And that liberates you to be able to see a broader perspective,

to see things transcendent to the good and evil and not get caught in either

good or evil. [Inaudible]

Now most likely you've contemplated this construct.

And throughout the centuries various thinkers,

philosophers have asked the question, what is the meaning of life?

And people have attempted just like in morality to identify kind of a universal

scheme, a universal meaning that unites all of us.

And there have been various interpretations to that.

this is what it is, and others more relativist, based on the individualities.

Camus, philosopher, French philosopher, basically described it,

there was no meaning other than what the individual gives it.

And again,

the other end of the spectrum is that there is a meaning and it is divinely

given by some authority that has been written, et cetera.

So I'm just gonna just go off on some interesting adventures.

You may want to take some notes or write.

There are two types of meaning that I'll be addressing here.

One is a superficial, subjectively biased,

individualized meaning. And the other is a deeper,

broader, more transcendental

meaning the thing that similar to what Aristotle referred to in his time.

And so we'll develop each of them and put them into context the best I can.

And so you'll appreciate what this means.

So, first of all,

every perception from the time you were conceived in all the

developmental stages in gestation,

at birth and from birth to where you are now,

you have been accumulating sensory experiences.

These experiences have been pleasure

or painful oriented, seeking or avoiding or oriented,

survival oriented. And then you have, in addition to that,

from your previous experience,

you've had secondary experiences that either remind you or don't remind you of

previous experiences and they create compound,

you might say subjectively biased interpretations of the new

experience.

So you have an accumulation of experiences that add together and summate

into what you're interpreting with every new stimulus,

every new sensory stimulus and experience.

And this is called the associations we make. So in other words,

if we have,

let's say we've dated a series of men and they're brown hair,

and they're all ambitious and aggressive.

So every time you see now, a man with brown hair,

you might assume cautiously that they're probably going to be aggressive and

ambitious.

If all of a sudden you get one that's brown hair that is now not as ambitious

and more passive and maybe laid back or whatever, not driven,

you may skew that and tweak that and go, 'Okay,

well then there's a small percentage of them that do that.' But as you

accumulate experience,

you're putting associations on every new experience and each of those

is giving you a different interpretation of your reality,

and you eventually start associating various meanings to different

experiences. Now, compounding that,

is your mother and your father during your early childhood,

and they now have stacked their associations that

and they're now imposing that on you and giving you an interpretation of what

things represent and mean. So you've got your own experiences.

You've got now your mom's and Pop's experiences,

and they have their own experiences and their mom and pop experiences,

so that's, multi-generational kind of experience that's going on.

And some of that is epigenetically coded into your genetics

and your histones,

and are actually creating compounding from previous generations.

And so we can have a reaction to something that's an impulse towards,

or instinct away from something that's coming down from a multi-generational

influence that way, from parent to parent to parent, kind of thing.

Then we also have our preachers and our teachers.

You go to school and you've got a preacher getting in your head and they'll tell

you, 'well, a dove represents peace', or 'this represents that',

'and across represents salvation' or something,

and you might get that from a preacher or, or a rabbi or some Buddhist monk.

And now you've got teachers in your schools and religious instructors and

social influence starting to add to that on top of your mom and dad,

plus your own experiences.

So the culmination of all those compounding association

of what that meaning is.

And something can mean something to you when you're a 10 year old and it could

be something different when you're a 50 year old.

Your experiences and all the associations you make that are painful or

pleasureful add to it. See,

anytime you see or perceive something with any of your senses, sight smell,

taste, and the 110 senses we have,

interoceptive from inside the body or outside the body.

Anytime we experience anything, the live experience,

plus all the previous experiences are giving you rise to what you interpret that

reality to be, that experience.

And there is no universally accepted idea there really,

there are some that are pretty common, but there's not universal. For instance,

if we're in America and we see somebody that's got, having multiple wives,

they end up in jail possibly, but in South Africa,

they have multiple wives they're considered a King or something.

So in different cultures,

those same actions and behaviors may be interpreted totally different,

have different meaning to those people. One may represent power.

One may represent cheating and inconsiderate.

So all of the experiences you have and all the injected,

ideals, and values and experiences that people impose on you,

and then the traditions and conventions and religious ideas and political

ideas,

and all the experience you get from studying and reading

are coming together to create your expression and your reality.

And so semiotically the meaning of things is basically a

summation of whatever it is that you've experienced.

And I can't tell you that any two people ever have the exactly the same

representation of reality.

So you could take a tree and it could represent if you saw somebody hanging in

it, you might represent, 'that's a scary thing,

I don't want to be around the tree.' Somebody else may see a tree as where it's

blooming with flowers and you pick fruit from it, it may be a joyous experience.

So the representations that we can give things,

we can make a heaven out of a hell, as Milton said, or a hell out of a heaven.

We could take anything. In the Breakthrough Experience program,

which I've been teaching for over 32 years now,

I can take somebody that's had an experience and I can

of questions and make them have new associations with it and stack those

associations in a completely different direction.

And I can take something that they thought was traumatic and I can make it

ecstatic, or make something ecstatic and make it traumatic.

I can change those meanings and change those representations at any time.

So there's no universal meaning to something that is stagnant, that is stuck,

that is set, that's we're not going to change, we have the capacity to change.

When we think of now going into space, looking at the stars,

at one time looking at the stars, they imagined a big vault around the world,

you know, a fixed stars, and that was the finite boundary of the universe,

floating around on top of it.

And then we had a telescope and we saw galaxies and we saw multiple galaxies.

And now our representation of what the stars represent,

the wandering stars that are close called planets, and the distant stars,

completely different meaning.

And our whole representation of religion has had to evolve.

And most people aren't evolving with it,

they're stagnant in this old astronomical cosmological scheme.

And so their meaning is still based on something that may be 2000 years old.

So the reality is that those meetings are fluctuant and they're,

you can make them. Which is magnificent,

because it can also give you the power to take anything that ever happens in

your life and turn it into something that you choose to make it.

One of the things that I teach people is to,

not only prioritize their life and stick to the highest priority actions that

are most meaningful to them,

but to actually take whatever experience it is and ask,

how's it helping me fulfill what's most meaningful?

Because you can associate anything with anything,

and you could turn those experiences into something that is actually inspiring.

And I do that every week in the Breakthrough Experience,

take something that people think is terrible, and then a day, a week, a month,

a year, or five years later,

they may have discovered that it had terrific in it,

within the yang is the yin you might say, or yin in the yang.

Or I can sit down and do it right on the spot and not have the wisdom of the

ages with the aging process by finding it right now and looking where it is and

turning it into an opportunity. Within the crisis as a blessing you might say.

So the beautiful thing about meaning is that you have capacity to transform

anything that you've ever experienced in your past,

anything you've inculcated from people around you,

anything that may be epigenetic,

you have the capacity to transform any of those associations and turn into any

other new associations you want, you have that freedom.

That's the freedom you might say of choice that really is powerful,

that you have the capacity to transform anything into anything.

And I've been blessed to do that.

I've literally taken people that have been absolutely diagnosed, traumatic,

post traumatic stress disorder that society would generally think is 'my God,

that's amazing that they would endured that',

and turn into something that they have tears of gratitude for. And why?

Anything you haven't been grateful for is baggage,

anything you are grateful for is fuel.

So why wouldn't you want to take whatever you've experienced in your life,

instead of storing it as baggage in your subconscious mind,

why not add new meaning to it? And that leads us to a point of grace.

So then we can realize that nothing in our life is anything other than what

helps us get what we want. It's all on the way, not in the way.

And we have fuel and inspiration in life.

And I'm absolutely certain that can be done because I've been doing it for

decades now.

And I'm certain that that can be done and I've used it over and over again.

So the meaning is what we give it.

There is no inherent meaning in anything except what we've given

it. But, that's the superficial subjectively biased, re-associated,

stacked associations, form of meaning.

And you can see that there's many meanings.

When you go into a cave and you find drawings that are 40,000 years old or

something, or maybe in Blambos cave down in South Africa,

where it is, Blambos Cave,

I think it's called and it's 300,000 years. There's meaning there.

And we're trying to interpret today what that might've meant to them,

what the art might've represented. We don't know.

We're just interpreting possibilities.

But that's one form of meaning.

And that's the meaning that's completely flexible.

Then there's another level of meaning, a transcendent level of meaning.

And this is the one that Aristotle addressed.

And I've been using and addressing for a long time now,

and this I want you to write down because this is something you don't want to

overlook. The mean,

if you have a stock market and it goes up and down,

over a period of time with all the ups and all the downs, if you average it,

you have a mean,

and that's the mean is the average fluctuation of positive and negative,

growth and decay you might say of the market, rise and falls of the market.

And if you take an average in a probabilistic stochastic system,

you have a mean,

what is the average number of things that are happening and you have a mean.

And that's a different form of meaning. So let's just imagine,

let's say you're infatuated with somebody and you're conscious of the upsides

and unconscious of the downsides. And you have now a meaning associated with it,

which has made you see all the positives of it, not the negatives.

Now that doesn't mean that that's what it is.

It just means that's what you have interpreted with

you've picked up, you picked up from your parents, picked up from society,

et cetera, and now you've represented that's bad. And by the way,

different societies have different ideas of what somebody does is whether it's

good or bad.

We had in ancient times we had the Royal lineage had incest in it,

and that was good. And today it's a taboo, it's bad.

So what's interesting is that those associations are

made that are biased, subjective bias as I've said,

superficially subjective bias. But then there's a deeper meaning.

And that is to be able to see in the thing you're infatuated, the downsides.

See if you're conscious of the upsides and unconscious of the downsides,

the unconscious has information, but you're, might say,

you're skewing it out of proportion

and you're focusing on the upsides and you're ignoring the downsides.

And that's a form of ignorance.

That's an unconscious ignorance of the downsides of something.

You get infatuated with somebody, you eventually discover those downsides,

but you selectively biased them out.

You had a disconfirmation bias on the negatives,

and you had the confirmation bias on the positives and you false positive,

the positives and false negative, the negatives,

and you distorted it with your reality.

And so all of your experiences led you to infatuate with that.

But the actual truth is the person that you infatuated with also had downsides

and you were ignorant of it.

And you can also do the same thing on the resentment side.

You could resent something, and be conscious of the downsides,

unconscious the upsides,

and ignoring the upsides with a subjective bias and have a meaning and you

believe that meaning, that's your meaning at reality.

'That means that person's a mean person.' 'That means that person's absolutely

evil.' 'That person's absolutely good.'

But then you're ignoring, and unconscious of half of what's there.

We've all had situations we thought something terrible and later on,

we found the upsides to it. And so as we accumulated the upsides to it,

our meaning of it evolved because we stacked up new associations with it. Now,

what would happen if all of a sudden true meaning was being able to see both

sides at the same time and take you back into the mean,

the average between the polarities,

where you're not conscious of the upside and unconscious downside,

you're conscious of both sides? And if you're resentful, seeing the upside,

so you're conscious of both sides. And then what happens,

you're not infatuated and impulsively seeking,

and you're not resentful and instinctfully avoiding, you're centered,

you're poised. Now this is extracting meaning,

the mean out of your experience that you thought had meaning subjectively.

And in the process of doing it, you found the mean between them.

And Aristotle said this infatuation resentment, the mean was between the two.

When you're infatuated, you see more similarities than differences.

When you're resentful, you see more differences than similarities.

When you see both of them, you see a balance of similarities and differences,

a balance of positive and negatives, a balance of those things.

See if I went up to you and I said, 'You're always nice. Never mean.

Always kind, never cruel. Always giving, never taking. Always peaceful,

never wrathful.' Your BS meter would go off and go, 'Nope',

but that's the meaning you gave them,

that they were more positive than negative and you were infatuated with them.

And so that superficial meaning is not the actual person, the actual individual,

that's the persona that you masked and put on them and you labeled them.

But the same thing in the reverse,

if you saw more drawbacks than benefits and saw more differences than

similarities, you may label them something to resent and to avoid.

And that's the meaning you gave it.

But if all of a sudden you become aware of both sides and see both sides of

them. And, cause if I said to you, 'You're always mean, never nice.

You're always cruel.' Your BS meter would go off and go, 'No,

that's not true either.' But if I said to you, 'Sometimes you're nice.

Sometimes you mean. Sometimes you're kind and sometimes you're cruel,

sometimes you're positive, sometimes you're negative.' You'd go,

'Yes.' So there's a certainty of the objectivity of

seeing both where you now have a meaning that is the mean between

the polarities that make you seek and avoid, and that meaning,

that objective meaning,

which allows you to be poised and present and allows you to be objective and see

things both sided and be mindful of what's there,

is a more profound meaning than the superficial meanings that we give things

because of all the associations we've made that are biased. And if we're biased,

anything we infatuate with or resent occupies space and time in our mind,

and we're run by traditions, run by our parents,

run by those things on the external world,

instead of actually extracting intuitively the other side

to center ourselves and not be swayed into seeking or avoiding,

but actually be poised and present and purposeful.

And that extraction of meaning the mean between the meanings,

the subjective bias mean, the mean that's objective between the two,

is closer to a true reality,

or what's called actuality.

And extracting meaning out of our existential world,

our perceptions that are subjectively meaned,

is allowing us to transcend those labels,

those interpretations, which are local and in individualized,

and find a more universal scheme,

a mathematically equation that's balanced and allow us to have a balanced

physiology, a balanced mind. We're not, because if we're infatuated,

we're going to minimize ourselves relative to them. If we're resentful,

we're going to exaggerate ourselves and we're inauthentic.

But the moment we actually find both sides, we get to be authentic.

We get to be poised and present. We get to have a balanced system.

Our physiology heals, our relationships are more equitable,

in a state of equity. Our relationships in business are fair,

sustainable transactions in business occur.

We're more likely to be able to have sustainable economic growth,

we're more likely to be more of a leader reflecting and considering human beings

from an equitable position, more likely to have reflective awareness,

more likely to have a broader awareness.

So even though everything is whatever meaning you want to give it,

the reality is that the pairs of opposites that we could impose on all those

meanings,

the inherent integration of those allows us to have a maximum

understanding of the universe and allows us to see a hidden order in the

apparent chaos of everybody's subjective bias which are varying all over the

world, which creates sort of an injected chaos, and all of a sudden,

now we have a deeper meaning.

And that meaning I teach people in the Breakthrough Experience,

to experience that brings tears of gratitude,

to be able to find the perfect balance of opposites.

Because if we're infatuated we activate the parasympathetic system,

if we're resentful, we activate the sympathetic system,

but if we have those in perfect balance, we have resilience, adaptability,

we automatically have homeostasis, we have brain homeostasis,

chemistry homeostasis, and we get maximum potential.

So being able to extract meaning by being able to intuitively see both sides of

an event, because we can make a heaven out of hell or hell out of a heaven,

but we can see both of them at the same time, we get a deep meaning,

not a superficial meaning. And the superficial meaning,

everybody's arguing and conflicting over because they all have different

interpretations, but the deep meaning, the balance of opposites,

is the most universal meaning.

It's a balanced mathematical equation inside the human psyche.

And that's universal. Just like mathematics is the

that equation when it's balanced is a universal thing,

that's inherent in all human beings that are striving for that poised state

where authenticity occurs, equanimity occurs.

It's a spiritual experience for people.

That's why when you start to think about the individuals that use the Zeno,

you're dealing with the dialectic or Hegel, when he was doing the dialectic.

Thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis.

And the synthesis is actually was the spiritual experience to Hegel.

And so learning how to extract it, that's what the Demartini Method was,

in the Breakthrough Experience why I teach the Demartini Method is because it

allows you to extract that universal meaning,

which is what I'm defining as love,

because I always define love as a synthesis and

opposites. Or wisdom.

Wisdom is the instantaneous recognition that crisis is blessing,

the pairs of opposites. When you're able to extract out the meaning,

find the mean between the polarities and not be vicissituded and

volatilized by the misperceptions of the reality outside that your superficial

subjectively biased meaning and get to a core meaning,

it's not universal in the sense that it's around the world.

It's a universal in a sense,

it's the synthesis of all the variations around the world.

There's a law arristic escalation that shows that every value system is

counterbalanced by another value system in the world.

And even when you get married,

you find somebody with different complimentary opposite values.

The reason being is because all of those are creating a synthesis of pairs of

opposites.

And so extracting the deeper meaning out of things and finding the mean between

the pairs of opposites that are all the subjective biased,

interpretation and meanings,

allows you to transcend and not be caught in any of those traditional

local time and space tribal constructs, you might say.

And that liberates you to be able to see a broader perspective,

to see things transcendent to the good and evil and not get caught in either

good or evil and allows you to love people from a soul,

the state of unconditional love.

So that deep meaning is what I've developed the Demartini Method for,

why I teach the Breakthrough Experience,

one of the reasons why I'm doing these programs,

to broaden people's awareness to that level of awareness.

So that is able to take the heaven and the hell together and merge them

together. Because the truth when you're in a relationship,

is there going to be things that they support you,

they're going to challenge you, there's gonna be similarities,

here's going to be differences. The true love of somebody,

the true actuality of what's there is that synthesis.

So instead of being just superficially extracting or

projecting meaning, we can go deeper.

And so I'm not saying that any one is better or worse in the sense of a moral

construct, I'm just saying one is more fulfilling.

So the deep meaning is more fulfilling than the superficial meaning,

which is constantly keep you in a state of uncertainty, because anytime you,

I say to you, 'You're always positive,

never negative.' You can't be certain about it. 'Always negative,

never positive.' Can't be certain about it. But when I say,

'Sometimes you're nice and mean,

and positive and negative.' Then you can be certain about it.

So you have more certainty, you have more leadership,

you have more expanded awareness.

There's many benefits of going to a deeper meaning.

And I think the thing that distinguishes us from all of the animals is the

ability to extract that meaning out of our experiences.

An animal can have a sensory experience and be impulsively towards something or

instinctually away from it.

But human beings have the capacity to extract the meaning and bring it into the

mean with their objectivity,

their reason and not just their emotional vicissitudes,

but the actual poised reason that makes a human being unique.

So I just wanted to go over that idea of the superficial subjectively biased

meaning that is anybody can associate anything to anything with,

which is flexible, to a deeper meaning,

which is a synthesis of all pairs of opposites by extracting it.

And the quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask.

If you ask questions to make you aware, which is what the Demartini Method is,

to ask questions to make you aware of what you were unconscious of,

you take your unconscious,

join it with your consciousness to make you fully conscious, mindful,

or super conscious or spiritual conscious.

Anything that you have an imbalanced perspective to,

that's an artificial meaning, a superficial meaning, runs your life.

But anytime you see both sides and you have a deeper meaning, you run your life.

So that's my message for the day.

And just wanted to make you stop and think and reflect on that.

It's really quite beautiful. If you haven't been to the

please consider coming to the Breakthrough Experience where I can show you that

and let you experience it firsthand so you know,

and you'll realize that this world is what you want to make of it.

You can create a heaven out of hell or a hell out of a heaven,

or you can find a hidden order in the apparent chaos of those

volatilities. So that's the message.

And I just want to make two announcements.

One of them is if you'd like to expand your awareness and

see a broader perspective so you have more deeper meaning,

please consider taking advantage of this free gift that I want to offer you

called Awakening Your Astronomical Vision.

Each week I make sure that people know about this because it's a live

presentation I did in Johannesburg in a planetarium to a YPO group and

it was a very powerful presentation on how to expand your game,

how to see from an astronomical perspective.

You can't make a difference in yourself unless you have a vision as big as your

family.

You won't make a difference in your family unless you have a vision as big as

your community.

You won't be number one in your community unless your vision is as big as your

city,

you won't be number one in your city unless you have a vision as big as your

state.

And you're not going to have a global impact unless you have an astronomical

vision. And deep inside,

we may have a small or we may have a large vision in life,

but the greater our vision, the greater our life, the greater our contribution,

the greater our life. So if you'd like to expand that,

have an increasing probability of being able to have a global perspective where

you can see all the variations of meanings and have more of a deeper meaning in

life, then I know this particular audio program will be very valuable.

My experience is most people will listen to it five or six times.

So just know that's probably going to happen,

you're going to hear it again and again and again, and take notes on it.

Find Purpose and Meaning on Your Journey to Self-Mastery.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go down the rabbit hole a little farther

and a little deeper now for two hours instead of just 30 minutes,

or an hour and a half or so I think it is, instead of just 30 minutes, on this,

what I've been describing today, we're going to go further.

We're going to look at how it relates to your purpose,

how it relates to your value structure,

how it is that you want to dedicate your life to making a difference in the

world and how to have a deeper meaning and live with a deeper meaning and more

fulfillment on your journey of self-mastery.

[Inaudible] Thank you for joining me for this presentation today.

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I look forward to our next presentation. Thank you so much for