's a very common thing out there. They people talk about I sabotage. I've never seen sabotage. I've seen people who don't really know what is their life is demonstrating is valuable to them, who are now comparing themselves to other people, putting people on pedestals, trying to be second to being somebody else, injecting the values of those people into their lives and thinking it should be this when their actual life is demonstrating a hierarchy of values and they're living by it, but they're not honoring it.

• 39:37André Duqum?

  Can you give me an example of that?

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it happens every week. People say, well, I really say I want to be wealthy. I want to be, I want to be abundantly wealthy. I want to have, you know, more money at the end of my month and money at money at month at the end of my money. But the hierarchy of their values doesn't have deferred gratification and asset accumulation to allow them to have the passive income for what they say they want. They have a higher value on buying consumables that depreciate and their life's values show that these things are more important than the deferred gratification and wealth accumulation. So then they beat themselves up and they think I keep sabotaging my finances. No matter what I do, I can't get ahead. And what they actually are saying they want.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  What they actually are demonstrating, they want two different things. So many people don't know themselves. That's why this is so important. They don't know themselves. They think they do. But what they've done is they've inculcated and injected the values of outer authorities that they admire into their life and clouded the clarity of their own highest value and mission. And then they're basically claiming that something's important to them when their life doesn't demonstrate it. Your life demonstrates what you value. Every decision you make, every perception, decision, action you take is based on what you value. So what you say means very little. What your life demonstrates means everything.

• 41:04André Duqum?

  So what happens when someone's life is demonstrating that they really value dopaminergic impulses? They just follow from pleasure to pleasure, compulsive thing to compulsive thing. Their behavior is demonstrating that they value quick hits, quick dopamine hits. And yet, there is a deeper sense, there are deeper values that are perhaps underneath the current level of their awareness that they could discover. So how do you help delineate between what someone's behaviors are in this moment, which might say, I value food, sex, and sleep, and an abundance of it, versus there's actually deeper values that I still have yet to discover?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Impulsive, compulsive, immediate gratifying, addictive behaviors are compensations for unfulfilled highest values. So what I do is I ask that even though they're doing the behavior with their amygdala, and they're looking for immediate gratification, if I go and find out what are the benefits they're getting out of it, because they wouldn't be doing it. No one moves a muscle without a motive. Even Epictus has said that even the terrorist believes they're doing the greatest good.

• 42:20André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah. Hitler thought he was doing God's work.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Exactly. He thought he was doing what Levovsky thought was the purerian stock, right? So I go in and I help them identify what their unconscious motives are for their behavior.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  What they find is there's an underlying value that's really important to them, but they don't have strategies to be able to fulfill that. And the unfulfillment that's coming is making them back in their mighbala. So I can still identify what their values are that transcend what looks like their immediate gratification. And finding that is liberating. Because I had, I'll use an example. I had a gentleman that, a consultant that asked me to intervene on one of his clients. And it was a gentleman who just sold a company just about a year earlier and generated about a $750 million net to himself.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  And since he's sold his company, his drinking has skyrocketed. I mean, he's basically staying drunk most of the day. Drinking 20 something drinks at least a day. And staying kind of slouched or whatever it is throughout the day. And so no matter what this guy is trying to do and consulting with him, he can't get him to stop. He's just, he's not productive. So I asked him, when did he increase his drinking? He said, well, since I've sold the business. I said, you sold the business because you burned out from talking to him, burned out on doing actions in there that were not meaningful and inspiring to you,

• 43:58Speaker 00

  that you had once delegated and then all of a sudden the person you're delegated to that was getting it done wasn't there. And then you got burned out because you were now having to do something that was uninspiring. So you decided to sell it. But what you really love to do was doing deals. He was a deal maker. And as long as he's doing deals, preparing for the deals, he doesn't drink. And when he's doing the deals, there's no drinking. He's doing the deal. So what we did is we got him to, the company he sold, he went back to the person that he sold the company to and said, if I do some deals for you, because I still got connections, if I did deals for you. Could I get a fair cut and make you make sure you make even more profit? And help you grow the business?

• 44:43Speaker 00

  And I have no intention of taking over and starting a competitive business, whatever. And the guy said, I can't argue with that, absolutely. The second he got into something that was extremely meaningful, high in his values, deeply meaningful, very inspiring, um, his drinking went way down. He might have a drink, but he didn't get sloshed because he had something he couldn't wait to get up in the morning and do. When you can't wait to get up in the morning and do something extremely inspiring and meaningful, you're not distracted by immediate gratification because you're now focusing on long-term vision. So if you don't fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you and that help expand the space and time horizons of your vision, you will automatically go into the amygdala for immediate gratification and shrink your space and time horizons for

• 45:28Speaker 00

  a quick fix. So it's an unfulfillment response. So fill your day with high priority actions. If I'm teaching, I love teaching, right? I love researching around him. If my days filled with that, I'm a pretty inspired guy. If I'm not doing that, I can find myself being easily distracted. Distractions are the impulses and instincts that the amygdala assigns valency to that capture our attention that we admire or despise or look up to or down on. And so our judgments are a feedback mechanism to let us know we're not being ourself. We stop and really get that, that's really significant. Our judgments are symptoms of not being ourselves.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  Because when we're actually being ourself, we're too inspired and we're focused and inspired by what we're doing and engage in doing something that's in sustainable, fair exchange with other people, and we transcend the judgment world.

• 46:22André Duqum?

  I think that's so powerful because we often fall into the habit of judging and shaming emotions we don't want to feel, signals and judgments we don't want to have in our experience. But you're inviting the perspective that there's an intelligent hidden order, there's a design that is actually very useful and necessary for you to come back into your center into what you really value. So we can perceive all of these challenging experiences in life actually with a lot of grace and gratitude.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  They're on the way, not in the way.

• 46:51André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  I, I, I'd like to address this, just popped in my head. So.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  I have the opportunity to speak to all different types of groups. And a lot of them are business entrepreneurs and leaders that have ambitions. And the word ambition means a condition of both-sidedness, ambie, ambidextrous. If you can see both sides simultaneously, you actually expand the space and time horizons and accomplish the most because you're objective. But sometimes people with their amygdala create a fantasy. A fantasy is a positive without a negative. A nightmare is a negative without a positive. So our amygdala wants to avoid the nightmare and seek the fantasy. It wants to avoid the shame and seek the pride. So it's constantly trying to look for advantage over disadvantage, pleasure over pain.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  It's hedonic. So it's basically trying to set what it thinks is a goal that has more advantage and disadvantage, more positives, negatives, more pleasures and pains, more support than challenge. And by doing it, it creates a fantasy. Our intuition is designed to counterbalance that, to make us whole, to see things as they are, not as we're skewing. So our intuition brings up anxiety, fears, phobias, to balance the philia. It balances it with a phobia and a nightmare and anxiety and doubt and uncertainty and feelings of self-sabotage and all those things. All of those are important feedback systems to let us know that we're not pursuing a

• 48:26Speaker 00

  real objective, we're pursuing a fantasy. So we think it's a weakness, but it's not. It's a flawless response to guide us to set real objectives, not fantasies. Now, the ratios of goals can skew all the way from a fantasy, which is all positive, no negative, fantasy, illusion, mania, to an objective, which is a perfect balance of positive and negative. And there's a whole spectrum in between. The more fantasy it is, the more our nightmares come to wake us up. If it's up here, you get a little bit less anxiety. But once you get to the very top, there's at the very top, there's no anxiety.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Because what strategic planning and the executive center in the brain is for? To mitigate the anxieties and to calm and dampen the fantasies. The executive center uses glutamate and GABA, the facilitator inhibitory transmitter to neutralize whatever is stimulated and inhibited in our fantasy. So it's trying to calm it down. Our intuition is counterbalancing our gut impulse to seek and our gut instinct to avoid. So intuition is a negative feedback. Those are positive feedbacks that dramatize and polarize. The intuition is a negative feedback to neutralize and bring things back into objectivity where you see both sides. Imagine being in a relationship with somebody

• 49:56Speaker 00

  and you expected them to be positive, never negative. Happy, never sad. You know, one-sided. They're never going to live up to that. But when you expect them to be a two-sided individual and to live according to their own highest values, you have a realistic expectation and can have a fulfilling relationship. But if not, you have a fantasy about who they're going to be. They're going to be more positive, negative, and they're going to live in your values, not their own. And these are distortions. The same thing with goals, just like in relationships. We set goals that are not really goals and objectives. They're fantasies. And then we have anxieties. Anxieties and fears and phobias are not our enemy. I know, maybe people say, "You need to get rid of that." No, they're there very precisely

• 50:41Speaker 00

  and deconstructed there to make sure that you're not going after delusions and fantasies to set real objectives. The executive center is designed to strategically plan, to transform fantasies into objectives, to maximize the potential and actualization of our potential so we can achieve. And that's what ambition really is. The ability to see both sides and have both sides in the pursuit. When you are able to embrace the pain and the pleasure equally in the pursuit of some purpose, you're not in your passions, you're in your mission. You're not in your sufferings, you're in your servings. And that's what liberates people from a lot of the frustrations in the so-called achievement world.

• 51:26André Duqum?

  It makes me think how when someone has a meaningful mission they've declared in their life, how it changes what they notice on the way and what the bandwidth for what they can take along the way.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Well, when they're in their amygdala, things are more black and white. When they're executive shared, things are more gray. It's neither positive negative here. It's either positive negative here.

• 51:50André Duqum?

  You've mentioned the amygdala and how often we are living our life through the perception of it. Many times throughout this conversation, what do you feel like the path of evolution is as a human being? Because I see the sort of limbic lizard brain way of operating through duality and gain and loss and this kind of old paradigm that we're here to live through. And then like, where are we going to as what's possible within human consciousness? I'm curious what your thoughts are.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Well, this leads to an interesting slippery slope. A lot of people like to promote an opium of the future, which I try to debunk iconoclastic. I'm an iconoclast in that respect. Because whatever you know, there's always the next mystery. And with that next mystery, you're going to use that part of the brain again. So we're not going to get to a point where we're done. I think that's, I mean, if you take the planet and you take this little earth and one astronomical unit away is the sun, that's in about 93 million miles.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  So from the sun, the earth is almost indiscernible. And on the earth, it's spinning at about 800 to 1,000 miles an hour, you know, at the equator. And on there is a guy meditating there and he says, I am enlightened, I am enlightened, I am enlightened, I'm enlightened, I'm all aware. But to the sun, which is this vast sun compared to this dot, it's almost indiscernible. Now, if we go from the sun, 26,000 to 28,000 light years away, 186 miles a second, 864,000 seconds a day, times 365, times 26,000.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  If we go to the center of the Milky Way and we sit in the throat of the Sagittary A black hole, and we're looking out from that, and we're following Hawking radiation to kind of look at the Earth, if we can imagine it, we can't see the sun, there's too much dust and clouds, we can't see the Earth. So the guy that's going around and says, "I'm enlightened, I'm enlightened, I'm enlightened," that has a relative awareness based on dogma that it's been taught and observations and the paradigms and dialectics and teachings that they've accumulated through a finite period of time of 72, to give or take years, it's

• 54:30Speaker 00

  a relative endarcment. Now, we have a local group of galaxies, and then we have the Virgo Cluster, then we have the Loniche Supercluster, and the Great Attractor, and that's part of a filament of a bigger web, in the cosmic web, of immensity. And that's simply the observable universe, and we don't even know what's beyond the observable universe, we speculate. So whatever we know, I'll put it in perspective, is, as Socrates said, it's an infinitesimal. So we tend to think, and we try to create eschatologies at the end

• 55:12Speaker 00

  of the Earth, at the end of our life, at the end of times, that are anxiety-reducing eschatologies for our phobia of death, and our extinction, and our insignificance. So we create things to compensate for those insignificences by creating, you know, we're going to be enlightened, and we're going to be all aware, and we're going to go to this eternal salvation, or something, in order to compensate for our anxiety. But our anxiety is basically a compensation for all the fantasies we're still holding on to.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  Because we're still living in fear with our amiglets. Our amigla is the source of our mortal fears and all of our moralities and all of our judgments and eschatologies. If all of a sudden, we actually had a glimpse of a bigger picture, we realize that that's kind of trivia, a trivia pursuit. So where's it all going? This is a very interesting video I watched recently about on the pertinence or impertinence of existence. It's a very challenging question because it creates anxiety for most people.

• 56:31André Duqum?

  The question like, why anything exists at all?

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Not so much that is, is what is our significance?

• 56:38André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Let's take the most advanced human being that we know of that's been living and made a difference. They might leave a mark for three or 4,000 years. We might have a Texas shabaka that may go 10,000 years, but then it's touched to fade. And all the people that were there are just poofed. And so we have anxiety about that extinction of being. So we create these eschatologies to make us feel like we're going to do something that's immortal and great. And I'm, I'm a believer that that's sort of a necessary aspect of our existence because it feels futile otherwise. But at the same time, if we stop and really look at that, a billion years from now, Dr. John D.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Martini is, it was not probably even known about. I'm probably back to dust. I'm cosmic dust. Now, because of information theory and, and there's a conservation of information, whatever information that may have been accumulated in the experience of the earth, that may be eventually in the cycles of the red giant phase of the, of the solar system and eventually be engulfed and, and maybe eventually merged with another solar system and eventually go into a white dwarf and a black hole. That information may be then skewed back out into another solar system and continue to go on. And we may have significance that can perpetuates as an immortal expression of what contribution we made in our evolution.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  I can't deny it or confirm it, but I'd rather believe that because it gives me some sort of meaning and some sort of purpose than it would be to know that it was just poofed.

• 58:19André Duqum?

  Yeah, I always simultaneously, whenever I zoom out to the degree in which you just did, and you have this cosmological perspective of the sheer insignificance of us on that scale, I both have complete awe and wonder as to how magical and how much there is unknown and yet to be discovered. And then also, like, I'm curious your thoughts about slipping into nihilism, where like, none of this really even matters, you know?

• 58:45Speaker 00

  Well, this is the thing. If we go down into the subatomics and go towards Planck's dimension, one times 10 to the 33rd centimeters or something, we go down there, we seem very significant. So we're now vast beings compared to this thing, and so we have massive significance, relatively speaking, relativity. If we go to the vastness of the observable and beyond, it becomes now an infinitesimal. So we both have significance and insignificance. The question is, can we wrap our head around that and become conscious of both of them

• 59:28Speaker 00

  at the same time? Otherwise, we have a conscious self that we exaggerate, and again, we're puffing ourselves up in pride and pertinence, and/or we do the other and insignificant. And I think that we're here to integrate the two and to honor both, because it keeps us in check and it keeps us growing.

• 59:50André Duqum?

  It's interesting to see the overlay and how you probably would say they're one and the same when you look at the cosmological perspective and also the human developmental process, like the journey of finding back and returning back into balance from both polarities.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  We can't prove that that giant cosmos is not starting over. We don't know. We don't know if that's a reiteration or not. It's an interesting plausible possibility.

• 1:00:15André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  We might be, you know, in Men in Black, you know, there's the cat with the little thing that's, who knows? I don't want to say that I know that answer. I don't know that answer.

• 1:00:28André Duqum?

  I'm curious to hear what your speculation on when you mentioned Bohm's implicit order earlier in the conversation, you look at the Buddhist philosophy of interest net and how we are connected at levels we are possibly be only beginning to be able to comprehend. And we are fed this materialist reductionistic notion of how the world works mechanistically. And the way that you're describing life and the intelligence of life operating within this deeper hidden order feels feels very exciting, but also in like a it feels like a new paradigm that is going to be continued to be fortified with scientific rigor over

• 1:01:09André Duqum?

  the next decade and century. So I'm just curious, what do you is there anything that you're speculating on in terms of like how this all is working that you haven't really spoken too much before?

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:01:24André Duqum?

  It's kind of a big question.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  No, I love that question. I do think about interesting questions sometimes since I was a kid. When Sputnik, I was watching a movie the other day, October, the sky. I don't know if you've seen this. But a young boy looks up into the sky with his father when he was very young, and he sees Sputnik go across. Sputnik had just been launched. This is 1957. And in 1957, I looked out from the backyard and I saw Sputnik go across the sky. And I thought, I want to understand that. So I started at four, going out at

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  night, sneaking out at night, going through my window with a Corsica coffee cat cake can and a piece of paper and some pencil. And I would draw the outline of the moon and I watched the asterisms of the moon each night. And I tried to time it where I would go out at weird hours, just to get to capture the asterisms of the moon and to see the star backgrounds behind it and map these things. My whole room was covered in these maps when I was four. My parents used to just look out the window and think, okay, they didn't stop me. They were curious. But I was interested in astronomy. I've been what's one of my areas that I've written a lot about and cosmology and physics and

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  astrophysics and stuff. So I've been fascinated by that. But I now speculate, and I can only say speculate.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  That we live in a potentially infinite universe with an infinite number of complementary opposites at all scales of being and existence for eternity. So, instead of having the divine plan go from dark to light, or from negative to positive, or, you know, these amygdala-driven constructs that are anthropomorphic and geocentric and very limited. What would happen if, that every moment we perceive,

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  no matter what it is, because I, in my Breakthrough Experience program, as I take people through it, I take whatever perception it is, it doesn't matter what their perception is, I show them where the synthesis and synchronicity of opposites and I bring them to a tier of gratitude for it. And when I, they do that, they realize that no matter what they're perceiving, no matter what time or space, there's the divine order there. There's the tier of gratitude if you ask the right questions and become aware of it. So I speculate that there's an infinite number of those potential perceptions in this participatory universe that we are participating in as part of a reflective conscious

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  being, at all scales, from the subatomic plank, where our mathematics begins to break down, to the astronomical. And as we are expanding our awareness and becoming, you know, solarized and galacticized and continue, supergalacticized and go, that whatever we perceive, the equal and opposite was going to be will in our perception and will give us an experience of seeing the hidden order at that scale. At all scales, it's available for eternity. And to me, that would be the most ever-present, loving view,

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  not an idea that we're now going to go to some Empirian at the edge of our solar system and then sit there and praise some insecure deity or something.

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  I'd rather see that the entire thing is a conscious state. It's a pen psychism in that respect, at all scales of existence. And we have the capacity, and it is constantly giving us the opportunity to discover the magnificent hidden order and the divine presence of love, if you want to call it that, in that moment, at any scale, no matter what the scale of pair of opposites. In other words, as the black hole is taking in stars, it's simultaneously birthing new stars. The pairs of opposites are there. As the particle and antiparticles are annihilating, they're simultaneously generating at the

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  Planck's level, at the quantum vacuum. So whether it's small or large, as below or above, whatever it is, there's nothing but a synchronicity and synthesis of complementary opposites and experience of love at all scales if we know how to ask the right question and become present with both simultaneously. And I think that we live in a universe that is going to give us the opportunity to continue to explore that with every vehicle we have, telescope, astronomical, or microscope, whatever it is. And no matter where we go, no matter what size or magnitude, or any location, or any other thing, anything in the existential world is going to lead us back to the essential self. And so I think that's what the universe is really...

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  As Plato says, "For the sake of love." And our own conscious awareness and intentions are all remodeling it, so we're constantly remodeling it, it's never the same. We're all involved in a remodeling system.

• 1:07:00André Duqum?

  Do you think that essential self is something that we all share, like that being is shared? Do you think that?

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  Although I found this quote in a text about Schopenhauer, I was never able to find it in any of his texts, but somebody quoted it, so I don't know if it's a true quote or not. "We become our true self to the degree that we make everything else ourself."

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  So anything that separates self and other, which is a distinction, the primordial boundary, from the adem kudman of the kabbalistic tree into the adam and Eve, which differentiates a duality of some form, any form of duality, that separation in self and other, the existential beginning, as Peddickly has described, that would actually be, in a sense, a pure reflective universe. My girlfriend Donna is working on a book called The Reflective Universe. It's very possible that everything that is ever observed is a reflection of us. And we really don't know the boundaries of who we are.

• 1:08:10André Duqum?

  It really resonates through the Vedic lens of the two, or the one becoming two for the joy of becoming one again. Like the-

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  That's the cosmogonic cycle. The essence going into existence and the existence returning to the essence in a cosmogonic cycle, a self-regenerating system.

• 1:08:29André Duqum?

  It feels like also from the cosmological scale, from the Big Bang and the expansion to the contraction to the also like the- you could zoom out on the biological level and the same thing, the contraction and expansion that is happening pervasively throughout the universe.

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  If that is an accurate assessment.

• 1:08:46André Duqum?

  Do you think that is?

• 1:08:47Speaker 00

  In my textbook, I wrote, let's see now, 93, I think, refutations of the Big Bang Theory that I've been accumulating for many, many years. So I don't think, there's too many ad hoc components to that to say that that's the conclusion we have today. And many cosmologists are questioning that and tackling that and challenging that. But that's the model we have today, just like that's the model we have in religions. In religions, as Sam Harris did a nice thing as the atheist, he said, "The difference between atheist and atheist is one God." You know, the Christian doesn't believe in 900 gods that had once lived, and that he's an atheist to them.

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  And Sam said, "I'm closer to you than I am different. I just don't believe in that one too."

• 1:09:35André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  The anthropomorphic god that Xenophanes warned against and Thales warned against are concoctions of the amygdala to avoid the phobias and to create the philias to survive as a mortal being. And there's a much more transcendent state in theology and in cosmology. And this cosmology we have here is got, it's got weakness. Let's put it that way. I could do a whole thing on that one.

• 1:10:04André Duqum?

  It's, I love speaking to you, not just because of what you're saying, but the excitement in which what you're saying is coming from. I can tell the sincere passion and desire to understand reality to the degree we can. And how you're speaking to, instead of moving through life through this top-down processing, like moving through each mystery one after the other, through the bottom-up processing of, you know, experience, seeing what's alive for you in each moment, is such a more beautiful, fruitful way to live life that I feel like we all get to, we all can embody more of. And for somebody that's discovered your highest priority values and live life in according to that which is most meaningful,

• 1:10:48André Duqum?

  and yet you still have all of these other very interesting passions and explorations that maybe isn't your highest priority value of what, teaching and writing. I'm curious how you think about the different aspects of self that we like, we feel most ignited by. For example, music is something that is not my highest priority value in life, but it's something that I'm ignited by and I love studying and is, will probably be a lifelong journey. I'm curious, like, how do you think of these different buckets in your life? All these different passions and interests and curiosities? And how you prioritize what you spend your time doing?

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  When I was seventeen and I met Paul Bragg, and his presentation inspired me to believe that maybe someday I could become intelligent and overcome my learning challenges. He mentioned universal laws. And I didn't know what they meant, really, but they sounded cool. And so, when I left Hawaii and I returned to Texas and began my pursuit of trying to overcome my learning challenges, speaking problems and comprehension and things, I was watching a particular show with David Carradine called Kung Fu.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  And he talked about his Shaolin master. And I love the word "master." This sounded cool. Universal law, master. They somehow resonated with me. So I set out at age eighteen. I wanted to master my life. I didn't know what that meant, but it sounded cool. So I divided life into seven areas: spiritual, mental, vocational, financial, family, social, physical. And I made a commitment to learn everything I can about those topics and become masterful in those. I wanted to create original ideas that serve human beings across the planet mentally. I wanted to create a global business. My teaching was in every country around the world.

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  I wanted to become financially independent. I wanted to have a global family. As you know, I live on a ship called the World that goes around the world. That was because I had that dream. I wanted to have social influence, meet amazing people and have influence and learn from great minds. I also wanted to have a vital body, an energized body. I'm seventy-one in a couple of months and I'm still going. And I wanted to create, not a new religion, I had no interest in that. I was interested in a movement that would inspire people regardless of their backgrounds. It could be any faith of any form.

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  And that was my dream to do that. I also had a desire to understand the laws of the universe. And so I came back, got a dictionary out, got an encyclopedia out. What is the law of the universe? What is universal law mean? And it led me to natural laws. And there was a distinction between natural laws of the observable universe and universal laws that are even broader. And that led me to a pursuit called the logos. And the logos goes back to Heraclitus. And he considered that there was an order and pattern and a plan to the universe, like the Stoics and the Greeks sometimes did.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  And I wanted to know what this logos was. In fact, I'm writing a text on the logos right now. And I'm devouring everything I can from every angle I can on that topic and hit it. And that logos gave rise to the ologies. So I made a list of every known ology that somebody could study, every discipline or ology you could study in every field. And then I realized that the ologies were all wavelength based. So you have the subatomic particles, particle physics, they're small wavelengths. You've got the astronomical that are large wavelengths.

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  You've got myology, muscles, and physiology, and psychology. Each of these are wavelengths of structures that you're exploring, that you're now finding those same laws apply to. So I thought that all the ologies are dispersments from the one to the many of the logos, the plan. And so I made a commitment to myself that I would read at least 100 books on every ology, which is why I've got 31,000 books now in my head. So I wanted to do that because I wanted to have a body of knowledge that would stand the test of time.

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  And if I studied all the different disciplines and I found common themes and common principles that were universal, it would increase the probability that the material I'm presenting is something that's solid and it will, it will stand. So I just started going from the smallest to the largest. And starting with the Principles of Quantum Mechanics when I was 18 by Paul Dirac, studying particle and antiparticles, and studying Max Planck's work on all of his Planck's, you know, principles and all of his units, Planck units, and trying to figure out how he did that with five universal constants and how he put this whole structure together, which is absolutely ingenious.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  And I started to do what I could to find out what is the most common universal laws? The law of complementary opposites, the law of the one, the many, the law of conservation, Nether's theorem of symmetries. And I started to accumulate ones that I felt at all scales of existence, there they were. Even if they're talking about strong nuclear force, the proton or the neutron with a strong nuclear force and the mesons and the quantum vacuum fluctuations and all that still apply to universe scale. So I basically tried to find that and identify those and then apply that to human behavior and the evolution of human consciousness. So that's been my thing.

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  So there's no discipline that's not part of my mission. There's no discipline, other than possibly cooking and driving. I don't drive or cook. So those, but if, if, if I could probably easily show the dynamics sitting in the way cars are designed and the engineering of that to the same laws, but I just haven't had an interest in those for some reason. But pretty well all the other disciplines, 300 different disciplines and ologies that I've explored and tried to devour. For one objective, the evolution of human consciousness and one of the most fundamental principles that I can rely on to, to teach. So if I'm teaching, my teachings will not be a fad, not be a trend, it'll be a classic.

• 1:17:46André Duqum?

  Very inspiring. I'm inspired by that. I think it's a

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  Well, we probably have a resonant

• 1:17:54André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

  We're both, I mean, know thyself and that's what it's about.

• 1:17:58André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  And you know, I think, I think that true science and true religion don't fight. I don't believe that those are fighting. I don't know why they would ever fight.

• 1:18:12Speaker 00

  And I'm not talking about faith-based religion, because of course there'd be discrepancies, because those are things you can never have certainty about. But I believe that we can pursue these universal laws and continue to expand our awareness and certainty, and they can be very spiritually awakening. Many people like to separate materialism and spiritualism. I see them as inseparable. Because a state of equanimity, which is our authentic self, is also the thing that maximizes sustainable, fair exchange in the material world for economics. It's also the same principle that builds engineering structures that are stable.

• 1:18:54Speaker 00

  So no matter what area we go, there's no separation there. So I don't believe you have to create a pseudo-anthropomorphic, geocentric theology, except as a stage of awareness only. I think you can go all the way to the most advanced mathematics and come to a realization of the divine. But the divine means to emanate light. And I think the thing that unites spiritual and material and science and religion is purely light, the study of optics. I think Newton was on to it. I think Newton was trying to study optics for a number of reasons, because he was a devout spiritual student,

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  but he was also a scientist of the highest caliber. His Principia and his work on optics is masterpieces. And then Maxwell, in his work on the four differential equations of the calculus for light, is a masterpiece. I was flying from San Francisco to France, and I just happened to be sitting in the business. There were three seats in the middle and two seats on the ends. And I was sitting there, and right next to me was Carl and Stephanie Brown. And they're on their way to Geneva and they're particle physicist. One's a theoretical, one's a practical particle physicist, married. You know, one's really grounded, one's esoteric.

• 1:20:22Speaker 00

  And I'm sitting next to Carl and we had a phenomenal conversation. And it's about a nine and a half hour flight or something like that. I thought I was gonna sleep because I was gonna speak when I landed. So I was gonna shower and get on to speak, but there's no way I'm gonna stop if I got a particle physicist guy here. And so we just went down the rabbit hole. We went down and just explored and he was really a cool guy. And he's passed now, but so we explored those mysteries at the very depth of the particle physics world. And to me, my love of exploration and, and, and study. Every time I find another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that fits in,

• 1:21:06Speaker 00

  either through linguistics, I learn a new word that allows it to go in, or just a construct allows to fit, I'm brought to tears. A gamma synchronicity, a eureka moment. And the moment I do that, it's almost like I'm fulfilling my mission now. And I can't wait to share that with somebody. And that's, those are the two, that's the, those are the pinnacles of my being, right there. Now, if you go and ask people in every country, and I've gotten to speak in 161 countries. I've met cultures of all different types. If you ask them, how many of you have had a moment where you've been brought to tears of inspiration? And gratitude that you know, that you know, that you know,

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  that that is deeply meaningful, pay attention to it. And it's something about your path and your authenticity. Everybody knows that. They just know it inside.

• 1:22:03Speaker 00

  So I love maximizing those that my when I did develop the Demartini method. And I developed some of the questions. There's two of the questions are designed specifically to maximize how to access and increase the frequency, intensity and duration of that. Because that is one of the greatest guides that we have that is transcendent to the subordination or superordination of other people that can distract us and allows us to guide ourselves to a great magnificent path of exploring the universe, which we have innately within us. No matter what our background is, there's a part of us that's wanting to explore the universe because it's us. We want to know ourselves. We want to know thyself.

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  So that's probably the most meaningful and inspiring things that I get to do on a daily basis.

• 1:22:53André Duqum?

  I think by living in alignment with that which brings you most joy, you also become a reference point and an inspiration for other people to discover that within themselves. The person who quoted this is escaping my mind, but to not ask what the world needs, but ask what makes you come most alive, because what the world needs is people who come most alive and discovering those, the hierarchy of values, the things that bring you most excitement in life is just an empowering reminder and refinement too of it's we're living it to like in my own life to a relative degree in alignment with those values and the things that are most meaningful to me. And I'm just curious to, because you mentioned it briefly, in the practical sense, how do

• 1:23:38André Duqum?

  you actually delegate all that is not as meaningful to you in life? Like, how have you set up your life in a way so you can like?

• 1:23:44Speaker 00

  Easily. Yeah. I learned, I was 23 years old. I was entering into professional school and I asked myself a question. Why do some people walk their talk, some people live their life? Why do some people do what they say and others don't? As McGregor did in 1960 at MIT, why does some people have spontaneous action and some people need to be extrinsically motivated with reward and punishment? I want to know the answer to that.

• 1:24:14Speaker 00

  It led me to a very obvious study called axiology, which is a study of value and worth, because that's what drives human beings. And I realized that led me to David Hume's work, which I mentioned earlier. And David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, said that there's is versus ought. I found that those are exactly the distinctions between intrinsic drive and extrinsic drive. If you know what the hierarchy of values actually are, the is, not what they ought to be, the conformity of society's deontological normative ethics,

• 1:24:55Speaker 00

  you access your greatest potential. You can actualize your potential. Ernest Becker, who wrote The Denial of Death, a Pulitzer Prize winner, he beautifully stated that people are confronted by their mortality and the anxiety of the eschatological mystery. And so they create two mechanisms to survive it. A path of individual heroism, a path of immortality for the individual, or a path of immortality through the collective conformity. These go into oblivion and leave no mark.

• 1:25:39Speaker 00

  These leave a mark, but they're radically opposed and offended. And, you know, as Jung says, "We live in a world that we want to be ourselves in a world that doesn't want us to be." And we want to make a difference. We can't make a difference conforming. You can only make a difference following an individual path. So all of the studies on axiology, there were 12 textbooks in English available at the time, only 12, that I had access to. None of them satisfied me, because it's all about how you ought to be and how people should be and how to fit into society. And it's all designed for theological and socio-political governance

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  of societies to work in in a system that are easily controlled.

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  There's an individual path, the unborrowed visionary, as Ian Rand said.

• 1:26:36Speaker 00

  I was interested in that.

• 1:26:39Speaker 00

  The trailblazer, the one with the machete walking through the thing and not following a path, but creating a path.

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  The one that had the dharmic path, not the karmic wheel.

• 1:26:52Speaker 00

  So when I did that, I realized I'm going to have to create my own value determination process to discover what it actually is, not what it, people think it should be. Because all of it, Schwartz and Hartman and all the people that were doing axiology at the time, were asking questions, if you're in this setting, how would you respond? Knowing full well that they would respond in order to not be rejected. So you can't go by what they say, you got to go by what their life demonstrates. So I set up a criteria to do value determination, which is on my website, to get closer to an objective what is, not what it ought to be. To be able to then find out what is intrinsically driving them.

• 1:27:38Speaker 00

  Because when you actually find that out and prioritize your life according to that, you don't have the internal conflicts, you don't have the fantasies as much, you don't have the self sabotaging, personal development stuff. You just walk your path.

• 1:27:56Speaker 00

  So how do I do it and delegate? I learned from a book by Elet McKenzie in 1982, October 1982, reading The Time Trap. And in there, he basically gave all the criteria why people don't delegate.

• 1:28:17Speaker 00

  I can do it better than them. By the time I do it, I could have, I give it to them, I could have just done it. By the time I explain it to them, well, they're going to do it differently anyway. All the different reasons for doing it. But I realized that you will trap your life if you're not delegating. You can't self actualize your life very easily without delegation.

• 1:28:36Speaker 00

  Unless you completely simplify your life and do like the cynic diogenes that live in a barrel with a dog and have nothing, no attachment, or a Gandhi approach.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  So I basically learned at age 27, the importance of prioritization. Because if you don't fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, your day is going to fill up with low priority distractions that don't. And the distractions that don't are going to be unfulfilling and distracting to create a frustration to go back to priority, to get you back to yourselves, because these are not you. This highest value is the ontological identity that revolves around is your highest value. Whatever your highest value is, if you ask anybody, who are they? They're going to tell you whatever's highest on their value. That's going to be their answer. Mine's teacher. If you're raising children and your highest value is of being a mother, if you ask her, who are you? She'll say, I'm a mother. If you go to a person who's a serial entrepreneur and ask him,

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  even though he's got three or four kids, you ask him, who are you? He's not going to say, I'm a father. He's going to say, I'm an entrepreneur. Because whatever's highest on one's value, their ontological identity revolves around, their teleological purpose revolves around, and their epistemological area of expertise excels there. So that's where they're most powerful. So finding that out and delegating anything else that devalues you is what I set out to do at age 27. And within 18 months, I pretty well gave it all away. And I basically teach, research, write, and travel. That's about it. Teach, research, write, and travel. I'm pretty useless outside that. Technology I delegate, business administration.

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  I just teach, research, write, travel pretty well every day. I'm pretty, like I say, I'm an idiot outside that. I'm relatively aware inside that.

• 1:30:28André Duqum?

  Yeah. I'm like that 27, I'm 28. So I'm like, I'm at that point where I'm transitioning into that full-time delegation of all the things that aren't highest priority value, most meaningful to me. But is there something that you feel called to share about what would serve someone like myself, who's embarking on the journey of life, getting to hopefully living a life that is most meaningful and aligned with my values decades down the road?

• 1:30:59Speaker 00

  I wouldn't change anything back there. But I would say that I was very grateful to go through a few intermediate steps to get feedback on how important it is not to try to be second at being somebody else and not try to worry about whether people like or dislike you. When you Nietzsche in his Beyond Good and Evil and Machiavelli in his Prince, say basically some overlapping ideas, that when you can embrace both sides of yourself and be the hero and the villain, the saint and the sinner, and realize nothing's missing

• 1:31:44Speaker 00

  in you, you're the most extreme of everything that could be even known, the most virtuous, the most vicious. When you can embrace all of that, then you're not going to be distracted by people's opinions. But as long as you're disowning any of those, the world on the outside will run you and you'll have evoked potentials instead of spontaneous potentials guiding your life. So, you know, there was a concern in my twenties, what will people think? Or what would happen if I did this? And that gradually kind of became less of priority, if that makes any sense. Because I realized that I could have the whole world against me, but the question

• 1:32:27Speaker 00

  is, do I have my soul against me? My soul being the state of unconditional love and my most authentic state. And you're going to be liked and disliked no matter what you do. I tell people, you're only going to grow to the level of embracing of the hero and villain. So if you can embrace this much hero, but only this much villain, you're only going to grow to that level.

• 1:32:53Speaker 00

  You have to be able to be liked and disliked by the same number of people. If you can do that, I mean, Donald's a good example of that. Donald's got a billion people liking and disliking him, at least, maybe four billion, liking and disliking him, who knows? So because of that, he's probably on every newspaper in every country, every single day, his influence. How well can you embrace and own all your parts? If you, any part you're disowning is emptiness. Any part that you could ever imagine in anything that you don't own is your emptiness.

• 1:33:33Speaker 00

  So that would be the journey is to learn to appreciate. Forty-one years ago, I was about 30 years old. And at the time, as I mentioned earlier, I went to the Oxford English Dictionary and I went and identified every one of the traits inside me. Because that was my attempt to try to own the parts and have a preemptive strike instead of having to wait till people push my buttons and react with hindsight. I'd rather have foresight and identify it. So when I saw that and people would say things about me, I'd go, okay, that's true too. You know, somebody says, you know, you're this or that. If I can honor that and see that, I don't have a reaction. They can't control me.

• 1:34:18Speaker 00

  But if I try to disown it, they can manipulate me. And I can be influenced by them for fear of losing or gaining or something and get attached one way or the other. These are the Buddhist attachments that stop people from being themselves.

• 1:34:34André Duqum?

  That shift from perceiving life happening to me as a victim versus for me, as me, through me. The way that you spoke to and what I really resonated with in our last conversation too is how you mentioned that you devoted your life to the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love.

• 1:34:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. Howard Hughes is the one that stimulated that one.

• 1:35:00André Duqum?

  It feels like you've been speaking to it throughout this whole conversation, but what would you, how would you describe the essence of what wisdom is?

• 1:35:10Speaker 00

  It's inseparable from love. It's the synthesis and synchronicity of all opposites.

• 1:35:17Speaker 00

  The dialectic that Zeno put together, even though predated, there's predates to that.

• 1:35:24Speaker 00

  You take a proposition, you take the opposite proposition, and if you're in your amigla, you call it a debate. And you both want to be right, and both want to be proud, and hold on to the fantasy that the other person's going to come on to your side. As you go from debate to the dialectic, you start to incorporate the other side into your awareness until eventually both become aware of both sides simultaneously. The synthesis, as Hegel described.

• 1:35:52Speaker 00

  And the synthesis and synchronicity of any complementary opposite is going to experience love at any scale, no matter what you're perceiving. That's why whenever I'm researching, I'm always, whenever I read a piece of literature and there's any bias to a side, I'm looking for the other literature that was written simultaneously by the law of heuristic escalation. There's, you know, when the, when the theory of evolution comes about in 1859 or so by Darwin, the theory of entropy came out. The path of evolution in life and the path of death. And they were entangled, pairs of opposites, coming out of the same city, basically. And so this is part of nature, a unity of opposites.

• 1:36:34Speaker 00

  Will Durant did a beautiful piece on the philosophy, history, or story of philosophy and its civilizations. A beautiful rendition of the unity of opposites and the dialectic is underlying all the different cultures.

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  I believe that there's a, there's an evolution from taking a side and being opinionated and black and white and absolutist, just like there is in morality. There's absolute morality and there's relative situational ethics and morality. And that's the evolution from the most dense to the most etheric or rarefied. I think that's what we're here to do, to utilize that. And wisdom and love, the love of wisdom, the wisdom of love are the same pursuit. Now, Swedenborg did a beautiful job on it. And he wrote, "Wisdom was the light of the sun and love was the warmth of the sun."

• 1:37:37Speaker 00

  And I love that analogy in his books. I devoured all of Swedenborg's books and just lived and studied his books back in my twenties. And I love that little rendition of it. It's a smaller book he did. But wisdom, the pursuit of wisdom has been, I have cuff links that say love and wisdom on them. I don't have them on today, but I carry them wherever I go, gold and silver ones. Because the wisdom of love and the love of wisdom is what I was told by Howard Hughes to gain. And that's been pretty well the pursuit. The love of wisdom, the wisdom of love. I don't think they're separated.

• 1:38:14André Duqum?

  Could you give me your like five, six top individuals who have influenced you most on that journey? Because I think you mentioned many throughout and it's rare that I get to speak with somebody who's so well-read across so many different disciplines. Who, who do you think are the best thinkers in embracing that understanding of wisdom and love? The best writers, best teachers you've studied?

• 1:38:37Speaker 00

  That's a good question, because I'm just...

• 1:38:46Speaker 00

  I don't know if I got an answer for that. The best.

• 1:38:50André Duqum?

  Well, the most impactful for you, perhaps.

• 1:38:54Speaker 00

  Well, there's a beautiful book, I think I mentioned last time, Syntopicon, by Mortimer Adler, that I've loved reading, that I encourage anybody to read. It's a two-volume set, each are about 900 pages each. And it is a summary of the greatest minds in the Western world from Thales all the way to modern psychologies and philosophies. Summarized. Syntopicon, a synthesis of the topics that every human being are wise to study.

• 1:39:38Speaker 00

  And it starts out with A and goes all the way through the alphabet. And that's probably, those two volumes are probably the most significant volumes that a person's probably going to read. Probably to read. And there's hundreds of philosophers sitting inside there. So, yeah, I think that that would be the, it wouldn't be a human being, one being. Although there's been many people that have influenced me. I had a gentleman named Lakishwar Ram, who is an Indian mystic, who I met at 23, who had six PhDs,

• 1:40:21Speaker 00

  a doctor of philosophy, a doctor of osteopathy, a doctor of medicine, a doctor of chiropractic, a doctor of physiology, a doctor of divinity. Very aware guy. And I got to be his student and learn from him. And we explored the mysteries together. Or he shared what he understood the mysteries. Questions, whence do we come? Whither we go? Why are we here? Who are we? Do we have free will or free destination? The basic mystery questions.

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  And that was an influence, and he had an influence on my exploration of the mysteries, the mystery traditions, the comparative religions and comparative philosophies and the sciences and some of the arts that expressed those. So he had an impact on me. But I'd have to say that the, the great books of the Western world that I got a hold of when I was 21, and More and More Atlas and Topik in volumes one and two, which are the two volumes that started off, are two, it's an introduction to a PhD on life. It's a great set of volumes just for people to, to feed their mind.

• 1:41:32André Duqum?

  How do you learn in a way that you're able to integrate and synthesize the information? How have you learned how to learn?

• 1:41:40Speaker 00

  Okay, that's a great one. Okay, now let's, let's play with that one. I had learning problems, as you know. So as I started to learn and read at age 18, I, anything I asked myself, what worked and what didn't work today, and I kept record of it. What allowed me to go more efficiently and what allowed me to be less efficient? I noticed a bunch of things. I noticed when I was reading a book, some books I would get my reticular activating system would make me fade, some topics. And other topics I would be engaged in, wouldn't want to go to sleep. And I watched that polarity. And I looked at the content and I asked, why is it doing that? This is before I knew about values. And the only

• 1:42:25Speaker 00

  way to get through that, when I would read, so I wanted to study all the disciplines, but some were less inspiring than others, is that if I read 20 minutes doing this, by the time I was fading, I would then stop, read 20 minutes over here, and I would be, wake up again. And I kept myself going back and forth between those to keep myself awake. So I could read 20 hours a day. Because that was my objective, to try to at least devour, because I slept four hours a day for 35 years, and I just read pretty well, or shared. So I found that. Then I found that sitting up did a whole lot better. You know, sitting up in a proper posture was way better at reading than slouching or sitting sideways. So I found the proper temperature. I found water. I drank water.

• 1:43:09Speaker 00

  I found anything that caused any perturbation of blood sugar affected reading and learning. So I drank water and I did yoga breathing and I did yogic recall at night. And there were certain things that I just accumulated what was working and not working. I learned about visual guides in reading and I started using visual guides and got faster and faster to where I could read one day 11,000 pages. I really devoured the reading. But I also learned that if I take one common theme that I tie all my reading to. When I turned 23 and I learned about values, my, my reading accelerated vastly.

• 1:43:53Speaker 00

  I mean, it just took off because then I realized if I asked the question, how is this topic helping me fulfill what's most deeply meaningful, my highest value, what's most inspiring, what's most meaningful? If I link that and make links, the more links I do, the more photographic and autographic the information becomes. So that was a major breakthrough on that. Then I learned another thing when I was doing a presentation to a group of 400 dentists on, on TMJ. I was studying carpatic and astronomy and dentistry at the same time in medicine. And so when I was, when I was doing a presentation to a group of 400 dentists, a guy asked me this challenging question and out of my mind came a, literally a photographic image of Grey's Anatomy.

• 1:44:38Speaker 00

  And I was just reading it off the page to him. And then he goes, okay, okay, I got it. You, you gave me the answer. And then I went home that night and I go, how did I know that page? Cause I was not aware I had that page. I realized one of the great principles of learning, that you have conscious awareness, which is 0.004%, and unconscious awareness, which is vastly more. So when you're devouring information, you're only getting a small percentage of it. Even though I'm, was, could photograph things, still got not everything. But then when I found out that the second I had a purpose for reading.

• 1:45:19Speaker 00

  The pulvinar nuclei filters the information and takes it out of the unconscious and puts it into the conscious awareness. So, when I did that, when the guy asked me the question, out of my unconscious, I didn't even know I knew that page, but my, I saw it. But my pulvinar nuclei filtered it out as not pertinent, out of the infinitude, to give me what was most priority. And so that area of the brain, the top end of the reticular activating system, wakes us up and allows us to get the most pertinent information out of the infinitude that we were facing. So, when he asked the question, now I had a purpose for that. It went higher on my values and it came from the unconscious up into the conscious awareness.

• 1:46:03Speaker 00

  Well, that was a big breakthrough for me. Because now I realize, I can just devour volumes and volumes of material visually. And the second somebody asks me a question, doesn't matter what it is, I got access to it. And so I then started to do presentations with Q and A, to expedite my infinitude unconscious into the conscious awareness to speed up my learning. And that was really very, very eye-opening for me. So now I realize, and I also realized that why I was waking up and going to sleep originally was value-driven. When things were linked to my values, I got the reticular activating system and the pulvinar nuclei allowed it in. If it wasn't linked, fall asleep, unimportant.

• 1:46:47Speaker 00

  So then I realized that whatever I read, every class I took, as part of my speed reading program that I taught for years, I would take whatever class you were taking, whatever the topic is, and I asked, "How specifically is studying this topic helping me fulfill my highest value, the most important information, which is the evolution of human consciousness and how to maximize human awareness of potential and to help people understand the divine magnificence?" So, I would link whatever it is, physics, mathematics, science, I don't care what it is, I would link it, except cars and cooking. I linked it all to that objective, because I didn't want to take up time eating.

• 1:47:28Speaker 00

  I wanted, I wanted, I used to have all these bowls of nuts and seeds and dried fruit in a thing of water here. And my eating, and I had a thimble and a sponge that was wet. Because as I was speed reading, my, my fingers would get... I would lose the finger, uh, fingerprints as I'm reading. So I had to use a thimble and I had to use a sponge to moisten it to be able to keep turning pages. And I had food there, so I wouldn't lose time having to be distracted by eating. The only thing that distracted me from my reading was to go pee.

• 1:48:04André Duqum?

  You're reading so much, the literal texture of your skin was coming off.

• 1:48:08Speaker 00

  The fingertips were gone. I couldn't do it because you burn, you, you get, the pages get hot and you end up getting, you get burned. Your fingers get burned.

• 1:48:16André Duqum?

  Oh my God, it's just an incredible visual. Wow.

• 1:48:20Speaker 00

  But I learned that, that the visual reading, you know, you, most people read at the speed at which they speak. And if you speak fast, you can read fast. If you can't, you're going to read slow, guaranteed. Because your phonemes, that is how you were taught reading. You have to break to sound barrier, go into the visual system to be able to go to faster reading. And so I just allowed myself to devour information and I didn't even care if I got it consciously. I would specifically set up questions for people to ask me to find out what I did read. To prove to me that I could get access to the unconscious.

• 1:48:58André Duqum?

  So that's the way that you would train your recall capacity? Would you, was there a note taking or highlighting system or?

• 1:49:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:49:05André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:06Speaker 00

  As I was speed reading, I use a pencil. And I created a coding system. Spiritual, mental, vocational, financial, family, social and physical, because I wanted to master those areas. And then I did spiritual, SPM, spiritual meditation, SPA, affirmations, SP, you know, rituals, R. So I broke everything I was studying into these subcomponents. And then as I'm speed reading, going through it with a pencil. And, and you, you start out with, you're doing a line and line and line, and then you end up narrowing it tighter. And eventually you just go down the page. But whenever I would read something that was of pertinence or a quote or something,

• 1:49:50Speaker 00

  I would immediately put out a coding on the side of the page. And I'd underline what that thing is as I'm going through it. So then I could hand that and delegate that to a lady that typed 110 words a minute to type that out and put the reference in there and to categorize them alphabetically into my encyclopedia system. So that way I could just keep reading and then I would have the information all sorted and all ready for me when I needed it. And then it was by topics. I used syntopican idea and I would synthesize the topics and then whenever I was doing a presentation, I'd pull up everything that I'd ever read from any other source or any seminar. And I did it on index cards originally. So I only put one idea per card and I put all the cards through these topical systems and abbreviated it.

• 1:50:35Speaker 00

  And I had my own abbreviation system and kind of shorthand. So when I took notes from classes, I developed a shorthand. I took all the vowels out and I just put consonants and I shortened it down so I could get every single word that anybody said and I could quote back to them. And that way I had the best notes. And then I would sell those to students that would want to do it because I got the top grades. They'd want to get my notes. And I would sell them. That way I was getting paid to study. Because I always say, anytime you want to do what you love, you always going to ask, how do I get handsomely paid to do what I love? So I got paid to study. I made $100,000 a year teaching and studying when I was in school, when I was in my early twenties.

• 1:51:19André Duqum?

  As someone who's devoured such a heap of knowledge and information, how do you delineate what's your own original idea versus information you've read?

• 1:51:28Speaker 00

  Good question. Hard. Because it's a synthesis. Now, my methodology that I've developed is an original piece of work, but there's underlying components you can trace back.

• 1:51:45Speaker 00

  So when you're doing, where do I do the same thing? Well, that can go back to Islamic teachings, the sixth century. You can go back to Christian teachings in the first century. You go back to Egyptian teachings on tomb in a four millennium back. And I don't know, some earlier texts. I have a friend that's got the largest collection of private texts in the world. And about almost $6 billion worth of ancient manuscripts and texts that he got out of Iraq and different places around the world. And looking at some of his oldest texts, a lot of stuff goes back 3,000, 4,000 years. If you can decipher and put it into English, because I couldn't decipher the cuneiform, but I could see the English translation of it.

• 1:52:29Speaker 00

  Some of these principles go way back. And some of them don't even have a name on where they originate. So I'm an originator of a new form of combining things. Origination can be sometimes a new combination. But some of the principles, you don't know if they're new. Now, the complete synthesis synchronicity of opposites, which I call my great discovery, which is to me, the greatest discovery in psychology that I've come across. I haven't seen anywhere, but I've seen reference to it in Jung's work, but he didn't have a tool on how to do it. I saw it as a unity of opposites in Heraklides' work, but he didn't have a tool to do it. So I was able to create the tool that allowed them to do it.

• 1:53:13Speaker 00

  I spoke at New York University to the physics department, psychology department. And there was packed rooms, hot. At the end of it, the professor said, if Jung was alive today, he'd be using your method. I said, I believe that because he understood, but he didn't, and he had a framework, but he didn't have a tool to access the synchronicity and simultaneity. Wilhelm Want in 1897, in his Principles of Psychology, said that there are simultaneous contrasts and sequential contrast. Sequential contrast creates the perturbations and the vicissitudes of perception. But the simultaneous contrast was where love and wisdom is. He said, if you have that, you've got stability.

• 1:53:56Speaker 00

  So, but he didn't have a tool, no reference in it in his text. So I think I've developed a tool on how to do that, that's methodical, that's reproducible, that's duplicatable, that works in every culture, translatable. So that part, I think, is relatively original until I find somebody that maybe have done that earlier than I just didn't have, didn't come across yet.

• 1:54:15André Duqum?

  Yeah, I always find it fascinating, even in my own life with my own writing, where I like come across what I think or perceive in the moment as a relatively novel idea or phrasing of wording, and then come to read some of sort of ancient texts or like this guy Ibn Arabi, who's an amazing writer and like thousands of years back, saying the exact same thing. And it's, I guess it just makes me inquire about the possibility of what an original idea really even is, if it's possible, the rarity of one, if so. And then what seems like when you devour such a large heap of information and you're

• 1:54:57André Duqum?

  creating what is a unique sort of framework or model that maybe has never been put together in the way that you have with your value system and the Demartini process, for example.

• 1:55:05Speaker 00

  Well, Herbert Spencer was trying to create kind of a universal evolutionary model. You know, the survival of the fittest is from him, Darwin kind of played with. And that has a completely different distorted meaning today. It's like aggression. The survival of the fittest has nothing to do with aggression, really. Because, I'll use an analogy. If you're infatuated with somebody and they represent prey, and you had no predator, and you had only prey, you'd be gluttonous and fat and lose fitness.

• 1:55:44Speaker 00

  If you had predator, and you resented somebody, and they represent predator, and no prey, you'd starve in a maze shape. And lose fitness. But if you put the prey and predator together, you maximize fitness. So survival of the fitness, or thrival of the fitness, is really the person who is able to integrate the pair of opposites, not the person that dominates. Although they dominate because they survive, they're not having to be aggressive any more than passive. They've integrated it. Because if they're aggressive to a predator, they may be passive to their own offspring. You know, when you're protecting your own children,

• 1:56:29Speaker 00

  you're being kind and you're being cruel. And people think you can separate inseparables, but you can't. That's why nice and mean are not really separable. People think, well, that's a nice thing. No, it isn't. Or that's a mean thing. No, it isn't. It's neither. We've got caught in the trap of the labels and naming the inevitables.

• 1:56:50André Duqum?

  A big golden thread throughout this whole conversation and what I think will leave more evoked within my own life is when somebody comes to me with a perceived problem or thought around reality, a perception, a judgment, when it comes up within me, it's just such a liberating, it feels so much more spacious to have the inquiry of what is the complementary opposite? What is the other perspective that is also here, coupled within this experience? And it allows, I feel like it just will continue to allow me and allow everybody who's listening to walk through life, not clinging on to our ideas of how reality should be in a dogmatic persona, but allowing the mystery to permeate or being a bit more.

• 1:57:35Speaker 00

  That's well said. That summarizes it. Holy curiosity, Einstein said. He used to say it, and I'm paraphrasing, "It's enough for me on a daily basis to sit in awe contemplating the intelligence that permeates the universe." I think that's a nice way of saying it. And, you know, whether or not somebody, the mysteries of reductionism that they've been trying to solve on the hard problem in consciousness hasn't been solved. And believe it or not, some of the pre-Socratics already conceived the brain as the receipt of the consciousness. That was already back at the pre-Socratics. And

• 1:58:21Speaker 00

  We haven't really made a whole lot of progress there. We've reduced it down to quantum levels. Now there's quantum theories, you know, and microtubules and there's tubulin. And now there's quantum entanglement. Now there's photodissection of biomolecules and photons going all over the body. And there, I mean, I've, I've had fun with it. To me, the most fundamental level of consciousness would be the quantum vacuum creating virtual photons and virtual particle nanoparticles. And at that level, that's one thing common panpsychically to all parts of the brain. So maybe it's going in and out, just like a proton is actually

• 1:59:02Speaker 00

  an inner play of quarks and gluons and mesons, and it's a dance out of the quantum vacuum into existence and not. And we, we think they're stable systems, but they're actually murky. And it's possible that the information that's sitting in there and the storage of that is the same thing as our consciousness. It's actually just emerging and submerging in the quantum vacuum into our, into our brain and then out of our brain. And maybe looking for this, the pursuit of this, finding this location in the brain. Right? Even though we know that it integrates in the medial prefrontal cortex, eventual, we know that we have action potentials there. And we have different modules of the brain for different functions.

• 1:59:45Speaker 00

  Because if we can destroy that area, we can alter those functions. There's still something more fundamental. And right now, with our level of understanding and our math, the quantum vacuum would probably be the most panpsychic source that may be underlying the whole thing. But this is just speculation.

• 2:00:04André Duqum?

  I love so much of what you just shared and will need to be postponed additional for, for a third conversation at some point. But I just find it, I do find it so fascinating. How I'm also in the midst of preparing for a podcast I'm doing tomorrow with Dr. Ian McGilchrist, who

• 2:00:22Speaker 00

  Oh, he's bright.

• 2:00:23André Duqum?

  He's, he's amazing.

• 2:00:23Speaker 00

  Lovely guy. He understands unit of opposites.

• 2:00:27André Duqum?

  Yeah, I'm excited. This is a full week. I'm excited these conversations all bounce and fulfill off of one another. But I just bring that up because he speaks the different ways and capacities of knowing, both within the left and right hemisphere, and inherent asymmetry within our brain, and how great innovation almost unanimously comes through letting go of priors and knowns. And imagination and intuition is actually where the great discoveries throughout all ages have come from, and what that could say about our own life as we come into that place of stillness and quiet and allow us to re-innovate what it means to be human in our life. So it's a great balance, and I've just appreciated your awareness of the two.

• 2:01:11Speaker 00

  I loved our conversation last time, and I'd love this conversation this time. And who knows, maybe there'll be another time.

• 2:01:20André Duqum?

  I feel so honored if so. This conversation is so fulfilling, and I can tell by the excitement and aliveness throughout the whole conversation, both this time and last. It's such a gift to be able to do this, to have these values, to have these curiosities, but then to be in conversation about it. It's just so meaningful for me. So, thank you so much for the work.

• 2:01:44Speaker 00

  Thank you for the great questions and for the opportunity to be with you again. Whoever may be listening, just know that there's a 12-step program called Survivors of De Martini. In case you didn't understand something I said, maybe I'll have the opportunity someday to meet you and clarify it.

• 2:02:05André Duqum?

  Yeah, thank you for mentioning. I mean, everybody, LinkedIn description, as always, will be our guest's information of his work, his courses. We scratch the tip of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your process and being able to actually really identify our own core values and all of these things. And so I encourage people to, if they feel called, take a gander. Thank you so much.

• 2:02:30Speaker 00

  Thank you again.

• 2:02:31André Duqum?

  Everybody, thank you. Until next time, be well. We did it.

• 2:02:34Speaker 00

  Bound it.