These were the passions. They were ungoverned,
Speaker:uncontrolled behaviors that were the animal
Speaker:nature within us.
Speaker:Living as a slave to a passion or living
Speaker:as an inspired missionary.
Speaker:I'd like to make a difference between that because today, very commonly,
Speaker:you hear the word, 'find your passion', 'get your passion', you know,
Speaker:'get passion', 'I wish I had more passion', these kinds of things.
Speaker:And I am an etymologist to some degree.
Speaker:I love looking up the words. When I was young,
Speaker:I used to live in dictionaries and I'd look up the etymology and what the words
Speaker:meant. And if you pull out your
Speaker:iPhone and pull out your Google and look up the word, passion-etymology,
Speaker:E T Y M O L O G Y. If you look up that word, passion,
Speaker:you will see that it comes from the word pati and passio,
Speaker:which means to suffer. Yes,
Speaker:most of your self-help people are talking about, 'get your passion,
Speaker:gets some passion, I wish I had more passion, if I find my passion'.
Speaker:But the word passion means to suffer.
Speaker:And compassion means to suffer with somebody.
Speaker:And these are so commonly used today without even
Speaker:Since about 1985,
Speaker:the term passion came into kind of a common use, after the book,
Speaker:The Passion for Excellence. And it's basically, you know,
Speaker:a high excited pursuit of something they think.
Speaker:But if you look up the word passion, it means ungoverned, uncontrolled behavior.
Speaker:It's an animal behavior.
Speaker:It's a wild animal kind of response in its original roots.
Speaker:Even in early Christianity, well, not too early,
Speaker:but earlier Christianity,
Speaker:they talked about the seven deadly sins, gluttony, sloth,
Speaker:wrath, you know,
Speaker:greed and these, and lust.
Speaker:So these were the passions. They were ungoverned,
Speaker:uncontrolled behaviors that were the animal
Speaker:nature within us.
Speaker:And that's distinguished from an inspired mission.
Speaker:You've heard of the term finding your inspired purpose, your inspired mission.
Speaker:So I'd like to elaborate on those two and explain them.
Speaker:And the mission and its etymology means to send forth.
Speaker:So in Christianity,
Speaker:the Jesuits sent their people forth into the world to try to share their
Speaker:mission. Those with a mission have a message,
Speaker:I've said many times before.
Speaker:An inspired mission is an intrinsic calling
Speaker:and a passion is an extrinsic derived reaction.
Speaker:So you're run extrinsically from the world around you by the passion.
Speaker:Lust,
Speaker:it means this stimulus over here is so intriguing that you have to have it,
Speaker:and sexually. Gluttony, the food over there,
Speaker:the sugar over there is something you have to eat.
Speaker:But an inspired mission is intrinsic.
Speaker:It's something that's a calling from within.
Speaker:And theologians use that as the calling, some called it the métier,
Speaker:the purpose that we drive our life by.
Speaker:So I'd like to elaborate on each of these and distinguish these and show
Speaker:why you can become a slave to your passions or you can become liberated
Speaker:by an inspired mission, a master.
Speaker:And I rarely do a presentation about talking about values.
Speaker:And this is no exception. You will probably not ever hear me do a talk,
Speaker:a presentation without it because it's the foundation of all human behavior.
Speaker:So let's just,
Speaker:let's go down the rabbit hole a bit and let's take a look at what these two
Speaker:terms,
Speaker:mission and passion really represent and what they can be used for in your own
Speaker:mastery of life. You have,
Speaker:as all people have, a set of priorities,
Speaker:a set of values that you live your life by.
Speaker:And this set of values, this hierarchy of values,
Speaker:or set of priorities, are unique to you, they're fingerprint specific.
Speaker:Whatever's highest on your value list,
Speaker:the thing that's most important in your life,
Speaker:you're spontaneously inspired from within to do and to
Speaker:fulfill. You don't need any motivation on the outside to get you to do it.
Speaker:Just like the video games for the young boy who loves video games,
Speaker:he just does it. He doesn't have to be reminded. Doesn't have to be motivated.
Speaker:Doesn't have to be incentivized to go do his video games.
Speaker:So whatever the highest value is, which Aristotle called the telos,
Speaker:the end in mind,
Speaker:which the word teleology,
Speaker:which is the study of meaning and purpose is derived from, your most meaningful,
Speaker:most purposeful, most fulfilling, most inspiring,
Speaker:most empowering thing you can do,
Speaker:is to pursue and fulfill what you value most.
Speaker:That's where you have fulfillment. The mind is full.
Speaker:That is a spontaneously, intrinsically driven calling.
Speaker:Mine happens to be, my highest value happens to be teaching. I love doing that.
Speaker:I do it every single day. I'm about to start late tonight,
Speaker:a seven-day program. I just finished a program yesterday.
Speaker:I'm constantly doing presentations. Nobody has to motivate me to do that.
Speaker:I love doing it. I love teaching. So whatever that is,
Speaker:that's highest on your value, that's what your inspired mission is.
Speaker:And that is something that you will embrace both pain and pleasure in the
Speaker:pursuit of. In other words,
Speaker:if you see a challenge in the way you won't stop. You'll go over it.
Speaker:You'll go under it. You'll go around it. You'll go through it.
Speaker:And you'll find how whatever happens that's an obstacle, how it's on the way,
Speaker:not in the way, and you'll pursue the challenges that inspire you.
Speaker:Just like a young boy who finishes his video game,
Speaker:he wants to immediately go to a more advanced video game,
Speaker:because that's what he loves doing. And he doesn't want to stop.
Speaker:He's pursuing challenges that inspire him and extracting out of it,
Speaker:creativity and innovation and waking up genius.
Speaker:And that is what is the power of fulfilling a mission, the highest value.
Speaker:And you want to go forth, you don't want to hesitate back.
Speaker:You want to go forth and share what's inside you and express yourself.
Speaker:Kind of like you want to extrovert in the highest value.
Speaker:But as you go down the list of priorities in life, lower values, you
Speaker:require greater degrees of motivation, to get you to do it.
Speaker:And instead of the blood glucose and oxygen going into the forebrain,
Speaker:where you see a vision, that's inspiring to you,
Speaker:you strategically plan an action on how to get there,
Speaker:you mitigate the risks so you see things on the way and no matter what happens,
Speaker:you found a solution to it, you move forward on it, you execute those,
Speaker:and you have self-governance because the forebrain automatically calms down the
Speaker:amygdala. In that area, you automatically become master of destiny.
Speaker:As an inspired missionary as a master of destiny,
Speaker:you exemplify walking your talk and enduring, as a leader,
Speaker:the pairs of opposites, the support, the challenge, the ease, the difficulties,
Speaker:and you embrace them both forward, fulfilling what's meaningful to you.
Speaker:The highest value, the Telos as Aristotle called.
Speaker:But as you go down the list of values,
Speaker:the blood glucose and oxygen goes into the amygdala and the hindbrain,
Speaker:where hindsight, not foresight rules your life.
Speaker:And that amygdala is a desire center, not the executive center,
Speaker:which is the forebrain, but the desire center.
Speaker:The desire center is seeking that which is pleasure and
Speaker:avoiding that which is pain. Seeking prey, avoiding predator,
Speaker:seeking that which you want to consume,
Speaker:an impulse to eat and consume.
Speaker:And that you want to avoid that which is trying to consume you.
Speaker:So the amygdala,
Speaker:the desire center is trying to separate pain from pleasure.
Speaker:The executive center embraces them both,
Speaker:and sees both of them as essential.
Speaker:Imagine if you're out there in the wild and you are seeking prey, food,
Speaker:and you had no predator, you had just an abundance of food.
Speaker:You'd lose your fitness because you would gluttonously eat,
Speaker:and you'd have a passion. But by having a predator on the spot,
Speaker:you eat just enough to maintain your sustain maximum life and fitness,
Speaker:but not too much where you're slow and fat,
Speaker:which then makes the predator target you because of the calories and because you
Speaker:can't run.
Speaker:So maximum development and fitness occurs at the border of support and
Speaker:challenge, prey and predator, the positives, negatives.
Speaker:So when you're living in your highest value, which is your inspired mission,
Speaker:you embrace both of them objectively. Objectivity means even minded,
Speaker:balanced minded, neutral. But if you're down in your amygdala,
Speaker:you're trying to avoid one side and seek the other,
Speaker:trying to avoid the predator to seek the prey. And by the way,
Speaker:if you avoided the predator and sought the prey,
Speaker:you'd get gluttonous and fat as I've said, and lose your fitness.
Speaker:You wouldn't maximize your potential. And you'd be looking for a fantasy,
Speaker:a pleasure without a pain. And as you know in life, as the Buddha says,
Speaker:the desire for that, which is unobtainable, pleasure without pain,
Speaker:and the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable, pain without pleasure,
Speaker:is the source of human suffering. And suffering is the source of passion.
Speaker:So passion is a by-product of the amygdala's response to its environment,
Speaker:trying to avoid one side and seek the other and trying to divide that which is
Speaker:indivisible, to separate that which is inseparable,
Speaker:to polarize that which is unpolarizable, to label that which is unlabeled,
Speaker:to name that which is ineffable.
Speaker:So the second we're in our amygdala and living by lower values,
Speaker:we automatically are subject to the passions.
Speaker:And now we are infatuated with somebody, we want food, gluttony,
Speaker:we want wrath for something that challenges us.
Speaker:And all the passions that are ungoverned reactions to external stimuli that we
Speaker:see in an imbalanced way. Now,
Speaker:when you're infatuated with something and you seek a prey, you might say,
Speaker:and you're conscious of the upsides and unconscious the downsides,
Speaker:you're not fully conscious.
Speaker:When you're avoiding a predator and you're seeing that as something you want to
Speaker:avoid, you're conscious of the downsides, unconscious of the upsides. Again,
Speaker:you have a incomplete awareness. You have ignorance of what's there,
Speaker:and you're unconscious of what's there, and you're not fully conscious,
Speaker:but if you're living in your executive center on an inspired mission,
Speaker:you're fully conscious of the pros and cons, the positives and negatives,
Speaker:the advantages and disadvantages. You're managing what leadership demands,
Speaker:which is paradoxes of opposites. And you're embracing them neutrally,
Speaker:so you have no fear of losing the fantasy and no fear of gaining the nightmare.
Speaker:You're able to see things, resiliently, adaptively,
Speaker:and you're able to pursue things and wake up your genius and pursue challenges
Speaker:that inspire you and accomplish something that contributes to the planet as an
Speaker:inspired missioning, sending forth your message into the world.
Speaker:But down in the amygdala, you're going to want to avoid pain and seek pleasure.
Speaker:And the more you try to avoid that which is inevitable,
Speaker:the more frightening it becomes.
Speaker:And that's the difference between living in distress and eustress.
Speaker:Eustress is wellness promoting,
Speaker:cause you're embracing the pains and pleasures of life.
Speaker:And distress is illness promoting cause you're trying to avoid half of life,
Speaker:but it keeps smacking you. And you keep trying to avoid something,
Speaker:but you can't avoid it. It's the unavoidable.
Speaker:The moment you're in your amygdala, trying to go from avoid to seek,
Speaker:you activate what I call the impulse,
Speaker:the compulse, the immediate gratifying addicted behaviors.
Speaker:Addictive behaviors and consumptions, which is what people do,
Speaker:they consume products that are overpriced with other people's brands and then
Speaker:they squander their money on immediate gratification.
Speaker:And then they don't build a brand and build a mission that actually serves
Speaker:people that builds a brand that makes them wealthy. And so, as a result of it,
Speaker:they keep banging their head against the wall,
Speaker:trying to be getting ahead but they can't.
Speaker:Because they keep trying to avoid the very thing that they need to get ahead.
Speaker:The challenge. So the passions,
Speaker:you become a slave to. Why?
Speaker:Because anything you infatuate with occupies space and time in your mind,
Speaker:anything that you resent occupies space and time your mind.
Speaker:So we've all been in a situation we've been highly infatuated with and tried to
Speaker:sleep at night, couldn't sleep.
Speaker:Or highly resentful and raged about somebody and couldn't sleep,
Speaker:because they're occupying your mind. Anytime you have
Speaker:you're conscious of the upsides, unconscious of the downsides,
Speaker:conscious of the downsides, unconscious of the upsides.
Speaker:Anytime you have a subjectively biased,
Speaker:distorted perception of your reality,
Speaker:it's going to occupy space and time in your mind and it's going to be stored in
Speaker:your subconscious mind and your subconscious mind stores all conscious,
Speaker:unconscious splits. And it causes you to avoid and seek.
Speaker:And therefore you're externally driven and run.
Speaker:And extrinsic motivation is a symptom, never a solution for mastery.
Speaker:And you end up being a slave because when you're infatuated with something and
Speaker:you minimize yourself to it,
Speaker:you're going to want to change you to be more like it.
Speaker:And when you're resentful to something,
Speaker:you get kind of puffed up and you want to change it to be more like you.
Speaker:And anytime you try to change and live outside your values,
Speaker:in somebody else's values,
Speaker:or try to get other people to live in your values away from their values,
Speaker:you have futility. So the passions are futile,
Speaker:but the missions are utile. Utile means utility. You contribute.
Speaker:You go out and make a difference in the world.
Speaker:And you actually awaken your highest value, which is unique to you,
Speaker:which allows you to go and be the individual,
Speaker:the essence of your being instead of just existing and surviving.
Speaker:So if you live by your highest value, you end up thriving.
Speaker:If you live by your lower values, you end up surviving.
Speaker:And surviving with the passions is not where it's at.
Speaker:So when you hear the gurus and the new self-help people talking about find your
Speaker:passion, get your passion. You might consider what passion means,
Speaker:and might replace the word.
Speaker:Because sometimes what they're saying is just a confusion of etymology.
Speaker:Sometimes what they're saying has wisdom,
Speaker:but they're not using the word that I would use anyway. I would use the word,
Speaker:inspired mission. I'm a man on a mission. I'm not a man that's got a passion.
Speaker:I'm not interested in being governed from the outside world.
Speaker:I'm not interested in being reactive.
Speaker:I'm not interested in getting out of control and reacting.
Speaker:And that takes no effort. It takes no effort to have passion.
Speaker:But it does take effort to have an inspired mission.
Speaker:And most people don't want to do the effort.
Speaker:They want a lazy man's guide to enlightenment.
Speaker:They're not willing to do the work,
Speaker:but the work is worth it because the fulfillment of living by your highest
Speaker:value, doing something that contributes a service,
Speaker:and getting remunerated for it with sustainable fair exchange,
Speaker:is one of the most fulfilling things an individual can do.
Speaker:You can rest at night with a clear consciousness,
Speaker:You're synthesized.
Speaker:I like to think of love as a synthesis and synchronicity of all complimentary
Speaker:opposites. When you're living by your inspired mission,
Speaker:you're doing what you love and loving what you do.
Speaker:And you're making a contribution and spreading and exemplifying that as a
Speaker:possibility for human beings, which draws and synchronizes people, places,
Speaker:things, ideas,
Speaker:and events into your life to help you fulfill yours and inspires them to carry
Speaker:on, you might say, the chain reaction of fulfilling their, the ripple effect.
Speaker:But if you're living in your passions,
Speaker:you're going to be run from the outside world. And I see all the time right now,
Speaker:people are going around trying to find their passion and trying to get more
Speaker:excited, trying immediate gratification. I see it in the media.
Speaker:I see it in the news. Everything is quick, quick, quick, quick,
Speaker:get to the point,
Speaker:but just know that immediate gratification costs you long-term fulfillment.
Speaker:You know, when it comes money management,
Speaker:I see people right now looking for speculations,
Speaker:trying to get rich overnight and go into the crypto world or things like that to
Speaker:try to get fixes, try to get that high.
Speaker:But the moment they get high and they don't see the low that's associated with
Speaker:it, they end up being addicted to that and then they got to get that next high.
Speaker:And that's exactly what the addicted behavior is.
Speaker:It's like walking into a casino.
Speaker:The passions run the casino world and the casinos got big buildings and you got
Speaker:little houses. If you want to give away your potential, your energy, your money,
Speaker:and everything else to the passions, fine, you'll learn your lesson.
Speaker:But finding some dedicated purpose, some inspired mission,
Speaker:that really deeply means something to you, the meaning.
Speaker:You know what the word meaning means?
Speaker:It means extracting out the mean between the pairs of opposites.
Speaker:Look into Aristotle's work and look up what the true virtue is.
Speaker:It's the two extreme, between the two extremes of vices,
Speaker:and it's the pairs of opposites.
Speaker:So true meaning is basically extracting out between the two pairs of opposites.
Speaker:In the Breakthrough Experience program, which I do pretty well weekly or well,
Speaker:since COVID a little less, but I do it regularly,
Speaker:I've done it 1,123 times in that program,
Speaker:I show people how to extract meaning out of their existence,
Speaker:how to take any situation in their life and how to turn it into an opportunity
Speaker:that they can fulfill their mission with it. It's never what happens to you.
Speaker:It's your perception, decisions, and actions that determine that.
Speaker:So when you're living by your highest values and you're living with an inspired
Speaker:mission and you're purposefully driven from within, intrinsically,
Speaker:you see no matter what happens to you on the way, not in the way.
Speaker:You're grateful. In fact, the medial prefrontal cortex is the gratitude center.
Speaker:So if you're living in your highest values and activating the medial prefrontal
Speaker:cortex,
Speaker:you're actually grateful for your experience and
Speaker:you for is baggage, anything you can say thank you for his fuel.
Speaker:But down into the amygdala,
Speaker:the amygdala is letting you know what you have judge, what you haven't loved,
Speaker:you have strife inside yourself. And you're trying to avoid and seek.
Speaker:And you're externally run.
Speaker:And you're an automaton reacting to misperceptions stored in the subconscious
Speaker:mind. Now the purpose of that amygdala is survival.
Speaker:The purpose of that is an emergency. It has a place. It's not a bad thing.
Speaker:It's not a moral issue. It's just not a thriving mastery. See,
Speaker:there's two types of stresses in life.
Speaker:The perception of loss of that which you seek and the perception of gain of that
Speaker:what you're trying to avoid. That's it, two stresses. And in the brain,
Speaker:all biological responses, no matter what the perceived stresses are,
Speaker:all go down to the same neurological responses.
Speaker:So the second you're infatuated with something or resentful to something,
Speaker:you're going to fear it's loss and fear it's gain.
Speaker:So when you're in the amygdala, you're going to increase your fears.
Speaker:And fears are feedback mechanisms to let you know that you're pursuing
Speaker:fantasies. And fantasy's are trying to get a one-sided world,
Speaker:a positive without a negative. And a nightmare is a by-product of doing that.
Speaker:If you're depressed,
Speaker:it's because you're comparing your current reality to a fantasy that you're
Speaker:addicted to. And as long as you're in the amygdala striving for a fantasy,
Speaker:you're going to keep creating nightmares because they come together as a pair,
Speaker:like two poles of a magnet.
Speaker:The master of life embraces the two sides of the magnet,
Speaker:knows how both serve a purpose. The predator, just like the prey, is you can,
Speaker:you can eat, but the predator keeps you fit. In fact,
Speaker:it's been shown that we biologically grow and have the most fitness at the
Speaker:border of support and challenge, prey and predator.
Speaker:That's why there's a food chain with prey and predator that we need in the food
Speaker:chain for the efficiency of usage of energy.
Speaker:So our prey and predator are to be synthesized,
Speaker:not polarized. You're not here to avoid one and seek the other,
Speaker:that's the animal passions. You here to have an angelic mission,
Speaker:something that's, I always say, an angel is a messenger,
Speaker:a messenger, a man with a mission, a woman with a mission.
Speaker:So give yourself permission to do something that makes a difference that's a
Speaker:mission on the planet, because that's the power of it. One's an animal.
Speaker:One's an angel if you will. An angel just means messenger.
Speaker:One who is enlightened and has a message to the world.
Speaker:I'd much rather be an enlightened individual with
Speaker:to the passions of the animal and just surviving.
Speaker:So if you want to thrive and you want to go out and do something amazing,
Speaker:live by your highest values, prioritize your life.
Speaker:If you don't live by the highest priorities and fill
Speaker:actions that inspire you spontaneously,
Speaker:your day keeps filling up with low priority distractions that don't.
Speaker:And that's the result of the passions.
Speaker:So I just want to make a distinction between inspired mission and a,
Speaker:you might say, surviving passion. I know that many people talk about passion.
Speaker:It's all over the lexicon, but I just want you to look it up.
Speaker:Please take the time to go look up these words,
Speaker:find out what their meaning is and use them,
Speaker:because also another aspect of the mission is to be able to conquer your lower
Speaker:animal nature.
Speaker:So an individual who is on a mission who has a message and spreading that out
Speaker:and getting that and disseminating that is also conquering their animal nature
Speaker:that is constantly distracting them from their mission.
Speaker:And I find that the people who are clear about their mission go farther in
Speaker:places, achieve more, and they set real objectives, not fantasies,
Speaker:and they accomplish more and achieve more and have more fulfillment.
Speaker:So that's my presentation. I want you to know you to know the difference.
Speaker:Please look up those words just for your own sake and appreciate those words and
Speaker:use etymology to your advantage.
Speaker:It's a great thing because the evolution of words have deep meaning in our lives
Speaker:and they may guide us to help us discern when information on the marketplace is
Speaker:actually sound or maybe misrepresented.
Speaker:So I just wanted to share that. So you have now the distinction between those.
Speaker:Fill your day with high priority actions, activate your executive center,
Speaker:become the executive. You'll be paid more, you'll have more self worth,
Speaker:you'll have more fulfillment,
Speaker:you'll end up spontaneously waking up your leadership and you won't be subject
Speaker:to the external world running your life. If you want to run your own life,
Speaker:follow your highest values with an inspired mission.
Speaker:If you want other people to run your life,
Speaker:have no effort whatsoever and just allow your passions to run wild.
Speaker:This is Dr. Demartini.
Speaker:I just wanted to say one last thing that coming up on our next little
Speaker:presentation,
Speaker:we have a program coming up a demanded masterclass called Finding Meaning and
Speaker:Purpose on the Path of Self-Mastery.
Speaker:If you have any interest in what I shared today, I'm going to take it further.
Speaker:I'm going to go in and describe what purpose is and what self-mastery is and
Speaker:what meaning is,
Speaker:and the etymology to these things and what they're actually trying to represent
Speaker:and how you can action step your life to help help you fulfill that.
Speaker:So what I shared today is just a little wetting of the appetite for what I'll be
Speaker:sharing in this masterclass. And that way you can do that.
Speaker:And if you come and join me on this masterclass today,
Speaker:you'll actually receive a free gift,
Speaker:which is Awakening Your Astronomical Vision. Those with a vision flourish.
Speaker:Those without a vision perish. The amygdala doesn't have the vision,
Speaker:but the forebrain does.
Speaker:So if you'd like to live with an inspired mission and be a missionary and
Speaker:self-mastered individual that has meaning and purpose,
Speaker:I'll see you at this masterclass. Look forward to seeing you there.
Speaker:Thank you for joining me today. See you next week.