It is so easy to blame what is happening outside for what and who we are. However, it is important to remember that everything is already inside us. We have the natural ability and the potential to become better. That is one of the fascinating aspects of human behavior, our drive towards self-improvement. In this episode, Dr. Diane Hamilton interviews Dr. John Demartini—a world-renowned specialist in human behavior, researcher, author, global educator, and the founder of the Demartini Institute. Here, Dr. Demartini shares with us some of his great knowledge, wisdom, philosophies, and ologies about aspects in our lives that prove there is a genius in each of us. He talks about how perception impacts our lives, how to permit ourselves to prioritize things, when money can lead to debauchery and philanthropy, how to assess our values, and more. There are so many great nuggets to be learned from this episode, so follow along to this conversation to discover how everything is on the way to get you to be authentic in this world.
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Studying Human Behavior And Our Greatest Potential With Dr. John Demartini
I am here with Dr. John Demartini, who is a world-renowned specialist in human behavior. He’s a researcher, author, and global educator. He is the Founder of the Demartini Institute, a US-based private research and educational organization with a curriculum of more than 70 courses focused on human development. He’s the author of more than 40 self-development books, which have been translated in more than 36 languages. He’s shared the stage with Deepak Chopra and Richard Branson. You’ve seen him in The Secret. He’s shared the screen with you Hugh Jackman, Seal, and Ringo Starr. It’s nice to have you here, Dr. Demartini.
Thank you for having me.
I was looking forward to this because we study human behavior. I’m interested in learning about your research into the ologies and all of that. I want to get a backstory on you. I know everybody probably knows you, your work, and everything, but you have a fascinating backstory. I hoped you might share that.
I don’t want to go too long on that, but I had learning problems as a child. I ended up having difficulty in school. I dropped out. I was a street kid as a teenager. I hitchhiked from Texas to California when I was fourteen. When I was fifteen, I made it to Hawaii. I was a surfer. I nearly died at seventeen and in the recovery of that, I met a teacher named Paul Bragg. One night, one hour with one message, this one man spoke to me and inspired me to want to do something different with my life and help me overcome my learning challenges because I had learning problems as a child. That was the day I made a decision that I wanted to overcome my learning problems and someday become intelligent, learn how to read and to speak properly. Many years later, here I am. I learned how to read and speak a bit and I certainly wanted to travel the world and do that. I’ve been doing something like that ever since. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing.
I’ve seen your backstory and what I wanted to ask you is based on your story. There are a couple of things that you touched on briefly that I want to hit on in a little more detail because they were important. You talked about nearly dying. You talked about one message changing your life. You talked about not being able to read, but then later being able to read. I want to know what those parts were if you feel comfortable.
I nearly died. I was surfing in Laniakea which is a North Shore wave. It was big, about 40-foot. The right side of my body froze and my diaphragm wacked up on me. I had accumulated strychnine and cyanide poisoning from some food. I was eating there on the North Shore and some plants I was eating that I didn’t realize were that toxic. Luckily, I made it out of that and I was unconscious for 3.5 days from that. A lady found me in my tent unconscious and the one that helped me go to a health food store, which led me to meet Paul Bragg, says, “It was strychnine and cyanide.” If you’ve seen a rat laying on his back trying to gasp for air, that’s almost what happened to me.
We have a natural ability to heal. Click To TweetThat’s almost dying. When I met Paul Bragg, I never read a book from cover to cover. I did have difficulties learning and reading. After studying with him for the next three weeks, I started meditating and I decided to go back and see my parents. I flew back to LA and hitchhiked back to Texas. I haven’t seen my parents for a long time. They encouraged me to take a GED. Paul Bragg gave me this little affirmation, “I’m a genius.” I apply my wisdom and he made me say that every day to help me overcome my learning problems. I took this GED. I sat down and took the test.
For some miraculous reason, I passed it. I couldn’t read the questions. I closed my eyes and penciled in a dot and figured I’ve got nothing to lose. If I pass this thing, I get my high school degree. If I don’t, there is nothing to lose, but I passed it. I then took a college entrance and I passed that somehow. It was purely guessing. I don’t know how I did it. I then took my first class in history. I thought the same thing was going to happen. I was going to pass by this miraculous thing, but I ended up getting a 27. You needed a 72 to pass. I was devastated. I was embarrassed because everybody’s grade was above 70. Mine was down at 27. I was humiliated.
I ran to my car and I cried in my car. I drove home, curled up in a fetal position under a Bible stand at my parent’s house, and had a doubt for a moment there. This whole thing is an illusion. All you could hear is my first-grade teacher talking in my head. “He’ll never read. He’ll never be able to write. He’ll never be able to communicate. No matter what thing he does in life, he won’t go very far.” That’s what they told me when I was first grade. I had to wear a dunce cap in first grade. That was 1960. I had a low moment. My mom came home from shopping and she saw me there and she said, “What happened?” She hadn’t seen me cry since I was about thirteen.
I told her what happened. She said something that only a mother could say that transformed my life. She put her hand on my shoulder and she said, “Son, whether you become a great teacher, a philosopher, and travel the world like you did, whether you return to Hawaii and ride big waves, or you return to the streets and panhandle as a bum, which you’ve also done, I want to let you know your father and I love you no matter what.” My mom’s love, her gratitude, her certainty, her presence at that point was exactly what I needed. When she said that, my hand went into a fist. I looked up and I saw a vision. It’s the same vision I saw when I met Paul Bragg that night, me speaking in front of a million people.
That vision is painted in my office. It’s amazing a picture that’s painted. I said to myself, “I’m going to master this thing called reading, studying, and learning. I’m going to do whatever it takes on a message called philosophy and healing. I’m going to do whatever it takes to travel whatever distance, pay any price you give my service of love across this planet. I’m not going to let any human being on the face of the earth stop me, not even myself.” There was no turning back at that point. I got up, and I hugged my mom. I went into my room. I got a dictionary out. I made a commitment to memorize that dictionary. I did 30 words a day. My mom tested me on 30 words a day, pronunciation, spelling, usage and meaning. I gradually memorized 30 words a day until I was able to pass school. I did not stop. I started reading everything I could, like encyclopedias.
Months later, my mom asked me because I was born on Thanksgiving Day, “What do you want for your birthday and Christmas?” I said, “Mom, I want the greatest teachings on the face of the Earth, the greatest writings humanity’s ever created by the greatest mind who ever lived.” She said, “Are you sure you don’t want a t-shirt?” I said, “No. I want the greatest teachings on Earth.” She contacted her brother who was Uncle Ralph. He is a professor at MIT in Physics and Chemistry. He, as a gift which I’m very grateful for, sent giant 6x6x6-foot wooden crates on a flatbed truck down to our home. The big crates came in and they lowered it on the ground, opened them up with a crowbar. I came in with thousands of books. I filled my room with thousands of books. I spent the next 18 to 20 hours a day, unless I was driving to school then I’d read on the drive. I was reading every single day. I did not stop. I’ve been blessed to read over almost 30,500 books. I’m grateful that I learned how to read. It’s the thing that inspires me. I get to share whatever I learned from all these great minds around the world.
Fall over laughing. Click To TweetI’m curious about your reading issue. Was it as some kind of dyslexia? Was it just you weren’t interested? Do you do better listening than reading, visually? What was it that made you change?
It’s dyslexia. When I was 1.5 years old, I had to go to a speech pathologist. I remember going there with my mom. I had to put strings and buttons in my mouth because I wasn’t able to use my mouth properly. I couldn’t pronounce. I was born with my arm and leg turned inside of the form of the arm and leg. I had to wear braces until I was four. I had dyslexia and no matter what I did, I would twist letters. I couldn’t pronounce words. There’s no meaning to them. The only way I made it through school and elementary school was by asking the smart kids what they got out of the class. If they said something and I listened to it, I could retain some of the information.
I became known for a guy to ask questions because I’ve been asking questions all my life to get through those challenges. I eventually developed a methodology that helps people with dyslexia on not subordinating to outer authority, by owning a trait of the greats, as I call it. A lot of times, we humble ourselves and look up to people. We think they have something we don’t instead of looking within and finding out we have what we see in them inside us in our own form. As I started owning the traits of the greats, taking great minds and great leaders, and finding out what I admired about them and then looked inside myself where I demonstrate that, I noticed that my dyslexia, in the last years, dissolved away. I now help other kids who have dyslexia with that simple tool. It’s such a powerful tool.
You talk about some of the things that I studied with curiosity and some of the things that hold people back. That was my research, what was keeping people from being curious, because you changed from not being that curious to being overly curious, compared to most people. That was huge. I found four things that keep people from being curious. It’s fear, assumptions, technology, and the environment. In your environment, your mother had a huge impact. There are lots of things you’re telling me that is fear-based, assumption-based. All those things that come back in our heads. I loved your research because we do look at other people and we see, “They’re so great.” You don’t see that you have those things. That’s a fascinating realization. You come into a lot of your realizations from reading so much on these ologies. I want to talk about these ologies. What is an ology for people who aren’t aware? What made you go that direction?
When I met Paul Bragg that night, he mentioned the term universal laws. He also talked about mastering your life and that sounded cool, mastery and universal laws. When I moved back to Texas and I started getting to that dictionary, I looked up, what is a universal law? I realized that it’s a general principle, usually in mathematics. That is a general law that’s brought into a proof in equations in mathematics. When I went and looked at it, it took me back to Aristotle. It took me back to natural laws. It took me back to what was called at the time, the Logos. The Christians called it that. It was the reason and the order that was inherent in nature, that the philosophers of natural science were trying to find the laws that govern nature. It’s going back to fails. I looked at the Logos. It meant reason, the verb and the word.
From a theological perspective, it’s like the word of God talking onto the universe and making the divine design thing. I thought, “That’s cool,” but then when I looked at the Logos, I found out that Logos was also used in ology, the study of information. The highest of worship was the study of nature. I went in an encyclopedia and dictionary and I looked up every ology, every discipline, every field of study and inquiry that individuals could make. I made a list of them alphabetically. I realized that at the time I was doing that, I asked some of the professors. I read René Descartes’s book that my uncle sent me on European philosophers, Descartes and Nietzsche. Descartes said that he wanted to be a man of letters. A man of letters was somebody who had multiple disciplines mastered, was a polymath.
Our perceptions are influenced by the cultural subordinations that we have. Click To TweetI wanted to be a polymath. I want to be a man of letters. I want to understand these laws of the universe. I made a list of all of them. I found out that the average PhD will devour at least 100 books in their fields after their basics. They’ll read at least 100 texts. I made a goal to read 100 books in each of the ologies that I found. The fact that the number of ologies has gone since the last 48 years. In some areas, I’ve gone on to 400 and 1,200 books in an area, 1,400 books in some areas and some areas, maybe 60 books. After a while, I got it all. I’ve seen much in that field. I went out to tackle as many disciplines to try to find the most universal principle to the base foundation of human behavior. I can study mineralogy and microlite remodifications of minerals in the study of rocks. They’re related to enzymes and the study of enzymology to be able to study biology, to be able to relate to how we have the energy to think in the brain. It doesn’t matter where I’m coming from. It all goes back to consciousness.
You have a degree as a chiropractor too. Do you have this background?
I was involved in Healing Arts and I was premed in college by the time I was in my third year. I was an honor roll by then. I went right to the top. What happened is they asked me what I wanted to study. I didn’t believe that we had an excess of organs and a deficiency of drugs. I believe that we had a natural ability to heal. I was interested in how to maximize the natural potential within the human being so much more than blaming something on the outside and looking for outside solutions. I want to look at what the inner potential was. There was naturopathic and chiropractic at the time. Naturopathic had too many constrict so I took chiropractic. I’m glad I did because of the people I met and the pathway of studies I got. I also went on to Baylor Medical School while I was in chiropractic college.
I also did Dentistry while I was in chiropractic college to find out if the education I was getting was up to par. I made the standard ten times, whatever the education was for my own standard. I found that if I lectured on the topics, it accelerated my learning. I forced myself to do dental talks, medical talks, chiropractic talks, and all these other things while I was in school. I taught almost every single day. That expedited the learning process. Anything on the maximization of human potential, awareness, and the evolution of human consciousness in any possible field. I’m writing a textbook. It’s an 800-page textbook on the relationship between human beings and the sun. It’s on nuclear physics. It’s on the nuclear transmutation and transformation, fusion and fusion relations in human psychology as it relates to the development of stars in the Milky Way and the galaxies. I’m certain it will be a mind-blowing, fascinating exploration exploring it.
It is a light read though, right?
It’s in-depth. There are a lot of disciplines in there, but at the same time, if people knew the role we play in biology with our consciousness, it’s almost a panpsychic view of holographic constructs coming from string theory all the way down into the sun and down to black holes, down into the Earth. It’s mind-blowing. It relates to our evolution and what we do on this planet and our mission in life, way more than people comprehend. I can’t wait to present it.
I can’t wait to read that. One of the books I always loved was Death by Black Hole. I’m very much like how you are. I want to learn everything about everything. I’m kind of a sponge. I learned this and I learned that, but not to your level. Do you ever feel like you get an obsession? I thought I heard you say you’ll do this for sixteen hours or something. It seemed a long amount of time that you were reading it one stretch when you were young.
I’ve done twenty hours. I’ve done days because I’m on a roll and I don’t pay attention to time.
Are you married or not?
I was married to somebody from Australia who passed away years ago. I’m dating an actress, a singer, and a model from Istanbul.
What did they think of you being this focused?
Anybody who’s with me, if they’re not focused, it’s not going to work. They’ve got to be focused too. If they got idle time, then I’m not the guy.
You’ve got to give yourself permission to live and fill your day with high priorities. Click To TweetI’m the same way, “We’re going. Let’s study. Let’s go.”
She’s got to be a global visionary. My wife was Athena. We lived on a ship called The World and I’ve sailed around the world. I’m not able to get on now because of the Coronavirus, but soon, we’ll be back. I’ve been living there for years. We sailed around the world, we go and speak, travel and stuff like that. It’s a private yacht, the biggest yacht in the world. There are a hundred of us that own it and we sail around the world. That’s the perfect place because I’ve said that the universe is my playground. The world is my home. Every country is a room in the house. Every city is a platform to share my heart and soul. When I saw the world, I said, “That’s perfect.” That goes all over the world. It goes from the Antarctic to the Arctic. It’s non stop sailing. I’m getting off and on as I need to, as I travel. It’s a perfect home. That’s home.
I’m here in a hotel right now, but that’s not available. My wife passed away years ago. She was a cosmic lady. She was a senior actress. She wrote books. She was a mystic and an amazing lady, but she passed away from cancer unexpectedly. I’ve dated three girls, since then. I’m dating another one. All of them have been magnificent and amazing people, but I’m the open guy that says, “Anything that I’m not willing to do for you, I’ve got to be willing to delegate. Anything I’m not willing to do for my mate, I’ve got to be willing to delegate.” I tell them, “If I’m not able to make love, and if I called Hugh Jackman and I had him make love on my behalf, I still love you.” Probably I am odd to some people, but I love what I’m doing. I’m on a mission to do it. I do have a global life. The girlfriend that I have is also the same. I have two daughters and a son.
They are taking over your business someday. I heard you had this legacy for her.
Alana’s got the business. Breccia is also in on it, but she’s also a singer and a fashion designer. She’s an amazing girl. My son’s a YouTube guy. He has 27,000 followers or whatever and growing.
I do wonder though when you have kids and have a parent like you. Sometimes my daughter will say this to me, “I’m not like you. I can’t do all these things.” That’s not her desire in life. I’m like, “I don’t want you to be like me. You’ve got to be like you. You’ve got to be you,” but is it intimidating to be your kid?
I’m sure that there’s a part of that, but they all are unique. I’ve told them, “You don’t compare yourself to anybody else. You compare your own daily actions to your own dreams.” I had an archive all the way, going back into my twenties of audios and video programs I did and things on this nature. I hired my son, I said, “I’d like to do things. You don’t compare yourself to where you are now to where I am now, but you compare yourself to where I was at your age. I want you to look at the journey and have some laughs. Fall over laughing and looking at the journey from when I was your age, all the way until now.” It was a great exercise because I got to archive how much I win. He got to see that and get paid to do that. He just watched videos and audios and listened.
That was a way of educating them and also learn that, “My dad was an idiot.” It allowed him to go after what he wanted to do, which I thought was great. The daughters, as they’ve gone on, I’ve always told them, “It’s your dream. You’ve got to follow your heart. You can’t subordinate to anybody else. We’re not here to live in shadows. We’re here to stand on shoulders.” They found their niches. They’ve found both their boyfriends and potential partners in my program. They come to the program and they helped me in the programs. They said, “Dad, we can’t date anybody that doesn’t know your work. It is a prerequisite to date. ‘You want to kiss me? Come to the seminar.’”
Everything you write about fascinates me because I’ve been writing my next book about perception. I wrote a book on curiosity and I’ve written about emotional intelligence and all these things. I see all this as a perception of how we view ourselves and others. It goes into the empathy of emotional intelligence. It goes into IQ and critical thinking. It’s like IQ, EQ, cultural quotient, and curiosity quotient all combined when you’re talking about perception. How do you see it? Give me your viewpoint of how perception impacts our lives, especially in the working world.
My observation is, every perception we have is filtered to the pulmonary nuclei, the gating mechanism with a selective bias, according to what we value most. If your highest value is your children and you’re 35 years old, you have three children. Your focus was on being a mother at the time. When you walk in the mall, you’re going to spot children’s clothes, children’s education, children’s things. You’re not going to watch and see motors, computers, and things that you don’t see how it’s going to help you get which one. You filter your reality. The hierarchy of your values filters your reality of perceptions and your decisions. You’re going to make a decision based on whatever you believe is going to give you the greatest advantage or disadvantage with the data that you’re picking up, that you filtered. You’re going to take actions accordingly.
Your highest probable action is the one that you think is going to give you the greatest advantage in what’s going to help you fulfill what’s most meaningful. You’re filtering it. When you’re living by your highest values, you’re most objective with that information. When you’re living by lower values because you’re trying to fit in and conform, you’re afraid of startling other people or whatever and you lose yourself into the crowd. You go into more subcortical areas of the brain. You end up getting into your medulla and go into the desired center. You tend to avoid pain and seek pleasure and use subjectively bias as a survival mechanism of your reality. Therefore, filter reality in a skewed manner, and then you exaggerate the ups and downs. You’ll have a subjective bias and then we ended up having false positives and false negatives in our perceptions.
We can skew it and then we store that in our subconscious mind, which is electronically and molecularly in the brain. We ended up having all this data that’s not the most fluent and congruent information to help us maximize our potential. Our perceptions are influenced by the cultural subordinations that we have. As Freud says, the second you get to a one-year-old and your mom becomes your authority and you’re frightened of losing your mommy, you’ll inject her value because you don’t want to be without mommy. You’ll confuse your identity with who you are relative to mommy. It then goes to daddy, preachers, teachers, and then society. You eventually try to fit in and lose your identity and create these alter and false egos of who you are.
If you don't empower yourself intellectually, you will be told what to think. Click To TweetEventually, you have to learn to get past and transcend that with covertness. You’re going through and you’re getting that. Emotional is the conflict between all these injected values in your own identity, trying to emerge. You create all of these emotions because of the subjective biases that we perceive because we’re not consistent with the priorities in our life. You’ve got to give yourself permission to live and fill your day with high priorities. I learned that at age 27, how important it is to decide what is truly the most important, highest priority action I can do at this moment to help me fulfill what’s most meaningful that serves the greatest number of people. If I do that on a day-to-day basis, I’m more objective and less subjectively biased. I’m less likely to inject the values of others, more likely to lead and emerge as a leader, more inspired, more authentic, and more spontaneous. I’m more expanded in my awareness. I reach more full potential by doing that. I want to give myself permission to do what is inspiring to me that serves the greatest number of people. If I do that every day, amazing opportunities come into my life.
It is an important point. As I was listening to some of your other interviews, I was thinking about how you said you like to delegate the things that you don’t want to do and that you would pick these certain things if what your will or desire is, then you have to do these things. I was a little conflicted as I was listening because I like to do this stuff no one else likes to do. Those are the things that don’t make money.
You may not have that as the highest value. I can stand in front of 10,000 people and ask them how many of you want to be financially independent. All the hands will go up. If I’ll ask them how many of you are and all the hands will go down. Those are people when they fantasize about financial dependence, they fantasize about living the lifestyles of the rich, famous, and spend money on consumables that depreciate and value buying liabilities. They don’t have a value in buying assets. I learned that if I do that, I’ll be working my whole life for money and I’ll be a slave instead of a master. I started to buy assets and invest in assets. Now, I don’t have to work.
I’ve got money coming in almost $1 million in a week of passive income. I don’t have to work. I do the work because I love it. The purpose of financial independence is not because you want a fancy lifestyle. I keep it simple lifestyle. I wanted to because I want to do what I loved because I love doing it. Not because I needed to do it, I had to do it, or I had to pay bills. I wanted my finance to do it and then as a result of it to exemplify what’s possible. I wanted to self-actualize all seven areas. I want to wake up my genius. I want to have an international global business. I wanted to have financial independence. I wanted to have a global family dynamic, which I got. I want to have social influence, meet amazing people around the world.
I want to have vitality. I want to be inspired and create a spiritual movement. I got asked to speak to 100,000 people on spirituality in India. I wanted to have all of those things manifested. I didn’t want to be subordinate in any of them. I’m a firm believer that you can empower all of them. If you don’t empower yourself intellectually, you will be told what to think. If you don’t empower yourself in business, you will be told what to do. If you don’t empower yourself in finance, you will be told what to work. If you don’t empower yourself in a relationship, you will have to do stuff you don’t want to do at home. If you don’t empower yourself socially, you’ll be told propaganda that’s misinformation.
If you don’t empower physically, you’d be told what drugs and organs were taken. If you don’t empower spiritually, you may be trapped in an ancient dogma. That’s not even real nowadays. It’s not a cosmological up-to-date idea. I’m interested in empowering all of them and doing what I can do, help exemplify that possibility and inspire other people to empower as many as they want. There’s no rule. There’s no morality on it that if you don’t do it, you’re bad. None of that. It’s just what do you want to do? I’ve never met anybody that didn’t want to empower all of them when they were honest. They knew they could. If somebody says, “I’m not interested in money.” If I showed you how to make money doing what you love doing, not because you need it but because it’s able to do it, would you take it? “Yes.” They then would take it.
As you’re saying that, I’m thinking about a certain amount of balance. I grew up in a wealthy family where people either didn’t spend any money, were super cheap, and did certain things. They were more the nouveau riche where they buy everything and they never had anything of value. I listened to one of your talks where you were talking about Jimmy Choo shoes. Is there a balance that you don’t become obsessed with buying assets that don’t lose value? You can have a little appreciation for the Jimmy Choo part of life. Do you have to limit that for later?
My wife, we lived across the street from Gianni Versace. We’re friends with them. When she walked down Madison Avenue, every shoe store down that street knew my wife. Our first apartment, we had to finally move into another apartment because it became a shoe store. When she died, she had $2 million worth of shoes. We donated 800 pairs to a charity, but what’s interesting is the reality is you master wealth building. What I did is I set up a rule that when I want to raise my lifestyle, I just raised my savings and investments the same amount in taxes. I then can raise my lifestyle at any level I want as long as I’m willing to follow that little rule. I don’t need a lot.
I’ve had the Rolls Royce. I’ve had all this stuff and the penthouses. I’ve been there and done that. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about doing something and it’s deeply meaningful. Money without meaning leads to debauchery, money with meaning leads to philanthropy. I’m all for having that, but that’s not what it’s about to me. I’ve been there. I’ve seen that. It’s just accumulating stuff and then you have that stuff run on you. Doing something inspiring that makes a difference in people’s lives and be able to be fortunate enough to be able to do that even though you don’t have to do it and love to, to me, that’s more factual. I built my wealth because I want to master that area, not because of the lifestyle. I live on the ship. People think, “You live on this big thing.”
I’m very simple. Most of the time I’m doing this, what I’m doing now with you and I’m in hotels. I have that because it’s the most efficient location in the world for me to live to fulfill my mission. I’m a mission guy. I’m more about what’s the most efficient location. Having a house that you’re never there, that doesn’t mean anything. Being a house that’s moving around and you can travel with it, that makes more sense. My wife loved to travel. This is the way I could travel or meet with her around the world. When 9/11 occurred, we were living in the Trump Tower. In the process of doing, we realized that she didn’t want to be in New York after 9/11. We had homes in Australia so she went to Australia and then I said, “I’m not going to see you. We’ve got to find, come up with plan B.” That’s when I got the ship.
It’s interesting to see what people’s lifestyles are like. I’ve had a lot of billionaires on the show from Keith J. Krach, Naveen Jain, and Craig Newmark. As you talk to people who’s developed this, Naveen, for example, reads everything and sounds a lot like what you focus on whatever it is and learns. From Steve Forbes and different people I’ve had my show who’ve been successful people, I talked to them about their learning and what they’ve done to get better and to improve their lives. I guess that’s why I am interested in your learning and the work. If you’ve read those two crates worth of books, first of all, that will blow a lot of people’s minds. The stuff you’re reading from being a pharmaceutical rep and having a PhD and the things that I have, I know it’s intense stuff that you’re talking about. I could follow you, but I think a lot of people might not be able to follow you. I’m thinking they’re going, “That’s too much. I’ll never be there.” How do you talk to the people who don’t have this level of being able to understand what we’re talking about here? How do you get them? Do you think baby steps? What about bobbing this?
If I’m speaking on a mass television or something, I keep it simple. If I’m speaking to professors at the university, it all depends. If I’m speaking on astrophysics and meeting with Freeman Dyson at the Institute for Advanced Study before he passed away, if I’m having a talk on astrophysics, I’m talking about astrophysics. If I’m going to be talking to a mother’s postpartum blues, depression on television, I’m going to be talking about how you might be able to prioritize your daily actions to get the most out of doing things and get help and be willing to have help and believe that you’re worthy of having health instead of I’ll keep it simple.
Money without meaning leads to debauchery. Money with meaning leads to philanthropy. Click To TweetI try to meet people whatever their level of the world, but I don’t want to, in my own life, not continue to expand my awareness. There’s so much inspiration from learning about the subtleties and the magnificence. I think we live in a magnificent universe. The more I study all the feedback systems between the galaxies, the planet Earth, geosystems, atmosphere, biology, everything else, the more I realized there is a panpsychic intelligence during the game. This is too intelligent to ignore. This is almost esoteric going on here.
If you could find out everything, all your answers tomorrow, would you even want to?
Yes. Do you know Giordano Bruno? In the Copernican diagram, when he puts his head through the curtain and looked out into infinity on the finite world, he realized the vastness of infinity. No matter what, you always know what you don’t know. There’s bigger what you don’t know. There’s no end with that. You don’t get to know it all. I don’t have an expectation. I loved the learning, the journey, the journey of learning.
I do too. If they put you on top of a mountain, it’s not the same as climbing the mountain. It’s the experience. This is how the world is. You don’t know what you think you know. I think that we get a lot of problems with that with religions and things. People are dead set.
Religion stagnates if they’re not keeping current. I did a presentation on comparative religions because I studied 3,000 different religions. I met with lots of religious leaders and done interviews, dialogues, and stuff with people. What’s interesting is there are four major religions on the planet that is based originally on a geocentric world. It was based on the Primum Mobile that Aristotle had. Even Copernicus kept all the way into these early centuries of this last millennium. Their whole model is based on that, yet the Hindus had more of a galactic religion. We’re out looking at galactic clusters and we’re looking at super galaxy clusters. We’re looking at an observable universe, our cosmology, as it expands our religious understanding or our spiritual understanding has got to go with it. Otherwise, we’re living in a box. I confront those traditions. I honor where they are, but at the same time, I also say, “Let’s keep going. Let’s not stagnate.” We have to have a holy curiosity of perpetual expiration of the magnificence of the universe, as what Einstein says.
They still can’t reconcile a general theory of everything to combine Einstein. Why aren’t you working on that? With your brain, you should do that. Are you close to solving that?
No, it’s not. Leonard Susskind was interviewed in the day. He was answering this question. He says, “I’ll die and the next generation will come along and they’ll add upon mine. Newton was overdone by Einstein and then quantum theory came in and did a general activity.” It kept going and we’ll find out that’s even more because they’re about to do a particle. That’s eight times more powerful than what we had. We’re going to find new particles. You’re going to find new laws and we can propose those, but we’ll prove them as we go. There will be theoretical physics at the cutting edge and then there will be practical physics to prove it. There’s no end to that. I don’t have a fantasy that it’s going to be done or this is the final thing. It’s the exploration.
I think it’s brilliant to have that outlook. I remember in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book, they interviewed top physicists and they said something like, “At this point, we’ve learned everything we can learn about physics and all.” It was back in the ‘60s or ‘40s or whenever they were quoting this guy. It taught minds for their time and I don’t think we’ll ever know everything about anything.
When they found out that a photon can generate antiparticles, they can develop mass. That is something massless according to Einstein’s equation. What they didn’t know at one time that there were virtual particles as the intermediate stages, which store information that’s sitting in the photon that goes into these particles. Those are conserved. That was unknown and even Paul directs time when he thought of particle and antiparticles. That’s a new piece, but to say what’s done is, no, I don’t buy that. I’d rather have the courage to go out there and speculate on some new things, social, new ideas out there.
I love to talk about all the astrophysics and all that, but I want to come back a little bit because I think a lot of people who are reading are interested in the business aspect. I want to get back because I took your assessment. I want to tell you what I came in. Tell them a little bit about the assessment. You do this to look at your values kind of assessment. What do you call it?
The value determination criteria. When I asked people, what do they value in life? Nobody goes to work for the sake of the company. They go to work to fulfill what they value. If they can see how the job description, the mission, and the objectives of the company can help them fulfill what is highest on their values, they’re more engaged. If they can see how their daily duties are helping them do that, they do the job. To me, disengaged people cost companies, cost them their lives, productivity. I’m interested in anything that can increase engagement. I lecture a lot on that. What I did is when you ask people their values, they tell you social idealism. They tell you what they think it should be, what they imagined it to be like, “I want to be financially dependent.” No, you don’t. You want to spend money immediately.
I want to know what your life demonstrates, not what you say. I look at how do you fill your space because if you look around your space, things are important. You keep around you within reach. I want you to look at how you spend your time. You find the time, make time, spend time on things that are valuable to do. I want to look at what energizes you because when you’re doing stuff that’s truly high and magic and goes up and you’re not doing that, it goes down. I want to look at how you spend your money. You make money, find money, spend money on things that are valuable, and you don’t want to spend money on things that don’t. It tells me a lot about what’s valuable to you.
You've got to give yourself permission to shine, not shrink; radiate, not gravitate. Click To TweetWhen I was in my twenties, I was buying 40 to 70 books a week. Money was spent there. I look at where you’re most organized because you are spontaneous. You bring order to things that are valuable to you. If it’s not, you let it go into chaos. I look at, what’s your discipline? What do you spontaneously do every single day that nobody has to remind you to do? I spontaneously research and do interviews. I’ve done eleven interviews. I’ve done seven talks in a day kind of stuff. I look at what I spontaneously did. I then look at what exactly it is that I think about visual and internal dialogue to myself about how I would love my life to be that is showing evidence and metrics coming true. Not the fantasies that are not ever happening, but the actual ones that are coming true.
That tells me what you’re committed to and you keep working towards. You don’t let anything externally interfere with that. I then look at, what do you want to converse with other people about most? What do you keep bringing the conversation to? If you get to talk about it, you’ll be engaged all night with it talking late into the evening. What inspires you much to come to the people who inspire you? What are the most consistent goals that you have that you’d love to create that are coming true? The ones you commit to and make happen. What do you spontaneously read, study, learn about, and listen to on YouTube? If I take those thirteen questions, you answer those with integrity, not what you fantasize about to wish it would be or what it used to be.
What is objective to me now? You’ll see reiterated answers that will surface and it will give you an idea. It will point you in a direction to what your life is demonstrating as important, not what you fantasize about. Once we find out what that is and get the top three highest values and start structuring our life where you’re able to do that, where you can’t wait to get up in the morning and do that. We structure and delegate the lower part of things and figure out how to get paid to do that. Your vocation-vacation is matching. We’re inspired to go to work. When you can’t wait to get up and go to work and tap dance to work, people can’t wait to get your service.
If you do it in a way that meets needs, by finding the niches that you want to solve the problems and you want to contribute to it and you have a fulfilling life. You’re doing what you love, getting paid for it, and delegating the rest off your plate. I don’t do anything. I haven’t driven a car in 32 years. I haven’t cooked since I was 24. I don’t do things that are not what is in my inspiring list. I don’t waste my time on that. I delegate and surround myself with people that love doing that. I’m around people that are inspired while I’m doing what I do that I love doing. I found that way more inspiring for me.
As you’re talking about things that inspire you and things that you’ve read, you’ve read many books and I’m sure there are many people who inspire you. When I was writing about curiosity, it’s hard not to think of Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or all the people who always say how much they value curiosity. Is there anyone who’s the main person that you think of as the go-to guy? Can you even get it to a list?
I have probably 500,000 names in there. I’ve studied many different fields. There’s this one book that has 2,200 people that have made a mark in this field as a new book. It’s called Empyreans Ate The Sun. It was a Dante’s Paradiso, highest heavenly state of consciousness, where you were enlightened and you were in a fire and inspired by your life. It is not a popular book. It’s not a self-help book. This is for people that want to go and explore.
Your most popular book, The Breakthrough Experience, would you say?
When people ask me, “What book would you recommend?” I tell people without question, Mortimer Adler’s A Syntopicon volumes 1 and 2 are the two best books that an individual could read on life. It’s about 1,600 pages. It’s two volumes set. It goes from angel to love and man to the world. It’s the greatest minds who’s lived in the last 2,700 years. The summary of their ideas on the most important topics for a human being to know all in one package.
This is the time to read it during COVID. Everybody’s looking for a good read. That’ll keep you busy for a while. That’s a great suggestion. I think that there are many people who are interested in knowing what inspires you because you’ve been successful. You’ve been through these difficult times and challenges. You’re an ultimate success story. You had braces and you had to wear on your arms and legs. You had couldn’t speak properly. You had all of these things and you overcame everything. I imagined that you talk a lot about this in your speeches and everything you do. There’s something called The Demartini Method. How would you summarize what The Demartini Method is?
When I got the books from my uncle, one of the books was Paul Dirac’s writings on particles and antiparticles. When I had a dictionary and encyclopedia to be able to read that, that was way over my head at the time. Something stuck in my head that you could take a particle of light and convert it into matter and make positive and negative charged particles of matter, a positron-electron. When I saw that, I thought, “Wow.” You can take the positron-electron and put them in a particle, a positron/electronic separator, and you could make light. I thought, “You could convert energy to matter, matter to energy.” Thanks, Einstein. I wonder if you could take positive and negative emotions and slam them together and do call youngin and find synchronicity and follow Wolfgang Pauli and find coincidence synchronicity of those, could you make enlightenment?
It is a metaphor. I went on a journey of studying everything on the brain. I lectured on the brain and studied the brain inside out, probably 900 books on the brain. I went and devoured psychology the best I could. I went and studied physics the best I could. I am trying to find a solution on how to take anything extrinsically, stimulating and perturbing a human psyche and how to bring it back into poison grace. I call them the six transcendentals, true gratitude, true love, true inspiration, true enthusiasm, certainty, and presence. How to take the polarized emotions that we get infatuated with or resent, that we seek and avoid, that we have impulse instinct. Our desire in amygdala centers, and how to take those and because we infatuate a resilience that we’re consciously upsides and unconscious downsides or conscious downsides and unconsciously upside. Any of those occupy space and time in our mind and run us to make noise.
How do we take that noise and make a clear mind? I created a series of questions that allow us to bounce mathematical equations in the mind and to change the chemistry, change the epigenetics, and neuroplasticity in such a way that you could have grace. It does not matter. There’s nothing a mortal body can experience the immortal soul, the state of unconditional love can’t love and transcend. I’ve developed a method through a series of questions that allow you to see things, the apparent chaos in your life in a way that has got a hidden order. All of a sudden you have an infant order there as described and your grace by whatever happens. Nothing on this planet that you can experience can’t be turned into an opportunity. It’s a very powerful exercise. I’ve taken thousands of people through this process and train 6,000 or 7,000 facilitators around the world doing it. It’s inspiring to work.
Everything you work on is inspiring. I was having a hard time knowing which things to go talk to you about because I’m like, “I could talk to him for hours about that.” Is there one thing I didn’t ask you that you want to make sure you get in? I want to make sure because there was too much to narrow it down.
Don't let any human being on this planet stop you from what you dream about. Click To TweetFrom a practical perspective, the magnificence of who you are, the authentic unit, not the facades, not the personas, not the existential distracted view, the real true essential use the magnificent sense of that as far greater than any fantasies you’ll ever impose on yourself. You’ve got to give yourself permission to shine, not shrink, radiate, not gravitate. It will occur by living by true priority, not externally motivated priorities, but priorities that are called from the heart. When your courage comes from the heart and the courage to be yourself in a world that’s trying to make you another other than yourself is the mastery path. As Ernest Becker said in his The Denial of Death, people have collective heroism and individual heroism. The individual who can walk the path in an unborrowed visionary blaze a new trail with an innovative idea, handle the oppositions and challenges of the naysayers and walk the path.
They automatically become the new trailblazers that set the new pace for a new paradigm. I believe that the truth is there’s a genius in every one of us. That genius can surface to the degree that they live congruently by what they value most. To be authentic to that is probably the wisest an individual can do, whether it’s in their business or their personal life or whatever. I believe that that helps you empower all areas of life. I fully believe that you can live an inspired life. There’s absolutely no reason an individual has to, other than the ones that they impose on themselves by the fantasies that they compare their life to. I always say depression is a comparison of your reality to a fantasy you’re addicted to.
As long as you’re holding onto an expectation, others are supposed to live in your values and you’re supposed to live in other people’s values instead of live authentically according to your own, you’re automatically creating physiological, psychological, sociological, theological symptoms to guide you back to authenticity. Everything is on the way to get you to be authentic in this world. I think we live in magnificent world guidance to do that. I tell people to make a commitment to live by priority. If you’d find that one thing that is most authentic to you, and you stick to that and build momentum on that, eventually you become so unfired and enthused by it. People come around to watch it burn and people come and serve that objective with you.
This has been inspiring. That’s the greatest place to end this, but a lot of people are going to want to follow you and find your work. Is there some website or social media that you would like to share?
They can come to my DrDemartini.com website. They can go on the Value Determination Process. My website is an educational experience as you can imagine. There are YouTube videos and thousands of interviews. I have a weekly podcast that they can join. If they go on there, they could find out by looking at the events where I’m going to be speaking. I do programs seven days a week. People think, “That guy’s crazy.” I find that why should they delegate? I delegate sleeping for 35 years. I slept for four hours a day. I do more now, but I don’t delegate it, but I believe that you deserve to do something amazing. Don’t let any human being on this planet stop you from what you dream about. You’ve done it. You’re living it. You’re demonstrating it. You’re doing the things you love. You can see it and you are making a huge difference. That’s the way to live. You’re exemplifying it. That’s why it’s inspiring. Thank you for this interview.
I appreciate that.
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I’d like to thank Dr. John Demartini for being my guest. We get many great guests on this show and if you’ve missed any past episodes, I hope you go to DrDianeHamilton.com to check them out. It’s great to go to the blog on my site because you can read the shows and get the transcription. Sometimes that makes it great because you can go to the books and the things that we talk about. It’s all linked there. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you join us for the next episode.
Important Links:
- Demartini Institute
- Death by Black Hole
- Keith J. Krach – Previous episode
- Naveen Jain – Previous episode
- Craig Newmark – Previous episode
- Steve Forbes – Previous episode
- Paradiso
- A Syntopicon
- The Breakthrough Experience
- The Denial of Death
- DrDemartini.com
- Value Determination Process
About Dr. John Demartini
Dr. John Demartini is a world-renowned specialist in human behavior, researcher, author, and global educator. He is the founder of the Demartini Institute, a US-based private research and educational organization with a curriculum of more than 70 courses focused on human development. Dr. Demartini has studied over 30,000 books and more than 280 academic disciplines revolving around maximizing human awareness, potential, and leadership, which he has shared on stage in more than 150 countries. He is the author of more than 40 self-development books, which have been translated into more than 36 languages. He is a highly sought-after public speaker who travels the world sharing his insights into the human condition and how we can live more authentic lives and reach our inner potential. He has shared the stage from Deepak Chopra to Richard Branson. He has appeared in documentaries including The Secret and shared the screen with Hugh Jackman, Seal, Ringo Star and others.
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