Hi, I'm Dr John Demartini.

You have the option in your life to

take command of your life and kind of

create it on your own terms, or to

subordinate to outer authorities,

and inject the values of other

people and try to conform and fit in.

And you know, you may,

as a result of that,

diminish the fulfillment you have

because you're basically living by duty,

not design.

I'd much rather live by

design and organize my life

by priority and do it in a

way that serves other people, but

doesn't sacrifice for other people.

There's a difference. You know,

you can go through life and you can

minimize yourself and exaggerate others,

and then inject their values and

then try to live in their values.

And Ralph Waldo Emerson said envious

is ignorance and imitation is suicide.

And you compare yourself to the Jones's,

and then you end up doing things that

aren't really truly meaningful to you.

You can basically compare yourself

to other people and think, well,

I should have this. I need to have that.

Anytime you hear yourself saying

the imperatives, I got to have that,

I have to do this, I must do that,

I should do this, ought to do that,

supposed to do this, need to do that.

You can almost guarantee that you've

injected some outer authority.

Freud called that the superego,

the internalization of an outer

authority's values into your life,

creating a confusion and cloudiness

compared to your own clear hierarchy of

values and your highest

value, which is your telos,

which is the thing that

really calls you into action.

You lighten yourself up if you do that.

But few people give themselves permission

to actually live as an unborrowed

visionary, not borrowing the

visions of other people's shoulds,

but actually being true to themselves.

And I'd rather have the whole world

against me than my own soul. You know,

your soul or state of unconditional love,

or the real you, or the authentic you,

or the essence of being, or

whatever name you want to give it,

this is the one that is you.

And giving yourself permission to be

you is what the world sometimes doesn't

want you to. They want you

to fit in, not stand out.

And yet the truth is you want

to be loved for who you are.

And who you are is an expression

of what you value most.

And if you don't identify what you

value most and live accordingly,

you're probably going to subordinate.

I always say that any area of

your life you don't empower,

other people are going to overpower you.

If you don't empower yourself

intellectually, you'll

be told what to think.

If you don't empower yourself in

business, you'll be told what to do.

If you don't empower yourself in finance,

you'll be told what you're worth.

If you don't empower

yourself in relationships,

you'll be doing honey do things

around the house that's not inspiring.

If you don't empower yourself socially,

you'll be probably taking in

and inculcating the social media

misinformation campaigns

you're surrounded by.

If you don't empower yourself physically,

you'll be told what drugs and organs,

drugs to take and organs to remove. If

you don't empower yourself spiritually,

you'll probably subordinate to some

geocentric, anthropomorphic, antiquated,

mono glottal religious construct of

God. In the process of doing that,

you'll hold yourself back probably,

compared to what your real potential

is. You won't actualize your potential.

You'll just kinda live

relatively potential because

you're trying to please all

those people that are the authorities

that you've subordinated to.

And you can't, you can't live, in fact,

you will create a chronic fatigue

syndrome trying, a distracted mind.

Anytime you're not focused

on what's really priority,

you end up in distractions. And

distractions are the impulses,

immediate gratifying impulses and

instincts of seeking and avoiding,

philias and phobias,

fantasies and nightmares.

And these pleasure and pain,

seeking and avoiding

mechanisms are distractions.

The stoics warned against that, the great

teachers and philosophers knew better.

And it's a matter of

where do you want to play?

Do you want to stay in

a state of equanimity,

be yourself or a state of inequity

and constantly be distracted by

seeking avoiding mechanisms? You know,

all your life you've been bombarded by

people telling you you should do this,

you ought to do that. You're

surrounded by people that do that.

And I just have some fun with them. I

just say, according to who, they say,

you should do this, according to who?

Well, you ought to be doing this.

According to who? And they stop

and they reflect. And I go,

are you my authority?

Or the people that you've subordinated

to or are they my authority? Well,

many people subordinate to a text,

a book or a religious text or something,

or some political movement or some

hero or some guru or whatever.

And they don't stop and

think for themselves.

And it's maybe wise to stop and reflect

and realize that whatever you see in

those people out there, you have

inside yourself, you're not missing it.

And you have whatever you perceive

as missing and you're fulfilled.

And give yourself permission to stand

on your own two feet and decide for

yourself. Most people

are afraid to. They make,

they offload their decisions to other

people and subordinate to their needs.

And you know, they're afraid of peeing

people off, excuse the expression.

Don't confuse sacrificing yourself

for others as serving them.

Better to serve them,

to have sustainable fair exchange

between you and other people. You know,

not trying to get something for

nothing or give something for nothing,

but just be yourself and do it in a way

that inspires and fulfills other people.

But you're not going to please everyone.

You're going to have people

like and dislike you. You know,

if you go around trying to please

everybody, you'll find that's futile.

And you try to live in other people's

values, it's futile. You can't sustain it.

Almost anybody's been in infa.

You've probably been in infatuation

moment where you were really enamored with

somebody and you tried to live in

their values for fear of losing them.

And then you sacrificed what was

important and you eventually build up some

resentment, 'cause you

want your life back.

So don't give away your life by

infatuations and don't project your life

onto others and try to take their

life by resentments. Learn to love.

You know, love is a,

an embracing of the two sides of yourself

and the two sides of others and the

realization that we're reflections,

we're in a little self-reflective

universe in that respect.

So if you sit there and you're

basically subordinating to outer

influences and not giving

yourself permission, you

know, as Einstein has said,

my contempt for authority

is what made me one.

I think that's what made him Einstein.

I'd rather be first at being me than

second at being somebody else. So don't,

don't try to be somebody you're not.

The magnificence of who you are is far

greater than any fantasies you'll impose

on yourself.

And giving yourself permission to be

authentic self is where it's at. That's,

you want to be loved for that. Both

sides. The hero of the villain, the saint,

the sinner, all the positives,

negatives, the supportive or challenging,

the peace, the war. Everything that

you're going to face in your life,

you want to be loved for all of it.

'cause If you're trying to live in some

moral hypocricy and get rid of half of

your life, you'll never love yourself.

So allow yourself to be yourself in

a world that doesn't want you to,

and watch what happens.

You'll empower yourself.

And the very people that first will say,

you should, you should, you ought to,

this, turn around and respect you.

And then you gain respect and love for

being yourself because they deeply inside

want to do the same. And so at

first, they may ridicule you,

violently oppose you, condemn you,

but eventually they appreciate

you walking a path of an

authority yourself, your own

author of your own destiny.

Be captain of your ship and

master of your own fate.

That's the best way of do it.

That's one of the things I teach in

the Breakthrough Experience and do my

Demartini Method, all that.

The whole purpose of that is to master

your life and to give yourself permission

to be you. So in a world that

doesn't want you to be, be you.