Hi, I am Dr John Demartini.

You have in your brain

two layers, you might say. You have

the cortical layer, which is above,

and the outer layer, and

you've got the inner core.

In the analogy of a walnut

you got the shell and the nut,

and the people who live by the

inner core, the inner nuclei,

if you will, <laugh>,

end up nuts, <laugh>,

and people live with their outer

shell, their executive cortical area,

they're more sane, you might say.

One is called systems one thinking,

and the other one is systems

two thinking systems.

One thinking is for

emergencies and survival,

and it's sort of like the

animal passions and affections.

The impulses to seek pleasure

and the instincts to avoid pain.

And you're an automaton reacting to evoke

potentials and stimuli on the outside.

And then there's the executive

function, the medial prefrontal cortex,

where you have reason and you

have thrival not survival.

And here you have meaning. You found

the mean between the pairs of opposites.

The things you seek and avoid. You find

that the things you seek have downsides.

The things you avoid have

upsides. The executive center,

the medial prefrontal

cortex, governs the amygdala,

the nuclei below and calms it down

and takes it back into balance.

And brings you back into the

mean, the meaning, and the reason,

and allows you to have

thrival and long-term vision,

foresight, not hindsight.

The nuclei is a hindsight. You react

with impulse and then you, oops,

and I think about it afterwards.

Where the other one you foresight

it and think beforehand and then act

accordingly, proactively.

So you can actually live by

meaning or you can live by emotion.

And we're all going to

have some degree of both,

but the ratio of that can determine

whether we're stable or unstable in life,

and whether or not we have our cortex

running us or subcortex running us,

or our super subconscious and our

subconscious, sometimes called.

The amygdala and the nuclei

inside, the nut part,

assigns valency to stimuli

and makes you seek and avoid.

And so the world outside stimulates you,

and you get all these things that intrude

your mind and occupy space and time in

your mind, the fantasies and

nightmares, the pleasures and pains,

the philias and phobias,

and you basically have all this

insomniatic data in the brain,

it's noise in the brain, and you

can't get a clear signal of the soul,

the true you, the authentic you.

And so if you don't balance out your

perceptions and get back into the

meaning in the center, the real you,

you're lost as an at automaton

reacting to all these misperceptions.

And you have all these

attachments, as the Buddhists say,

instead of being in the middle

path. The middle path is untouched.

It's not distracted. You've extinguished

out the passions, the nirvana,

and reached a point where you're

now stable as a being, as they say.

So, if we give ourselves

permission to prioritize our life,

and not live by lower priority actions

that we've injected from other people,

but live by what's really deeply,

truly meaningful and inspiring

and purposeful to us.

And if we live by meaning and purpose

according to that highest value,

we activate that executive

center, that cortical area,

the area of the brain that has governance,

and we end up having self-mastery,

self-actualization, self-governance.

We're now executives

instead of just automatons.

You know, in a company, you'll see

that in the structure of the company.

You may have the workers

down at the bottom,

and you may have the supervisors

and managers and you know,

maybe some of the executives. And

finally, the leader who's the real,

real executive, the visionary.

And there's late gradations.

And it requires greater degrees of

foresight, greater degrees of planning,

greater degrees of prioritization,

greater degrees of delegation to rise up.

So if you want a meaningful

and powerful life,

it's wise to prioritize your life and

fill your day with high priority actions.

Now, what distracts that? Anything

that you infatuate with or resent,

anything that you look up to or down

on, anything that you judge around you,

it can be a distraction. And if

you want to have a meaningful life,

you can't let the distractions

fool you. You know,

you see a very attractive

person and you think, oh my God,

this one's got more positives

than negatives. No, they don't.

They got a different set

of positives and negatives.

Every relationship you've been in, you

find it has benefits and drawbacks,

positives, and negatives, over time you

eventually see that. There's no, oh,

I get a now all positive and no

negative. And the same thing in the past,

the relationships you've had also taught

you something and there were upsides to

things you thought were downsides.

Instead of sitting there and having

the wisdom of the ages with the aging

process, and eventually discover that,

why not just be aware now and

see that it's two sides to life.

They're simultaneous. Willhelm Wundt,

the father of experimental psychology

tried to guide people to see that.

He said, simultaneous contrast is a

stable point, sequential contrast,

where you're having a lag period between

seeing the positives with the negatives

or the negatives and the

positive, seeing the,

if you come from a Daoist perspective

and see both sides simultaneously,

you're more stable. You found

the way, the path. But if not,

you're wobbling all over the place.

I I like to imagine you have a

top and it's half black and half

white, half positive, half

negative, half good, half bad,

whatever you want to

give the polarities to.

And if you spin it really rapidly

at infinite speed, it turns gray

and it stands steady and you

don't even see it moving.

It's not wobbling and uncertain.

And but if it slows down,

it starts to wobble and precess

and slows down further and slows,

and eventually it pulls over and falls

over to one side or the other. Well,

if you want to vibrate on higher level

and see both sides simultaneously

and extract out space and time from the

mind and be present with both sides,

you'll master your game and you'll

end up having more of a empowered

life. Because anytime you judge

and infatuate or resent somebody,

you're disowning parts, you're not seeing

the other side that you're ignoring.

If you think it's a terrible event,

you're not seeing the upsides.

If you're seeing it's a terrific

event, you're not seeing the downsides.

And the same for people. So judgment

slows down the top, makes it wobble,

makes it fall over into black

and white and absolutes.

You've seen people that are extreme

radical, extreme fundamental absolutist,

how unstable they are and

how much conflict they have,

and how many times they're

distracted by trivia.

But the people that are able to see both

sides simultaneously and have meaning,

the mean, and be able to

live by purpose and priority,

the highest priority in their values,

and activate the executive

center and bring back reason,

and self-actualizing pathway, they're

the daoists that see both sides,

they're untouched, they're not

distracted, they're present.

And the present is where it's

at, you don't age in the present.

You only age when you add past

and future to things. Like I say,

when you extract out space and time

from the mind and become the soul,

you become immortal.

If you add space and time to the

soul and become the mind judging,

you become mortal. You decide

where you want to play.

Do you want to leave no legacy and

be living by impulse and instinct and

immediate gratification and be

like an addict and a subdict?

Or do you want to be somebody

who leaves a mark in the world,

a legacy in the world who sees both sides

and is extracted out and living in the

present moment?

I think this is what Saint Augustine and

many great philosophers have tried to

emphasize through the ages.

So give yourself permission

to be purposeful,

give yourself permission to live

with a meaningful, a mission,

something that's really priority, that's

according to what your values are.

On my website go to the drdemartini.com

and go do the Value Determination

process and look at what,

it's going to take 30 minutes, it's

13 questions. Answer them honestly.

And it's going to give you a great insight

about what's really important to you.

Your life demonstrates what you really

value and sticking to what's really,

really, really highest on your

value is what stabilizes you,

allows you to see both sides.

But if you don't and you try to live in

other people's things and live in all

the should's and ought to's and got to's,

and have to's and must's and need to's,

and you try to live by all the imperatives

of all the moral hypocrisies around

you and the projections of

other people around you,

you're going to be scattered and you know,

have a chronic fatigue syndrome instead

of actually being focused and present

and inspired and empowered.

So allow yourself to live by meaning,

allow yourself to live with a mission.

Allow yourself to prioritize

your life. Go online,

do the Value Determination process, or

come to the Breakthrough Experience,

where I show people how

to master that game,

because I've been doing that

program for 37 years and

thousands and thousands of people have

come in there and woken up to that

realization and given them

tools on how to do that.

It's not really that

complex. In fact, it's,

it's almost amazing that people try to

sell you the idea it's complex to keep

you dependent on them, but the real truth

is very simple. It's like investing.

People think that it's complex.

The brokers in New York want to make

you think it's complex and so they scare

you so you give them their money so they

take your money. Well, the same thing.

There's no reason why you can't master

your life. It's not that complex.

There's a mastery of that.

I always say the quality of your life's

based on the quality of the questions

you ask. And if you ask quality questions

that help you extract out the meaning,

the purpose, the mission, the vision,

the thing that's truly priority to

your life and stick to that, wow,

life becomes pretty amazing and you got

more vitality in life and you got more

clarity in life.

So just want to take a few moments

for that and to share with you.

And just know that you have a mission

innately inside you based on your own

unique set of values, based on

the voids of your own experiences,

driving you to find meaning

and fulfillment in your life.

And you have access to that.

And you don't have to be distracted

by things on the outside,

all the impulses and instincts and

infatuation resentments and pleasures and

pains and goods and evils, and all the

dualities around you that distract you.

You can become present and purposeful

and prioritized and empowered

and patient,

instead of immediate gratifying

and live a very purposeful,

meaningful existence. So,

just want to take a few moments to

share with you that little message.

And hope to see you in the

Breakthrough Experience.